Money for Nothing (2 page)

'I'm so sorry, Colonel. I do hope you're not hurt, Colonel.'

The injured man, maintaining an icy silence, raked him with an eye before which sergeant-majors had once drooped like withered roses, and walked into the shop. The anxious face of Chas Bywater loomed up over the counter. John hovered in the background.

'I want another bottle of that Stuff,' said the Colonel shortly.

'I'm awfully sorry,' said John.

'I dropped the other outside. I was attacked by a savage dog.'

'I'm frightfully sorry.'

'People ought not to have these pests running loose and not under proper control.'

'I'm fearfully sorry.'

'A menace to the community and a nuisance to everybody,' said Colonel Wyvern.

'Quite,' said Mr Bywater.

Conversation languished. Chas Bywater, realizing that this was no moment for lingering lovingly over brown paper and toying dreamily with string, lowered the record for wrapping a bottle of Brophy's Paramount Elixir by such a margin that he set up a mark for other chemists to shoot at for all time. Colonel Wyvern snatched it and stalked out, and John, who had opened the door for him and had not been thanked, tottered back to the counter and in a low voice expressed a wish for two ounces of the Special Mixture.

'Quite,' said Mr Bywater. 'In one moment, Mr John.'

With the passing of Colonel Wyvern a cloud seemed to have rolled away from the chemist's world. He was his old, charmingly chatty self again. He gave John his tobacco, and, detaining him by the simple means of not handing over his change, surrendered himself to the joys of conversation.

'The Colonel appears a little upset, sir.'

'Have you got my change?' said John.

'It seems to me he hasn't been the same man since that unfortunate episode up at the Hall. Not at all the same sunny gentleman.'

'Have you got my change?'

'A very unfortunate episode, that,' sighed Mr Bywater.

'My change?'

'I could see, the moment he walked in here, that he was not himself. Shaken. Something in the way he looked at one. I said to myself "The Colonel's shaken!"'

John, who had had such recent experience of the way Colonel Wyvern looked at one, agreed. He then asked if he might have his change.

'No doubt he misses Miss Wyvern,' said Chas Bywater, ignoring the request with an indulgent smile. 'When a man's had a shock like the Colonel's had – when he's shaken, if you understand what I mean – he likes to have his loved ones around him. Stands to reason,' said Mr Bywater.

John had been anxious to leave, but he was so constituted that he could not tear himself away from anyone who had touched on the subject of Patricia Wyvern. He edged a little nearer the counter.

'Well, she'll be home again soon,' said Chas Bywater. 'Tomorrow, I understand.'

A powerful current of electricity seemed to pass itself through John's body. Pat Wyvern had been away so long that he had fallen into a sort of dull apathy in which he wondered sometimes if he would ever see her again.

'What!'

'Yes, sir. She returned from France yesterday. She had a good crossing. She is at the Lincoln Hotel, Curzon Street, London. She thinks of taking the three o'clock train tomorrow. She is in excellent health.'

It did not occur to John to question the accuracy of the other's information, nor to be surprised at its minuteness of detail. Mr Bywater, he was aware, had a daughter in the post office.

'Tomorrow!' he gasped.

'Yes, sir. Tomorrow.'

'Give me my change,' said John.

He yearned to be off. He wanted air and space in which he could ponder over this wonderful news.

'No doubt,' said Mr Bywater, 'she . . .'

'Give me my change,' said John.

Chas Bywater, happening to catch his eye, did so.

To reach Rudge Hall from the door of Chas Bywater's shop, you go up the High Street, turn sharp to the left down River Lane, cross the stone bridge that spans the slow-flowing Skirme as it potters past on its way to join the Severn, carry on along the road till you come to the gates of Colonel Wyvern's nice little house, and then climb a stile and take to the fields. And presently you are in the park and can see through the trees the tall chimneys and red walls of the ancient home of the Carmodys.

The scene, when they are not touching off dynamite there under the noses of retired military officers, is one of quiet peace. For John it had always held a peculiar magic. In the fourteen years which had passed since the Wyverns had first come to settle in Rudge Pat had contrived, so far as he was concerned, to impress her personality ineffaceably on the landscape. Almost every inch of it was in some way associated with her. Stumps on which she had sat and swung her brown-stockinged legs; trees beneath which she had taken shelter with him from summer storms; gates on which she had climbed, fields across which she had raced, and thorny bushes into which she had urged him to penetrate in search of birds' eggs – they met his eye on every side. The very air seemed to be alive with her laughter. And not even the recollection that that laughter had generally been directed at himself was able to diminish for John the glamour of this mile of Fairyland.

Half way across the park, Emily rejoined him with a defensive, Where-on-earth-did-you-disappear-to manner, and they moved on in company till they rounded the corner of the house and came to the stable-yard. John, who for some years now had looked after the business of the estate for his uncle, had a couple of rooms over the stables, and thither he made his way, leaving Emily to fuss round Bolt, the chauffeur, who was washing the Dex-Mayo.

Arrived in his sitting-room, he sank into a deck-chair, and filled his pipe with Mr Bywater's Special Mixture. Then, putting his feet up on the table, he stared hard and earnestly at the photograph of Pat which stood on the mantelpiece.

It was a pretty face he was looking at – one whose charm not even a fashionable modern photographer, of the type that prefers to depict his sitters in a grey fog with most of their features hidden from view, could altogether obscure. In the eyes, a little slanting, there was a Puck-like look, and the curving lips hinted demurely at amusing secrets. The nose had that appealing, yet provocative, air which slight tiptiltedness gives. It seemed to challenge, and at the same time to withdraw.

This was the latest of the Pat photographs, and she had given it to him three months ago, just before she left to go and stay with friends at Le Touquet. And now she was coming home. . . .

John Carroll was one of those solid persons who do not waver in their loyalties. He had always been in love with Pat, and he always would be, though he would have had to admit that she gave him very little encouragement. There had been a period when, he being fifteen and she ten, Pat had lavished on him all the worship of a small girl for a big boy who can wiggle his ears and is not afraid of cows. But since then her attitude had changed. Her manner towards him nowadays alternated between that of a nurse towards a child who is not quite right in the head and that of the owner of a clumsy but rather likeable dog.

Nevertheless, he loved her. And she was coming home. . . .

John sat up suddenly. He was a slow thinker, and only now did it occur to him just what the position of affairs would be when she did come home. With this infernal feud going on between his uncle Lester and the old Colonel she would probably look on him as in the enemy's camp and refuse to see or speak to him.

The thought chilled him to the marrow. Something, he felt, must be done, and swiftly. And, with a flash of inspiration of a kind that rarely came to him, he saw what that something was. He must go up to London this afternoon, tell her the facts, and throw himself on her clemency. If he could convince her that he was wholeheartedly pro-Colonel and regarded his uncle Lester as the logical successor to Doctor Crippen and the Brides-in-the-Bath murderer, things might straighten themselves.

Once the brain gets working, there is no knowing where it will stop. The very next instant there had come to John Carroll a thought so new and breathtaking that he uttered an audible gasp.

Why shouldn't he ask Pat to marry him?

John sat tingling from head to foot. The scales seemed to have fallen from his eyes, and he saw clearly where he might quite conceivably have been making a grave blunder all these years. Deeply as he had always loved Pat, he had never – now he came to think of it – told her so. And in this sort of situation the spoken word is quite apt to make all the difference.

Perhaps that was why she laughed at him so frequently – because she was entertained by the spectacle of a man, obviously in love with her, refraining year after year from making any verbal comment on the state of his emotions.

Resolution poured over John in a strengthening flood. He looked at his watch. It was nearly three. If he got the two-seater and started at once, he could be in London by seven, in nice time to take her to dinner somewhere. He hurried down the stairs and out into the stable-yard.

'Shove that car out of the way, Bolt,' said John, eluding Emily, who, wet to the last hair, was endeavouring to climb up him. 'I want to get the two-seater.'

'Two-seater, sir?'

'Yes. I'm going to London.'

'It's not there, Mr John,' said the chauffeur, with the gloomy satisfaction which he usually reserved for telling his employer that the battery had run down.

'Not there? What do you mean?'

'Mr Hugo took it, sir, an hour ago. He told me he was going over to see Mr Carmody at Healthward Ho. Said he had important business and knew you wouldn't object.'

The stable-yard reeled before John. Not for the first time in his life, he cursed his light-hearted cousin. 'Knew you wouldn't object!' It was just the fat-headed sort of thing Hugo would have said.

There is something about those repellent words, Healthward Ho, that has a familiar ring. You feel that you have heard them before. And then you remember. They have figured in letters to the daily papers from time to time.

'THE STRAIN OF MODERN LIFE.

'To the Editor

The Times.

'Sir,

'In connection with the recent correspondence in your columns on the Strain of Modern Life, I wonder if any of your readers are aware that there exists in the county of Worcestershire an establishment expressly designed to correct this strain. At Healthward Ho (formerly Graveney Court), under the auspices of the well-known American physician and physical culture expert, Doctor Alexander Twist, it is possible for those who have allowed the demands of modern life to tax their physique too greatly to recuperate in ideal surroundings and by means of early hours, wholesome exercise, and Spartan fare to build up once more their debilitated tissues.

'It is the boast of Doctor Twist that he makes New Men for Old.

'I am, sir,

'Yrs etc.,

'M
ENS
S
ANA IN
C
ORPORE
S
ANO
.'

'DO WE EAT TOO MUCH?

'To the Editor

Daily Mail.

'Sir,

'The correspondence in your columns on the above subject calls to mind a remark made to me not long ago by Doctor Alexander Twist, the well-known American physician and physical culture expert. "Over-eating," said Doctor Twist emphatically, "is the curse of the Age."

'At Healthward Ho (formerly Graveney Court), his physical culture establishment in Worcestershire, wholesale exercise and Spartan fare are the order of the day, and Doctor Twist has, I understand, worked miracles with the most apparently hopeless cases.

'It is the boast of Doctor Twist that he makes New Men for Old.

'I am, sir,

'Yrs etc.,

'M
ODERATION IN ALL
T
HINGS
.'

'SHOULD THE CHAPERONE BE RESTORED?

'To the Editor

Daily Express

'Sir,

'A far more crying need than that of the Chaperone in these modern days is for a Supervisor of the middle-aged man who has allowed himself to get "out of shape".

'At Healthward Ho (formerly Graveney Court), in Worcestershire, where Doctor Alexander Twist, the well-known American physician and physical culture expert, ministers to such cases, wonders have been achieved by means of simple fare and mild, but regular, exercise.

'It is the boast of Doctor Twist that he makes New Men for Old.

'I am, sir,

'Yrs etc.,

V
IGILANT
.'

These letters and many others, though bearing a pleasing
variety of signatures, proceeded in fact from a single gifted pen –
that of Doctor Twist himself, and among that class of the public which consistently
does itself too well when the gong goes and yet is never wholly free from
wistful aspirations towards a better liver they had created a scattered but
quite satisfactory interest in Healthward Ho. Clients had enrolled themselves
on the doctor's books, and now, on this summer afternoon, he was enabled to
look down from his study window at a group of no fewer than eleven of them,
skipping with skipping-ropes under the eye of his able and conscientious assistant,
ex-Sergeant-Major Flannery.

Sherlock Holmes – and even, on one of his bright days, Doctor Watson – could have told at a glance which of those muffled figures was Mr Flannery. He was the only one who went in instead of out at the waist-line. All the others were well up in the class of man whom Julius Caesar once expressed a desire to have about him. And pre-eminent among them in stoutness, dampness and general misery was Mr Lester Carmody, of Rudge Hall.

The fact that Mr Carmody was by several degrees the most unhappy-looking member of this little band of martyrs was due to his distress, unlike that of his fellow-sufferers, being mental as well as physical. He was allowing his mind, for the hundredth time, to dwell on the paralysing cost of these hygienic proceedings.

Thirty guineas a week, thought Mr Carmody as he bounded up and down. Four pound ten a day. . . . Three shillings and ninepence an hour. . . . Three solid farthings a minute. . . . To meditate on these figures was like turning a sword in his heart. For Lester Carmody loved money as he loved nothing else in this world except a good dinner.

Doctor Twist turned from the window. A maid had appeared bearing a card on a salver.

'Show him in,' said Doctor Twist, having examined this. And presently there entered a lissom young man in a grey flannel suit.

'Doctor Twist?'

'Yes, sir.'

The newcomer seemed a little surprised. It was as if he had been expecting something rather more impressive, and was wondering why, if the proprietor of Healthward Ho had the ability which he claimed, to make New Men for Old, he had not taken the opportunity of effecting some alterations in himself. For Doctor Twist was a small man, and weedy. He had a snub nose, features of a markedly simian cast and an expression of furtive slyness. And he wore a waxed moustache.

However, all this was not the visitor's business. If a man wishes to wax his moustache, it is a matter between himself and his God.

'My name's Carmody,' he said. 'Hugo Carmody.'

'Yes. I got your card.'

'Could I have a word with my uncle?'

'Sure, if you don't mind waiting a minute. Right now,' explained Doctor Twist, with a gesture towards the window, 'he's occupied.'

Hugo moved to the window, looked out, and started violently.

'Great Scott!' he exclaimed.

He gaped down at the group below. Mr Carmody and colleagues had now discarded the skipping-ropes and were performing some unpleasant-looking bending and stretching exercises, holding their hands above their heads and swinging painfully from what one may loosely term their waists. It was a spectacle well calculated to astonish any nephew.

'How long has he got to go on like that?' asked Hugo, awed.

Doctor Twist looked at his watch.

'They'll be quitting soon now. Then a cold shower and rub down, and they'll be through till lunch.'

'Cold shower?'

'Yes.'

'You mean to say you make my Uncle Lester take cold shower-baths?'

'That's right.'

'Good God!'

A look of respect came into Hugo's face as he gazed upon this master of men. Anybody who, in addition to making him tie himself in knots under a blazing sun, could lure Uncle Lester within ten yards of a cold shower-bath was entitled to credit.

'I suppose after all this,' he said, 'they do themselves pretty well at lunch?'

'They have a lean mutton chop apiece, with green vegetables and dry toast.'

'Is that all?'

'That's all.'

'And to drink?'

'Just water.'

'Followed, of course, by a spot of port?'

'No, sir.'

'No port?'

'Certainly not.'

'You mean – literally – no port?'

'Not a drop. If your old man had gone easier on the port, he'd not have needed to come to Healthward Ho.'

'I say,' said Hugo, 'did you invent that name?'

'Sure. Why?'

'Oh, I don't know. I just thought I'd ask.'

'Say, while I think of it,' said Doctor Twist, 'have you any cigarettes?'

'Oh, rather.' Hugo produced a bulging case. 'Turkish this side, Virginian that.'

'Not for me. I was only going to say that when you meet your uncle just bear in mind he isn't allowed tobacco.'

'Not allowed . . .? You mean to say you tie Uncle Lester into a lover's knot, shoot him under a cold shower, push a lean chop into him accompanied by water, and then don't even let the poor old devil get his lips round a single gasper?'

'That's right.'

'Well, all I can say is,' said Hugo, 'it's no life for a refined Nordic.'

Dazed by the information he had received, he began to potter aimlessly about the room. He was not particularly fond of his uncle: Mr Carmody Senior's practice of giving him no allowance and keeping him imprisoned all the year round at Rudge would alone have been enough to check anything in the nature of tenderness: but he did not think he deserved quite all that seemed to be coming to him at Healthward Ho.

He mused upon his uncle. A complex character. A man with Lester Carmody's loathing for expenditure ought by rights to have been a simple liver, existing off hot milk and triturated sawdust like an American millionaire. That Fate should have given him, together with his prudence in money matters, a recklessness as regarded the pleasures of the table seemed ironic.

'I see they've quit,' said Doctor Twist, with a glance out of the window. 'If you want to have a word with your uncle you could do it now. No bad news, I hope?'

'If there is, I'm the one that's going to get it. Between you and me,' said Hugo, who had no secrets from his fellow-men, 'I've come to try to touch him for a bit of money.'

'Is that so?' said Doctor Twist, interested. Anything to do with money always interested the well-known American physician and physical culture expert.

'Yes,' said Hugo. 'Five hundred quid, to be exact.'

He spoke a little despondently, for, having arrived at the window again, he was in a position now to take a good look at his uncle. And so forbidding had bodily toil and mental disturbance rendered the latter's expression that he found the fresh young hopes with which he had started out on this expedition rapidly ebbing away. If Mr Carmody were to burst – and he looked as if he might do so at any moment – he, Hugo, being his nearest of kin, would inherit: but, failing that, there seemed to be no cash in sight whatever.

'Though when I say "touch",' he went on, 'I don't mean quite that. The stuff is really mine. My father left me a few thousand, you see, but most injudiciously made Uncle Lester my trustee, and I'm not allowed to get at the capital without the old blighter's consent. And now a pal of mine in London has written offering me a half share in a new night-club which he's starting if I will put up five hundred pounds.'

'I see.'

'And what I ask myself,' said Hugo, 'is, will Uncle Lester part? That's what I ask myself.'

'From what I have seen of Mr Carmody, I shouldn't say that parting was the thing he does best.'

'He's got absolutely no gift for it whatever,' said Hugo gloomily.

'Well, I wish you luck,' said Doctor Twist. 'But don't you try to bribe him with cigarettes.'

'Do what?'

'Bribe him with cigarettes. After they have been taking the treatment for a while, most of these birds would give their soul for a coffin-nail.'

Hugo started. He had not thought of this; but, now that it had been called to his attention, he saw that it was most certainly an idea.

'And don't keep him standing around longer than you can help. He ought to get under that shower as soon as possible.'

Hugo had an idea.

'I suppose I couldn't tell him that owing to my pleading and persuasion you've consented to let him off a cold shower today?'

'No, sir.'

'It would help,' urged Hugo. 'It might just sway the issue, as it were.'

'Sorry. He must have his shower. When a man's been exercising and has got himself into a perfect lather of sweat . . .'

'Keep it clean,' said Hugo coldly. 'There is no need to stress the physical side. Oh, very well, then, I suppose I shall have to trust to tact and charm of manner. But I wish to goodness I hadn't got to spring business matters on him on top of what seems to have been a slightly hectic morning.'

He shot his cuffs, pulled down his waistcoat, and walked with
a resolute step out of the room. He was about to try to get into the ribs
of a man who for a lifetime had been saving up to be a miser and who, even
apart from this trait in his character, held the subversive view that the
less money young men had the better for them. Hugo was a gay optimist, cheerful
of soul and a mighty singer in the bath-tub, but he could not feel very sanguine.
However, the Carmodys were a bulldog breed. He decided to have a pop at it.

Theoretically, no doubt, the process of exercising flaccid muscles, opening hermetically sealed pores and stirring up a liver which had long supposed itself off the active list ought to engender in a man a jolly sprightliness. In practice, however, this is not always so. That Lester Carmody was in no radiant mood was shown at once by the expression on his face as he turned in response to Hugo's yodel from the rear. In spite of all that Health-ward Ho had been doing to Mr Carmody this last ten days, it was plain that he had not yet got that Kruschen feeling.

Nor, at the discovery that a nephew whom he had supposed to be twenty miles away was standing at his elbow, did anything in the nature of sudden joy help to fill him with sweetness and light.

'How the devil did you get here?' were his opening words of welcome. His scarlet face vanished for an instant into the folds of a large handkerchief; then reappeared, wearing a look of acute concern. 'You didn't,' he quavered, 'come in the Dex-Mayo?'

A thought to shake the sturdiest man. It was twenty miles from Rudge Hall to Healthward Ho, and twenty miles back again from Healthward Ho to Rudge Hall. The Dex-Mayo, that voracious car, consumed a gallon of petrol for every ten miles it covered. And for a gallon of petrol they extorted from you nowadays the hideous sum of one shilling and sixpence halfpenny. Forty miles, accordingly, meant – not including oil, wear and tear of engines and depreciation of tyres – a loss to his purse of over six shillings – a heavy price to pay for the society of a nephew whom he had disliked since boyhood.

'No, no,' said Hugo hastily. 'I borrowed John's two-seater.'

'Oh,' said Mr Carmody, relieved.

There was a pause, employed by Mr Carmody in puffing; by Hugo in trying to think of something to say that would be soothing, tactful, ingratiating and calculated to bring home the bacon. He turned over in his mind one or two conversational gambits.

('Well, Uncle, you look very rosy.'