The Man Upstairs and Other Stories Part 51

Mary clenched her hands.

'It's this awful New York!' she cried. 'Eddy was never like that in Dunsterville.'

'Dunsterville does not offer quite the same scope,' said Joe.

'New York changes everything,' Mary returned. 'It has changed Eddy--it has changed you.'

He bent towards her and lowered his voice.

'Not altogether,' he said. 'I'm just the same in one way. I've tried to pretend I had altered, but it's no use. I give it up. I'm still just the same poor fool who used to hang round staring at you in Dunsterville.'

A waiter was approaching the table with the air, which waiters cultivate, of just happening by chance to be going in that direction.

Joe leaned farther forward, speaking quickly.

'And for whom,' he said, 'you didn't care a single, solitary snap of your fingers, Mary.'

She looked up at him. The waiter hovered, poising for his swoop.

Suddenly she smiled.

'New York has changed me too, Joe,' she said.

'Mary!' he cried.

'Ze pill, sare,' observed the waiter.

Joe turned.

'Ze what!' he exclaimed. 'Well, I'm hanged! Eddy's gone off and left me to pay for his lunch! That man's a wonder! When it comes to brain-work, he's in a cla.s.s by himself.' He paused. 'But I have the luck,' he said.

THE TUPPENNY MILLIONAIRE

In the crowd that strolled on the Promenade des Etrangers, enjoying the morning suns.h.i.+ne, there were some who had come to Roville for their health, others who wished to avoid the rigours of the English spring, and many more who liked the place because it was cheap and close to Monte Carlo.

None of these motives had brought George Albert Balmer. He was there because, three weeks before, Harold Flower had called him a vegetable.

What is it that makes men do perilous deeds? Why does a man go over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Not for his health. Half an hour with a skipping-rope would be equally beneficial to his liver. No; in nine cases out of ten he does it to prove to his friends and relations that he is not the mild, steady-going person they have always thought him.

Observe the music-hall acrobat as he prepares to swing from the roof by his eyelids. His gaze sweeps the house. 'It isn't true,' it seems to say. 'I'm not a jelly-fish.'

It was so with George Balmer.

In London at the present moment there exist some thousands of respectable, neatly-dressed, mechanical, unenterprising young men, employed at modest salaries by various banks, corporations, stores, shops, and business firms. They are put to work when young, and they stay put. They are mussels. Each has his special place on the rock, and remains glued to it all his life.

To these thousands George Albert Balmer belonged. He differed in no detail from the rest of the great army. He was as respectable, as neatly-dressed, as mechanical, and as unenterprising. His life was bounded, east, west, north, and south, by the Planet Insurance Company, which employed him; and that there were other ways in which a man might fulfil himself than by giving daily imitations behind a counter of a mechanical figure walking in its sleep had never seriously crossed his mind.

On George, at the age of twenty-four, there descended, out of a dear sky, a legacy of a thousand pounds.

Physically, he remained unchanged beneath the shock. No trace of hauteur crept into his bearing. When the head of his department, calling his attention to a technical flaw in his work of the previous afternoon, addressed him as 'Here, you--young what's-your-confounded-name!' he did not point out that this was no way to speak to a gentleman of property. You would have said that the sudden smile of Fortune had failed to unsettle him.

But all the while his mind, knocked head over heels, was lying in a limp heap, wondering what had struck it.

To him, in his dazed state, came Harold Flower. Harold, messenger to the Planet Insurance Company and one of the most a.s.siduous money-borrowers in London, had listened to the office gossip about the legacy as if to the strains of some grand, sweet anthem. He was a bibulous individual of uncertain age, who, in the intervals of creeping about his duties, kept an eye open for possible additions to his staff of creditors. Most of the clerks at the Planet had been laid under contribution by him in their time, for Harold had a way with him that was good for threepence any pay-day, and it seemed to him that things had come to a sorry pa.s.s if he could not extract something special from Plutocrat Balmer in his hour of rejoicing.

Throughout the day he shadowed George, and, shortly before closing-time, backed him into a corner, tapped him on the chest, and requested the temporary loan of a sovereign.

In the same breath he told him that he was a gentleman, that a messenger's life was practically that of a blanky slave, and that a young man of spirit who wished to add to his already large fortune would have a bit on Giant Gooseberry for the City and Suburban. He then paused for a reply.

Now, all through the day George had been a.s.sailed by a steady stream of determined ear-biters. Again and again he had been staked out as an ore-producing claim by men whom it would have been impolitic to rebuff.

He was tired of lending, and in a mood to resent unauthorized demands.

Harold Flower's struck him as particularly unauthorized. He said so.

It took some little time to convince Mr Flower that he really meant it, but, realizing at last the grim truth, he drew a long breath and spoke.

'Ho!' he said. 'Afraid you can't spare it, can't you? A gentleman comes and asks you with tack and civility for a temp'y loan of about 'arf nothing, and all you do is to curse and swear at him. Do you know what I call you--you and your thousand quid? A tuppenny millionaire, that's what I call you. Keep your blooming money. That's all I ask.

_Keep_ it. Much good you'll get out of it. I know your sort.

You'll never have any pleasure of it. Not you. You're the careful sort.

You'll put it into Consols, _you_ will, and draw your three-ha'pence a year. Money wasn't meant for your kind. It don't _mean_ nothing to you. You ain't got the go in you to appreciate it. A vegetable--that's all you are. A blanky little vegetable. A blanky little gor-blimey vegetable. I seen turnips with more spirit in 'em that what you've got.

And Brussels sprouts. Yes, _and_ parsnips.'

It is difficult to walk away with dignity when a man with a hoa.r.s.e voice and a watery eye is comparing you to your disadvantage with a parsnip, and George did not come anywhere near achieving the feat. But he extricated himself somehow, and went home brooding.

Mr Flower's remarks rankled particularly because it so happened that Consols were the identical investment on which he had decided. His Uncle Robert, with whom he lived as a paying guest, had strongly advocated them. Also they had suggested themselves to him independently.

But Harold Flower's words gave him pause. They made him think. For two weeks and some days he thought, flus.h.i.+ng uncomfortably whenever he met that watery but contemptuous eye. And then came the day of his annual vacation, and with it inspiration. He sought out the messenger, whom till now he had carefully avoided.

'Er--Flower,' he said.

'Me lord?'

'I am taking my holiday tomorrow. Will you forward my letters? I will wire you the address. I have not settled on my hotel yet. I am popping over'--he paused--'I am popping over,' he resumed, carelessly, 'to Monte.'

'To who?' inquired Mr Flower.

'To Monte. Monte Carlo, you know.'

Mr Flower blinked twice rapidly, then pulled himself together.

'Yus, I _don't_ think!' he said.

And that settled it.

The George who strolled that pleasant morning on the Promenade des Strangers differed both externally and internally from the George who had fallen out with Harold Flower in the offices of the Planet Insurance Company. For a day after his arrival he had clung to the garb of middle-cla.s.s England. On the second he had discovered that this was unpleasantly warm and, worse, conspicuous. At the Casino Munic.i.p.ale that evening he had observed a man wearing an arrangement in bright yellow velvet without attracting attention. The sight had impressed him. Next morning he had emerged from his hotel in a flannel suit so light that it had been unanimously condemned as impossible by his Uncle Robert, his Aunt Louisa, his Cousins Percy, Eva, and Geraldine, and his Aunt Louisa's mother, and at a shop in the Rue Lasalle had spent twenty francs on a Homburg hat. And Roville had taken it without blinking.

Internally his alteration had been even more considerable. Roville was not Monte Carlo (in which gay spot he had remained only long enough to send a picture post-card to Harold Flower before retiring down the coast to find something cheaper), but it had been a revelation to him.

For the first time in his life he was seeing colour, and it intoxicated him. The silky blueness of the sea was startling. The pure white of the great hotels along the promenade and the Casino Munic.i.p.ale fascinated him. He was dazzled. At the Casino the pillars were crimson and cream, the tables sky-blue and pink. Seated on a green-and-white striped chair he watched a _revue_, of which from start to finish he understood but one word--'out', to wit--absorbed in the doings of a red-moustached gentleman in blue who wrangled in rapid French with a black-moustached gentleman in yellow, while a snow-white _commere_ and a _compere_ in a mauve flannel suit looked on at the brawl.