Robin pushed an armchair at his companion.
“Sit down and tell me about it,” he commanded.
The boy dropped into the chair.
“It was after I had been only a few months with him,” he began, “shortly after I was discharged from the army with that lung wound of mine. We were driving back in the car from some munition works near Baling, and the chauffeur took a wrong turning near Wormwood Scrubs and got into a maze of dirty streets round there....”
“I know,” commented Robin, “Notting Dale, they call it....”
“H.P. wasn’t noticing much,” Wright went on, “as he was dictating letters to me,—we used to do a lot of work in the Rolls-Royce in those rush days,—but, directly he noticed that the chauffeur was uncertain of the road, he shoved his head out of the window and put him right at once. I suppose I seemed surprised at his knowing his way about those parts, for he laughed at me and said: ‘I was born and brought up down here, Bruce, in a little greengrocer’s shop just off the Latimer Road.’ I said nothing because I didn’t want to interrupt his train of thought. He had never talked to me or Jeekes or any of us like that before.
“‘By Gad,’ he went on, ‘how the smell of the place brings back those days to me—the smell of decayed fruit, of stale fish, of dirt! Why, it seems like yesterday that Victor Marbran and I used to drive round uncle’s cart with vegetables and coal. What a life to escape from, Bruce, my boy! Gad, you can count yourself lucky!’
“He was like a man talking to himself. I asked him how he had broken away from it all. At that he laughed, a bitter, hard sort of laugh. ‘By having the guts to break away from it, boy,’ he said. ‘It was I who made Victor Marbran come away with me. We worked our passages out to the Cape and made our way up-country to Matabeleland. That was in the early days of Rhodes and Barney Barnato—long before I went to Canada. I made Victor’s fortune for him and mine as well. But I made more than Victor and he never forgave me. He’d do me a bad turn if he could ...’
“Then he broke off short and went on with his dictating ...”
“Did he ever come back to this phase of his life?”