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“How do you know it’s your only means of making a living? Why don’t you try something new?” “Such as——” “How should I know? Anything that comes along. Good gracious, Mr. Marson; here you are in the biggest city in the world, with chances for adventure simply shrieking to you on every side——” “I must be deaf. The only thing I have heard shrieking to me on every side has been Mrs. Bell—for the rent.”
On the theory, given to the world by my brother-pen, William Shakspere, that it is the lean and hungry-looking men who are dangerous, and that the “fat, sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’ nights,” are harmless, R. Jones should have been above suspicion. He was infinitely the fattest man in the west-central postal district of London. He was a round ball of a man, who wheezed when he walked upstairs, which was seldom, and shook like jelly if some tactless friend, wishing to attract his attention, tapped him unexpectedly on the shoulder.
Nobody appeared to notice him. He so seldom came to London these days that he was practically a stranger in the club; and in any case your Senior Conservative, when at lunch, has little leisure for observing anything not immediately on the table in front of him. To attract attention in the dining room of the Senior Conservative Club between the hours of one and two-thirty, you have to be a mutton chop—not an earl.
“But sincerely. Last year, when I found that you had gone to England, I came on after you as soon as the firm could spare me. And I found you engaged to this Freddie excrescence.” “I like the way you stand up for Freddie. So many men in your position might say horrid things about him.” “Oh, I’ve nothing against Freddie. He is practically an imbecile and I don’t like his face; outside of that he’s all right.
“Your first situation?” said Mr. Beach. “Indeed!” “I was—er—doing something else before I met Mr. Peters,” said Ashe. Mr. Beach was too well-bred to be inquisitive, but his eyebrows were not. “Ah!” he said. “?” cried his eyebrows. “?—?—?” Ashe ignored the eyebrows. “Something different,” he said.
“Young man,” he said slowly, “if, after all this, you fail to recover my Cheops for me I’ll—I’ll—— By George, I’ll skin you!” “Don’t talk like that,” said Ashe. “That’s another thing you have got to remember. If my treatment is to be successful you must not let yourself think in that way. You must exercise self-control mentally. You must think beautiful thoughts.” “The idea of skinning you is a beautiful thought!” said Mr. Peters wistfully.
Of Mrs. Twemlow little need be attempted in the way of pen portraiture beyond the statement that she went as harmoniously with Mr. Beach as one of a pair of vases or one of a brace of pheasants goes with its fellow. She had the same appearance of imminent apoplexy, the same air of belonging to some dignified and haughty branch of the vegetable kingdom.
Nature had never intended Baxter for a night bird. He loved his bed. He knew that doctors held that insufficient sleep made a man pale and sallow, and he had always aimed at the peach-bloom complexion which comes from a sensible eight hours between the sheets. One of the King Georges of England, I forget which, once said that a certain number of hours’ sleep each night—I cannot recall at the moment how many—made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. Baxter agreed with him.
The shots sang above Baxter’s head one after the other, six in all, and found other billets than his person. They disposed themselves as follows: The first shot broke a window and whistled out into the night; the second shot hit the dinner gong and made a perfectly extraordinary noise, like the Last Trump; the third, fourth and fifth shots embedded themselves in the wall; the sixth and final shot hit a life-size picture of his lordship’s maternal grandmother in the face and improved it out of all knowledge.
