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Title: The Same Old Troddles—A Book of Laughter

Date of first publication: 1919

Author: R. Andom (ps of Alfred Walter Barrett) (1869-1920)

Illustrator: Louis Gunnis (1867-1926)

Date first posted: April 9, 2026

Date last updated: April 9, 2026

Faded Page eBook #20260422

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Cindy Beyer & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

By the same Author.

We Three and Troddles
 
Troddles and Us and Others
 
Troddles’s Farm
 
Troddles not to Mention
  Ourselves
 
Martha and I
 
Cruise of the Mock Turtle
 
Burglings of Tutt
 
Identity Exchange

THE SAME OLD

TRODDLES

A Book of Laughter

R. ANDOM

Author of “We Three and Troddles,” “Troddles and Us and

Others,” “Cheerful Craft,” “Neighbours of Mine,”

etc., etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY LOUIS GUNNIS

JARROLDS

PUBLISHERS (LONDON)

LIMITED

DEDICATED

SHUREYS IN RECOGNITION

OF LONG AND PLEASANT

LITERARY RELATIONS

CHAPTER I.
FOLLY AND A FRYING-PAN.

I don’t know if you know us already; if you don’t, allow me! We are worth knowing. The room is in the house of Mrs. Bloggs, a widow lady of uncertain age and temper, which, along with another—room, I mean, not temper—I rented for everybody’s use, it seemed to me, but my own.

The big, fat fellow on his back on the couch, fast asleep as usual, with his pipe sticking out at a silly-looking angle, is Troddles, whose proper name is not Troddles at all, but—te he!—Algernon William Rufus Marks. There was a thought too much of it, and back in our early schooldays we called him Troddles, and he has answered to it ever since.

There are four of us, and Wilks is the long of it and Murray the short; and I—well, I am the scribe, and thy servant, and a dog that he should do this thing.

And the place is somewhere off the Blackfriars Road, and the time mid-March and evening.

Mrs. Bloggs was out—at chapel, she always gave me to understand, and, even though I do not consider she dealt fairly by me in this matter, I would not be thought mean and malicious enough to throw any doubt on her piety and truthfulness. All I can suggest is, if she really did go to chapel that night, they or she cut the service disgracefully short, and the brand of Christianity ladled out by her sect must be sadly lacking in the practical humanities which should encourage and enjoin landladies to be particularly tender and forbearing towards helpless young men who depend upon them for frying-pans—and other things.

We had finished tea, and as a pleasant alternative to kipper and cake, and bread and butter and jam, Troddles said he had a wild, weird longing for pancakes, which he was bound to gratify or burst.

“Well, you can’t gratify it here,” said I. “Mrs. Bloggs is out—chapel night—and, as she is bound not to have anything in the house, and she sacked the girl on Saturday, she will have plenty of reasons for saying us nay, even if I were fool enough to ask her.”

“Need we do any asking?” put in Murray. “It is your room and your fire, and with a few coppers and shops handy it is a degrading thing for four strong, healthy men to depend on a poor old widow for pancakes. I hadn’t thought of it before; but now I feel that pancakes are the only thing in life I really care about.”

Wilks said he felt like that too, only more so, and, seeing that some day we might want to get married, he said, he was sure that the experience we should get would more than repay us for our time and trouble.

Wilks said it was not that altogether; but he should need to be critical, and that is an attitude best maintained when one has a practical knowledge of the subject.

“Well, what knowledge have you?” said I, hoping to head them off from an enterprise which I vaguely distrusted as offering a menace to a peaceful enjoyment of my tenancy.

Wilks said it didn’t want knowledge, only pluck and energy; which I thought rather contradictory of him, unless he meant that any girl who was fool enough to marry him must of necessity be wanting in those qualities. Wilks said he didn’t, and shied a cushion at me and put the slop-basin out of action.

I had with my customary good nature offered to clear the table, as there was no girl, and Lucy—Mrs. Bloggs, I mean—could not linger long enough to do it herself; so we took down the tray, and Murray artistically arranged the broken crockery on the kitchen floor. He said it would speak for itself, and there would be no real need for me to mention that the cat had done it, if I had any conscientious objections to telling lies.

I thanked him without enthusiasm; but it is a waste of time to be formal or sarcastic with Murray; he simply doesn’t understand it. He said I was quite welcome to that and any such little invention calculated to conserve my domestic peace, which was beyond my heavy mind and somewhat low order of intelligence to accomplish for myself.

Troddles paused in the act of lighting his pipe and broadened into a smile of hope mingled with greed.

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t, Bob,” said Wilks. “It will be fun, and Mrs. Bloggs can’t have any real objection.”

“We’ll save her a couple,” said Murray; “and if she has she’ll forget it the moment she sees them, and fall on our necks and call us blessed.”

I said it would make a touching tableau; but something less than that—her saying nothing at all, for instance—would content me. As for the project, if they could guarantee to make nothing more than pancakes and knew how, I didn’t see why we should not pass the evening in pandering to Troddles’ greed. Besides, I am partial to pancakes myself when they are nice and crisp and brown and greasy, with plenty of sugar and lots of lemon juice, and I admitted it. Wilks said there was a recipe he had noticed in his paper that morning which he thought we might as well follow, and he got it out and read it to us. It was simplicity itself. A cupful of flour, half a pint of milk, an egg, and a pinch of salt had to be made up into a batter and fried in lard. It seemed scarcely worth doing as an occupation only; but, of course, we were not doing it as an occupation so much as to fill in the time between tea and supper and give gluttony, alias Troddles, a treat. Anyway, it was cheap, and, as Wilks said, we weren’t risking much even if we failed to make anything but a mess.

We sent Troddles out after the ingredients, while we made up a good cooking fire and got things ready. He was gone rather a long while, owing, he said, to the difficulty of finding a dairy open, and then he forgot the lemons and had to go back again and get them.

While he was gone, Wilks, who took charge of the operations in his customary way, and fussily contrived to do nothing while he ran round fetching and carrying, sent me down after a basin and the frying-pan. I couldn’t find anything I thought big enough, so at Murray’s suggestion we got one from my washstand. The cupful of flour we put in looked to be rather lost; but Wilks said it would grow when we added the other things, and the basin being big was all the better, because there would not be so much danger of splashing batter over the table-cloth and carpet when we started beating up.

We couldn’t find the eggs, and had to stop at that stage until Troddles came back and told us, with an amused smile, on questioning, that he had got them in his coat pocket and had quite forgotten them himself. One had got rather badly bent, he found, when he went to fish them out, and he dropped the other on the carpet so as to divert our thoughts and prevent us sorrowing unduly over the messy ruin of his overcoat. Murray retrieved them both with the help of a teaspoon and put them in a basin. He said he thought they would do after he had weeded them a bit, and he advised Troddles to turn his pocket inside out and sponge it in clean cold water, and let that be a lesson to him.

There didn’t seem to be much of it when we had got the batter mixed, and Troddles said, frankly, it was an absurd provision for four healthy men, to say nothing of the small portion we should require for Mrs. Bloggs’s proposed treat. So Wilks put in another cupful of flour, and that made it too stiff, and Murray added water, and that made it too thin. They kept on like this until there was a dangerously high tide in the basin, and Troddles protested on the score of the heavy duty they were imposing on two poor little eggs and one half-pint of milk. He said it wasn’t fair, and besides, much as he loved pancakes, he didn’t see how we were going to dispose of them by the hundred, to say nothing of cooking them.

Wilks blamed Murray, and Murray had a cast-iron conviction that the fault was all Wilks’s, and when either of them gets an idea of that sort he usually mentions it. They wouldn’t let me mix the batter as I wanted to, and I knew they’d make a mess of it somehow, though at the outset it was difficult to see how they possibly could; but Wilks is the sort of man who could get creases in a paving-stone if you left him with it long enough, and Murray is, if anything, a trifle worse. I didn’t say a word, but just went and squatted on the edge of the table and watched them, and that made them nervous, and they got in each other’s way and upset the flour, and Wilks knocked the lard on to the floor and Murray trod on it.

However, they got it mixed eventually. There was about half a gallon of it, and if it was unduly thin and sloppy in some places it was balanced by the lumpy solidity of others.

“It is beaten as much as I am going to beat it,” said Murray firmly, reaching for his jacket. “You and Troddles can have the next go. You have done nothing since we started but sit there and grin like a Cheshire cat.”

“I was absorbing knowledge,” I protested. “I don’t profess to understand cookery, you know, not even pancake cookery; but I have seen batter made before, and it was never done anything like the way you did it, and it looked different, too, when done.”

“It is thin,” Wilks admitted; “but it will have to do, unless Troddles will run out and get some more flour. We’ve used that lot.”

Troddles wouldn’t. He was asleep on the sofa when we woke him up to ask him, and he seemed to prefer to be allowed to go on sleeping. He reminded us that the recipe stated particularly that the batter should be left to stand for several hours, and he said if we woke him up in several hours the pancakes would be all the nicer. We couldn’t allow that because it was nearly eight then, and I thought I would rather not be engaged in making pancakes when Mrs. Bloggs returned. Wilks and Murray agreed with me, and together we prevailed on him to get up and take an intelligent interest in the proceedings.

Murray said the whole secret of turning out nice brown, juicy pancakes was to have plenty of boiling fat to fry them in, so I cut off a generous chunk of lard and put it in the pan on the fire to boil. Troddles was going to bring me the batter cupful by cupful as required, but it was so sloppy and made such a mess that I told him to bring the basin and set it down on the rug where I could help myself.

By then the fat was bubbling up, and Murray said it was near enough to boiling to do. As an afterthought he told me to mind my hands when I emptied the batter in case I got scalded. I had thought of that myself, and I just left the pan while I crossed the room to get a cloth or something to cover my hand with, when the silly thing burst into flame, and in half a second the chimney was on fire.

Troddles stood there gazing at it in blank astonishment, and if Murray hadn’t rushed forward and snatched the pan from the fire I don’t know what would have happened. As it was, I knew perfectly well, and so did Murray and Troddles—especially Troddles. The handle was nearly red hot, Murray said, and though we didn’t test it we were willing to believe it. He let go the pan in a hurry, and it fell on to the rug and filled up Troddles’s boots with hot fat. Troddles gave a yell and jumped back clean into the batter, breaking the basin and liberating a glutinous torrent. As if that wasn’t sufficient he sat down in the midst of it heavily, and tried to take off both boots at once.

It was like a bit out of the clown scene at Drury Lane, and when Wilks, rushing to extinguish the chimney with the salt-cellar—which may have been capable of holding a tablespoonful at a pinch—croppered over Troddles and covered himself with incipient pancake, you felt instinctively that the act was full; one more incident would crowd it and spoil the whole thing.

I was out of the line of fire, so to speak, and I kept there. Everywhere else was batter and strong men complaining with pain in cuss-words that didn’t ought to be spoken even on the most grievous provocation. Murray was especially eloquent. What he lacked in batter, he made up for in burns, but there was no lack of batter. It was everywhere and over everything. I have never known such wonderful stuff as that was to make a lot of itself. I even found a supply of it in my jacket-pocket; but on second thoughts I remember Murray telling me casually that he emptied it there himself during the mixing, while I was too intent on guying them to notice what he was up to. He said it was only the recollection of that half-cupful in my pocket that restrained him from emptying the whole basin over my head.

By that time Troddles had got his boots off and was able to nurse his feet without their intervention. They were only scorched a bit, not seriously burnt, but he does make such a fuss about trifles, and as we had to get the fire out or suffer a most ghastly row, I sent him and Murray, who was also complaining over his hands, down to get vaseline to rub on their injuries. I wasn’t sure, but I thought it removed pain from burns and scalds. Anyway, it removed them, and that was something to be thankful for.

“You’ll find a box in Mrs. Bloggs’s bedroom, I expect,” I said to them. “She gave me some the other day, and I saw her take it back there. Be quick, and come and help us clear this mess away.”

“Do you think any clearing possible?” asked Wilks dubiously. “Better all go out for a long walk, I think, and pretend a burglar must have done it during our absence.”

I shook my head to imply my conviction that the device hadn’t the merit of being workable, let alone honest, and so we fell to cleaning up, and inside five minutes you could have traced our little footsteps in the batter all the way from the piano to the pansy on the mat outside the door.

We didn’t hear a sound of the two martyrs below; but Murray came up very soon and told us they had found the ointment, though Mrs. Bloggs had lost a tumbler and a table ornament in the finding—brushed off when feeling round in the dark. Piggy-like, he had taken first go, and he had brought up the fragments of glass and china in his pocket, he told us, and the last he saw of Troddles he was sitting on Mrs. Bloggs’s bed dragging off his socks preparatory to rubbing unguent on to feet that he, Troddles, was swearing would never be quite the same again.

“Lor’ if old Bloggy comes home now we shall be in the soup,” said Wilks with vulgar flippancy; and then—Mrs. Bloggs came home.

We heard her open the front door, pause half a second before her own, which we well knew was standing wide ajar when it should be close shut, slam it, and turn the key, and then come pounding heavily up to me.

“My stars!” ejaculated Murray laughing hysterically, as men laugh when their brains are giving way under the awful strain of telling the judge they don’t see any reason beyond a personal objection to the process why they shouldn’t be hanged. “Turn out the gas and come and sit round the fire and be playing forfeits. Say I’ve got a sick headache and can’t bear any light, and you are soothing me off with ‘Who’s been sitting in my batter?’ ”

It was an “also ran” chance, and Wilks turned the gas-tap as Mrs. Bloggs reached the handle of my door. Fortunately I had shut it as soon as I heard her step in the hall below, and I could only hope she had not seen the light before I did so. She did not bother about knocking either, but burst in in a way that made me shudder to think how it might have been had we been uninformed of her return. From that and other things I judged that she was touchy in temper, if not downright angry.

“Mr. Andom,” she said, “your chimney is alight, and half the street is out gaping at it.”

“Is it, Mrs. Bloggs?” I enquired, with a sufficient show of interest. “It wanted sweeping, I’m afraid. Never mind; you’ll be saved the expense and dirt now, and there’s no danger. There is a slight penalty, I believe, but no one ever dreams of paying it.”

“That’s so, Mrs. Bloggs,” put in Wilks, eager to soothe her agitation and get my landlady out of the danger zone. We knew nothing just then of the other danger zone below, with the barefooted beauty squatting in the middle of it, wondering whether to dive under the bed or come out bravely and take his gruelling. “An uncle of mine, who is a chimney sweep in rather a high-class way of business, was telling me the other day that no one scarcely troubles to have their chimneys swept now. They just burn them out, and if it wasn’t for the carpets he’d be having the brokers in twice a week.”

Mrs. Bloggs didn’t seem to be particularly interested in Wilks’s mythical relative.

“Which of you gentlemen has been in my room—and left the door wide open?” she demanded.

I denied the offence for myself, and tried to make my tone suggest that nothing would induce me to withhold the information despite the absence of reward, did I but know. Wilks said he’d been “batter” employed, and it was unfortunate that in kicking at him to warn him to suppress his silly jesting habit I should catch Mrs. Bloggs neatly on the shin. Fortunately it was not a hard kick, but it left a very neat impression of my foot in batter on her skirt, and when a landlady gets marked in batter and misses her frying pan on the same evening she is apt to put two and two together and spell them pancakes.

Murray came to the rescue and saved us for the moment. He spoke in a weak sort of voice, as one who had but a short time to live, and whose evening had been full of trouble, and without going into detail he contrived to make Mrs. Bloggs believe that he might unwittingly have opened her door in trying to reach the kitchen, and so to the grateful coolness of the back-yard beyond.

“I’m sorry,” he said faintly. “It was so hot up here that I came over all faint and dizzy, and I really did not know where I was going or what I was doing. I wanted to go and sit on the dust-bin a bit and let the fresh air revive me.”

Mrs. Bloggs tried to consider the dust-bin in the light of a health resort; but the problem was too much for her to grapple with, and she turned and left the room without a word. We heard her go into her own room to take her things off, and we knew what followed from the account she gave the policeman who came at her call. The moment she lit the gas she saw that her dressing table had been what she termed “rummaged,” and right in the middle of the bed was an upturned vaseline pot and a pair of knitted meal sacks which Troddles calls socks. And, as though this was not sufficient, a couple of bare feet were plainly visible below the towel-horse, behind which Troddles had hastily retired.

Mrs. Bloggs is a strong-minded woman, and she didn’t scream or go into hysterics. She composedly turned out the gas and left the room. She turned the key and withdrew it, and came up two steps to inform Wilks, in whose strength and fighting capacity she has great faith, that there was a man in her room, and he was to watch the door to see he didn’t break out while she was fetching a policeman.

It was an error of judgment from every point of view, but we hadn’t time to argue the matter, because Mrs. Bloggs was out in the street before we were half-way downstairs. For once in a way a policeman stood just where he was wanted, or, from our point of view, where he wasn’t wanted. As a matter of fact, X306 was standing there trying to decide between duty and benevolence. He had seen our chimney, and he had either to report it officially and profit the State, or admonish my landlady privately and profit himself. Mrs. Bloggs resolved his doubts for him; and not altogether to his liking. But, however kind he might be to flaming chimneys, he could not be discriminating when it was a question of barefooted burglars concealed in a lady’s bedroom.

Only Troddles was not exactly concealed. As a matter of fact, he was sitting on the bed putting on his socks when the policeman, with us in the background, threw open the door and lit the gas.

“Troddles! However did you get here?” said Wilks, brazenly, and Murray giggled hysterically and muttered something that sounded like “sleep walking.”

Troddles has no inventive faculty at any time, and he was in an aggressive mood for him, and not inclined to account for his position and batter-smothered clothing by any excursions into the realms of romance.

“Hopped here in search of vaseline on feet burned to the bone,” he snapped. “You knew I was here jolly well. What did you want to go and lock the door for?”

The policeman was bound to have something, and if it wasn’t to be a burglar, he said, he’d have to fall back on chimney. Murray sneaked off and got his hat and coat and bolted, and Wilks got away as soon as he could after listening to one of those straight talks to young men which would have done him a lot of good had he been in a proper state of mind to profit by it.

Of course all came out—broken basin, burnt frying-pan, spoilt carpet, and all the tale of incidental destruction. The bill which I got along with notice to quit, including the fine for the chimney fire, came to close on four pounds, and those pancakes which we never got must be the dearest on record. Wilks said, when he weighed over his share, that they were a jolly sight too expensive for a man of limited means like himself, and the next time he wanted a cheap feed of pancakes he should go to the Criterion or Cecil for them, and I said he’d have to.

CHAPTER II.
TRODDLES’S MILLIONAIRE.

Troddles was staying with me at the time, and I, of course, was holding on at the Maison Bloggs by tenure so precarious that I wouldn’t have staked half a crown to a carrot in favour of my being in possession that day month. Wilks and Murray did that for me. Wilks and Murray did everything that was done in the way of money and destructive meddling; but oddly enough it was neither Wilks nor Murray who brought about my downfall and applied the last straw which gave my particular domestic camel the hump and caused her—Mrs. Bloggs—to drop poetic frenzy and return to plain, sober-minded fact, to rise in wrath and declare that no more than two suns and moons should be allowed to set upon it and her and myself altogether in the same house. It was Troddles who did that—Troddles who never did anything intentionally, except eat and sleep, and those more by instinct than intention and deliberate purpose. Alas! Woe is us, and so on.

The manner of it was thus. Troddles has a kind heart and one of those rare simple generous dispositions that are for ever being imposed upon and getting themselves and their friends into no end of bother, and Troddles was touched. Murray and Wilks both admitted that afterwards, but I think from the way they spoke they were thinking more of Troddles’s intellect than his heart.

It was a raw, damp, miserable night in early spring or late winter, whichever you choose, when Troddles, returning from the bank where he sleeps from ten to four every day of the week, except on Saturday, when they wake him up and put him outside at one, found fortune awaiting him on the doorstep. It wasn’t a very promising-looking fortune, and I don’t think even Troddles recognized it for what it really was. In fact, I am sure he didn’t, or he and we should have been saved much pain and tribulation and material loss.

Troddles’s fortune was disguised very effectually in the semblance of a very seedy and unpleasant old man. He was about seventy, I judged, and very sparsely built, with one of those loose, scarcrowy sort of frames on which clothes seem to hang precariously. He was clean shaven—or had been a week or so beforehand—with a cunning, ferrety expression, and curiously bright, searching eyes. Troddles brought him up to me not so much because he thought I was collecting freaks as because he didn’t know what else to do with him.

“He says he is hungry and homeless, Bob,” Troddles remarked in answer to the query my uplifted eyebrows expressed. “We can find him something to eat, anyhow, and what about that little off-room on the next floor? It’s empty, and I don’t see why Mrs. Bloggs should object to rent it to me for a night or two.”

I said I didn’t know either, unless it was out of pure cussedness. For my part, I said, if I were a landlady letting my house for profit combined with pleasure, I couldn’t think of any more pleasing proposition than to take in and harbour a disreputable and somewhat dingy tramp, at which Troddles looked pained, and his protégé snapped his mouth together viciously.

“Ah, you are one of those young chaps what judges by appearances,” he observed.

“Only on behalf of our landlady,” said I soothingly. “As far as I am concerned, I am sorry to hear you are hungry and without shelter; but my charitable leanings are perforce tempered by the reflection that I myself am only sheltered on sufferance, and the lady who does the suffering at so much per week is uncertain, coy, and hard to please. I cannot say how she will receive you; I only know that I shouldn’t like to make the proposition to her, and if my friend really wants to retain you, his best chance is to adopt you as a long-lost uncle.”

Troddles wouldn’t do that. I don’t think he liked the suggestion overmuch, and perhaps that is not to be wondered at, particularly in view of the way Wilks and Murray roasted him when they turned up after tea.

“Why couldn’t you have given the old chap a dollar and sent him on his way rejoicing?” demanded Wilks querulously and for the fourth time. “It would have been more than he expected, and you’d have found it cheaper in the long run.”

Troddles said he wasn’t estimating the matter from an economical standpoint at all. The man was needing assistance, and it fell to him to afford it as far as lay in his power. Murray said that was all very well, but as far as he could see, the kindness was on Mrs. Bloggs really, and he doubted whether that lady would be at all charitably inclined when she got a square view of the forlorn object he, Troddles proposed to blow in upon her.

“I’ll pay,” said Troddles stoutly. “Besides, the poor old chap is cleaning himself up in my room, and with a shave and a brush-up he won’t look so bad as all that, and you don’t expect anyone you find on the doorstep to wear dress clothes and diamonds, do you?”

Murray said yes he did; by that alone he knew their deserving natures, and took them in to strange landladies and did for them accordingly.

Troddles’s charity didn’t extend to stopping awake and entertaining his guest during the evening. I doubt whether he would or could do that under any circumstances whatever; but he charged us to be kind and tolerant to the old buck when he returned, and try and make the evening pleasant for him.

“Mrs. Bloggs will stir it up for us,” I suggested. “She only needs to come up and find the sort of angel she is entertaining unawares, and you will be able to take us in and share us up between you as homeless wanderers.”

“Serve you right,” said Murray viciously. “What did you want to let Troddles do this darn silly thing for? It is your place, and you ought to know better than to let him turn it into a casual ward.”

“I rather admired him,” said I frankly. “It was so simply brave and reckless. Of course all the rest is an impossible proposition, but to give the infirm and needy a square meal and a warm shelter for a few hours in defiance of you all is admirable—just admirable.”

Murray whistled in derision, and Wilks scoffed in his customary churlish fashion; but before either of them could do himself anything like justice, Troddles’s pet re-entered the room, and then, of course, even they had to be silent, and conceal as best they could the dislike and disapproval from which they were suffering.

“Your friend is tired,” he observed, catching sight immediately of the sixteen stone of inanimate beauty on the couch.

“No more than usual,” said Murray somewhat frigidly. “He always sleeps when he is not eating, and eats when he is not sleeping. That is why we find him so interesting.”

“He is a very excellent young man,” retorted the other sharply. “You don’t approve of his action with regard to me. I know you do not, so it is no use denying it.”

Wilks said at once that denying it was not in his mind, and Murray said, somewhat rudely I thought, that as a bit of thought-reading he must admit that demonstration to be convincing in its direct accuracy.

I didn’t say anything either in confirmation or reproof. I was too busy studying Troddles’s windfall. He looked different somehow in appearance, and in speech and bearing he was markedly changed. Of course, it may have been the shave and wash, which will alter the appearance of anybody really needing them.

But I forgot my speculations immediately after, and came to attention with a jump. So did Murray; and Wilks sprang so hard and suddenly that he jerked his mouth open and forgot to shut it again.

“I have been looking for nearly ten years for such a man,” said the intruder musingly, glancing about him for a pipe and tobacco, and discovering them in Troddles’s discarded outfit inside two seconds. “One who would do a kindness naturally without comment or question. Men like that are rare, and I had almost determined to give up the search when chance led your friend across my path, somewhat, perhaps, to his advantage.”

He paused to light the pipe he had calmly annexed, and we looked at each other to see if we could find confirmation of our own opinion regarding our guest’s mental condition elsewhere.

“Now, if I told you I was a millionaire, I suppose you would laugh,” he continued passively.

“I shouldn’t. I should cry to think of poor old Ananias losing the record after all these years,” said Wilks with brutal candour.

“Appearances are deceptive,” he said. “I could hardly expect to find disinterested and spontaneous kindness if I went looking for it in a motor-car, could I? Anyhow, I should not be able to know it if I did. It does not matter to you in the least just how much or how little I possess, and to be quite frank with you, you do not impress or interest me in the least. You strike me as being shallow and selfish, and I haven’t the slightest doubt that if I had appealed to you as I did to your friend you would have listened impatiently, and sent me on with a copper or two.”

“Things and persons are not always what they seem,” objected Murray. “For my part, it was just because I suspected something of this kind that I lodged an objection to your coming here. There is nothing of the fortune hunter about me, and if I am poor I am honest. I knew all the time you were not what you pretended to be. Why, we were taught by the books we used to read at school that any beggar who came to your gate and begged for cups of water was a millionaire in disguise, or else a king. That is, if you didn’t give him any. If you did, he was on his weary way to the nearest workhouse.”

“If what you say is true why did you tell Troddles you had no money?” Wilks asked.

“I didn’t,” retorted the other. “I said I was hungry and without shelter.”

“I think if I were a millionaire or thereabouts I shouldn’t spend the fragrant joys of life in the mud on an empty stomach,” he said. “But there’s no accounting for taste, and you may find happiness in scissoring the fringe off your trousers where we find it a painful and frequent necessity.”

“The possession of money is often that,” said the other sadly. “But we are wandering away from the subject, which is your friend. I like him, and I intend to benefit him.”

“You need not do that,” said the other hastily. “In fact, I do not want him to know just yet. You yourselves do not believe I am serious, and when I have convinced you I shall want your assistance in carrying out the plan I have formed for rewarding your friend’s generous kindness to age and poverty. It is rare, as I have told you already, and so will be the recognition of it.”

We were convinced, and perhaps a thought too easily; but as Murray urged, when we got a chance to talk the matter over together, what sense could there be in the man making up such a story if it were not true? Nothing was expected of him or from him, and anyway, the bundle of notes we were shown was proof positive that Troddles’s pauper must be pauping for pleasure, since he obviously was not doing it for profit. He had gold as well as notes. We saw it produced in handfuls from any pocket seemingly the miser chose to dip into, and the sight so impressed Murray that he went straight down and told Mrs. Bloggs that Troddles was entertaining an enormously wealthy uncle who had returned from the Colonies in the guise of a mendicant, just on purpose to see what sort of man his nephew was before he took him away to live in a palace on an income that would make a prince envious.

“We are pledged to secrecy, Mrs. Bloggs,” Murray warned her, “so you must not say a word, and it will be better to pretend that you do not know anything about the money at all.”

Mrs. Bloggs said wild horses should not drag the secret from her. She felt, as we did, the reflected comfort of having that fortune so near her, and the fact of it being Troddles and not one of us also pleased her.

Troddles would have been surprised at the deferential attention he received from Mrs. Bloggs for the next day or two, but he was so relieved by the calm way she accepted his tramp and the pains we took to be nice and attentive to him that he failed to observe the early signs of this natural tendency to worship wealth.

There was one thing about the man we quickly noticed—he was no fool, judged by the test of the old saying that “A fool and his money are soon parted.” He didn’t part with a penny, though he was continually getting one or the other of us to fetch him things, and he always gave us gold and counted the change with unflattering care. The only contribution he made towards the expense he was putting us to was for his room. He insisted upon paying that himself, and gave Mrs. Bloggs a five-pound note, out of which the poor lady had to take three-and-sixpence, despite her assurance that it did not matter and my request to be allowed to settle it with our own bill.

“Don’t you be so careless over money, young man,” he said to me severely. “I made all mine, and I know what I am talking about.”

He certainly did, and it was over this matter of his persistence in paying for his own requirements that Troddles came to discover that he had money.

We had been out together one evening, leaving Troddles asleep, as usual, on the sofa, and the old man with his pipe and paper beside the fire. When we returned Troddles drew us aside with an air of great mystery.

“I believe that old man in there is a fraud,” he said, nodding towards the sitting-room, where his unconscious benefactor was. “He woke me up in the middle of the evening just as I had got comfortably settled to go and get him an evening paper, and gave me a sovereign to pay for it. He pulled out quite a handful of money, and I am nearly sure most of it was gold. You haven’t missed anything, have you?”

“Not that I know of,” said Murray gravely. “I’ll go and overhaul my gold stock, and see if there is a shovel or so missing. Did you get him the paper?”

“Yes; but I didn’t give the shopkeeper a sovereign to take a halfpenny from,” said Troddles. “I paid for it out of my own pocket, and gave him the sovereign back. He was quite nasty about it, and I only quieted him by getting Mrs. Bloggs to lend me enough to make up his silly nineteen and elevenpence halfpenny. Anyway, I am getting fed up with him, and if he doesn’t stand in need of assistance, he had better drift along, and so I shall tell him.”

“Oh, you mustn’t do that,” said Wilks, frantic at the very idea of sending fortune away like that. “He has got money, heaps of it, and it’s because you were kind to him when you thought he was poor and homeless that he intends to give you the lot. I oughtn’t to have told you, but I’m sure you’ll go doing something darn foolish, and we’ve built on this to such an extent that we’ll never forgive you if you let us down. I ordered a new suit to-day just on the strength of it.”

“And I’m having my boots mended, and Bob is thinking of keeping white mice, all of which is coming out of your luck,” Murray added.

“It seems a rum sort of yarn,” he observed. “I don’t see any sense in it myself; but you believe it, I suppose, or are you rotting?”

Wilks said we were not. On the contrary, he said, we were in deadly earnest, and now that a fortune was being blown his way, undeserving as he was, it behoved Troddles to do all that lay in his power to secure himself and us from a penurious old age.

“Well, if I’m going to be awakened of evenings to run out and get papers I shall have earned it,” said Troddles. “Is it much?”

“He is a millionaire, he says,” Murray explained. “But precisely how far a grateful admiration will carry your claim I can’t say. From the way he spoke I should think your chance of copping the lot is rosy, my boy—just rosy. Why, he must be simply rolling in coin. He never pays for anything with less than a sovereign. I have changed over twenty for him myself, and he has only been here a week.”

“Well, what does he do with the change, then? Eat it,” demanded Troddles. “He must be heavily weighted with silver and copper if he buys haporths of stuff with sovereigns.”

It was a mystery, and a mystery it remained until the end of the week following. The first sign of the impending storm came in a paragraph in the local paper to the effect that the police were greatly exercised over the amount of spurious coin that was being put into circulation in our neighbourhood.

Wilks got hold of it and read it out to us. And we remembered afterwards that Troddles’s millionaire was very interested in it. He had it read all over again, and asked us as a special favour to try and find out at the address of the shopkeeper who was mentioned as the latest victim if anybody was suspected.

Troddles, puzzled and bewildered by what we had told him, and uncertain of his ground, made no sign of his knowledge of the great glad future before him, but ate and slept with his normal stolidity. Consequently he was not able to inform us as to the how or when or why of his protégé’s departure when we returned after a short absence one evening and found him gone.

It was vexing, because we wanted him urgently as a man of substance and standing—though he didn’t look it—to come and bail Mrs. Bloggs out. He had promised his aid spontaneously when we had been summoned by the maid to interview a stolid policeman on a matter of “a party of the name of Bloggs,” who was being detained at the station on account of a five-pound note which a suspicious grocer didn’t like the look of.

Murray laughed at the idea of Mrs. Bloggs, who was the embodiment of chapel-going respectability, being even suspected of such a thing, but the policeman said it was no laughing matter! Mrs. Bloggs, we gathered, had explained to the police that she had received the note from the uncle of one of her lodgers, a very wealthy and extremely respectable man, and the police wanted to make his acquaintance just as a matter of form, of course, and on the offchance that he could help them along a bit farther.

It was like Troddles to go and blurt out that he hadn’t got any uncle staying with him, and didn’t know the man from Adam. Besides giving us away to Mrs. Bloggs, this naturally prejudiced her case in the eyes of the police, and drew us in as well. The note was undeniably bad, and though they were not prepared to charge my landlady with uttering it, the authorities were far from satisfied, and we were given to understand that we should hear more of the matter.

Mrs. Bloggs didn’t look capable of uttering anything just then, not even a word; but I thought I knew something of what she was yearning to say from the glance she gave us when Troddles placidly denied the statement which had led her to tolerate the harbouring of a dirty old tramp, who looked like being a criminal as well.

We couldn’t believe that until we got back, and then Troddles missed his Sunday gold-mounted gamp, and Mrs. Bloggs made a pilgrimage upstairs expressly to inform me that her bedroom and parlour had been ransacked and everything portable of any value, including her bank-book, had been stolen. My best boots and a pair of trousers and overcoat had gone too. What would have happened to us all I don’t know, for the next day Troddles was arrested for trying to pass a dud sovereign, and when Murray went to his assistance he was identified by the shopkeeper, and detained on a charge of passing six at recent dates. We had a policeman permanently stationed on the doorstep while they were searching for evidence to rope in Wilks and myself, which the man at the tobacco shop round the corner could have supplied quite easily had he been asked. Of course we told all we knew, and the millionaire himself was apprehended as a direct result of our information, and wearing my boots too!

At first he denied all knowledge of us, but those boots and a parcel of spurious notes and bad sovereigns found on him were too strong for him, and he owned up and got off with six months in consideration of the value of the evidence he gave.

It seems that he was the father-in-law of one of a gang of three enterprising gentlemen, who had gone into hiding in the Blackfriars Road, after literally coining money in another district. On the night when Troddles found him, or he found Troddles, there had been a falling out, as is frequently the way in such circles in times of danger and privation, and his son-in-law had given him the choice of quitting or remaining to have his neck broken, and he had chosen the former. Partly out of spite, and partly because it might prove useful, he had annexed as much of the nefarious stock-in-trade as he could lay his hands on, and then, in fear of what he had done, and the chance of falling into the hands of the police or his late companions, he had looked out for some one soft to impose himself on. And Troddles did the rest.

Troddles said it was our fault entirely. For himself, he said, he had never believed that stupid story we had told him, and anyway he had been no party to deceiving Mrs. Bloggs, who seemed to him to be the chief sufferer. Mrs. Bloggs thought so, too, and she was so raw about it that she wouldn’t even see us, but sent the girl up with the customary weekly account when it fell due, and a curt request that we would look out for a landlady who didn’t object to lodgers whose relatives were in jail or ought to be.

CHAPTER III.
THE SACRIFICE OF PHRYNE.

Of course, he could trust us right enough really. He only began that way to interest us and make us eager and curious.

“Yes, it would be nice, wouldn’t it?” I retorted, refusing to gratify him.

“It would be livable and with something of comfort and decency about it, which is more than can be said for this existence,” he said equably. “We haven’t had a tolerable evening since you were brutal and foolish enough to oblige Mrs. Bloggs to turn you out, have we, you chaps?”

Wilks said no, we had not, and perhaps Troddles would have said no too, only he was asleep, and under the circumstances they hadn’t the heart to wake him up. We hadn’t much heart for anything in those days immediately succeeding the fall, so to speak. Troddles and I had got wedged up with a Mrs. Macnabley, an austere lady of thrifty habits and uncompromising acerbity, who cooked badly, made a virtue of unpunctuality, and charged us fifteen shillings apiece more than we should have paid for twice the accommodation and three times the fare in quantity and quality.

When we took the rooms we thought Mrs. Bloggs would surely relent and kill a calf and welcome back her prodigal lodgers inside a fortnight, and we regarded Mrs. Macnabley as merely a temporary expedient and put up with things. As Troddles said, it was bed and board, though he was darned if he could tell the bed from the board. And we couldn’t be running round South London all our evenings looking for an understudy to Mrs. Bloggs, particularly if we were going to take back the original so soon.

But that was the trouble. Mrs. Bloggs didn’t want to be taken back, and she wouldn’t be taken back. We went round in a body a week after the exodus and asked her, and she said: “Not on no account, Mr. Andom—not if I stood empty for a year.”

We expected as much at a first visit, but we didn’t expect it to be repeated with firmer emphasis at the second, and at the third time of asking, and being refused, I began to feel that my erstwhile landlady, though foolish and misguided, had all the courage of her convictions and was really intending to stand by them. And it was about then that Murray took occasion to make a lull in the depressing silence by implying that he could not trust us.

I took up a sock ostentatiously and started to darn it. Between ourselves, I was not really reduced to the necessity of darning my own socks, but it irritated Wilks and Murray to see me do it, especially when I furtively wiped my eyes and suggested that if I had not been heartlessly torn away from the kind and good Mrs. Bloggs I never should have been reduced to such an extremity. Wilks turned to his Patience, and that vexed Murray almost as much as my sock-darning did both of them.

“Oh, well,” he said, “if you don’t care any more than that about it, I’ll write and decline.”

“My cousin’s offer,” said Murray patiently, as though he had been telling us of his cousin’s offer for the last hour and twenty minutes, and could not find it in his heart to be cross and harsh with us for being as we were made—dull and foolish. “At least, it isn’t my cousin really,” he explained, tranquilly irritating now that he had got us interested beyond the power of a darning needle and a card game to reclaim us. “His wife is my second cousin’s sister-in-law, but he’s very comfortably off, and he has a jolly nice house, and if I only could trust you——”

“If you have the invitation, extend it,” said I. “We know how to comport ourselves in all societies.”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of the spoons,” retorted Murray. “I was thinking of the bric-à-brac and the fauna and flora, and the billiard-table, and something my cousin who isn’t really my cousin, but——”

He caught sight of the danger light in Wilks’s eye and closed up on the pedigree hastily.

“Go on,” said Wilks smoothly. “When I reached for that cushion you were about to say that your cousin who isn’t your cousin has something——”

“Yes, a lot,” Murray admitted. “He calls it his reputation and values it beyond all his worldly possessions.”

“Um! I’d sooner have the billiard-table myself,” commented Wilks, “but there is no accounting for taste. And what have we to do with your far-removed cousin’s reputation?”

“Well, perhaps not his reputation,” said Murray. “But his house and the neighbours and all that sort of thing require living up to, and, as I started to say when you so rudely interrupted me, if I could trust you with these things and others, we might have them, and all to ourselves and for an indefinite period too.”

“His wife’s health has broken down, and he sees a chance of taking her to South America on a business trip, and the only thing that is worrying him is his house and oddments,” Murray explained. “He called on me in the City to-day to see how I was placed, and from what he said I gathered that an offer to go and live in the place and keep it warm and safe would be jumped at.”

“Why not let him jump, then?” I queried. “Only a man niggardly and selfish in his instincts would refuse healthy exercise to a what-you-may-call-it cousin, and it wouldn’t have cost you anything.”

“It would save us a lot,” said Wilks not at all doubtfully. “Allowing for reasonable expenses, we could save four pounds a week between us on capital expenditure. Do you really mean to say that you have such a chance in your pocket?”

“Practically yes,” Murray admitted. “I wasn’t asked outright to come and take possession, but the visit meant that, and the lunch at Gatti’s, which followed, was an appeal to my kindest and most charitable instincts.”

“It wouldn’t have failed with Troddles,” I commented. “Where is the place—twenty miles from anywhere and fifteen shillings return to get to it?”

“Tooting, near the Common, and just a good, healthy walk for the sturdy and mean,” said Murray.

“Tell your cousin, who ain’t to take the bill down, the house is let,” said Wilks firmly. “I can’t afford to chuck away a pound a week if you can, and it isn’t as though we were getting anything for it either.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I have,” said Murray brazenly. “I didn’t jump at it with indecent haste, but sort of allowed myself to be persuaded. I couldn’t be expected to live there by myself, of course, and I stipulated for a companion and a free hand in inviting, friends. I shall invite Troddles for a permanency, and you can come as guests on sufferance. He is the safest of you.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” retorted Murray. “Hang it all, you don’t want me to find the house and make your beds, do you?”

I was afraid, from Murray’s tone, that it didn’t much matter whether we did or not. Wilks said, for his part, it was just the domestic side of the proposition that appealed to him, and if there had been half-a-dozen servants and a housekeeper he should have refused to go.

He was for waking Troddles up and making him come and help us enthuse, but I restrained him.

“Let’s lead him to it Wemmick fashion,” I suggested. “Here’s a house; let’s go and live in it. It will puzzle him no end, and then, when he thinks he’s got to turn out and come back to this, we’ll break the truth to him gently and see him beam.”

Murray said it wasn’t a bad idea, and he liked tying knots in what Troddles called his mind, “But,” said he, “it’s a business proposition. My cousin is no particular fool, and hasn’t been merchanting with South Americans for fifty years for nothing. I am to keep the house intact and in good condition, pay all charges incurred, and rates and taxes, and render it up on demand as I received it, and pay for all damages and dilapidations.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Wilks. “We’ll have a sinking fund of half-a-dollar a head a week for that, like the Government does. We shan’t need it, but it will come in handy for a frolic at the wind-up. When do we go down and take possession?”

“I go on Saturday,” said Murray. “I’m going to see them off on Monday morning, and Saturday and Sunday will be pleasantly passed in getting introduced. There’s a dog and a canary and parrot, and a few hundred chickens of exquisite plumage and rare and choice breeds, and—— Oh, it will want getting used to. We had better meet at London Bridge on Monday evening and go down together.”

“Right,” said I. “Give my love to the cousins several times removed and tell them that they know not what they are doing, but owing to me the realization, when it does come, will not be so painful and expensive. I can’t ask you to supper, because Mrs. Macnabley weighs the cheese and makes a mark on the bread, so as to know how much has been eaten, and the comparative cost of our supper. She divides it by two, which I don’t think is fair, even though Troddles has got a tin of biscuits to help his allowance out. Good night, and pleasant dreams of camping out in bloated luxury next week.”

“I rather think Murray has got something on for to-night,” said I innocently on Monday morning at what our landlady humorously termed the breakfast-table.

I protested my innocence of any intention of getting at him, and even stood surety for the simpleness and purity of Murray’s design, which is a risky thing to do.

“He wants us to meet him at London Bridge Station as soon after six as we can get there,” I explained; and Troddles, ever good-natured and obliging if it isn’t too much trouble, agreed to keep the appointment.

I was a bit preoccupied and absent-minded during the day, so much so, in fact, that I got a wigging on two occasions, and the manager offensively called me “young man in love,” right before a roomful of clerks too.

It was absorbing—the thought, I mean, not the official wit—and there was more mystery and excitement to it than a holiday, because within bounds you do know pretty well what you are going to get on a holiday, and I would defy Old Moore himself to prophesy what lay before us during the next few months. Judging by their state of suppressed excitement when they turned up, I think the others must have been similarly affected, except Troddles, of course, who, knowing nothing, saw no reason for being anything but normally fat and placid.

Murray said there wasn’t any wheeze, and Wilks said, “Wait and see.” That phrase has since become historic, and I cannot help thinking that a future Prime Minister of State was in the carriage that night, though I only noticed a bricklayer, two very junior clerks, and an office boy besides ourselves.

We got out at Streatham Hill. Troddles wouldn’t be blindfolded, though Murray tried hard to persuade him. He said he thought it would look foolish, and if, as we had alleged, we had brought him out to see the country, he could do it better with his eyes open.

In default Murray led us by devious ways and long detours to our new house, and, not knowing this, it struck me that we should need to observe earlier rising than we were accustomed to, and be a trifle less dilatory, if we were to observe our usual rule of never being late to business more than three mornings out of five. Even Wilks looked concerned.

“Then we are going somewhere definite,” said Troddles, taking him up quietly. “Just now you said you weren’t.”

Wilks evaded the question, and Murray covered him by observing a superior-looking semi-detached villa on our left and pausing to survey it.

“Whatever for?” demanded Troddles. “It isn’t a public-house nor a restaurant.”

“It’s the sort of house we could buy and furnish and live in with that money you are nursing uselessly in the bank,” said Murray firmly. “I’m interested in houses, and in that one particularly.”

“Cousin?” echoed Murray, doing his best to look surprised and failing dismally.

“Yes; the cousin who isn’t really your cousin, and is going to South America, and wants you to come and mind it,” said Troddles.

It was our turn to look surprised. This was more like divination than intuition.

“I heard you tell the others last night,” said Troddles, exploding the mystery and shattering our hopes ruthlessly. “I wasn’t asleep as you supposed. I am not, quite frequently. Do you want to see me beam?”

We said “Oh!” limply, though Murray seemed to consider that we had been imposed upon, and said so. He said it was deceitful of Troddles, and we had wasted an hour and done three miles of solid tramping just because he couldn’t be frank and honest with us.

“Of course not,” said Murray. “Ten minutes’ brisk walking should do it by the direct road.”

“Well, the joke has gone, but the house remains,” said Wilks consolingly. “It is too much to expect to realize all our hopes of happiness in this wicked world. Get the key and let’s see what we have captured.”

Murray let us in, and we were properly impressed and somewhat subdued by what we saw. I don’t know whether Murray’s relative was merely mean and lived in a small house in order to save on rates and taxes, or whether he was pretentious and foolish, and had no proper sense of proportion. The house might have been rented by a man with two hundred a year, but it was furnished and fitted to suit the extravagant and uncultivated taste of one with a thousand, and the effect was rather overpowering until you got used to it.

We soon got used to it. Wilks made himself at home immediately by hanging his hat on a handsome full-sized replica of somebody’s Phryne, which he not unnaturally supposed was a fixture. It wasn’t, and if I hadn’t caught the plaster of Paris beauty as it toppled off the pedestal we should have had five pounds up to head the subscription list, I told them.

“Plaster of Paris—five pounds!” echoed Murray in fine scorn. “That statue is solid marble, and my cousin told me it cost a hundred and seventy guineas at an auction.”

“I don’t want to be assertive,” I said, “but if the responsibility of all this rested on me the first thing I should do would be to lock up all these decorative breakables in a spare room and keep the key in my pocket until the owners returned. It wouldn’t be so showy, but it would tend towards economy and peace of mind.”

Murray said it wasn’t a bad idea, and he would think about it after tea. He was a bit shaken with the shaking of the statue and the practical illustration Wilks had given us of the ease and simplicity with which things can be made to happen.

If there was overmuch of foolish and ostentatious decoration about the house, there was everything for solid comfort and many things of utility or pleasure, including a small chamber organ, with which I promised myself many happy, dreamy half-hours. A three-quarter size billiard-table, with all the appliances stowed away in one of the upstair rooms, and almost lost in dust and cobwebs, captured Wilks and Murray on sight; and for Troddles there was the dog. Troddles dotes on dogs, and Godolphin, a half-breed collie, reciprocated immediately and fawned on our fat friend, and nipped Wilks by the leg, just to show that he wasn’t all honey, and could be a darn good house-dog when he turned his attention that way.

I am fond of dogs myself, but I got rather a prejudice against Godolphin, because of his habit of trying to sing whenever I played the organ. His voice was all right, strong and resonant and all that sort of thing, but it was a music-hall sort of voice and not a bit suited to the solemn, churchy sort of music that I played. Troddles seemed to think it was the fault of the music; perhaps the dog didn’t recognize it for such. I asked him if he was reflecting on the dog’s intelligence when he suggested that Godolphin could possibly mistake a nocturne with all the stops out for a cat fight in the garden. He said “not altogether.” It is unlike Troddles to try and be offensive, or I should have considered that answer ambiguous and pressed him for an explanation.

There was much to see and much to arrange, and we didn’t make any elaborate preparation for meals. That would come later, when we got more settled and required a little domestic interlude to help pass the time pleasantly. For that evening bread and butter and tea and bread and cheese and beer had to suffice.

Troddles and I ran out to obtain supplies for supper and breakfast, and coming through the hall on our way back I noticed that the statue had been moved. I concluded that Murray had adopted my suggestion, and mentally commended this display of prudence and sagacity, which is not common to his nature.

We gave Troddles the best bedroom by general consent. It was what I call a dangerous room. I should have been safe in it, or, rather, the room would have been safe with me, but they wouldn’t let me have it. Wilks said he didn’t want it, and Murray said he wouldn’t have it as a gift, so Troddles got it, and it was fairly obvious that he had got what he wanted.

“I believe I can sleep in that bed,” he said. “The only thing is it will make going back to Mrs. Mac’s impossible.”

“Oh, we won’t go back,” said Murray recklessly. “We’re rising in the social scale. After this it will be the Hotel Swissle or something. We’ve been stagnant all these years, tied to the heels of the unimaginative Bob and his sordid, grub-hunting attachment to Mrs. Bloggs.”

We had a bit of a concert after supper, and we were getting along very nicely with it, though Murray made an awful hash of the organ, which he would persist in trying to play, and spoilt all my fine piano effects. He said it was noise, anyway, and that was what we were chiefly wanting. It wasn’t what the people next door were wanting, and they began banging on the wall. We let them bang; as Wilks sensibly and kindly said, it was as much their wall as ours, and he didn’t suppose there was anything in the lease that prevented them doing so if they wanted to. But when they came and banged at our front door and played fantasias on the electric bell, we had to pay attention. A demure little servant stood there. We had expected, from the force and insistence of the summons, to see six foot of muscular man armed with the kitchen poker at least.

“Please, sir, master’s compliments,” she said, “and as mistress isn’t very well would you mind not making such a horrible row?”

They weren’t very complimentary, these compliments! Murray thought the message must refer to my playing, or else Troddles’s singing; I, on the contrary, felt convinced that it was a direct and justifiable criticism of his organ effects, which, in combination with Godolphin’s howling, were horrible enough to paralyse a Comanche on the warpath. The girl said her mistress wasn’t a “common she,” and she should just go and tell her master what I had called the best wife that luck and a fair position had enabled him to procure.

This stupid and perverse interpretation of my words staggered us for the moment, and while we were reeling Godolphin saw a cat in the offing, or in his mind’s eye, or somewhere. He bolted between us, upsetting Troddles as he passed, and the last we saw of him he was going off towards the Common at twenty miles an hour, and we were trailing out in breathless pursuit, whistling and shouting as we ran.

Godolphin had several advantages over us, including his name and an intimate knowledge of the locality, and it wasn’t a fair race. Wilks, who was still sore and revengeful over his bitten calf, suggested that we left the brute to do all the running he cared about, and come home when he was tired, and I rather sided with Wilks. Troddles didn’t; he said the whole joy of his life would go out if Godolphin were not recovered; and Murray said it was a duty, and a heavy pecuniary responsibility rested on getting the dog back. It was a very valuable dog, his cousin had told him. Everything was in that establishment, it seemed to me. The teapots were Camberwell china, and the very frying pan had a pedigree.

It took us over an hour to capture Godolphin, and as it was past twelve when our concert was broken up we were tired and fain would be in bed. Troddles said he was dog tired, but I don’t think it was anything more than accidental. Godolphin seemed to know his own way to bed; he got his own supper, too, which was the bacon intended for our breakfast, but of that we recked nothing—just then.

I was making good progress in a race against time for my pillow when my bedroom door was pushed open and Troddles’s broad face, looking as solemn as soot, appeared.

“Don’t make a row,” he said as I started to speak; “there’s a chap hiding under my bed.”

“It isn’t,” he insisted. “By good luck I dropped my stud, and when I stooped to pick it up I saw him as plainly as I see you. A great big hulking ruffian he is too.”

“No; fortunately he had his head turned the other way,” said Troddles, “and I went on whistling quite naturally.”

“Very well. Run back and hold the fort a second while I bring up Murray and Wilks,” I directed. “This sort of thing must be discouraged, and they’ll enjoy a shindy.”

Troddles looked as if he didn’t, but he obediently went back to the post of duty and danger while I armed myself with a stick and obtained assistance.

“Troddles has found a burglar under his bed,” said I, poking my head in at Murray’s door. “Slip up and help him. This isn’t a joke; it’s serious. You needn’t stop to wash or do your hair.”

The behaviour of Wilks when I made the announcement to him struck me as odd—afterwards. It would have at the time, only I had so much else to think of, and I was excited, and, I don’t mind owning it, nervous.

“Oh,” said he casually. “Is he a pedigree burglar or only a common or garden one?”

I said he was a dangerous, desperate one, with a life preserver in each hand and revolvers peeping out of every pocket. Wilks said he would come, but it was a horrible fag. Had it been anyone but Wilks I should have thought he was funking, but Wilks couldn’t be accused of that. He dotes on a row, and would run a mile after a fighting burglar rather than stay in a room out of the way of one.

“Accomplices!” I whispered. “They’ve heard us and have turned off the gas to give their pal a chance. Look out he doesn’t rush us.”

Murray said no, he didn’t think it was that, but the meter run out. It was one of those shilling in the slot affairs, and he had intended replenishing it before we came up. He said it was necessary to be just, even to burglars, and one of us had better go down and start the thing working again. I would have gone, only Wilks forestalled me.

“Oh, never mind the light,” he said out loud. “Let’s haul him out and take him down with us. There are enough of us to tackle one burglar. Rush him out—I’ll mind the door.”

He kicked the door open and pushed us into the room, and we went, though I, for one, was not keen on it. The thought of a brawny ruffian lurking in the dark ready to spring on us with a jemmy was uncomfortable, and, remembering the advantage that always comes to him who gets his blow in first, I reached the bed in two strides and made a vicious swipe beneath it with my stick. At the same moment I got a lick behind from another, and Troddles yelled: “Mind the door, Wilks; he’s out!”

Murray was thrashing away on the other side of the bed, and he sang out: “No, he isn’t; he’s under here, and he’s dressed in armour by the feel of him.”

“Stand back, Troddles!” I ordered. “That was me you welted, and it hurt.”

I felt cautiously with my stick. Yes, the man was there, so I gave him another welt for luck and called upon him to surrender. There was no answer, and a horrible fear began to take possession of me. There was a sharp crack as the stick landed, and I knew from the feel that I had hit the skull.

Troddles struck a match, and just as we were going to investigate Godolphin began to bark and then growl savagely; and then came a shriek from Wilks, followed by a scuffle and the sound of furniture being overturned.

“Murray, come and take this dog off; he’ll have me in a minute! Get up, you brute!”

The voice was the voice of Wilks, and we understood what it meant without explanation. Wilks had gone down to find the gas meter and had found Godolphin instead. Murray rushed to his rescue, and Troddles and I were left alone with the dead man. I told Troddles it was a dead burglar in case he should feel nervous. He said he preferred them dead to any other way, but he couldn’t help thinking that I was exaggerating, and he lit another match and cautiously approached the cemetery. It must have been stupefying, but I don’t think he needed to go and set light to the valance by letting the match burn under it while he crouched there with his mouth ajar and horror and consternation writ large over his massive features. I put out the blaze, and while doing it I got a full view of my victim. It wasn’t a burglar at all, but Phryne, the priceless statue—Phryne in three pieces and a good deal of powder, dressed up in Troddles’s overcoat and a cloth cap which I recognized as Murray’s property.

“A hundred and seventy guineas!” Troddles groaned. “And such a stupid old trick to waste it on!”

I hated to tell Murray what had happened, though it was no fault of mine, and I couldn’t even be sure now that I had struck the blow which had caused such havoc, but I had to, and Murray was properly wild about it. Wilks said it was very careless of us, and we oughtn’t to be allowed about with rare and expensive things. Anyway, he hadn’t broken the statue, and so he couldn’t be blamed. All he had done was to test Troddles’s courage, and he was pleased to see that it had stood the test creditably.

“But it’s rather odd that marble should break so easily,” he said thoughtfully, and he pulled out the ruins and examined them, then he sat down and began to laugh.

“Plaster of Paris!” he chuckled. “I thought as much. Worth fifteen bob. Order half-a-dozen of them to-morrow, Murray, and then we shall have one to spare in case of accidents.”

CHAPTER IV.
FIFTY UP AND SEVERAL DOWN.

We had been living the simple life on a luxurious scale for over a week, and were getting along quite nicely. Nothing had happened of any great moment—just a few teacups hopelessly crumpled up and a chair or so put out of action. Murray said it was wonderful, and Troddles and I thought it encouraging. Wilks seemed to think we were doing an injustice to ourselves and undue honour to our feat.

“We are not barbarians,” he complained; “and, of course, we know how to keep decent property in decent condition. Cracked crockery and silly tumble-to-bits furniture naturally will come to pieces if you go into the same room with it, but this is not Mrs. Bloggs’s shebang.”

I didn’t think Wilks was quite just or fair to the only sort of home I had been able to afford for him to collapse, but I didn’t think it worth while starting a discussion in which we should be bound to take strong and opposing views. So, in an idle way, I suggested that it was a bit of a pity that we should be faced with a wet evening and with no particular plans for passing it when there was a lovely billiard-table stowed away in a lumber-room upstairs, which only required getting out and setting up to afford us a continuous round of healthy and intellectual diversion.

Wilks said he had been thinking that way himself, only he expected we were such rotten players that there would be no credit and not much fun in beating us. He wasn’t in practice or form, he admitted, but he understood billiards as few living exponents understood the game, and there had been a time when Roberts would never have held the championship if he, Wilks, hadn’t had to drop out in order to earn his living.

Murray laughed, one of those nasty irritating laughs which roused every evil instinct in Wilks’s nature. I said I never was in the running for the championship, and the potboy in any low-down public-house where there was a billiard-table could probably beat me all round the room, but if I couldn’t play better than Wilks I’d eat the cue for supper.

“Whatever for?” demanded Troddles. “I have never seen you play. I have seen Wilks though, and I never laughed so much in all my life. If you play any worse than he did you will be worth watching. It will be as good as a circus.”

“And what about you, Trod? Got any latent germs of championship about you?” asked Murray.

Troddles said he shouldn’t put it that way exactly, but once he had made six not out, and if he hadn’t stepped on the only cue they had and broken it, so that he had to finish up with a broom-handle—which is an unhandy thing to play billiards with—he believed he would have won. The other man was paralysed, he explained modestly, in extenuation of his possible triumph.

Murray then said that if it wasn’t that he hated men who bragged he would tell us a few things he had done on a billiard-table that would astonish us. I thought he must be referring to the time when we were camping up the river and got driven into a hotel by stress of weather, and he had to sleep on one because there was nowhere else for him. That was the only use I had known him put a billiard-table to, and I said so.

“There are several things you don’t know,” he retorted rudely. “For instance, you don’t know that Godolphin has got your boots under the table and is pretending they are cats and worrying them accordingly.”

I certainly didn’t, and in the struggle to save my property and convince Troddles’s pet of his error I upset the tea-tray. Troddles saved the teapot by catching it in his lap. It was a valuable bit of family china, and I thought it rather fortunate that he happened to be there. Troddles didn’t seem to consider it in that light, and he made an absurd fuss, hopping about the room and treading on Godolphin’s tail.

While he was gone to take immediate steps to obtain ease and comfort we reverted to this question of billiard playing. Wilks was insistent; Murray was contemptuous and bragging; and I was not minded to have it left at the stage it was when Troddles had interrupted us by getting in the way of a teapot trying its first fall.

The worst of Wilks is he can’t argue without getting hot, and then Murray gets excited. Shouting isn’t argument, I had to point out; but all the same I wasn’t going to be shouted down. I didn’t say that I could play billiards, only that Wilks couldn’t, and Murray didn’t ought to be allowed to try; and by this means I was instrumental in bringing them to a calmer frame of mind, when they could see quite easily that the most satisfactory method of settling the dispute was to get the table in order and have a match.

Troddles came back just as we settled on that. He looked longingly at the couch, but agreed to join us, though, he said, I had seriously handicapped him, and he was not sure that a better place for him wouldn’t be the nearest cottage hospital. I suggested that clearing away the tea-things would be nearly as beneficial and much more useful. I have heard that domestic work is the finest remedy you can possibly have for nearly anything. Troddles said it wasn’t for scalded legs. He made such a strong point of it that I did the clearing away myself, while Murray and Wilks went up to see about getting the table ready.

I wouldn’t keep them waiting by stopping to wash up, I thought, so I just shoved the things out on the copper with lots of other things, and when I got upstairs I found that I need not have hurried after all, except that I wanted to. I always do when there is washing up to be done. There wasn’t going to be any billiards from the look of it. The table was there all right, and so were the cues and the balls and all the rest of the paraphernalia, but there was no room. Anyway, it was difficult to tell which was the room and which the table, they blended so nicely.

I said I thought if we opened the window and door, and shot from the end and offside, we could manage; but Wilks objected. He said you couldn’t play billiards that way, and it was billiards we were wanting, not shove-ha’penny. Murray said it would be novel and advocated trying it. He said he and I could sit on the mantelpiece, and Troddles could take turn and turn about with Wilks in the doorway.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Wilks urged plaintively. “It’s nearly eight now, and we shan’t have time for a game if we don’t hurry. Let’s take the darn thing downstairs and set it up in the dining-room. We can shunt that table up here and put a cloth on this and use it for meals. It will be much more convenient, and we can have a game whenever we fancy one.”

“Easily with the four of us,” said Wilks, cocksure as usual of things he knew nothing whatever about.

We were deceived, perhaps by Wilks’s assurance, perhaps by the table itself. It looked so easy and simple and innocent that we never suspected what latent cussed malevolence was contained in it. We didn’t even trouble to remove our coats, but just waded in as we were, and in a cheerful, light-hearted manner caught hold of that table and prepared to give it the surprise of its life, so to speak. Troddles even went so far as to suggest that we should not require him, and in that case he could more pleasantly employ his time downstairs; but that we could not admit or allow, and Troddles stayed by request, and skinned his fingers and barked his shins and imperilled his precious life with the rest of us, which was only just and right and fair.

The table was heavy! We admitted that as soon as we lifted it, and when I thought of the distance between it and the dining-room, not to mention the flight of stairs intervening, I whistled thoughtfully and suggested, if it were at all practicable, it might be easier and better to bring the dining-room up to the table.

Troddles said if we wanted his advice, though we were going to get it whether we wanted it or not, it was to leave the table severely alone and go and have a shilling’s worth of billiards at the Blue Bell.

“I know these things,” he urged, “and they are the devil. You’ll get it half-way through the door and then it will stick and won’t go through and won’t go back. And you’ll either have to leave it there, which Murray’s people will be sure to object to, or else cut it up for fire-wood, and I don’t suppose that will please them either.”

Troddles must have been inspired that night, or else he knew more about furniture shifting than we were aware of. But he was a prophet in his own country and without honour, and we ignored him; we even laughed as him. Alas! woe is us, and so on.

Two minutes later Murray was saying that it was a stupid and malicious thing of Troddles to go and tell the table what to do like that, and Wilks was saying—but no, I don’t think I had better tell what Wilks was saying. The table had caught his fingers between the edge and the door frame, and it hurt, though I don’t think that is sufficient to justify a man who has been carefully brought up, as I know Wilks to have been, using the language he did. It hurt me, and I had to laugh to conceal my vexation, which hurt Wilks and made him say some more.

“You wait until your turn comes,” he said vindictively; “I’ll come and gloat over you.”

My turn came all right, though by then Wilks had got so much else to think about on his own account that he allowed me to suffer without the additional pangs of his jibing. Before it arrived Troddles had a run in. He didn’t want to, but Wilks had a theory, and solid weight, such as only Troddles could supply, was necessary for testing it.

“If we could only tip it it would go,” he explained. “Scramble over it, Trod, and put your weight on the other end. Mind the cloth with your boots.”

For once in a long way Wilks’ theory was correct. With a little assistance from us Troddles’s weight converted the table into a see-saw, and Troddles as Casabianca was a really fine and inspiring sight, until the angle became one of forty-five degrees or thereabouts, and then he did what Casabianca never would have done—slid off the deck which was not burning, bumped down a short flight of stairs, and sat up, complaining dismally, on the landing. Relieved of the weight, the table returned to its original position, with one leg nestling affectionately on Murray’s toes, and then he had something to complain about.

It looked so innocent, too, so simple and guileless. We put on our pipes and sat round and studied it, and we all agreed upon that; but, as Murray said, it was never entirely safe to go by appearances, and men who have been hanged for the most shocking murders always looked respectable, with a sort of Sunday-school-superintendent air about them.

After half-an-hour’s thoughtful consideration and study, Wilks suddenly jumped up and called for a saw.

“It only wants half an inch more space,” he pointed out, “and we can get it by cutting the door frame. We’ll do it neatly, and with a bit of putty we can put it back so that it will never be noticed.”

Murray seemed willing to take the risk of that, and if he didn’t mind his relative’s house being cut up I didn’t see why I should trouble. So Wilks cut it up—clumsily, and by that means we got the table out on the landing and headed it for the stairs, and there it jammed again and stuck firmly and finally. From the point of view of those who would have to live in the house, I didn’t consider this any improvement. Cocked up in the doorway of a spare room, a billiard-table is merely an eyesore, and only inconvenient or painful when you forgot to duck in passing it and jabbed your ear against the leg; but at the head of the stairs it was a positive nuisance. Mountaineers and cragsmen could manage with the aid of a rope ladder and alpenstocks, but delicate ladies and serving-maids could not be expected to go to bed every night in peril of their lives.

I said we should have to remove it. Murray said he was glad to hear me say that because it confirmed an idea of his own. I think he was trying to be sarcastic. He succeeded to his own satisfaction, for he went on and asked Wilks whether a crowbar would be sufficient this time, or if we should need to use dynamite. Wilks said he hated to be done, particularly by half a ton of spiteful slate and woodwork masquerading as a billiard-table, but he was too honest and straightforward a man to refuse to acknowledge when he was fairly beaten, and we’d give up our proposed game and put the wretched table back in its place and try and forget that it existed.

That is the most honest and manly thing I have ever heard Wilks say, and the abiding pity of it was that we couldn’t carry it out. The table wouldn’t go back. It was out for fifty up and the championship, and if we were faint and weakhearted it wasn’t.

That ill-advised attitude begot a corresponding cussedness in Wilks and Murray. They said if it, the table, had allowed itself to be taken back quietly and put to bed in the spare room, they would have forgiven it and forgotten the matter; but now they would play the game if they sat up all night and pulled the house to pieces to get it.

“What we want is another man,” said Murray. “Slip under, Bob, and go and find us one. There’s bound to be a hearty, muscular tramp loafing about by the Common who’ll risk his neck or legs for a bob and unlimited beer. Lay great stress on the beer.”

I found one. He didn’t look like a Hercules, and he coughed painfully and implied that brief life was here his portion until he understood that the shilling and the beer could only be come at by an understudy of Sandow. He stopped coughing and told me in the strictest confidence, that it was his strength that had been his undoing. He was a plasterer by trade, but he couldn’t get a job because his muscular force and energy were so great that when he put the plaster on he shoved the bricks out of place or else broke ’em, and of course no builder would stand that.

“What sort of a job is it, mister?” he inquired, somewhat anxiously I thought.

“Only just to help us bring a bit of a table downstairs,” said I, and I felt sanguine and cheerful as I led my Samson back to the house. I asked him if he would like to see the job, and he said he would sooner see the beer first.

“Shifting furniture is a job that requires brains, guv’nor,” he explained, “and there ain’t nothing like a glass of beer for ’elping you to study a propersishon as you may say.”

Wilks came down when he was half-way through his second aid to study. He said he didn’t feel like standing on the stairs holding up a billiard-table while I was carousing with tramps, which I thought was a grossly exaggerated misrepresentation of the case, and very unkind and unjust. The tramp, who had been rather affable and condescending with me, changed his tone to Wilks.

“I was only just stopping to oblige the gent as he was so pressing,” he said; “but my motter is work first and booze afterwards.”

Wilks said he was glad of that because this was a job for the moment, and he ostentatiously bottled up the beer and put it away and led to where duty and danger waited. We met Godolphin on the way, and if Wilks hadn’t saved the tramp with his boot we should have had to bury him and go and find another. Godolphin was positively nasty over it. He swore at us for the most blank, unfathomable fools he had ever encountered, and he begged and implored us to let him kill that tramp. He even told us why, but we couldn’t understand his language, except the coloured parts. We understood the tramp’s, which was equally violent and just as coloured.

“You shut ’im up safe somewheres, guv’nor, or out I goes,” he concluded. “I’ve ’ad ’iderphobea once, and I don’t want no more.”

Wilks tried to persuade him that our dog was perfectly healthy, and at the worst would only bite him a bit. He didn’t want to be bitten, he said, and so, to save argument, Wilks pushed Godolphin into the boot cupboard and locked him up.

I think that tramp must have been foreman in his job, though that wouldn’t quite fit in with his own story. His idea of helping us was to tell us what to do and swear at us for doing it. Even Troddles got restive, so well did our assistant understand and apply his knowledge of foremanship. Wilks laughed, but when the cheerful torrent of profanity and abuse came his way he set down his end of the table and asked the man to which of us precisely he was speaking.

The tramp was going to explain, but he caught Wilks’s eye in time, and excused his seeming rudeness on the score of his zeal, even though Murray and I laughed merrily and did our best to encourage him to be manly and honest. We thought it would be good for Wilks, but the tramp evidently concluded that it wouldn’t be good for himself.

Little by little, inch by inch, we forced the table down the stairs, tearing off paper and breaking away the plaster as we progressed, and then it stuck again, and nothing we could do served to move it.

The tramp was below, lifting, and we were above, ready to lift or hold on as the case required. It was the harder but the least dangerous place, and we arranged it that way by universal consent, except the tramp’s. He didn’t seem to notice that in case anything went wrong he would be in the way of the avalanche, and when he did petition for assistance on the score of effectiveness we couldn’t get down to him. And at that moment the silly gas went out again. I think those slot meters are the most foolish, irritating things ever devised. They always go out just when you are most in need of light—at least, ours seemed to.

Murray found a shilling and slid it under the table to the tramp, and explained the location and working of the meter to him.

“We can’t get down, but you can do it quite easily,” he explained kindly but needlessly.

The tramp said he would try. He was a long time about it, and once Wilks thought he heard him in the drawing-room.

Murray called, and the tramp answered from the foot of the stairs with suspicious alacrity.

“Just a minute, guv’nor,” he said. “It’s so bally dark I can’t see what I’m laying me ’ands on.”

“There’s no need to lay your hands on anything!” said Wilks sharply. “The meter’s in the scullery on a shelf behind the door. Put the shilling in and turn the handle.”

Troddles asked us what “I don’t think” meant. He said that was what the man said, and the tone somehow suggested beer to him.

Ten minutes later we began shouting. Godolphin jeered at us from the boot cupboard, but this was all, and it began to strike me that something was amiss. I remembered the man’s cough and the strenuous labour we had made him perform. Supposing to gain the job the poor fellow had misrepresented his condition. I pictured him lying in a dead faint in the scullery and perhaps perishing for want of timely aid. Or perhaps he had fallen dead outright.

I mentioned my fears to the others. They seemed to think I was taking an unnecessarily gloomy view of the affair, though they had to admit that some thing was wrong somewhere.

We called again, and Wilks hurt himself in trying to scramble over the table to go down and see what had happened. Then he tried to persuade us to make the attempt, but after his experience we didn’t care about it. We sat on the stairs in the dark for another half hour, and then Murray said he should have to do something, and did it himself, being lithe and agile and practised in entering and leaving houses by unusual routes.

We let him down from the bath-room window on to an annexe, and from there he managed to reach the ground. There was no sign of the tramp in the scullery or the kitchen. We hadn’t any of us got a shilling, and those silly meters don’t accept equivalents or give change. Therefore he could not light the gas, so he lit matches and discovered that the hall and the dining-room were equally bare of tramp, dead or drunk or merely sick. Is was puzzling, and, not knowing that Wilks had carefully put the beer away, he drew no conclusions from the sight of two empty bottles standing on the table.

“I believe the beggar’s paid himself with the shilling we gave him for the gas and bolted,” he called up to us.

“Mean skunk! It’s the sort of thing he would do,” said Wilks. “Get the gas on again and let’s finish this frolic. I want that game of billiards.”

Murray went out and changed a two-shilling piece with the first policeman he met. The constable only had a shilling-piece and fourpence ha’penny in coppers, but Murray took it as fair value and came back and gave us an illumination in more senses than one. His best gold-topped gamp had gone. We laughed, and Wilks said, “Good for the tramp.” My boots had gone. Murray laughed heartily, assisted by Wilks. I swore without assistance. The only pair I had got, and, pretty well new and unsoiled except by Godolphin’s teeth. It was too bad. Wilks’s overcoat had gone. Wilks swore—better than I did—and Murray and I nearly did ourselves grave physical injury in trying to be as merry and bright as the occasion demanded. The clock from the drawing-room, a genuine Slade and absolutely priceless, had gone. We all swore together except Troddles, who laughed hysterically.

Troddles is capable of unexpected flashes at times. We told him that, as a bit of deduction, we considered that brilliant. He said no, it was only just how it had struck him.

After that it seemed superfluous to mention that our bottled beer had gone, but Murray mentioned it all the same, if only to remind us to get some more before the shops closed. He, Murray, said it was a pity the tramp hadn’t stolen the table as well; but since he hadn’t and in less than four hours we should be wanting to go to bed, we had better tackle it again. He eyed it with intense disfavour; we all did, for we felt that we hated billiards and never wanted to see a billiard-table again, at least, not on the staircase of any house we were inhabiting.

We got it to budge eventually to a more convenient angle. If we should have to leave it so, we could at least crawl beneath it to and from the bedrooms.

“If we could only get it to pieces——” Troddles began, but Wilks interrupted him with sudden enthusiasm.

“Why ever couldn’t you have suggested that before, fathead?” he demanded, pleasantly rude. “Of course we can. We can get the top off, anyhow, and that is as much as we need to trouble over. Find a screwdriver, Murray. Troddles has busted a way through by sheer weight while we were intellectually trying to penetrate by tramps and muscles.”

Murray got the tool and we hunted about underneath and found stout screws which looked as though they might be holding the bed in place. There was a terrible lot of them. I took out twelve myself, and Murray removed as many more. He had handed up the driver for Wilks to have a turn, and he had had several, when there was a sudden snap and sound of tearing woodwork. I saw the top begin to slide and yelled a warning to Murray. He dropped under, and the heavy slate bed slid over his head down the stairs, snapping off the newel post, wiping out half-a-dozen banisters, and coming to rest with one corner digging into the party wall.

It was a disgracefully thin wall, and when we pulled the table out we could see clean through into the next-door people’s hall. They could see through into ours, too, and the man came and spoke about it. He had a quick temper and a hasty, impatient nature; also an uncurbed and offensive curiosity. He fixed his eye to the aperture we had inadvertently made and spied on us. I caught sight of the eye and signalled my discovery to the others. Murray looked round and saw the fiery optic and said, “I spy an eye.” Troddles giggled, and that, as Lindley Murray would have said, done it. The eye gave place to a mouth, and the mouth up and spake.

“What the devil are you men up to?” it said. “You’ve knocked out a couple of bricks in my hall.”

“Oh, shove ’em in again, will you?” pleaded Murray. “It will be draughty if you don’t. I’ll get them set permanently to-morrow. We are shifting a billiard-table. Quite an accident. Awfully sorry.”

Our neighbour didn’t seem satisfied, and he wouldn’t give up the bricks, so Murray got a picture and hung it over the hole, and made quite an effective repair. You would never have suspected that any damage had been done unless you moved the picture. Wilks said we could glue the newel post together and buy a few banister rails to replace those that had been smashed, and in an hour we could put everything straight. We would see to it on Saturday, he said; but we never did.

The table wasn’t greatly improved by our treatment of it. One of the pockets had been torn out altogether, and the brass rim of the other that had gone through the wall was knocked into such a funny shape. It made me laugh, it looked so quaint, and when Wilks got the hammer and tried so hammer it round again it broke off. It looked more natural then, but it was no more useful.

We shifted the dining-table out into the conservatory and got the billiard-table up in its place. The base was awkward but not dangerous, and we got it down all right except for a few scratches, and Murray and I screwed it up while Wilks improvised fresh pocket frames with a bit of split cane; and Troddles went out to do some necessary shopping, taking Godolphin with him as consolation for being shut up so long in a cupboard and deprived of a succulent feed of tramp meat.

In consequence of this and that and several other things, it was very late before we got our game; but we got it, fifty up, and Troddles beat us hollow. He was all over that table, and we simply hadn’t a show. He made seventeen breaks, including a gas globe and one of the French windows leading to the conservatory, and he ripped up the cloth and prodded Wilks in the what-do-you-call-it and nearly poked my eye out. It was magnificent, but it wasn’t billiards as I understood the game. Wilks said it reminded him of rounders more, but Troddles said no, it was just plain billiards, and if we would only spot the bar, or bar the spot, or something, and get out of his way, he could do ever so much better.

He spoke excitedly, and there was a dangerous gleam in his eye, and I began to understand then the danger which lurks in a billiard-table, against which I had been warned in my youth. So we took his cue away from him and gave him bread and cheese and a beer bottle to soothe him.

Billiards is a dangerous game. We ached and Murray limped for a week, and the total cost of that fifty up was well over a ten-pound note, not counting things the tramp had despoiled us of, which could be justly charged to the account.

CHAPTER V.
FOUR MEN AND A MULE.

It was sporting, but it was not a square deal, according to my way of thinking, and I lodged a protest on principle.

“We agreed to spend Saturday in putting the house straight,” I urged. “There isn’t a clean dish, and I don’t care about tea in a gallipot, which is what I had to use this morning; the beds haven’t been made since—— How often have you made yours, Troddles, since we came down?”

“Once,” said Troddles triumphantly. “I did it last week. It doesn’t seem quite right, somehow; but I’ve found out what is wrong, and I’m going to tackle it again soon.”

“Well, I hope the sanitary inspector won’t come messing round,” said I gloomily. “ ‘Unfit for human habitation,’ I believe they call it, and they make a closing order and fine you fifty pounds for every day you keep open after. Besides, we haven’t got a horse.”

Wilks said fools kept horses and wise men used them, and a fool and his horse were soon parted, anyway. Murray said while he agreed with me in principle, he could not back me up in making a joyous pleasure into a grievous burden.

“Perhaps Bob would prefer to stay at home and earn half a crown at domestics while we go driving,” suggested Wilks. “It is a kind thought, and, although we shan’t get much for our money, we shall have the satisfaction of knowing that he is true to his motto, ‘Duty before all,’ as the Custom House man said when he rooked me five-and-nine for those cigars.”

Troddles was with me in spirit; but the alluring joys of a drive along country lanes, a “put up” in some little wayside inn, and a Sunday unmarred by the need of peeling potatoes and doing his share of the graft fought powerfully against his sense of right and decency.

“Of course,” he said in a ready spirit of compromise, “if we could get a woman to come and put it all clean and tidy it would be best, and much easier and more comfortable. We can start again then, and clear up as we go along, so as not to have quite such a formidable lot of it to tackle.”

It was Friday evening, and we were still at the tea-table, though it had gone eight, and we had had other and more promising ideas for passing the evening pleasantly. Early in the meal a discussion had arisen, with a certain amount of dissension. This housekeeping business wasn’t panning out at all satisfactorily, and I took a firm stand over it. I had my living to get, and to have to come home tired and weary to do housework after a harassing day at the office was bad enough, but to be cook, general servant, charwoman, and errand-boy all in one, while Troddles slept and Wilks smoked and Murray messed about, didn’t seem to me to be playing the game. I said so. I hadn’t done that or anything so far, I know, but I could see that I soon should have to, and the prospect displeased me. I don’t mind doing my share; but I do object to doing three-fourths of what is done and having the rest left untouched. It always seems to me like that, though Murray thinks I am unduly sensitive, and that I never really run any serious danger of doing more than I ought.

Day after day the house had been pulled to bits and left so. The scullery was crammed with dirty crockery, and wouldn’t hold another clearing-up if there had been one to put there. Each morning they said they would clear it up in the evening, and every evening they were too tired or too something to tackle it, but would get up bright and early the next morning and do it while the sun was rising and the birds crowded round and warbled to them. Of course, they never did, and then, when even what Murray calls his conscience reproached him, they made a solemn oath—they had been swearing about it on and off for days in a commonplace, ordinary way—to give up the week-end to domestics, and wash and tidy and repair as well, so that if Murray’s relatives came home unexpectedly they would never know, from what they could see, that anyone had been living in the house at all.

That was an exaggeration, of course; but I didn’t want to dampen their enthusiasm, and I let it pass without comment. And then, on the very eve of the battle, so to speak, Wilks broke into a stable at the bottom of the garden. It was locked, and the key was missing; but that makes no difference to Wilks when he is actuated by curiosity. It contained lumber, mostly; but there was one thing which was not lumber, and he fastened on it enthusiastically. It was a governess car, rather a good one, I judged, though I know nothing of these matters, and Wilks said it was the one thing he had been longing for.

“What about the billiard-table?” queried Troddles. “I thought that was the centre of attraction.”

It certainly had, but I don’t think Wilks meant it in that way. He wouldn’t discuss it at all, or the dirty crockery, or anything but the car. We must get a horse for it and go for drives, he insisted. We might even go up and down to business in it and save our fares, he suggested. I said we might, and then again we might not, which last I considered most probable.

Wilks had a look round; but he couldn’t find any horse belonging to the outfit, and there the matter seemed likely to end. It would have done, with most men; but Wilks is very assiduous and persistent in some things, and during the day he pondered on the problem of a cart without a horse, and solved it. And that was how the trouble began, and why we sat at variance in an untidy room, before a table littered over with the remnants of our meal, and smoked, while I gently and persuasively endeavoured to bring them to a proper sense of duty and order.

“Besides,” I urged, “it isn’t only ourselves. The man next door is kicking up a deuce of a fuss over his hall, and he’ll go and complain to the landlord if we don’t have that hole mended.”

“I’ll tell his wife he came home squiffy last night if he does,” said Murray. “He had a friend with him, and a nice old pair of ducks they looked—all over the road, and propping each other up!”

“Oh!” said I limply. “Anyway, we haven’t got a horse, and, as we can’t go driving without one, perhaps we had better carry out our purpose and get it done before Wilks gets breaking open something else and discovering a pair of bays and a coachman and a boy in buttons, all complete.”

“I haven’t a horse, it is true,” put in Wilks maliciously, “and the sort of ass you make is no good between the shafts; but I’ve got a mule—or the promise of one—for a consideration, of course.”

“A mule, and a jolly fine one,” said Wilks placidly. “You know what a mule is, I suppose?”

“Of course,” retorted Wilks. “Pulls governess cars along honeysuckled lanes, and goes like the wind for hours and hours, and never gets tired or jaded.”

“Perhaps not,” said I; “but the men in charge of it do. The mule is the coroner’s best friend, and a kicking treat for undertakers and doctors to gloat over. Wilks, my poor friend, you’re dotty, and the worst symptom is that you could imagine for one instant that we should ever consent to abandon our necessary duties to come and help you sit on a sun-baked road in a tangle of wooden splinters, holding our shattered jaws together with one hand while we pencil our wills with the other.”

Wilks said something rude about me holding my “insufficiently shattered jaw,” but not before Troddles had caught the trend of my argument.

“That is only a bright and mirthful fraction of what they do do,” I answered him. “They kick by habit and instinct, but their chief relaxation is biting.”

Troddles said then that he preferred the teacups and a dishcloth, and if we’d only let him off that drive he’d clean the knives as well; and it was all in vain that Wilks begged him not to listen to me, that I was an unreliable untruther, and that mules were the gentlest, sweetest-tempered creatures in existence—so gentle, in fact, that poets meant mules really when they absentmindedly wrote gazelles. He challenged me to name any single occasion when I had been bitten or maltreated by a mule, and because I couldn’t on the spur of the moment, he held that the case against me was proved, and Troddles need not place any further faith in my veracity.

Saturday was simply perfect, and we were sorry that we could not take advantage of the morning, as well as the rest of the day, for our outing. But we had done rather a lot in the way of impromptu holidays lately, and we simply daren’t run in another on any pretext whatever until, as Murray said, we had effaced our record by at least a solid month of punctuality and extreme diligence. He said we should enjoy ourselves all the better for having a just title and an easy conscience—a noble and earnest sentiment that at one time would have made me hopeful of Murray.

Wilks wouldn’t tell us how he raised the mule. We thought we understood why when we found we had to walk the car to Wimbledon. The mule resided at Wimbledon, and the baker who had been moved by Wilks’s tears or cash to lend us his aid could only arrange with his brother to let us have her on personal application. I hate going for a walk between the shafts of a governess-car; it makes you look such a fool. Wilks said it was a drawback; but, as the mule was at Wimbledon and the car at Tooting, he didn’t see how else we could manage unless we fetched the bee to the honeysuckle, so to speak, which would be just as tiresome, and a shocking waste of time. Anyway, he said, he hoped we should recognize that he had done his part in providing the treat for us, and not expect him to do any drawing.

“Catch hold of it, Troddles,” he said, briskly. “It is only about three miles—nothing to strong, healthy fellows like you.”

Troddles is the best-natured fellow breathing, and when we saw that he was quite prepared to go between the shafts as soon as ever he got his pipe on and drawing freely, we forebore to advise Wilks to abandon hope, in case it disturbed Troddles’s placid acceptance of this task of understudying a mule. We helped him from behind, until we saw that he was getting along quite nicely without any assistance, when Murray undid the door and nipped in. He motioned to me that there was plenty of room, and I followed him. Wilks sat on the step behind and whistled like a blackbird in sheer content and satisfaction, while Troddles hauled us along, blissfully unconscious that he was doing all the work and we were having all the fun.

For a time the road sloped gently down, and he didn’t notice the increased weight until we came to a sharp rise where it ran over the railway, when he began to feel the strain.

“I say, this dam thing is heavier than I thought,” he panted. “Are you chaps shoving?”

Murray said “shoving” was hardly the word for it—and it wasn’t. Troddles grunted something inarticulate in reply, and struggled on gamely a bit farther. He wasn’t altogether satisfied, knowing Murray and Wilks and their capacity for shirking as he did, and before Wilks could slip off he dropped the shafts and ran round, and caught us in flagrante delicto, as the lawyers say.

Wilks told him that that was just how it had struck him, and if he, Troddles, had only waited two more seconds he would have had us out and shoving that old chariot along at twenty miles per hour.

We got out—we had to, Troddles made such a point of it—and as soon as we were out he got in and spread himself comfortably over the seats and told us to stop at Wimbledon for a change of steeds.

“I’ve done my share,” he said, “and if I’m here it will make it easier for the man who succeeds me in the shafts.”

Murray and Wilks went without question. I don’t think they could stand Troddles’s gentle raillery, or else the sight of his monumental placidity was too much for them. As soon as they had got going I joined Troddles again, at which he grinned, but made no comment.

The trouble with Murray is he is too active in his mind and too lazy in other respects. We agreed about that with wonderful unanimity later, when we stood a long way down the Kingston road and watched the motor van which had brought us so far glide down the road, with the mocking laughter of the drivers ringing in our ears and disturbing our speculations as to whether Wilks would have the gumption to secure the mule and ride after us, or whether we should have to trail back, miss him on the road, and spend the rest of the week-end in looking for each other.

It began at a halt in the traffic at a confused system of cross-roads not half a mile from where we changed places—or rather, where the others did. Right in front of them a big motor-van belonging to one of the supply stores in London was drawn up, and Murray improved the shining two minutes by running the shafts under it and strapping them securely to the axle. Wilks lent a hand as soon as he caught Murray’s drift, and then they came round and piled in with us, and put on their pipes and beamed.

They kept beaming, although it was a job at times, when we had to grip on to the seats or sides or anywhere that came handy, to save ourselves from being shot out on the road like sacks of soot. That motor had a lot of pace in it, and the drivers seemed to be in a hurry. Also it was a non-stop express, and we went slap through Wimbledon and out on to the Kingston road before we knew where we had got to.

It was jolly enough and exciting, though not without danger, and for a time we enjoyed the novelty and ease, until Wilks suddenly awakened to the fact that we were coming past our destination. He wasn’t really concerned about it at first, and he sang out in a cheerful, light-hearted way to the drivers that we were ever so much obliged to them for the lift, but we would not trespass on their kindness any further, if they would kindly stop and release us.

They didn’t hear, or, if they did, they took no notice. It was in the early days of motors, when they barked and rattled alarmingly until you got used to them, and quite likely the drivers did not hear us. If they had, they would have stopped and come round to punch Wilks’s head for the things he called them. They couldn’t have stood it and allowed him to go on living—no man worthy of the name could. So, seeing that his oratory was no use, Wilks opened the door and jumped out. The last we saw of him, he was coming after us on his ear and elbow in excess of the legal speed limit. He looked very quaint, but we didn’t laugh.

I suggested it might be for a change and exercise, and I was inclined to believe that Wilks expected us to follow him. I said I thought he would be glad of our company; but they wouldn’t abandon the car or have the car abandon them merely for the chance of getting a day or two in a cottage hospital. All the same, it was an awkward position to be in, and we couldn’t help ourselves in any direction until a couple of miles farther along, when the motor slackened speed and allowed us to make ourselves heard by shouting in chorus at the top of our voices, “Hi, stop!”

The motor drew up with a sudden jerk, and the drivers jumped down and ran round to us in a panic, under the impression that they had run over somebody. They seemed disappointed that they hadn’t, I thought, when they found us getting a ride out of their petrol for nothing. I explained the matter to them while Murray was casting us loose, and the knowledge of the evil they had done us seemed to gladden them. They went off jeering, as I have stated, and after some debate we drew the car to the side of the road and left Troddles sitting in it, with strict injunctions not to go to sleep and allow himself to be stolen, while we went back to offer a reward for Wilks, or all that was left of him.

We found him limping along just outside Wimbledon, with a noticeable space between the rim and body of what had been a fairly respectable bowler, his left knee showing obtrusively through his trousers, and a well-defined slit in the shoulder of his coat. He hadn’t got the mule, he told us; he hadn’t got anything but several compound fractures and the hump. That was also very clearly defined, and he was rather unreasonable about it. He didn’t say it was our fault, but he might just as well have done. He had been badly bumped, mentally and physically, and at that moment I believe he would almost sooner have been washing dishes or scrubbing floors.

We got him to see reason through the medium of an upturned glass, and at the second filling he acknowledged that he hadn’t broken anything, and the little damage he had suffered was entirely his own fault, and we were not to blame, which we considered was very handsome—for Wilks. Also we got him to tell us where the mule lived when at home, and, having got precise directions for a twenty minutes’ walk in search of it from the landlord, we set out and did it in three-quarters of an hour.

The baker’s brother acknowledged his identity and the ownership of a mule; but he didn’t seem willing for us to have her. I think he was under the impression, being misled by Wilks’s appearance, that we wanted to go hawking cabbages and were hiding the barrow round the corner so as to deceive him. It must have been uncomfortable for Wilks, although Murray did his best to help him by telling the owner of the mule that he mustn’t suppose that was the best hat our friend had got, because it wasn’t.

The man said then that he wasn’t thinking of clothes so much as what we would do with his mule and ourselves when we got her, if we could do all that with a simple governess-car.

“Why, isn’t she safe?” I demanded suspiciously, and resolved to know the truth.

“Safe enough, yes,” said the man. “But you don’t want to get playing no monkey tricks with mules, and if you start them running or kicking you are likely to see trouble.”

Here Murray intervened, lest I inquired further and got too well informed. He said he had been reared and educated to the understanding and management of mules, and, as we were contemplating the outing now immediately, and not some time next week, perhaps he, the baker’s brother, would produce his one ewe lamb and deck her for the slaughter, so to speak.

It didn’t sound encouraging, but I think by then the man had come to recognize that Murray was one of those cheerfully irresponsible asses who mustn’t be taken seriously, and, between entreaties and cash, he was prevailed upon to produce the mule and hand her over. As we led her off, Murray called back that we would be very kind to her. Ten minutes later I began to wonder whether that was a consideration that really mattered. It struck me that a more important one was whether the mule would be kind to us; and the fact that mules are exclusively vegetarians, on which Murray kept insisting, didn’t console me for the nasty, sly, vicious way this one kept reaching for my arm.

I didn’t like it, and I told Murray so, and before he could catch hold of the halter, which I abruptly relinquished in his favour, or anyone else’s, a fool of a dog rushed out of a gateway with the avowed purpose of having mule-meat for supper. Up went Freda’s heels and up went the tyke, over went Murray and away went the mule, with three men and a dog in hot pursuit. We picked up other men and other dogs as we progressed, and the procession trailed by Troddles, headed by Wilks and a warrior of His Majesty’s “Foot,” and brought up by myself and a cripple, who was excited and enthusiastic over the sport of hunting a mule on crutches—he was on crutches, I mean, of course, not the mule—was a respectable one in point of numbers, though straggling and very puffed and jaded. Wimbledon turned out nobly, and, under the impression that it was hare and hounds or something of that sort, Troddles stood up in the car and cheered as we passed him.

I dropped out and joined him, feeling that I couldn’t be in at the death, and not seeing a need to be in at my own. I excused my action to myself on the score of forethought and kindliness. I would instruct Troddles to bring along the car, and save time and perhaps trouble. Wilks and Murray would be tired after their run, and would be glad to be saved the fag of bringing the mule all the way back.

Troddles stopped smiling when I explained my views to him, and told him that what he had taken to be a good, hearty exhibition of English sport was nothing more or less than Wilks and Murray and a scratch army of volunteers trying to run down our mule, with the odds on the mule.

I said it wasn’t. That would come along later, no doubt; this was a preliminary canter, so to speak, and, in order to get the introduction over and come to the honeysuckled lanes and the fields of ox-eyed daisies more quickly, we had best gather up the car and join the chase.

“Else,” said I, “it will be all introduction, and there are some things I would sooner be doing on a fine Saturday afternoon than nursing a governess-car and taking an ‘also ran’ part in a mule-hunt.”

Troddles agreed without any enthusiasm, and together we pulled the car along for about half a mile, when we met the procession coming back. The mule was still leading, and the field was nowhere in sight. There was a sharp bend in the road just there, and the mule was on us and past us before we could take in this new development. We were still considering it when Wilks and Murray turned the corner and bore down on us. I asked them if they had had a nice run, but as a conversational effort it was not a success. They both seemed to think that we had been remiss somewhere. Murray said so, and Wilks added that he would never bring us out for a drive again as long as he lived. I didn’t see how he was going to do it after; but, given immunity for the length of his days, I thought I could preserve myself for the rest of mine, and I expressed my gratitude suitably.

They couldn’t stop to argue the matter—not then, Murray told us, though I didn’t see that any argument was called for. They continued the chase, and we were instructed to follow with the car. Troddles looked at me, and I looked at Troddles. The same idea had taken possession of us and he voiced it.

“The nearest pub, and shove it in a stable and ourselves before a tea table,” he said.

“Well, we shall be pleased and happy over it,” said Troddles sturdily, “and there’s no majority. It’s two to two, and we have the casting vote.”

And so we sat in a pub outside Kingston and beguiled the tedium of doing it with tea and our pipes, waiting for Murray and Wilks to bring the mule to the car, while they sat in another outside Wimbledon and waited for us to bring the car to the mule. We didn’t know that at the time, of course, though I don’t think it would have made any difference if we had. When it comes to waiting, Troddles is hard to beat!

“Never the car and the mule and the loved ones altogether,” I quoted; but Troddles doesn’t know much of Browning, and his mind was on the tea.

“I say, can’t we have some radishes and cake and things?” he said, ignoring me and giving the girl a look of tender entreaty that would have made the heart of a more susceptible damsel go “phut-phut.” But this one wasn’t susceptible. She said, “No, you can’t.” But we did, all the same. Troddles went out and bought them for us, which is a detail, and not to be mentioned, except to show you what a dogged, persistent fellow he really is when his mind or stomach is set on radishes and cake and things.

We took our pipes and walked back to Wimbledon after tea. The car we said we would call for when we had got something docile to hitch it to. By then we had got suspicious of the intentions of Wilks and Murray. We knew they must be loafing somewhere, and we were quite prepared to find them squatting on the roadside holding on to the mule and cussing us profoundly. But we didn’t, and we got right back to Wimbledon without finding a trace of them. I said it was strange, and Troddles said it was marvellous.

I thought I remembered where the baker’s brother lived, and as a last resource we decided to go there and make inquiries. It took us a long time to find the house. Wimbledon is a most confusing place to find anybody in when you haven’t the address and are not quite sure of the name; but we did find it eventually and might just as well have spared ourselves the trouble. Our friends had not been there, and the mule’s owner was so interested over our account of the runaway that we knew he was hearing of it for the first time and was wondering how much to charge for it in his bill.

As a matter of fact, we discovered later, while we were dodging about the side-streets of Wimbledon looking for them, Murray and Wilks had set out with the mule in tow to find us and tell us precisely what they thought of us. They were feeling refreshed and strengthened by the rest and light sustenance, and although a mule isn’t an ideal companion for a country walk, they got along very fairly until a choice of roads the other side of Kingston Bridge brought them to a halt, and finally determined them to stable the mule and hunt us without an independent witness.

Troddles and I supped and breakfasted where we had had tea, and we met together about eleven the next morning on the river near the weir at Hampton Wick.

I saw a couple of fellows fooling about in a boat as though they had never seen one before and would never see another unless they were expert swimmers, and something about their cut and style arrested my attention.

“I believe that’s Murray over there,” I said, and at the same moment they caught sight of us, and confirmed my impression.

“Well, you’re nice fellows, I must say!” Wilks greeted us with. “Where’s that car?”

“Where’s that mule?” I retorted. “Is this what you call coming for a drive?”

They said it was one variety. Murray asked me as a reasonably honest, straightforward man whether in the time they could be expected to give us more than they had done.

“All in good time,” said Wilks. “The drive begins after lunch, round through Surbiton and Esher and back by Maldon. We have mapped it all out—a lovely trip.”

But we didn’t! Murray upset their boat during the morning, and in trying to get him out Troddles upset ours, and we spent the rest of the day with a kindhearted bungalow-owner, chastely attired in blankets, while our clothes were being dried, and went home by train, leaving the mule to be retrieved by the owner and the car to be fetched when we felt like it.

CHAPTER VI.
A THOROUGH CLEAN UP.

That was just what we intended it should be—a thorough clean up—and that was what Wilks said it was. I am not sure about the cleaning up part, but of the thoroughness there could be no possible shadow of doubt. If it had been any more thorough there wouldn’t have been enough of the house left to assess for taxation purposes.

Wilks organized it, and Murray stage-managed, while Troddles and I ran round with material and appliances and house flannels in our hands, and said, “Where shall we put this?” or “What shall we do with that?” And so happy and careless and light-hearted were we that we only laughed when Wilks or Murray said “Eat it.” I had no idea that house decorating was such jolly fun, and Troddles said, after a good meal or a restful lounge on a comfortable sofa, there was nothing to equal the enjoyment to be got out of spoiling somebody else’s house. And he wasn’t speaking sarcastically, either, mind you, although Murray looked askance at him, and Wilks reproved him for the sloppy way he phrased his ideas—saying “spoiling” when he meant “decorating.”

It was the decorating part that pleased us. Over the cleaning and dusting we couldn’t enthuse. It was a duty and had to be done, and we did it. We were young and strong and too manly to show a craven spirit before a house flannel or a scrubbing-brush; but it was the decoration part we really liked. I have never laughed so much in all my life as I did over watching Wilks papering the kitchen, unless it was at Murray whitewashing the ceiling; and they both said there was more fun to be got out of sitting on the stairs and seeing me paint the banisters than in all the music-halls in London put together. As for Troddles—well, I will just tell you how it all happened, and then you can judge for yourselves.

The week after we went for what Wilks would idiotically persist in calling a drive in the country it set in wet, and that and a misadventure or two with the house determined Wilks not only to set the place in order, but to do it up.

“It wants doing up,” he said firmly, and with stern, resolute purpose, as though he anticipated a concentrated and desperate opposition from us.

“It does,” I admitted readily. “I am glad you realize that. I had almost come to the conclusion that you were under the impression it wanted doing in. You have quickened up some, too, haven’t you? Getting in form, I suppose. Up to last week the house was merely a pigsty; now it is a wreck. If Murray’s relatives came in at the front door at this moment, do you know what I should do?”

“In place of the one you busted the night before last in forcing your way in when we had shut you out in the garden for the good of your health?” suggested Wilks languidly.

I told him it was a rotten old wheeze, and if he must be flippant he might, at least, try and be flippant on original lines.

“I should go because I should be ashamed to face them,” I said. “That broken fastening is a trivial detail. It was an accident, and, any way, you brought it on yourselves. But look at the ceiling in the dining-room.”

“It does look spotty, doesn’t it?” he said musingly. “It was an accident, though. I shied my boot at Wilks, not at the water-jug, and I couldn’t be expected to know that he would dodge.”

“You might have surmised it without having the deductive qualities of a Sherlock Holmes or the prophetic instinct of Mother Shipton,” said Wilks reproachfully. “I always do dodge anything heavier than slippers.”

“And the kitchen,” I pursued relentlessly. “Have you ever seen anything more disgracefully greasy and blackened than our kitchen?”

“That was an accident too,” said Troddles. “Besides, I asked you to keep your eye on the pan.”

“Well, I couldn’t know that the silly thing would go and flare up like that and smother the house with greasy soot,” I objected. “Besides, I had my own affairs to attend to. When you want delicacies for breakfast you should see to them.”

“I didn’t get that fried bread,” said Troddles pathetically; “and I took a lot of trouble with it too. I don’t think those gas stoves are any good for cooking with—not like a grate. They are too unexpected, and if anything happens it doesn’t go up the chimney, but all over the room.”

“Well, after that I hardly like to mention the state of the staircase and hall,” said I; “but it seems to me that something ought to be done, and, in case you are absolutely void of ideas, I suggest for your consideration that we call in a builder and get an estimate for patching and restoring. It oughtn’t to cost a great deal.”

“It oughtn’t to, but it will,” said Wilks. “If you set a builder on a job like that he’ll live on it for the rest of his life. For instance, he’d say that ceiling was dangerous and must come down; and if you wouldn’t agree it would come down of its own accord when he started to whitewash it. The same with the kitchen. He’d find cleaning quite impossible, and have to paint and paper and whitewash the whole room. I know those chaps, and I’ll bet you a level five bob it won’t cost you a penny under twenty pounds.”

“Oh, rubbish!” I protested. “Say five—twenty-five bob apiece, and dear at that unless we can get the scrubbing and dishes thrown in.”

“I don’t think we should have to,” said Troddles, “but we might get the estimate. That wouldn’t commit us to anything, and if it is too dear we’ll try some other plan.”

“All right,” said Wilks patiently. “Is the bet on? An even five bob that the estimate isn’t less than twenty pounds, and that he insists on taking down the ceiling and repapering and painting the kitchen?”

It seemed an easy way of making five shillings, and Murray and I took it on. Troddles doesn’t bet, so we made him hold the stakes, having had some experience of Wilks’s method of turning his bets into a jest after he has lost, and paying us with an airy “Of course, you didn’t think I was serious!”

Wilks said he would go round and fetch a man at once, because these affairs were best settled out of hand, and he didn’t think the suspense would be good for us—it might make us restless and unhappy, he said. He went off, and was gone so long that, quite jocularly and without any suspicion or purpose, Troddles remarked: “He’s hunting up the most expensive man he can find just to win his bet.”

I said he couldn’t do that however much he hunted, because a West End firm of decorators wouldn’t have courage enough to charge twenty pounds for a pail of whitewash and a pot of paint, and a man to smear them on. Murray said that was so, and Troddles might just as well hand over the stakes then and there, and rid himself of the responsibility.

Troddles wouldn’t, and while Murray was urging him Wilks came back with a short, tubby man in tow. This was the builder, the best and cheapest in the neighbourhood, he told us, and the man looked gratified but somewhat surprised, I thought.

We led him into the sitting-room and showed him the ceiling, and he said at once that it would have to come down. Wilks cackled, and again I thought the man showed surprise. Incidentally he examined the hall and staircase on the way to the kitchen. He said he could no doubt patch and renovate, but the cheapest and most satisfactory job would be a new outfit to the stairs and fresh paper for the hall.

“That would have to be entirely done out,” the man said, and, having regard to his professional pride and standing, he could not afford to lose more than a five-pound note over the whole job, and that he would do if he charged us less than twenty pounds ten and elevenpence ha’penny.

“Charge me grandmother!” he said, I thought, somewhat rudely. “We don’t want the place rebuilt. Any way, you won’t charge us that because it won’t be done, not at that price.”

“This gent said you didn’t mind anything up to that,” persisted the builder, turning inquiringly to Wilks, who had the grace to look sheepish.

“Oh, did he?” retorted Murray. “And I suppose he primed you about the ceiling and the staircase and repapering as well?”

Wilks said the builder must have misunderstood him. What he did say was that he wanted a thorough and satisfactory job made of it, even if it cost twenty pounds and entailed putting in a fresh ceiling and staircase. We ignored him and turned to the builder.

“Any reduction on twenty pounds ten and elevenpence ha’penny?” Murray queried, succinctly.

There was. The man said Wilks had misled him shamefully, and he could see now that if he charged us sixpence more than seventeen pounds he would be robbing us, which, as an honest, hard-working house decorator, he would scorn to do; and if he charged us that much less he would be robbing himself, which, he implied rather than stated, was not in his calculations.

Wilks, who seemed to have got a sudden and unreasoning dislike to the man, said we would consider the estimate and let him know, though he couldn’t encourage him to nurse any great hope of getting any seventeen pounds out of us.

There was a coldness between us and that builder when we parted, but there was plenty of warmth in our subsequent dealings with Wilks. He claimed the stakes at first on the ground that the estimate had been for over twenty pounds, and was only reduced because we terrorized the man and got him to speak falsely. Then he offered to call it off altogether, but Troddles said no. Wilks had tried to win by underhand means, he said, and he had deservedly lost his money and what there was left to him of reputation.

And he gave us our ten shillings, and said he hoped this would be a lesson to Wilks not only not to cheat, but not to gamble.

I don’t think it was. We had another row with Wilks that night. He took my boots and Murray’s watch and went off and pawned them for five shillings on each count, and gave us the tickets at supper, when we were roasting him for throwing ten bob away on his silly, cocksure belief in his own knowledge and sagacity. I didn’t want his wretched five shillings, but it pained me to have to pay it back by way of a pawnbroking establishment.

At the time, and before we knew of his mean and impudent action, Wilks told us that he hadn’t sought to coerce the builder to win our money at all, but just to get us out of favour with the idea of engaging professional services.

“We can do it ourselves at the expenditure of a few shillings,” he said, “and I think we ought to. It will be rather good fun, and there isn’t much about whitewashing or paperhanging that I don’t know; any fool can slap a paint brush round—Bob could, or Troddles.”

“Thank you,” said I unpleasantly, seeing Troddles gasp at this spiteful punch below the belt, and not likely to come up to time.

“Welcome,” said Wilks briefly. “As for that guff about the ceiling, that’s one of their methods of inflating the bill. The ceiling is as sound as a rock.”

He got a broom and poked at it, perhaps to show us what an uncertain thing the soundness of rocks can be, and at the third prod down it came. I jumped and dodged my share, but Wilks caught it squarely and fairly, and Murray and Troddles didn’t entirely escape.

Wilks didn’t seem to care to accept that theory, though Murray agreed that it was a very possible and likely one; but it settled the question of repairing and renovating most effectually, he admitted. A hole in the ceiling is such an uncompromising thing. You can’t smear that over with a coating of paint or hang a picture over it. I had considerable misgivings over our ability to do anything else with it; but Wilks and Murray both seemed satisfied as to their capacity to plaster and whitewash, and by common consent we left that department in their hands.

Troddles said for his part he should take over the painting. He said he could be happier with a paint brush than almost anything else, and he stuck to it, though I urged him to tackle the purely domestic side—the teacups and floors and things—and leave the painting to me. Painting is really difficult and dangerous work, I pointed out to him, though it looks so simple and easy, and quite a lot of men have contracted painter’s colic and been forced into early graves through taking it on when they knew nothing about it.

“Yes, and what do you contract through scrubbing floors and washing dishes?” asked Troddles.

“Housemaid’s knee and the hump,” said Murray crudely. “You can always distrust Bob when he poses as a philanthropist. Stick to the paint brush, old man, and chance it.”

We wouldn’t begin that night, though Murray tried to get us to. He said a thing well begun was half done, and for his part he was simply pining to see old Wilks balancing himself on top of a step-ladder with a bucket of mortar and a ripe inexperience to get it anywhere but in his eyes.

“That shows how much you know about it,” retorted Wilks. “You don’t use mortar for ceilings, you use plaster of Paris. I’ll go and get some, and order the other things too, then we shan’t need to waste any time to-morrow. I’ll get that hole filled up in the morning before we leave, and it will be set and ready for whitewashing by the time we get back.”

The frolic began a little after six the next morning. Wilks had well begun his job, but it wasn’t half done or anything like it. Wilks was. I heard a terrific smash in the room below me, and, running down lightly attired, I found him on the floor mixed up with a step-ladder and a broken hand-basin, and smothered in some white clinging stuff which instinct told me must be plaster of Paris.

“No, I’ve done,” he retorted sourly. “If you weren’t such a pack of lazy skulks, snoring away up there and leaving me to do all the work, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“What wouldn’t have happened?” said I, surprised at this unexpected and uncalled-for attack.

“Why this,” said Wilks. “The steps were too short, and I had to put them on the table to reach, and they slipped or something, and I’ve broken my leg and put my shoulder out.”

Of course, he hadn’t done anything of the sort, but it’s Wilks’s way to exaggerate his injuries and make a compound fracture out of the slightest bruise. I helped him up and on to the sofa, and went and told Murray that Wilks had killed himself, and it was his turn to come down and finish the ceiling. He came down, and seemed more concerned about the state of the room than Wilks’s injuries. Concerning them there was room for doubt, but concerning the room there wasn’t. We thought it bad when we left it, but it seemed the pink of perfection and orderliness compared with its present state.

I don’t know if plaster of Paris is good for carpets and furniture. Wilks said it would brush off all right, and perhaps if we would get him some liniment or something healing he wouldn’t die after all, but would lie on the couch with his pipe and instruct us in that and practical plastering as well.

I don’t know where Murray got his information from, but I do know that it was wrong, useless, and entirely unreliable. Murray and I both had a go at that ceiling, more out of curiosity than anything else, and we both came to the same conclusion. We did wonderful things with that plaster of Paris, and we plastered ourselves and everything within reach of us with it, but we didn’t mend the hole. It is the silliest, most perverse, irritating stuff ever invented. I would mix a nice soft creamy bowlful of it, or Murray would, and hand it up to the other on top of the steps. It would look all right and smell all right, and, as far as we could judge, taste all right; but as soon as we lifted out a trowelful it would begin to play up. The part that fell on us or on the table was always soft and splashy, but the rest would be as hard as a paving stone.

Murray thought we might take a pattern of the hole in paper and mould the plaster to fit it, and screw it up. I didn’t think much of his plan, and while we were arguing it out, assisted by Wilks in the intervals of rubbing his leg with some soothing application, Troddles came down.

“I say——” he began, and then he stopped and looked at the room inquiringly.

“Yes?” said Murray encouragingly. “Go on, though I think we’ve already said most of it. Breakfast isn’t ready, it’s getting on for eight, and Wilks isn’t nearly as dead as he pretends to be. You can climb up and have your share of the frolic if you like. It’s healthy as an exercise, though there are cleaner and more enjoyable methods of taking it. Plaster of Paris is no good for mending ceilings with, or else Wilks didn’t get the right sort. Try it in your bath; it may go better there.”

“Water of course,” said Wilks. “What do you suppose we mixed it with—treacle?”

“No, vinegar,” said Troddles simply. “You should do; that’s what I came down to say. If you don’t it goes hard before you can use it.”

Murray said “Oh!” in a still, small voice, and Wilks tried to look as though he had known all about that vinegar dodge all along, but had kept quiet over it to punish us for not coming down to catch him when he wanted to fall off the steps.

Troddles is not clever, but he is observant. He had once watched a tobacconist mend a favourite meerschaum with a pinch of plaster of Paris and a spoonful of vinegar, and charge two-and-sixpence for the job, and that is how he knew.

It was getting late then, so we decided to put off experimenting with Troddles’s recipe until we returned from business; besides, it was Wilks’s job, and we didn’t want to be greedy and do him out of it and leave him standing about idle and listless while we were enjoying ourselves no end with paint brushes and teacloths and things. He thanked us without enthusiasm for our consideration.

We went into that job with a light-hearted ease and unconcern that would have appalled professional house decorators and builders with a lifelong experience. And confidence—I have never known a man more confident than Murray, unless it was Wilks. They wouldn’t promise us it should all be done by tea-time, but they did say that we would just have a cup of tea about five to refresh us, and have a substantial meal as soon as we were through, which Troddles and I thought good enough.

So we put on our oldest things, shoved all the furniture that seemed in danger of getting damaged or dirtied into the garden, and started on our respective sections—Wilks plastering, Murray bricklaying, Troddles painting, and I general servanting.

I can’t say I enjoyed myself out in the back kitchen with the dishcloth and towels; no man can make such a statement and remain truthful. Being able to smoke made it endurable, and an occasional trip into the hall or sitting-room to see the others suffering gave me some relief and satisfaction. Even Troddles wasn’t completely happy; the paint would run up his arms and splash in his eyes, and little things like those worry you when you are not used to them.

But Wilks was having the gayest, gaudiest time, because he always had the ceiling to fall back on, or to fall back on him. He put it up five times, and sometimes it fell down again while he watched it, and sometimes it waited until he got out of the room before it came down; but it always did come down, and just when he was thinking of pasting a nice clean sheet of white paper over the hole and letting it go at that, Murray suggested putting a bit of board over it and wedging it up with a broom until the plaster set. They couldn’t find any board that would serve, so they took the copper lid, which answered capitally.

We worked very hard and accomplished much, all except Murray and Godolphin, who were more of a hindrance than a help. Murray did nothing himself except get in our way and annoy us while trying to do everything, and Godolphin went and put his paw in Troddles’s paint-pot and upset it all down the stair carpet, and ran about leaving impressions of his pads in white paint all over the house.

I asked Murray once what particular job he was supposed to be engaged upon, and he said he wasn’t engaged on any one particular job, but was sort of foreman of the works, with a right to lay a brick or send back a vegetable dish for rewashing if he felt like it. That was just before he upset a tray containing most of the second-best dinner-service and crumpled up half of them. I was rather vexed about it. If he had done it before I had got them washed and wiped I wouldn’t have minded so much, and I asked him to pick out the rest of the things he intended to smash from the dirty pile.

He wouldn’t do that or go away from the danger zone, arguing that among such a lot of table stuff a few broken dishes more or less wouldn’t matter, though it seemed to me that there wouldn’t be such a great lot by the time he had done. So I said if he was going to oversee me, I’d go and oversee Troddles, because it wasn’t right that such an important affair as painting banisters should be allowed to go without supervision.

Troddles had given up painting the banisters, and was contenting himself with touching up the worst places, and he gave up doing that as soon as I appeared on the scene.

“Change jobs?” he inquired. “I don’t seem to care about this as much as I thought I should.”

I never had any illusions over mine, and so I finished the staircase and Troddles cleaned the scullery. Wilks said he didn’t think we were getting on as quickly as we might, and he asked us to remember that we were more concerned with cleaning and repairing than house decorating, and we couldn’t afford to spend a month over it.

“Certainly,” I agreed readily. “Cut out my lot; I won’t be offended. I feel like an understudy to the handmaid of sorrow already, and sometimes I wonder if economy and thrift is quite all it’s cracked up to be. I know a man who saved a lawyer’s bill of six-and-eightpence and lost thirty pounds.”

“Nothing, except that Bob is getting work-shy,” replied Wilks. “By and by he will advocate calling in that builder and banging a couple of weeks’ combined salary on him.”

“We might do worse,” said I. “I don’t mind doing the work or spending the money, but I don’t want to do both, and, judging by the exhibition of your capacity and skill, I am afraid that’s what it will come to.”

Wilks said, “Oh, rubbish!” and kicked over a pail of whitewash Murray had mixed ready for the ceilings. It made a shocking mess, and was wasteful as well, because a lot of it went in our boots and couldn’t be retrieved, and what we did scrape up and put back in the pail contained dirt and foreign matter which I didn’t think would look well on any ceiling. Murray said it would be all right if we mixed it up well, and we would do the kitchen first and try it there, because however badly it looked it was bound to be some improvement. He did half a yard or so just to show us, and we had to admit that the effect was on the whole good, rather streaky perhaps, but encouraging, and, stimulated by our praise, Murray sloshed away while we held the steps and steadied the bucket.

He was getting on finely, whitewashing the ceiling a little and everything else, including ourselves, a lot, in his eagerness to cover as much as possible before we clamoured for our turn, when a tiny splash fell in his eye. He dropped his brush, and Wilks, who was looking up to criticize and direct operations, caught it in his face. Wilks let go the steps and staggered back just in time to prevent Murray coming down on top of him; the steps collapsed, and the pail shot over and bonneted Troddles, while the contents emptied themselves down his shirt collar.

You never saw such a mess in all your life—at least, I never did. I went and sat on the kitchen table and studied it thoughtfully. I have read of men being whitewashed by courts of inquiry and such-like things, but I had never seen it done before. It struck me as being a painful and unpleasant ordeal, and Troddles confirmed my impression. He didn’t say a great deal, but what he did say was pithy and pointed. Wilks was also short about it, so, just to divert their minds, I mentioned that it had come on to rain again, and that probably a saddle-bag suite and some other things we had left in the garden would not be improved to any great extent by getting moistened.

The effect was immediate and, I considered, a complete demonstration of the superiority of mind over matter. They promptly forgot their sufferings and rushed out to save the furniture. I think it must have been raining some time; the couch was distinctly juicy, and thin streams of moisture trickled down the legs of the chairs. We made Troddles sit on them to squeeze out as much damp as possible before carrying them into the house again.

Wilks tried his patch when we returned to the jobs we had deserted. He took away the broom, but it remained firm in place; so also did the copper lid, and when he tried to detach the latter the ceiling gave signs of coming down with it, and he desisted. It looked funny, but, as Wilks said, it was better than the hole, and he thought if we took off the handle and enamelled the rest salmon pink it would make rather an effective rosette. Murray looked dubious, but he said we could try it, and if we didn’t like it we could always knock it down and have a plain ceiling.

We finished whitewashing the kitchen while Troddles got us, and himself, some tea, and after that Wilks papered it for us—the kitchen I mean, not the tea.

I don’t think he altogether intended to give us a treat, but we made it one, and sat on the table with our pipes on, and laughed solid from seven to ten. It was the funniest thing I had ever seen, except the sitting-room the next morning, and that was beyond being humorous; it was dangerous. Troddles and I leant helplessly against each other and roared, and Murray sat in the doorway and helped us. Wilks took the fun much more soberly. He said he reckoned it was going to cost us something, but it was a poor heart that never rejoiced; and, any way, there was a clean cup or two and some plates on the dresser, and that alone was almost worth the money.

CHAPTER VII.
THE TALE OF A CAR.

We had forgotten all about the governess-car Wilks had sneaked under pretence of giving us a treat, consequently Troddles failed to attach any significance to the somewhat grubby-looking billet-doux that came for him one evening while we were out hunting for diversion in sundry likely quarters. He read it, and tossed it aside. He would have lit his pipe with it, only there was no fire, and so he had to use a match instead. Wilks found it behind the couch a few days later, when making a wild and desperate search for his cap, which, had he but known it, Murray was wearing as an easy alternative to looking for his own.

Murray said he thought we could tell him better after we had heard it, and Wilks, who likes to be obliging where he can without cost or trouble, read it out to us:

“Dear Sir,—This is to give you notice that if you don’t fetch away your blooming cart, which is bunging up my stable, within seven days, I shall sell it to pay expenses, and so I tell you strate.”

“That’s taken verbatim from the ‘Polite Letter Writer,’ ” said Murray. “I know the style.”

“It suggests Addison to me,” I commented. “The man who wrote that has a decided literary style and a good, sound knowledge of legal possibilities. I suppose it is from that pub where we left the car.”

Wilks said I had guessed it in once, and Troddles remarked that the letter had been addressed to him, and had come one evening when we were out, and that he had been intending to speak to us about it, and would have done, only he went to sleep and forgot it. Some things were best forgotten, he added, and if it entailed another silly week-end jaunt with an unspeakable mule running on miles ahead or furlongs astern of the car it was supposed to be drawing, that was one of them.

“We shall have to fetch the car,” said Murray determinedly; “but you needn’t worry about the mule. We are distrusted by the owner, and all the money we could scrape together wouldn’t purchase her valuable services for another afternoon’s outing.”

“A dam good job, too,” retorted Troddles. “I am not mean, as you know, but to pay half a sovereign and expenses for the fun of hauling a cart about and watch you fellows play Chevy Chase with a mule, seems to me a wicked waste of money.”

“There won’t be any mule,” said Wilks soothingly. “Let’s go down for the week-end. Something may turn up, and if it doesn’t, we can knock about on the river and arrange for the return of the car, carriage forward. Anyhow, we can’t let it go; and there is nothing else in view, is there?”

“I did think of dropping in and seeing Mrs. Bloggs,” I ventured. “I don’t want to fade completely from her recollection; the time will come when we shall have to turn out of here, and then we shall be glad—or I shall—of knowing where to place my head of nights at a reasonable rate and in assured comfort and security.”

“Then pray that she forgets you, and takes you in as a stranger,” said Murray offensively. “While she remembers you’ll not take her in. Give her another week or two at least, and then we’ll ask her round to tea, and do her well, and be so nice to her that she’ll simply pine to have us back.”

“Sure of it,” said Murray. “Let’s go and fetch that old chariot, and we might finish up by hiring a horse and driving her home to Blackfriars in style. That’s certain to fetch her.”

“ ‘Who are you going to meet, Bill? Have you bought the street, Bill?’ ” Wilks trilled, straddling a chair and prancing ridiculously with imaginary reins to show us how we would “fetch” my late landlady by our style of driving her home.

I didn’t think much of it. But there was no need to ruffle Wilks by saying so. Mrs. Bloggs was not the sort of lady to trust herself in a governess-car, even though it was driven by the Lord Mayor’s coachman in his best uniform. She “can’t abide” omnibuses, and would almost sooner walk than trust herself in a tram-car. As for the rest, I said go, Murray said go, and as Troddles had gone out of the discussion for all practical purposes we went.

It seemed “chancey,” but the weather was exceptionally brilliant, and at the worst, I argued, we could have a very decent time on the river. Consequently I was not altogether surprised when Wilks, aided by Murray, set to work on Friday night to pack up all our available supply of foodstuffs. Hampers are jolly useful things to have with you on the river, though I was rather surprised at the extent and thoroughness of their preparations. Cold stuff and some bread and cheese and a pot of jam and a few bottles of something useful are all right and proper enough to take with you; but when it came to kettles and frying-pans and a brand-new paraffin stove and all the adjuncts for emergency housekeeping, I thought they were overdoing it, and said so.

“I think we shall have had enough of the boat in three or four hours,” I said.

“Boat!” echoed Murray. “Who said anything about a boat? That’s the worst of you, you have no imagination. Now Wilks has got a really splendid idea; it has all the merit of originality, and there isn’t a boat anywhere to it. We are going gipsying in a governess-car! Has that ever been done before?”

I didn’t think it had. The nearest I could get to it was the case of the lady I had met a few evenings before going to the police station in an ambulance. Murray said that wasn’t at all the same thing unless, of course, I or Troddles made too free with the tonic and had to be dropped into a haven for the dippy to save themselves the trouble and annoyance of our company. That was foolish and somewhat offensive, and I waived it aside.

“If we can—yes,” agreed Murray. “We go all the same if we can’t. The idea is to fill the car with our things and go for a walk with it: horse-drawn if we can obtain one reasonably, hand-drawn if not. There is no need to go any very great distance. Five miles from Kingston will put us in the most charming camping country; and we sleep out as well, you know.”

“Why, it is a ripping plan!” burst out Troddles, who had been turning the purpose over in his mind more and more approvingly as the possibilities of it appealed to him. “We can see the sun rise.”

“We can—also the moon and the stars, and listen to the nightingales as we sit under the trees and eat bread and cheese,” said Murray buoyantly. “We are going to do that, and sleep—two of us in the car and two underneath. We have fixed it all up.”

“There won’t be any expense scarcely,” put in Wilks. “Hotels run you into an awful lot, and we shall be our own hotel, and snug at that. Can any of you chaps sew?”

“Not a sew,” said I. “I can’t sew, and I can’t reap, and Troddles can’t—he’s fast asleep.”

“No, I’m not,” said Troddles. “I can fasten a button to a trouser, or a trouser to a button, whichever it is. What’s wanted?”

“Just to run a couple of blankets together,” Wilks explained. “We’ll get a bamboo to go across the car and drape the blankets over it, and make a jolly tent, with another to windward side to keep out the draught from those sleeping beneath. Best take a couple of macs for that, too. I don’t mind turf, but I bar dew and damp and rheumatic fever.”

“There’s no need for sewing,” I suggested. “Fasten them together with safety-pins, and take an extra blanket to go over the join. We’ve got plenty, and we shan’t be wanting them here. Pins won’t hurt blankets, and Troddles’s sewing conceivably might.”

We looked rather like a Polar exploration party when we set off on Saturday, and I was a bit vexed about it, because they had given me the blankets to carry. I felt certain of meeting everybody I knew. I always do when I particularly yearn for obscurity.

Murray said it was just sickening pride, and he should be ashamed of it if he were me. He had got a hamper, and a frying-pan, and a big stone bottle to hold water, to carry, he pointed out, and he wasn’t in the least bit troubled.

“It isn’t as if you had stolen them,” he said soothingly. “You may be going to get them cleaned, or even to pop them, for all they can tell.”

“Yes, that’s just it,” said I; “I may be. I can’t very well go along explaining that we are a camping-out party and not a moving job; and blankets are such odd luggage. I’m sure people will laugh.”

“We’ll let them laugh,” said Wilks generously. “You don’t grudge them a laugh, surely!”

I did; but I didn’t like to say so, and it wouldn’t have been much good if I had. Contrary to my usual experience, we didn’t meet anybody we knew—anybody that mattered, that is; and though the public at large commented freely and offensively on our appearance, we were hardened enough not to be unduly troubled by outside opinion.

We joined the Kingston train at Clapham Junction. It was crowded when it drew in to the platform, but we found a carriage with only two standing, and decided to make that do. It was only a short journey, Murray explained, and we didn’t mind the inconvenience. The other passengers seemed to. It was a good deal more crowded when we got in, and being a very warm day, and blankets and macs and hampers stuffy and uncomfortable things to be boxed up with, I couldn’t help seeing that we were not popular. One man told me not to ram my confounded blankets in his face, and it was useless for me to explain that the blankets were not mine, but belonged to a sort of relation of Murray’s, who had gone abroad for his wife’s health and left us to mind them—and other things.

He said he didn’t care who they belonged to—it was his silk hat they were ruffling up, and he would be obliged to me if I would point them in some other direction. To divert his thoughts, Murray stood the hamper on his toes and rested the water-bottle on his knees; but even then he wasn’t satisfied, and he got so offensive that Murray said he was sorry we had come in the carriage at all, and for two pins we’d get out and find another. Nobody offered to put up the two pins, and so we stopped where we were, and let them grumble, which they continued to do until we got to Kingston.

We had brought Godolphin with us at Troddles’s insistence. I thought it was a mistake, and likely to lead to trouble; but Murray agreed with Troddles that it wasn’t kind to leave the poor brute by himself so much. Wilks said he would be useful to mind the camp and prevent anything being stolen, if we should want to go off for a walk or to fetch things, and so I withdrew my opposition, and he came.

We attracted a good deal of attention on our walk through Kingston, and I must say our appearance was impressive, considering how few we were. Murray said we only wanted a brass band and a banner or two to be a regular procession. Troddles went first, led by Godolphin, who was so eager to go camping that he tried to take short cuts across crowded streets under the wheels of fast-running traffic. Being only a dog, Troddles couldn’t make him understand that he didn’t want to go all the way to Paradise, so he banged him with the rush bag he was carrying. It contained provisions and dry goods very loosely packed, and a tidy-sized knuckle of boiled bacon, on which we had based our hopes of a substantial supper and a breakfast devoid of trouble, with a snack or so between whiles, when we felt like it, bounced out on to the pavement. Godolphin retrieved it for us, and carried it. We didn’t want him to, but he made such a fuss when Troddles tried to take it away that we advised him to desist.

“Besides, we don’t really want it—now,” I urged. Murray said it might be dusted and put back until the recollection of its adventures had got misty; but the voting was against him.

Godolphin carried the bacon sedately until we were crossing the market-place, when Troddles and he had a difference of opinion as to the correct side on which a lady should be passed, when she is young and pretty. Troddles thought the left was right, and went that way, and Godolphin went the other. The result was embarrassing for Troddles and inconvenient for the lady, and while he was extricating her and doing his best to reconcile a face like a freshly cooked beet with an air of simple dignity and self-possession, a big yellow mongrel came up and admired the bacon. He said it was the finest piece of boiled bacon that he had ever seen, and as he was very hungry, and Godolphin seemed to be well fed and owned by generous people, it was clearly a case for shares. Godolphin said it wasn’t; but I don’t think he needed to bite the supplicant in the neck as well. A simple and dignified refusal would have been quite sufficient. The bite was, anyhow, and inside two seconds a pitched battle was on in the market-place, and people were running from all parts to see what was up.

“There you are!” said I. “I told you what would happen if you brought that dog!”

“Oh, never mind that just now,” retorted Murray impatiently. “Blanket them!”

He grabbed my burden to perform the operation himself—whatever it might be; but by then the mongrel had had enough and quitted in a hurry, and while Godolphin was seeing him off the field a terrier snapped up the bacon and got away with it, which I thought was a splendid object-lesson not only for Godolphin but for quarrelsome men as well, and I advised Wilks to profit by it. Also, I picked up the hampers and left Murray the blankets—which was another for rashly interfering folks; but that was a lesson I did not draw.

The publican wanted to charge us five shillings for minding the car for us. Wilks was indignant about it, and despite the recent object-lesson I had just pointed him to, he was well on the way to provoke a quarrel, when Murray stepped in.

“Cheap, too!” he said casually, after tying the man up in knots with a discourse which sounded fine and meant nothing. “We’ll take it out in trade, if that will suit you.”

The publican said it would do as well as anything, and better than most, and Murray got a big piece of cold beef, some fruit pies, and half-a-dozen bottles of Bass. The publican helped us to load up the cart, and shook hands with us quite cordially, and agreed with Murray that it was always better to settle these disputes amicably, if possible.

“Well, I’m jiggered!” said Wilks, two minutes later; and then he paused and whistled thoughtfully. “I don’t think we had better put up there any more,” he added as an afterthought.

We were crossing Kingston Bridge when we heard a shrill whistle behind us, and, turning in idle curiosity, Troddles was beckoned to violently.

“It’s somebody wants us, I think,” he said apprehensively. “I hope there’s not going to be a row about that dog.”

It wasn’t about the dog, it was about the more recent transaction. The publican’s assistant, heavily bucolic, was panting in a most distressed manner, and we had to give him time to regain his breath before he could tell us it was so, or who he represented.

“No, of course we haven’t!” he said. “How very foolish of me! I was setting the payment for services rendered against the bill, and it should be the other way round. Here it is—five shillings. Tell your master we’re frightfully sorry. You’ve had a dry run. Here’s twopence to wet the return journey. Good-bye! and thanks ever so much for coming to inform us.”

Wilks told us once more that he was jiggered. I don’t know what being jiggered is exactly, but it seemed to be something tickling.

“How was it we didn’t pay when we had the things, then?” asked Troddles innocently.

I said it was chiefly because Murray had missed his vocation. He ought to have been an estate agent or a company promoter. As a mere clerk, and the companion of dull witted fellows like ourselves, he was wasted.

The Hampton Court road looked arid and dusty and uninviting, and they wouldn’t let us go through the Home Park gates with our car, so we went down on to the tow-path and kept along by the river for half a mile, when Wilks called a halt.

“We don’t want to pull that darn thing along behind us all day, if we can help it,” he said.

We didn’t; but considering that it was his own plan, I thought the protest would have come better from one of us, and I told Wilks so.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” said he impatiently. “Of course, if it has to be done, it has; but my idea is if we only sit here long enough a barge will come along, and for a bob or two we can get put on board and taken up a few miles, where lovely camping grounds can be had.”

We commended him for his brilliant ideas. Murray said he should hardly have expected quite such a consistent flow—from Wilks. And I agreed that he was improving. Troddles doesn’t know how to be unpleasant, and he won’t try; but he said the idea was a good one, and he could sit here and smoke until the moon came up, if that was all it entailed.

We didn’t have to wait quite so long. Half-way through the second pipe a barge came up the river, and the skipper readily consented to take us when he heard our proposal entire, instead of swearing at us for blocking his path with our car, as he had been minded to do at the outset. So we woke up Troddles, and, working together, we heaved the car up on deck and went forward with our pipes and had a most delightful afternoon.

What struck me most about it was the original ways we had of going for a ride in a governess-car.

“If we don’t go very far from the river we can come back the same way,” put in Murray lazily. “We can get as far as Wandsworth, anyway, and that won’t leave us much of a fag to walk home.”

“Oh, don’t talk about coming back—we haven’t got there yet,” protested Troddles, who was stretched out on deck on the broad of his back busily engaged on the job that most pleases him—blowing smoke rings into the air.

We landed shortly after seven. We hadn’t any of us the least idea where, and we were too excited and busy to think to ask the bargeman. It was pretty and rural, which was what we chiefly cared about; and half an hour from the time of being put on shore we were setting up our camp on a piece of waste land by the roadside. It was a quiet country road, and very little frequented, we judged, and there were plenty of bushes about to afford us as much privacy as we desired.

The camp didn’t require a great deal of preparation. Wilks had forgotten the bamboo, but he obtained a serviceable substitute from a tree, and while he was trimming it down Murray got out the stove and started the kettle, and Troddles and I arranged the banquet.

I don’t know why it is, but these meals, meagre in themselves, badly prepared, and taken under circumstances of acute discomfort, always seem more jolly and enticing than those we get at home. Wilks thought it might be because they cost less; but that was a sordid theory, and not exact, if you count the cost of travel and appliances. Murray said it was the freedom and irresponsibility partly, and partly the natural cussedness of man which caused him to enjoy most the things he got least often. It was clumsily expressed, but I thought I knew what he meant, and I agreed with him, even though Troddles offered us an illustration to the contrary in his own bankruptcy, which he hadn’t liked at all, though he had only had one experience of it.

Certainly it was a very jolly meal—composite, you know, and rather haphazard, with cold beef and bread and jam taken pretty much as they came to hand. Troddles was down first and up last, an easy first if it had been a stuffing match. Wilks and Murray were about level, and I toyed with a trifle here and there just to keep them in countenance, and then we left the things where they were and climbed up on to a grassy bank and smoked and watched the sun go down in a blaze of glory across waving fields of fast-ripening corn.

It made you feel good just to sit there and smoke and imbibe nature and watch the birds flying home to nest, and we continued feeling good until we discovered that Godolphin had sneaked off and exchanged scenery for our joint. Murray snatched up the frying-pan and welted him, and he bolted, taking all that was left of the beef with him. We didn’t want to lose him, and we followed, whistling and calling, and at last abjectly acknowledging his right to the spoil, and promising that if he would only come back all would be forgiven.

Either the dog didn’t trust us, or else his dignity, as well as his ribs, had been hurt by the frying-pan, and he continued to run, and we, perforce, to chase him. It was good, healthy exercise, but a trifle strenuous after a heavy meal, and after we had run a couple of miles, mostly across fields which looked as though they might be private property, we struck. Murray said it would break his cousin’s heart. But, all the same, if Godolphin had made up his mind to be lost he might for all he, Murray, cared. We agreed with him, and, privately, I hoped that Godolphin would get lost and trouble us no more, at least, until the day of reckoning came along. But no such luck! We hadn’t walked a hundred yards back when he was frisking ahead of us as though the whole thing had been arranged purposely to give him an outing.

It was dark when we got back to the camp. We didn’t hurry at the outset, and when we did get anxious about our property, we had some trouble in locating the camp. In the dark and the absence of any distinguishing features it was most confusing, and it was only by sheer luck we found the place at all. In fact, Troddles was beginning to openly advocate letting the camp look after itself and hunting up an inn, or, failing that, a cottage where they had a bed or two to lend us for a consideration, when we stumbled on the place, and glad enough we were to be at the meagre outfit that served us for home.

Wilks and Murray fixed the blankets in position while Troddles and I groped about in the dark after bread and cheese and beer bottles. It was unfortunate there was no moon, and we had forgotten to add a lantern, or even a candle, to our outfit; but Murray, who is nothing if he is not resourceful, suggested lighting the stove, and by that simple illumination we contrived to satisfy our needs, and went to bed.

Troddles elected to sleep on the ground. He said it might not be so soft as the car cushions, but it was more roomy, and he shouldn’t be in dread of rolling off. So he retired there with Godolphin, whom he used as a pillow. Murray had one seat and I the other, and Wilks bedded out on the floor. He had to curl up considerably, and so did we, and there were times when I began to wonder whether well-appointed dwelling-houses and hotels were such bad places after all. But the nightingales sang in the hedges around us, and crickets and droning insects cricketed and droned, and Troddles and Godolphin had a snoring contest beneath us, and, as Murray said, you don’t get that at home.

“True,” said I drowsily, and I was trying to think up a counter-argument to squelch Murray and prove conclusively that there was no place like home, your own or somebody else’s, however jolly a ten-inch cushion in a stuffy, crampy little governess-car may be, when everything faded out, and the next thing I knew some one was trying to fill up my ear with cold water. I jumped up in a hurry, forgetting where I was for the moment, and rolled over smack on to Wilks.

“What the—— Here, I’m all sopping!” he began; and then Troddles warbled plaintively from beneath us that he was lying in a pool of water. He added his firm conviction that it was raining hard, and when I reached up my hand to see, I dislodged the ridge pole, and half a hundredweight of saturated blanket fell in on us and tried to smother us. Murray woke up with a yell, and prepared to sell his life dearly, and what would have happened I don’t know if Wilks hadn’t kicked open the door and wriggled out and dragged the blankets off us.

It was raining hard and persistently, and had been for hours, judging by the amount of moisture about us. Troddles crawled out and joined us, and we stood in a melancholy and helpless group and surveyed the ruin of our camp. That is a figure of speech, of course. It was pitch-dark, and we couldn’t see anything really; but we could feel, and it was unpleasant.

Wilks said it was no use standing gaping. There was a clump of trees just behind us, he pointed out, and if we dragged the car over to them we might get very good shelter, and arrange to sit up comfortably for the rest of the night, even if we couldn’t sleep.

There was; but there was also a broad and well-filled ditch, and the first intimation we had of its presence was when Troddles stepped into it and scrambled out on to the other side in time to avoid the car, which came tumbling down after him. It was a rotten old thing—it must have been—for with just that little jar one of the wheels collapsed, and in trying to pull the rest out one of the shafts broke clean off in Wilks’s hands.

That and the dark and the damp discouraged us so much that Troddles said, for his part, he was going to boot off to the nearest pub and insist on being taken in. If we were wise we would follow his example; if not, he would be round after breakfast to give us a hand with the ruins.

“We might as well go,” said Wilks miserably. “We can’t do anything now for the car, and we may for ourselves.”

We were willing, and even anxious, and we prevailed on Troddles to stay and help us stack all our belongings we could find in the car, laid the blankets over them for covering, and set off, a damp and dejected crew, with Godolphin bringing up the rear with his tail between his legs and cursing for himself and party this development of the trip.

We made a mistake in setting off, and turned towards the river. When we got there, of course, we had to turn back again. As exercise it wasn’t required, and as a waste of time and an accumulation of moisture and misery it was superfluous. Nearly an hour was squandered in that error, and when we at last got going in the right direction we fared no better. We couldn’t find a pigsty, much less a pub, though we wandered until daybreak, and covered more miles than I should care to mention, and it was five o’clock, and we were heaven only knows where, before we tumbled on the “Thatcher’s Joy.”

That was satisfactory in its way; but not sufficiently so. They were all deaf or dead in the hostelry, and after we had nearly knocked the door in and yelled ourselves hoarse we retreated to a cowshed and bivouacked there until eight.

Not knowing where we had landed, or which way we had come, we had to spend the rest of the day in finding the car, and when we did find it, it was as bare as a ham bone after Godolphin has done with it. The car was there, certainly; but in such a state that it didn’t seem worth troubling about, and we left it by common consent, and went home by train, and what became of it or the blankets or stove and a goodly selection of the domestic appliances we had in our charge we never learned to this day.

CHAPTER VIII.
ARRYSORYER.

We had been in possession of Cumber Lodge for some six weeks, and there is no denying the fact that a spirit of discontent and unrest had set in. The unrest was very marked in Troddles. He said he hadn’t had a decent meal since we left Mrs. Bloggs, and it was a shame. I agreed that either domestics was a subject too deep and intricate for our understanding, or that Murray and Wilks understood it too well, and made a painful and destructive toil of what should be a light and delightful recreation. That was after we did the washing, and I was feeling sore in more senses than one.

It was Wilks’s idea that we should have a rollicking evening at the wash-tub. He said it would amuse us and broaden our minds and deepen our understanding, and do us no end of good mentally, morally, and physically. Also, he said sanitary steam laundries spoilt your things so badly, and, even if we were careless and indifferent of our own property, we ought not to be so with that entrusted to our charge.

It sounded thoughtful and considerate, if that really was Wilks’s motive, though I don’t believe the best and most powerfully equipped laundry could have done as much spoiling in a couple of years as we contrived in one short working spell of from eight to eleven.

But I don’t believe it was. It was economy. Wilks is great on economy. He will kill us with it one of these days, or drive us all into a hospital for incurables, and cost us more than he has saved us for funeral expenses or our keep.

There were other causes of discontent besides that—cooking, for instance. I know a good deal about cooking—much more than the average man, in fact. I know it from the scientific side, and I have read Mrs. Beeton, but I couldn’t always be cooking, and generally our meals were indifferent. At first we regarded them as a novelty and a change, and exciting as well. When Troddles made us a pudding he would allow us three guesses to say what it was, and if we failed we had to do the washing up. Troddles never did any washing up on his pudding days; that is why they came so frequently, I expect.

It wasn’t this or that we jibbed at, but everything taken together; and when Wilks asked Murray rather pointedly how much longer his relations expected us to look after their confounded old pigsty of a shanty, he pretty well expressed our views, though not exactly in the phrasing we should have chosen. Murray didn’t know with any certainty. Anyway, it would be until they returned, and, considering the bill for dilapidations we had been running up in a cheerful, light-hearted way, he said, he hoped for our sakes that it wouldn’t be inside another six months.

“Six months more of this!” echoed Troddles faintly. “Well, I’m sorry for you chaps. It won’t concern me, as I shall be dead long before then—dead of overwork and underfeeding and an absence of proper rest.”

“We will record it on your tombstone, unless Wilks buries you in the garden and does you out of a tablet, in order to save your pocket,” said I bitterly. “He may. He made me do my own washing; any laundry would have done it for three and sixpence, and it’s cost me more than that for new socks and flannels and things.”

“That’s because you boiled them,” said Wilks. “Any fool would have known that woollen goods shouldn’t be boiled.”

“Why, you boiled yours, and the blankets and those thingummy jigs, and spoilt them too,” I gasped.

I said “Oh!” limply and subsided. Ten minutes later I could have thought of several crushing things to have said, but just then “Oh!” was the best I could manage.

“Can’t we get some sort of assistance?” put in Troddles hastily, in order to divert our thoughts and stop “the little rift within the lute,” which showed signs of busting up the band. “Some one who understands these little things, and doesn’t mind doing them for pay.”

“We can’t have a servant,” said Murray thoughtfully. “You would never get one to come, and it wouldn’t be proper. A good strong charlady——”

“Who’ll run us into no end of expense, and run up bills, and get boozed and set the house alight,” objected Wilks.

“Not necessarily, though there is a chance of it,” said I. “But we certainly do require an angel in the house, whether she comes disguised as a charwoman or a housekeeper.”

We didn’t know of any shop where they supplied angels with domestic ability to benighted bachelors, and Murray said if we did, he reckoned one square look at this new and original Paradise would suffice to send it flapping over the housetops out towards the open country beyond. Murray must have been thinking of pigeons, I believe, though he said no, he meant angels; but he admitted that the metaphor was strained and not entirely happy.

“For that matter, neither am I,” he continued. “I’ve to go and wash up those darn tea-things. Come on, Troddles, it’s your turn to wipe. Isn’t that hand of yours nearly better, Bob? It’s lasting you well.”

“It will,” said I frankly. “I’m cultivating it assiduously, and nursing it all I know; but, despite my best efforts, it’s mending. Already it’s well enough to be used with care on the piano, and I’m afraid by the end of the month it will be able, though unwilling, to dip into greasy water.”

I gained that much as compensation for what I had lost by doing my share of the washing. I was wearing my right hand in a sling, and when I thought of it, or when I caught one of them gazing reflectively from the dirty crockery to it, I would screw up my face into an expression of agony borne with much fortitude and resignation, and ask them if they knew the symptoms of gangrene, because I rather thought I had got it. Of course it wasn’t very bad, really, after the first half hour; but I said it was.

Murray did it with a bucket of hot water which I wasn’t ready to receive, and the chemist to whom I took it—my hand, I mean, not the bucket—said it might have been a very serious thing for me if the water had been more boiling.

It is a singular thing, but as I sat in the drawing-room, smoking my pipe and idly accompanying on the piano the distant smash of breaking crockery, and listened to the others scurrying around and swearing at each other and things in general, I began to think that we didn’t really need any assistance, except, perhaps, some one to come in now and again to make my bed and brush my things and put them away. It was an absurd fuss to be making over a few light and not unpleasant duties, and I would have reproved them if I thought it would do any good, but I knew it wouldn’t, and it might do me some harm.

They are lazy; that’s what is the matter with them—lazy. Troddles was born so, and has gone on with it ever since, and Wilks and Murray have acquired it gradually for use whenever there is anything knocking about that ought to be done which they don’t want to do. I was ashamed of them, making such a fuss, and, if it hadn’t been for what the chemist said about my hand, I would have gone out and taken the dishcloth away from them. I pictured myself doing it, and Troddles’s look of honest shame and Murray’s sheepish abashment, and it was only with a strong mental effort that I restrained myself and let them go on their abandoned way, breaking the dishes and swearing at the poor little teacups, as though they could help having to be washed up and put away.

Still, it made me feel good to have such noble, manly impulses, and I was right in the midst of it when I heard a soft dab at the front door, as though some one was anxious to attract attention but afraid of what the result would be. I gave the others a chance to determine that; but they didn’t seem to want it, and at the second dab I went myself.

I opened the door, and there stood—don’t scream!—a man: Arrysoryer, in fact.

“Beg your pardon, mister, but have you got a crust of dry bread you can spare a poor man?” he said.

“No, I’m afraid not,” said I, after giving the question rapid but sufficient thought. “I’ve got a scalded hand, and the rest of us have got a tidy-sized hump. This is what you might call a house of mourning just at present. What poor man?”

“Me, mister,” said he. “I’ve walked close on twenty miles to-day, and I ain’t had a bite since I started.”

Godolphin ran out from the kitchen and tried to give him one, and Wilks, who was following, came forward on hearing the scrimmage.

“A poor man who hasn’t had a bite all day,” I explained. “Godolphin wants to make up the arrears, but I don’t think he ought to be allowed to.”

“A beggar, I suppose,” commented Wilks harshly. “Nothing doing; shut the door.”

“Oh, don’t be a pig just because you have to do a bit of housework,” I reproved him. “The man says he’s hungry, and he may be right. Anyway, he’s better able to tell than you are. Try him on that last pudding Troddles made, and if he downs it I’ll give him twopence for his pluck.”

Wilks said that would be manslaughter, and, though he disliked tramps and beggars, and would like to have them all shot or put in prison, he didn’t hold with torturing them.

“Besides, he looks delicate,” Wilks objected, “and unless you’ll let me back the pudding and not the tramp, as I prefer to, I shan’t stand an earthly.”

“This is benevolence, not betting,” said I. “Haul Godolphin into one of the rooms and shut him up, and let’s give the man the pudding at his own risk. We shall only have to throw it away, and I think Troddles would sooner the beggar had it.”

“What’s your name?” he queried at last, making up his mind to allow the identity to go by default.

“Arrysoryer, I told you it was, didn’t I?” said the man, with a trace of irritation in his tones. I don’t think he knew his catechism, because when I asked him who gave him that name he said, “Some blighter, I suppose. But what about that pudden, mister?”

“Are you really game to tackle it?” said Wilks, looking at him with respect and admiration, and then, without waiting for a reply, he shouted: “Troddles, Troddles, here’s a man going to eat your pudding!”

Troddles came lumbering along to see the phenomenon, and was pushed forward by Murray, who also wanted to see what manner of man this could be who was so reckless and so brave.

“Which one?” asked Troddles. “There are seven of them; but I don’t think the first five are fit to eat—they’ve gone furry.”

There were other disqualifications; but we didn’t want to make the man’s enterprise any more difficult than it was, so we didn’t mention them. We took the hero through into the kitchen and set him down before his task. I bet Wilks a shilling the man would win; and he and Murray backed the pudding. I also bet the man a shilling that he didn’t finish the meal that we had provided. It is what they call “hedging,” and I thought it particularly artful on my part until Wilks asked me how I should have got on if I had won, seeing that the man couldn’t possibly have paid. But there was no need to have worried; the pudding didn’t stand a chance, although Godolphin had given it best, and Arrysoryer was game to go on and tackle the other, if we would have let him. Troddles was awfully pleased about it. I think it was the first pudding he had ever made that got eaten, and naturally it encouraged him.

“It’s a sight better than nothing, mister,” said the other cautiously. “But that cook of yours wants sacking bad, that she do. I’d have been chucked overboard if I’d served up a fakement of that sort.”

“And can you, by any chance, wash dishes and make beds and keep a house clean and tidy?” continued Troddles.

“On my ’ead,” was the encouraging reply. “I was ’andy boy in a sailors’ doss-house at Portsmouth for three years, and that’s how I came to go to sea.”

“And you want a job?” Troddles’s tone was anxious, and his voice quivered with suppressed excitement.

“Then hang your hat on a willow-tree—I mean behind the door—take off your coat, and go and finish those tea-things,” said Troddles. “Bob, go and buy a steak, a big one, and get some onions too, and call me when it is supper-time. You will find me on the couch, and quite likely I shall be asleep.”

“Righto, mister; I’m on to it!” he said. “And I’ll give you a supper the like of which you ain’t never tasted.”

Murray and I confirmed the appointment, and Wilks’s reservation was confined strictly to making the best terms possible.

“Yes, and take in mangling as well for you, if you like,” retorted our new servant. “I’ll do all you want doing, never fear, and be glad of the chance. You’re toffs, and I’ll serve you straight, that I will.”

“What about wages?” queried Murray. “Shall we say five bob a week and all found, including caps and aprons?”

“Caps and aprons!” echoed Arrysoryer, and then he began to chuckle. “I reckon you’re the funny man of the party, ain’t you?” he queried. “The money will do, anyhow.”

Five minutes later the sound of domestics being briskly carried on and the pungent reek of strong shag stole through the hall to where we were, and Murray nodded in the direction of the kitchen.

“I hope it won’t fly away with the silver,” he said. “Didn’t we ought to get a character or something?”

“Why, he’s washing up, isn’t he? What better character can you want than that?” retorted Murray. “Come along and let’s get that steak, Bob. I look upon it as a reward to Troddles for his ready resource, and I’m so grateful that I’d steal it for him if we couldn’t afford to buy it.”

Arrysoryer was a treasure! He served us a supper that would not have discredited Romano’s, and when we went out to the kitchen to have a look round it almost frightened us, it was so clean and neat. He made all our beds and tidied up upstairs while we were surveying and marvelling at his handiwork below, and when we went to gape at that he whipped the supper-things off, and had them washed and put away before we got back.

He said he wouldn’t start cleaning that night, as he felt a bit done up from his tramp and short commons; but the next day. If we didn’t mind, he’d like to do the house down from garret to cellar, for it needed it.

He was a sandy, smooth-faced little chap, with watery blue eyes and a fair-sized gap where his teeth should have been, and he was offensively free in his remarks, and smoked something horrible in the way of shag all day long; but, as Murray said, you can’t expect to get everything for five shillings, and he didn’t believe we could find half as good a servant in petticoats for double the money.

It made a lot of difference to our life, and we realized it the next morning more clearly even than we had done overnight. The mornings had been particularly dreary; quite often we didn’t get any breakfast because the table was crowded with supper-things, and there wasn’t anything clean and no time to clean them.

I thought I was in Paradise, or at least back with Mrs. Bloggs, when I was rapped out of slumber, and struggled up to find Arrysoryer approaching the bed with a tray in his hand.

“Cup of tea and your shavin’ water, mister,” he said. “It’s half-past seven, and the kitchen fire is going, if you’d like a tub.”

Troddles brought his tea in and sat on the edge of my bed and voted we raise Arrysoryer’s wages. He said he thought five shillings a skinny lot to offer, and wanted to make it ten. I pointed out to him that the man seemed contented, and, while we were arguing, Wilks sneaked in and got the first go at the hot water.

Breakfast was all ready, and, if it hadn’t been for the prevailing odour of shag, we could have sworn that the fair hands of some unusually capable woman had done this thing. Boots cleaned, too—I hate cleaning boots—clothes brushed, and nothing to account for it all except a whiff of shag and a voice more cracked and raspy than Wilks’s droning out a hymn in the scullery.

Arrysoryer didn’t understand he was to have the house to himself all day, and every day except Saturday and Sunday, and he didn’t seem to care a hang one way or the other when Murray explained it to him.

“Right you are, cock!” he said. “A bit of bread and cheese and a bottle of beer will do me. I ain’t on the temperance lay, am I?”

“Only a mild restriction,” said Wilks guardedly. “Two bottles a day—take them when you like.”

“That’s good enough,” said he. “Boot off, or you’ll be late for your train! Grub at seven. Tea and toast, I s’pose, or do you want anything cooked?”

“No; that will do nicely, thanks,” said Murray. “If the coals come, lay them in; if the tax-scrapers, or anyone wanting your job, lay them out.”

Arrysoryer looked puzzled for a minute, and then he chuckled. He never laughed by any chance, we found—just screwed up his eyes and cackled.

“It’s a way he’s got, ain’t it?” he said, turning to me, and I said yes, it was, one of many.

“It’s a dream, isn’t it?” said Troddles, stopping suddenly half-way across the Common.

I said no, I thought it was a tangible reality, but it wouldn’t last. Wilks agreed with me there, and he wanted to bet us five bob that Arrysoryer would be missing, along with every portable item of value, by the time we got back. We wouldn’t take him, but I’m sorry we didn’t. So far from pinching the silver, Arrysoryer had collected it together from all parts of the house and cleaned it, and everything else besides, even to the dog, and everything was ready and waiting.

“You seem to understand this sort of thing rather well,” said Murray, in gratified surprise, when he found that he hadn’t even to hunt for his slippers.

“Gent’s servant for three years, I was, out in Barbadoes,” said Arrysoryer briefly.

“Is there anything or anywhere you haven’t been?” began Wilks, but Troddles stopped him. There were poached eggs on toast waiting, he reminded us, and he never liked to keep poached eggs in a state of suspense; it spoilt the flavour, and was hardly worth while merely to gratify Wilks’s idle curiosity.

“I reckon you’d sooner be gratifying your belly,” he said. It was vulgar, but very telling, and we enjoyed it.

“Crude, but true; I would,” said Troddles brazenly. And he proved it so by running in three eggs and rounds of toast ahead of us.

Arrysoryer did for us, but never did us, so far as we knew, for nearly three weeks, and the only fly in the ointment, so to speak, was being summoned by the Inland Revenue authorities for keeping a male servant without a licence.

I believe the man next door must have given us away in revenge for Murray seeing him when he had been looking upon the wine when it was red, and talking about it. Anyhow, one evening soon after we got down a spruce gent with a swallow-tail coat and eyeglass, and other things, of course, turned up and knocked us down, metaphorically speaking, with the statement that we were keeping a male servant without being properly licensed. Wilks said is was curious how information seemed to lurk with taxing officials, but, allowing, for the sake of argument, that keeping a poor old tramp from the workhouse was magnified to that extent, what then?

Summons, fine, and costs was what then, we learned, and Murray did not mend matters much by contrasting the agent of a harsh and tyrannical government with Ananias, with a serious loss of prestige to the latter. It was a silly thing to have said, because it put the man on his mettle to prove that he but did his duty, and we who lied, and he went off in a dudgeon, threatening us with no end of horrible things.

Wilks got us out of that by pleading the gaming laws or something. It cost us fifteen shillings to get the licence; but that, Wilks said, was a cheap let-off, as we might have been fined twenty pounds and costs.

The charm, to my mind, about our butler-cum-bottle-washer was his adaptability, resource, and absence of fussiness. You just said you wanted a thing, and you got it. And it was on that account that we came to have a surfeit of fowl. Troddles, who, as usual, had become first favourite on sight, said he liked fowl, particularly roast fowl with bread sauce. After that we didn’t get much else, and Wilks complained about it. At least, he did not exactly complain, but he referred to it somewhat impatiently, and when we reproved him he said he had no fault to find with fowl as fowl, but there were other things.

Of course, we couldn’t dispute that as a proposition, so we fell back on our second line of defence, and said that a man who grumbled at having to eat roast fowl deserved to be put on a scarce diet of bread and cheese, with an onion on Sundays.

“What puzzles me is how the beggar does it,” said Murray, “unless he’s running bills. He never seems to want any money, and, so far as I can tell, this high-class Hotel Metropole style of existence is actually coming out cheaper than our old happy-go-lucky scrape-along-and-peck-where-you-can method.”

“Well, that’s no fault,” put in Wilks cheerfully. “If it is true, that is. I expect it is less a miracle than a matter of an account being run somewhere.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Troddles. “I asked Arrysoryer if there was anything owing at the shops, and he said there wasn’t.”

“Strange,” commented Wilks. “He must be buying them out of his own money out of gratitude.”

“Kind, but improvident. I wish he’d buy himself some boots,” said I. “He wants a pair even more than we want roast fowl four times a week. A new suit wouldn’t come amiss, either. The one he wears is enough for decency, but there’s no style about it; and, as we are doing so well in that line ourselves, I think he owes something to appearances and our credit.”

“I don’t think Arrysoryer cares much about dress,” said Murray reflectively. “I had thought of suggesting a uniform for him with gold braid and buttons; but it might spoil his simple, unaffected nature, and it wouldn’t go very well with that dirty, short clay, smoked mostly upside down, would it?”

“You had better leave the man alone,” advised Wilks. “As he is he is practically useful, and that’s what we want him for. If you go and paint him up and put fine togs on him you’ll stand a chance of making him uppish, and he’ll go off and get a job to run one of the swagger hotels. They’d pay a man like him big money, if he only knew it.”

“No; there you are wrong,” I protested. “Arrysoryer is a good example of a man with a great natural ability hampered by an entire lack of education. He would run the hotel all right, but he’d clear it out in a week with his pipe and habit of addressing his patrons as ‘old cocks’ or ‘blighters,’ according to whether he approved or disapproved of them.”

The mystery of the cheap and constant poultry supply was cleared up by Arrysoryer himself that very evening.

“I reckon you’ll have to go butchering after to-morrow, mister,” he said to Troddles, with a kindly glance of sympathy. “Them chickens is well-nigh done.”

“Out of season?” queried Wilks, who had lost interest in fowl after a steady diet of it for a week or two.

“Why, you don’t mean to say you have been eating our own poultry?” gasped Murray.

“No; but you have,” said Arrysoryer. “That’s what they was for, wasn’t it?”

It seemed superfluous to tell him that it wasn’t, that there wasn’t a bird in the run which hadn’t a pedigree, and it would take us a month’s pay to replace them at listed prices.

“They wasn’t good for much else,” he pursued, blissfully unconscious of the havoc he had wrought. “They wasn’t laying no eggs, and I says to them, one at a time, I says, ‘An egg to-morrow, or into the oven you goes.’ And in they went, sure enough, except the last one, and that’s in the coal-hole, ready for to-morrow.”

I said, “Oh!” and then I began to laugh. We began with Phryne, and we had got down to the pedigree poultry. The chain of destruction wasn’t entirely complete; there was still Godolphin and some of the furniture left, and if Murray’s relatives hurried back soon we might not be able to present them with an absolutely clear field on which to re-start a home. Wilks joined me, not knowing my thoughts, and then Murray. He said common shop fowls at three shillings a time would have done us just as well; but, as we had eaten the pedigrees, we’d just have to fill up the run with the proletariat. He felt pretty certain his cousin wouldn’t know the difference, he said, and fowls were made to be eaten, anyhow.

For some three weeks we lived in a state of blissful ease and contentment. Arrysoryer served us well—uncommonly well for a man. He mended our things and darned our socks and repaired curtains and pillow-cases, and, though I am no judge of fine-art needlework, I knew enough about it to know that no woman could have done better. In the house or in the garden, it was all the same; there was nothing he couldn’t do, and do well. And always there was some good reason to account for such ability when we inquired. He had been gardener here for four years, sewing-instructor there for three, and so on.

In a spirit of idle inquiry, I asked him how old he was. He said twenty-five, just on; and then I did a little arithmetic, and came to the conclusion that Arrysoryer added lying to his many and varied qualifications.

“Oh! you can get a lot of experience knocking about the world in ten or twelve years, and he may have begun early,” said Murray when I mentioned my conclusions to them.

“He must have done,” said I. “Three years before he was born, in fact. That’s what it comes to on paper. If you ask me, Arrysoryer is a liar.”

“We didn’t ask you. But what if he is?” said Murray. “All men are; so am I, and so are you.”

“No, that’s where you are wrong,” I objected. “At a pinch, and in times of urgent need, we can and do become clumsy perverters of the truth; but that isn’t lying. Lying is an exact science; it goes into detail and says how many years you were sailing the bright blue seas, and the number of medals and honourable mentions you acquired when you gardened for Sir Simon.”

“He may have made a mistake in his age,” suggested Troddles. “Anyhow, I don’t see it’s any business of ours.”

It wasn’t, and the lying was merely an incident, which didn’t affect us or our manservant, except to help us to understand some things better, when one luckless evening we reached home and found the house strangely quiet and deserted. Our next-door neighbour intercepted us at the gate.

“I hope you can trust that man of yours,” he said. “There’s been a rough-looking fellow hanging about here for the last two days, and he seems to be watching your house. I should put the police on him if I were you.”

We thanked him, without enthusiasm, for his solicitude, and even when we got in and found the house deserted we didn’t think much about it.

“Having a day off, I expect,” said Wilks cheerfully. “He might have mentioned it, but I suppose it’s all right. I hope he won’t come home squiffy, though.”

We got our own tea and left the remnants for Arrysoryer to clear away. No Arrysoryer showed up, but just as the shades of night were falling fast a heavy clump came at the front door, and when Troddles answered it a burly, beetle-browed ruffian shoved his foot in and demanded his “missus.”

“It ain’t no use telling me lies, young man, ’cause I seed her face through the glass, and when I catch ’old of her I’ll alter the shape of it a bit, too!” he said truculently. “And yours, too, if you don’t trot her out.”

“You’re making some mistake, my man, there’s no woman here,” said Wilks briefly. “What’s your name?”

“None whatever—half a mile down the street,” said Wilks pointedly. “Carry it there, or I’ll give you the choice between a hospital and the police station. You’ve just come out, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have,” said the other viciously. “Four months, and that woman got me put away, her own lawful ’usbin’, just for giving her a bit of a bashin’ to keep her in her plice. I swore I’d cripple her for it, and, blimey, I will!”

Wilks won! The man did his best, but he was a gross, beer-laden ruffian, with no pluck and no science, and, after sewing him up on the garden path, Wilks kicked him through every room downstairs, just to convince him that the house was empty except for ourselves, and then propelled him into the street and advised him to travel farther for results and safety. He travelled, and we went in and shut the door to discuss the situation and sit down and mourn.

“And so,” concluded Wilks, “Arrysoryer is a lady. That accounts for the domesticity.”

“Hiding in disguise from the gentleman to whom she is legally but not soulfully attached, and that accounts for the bolt,” said I.

“I’m sure of it,” said Murray. “Whose turn was it to do the washing up?”

CHAPTER IX.
TRODDLES’S BURGLAR.

A week after the departure of our able, if deceitful, lady manservant, a committee meeting of the shareholders—or share-shirkers, rather—of Cumber House, Ltd., was called to consider matters of such urgent moment that I threatened to resign, and Troddles packed his bag with the avowed purpose of finding a hotel boarding establishment, or doss-house, where he could at least be certain of having the things he paid for, or could be allowed to pay to avoid having the things he did not want.

We took the bag away from him and locked it up, and Murray sneaked his hat and boots and hid them as a temporary expedient for detaining him; but of course we knew very well that something more drastic and soothing would be required, and then it was that Wilks hit on the idea of the committee meeting and having the whole situation thrashed out and plans made either to abandon our charge or else to run it on sound business lines both for comfort and economy.

The house wasn’t a home for incurables, he said, although I seemed to think it was, and, as the farce had gone sufficiently far in his opinion, if I would throw away my bandages and Murray would give up his heart disease, he would take his arm out of splints, which were darn uncomfortable things to go about in, and undertake to show us how housekeeping should be done, provided, of course, that we would practically and energetically profit by his knowledge and advice.

I didn’t like the suggestion that I was shamming, and I protested. Certainly it was a strange coincidence that I should scald my hand a second time, and on the same day that Arrysoryer left us; but, as I pointed out, there was no need and no occasion for me to do it before then, because I didn’t have to undertake dangerous work.

Murray said it was just how it was with him, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that we were left unaided to do a lot of things we knew nothing about, and which it was becoming painfully evident to him we didn’t wish to, he might never have known that he had heart disease in its most fatal form, and gone on recklessly enjoying himself with one foot in the grave as you may say.

Two from four still leaves two. Quite enough in stalwart and healthy men to clear up a few odds and ends and keep a small house tidy and comfortable, Murray and I considered, and we were getting along contentedly enough, so far as we were concerned, when Wilks went and broke his arm. I don’t know how he managed it, and Wilks was in such awful agony that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give us any details, although we pressed him for them rather insistently. He went up to his bedroom shortly after tea one evening, a strong, hearty man whom any insurance office would have been glad to accept, and came down half an hour later a decrepit wreck, with his arm broken in seven places and nothing but a lingering and painful peter out before him.

Troddles, who had been awfully good and thoughtful towards us, and particularly to Murray, who laid it on a trifle too thick, I thought—Murray doesn’t know how to differentiate artistically between heart disease and humbug—was overwhelmed with this new trouble, and his kindness and sympathy towards Wilks were touching. Of course, we helped him as much as we dared. I cleared the table with my sound hand, and Murray undertook to watch the kettle so as to let Troddles know when it was boiling, and after that to water the ferns and take Godolphin for a gentle stroll across the Common.

He made a point of seeing to the dog’s exercise after his heart disease set in. I don’t believe any man’s dog has ever had more attention paid it than Godolphin. Murray wouldn’t miss that work for anything. Even when it was raining cats and dogs he went. He said it was a consolation to him, and although it was dangerous because Godolphin was so rough and boisterous, he liked to do it, as it made him feel that he was of some little use in the world, and when he left it, as he soon should have to do, Godolphin at least would miss him, and fret for him, and come and lie on his grave, and be found there a frozen corpse one peaceful Sabbath morning when the birds were singing and the grass was all lush and beautiful.

“What, in the middle of July?” asked Wilks, who hadn’t any great faith in Murray’s complaint, and is much too sordid and materialistic to be moved by pathetic touches of that order.

“He is more likely to be found quarrying for rats, or laying out some unfortunate cat there,” I added.

Murray smiled a sad, wan smile and forgave us. We were cold and harsh, but he forgave us, and we were encouraged to hope that we shouldn’t have to subscribe for a tombstone for him yet awhile by the breezy heartiness with which he cussed Godolphin for upsetting him in the struggle to see which could get out first, and also by the pungent reek of strong tobacco Murray had taken to now that his disease left him more leisure to enjoy the solace of his pipe.

It was unfortunate that Troddles discovered, quite by accident, that Murray’s arduous contribution to the world of work so far as it concerned our domestic affairs consisted of a healthy sprint to the nearest billiard-table, and Godolphin’s exercise was confined to that and sitting in a pub all the evening eating biscuits and endeavouring to sample the legs of the marker.

“Heart disease or no,” Troddles complained, and not without some justification, “I think a man who is able to run round a billiard-table for a couple of hours is quite safe in venturing to wash up a few teacups.”

I agreed with him, but Wilks looked grave. He said it was foolhardy to the point of being criminal on Murray’s part, because the chemist who had set his arm in splints—Wilks went to a chemist because it was cheaper, he told us, and they understood those things just as well as any doctor—had told Murray, in his hearing, that he wasn’t on any account to jerk his arms about, and we had seen Murray’s method of playing billiards.

Troddles made no comment then; but later on in the evening he went out, and when he returned he didn’t even trouble to remove his hat, but brought out his bag and began packing it, and in the intervals of packing he told Wilks exactly what he thought of him.

“I have been to Jells,” he said sternly, and it was pleasant to see Wilks’s guilty start and change of colour. “He said there is nothing the matter with your arm, and you never pretended there was—to him. You told him that you were an actor, and having to play the part of a man with a broken arm you got him to sell you some splints and show you how to wear them. You wouldn’t let him take them off again, which surprised him at the time, and as for Murray, he knows nothing about him.”

Wilks tried at first to pretend that he had made a mistake in the name of the chemist, and that he was not the party referred to; but a real and an imaginary broken arm in the same district on the same evening was too much to ask even Troddles to swallow, and Wilks knew it. He wouldn’t waste time and words by defending his action, he said, and he would give up all the sweet, restful joys of a broken arm if I would let my hand heal up and Murray would throw away his heart disease. That didn’t entirely satisfy Troddles, and it left us entirely discontented, and so we argued the matter out, and Wilks finally suggested the committee of inquiry to which I am coming.

Troddles took the chair. We gave it to him to flatter him and make him forget certain matters of duplicity, seeming in my case, actual and brazen in Murray’s and Wilks’s. He looked very well there, too—a trifle stiff and formal at the outset, perhaps, but Murray corrected that with a touch of still life—a bottle and glass and a tin of mixture.

“We shall have to do something,” he said then, as though with that he had settled the whole affair firmly and finally.

“Yes; but what?” queried Wilks. “We mustn’t talk about running away. It would be unkind and cowardly. This house is more or less a duty, and as such it should be done.”

“It will be that, right enough,” I put in. “I think Troddles is more concerned with ourselves than the house, and he thinks he is a duty who has been done. Now he calls for rest and some refreshment, and unless he gets it he is going to default. We have either to obtain skilled assistance, or put aside our taste for more restful and cultured pursuits and do the work ourselves. We can’t do it ourselves, so we must get assistance; we can’t get assistance, so we must do it ourselves.”

Murray said they couldn’t extract a great deal of comfort from that, and Wilks said it was astonishing how I was sometimes so much more an ass than at others. He supposed it was the temperature, he said. For his part he was inclined to think that the whole trouble was that we didn’t get enough recreation, and he said if we let the house go to Jericho and all loafed together and nobody cheated it would be all the same in six months’ time, and we might have a very enjoyable interval.

Troddles said we had been doing that all the way along, and if the result was Wilks’s idea of enjoyment he must have very singular and nasty ideas.

“If you fellows would all do your share it wouldn’t be so bad,” he argued. “It’s got to be done, and that’s flat, but I don’t think there ought to be so much of it. How would it do if we locked up every room in the house and only used the kitchen and two bedrooms? We ought to be able to keep those clean and fairly tidy, and I should say if we did the same thing with the crockery and only kept out a plate and cup and saucer each, and each washed his own or used them dirty, as he most preferred, we might be able to make shift until we can hire some one to come and do for us.”

I thought it a very good idea, and commended Troddles warmly. Murray wasn’t enthusiastic, and Wilks said he couldn’t see the advantage of having a roomy and imposing mansion all to ourselves if we were going to reduce life to the level of a Sunday school treat.

“Well, we do worse than that: spend pounds on it, and lose all our things and get horrible colds and call it a holiday,” said Troddles doggedly. “Look at that last camp out we had.”

“Don’t,” I pleaded. “There’s still six blankets to be replaced. What are blankets per six?”

“If we hadn’t been so prodigal we might have taken one apiece and a box of grape nuts and a spoon, and gone and lived the simple life under the apple tree down the garden,” said Murray. “That would reduce housekeeping to the meagerest proportions. We could burn the boxes and lick the spoons. Let’s do it.”

“Well, so we shall be,” assented Wilks. “But it will be a new and original form of dottiness, and it rather appeals to me. Troddles’s plan didn’t, because it either went too far or else not far enough.”

“Too far if anything,” put in Troddles hastily. He was alarmed at the possibilities of further discomfort and privation his simple scheme was being made to develop, but it was too late to stop the flow of enthusiasm. Wilks said quite swell people lived out in chalets on their estates in the summer; we hadn’t got a chalet or an estate, but we had a decent-sized and secluded garden, and by extending the rustic summer-house with something of the nature of a tent we could play “Robinson Crusoe” out there, and never need come into the house at all unless we wished to.

The house had slumped considerably, and I had no great affection for it myself. But I didn’t like to hear it talked about as though it were a cross between a mortuary and a cowshed. It seemed ungrateful and unjust, and reckless as well, considering how often and painfully experience had taught us that the haste we made after some new and enticing freak was as nothing to the haste we made to get away from it. But you can’t reason with Wilks or Murray when they are in that mood, and, rather to my surprise, Troddles encouraged them. I thought at first he was viewing it in the light of liberation from the thraldom of dishcloths and dustpans, and so he was. But there were other considerations. He had got an idea all his own, and he wanted to try it. It wasn’t much of an idea, and it wasn’t his own, except in applying it personally, instead of reading about it, as he had been doing in one of Marryat’s novels.

“I shall get a hammock,” he said. “I’m not partial to plank beds or gravel ones, and they’re very comfortable things to sleep in.”

“You won’t get one down here,” I objected. “I don’t know if we sleep out to-night and in to-morrow, or in to-night and out to-morrow. It will extend the experiment if we don’t begin too soon. I think a couple of days will see its collapse.”

“No, it won’t,” retorted Wilks. “The house is a compelling influence, you must recollect, and apart from that you won’t have any desire to come back to bricks and mortar. People who have camped under proper conditions never do. That hammock idea is not a bad one, though. We’ll do the best we can to-night, and to-morrow we’ll do better with their assistance.”

“Leave it as it is,” said Murray. “Arrysoryer may come back, or something may happen that will save us from any further trouble with it. Anyway, it’s only got to be done once, and we may take it as a recreation task for our summer holidays.”

“It will save us something considerable, too,” said Wilks. “I reckon there’s a couple of pounds of our hard-earned money in that gas meter alone. It absorbs bobs like Troddles wolfing potatoes. I don’t believe it’s accurate.”

“It’s jolly handy,” I ventured. “We’re not going to mess about with an oil stove, are we? I can see some of us getting sacked for unpunctuality, or fading away from a consistent lack of breakfasts if we do.”

“We’ll have a camp kitchen,” said Murray enthusiastically. “I know how to build one. We’ll put a few shovels of mould down, and get that iron plate out of the stove, and it won’t spoil the grass very much.”

We took the brooms for tripods and ridge pole, and the kitchen carpet for the annexe, and out of these homely appliances we converted the summer-house into a quite roomy and cosy-looking chalet. The carpet was old and faded—very much faded in parts where the frying-pan had gone over under Troddles’s unskilful handling, and, as Wilks said, we couldn’t possibly damage it any more than it had been damaged, and the open-air treatment might do it some good. Murray scooped all the fire bricks out of the grates, too, to build his camp kitchen, and sneaked the enamelled plate from the top of the gas stove to make an oven with.

There was plenty of lumber lying about in the sheds and round the garden, and inside an hour we had got the camp fixed up and were sitting round a jolly fire, smoking our pipes, and casually wondering what on earth people wanted to live in houses at all for when they could save money and be healthier and happier and entirely free from worry by living in their back gardens.

Wilks said we might let the house, to careful, responsible tenants, of course, and make enough to cover all our expenses and put something by against the winter, but Murray thought we had better not. He was sure his cousin wouldn’t like it, and they might be rough, careless people who would break things and dirty them up, and cost us more than we received from them. For the rest, he said, he quite agreed with Wilks, and he suggested when the time came for us to turn out we rented a field or orchard and went on living the simple life, at least, until the winter came, and drove us back to the crowded haunts of men.

Troddles didn’t wait for the winter snows to drive him back. A couple of hours on a hard plank, with nothing but a blanket and his pillow sufficed. We were asleep, and didn’t know of his base desertion until I woke up just before two with some well-defined aches and a choice assortment of bruises, and found his place bare. Even the pillow and blanket had vanished, and it didn’t want a shilling manual on elementary deduction to enable me to solve the mystery.

“Gone to find a bed which isn’t all board,” I mused. “Mean but not entirely unjustifiable. Troddles likes to lie soft. I’ll follow his example and lie hard if Murray wakes up and misses me. I can say I went to dig out Troddles, or for a cold bath, or see the sun rise, or just sleepwalked and know nothing about it.”

I crawled round Wilks, who was on his back, snoring musically, stepped over Murray and streaked up the garden, pillow in hand, and my blanket trailing after me. I was considerably surprised, on drawing in line with it, to find the gas was burning in the dining-room, and that the kitchen was illuminated in a grossly extravagant and wasteful manner considering the hour and all the occasion there could be.

“Lit up to look for something, and then muddled off to bed, forgetting to put it out again, I suppose,” I reflected. “It’s a good job I found it, and not Wilks. It would have vexed his frugal mind, and served as a text for the next six months.”

I pushed open the scullery door, and then I began to realize that Troddles hadn’t gone to bed after all, or, if he had, it was quite time one of us did come up. Anyhow, some one was awake and on the move, and in case it might not be Troddles I stole over to the kitchen door and applied my eye to the crack. I thought I should have a fit on the mat. As a tableau it required a title or a few words of explanation, but as a picture of laziness upheld by labour it was perfect. There was Troddles in his pyjamas and a blanket comfortably installed in an old wooden armchair. He had his pipe on and a smile of philanthropic benevolence, and in his hand was one end of the clothes line. Attached by his leg to the other was a man about to wash up. He had the bowl ready, and the table was filled with dirty crockery. A small, vicious-looking man he was, whose face seemed to suggest that fate had dealt harshly with him, and he was discontented and annoyed about it. I didn’t wonder at it; he had come out for diamonds, and had been given a dishcloth, and if that isn’t enough to discontent anybody, tell me what is. Then Troddles spoke in that slow, reflective, booming way of his when he feels strongly that it is his duty to be unkind, and is going to do it.

“It’s no use your being raggy,” he said. “I might have got you six months’ hard labour, and if you ask me it’s a cheap let-off to only have to do a few hours of easy. You broke into this house to steal, and, of course, you must do penance. I don’t suppose you have done a day’s useful work in all your life, and this is your chance, if you could only see it, to find out that work isn’t nearly so bad as you think. Why, we’ve been doing what you are going to do for months for sheer pleasure. Come, get on with those teacups. There’s beds to make and floors to scrub, and you must be done and away before six, or you’ll be having my friends along, and they may not be so easy to deal with as I am.”

The burglar muttered something about opinions as to pleasure and ease differing; but it was so swamped in profanity that it was difficult to catch the full sense of the meaning, and feeling that I had some concern with what was going on I pushed open the door and walked in.

“Hello, Bob!” said Troddles cheerfully. “Look what I’ve caught. I found him packing up our spoons in the dining-room, and as it was a case for hard labour I thought we might as well have the benefit of it as the Government. I’m glad you’ve come in case somebody has to go for a policeman. He’s not what you could call a willing worker, and I don’t think he’s very experienced; but beggars mustn’t be choosers—we of our servant, or he of his job. You can come and hold the string if you want to.”

“No, thanks,” said I laughing. “Shall I fetch the others? Murray would enjoy this, and Wilks has one or two jobs he is certain to want done with free labour available.”

“Then he won’t get them,” retorted Troddles firmly. “This is my burglar, and I’m not going to disclose him. I intended to get everything cleaned up and put nice and tidy, and surprise you no end in the morning, and if you persisted in thinking I had done it I couldn’t help that, and didn’t intend to try. Let’s keep it to ourselves and give the man a show. I don’t believe he is really bad, only unfortunate. He was forced to become a burglar because he couldn’t get any work. That’s why I gave him a job instead of running him in.”

“Charity profitably employed,” I commented. “I don’t know that I should be inclined to trust him; he looks tricky, and if he can only get one fair chance of a swipe at you I’ve a sort of impression that he’ll take it, and try and convince you that he prefers house-breaking to house-cleaning.”

I put on a pipe and went and sat on the edge of the table and studied the ways of burglars in captivity. It was very interesting, and I like watching men throwing themselves into useful practical work that helps the world forward. It’s a weakness of mine. I wouldn’t give a “Thank you” to go and see a cricket match or a horse race; but I can stand for hours and watch men breaking up a street or laying asphalt, and when the foreman isn’t about I talk to them. I talked to Troddles’s burglar; but he hadn’t much conversational ability and very few ideas. When I asked him if he liked washing up he scowled, and when I inquired if burglary was really as profitable as I had read it was, he swore.

Troddles reproved him. He said we were really friendly and kind to him if he only had the wit to see it, and, anyhow, he, the burglar, needn’t stop if he didn’t wish to. There was a policeman down at the corner, and inside five minutes he could be wending his way to the police station in company that might not compare at all favourably with ours.

The man cooled down at that. He said it was a fair cop, and he didn’t mind “doing his bit,” though it grieved him—gave him the spike is the way he phrased it—to be doing slavey’s work, he who stood so high in his own profession; but he didn’t like having it rubbed in, and he didn’t like being watched.

Troddles told him we all had things we didn’t like at times to put up with. He, for instance, had had to sleep that night on a hard, bare plank, and it was chiefly because of that that he, the burglar, had come for silver and remained to serve.

We didn’t seem able to make the man happy somehow. He was a surly, ill-conditioned brute, on whom kindness was wasted; but we made ourselves fairly comfortable, and got a heap of useful and necessary work done, so we were satisfied, and, as Troddles said, you can’t expect to please all parties. But, ’tis said, “Who sups with the devil needs a long spoon.” Certainly those who harness burglars to domestic service need a gun.

Along towards morning we grew sleepy, and careless in consequence, and at last Troddles handed me the tow line, and went upstairs on some pretext or other and coolly turned in, leaving me to carry on the good work, and supply as much more as my ingenuity could devise. Ten minutes later the burglar dropped his scrubbing-brush into the pail and stood up with a sudden, and, it seemed to me at the time, friendly inspiration. I thought differently about it two seconds later.

“That, you blighter,” he snarled, ramming my own pillow into my face, and before I could realize that I was being attacked he whipped my blanket over my head and ran round me with the clothes line and bowled me over, trussed up and helpless to move or call for assistance. Then—I hardly like to mention it, it is so undignified—he emptied the bucket of dirty water over me, smacked me hard and painfully with the scrubbing-brush, and bundled me into the cupboard under the dresser and closed the doors.

So quickly and deftly was the outrage carried out that I scarcely realized it before I was in captivity, with my head nestling in an old frying-pan and a flat iron digging into my back. I couldn’t move hand or foot, scarcely could I breathe, and if I hadn’t thought to chew a hole in the blanket I should very probably have finished my career tragically and ignobly by suffocation. That burglar didn’t care, and I date my acute dislike to the class from that night.

I lay there cramped and aching for, it seemed, weeks, years, centuries, though it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours, and then I heard some one moving about in the room. I tried to call out, but the hole had shifted round to my ear and I couldn’t wriggle round to it, and I couldn’t make myself heard through the fold of blanket and the cupboard doors. I heard Wilks call to Murray, and I heard Murray yell “Bob! Troddles! Come out of it, you mean, disgusting sneaks.”

They went up and dug out Troddles, and by and by they came back with him. He evidently hadn’t enlightened them about the events of the night, for I heard him say, “Where’s my burglar?” and Murray countered with, “Where’s Bob?”

They didn’t think I had abandoned the house and thrown in my lot with the burglar even when they discovered that every item shiftable and worth shifting had been cleared away, Murray told me with kindly generosity, and he seemed surprised and said I was unreasonable when I said they might have thought of looking in the dresser cupboard. It was Godolphin who did that. At least, he made such a fuss outside sniffing and swearing, that Wilks opened the door at last and let him come in and bite my legs to see if it was me or the burglar. I didn’t think that was necessary; but Murray defended the dog, who, he said, didn’t know me as well as they did, and yet they were unable to identify me, so thorough was my disguise. Wilks was inclined to blame us for the loss of the things entrusted to our charge, until we pointed out the cleaning we had got in exchange; but he made Troddles promise the next time he caught a burglar he would share him up, and sent him off to the police station to lodge information while they got breakfast ready.

CHAPTER X.
MURRAY AND A CAMERA.

We rather approved of it when we first heard about it. It was a sensible hobby with an educative influence, and besides, we considered that it would keep Murray out of mischief and allow us more ease of mind and comfort of body if we didn’t have to be perpetually tagging round after him, protecting our own property, and preventing that of others from coming to grief unduly. Murray isn’t really bad, but he is thoughtless, and it damages a house just as badly to set the bath taps running, go off to see about something, forget all about them, and come back an hour afterwards to find the whole place a swamp as if you do it on purpose and sit on the window-sill and gloat over the mess you are making.

Not that the house was troubling us unduly, or we the house. The camping-out scheme answered capitally in that respect. The garden was not greatly improved by it, but the house didn’t receive a solitary additional fracture to mark our tenancy, and we were particularly careful to avoid any more accumulated heaps of soiled kitchen utensils and dirty crockery. We were very rigid and sparing in our requirements, and nothing we took out of the scullery or off the dresser ever went into the house again. It usually went into the dust-bin, and I am bound to admit that the mortality among the teacups was high. But they were cheap enough—twopence each, Wilks told us—and we got a saucer thrown in which would come in handy when he got his gun. They made first-class targets, he said, and if we were very good we should perhaps see him break as many as six in one evening at two hundred yards.

We had started the simple life chiefly as a measure of self-preservation from a pecuniary point of view, and it was satisfactory to us that it was panning out so well as far as the house was concerned. Personally, we were not so contented. Murray said it was a thought too simple. There was nothing to do; and after a couple of nights we agreed with him. The camp kitchen was a novelty, and acted well, but we couldn’t always be cooking, and when we could Murray monopolized it so completely that our part generally consisted of chopping wood. As a pastime, I don’t greatly care about wood chopping, and running round looking for bits of paling and loose shed boards isn’t exactly exhilarating.

It was then that Wilks first began to talk about buying a gun, and, encouraged by this, Murray sprang his camera on us. He hadn’t got it, he told us, but he had paid five shillings off the purchase price to a fellow at his office who valued cash before a camera.

“He’s going to give me some lessons, too,” he said, warming to the subject. “It’s very simple, and I’ll take you all to-morrow night as a trial trip.”

We thanked him elaborately, and he told us not to mention it. It would be practice for him before he tackled really important, serious subjects.

“Anything you like,” said Wilks generously. “You can’t have my gun, if that’s what you are hinting at, but you can get one for yourself. They are not very expensive, and it works out at a penny a shot.”

I don’t care about guns. They are nasty, dangerous, uncertain things I think, and I very strongly objected to Wilks having one. Doctor’s assistants or the coroner’s best friends I call them. Wilks said with men like myself they were probably all that, but not with him. He said doctors would be begging their bread from door to door and the coroner would be going round barefooted if he was all they had to count on for a job.

I said I would think about it; but they pressed me to find myself a hobby in case I felt lonesome and restless, so I decided to buy a croquet set.

“One of those big wicker reclining chairs and as many cushions as I can lay my hands on,” said Troddles promptly. “Rest is what I chiefly stand in need of. I don’t get it comfortably on the grass, and hammocks are not all they are cracked up to be. You have to be at sea to appreciate them properly.”

So Murray bought his camera—at least, he got it on the strength of his deposit, which was trustful on the part of his colleague, to say the least of it. He didn’t know anything about photography, but he had got a shilling manual of the art which, he told us, contained all necessary information, and he had been shown how to work it.

We were all very much taken with the camera, using the word in its exact technical sense, especially Troddles. He made a better subject than we did, because he was so restful and passive, and never spoilt a plate by reason of untimely movement.

I had tried photography without success and without enthusiasm. It struck me as being rather a slow and tame pursuit. I expect I wasn’t adapted for it, or else I didn’t get properly inoculated with the craze. In Murray’s hands it didn’t look to be a hobby at all, but a disease, and one of the symptoms was a callous selfishness combined with a carelessness almost criminal. He left his chemicals about all over the place, and they got mixed up with our meals. One morning, I remember, we had soda sulphite tea. It wasn’t poisonous, as far as we knew, but it was confoundedly nauseous, and instead of apologizing and expressing his regret, as he should have done, Murray told us to “hold hard a jiff” while he fetched his camera.

“You do look so funny,” he explained in extenuation, and he was quite hurt because Troddles wouldn’t take another sip in order to try and recover his first pose of surprise, indignation, and disgust. And the worst of it was we couldn’t make fun of his photographs. He turned them out passably well, and if there were any unintentionally funny ones we never saw them. Our commendation, though generous, was mistaken.

Murray got swelled head, and from being a mere amateur dabbler became a rabid nuisance. He got himself and us disliked in the neighbourhood by going round looking for subjects in the early morning. The first time he went out he snapped the policeman on duty dallying with a serving maiden, and the man across the road, who was frugally inclined or had suffered reverses, cleaning his own front windows. Both subjects were annoyed, and the latter came over and made a fuss about it. He wouldn’t be pacified even though Wilks told him there was no disgrace in cleaning windows; on the contrary, in fact, it was evidence of reckless courage, both physical and moral.

The implied flattery was without effect, and, after a long and heated argument, Murray parted with the snapshots and all rights for half-a-crown. That gave him an idea. His hobby wasn’t anything like as cheap as he had expected to find it. The plates and chemicals cost a good deal—more than they need have done considering the waste by breakage and spilling—and, as we refused to give up the bath-room to him for a dark room, he had to turn out and contrive another in the stable. The receipt of that half-crown suggested commercial possibilities in his hobby, and he set up a board in the front garden inviting custom, which gave Wilks fits, but rather vexed me when we caught sight of it. He stencilled it himself, and it looked awful.

JACK MURRAY,

Crown Photographer.

Photographing Done In All Its Branches.

He didn’t sit down and wait for clients, which was as well, because there weren’t any. Only one man was attracted by the notice to the extent of making inquiries, and he was an official on the track of a twenty-pound fine, which is inflicted for the unauthorized use of royal arms and patronage.

“No, but I am a crown photographer,” retorted Murray. “That’s all I claim to be, and I’m open to make it four-and-six if you think five shillings too dear.”

The man seemed to think he had been cheated, and he went off without leaving an order, even though Murray dropped his charge by quick stages to a shilling cash with order.

It was rather slow for me. Murray was so immersed in his camera and Wilks in his gun that I couldn’t get them to join me in my game, and croquet by yourself soon palls. Murray would only let me carry the legs of his camera, and run about fetching things for him, and Wilks was so mean with his old gun that I only got one shot with it the whole time he had it. I broke the plate, too, and should have won a shilling by it, only Wilks refused to pay the bet. He said, of course, he meant with the bullet, and not by a fluke, whereas my shot had hit the path a couple of yards away from the target and dashed a pebble against the plate. Also, it dashed others over the fence, and one of them broke a pane of glass in a forcing-frame, and another hit the tenant on the ear, and there was a row about that.

The man leant over the fence and told us we were dangerous and destructive nuisances, and he should get an injunction and restrain us from banging a gun off in the early morning and all the evening to the danger and disquietude of himself and family.

Murray tried to turn his attention and whip up trade for himself, but our neighbour didn’t seem to care about photography any more than he did shooting, and when I invited him to hop over and join me in a game of croquet he got positively nasty. That is the worst of these suburbanites, they are so stilted and unsociable. At Mrs. Bloggs’s, had croquet or anything else been possible, I should have had half the neighbourhood over without any invitation and been chiefly concerned to get them out again.

Of course, I couldn’t force the man to come and play if he didn’t want to, though Murray could, and did, take his photograph, and Wilks went on firing with cheerful disregard of impending summonses, and I complained about it.

“You’re having all the fun, Troddles all the comfort, and I all the work,” I protested.

“Well, if I did I’d make some practical use of them,” I retorted. “I wouldn’t be shut up in a back garden when there are rabbits in the fields and sea fowl on the shores, and no end of types and picturesque old churches and inns to be shot and snapped.”

“My word, but that’s an idea,” said Murray. “A week-end with my camera and a couple of dozen plates would please me more than anything just now. Let’s go. There’s bound to be a cheap excursion somewhere, and wherever it is there will be more fur and feather on the move than you are likely to bag, Wilks.”

If I had been Wilks I should have wanted an explanation of that speech, but he took it to refer to an abundance of game, and not, as I felt sure it was meant, to his own rotten shooting, and he got quite enthusiastic over the proposition, and carried it without any reference to Troddles or me. If we had any objections to urge we could recount them on the way down—it would serve to pass the time and beguile the tedium of the journey. But he didn’t see what reasonable objection we could have, he said. We all knew Troddles’s weakness for country pubs, and we could smoke and sleep as well on a grassy bank as in our back garden, and with more enjoyment.

That was the view Troddles took of it when we woke him up to sound him. As long as he wasn’t expected to carry the camera or gun he was game to go anywhere, he told us, and he didn’t mind confessing that he was feeling in need of a change and rest.

“It’s that I am going for, you will bear in mind,” he warned us, and when we said we would endeavour not to forget it he told us that he had noticed a three-and-sixpenny week-end excursion to Maldon being advertised, and Maldon being an old-world port, and on the banks of an estuary, it might suit us very well to go there.

“You’ll want a licence for your gun, won’t you?” I remarked. Wilks said he was afraid he should, and as for the sake of seven-and-six he didn’t feel inclined to risk a heavy fine and imprisonment, he should take one out unless they would let him swop our manservant permit, for which we had no further use, for one.

“They ought to,” he said. “It’s a fifteen-shilling one, and nearly brand new. We didn’t have a week’s wear out of it.”

“Take him too if Troddles will be responsible for him,” suggested Wilks. “It will mean having him at the office for the morning, and Monday as well, possibly, if we don’t come up on Sunday night. But we can’t leave him here very well, and he’ll be useful to retrieve wild ducks I shoot when they fall in the water.”

I said “Te-he,” and Murray said “Haw-haw,” and when Wilks asked us what the deuce we were cackling over we said it was at the thought of Godolphin’s surprise and delight if he got any retrieving to do.

I do like going off for a holiday, even a short one, especially if it’s to a place I have never seen before, and may never want to see again. There is such a pleasurable sense of anticipation in packing your bag and studying time tables that you almost get the value of your ticket out of that alone.

Troddles was right about the excursion tickets, and by three o’clock on the ensuing Saturday we had availed ourselves of the generous offer, and were rushing through the country on our way to gather in all we could for the money. Wilks wouldn’t stop in Maldon. Murray wanted to, and I was willing, but he objected on the score that it was too towney for duck shooting, and Troddles thought we might do better by walking out a bit and looking for some quiet, comfortable old inn. So we walked! The station, fortunately, is on the far and water side of the town, and we did not have far to go before we were able to get on to field paths and country lanes.

We wandered along in a desultory manner for five or six miles, and then we came to just such a hostelry as we had seen in our dreams—timber built, lattice windowed, rose covered porch, and Colchester ales. Murray, with his recently cultivated artistic sense, photographed it then and there, and while he was doing so Troddles, sternly practical where his comfort is concerned, went in and bargained for accommodation over a sample pewter full of the liquid wares.

“Any shooting about here, landlord?” Wilks asked more than an hour later when we had anticipated all reasonable requirements in the way of eating and drinking for the next five hours or so. It had been a substantial meal, and we were glad later to remember that.

“You can knock over a rabbit or two along the banks, I daresay, and there’s plenty of fowl out on the saltings,” our host assured him. “Best be careful if you haven’t a licence, and make sure there’s nobody about before you fire. There’s a new policeman down while our chap takes his holidays, and he’s officious.”

“That’s all right; I’m properly equipped, though I’d have saved seven-and-six and chanced it if I’d known it was so easy as all that,” said Wilks. “Come on and let’s see what we can get. Going to take your camera, Murray?”

“We’ll be in by ten. Have a good supper ready, landlord,” said Troddles heartily, and he lit his pipe and followed us out and never once looked back to the place where he might have been so comfortable and happy had he only refused to accompany us.

Murray began it. The place looked picturesque enough from the shore, but he thought it would be still more effective from the water with the tide high and a strip of beach fringing it and cutting it off from the sea wall and the green fields intervening, and an old boat lazily rocking close inshore and moored to a stake on the beach suggested the means. He drew it in and we all got on board and pushed off. When we were far enough out Murray fixed his camera in the stern while Wilks sat forward in the bow with his gun and watched for a chance of using it. Nothing came over us, but far across the estuary we could see whole flocks of sea birds circling over the swampy wastes, and, instead of going back when Murray had taken his photograph, he suggested we row him across.

Being good-natured by disposition and feeling very well contented to be out on the water, Troddles and I complied. It was a good deal further across than we had judged, and, owing to the rapidly falling tide, we got carried down considerably, so that when the boat ran on to a mud bank, too far out to be of any service to Wilks, we had lost sight of our village and everything else that betokened the presence of man. We seemed to have the whole place to ourselves, land and water. Just then we were too much exercised in our minds to pay much attention to our surroundings, though. From experience I had learnt that stranding in these waters can be a very serious matter. The mud is generally too soft and treacherous to incline you to venture across it, and the alternative of spending eight or nine hours cooped up in a small boat is not alluring.

“Get her off, never mind about the shore,” I insisted. “Shove her back into deep water. It means all night here if you don’t.”

I had an oar out one side and Troddles on the other was putting out all his strength to prevent such a catastrophe, but we couldn’t move her. The mud was so soft and squelchy that we couldn’t get anything like a fair push, and, seeing this, Wilks slipped off his boots and socks and slipped overboard. She went then somewhat suddenly, the oars, being firmly embedded in the mud, remained behind, and Wilks only kept company with us by flinging himself over the bows and trailing his legs through the water until we could reach forward and drag him completely into the boat. By the time we had rescued him the oars were hopelessly beyond our reach, and we found ourselves in mid stream running out to sea, and hopelessly incapable of doing anything to help ourselves short of abandoning the boat and swimming to shore. We were not greatly concerned about the boat, but the chances for ourselves weren’t sufficiently enticing. As Murray pointed out, we were on the wrong side of the water, and should probably have to walk miles to get round, not to mention our soddened condition and the loss of the gun and camera.

“We shall touch again before long,” said Wilks hopefully, “or we may be picked up by a fishing boat.”

We didn’t any of us consider the position really serious. Irritating it was, and by and by it might become uncomfortable and irksome, but nothing worse. Murray was chiefly vexed because he had lost the chance of snapping old Wilks being trailed through the water, and Wilks’s cause of complaint was that he couldn’t get at the plover and other fowl skimming about the foreshore, and they wouldn’t fly out to him and be shot. Troddles only remarked that it was strange how easily things went wrong, and how very happy we had been half an hour ago, and then went to sleep in the bottom of the boat.

It must have been about six when we went afloat, and it was past ten when, by sheer luck and an eddying current, we were driven on to a sandy spit and remained there.

“Well, we are ashore somewhere,” said Murray, jumping across Troddles and following Wilks over the bow to shore. “One pub’s as good as another, and heaven grant that it isn’t a barren island with no pub or even cottage available.”

We made Troddles wake up and get out and help us drag the boat up into safety, and then it occurred to us that we were in a singularly ridiculous and helpless position. All around us was blackness and the unknown. If we left the boat at all we might never find her again, and, what was worse, we might not find anything else. Not a light twinkled in any direction to give us hope of civilization betokening pubs and such-like pleasant places, and, as far as we could tell, fields and dykes and filthy ditches composed the landscape. There was a sea wall which offered some sort of guidance, and at Murray’s suggestion we gained that and walked three or four miles along it without coming to a road or path or anything that would entice us to put our fortune to the test and cross the fields.

Wilks fired off his gun in the hope of attracting attention, but no answering call came to us, nothing but the shrill screaming of gulls out at sea. We halloed in chorus with no better result, and then Murray up and spake. He said we were making a troublesome and weary nuisance out of a slight misadventure. In four or five hours it would be dawn, and then we could see where we were and act accordingly. It was no great matter for four tough and stalwart men—men who were used, moreover, to roughing it and the outdoor life—to stretch themselves against their boat and take a nap, and in the morning, if we could do nothing where we were we could go afloat again and drift back as we had drifted down. Murray’s tone of breezy heartiness, combined with stern reproof, was splendid. I expected him to follow it with, “Fie, fie, naughty, naughty, to grumble so.” You never would have believed it was the same man who sat up and cussed frantically some two hours afterwards on account of a few buckets of rain pitched on us out of the sky to moisten a thunderstorm with.

Murray said he hadn’t bargained for rain, and the combination of evils thus induced was beyond his philosophy in the absence of umbrella and mackintosh, or anywhere to fly to for shelter.

“Why not turn the boat over and let that shelter us?” queried Troddles. “It’s heavy, but we ought to be able to manage it, and it would make a stout shed for an emergency.”

“Bravo, Trod! Hunger is sharpening your wits,” said Wilks approvingly. “Altogether, and mind she doesn’t drop on your toes, unless you’ve a mind to lose them.”

The boat was a heavy, awkward old tub, but we were desperately in need of her as a roof, and we stuck to her gamely and won with nothing to spare. We canted her towards the rain, and Wilks thoughtfully propped her so with his gun and prevented her from coming down altogether. Even so it was a close scrape to get underneath, but we got in, and scooped comfortable troughs to lie in in the sand, which was soft and dry enough immediately below the surface.

It was rather cramped, and it wasn’t photography and it wasn’t shooting, but we were thankful for the shelter, and after a little desultory conversation we dozed again, as Troddles said, to forget that we were hungry, and at ten the night before a good supper that might have been ours had been wasted. I awoke later with a sense of suffocation, and found the place like the Black Hole of Calcutta, with the windows closed and draught excluded round the door. Wilks and Murray were awake and sitting up, I found.

“The gun has sunk in the sand, and the boat has settled down and sealed up our ventilation,” Murray explained. “Wilks wants to shoot a few holes in the roof, but I object. It will spoil our programme if we have to go afloat in her to-morrow morning to carry it out.”

“To-morrow morning!” I echoed. “How many more hours have we got of this, then? I feel as though it were hours past breakfast-time already. It’s still raining, anyhow. Just listen to it pelting down.”

Murray said they had been listening to it for quite a long while, and, as he really did feel an imperative need of breathing, he would sooner give his mind to that.

“Well, you mustn’t damage the boat,” I urged. “In the first place, she isn’t ours, and in the second we may want her. Lift her a bit and wedge her up afresh.”

We tried, but we couldn’t move her, and then we woke up Troddles in a sudden panic to make him come and help us. The result was the same. Cramped as we were, and working in such confined quarters, we couldn’t gain enough to let a fly escape, and Wilks was about to put his drastic plan for ventilation in operation when I bethought me of the plug which is to be found in every boat for draining purposes. It was up Murray’s end, and he sought for and found it, and gave us a certain measure of relief, though the steady stream of water which trickled in didn’t add to his own comfort.

“I say, this looks rather as though we shall have to stop here until some one comes along and helps us out,” said Wilks suddenly. “It is Sunday, too, and nobody may come. I suppose at a pinch we can kick out a board or two and make a space wide enough for us to crawl through.”

I rather doubted it, but I didn’t see the use of testing the chances until the rain left off. We didn’t want to get out. Troddles disagreed with me promptly. He didn’t mind a wetting any day, he said, but he strongly objected to being starved, and for his part the sooner we were out and streaking for a breakfast-table the better would he be pleased. We said, of course, if he was going to put it on those grounds it was another matter, and just to try and please Troddles we spent another half-hour in finding out that we really couldn’t budge that boat.

It was a silly position to be in, and awkward, it suddenly occurred to me, if the tide should come up, as it most certainly would before long. That stimulated even Murray to take a sudden and pressing interest in the matter of our liberation rather than wait for chance aid, and when we found that we couldn’t kick our way out the situation grew desperate, and all the humour went out of it. We hurt ourselves and each other in trying to force the boat up or a way through it, and then, when we had almost given up hope and were indulging in gloomy, morbid fears, Troddles began to laugh.

We thought at first that fright had turned his brain, but it wasn’t that, he told us. It suddenly occurred to him that if Godolphin really wanted to get outside he would dig his way there, and he didn’t see why we couldn’t do the same thing. Neither did we, now we came to think of it, and ten minutes later we were outside, very grubby, and somewhat moist, but safe and free, and not too soon either! The tide was within a dozen yards of us, and coming up fast.

We climbed the sea wall and took an extended survey of the landscape, but no promise of relief was to be found in that direction. Sodden fields and driving rain. The sea offered a better chance, and we took it, and were five hours floating at large before we managed to recover the oars and row ourselves back to our starting place. We shouldn’t have done it then only Wilks stripped and swam for them as we drifted by and brought them on board.

Nobody seemed to have missed the boat. We left it just where we had found it without comment, and when we got to our inn the landlord merely remarked that we had been a long while, and must have found good sport to keep us out in the rain all night. Murray said pretty fair—he had had his camera—and Wilks said he had had his gun, and, being sportsmen, they wanted nothing more to content them.

“I do,” said Troddles tersely, and when roast duck made its appearance and we saw him sit himself down determinedly before it we thought we knew what it was.

CHAPTER XI.
THE FIRE CALL.

We were contemplating a garden-party, and Murray had spent the evening before in devising a scheme of decoration which would, he thought, attract and please our guests. Much of that evening had been devoted to carrying out his ideas, and if our laughter could be taken as a sign, Murray’s endeavours stood a good chance of earning success. We laughed—we had to, the effect was so quaint and amusing.

That garden-party would have been the biggest and quaintest freak ever perpetrated in the locality if it had come off. But it didn’t. Fate and a fire engine intervened and saved our reputation for sanity at the expense of our pockets.

It was Tuesday or Wednesday evening, and the party was to be on Saturday. Despite our protests, Murray had insisted on turning the garden into the semblance of a badly-kept farmyard, owned by a lunatic, as a sort of trial trip, just to see how it would look. We had settled down to make out a list of those we would invite when we heard the clang of a bell and the hoarse, excited shouting of men in a hurry to get somewhere and anxious not to hurt anybody in doing it.

“Hello, that means a fire!” exclaimed Murray, jumping up and streaking for the house.

He dropped his pipe on the way, but he was too excited to stop to recover it. Murray simply dotes on fires! He will run miles to see one, and when he gets there you might as well try to push Ludgate Hill up Fleet Street as to get him to come away before the show is over and the last engine has left.

We found him standing in the road, and just as we joined him another engine dashed by. Off he set, hatless and in his slippers, and we trekked after him, Godolphin leading and I bringing up the rear. I lost some time in going back to close the door as a simple measure of precaution; but I caught up with Troddles before he got to the end of the road, and we found the others waiting for us on top of the hill.

They had located the fire, and Murray pointed it out to us with a joy that seemed extravagant considering the cause. It was just a ruddy tinge in the sky, with a flickering light low down among the trees and chimneypots.

“Twenty minutes’ trot at the outside,” retorted Murray. “Come along before they get it out.”

That was an underestimate. We ran hard for half an hour, and then we couldn’t find any fire or signs of one. It was late and there didn’t seem to be anyone about of whom to inquire. I thought this odd, because with a fire in the vicinity you would expect all the parish to be out of doors and making for it. The public is not so well provided with entertainments that it willingly misses a cheap show of that sort.

“They are not missing it; they are having it,” Murray complained. “It’s a gorgeous blaze—an orphanage or asylum or something—and I reckon we are about the only people in South London who are not seeing it.”

A couple of miles of solid and wearisome pounding brought us out on the Merton Road, and then we were again at fault. Troddles was for giving up the vain pursuit then; he admitted that he hadn’t Murray’s morbid taste in pleasures, but we had done our best and suffered much to gratify him, and now we might reasonably be allowed to gratify ourselves by turning back.

“It will be a decent old plug at this time of the night,” he added wistfully, “and my slippers are painfully thin.”

So were mine, I said, and I hoped the next time Murray wanted to go fire-hunting he would give me notice beforehand, so that I could make a little necessary preparation. I also said I didn’t believe there was any fire, and Murray had been fooling us just to gratify a nasty, spiteful disposition because we had laughed at his straw-yard scheme of decoration.

“And what about the engine?” he queried. “You don’t suppose I entered into a conspiracy with the fire brigade as well just in order to fool you, do you?”

I would like to have said I did, but I couldn’t very well, and Wilks broke the awkward pause that followed by declaring that he had run six miles or more to see a fire, and he wasn’t going back without seeing one if he had to stop up all night looking for it.

We weren’t so keen on seeing a fire as all that, but we agreed, after some discussion, to follow the road along for a mile or two, and then, we said, if we didn’t get any satisfactory signs of the existence and whereabouts of the fire, we should give it up and go home.

We pursued our way on this understanding until we heard the sounds of a vehicle coming up behind, rapidly driven. Wilks suggested that we might get a little useful information, and, better still, a lift. We turned and waited for the cart to overtake us, and when it came up Wilks sprang in front of it and persuasively ordered the driver to stop. We thought at first the man must have taken us for footpads. He pulled up short and made a slashing drive at Wilks’s head with the stock of his whip. Wilks yelled at him and dodged, and then, when he saw us coming up, he clambered over the back of the cart to the ground, nipped over the fence, and bolted across the fields as hard as he could go.

We couldn’t see much of him, except that he was tall and thin and of seedy, poverty-smitten appearance, and we were inclined to believe that he was weak-headed. There is nothing about Wilks to drive a man crazy from just seeing him, unless it is that we have got so used to him that we don’t notice it.

We halloed all sort of offensive and encouraging things after the demoralized driver, but he took no notice, and disappeared from sight before we had got as far as telling him precisely what we thought of him.

“Hang it, we didn’t want him to give us the horse and cart, only a lift,” said Murray. “What’s it mean? Anyone would think the fool was afraid of us.”

“He’d have had reason if he’d waited another two minutes,” said Wilks grimly. “He’d have broken my jaw if he’d caught me. He’s been drinking and lost sixpence, I expect, and he tried to take it out of me. When he missed and saw you coming up, he had an idea that we might require an explanation, and he wasn’t far out. We’ll give him a run for his property, anyhow. Get in.”

“Don’t ‘but’ your luck or look a gift outfit of this sort in the mouth,” he urged. “It’s ours by right of conquest, and anyway we can’t leave it straying about the roads all night. All on board for the fire express. I feel as though we were having adventures.”

“I feel as though we were horse stealing,” said I. “I hope the chap hasn’t gone to fetch a policeman.”

Wilks insisted on driving us. He doesn’t know anything about it, but it was his right, he said, because he had stolen the turn-out, and of course, when he put it on those grounds, we had to give in. I said I was sorry for the horse, and Troddles said he was sorry for himself, and a bit doubtful about the wisdom of accompanying us. He hadn’t been enraptured with the walk, but that was safe if slow, and the drive, from what he could see of Wilks’s method of handling the reins, was likely to be exciting.

After that we didn’t say anything; it took us all our time to hang on, and Troddles and I, who were in the back, had enough narrow squeaks of being shot out on to the road to turn our hair grey in a single night if it hadn’t been a fast dye. It was a fortunate thing for us that we had the road to ourselves and there were no ditches. Wilks wanted a lot of room for his style of coaching, and when he got it all he wasn’t satisfied, but tried to get through a hedge and have a little private circus all to ourselves in a ten-acre field.

Murray asked him who told him he could drive. Wilks said he hadn’t been told—he knew it by a sort of natural instinct as soon as ever he touched the reins, upon which Murray laughed one of those nasty irritating laughs of his and suggested that natural instincts are dangerous guides in some matters. Of course, what he really wanted was to drive himself, and so, to pacify him, Wilks gave up one rein, and they drove us between them. I don’t think we gained much by that, and the horse, poor beast, must have been frequently puzzled to understand what they were trying to do. I was myself, and I was in a much better position to observe. I asked them once if they were looking for honeysuckle. I thought they might be, judging by the way they skipped from one hedge to the other.

We didn’t find the fire or any signs of it, and when we came into a town which seemed to be of some importance Murray said the best thing we could do would be to drive up to the fire station and inquire there.

“They will be certain to know,” he said, “and quite likely their engines will be away at it. You can say you are a reporter if they are curiously inquiring. You are—of sorts, so that’s no lie.”

Before we found a fire station a policeman found us and called to us peremptorily to stop. I noticed him surveying our jerky, erratic progress curiously, and I was not surprised when the summons came.

“He thinks they are drunk and incapable,” said I to Troddles, with a chuckle. “Now you’ll see some fun. I know these country police, and if Wilks answers back we shan’t see any fire to-night, except the one in the police station.”

“Well, what is it?” demanded Wilks with haughty condescension. “We can’t delay; we are going to a fire.”

Murray said he didn’t believe we had got one now he mentioned it. He giggled, as though there was something humorous in being caught without a light, and that put the policeman’s back up. He thought he was being chaffed, and took our names and addresses to begin with. Murray supplied the information, and Troddles gasped when he heard some of the answers. We were amused—then; but we were very annoyed with Murray later on, and Wilks beguiled the tedium of sitting in a cell and waiting for bail, or breakfast, by one of the most powerful sermons on the sin and folly of lying I have ever listened to.

“Whose cart is that you have got?” said the policeman as a sort of afterthought as he was shutting up his book preparatory, we supposed, to wishing us “good night and a safe journey.”

He was a simple, innocent-looking man of country aspect, and Murray was completely deceived by him.

“Ah!” said the constable, and he flashed his light on the side of the cart and read out “Bertram Snaggs, Camberwell.”

Wilks said “Oh, gosh!” and Murray murmured something about not knowing that it was there.

“I daresay not,” said the policeman meaningly. “You’ll come along with me, and no tricks, mind, or it will be the worse for you.”

Murray said he didn’t think anything could be much worse for us than this was, and Troddles looked as though he was never going to smile again if he could help it. He said it was a judgment on him for being in our company, and when Wilks suggested that the punishment was hard and severe he said he thought not.

We didn’t any of us see what a nasty mess we were in through sheer inadvertence, helped a bit by Murray’s silly misrepresentations; but at the worst we supposed we might have to submit to captivity or liberation on bail until the cowardly gent who owned the purloined outfit came along and confirmed the perfectly truthful and accurate account of our connexion with the affair, which Troddles poured out to the officer in charge of the station.

The constable, who still owed us one and was minded to pay it, did his worst for us.

“That isn’t what they told me, sir,” he said. “They said the cart belonged to them and they were looking for a fire. My attention was first drew to them by the way they was driving. I thought they was drunk.”

Troddles said “Oh!” in shocked surprise, and Murray mopped dry eyes with his handkerchief in mock grief that he, who had once been a choir boy, should have come to this.

“You do rather a lot of thinking, policeman, don’t you?” he asked, with a nasty emphasis on the “thinking.” “You can make up your mind for trouble, anyhow. There’s no need to think about that; it’s coming. Men obviously respectable cannot be stopped and charged with stealing with impunity.”

The policeman eyed our frayed and dusty slippers and rumpled and hatless heads critically, and laughed a jarring laugh, and the superintendent echoed it. He said the respectability didn’t seem to him to be so obvious, and we were not charged with stealing—yet. We were remanded for being in unlawful possession of goods and chattels, a horse and cart to wit, and in our own interests he should strongly advise us not to say anything more on the subject until we got legal assistance in making our lies consistent and plausible. I think the man meant to be kindly, but he had an unfortunate way of expressing himself. It vexed me and hurt Troddles; but Murray and Wilks were more concerned to learn that there hadn’t been any fire—at least, where we were looking for one. The engines we had followed were coming away from a warehouse down by the river near Wandsworth which had been burnt out early in the evening.

Troddles seemed to think then that it was time he took hold of his own destiny, and directed it while there was enough of it left to be worth bothering about. He was fagged and hungry and very sleepy. He told the official that since the fire we had suffered so much to come and see was past the interesting stage, and many miles away at that, he thought the best thing we could do was to sprint home, where bed and board awaited us.

“You can keep the horse and cart and send some one to see that we really do live there,” he said kindly. “Or”—with a sudden happy inspiration—“you might drive us back yourself.”

The man said he might, and then again he might not, which, he rather thought, was more likely. He had every intention of detaining the outfit—and us. And we shouldn’t be put to any expense or trouble, either, because there was bed and board of simple quality available, and we would be his guests.

We thanked him without enthusiasm. Murray said, since he was so pressing, we would live with him and be his love. Troddles said if there was food and a resting-place he had no objection to offer; and Wilks swore fulsomely and spoke of his solicitor. They listened patiently until he had pumped himself out, and then they ushered us into a cell and left us without saying “good night,” or referring to supper or our requirements for breakfast.

“Spelling it with a ‘c,’ I don’t think much of it,” said I. “It isn’t up to hotel form.”

He did. Five minutes’ hammering on the door and sturdy yelling brought the inspector back, and to him Troddles spoke in a way we were surprised to hear—from Troddles.

“Why, bless my soul, there it is,” said the other, pointing to the wood plank provided for the restful accommodation of suspects. “Where are your eyes?”

The inspector shrugged his shoulders. “Very well, eat it,” he said. “We shall have to charge for it, but feed away.”

Troddles, still fierce, told him he was a fool, a hard, callous, unmannerly clod!

“You bring me something to eat,” he said. “I have sufficient money to pay for a meal, and I want one. If I get it, all right; if not there will be a row all night, and a bigger one when I get out. You may be justified in detaining me, but you are not justified in starving me, and I tell you plainly I won’t be starved.”

The man liked Troddles. All the way along he had given him preferential treatment, and something about his simple, direct, honest, and passionate yearning for board prevailed to the extent of producing bread and cheese. That was the best he could do at that hour, the official said, but no doubt it would suffice to carry us along till breakfast, when we should fare better.

We ate it every crumb and could have done with more; but as no more was likely to be forthcoming Troddles curled himself up at one end of the plank and went off to sleep, while we squatted uncomfortably down at the other and discussed our awkward position in low tones, so as not to disturb his snoring.

“If this chicken-hearted Mr. Snaggs is honest and truthful it will be all right when he turns up,” said Murray hopefully.

“And if he is a liar, and says we brutally assaulted him and threw him out of his cart, it will be all wrong,” said I. “I don’t know what was the matter with the man, but he doesn’t give me much confidence. He must have been afraid of us or he wouldn’t have cut off as he did; and what he thought then he will stick to in the morning.”

Wilks said that was how it had been striking him, and he wasn’t at all sure that we hadn’t better plead guilty to a stupid joke without felonious intent and pay the fine.

He was joking, of course, but there was nothing jocular in the position, and the more we studied it the less we liked it. Innocent and thoughtless as this act had been, there was no doubt that Murray had hopelessly blackened the appearances against us, and it was then that Wilks delivered himself of that powerful exhortation against the sin and folly of lying to which I have referred.

He had got to the “fourteenthly,” and I had got to sleep, when a policeman came and turned us out. It was business before pleasure with them, and there was no bath or breakfast awaiting. The prosecutor had been down and identified his property—and then the blow fell. Our story was a complete and absolute tissue of lies. The horse and trap had been stolen from outside a pub in the Borough at four o’clock the previous afternoon, when Mr. Snaggs was inside refreshing himself, and so far from driving it along the road at midnight, looking for somebody to hand it over to, he had been at home and in bed.

Murray looked sick and I felt it; Troddles gaped, and Wilks’s face took on a stern, set expression, suggestive of a confirmed and hardened criminal bowled out at last, and with nothing left to pray for but an easy sentence and a merciful concealment of his past record.

We were going to have some breakfast, and then Mr. Snaggs was coming to charge us, we were told; and we said “yes, we supposed so,” in a dull, dazed sort of way. That breakfast was a miserable meal; nobody enjoyed it, and only Troddles ate it with anything like zest. He did it as a duty, he explained, and not because he was callous. We were dirty and very untidy, and appearances were sadly against us, and he didn’t think refraining from food would be taken as evidence of innocence.

The half-hour interval waiting for our prosecutor was too miserably dreary for description. Murray, with chuckle-headed heroism, beguiled it by giving the inspector a new and entirely original lie, with the laudable intention of getting Troddles and myself out. He said there was no use having four martyrs when two would suffice; and when he and Wilks came out, grey-haired and broken in health and spirit and fortune, we could, out of sheer gratitude, keep them in clover and try and pay back the enormous debt we owed them.

He told the officials that Troddles and I had nothing to do with the affair. He and Wilks had found the horse and trap unattended on the road and taken possession of it, and when we came along and told them about the fire they invited us to get in and go with them to see it.

Troddles heard him to the end; he was too flabbergasted to interrupt, but he found his tongue as soon as Murray had woven his fairy tale, and abruptly advised him not to tell lies.

Troddles said it was not a case of either. Our story was true, and there was nothing to add to or subtract from it. He was going to say some more when a constable strolled by the door of the charge-room, with a captive in tow, on his way to the police court.

I hadn’t seen enough of the man in the cart to say anything one way or the other, but Wilks had had a better opportunity, and he swore to the identity positively.

“That is the man who jumped out of the cart, constable,” he said. “Don’t let him go; he’s the man you want.”

We were excited, but the inspector wasn’t. He said there was no hurry, and for a day or two they would be able to put their hands on the man if they wished to. But he called the policeman and his charge in.

The fellow knew us; I could see it in his shifty eye and nervous bearing. He had been brought in for breaking a public-house window in the town with a whip-stock, and—joy of joys I—he had the whip with him—or the constable had. He wasn’t sufficiently drunk to please himself, and he was annoyed because they wouldn’t come down and fill him up. Of course he refused to identify us, and the inspector wouldn’t let Wilks go at him as he wanted to. It wasn’t legal or constitutional, or something, and they are awful sticklers for constitutional legality at police stations; but it was admitted in our favour that this new evidence might help us, especially if the whip was identified by the owner.

I don’t understand legal procedure myself, and Murray grumbled about it. He said he thought the least they could do would be to beg our pardon and appeal to our generosity not to take action against them. The inspector thought not, and he told us why. We might have stolen the things from the original thief, or the man might have picked up the whip which we had dropped.

Of course, that is what the man had done, as soon as he got the idea, and Wilks asked the inspector rather tartly if he was briefed for the boozy one. The man said no, he wasn’t; he was a strict and impartial administrator of law and order, and he went on administering it with a strong bias against ourselves in consequence of Wilks’s injudicious jibe, until the prosecutor turned up.

Luck flowed our way then. I recognized Mr. Snaggs the moment he entered the room as a man who served Mrs. Bloggs, and, what was of equal or more service to us, Mr. Snaggs recognized both his whip and the gentleman who had tried to use it on Wilks. He was lounging about the pavement when he, Snaggs, Esquire, had gone to get a drink, and had been refused a job when he proffered his services as a skilled and competent kerbstone minder of horses.

The inspector hated to do it, we could see, but he had to release us. Mr. Snaggs wouldn’t take the risk of prosecuting us, and he had no wish to. He didn’t want to charge the other man, but they insisted on that, and we went to the police court, after all, but as witnesses and not in the dock.

The man got six months on the dual charge, and we were warmly commended by the magistrates for our pluck and shrewdness.

“The only thing I do not understand,” said the chairman to Troddles, “is how you knew the horse and trap had been stolen.”

“We didn’t,” he said; “but the prisoner did, and when we stopped him to ask where the fire was he must have thought we did too. It was really an accident, sir, my lord, I mean your worship.”

The court smiled loudly, all except the prisoner, who looked as though he were wishing he could have another try at getting away with that unfortunate horse and cart.

It was too late then to think of putting in an appearance at the office. We might have saved the afternoon. Troddles was inclined; but we persuaded him not to. After all he had gone through, we said, we thought it would be dangerous to his health and detrimental to his position if he went and tried to do any work that day. He was easily persuaded, and when we got him before the ordinary at the Station Hotel we couldn’t detect any wistful yearning after his pen and ledgers. You never would have believed him to be the same man who had sat in a cell and partaken of bread and butter and cocoa as a duty a few hours before. The reaction, combined with duck and peas and a pint of ale, made him almost conversational, and once or twice during the meal he nearly said something.

But he who talks much can eat little, and Troddles knows that, and practises it so consistently, that we were surprised to see him suddenly push back his chair and stand up, as though he were going to make a speech.

Godolphin! We had forgotten all about him until Troddles spoke, and then we could only remember that we hadn’t seen him since immediately after we had got in the cart.

“Unless he has gone chicken hunting and got caught by the owners,” said I. “Godolphin at large is an unknown quantity, and, if you ask me, we had better foot it back carefully the way we came and make inquiries as we go.”

We did, but we could gain no tidings of Godolphin, and he wasn’t on the doorstep waiting to be let in when we got there. The man next door waylaid us as we were going in, though.

“Oh, was it?” replied Murray with interest. “We went to see it, but only got as far as jail. Much damage done?”

“A good deal,” said our neighbour unpleasantly. “Half my fence is ruined. You can do what you like with your own property, of course, but you’ll have to pay for that.”

“Well, I don’t know what you call it, but you are lucky in only having to pay for a bit of fencing,” retorted the other. “Go and have a look at it, and you will understand.”

We went in a hurry and we did understand. Murray’s pipe had caught the hay and the summer-house, chicken shed, harvest festival decorations, together with bushes, herbage and flowering shrubs were blackened ruins. Our boots and hats, Murray’s camera, and Troddles’s easy-chair, and a lot of the party fence had gone in the blaze.

“What rotten luck we do have,” said Murray. “Go miles to see a fire and don’t see it, and there’s a jolly blaze that is all our own property, and we get nothing out of it.”

“Don’t we?” retorted Wilks, with a dismal sigh. “Wait until the bill comes in. We shall get that out of it and it will be stiff.”

CHAPTER XII.
TRODDLES’S INVESTMENT.

There had been a lull in the procession of vexed and complaining neighbours just then, and Wilks, who has a morbid mind and likes dwelling on the gruesome, had taken advantage of it to make an estimate of our liabilities to date, when there came a ring on the bell. I don’t know where else the ring could have come; but that’s a quibble. So let it pass! Murray, in his pipe and shirt-sleeves—and other things, of course—answered the door, and found a tall, elderly gentleman with white hair and stern, discontented expression curiously examining a hole in one of the leaded panes where Wilks had inadvertently run the ferrule of his gamp through.

Seeing his interest, Murray explained how it was done in case he should care to try it on his own door. It was hygienic, and gave splendid ventilation to the hall, Murray pointed out, besides being useful to peep through and see whether the caller was the butcher or the broker’s man before opening the door. Of course, Wilks hadn’t done it for that reason, he said. He did it because he is a bit of a fool of the criminally thoughtless type and will persist in carrying his umbrella under his arm. He paused on the doorstep with it in that position to light his pipe, and Troddles, coming after, shut the door and run us into half a crown, which we were now saving up.

“Indeed!” said the other in a speculative way; and Murray, discerning too late that these little family affairs should not be told to outsiders, hastily changed the subject.

“I know what you have come for,” he said, in a burst of frank honesty. “You have come about the fire. It was a ripping blaze, only, unfortunately, we didn’t see it. It’s done in the garden and spoilt a lot of the fencing, and some preparations we were making for a garden party are hopelessly coopered. What are you after, cash or apologies? We are not doing much in the compensation line, but the apologies are now on tap. Come into the apology department. There are four of us, and we all stand up in a row and chant it. It’s arranged as a sort of an anthem, you know, and it sounds fine—quite a musical treat.”

The caller said “Indeed!” again, and then he told Murray he wasn’t a neighbour and he wasn’t musical, and he would sooner see the scene of the old fire than hear us sing. “I’m a surveyor,” he said.

We took him out and showed him the blackened ruins, and Wilks asked him if he was from the District Council or the Fire Brigade. He said he didn’t represent any public body, but was surveying in a private capacity.

“And are you monarch of all you survey, like What’s-His-Name Thingumyjig?” asked Murray humorously.

“Pretty well,” said our visitor grimly. “I happen to be the landlord of this property, and, in view of this destruction and what I have seen of the condition of the house, I intend to take action. I don’t recognize you as my tenants at all. I never accepted you and was not asked to, and by the conditions of the lease sub-letting is prohibited.”

“We are not your tenants, so you couldn’t very well recognize us,” said Murray promptly. “We are not renting the house; we are taking care of it.”

The landlord said, “Oh!” and there was such a quaint suggestion of dismay and incredulity and sarcastic amusement in that “Oh!” that Troddles began to chuckle, and then broke into a roar, and carried us all with him.

“It’s a fact,” said Murray, as well as he could speak for laughing. “My cousin is your tenant. He is away in South America just now, and we are minding the place for him. Of course, the responsibility for all this is on us, and we shall put it right at our own proper expense and at our own convenience.”

But that, it seemed, was what we could not be allowed to do. The house was going into the market, and the landlord had come down purposely to give his tenant the first offer. He, the landlord, couldn’t afford to wait, and, from what he could see, the property was not in exhibition order. It would cost about a hundred pounds to bring it to market standard, and, as it stood, he very much doubted whether a purchaser he had in view would touch it at any price. Appearances count for much in these matters.

“Oh, we haven’t got that far,” said the other. “I’m clearing up my affairs, and I really thought of offering this house to the tenant.”

“Five hundred and fifty or the nearest bid,” said the landlord. “It’s let for forty, you know, with over thirty years’ lease, and eight pounds ground rent.”

“Will you give us the option of it at four hundred for a week?” asked Wilks.

“No,” said the other promptly. “If you are really serious I will take four-seventy-five cash deal before twelve o’clock to-morrow. After that I shall sell it in the open market, and charge the difference between what it fetches and what I should get to my tenant, who will, I imagine, look to you for restitution.”

“I am really serious,” said Wilks. “Write us out that option, and by twelve to-morrow you shall have a cheque or our refusal.”

“What on earth are you thinking about?” I began indignantly; but Wilks stopped me with a gesture.

“I have always wanted to be a landlord, and this is the chance,” he said. “We will discuss it fully by and by, and we can always decline if you’ll go against me.”

“But you haven’t any money,” said Troddles. “You told me yourself that you were cobbled.”

Troddles said “Oh!” and subsided, and made no protest when the option was given him of becoming the owner of Cumber House, with demesne, appurtenances, affixtures, and whatsoevers thereto attached for the trifling consideration of four hundred and seventy-five pounds if paid by the hour of twelve noon on the following day.

In justice to Troddles, I must admit that he did not want to be a landlord. As a class he had heard them spoken of evilly, and in Ireland, he told us, there was quite a strong prejudice against them. We weren’t any more enthusiastic, and it was not until Wilks had consented to enlighten our dull understanding that we began to realize and appreciate all the solid advantages to us and himself that lay in the ownership of the house we were merely minding.

“To begin with,” said Wilks, opening the discussion in his best Sunday school debating club manner, “that old josser stands ready to knock us down for a hundred pounds. He can do it if the terms of the lease are as he states, and he will do it in the most unpleasant and disturbing manner by claiming directly from his tenant.”

“But can he do that?” queried Troddles doubtfully. “We haven’t been as careful as we might have been, I know, but a hundred pounds sounds an extravagant sum for a bit of a bonfire and a few misfortunes. You said they were merely trivial yourself.”

“To us, yes,” Wilks admitted; “but it won’t be any good telling a surveyor so. The damage has been done and must be paid for, and you may depend on it there won’t be any discount allowed off the price. Not only that, Murray’s cousin will be distinctly nasty, and he won’t have to travel far to find information from the neighbours, which will in all probability set him searching on his own account; and then I can see Troddles being left destitute in his old age, with nothing to save him from the workhouse but a stack of receipts from upholsterers and furniture restorers.”

There was something in that, and we admitted it readily. The only thing we couldn’t see was how our desperate plight was going to be improved by investing the whole of our capital in dilapidated property.

“Don’t you?” said Wilks scornfully. “Well, in the first place, there will be no suspicion aroused, and consequently no questions asked. Given a few weeks and a few shillings, we can make things look all right, and in these matters appearances count for much. The money is not the slightest use to us where it is, and never has been.”

“And no fault at all,” I assured him. “It has been a source of strength and much consolation when the angel of destruction was abroad and we lost control a bit.”

Murray thought that was merely an encouragement to recklessness, and as such not to be considered of any advantage. Wilks explained that he had meant the money was of no use because it didn’t earn anything and was not, or should not be, required for capital expenditure.

“If we buy this place,” he pointed out, “instead of having five hundred pounds eating its head off in a bank and doing nothing for us, we not only save a hundred pounds, but Troddles will get forty pounds a year and eight from the ground rent—that is just on fifty—to brighten our lives and soften our lot.”

“Nearly a pound a week!” said Murray with sudden enthusiasm. “It should be quite. This place is absurdly cheap at forty; we will raise the rent to forty-four.”

“If your cousin doesn’t jib,” said I. “Anyhow, you can’t until his lease runs out.”

“Oh, he’s an easy-going chap and won’t mind when he understands,” said Murray casually. “Besides, he owes us something for looking after his house for him, and he may as well express his gratitude in cash as give me a present or something I don’t want.”

We discussed the question at greater length, but after the view of it Wilks had presented to us there was no serious opposition to Troddles becoming a landlord. He was the one most concerned, but he went to sleep on the couch and left it to us to settle, and the upshot was that we agreed to buy the place. Wilks accepted by letter that very night, and in the morning he and Troddles went along and paid a deposit to clinch the bargain. He had strong hopes of being able to work another twenty-five pounds off the purchase price, which he said we would devote to restoring the garden to its original state; but it didn’t come off, and Wilks soon saw that if there was any working to be done the landlord was the one who would do it, and we should be the “worked.”

Wilks was sore about it and was inclined to blame us for not settling overnight; but Troddles, who hates niggling methods, protested his willingness to pay the amount agreed upon, and inside a week he paid it and received in return the deeds which made him a property owner and a man of distinction. We didn’t employ a lawyer, which was a mistake. We agreed about that later, but at the time we were gladdened to think that Wilks’s knowledge of the law was sufficient to save us from having to pay lawyers’ fees on our own account. It was sufficiently expensive as it was, and what with stamps and registrations Troddles paid out something like fifteen pounds, which, as Murray said, would make a tidy-sized hole in the first year’s return.

We got a lot for the money in the shape of reading matter, which would have been very interesting if we could only have understood it. Wilks did, or he said he did, but when we asked him why he hadn’t told us that the balance of twelve months’ rent, paid in advance by the tenant, was expressly retained by the vendor he couldn’t answer, except by vaguely stating that he never thought any man could be such a fool as to pay his rent before he received a threat of execution.

That was only one of the details we were to discover on the debit side of our bargain, and it was pretty serious, coming, as it did, on top of the stiff out-of-pocket expenses. To make matters worse, Murray and Wilks between them had ear-marked that twenty pounds for restoration purposes, and had ordered a new summer-house and got a man at work on the garden. This swamped Troddles’s small balance left after paying the legal expenses, and to make up the difference we had to levy on our salaries, and life for the next few weeks was frugal and restricted. Still, we were not unduly depressed. It was vexing but not serious, and, looking to futures, we were ready to agree with Wilks that, though unexpected, these small sacrifices were well worth making.

Our faith got another shock when Troddles received a peremptory demand from the solicitors of the ground landlord for two years’ ground rent, and on going to make a fuss about it we discovered that we didn’t get this rent, but paid it. Wilks tried to pretend that he had known this all along, and had been wanting to warn us about it, only our headstrong foolishness had prevented him; but we flatly declined to listen to any such nonsense, particularly when we found a clause in the lease by which Troddles expressly covenanted “to pay all rent and charges then in arrears and due.”

We couldn’t do it, not without borrowing. Murray suggested getting a bill of sale on the furniture, but Troddles objected, and I said I thought it would very probably lead to serious trouble with his relatives, and in the end he allowed himself to be persuaded, and wrote and borrowed ten pounds from his people. Troddles went to see a wealthy and good-natured uncle and raised another five without being under the distressing necessity of paying it back, and so we floated along with our noses just out of water, so to speak, and began to understand a little why so few people take the trouble to become rich and independent. We had purchased more stress and privation with five hundred pounds than we knew what to do with; and Troddles said it was a good job he hadn’t had a thousand, or we should have been sunk outright.

I think he was beginning to wish he had never seen the house; but, as Wilks pointed out, that was a wrong and quite unnecessary attitude to take.

“You always have got the place, which is as good as money deposited in the bank,” he argued; “and each quarter after the end of the year you get a ten-pound note.”

“Get the forty down in advance,” Murray suggested. “If my spendthrift cousin can do it for a stranger he can do it for us. Perhaps he will pay it now if I write and explain how things stand. I don’t like these straitened circumstances, and it seems to me that we must get capital or take in lodgers.”

“Well, if the house is as good as money in the bank, why can’t we raise something on it?” said Troddles.

“A small mortgage? So we can—why not?” replied Wilks. “That’s a jolly good idea. Your people at the bank would do it for you. Ask for a hundred, and we will pay it back out of the rent.”

Troddles took the lease up with him the next day, and found that the proposition was readily listened to. He got the money, and with it a better feeling and respect for his investment. It wasn’t quite all Wilks’s fancy had painted it; but there were mitigating circumstances if that bundle of parchment, with its elaborate and expensive decoration of stamps, could produce all that money on simple request.

With funds once more available, our position improved. Murray repaid his loan, and we paid forty-seven pounds ten and ninepence for the health and benefit of our tenant and the community at large. We didn’t want to, but they sort of insisted upon it, and we didn’t know how to say them nay when they came and dug up our drains and put in an entirely new system.

“There goes another year’s receipts,” said Murray, with a hollow laugh. “I used to envy landlords as men who got a lot of money without doing any work. I wonder whether I was wrong, or is it simply due to our youth and inexperience that we do a lot of work and don’t get any money.”

“ ‘Fools buy houses and wise men live in them,’ ” I quoted, and Troddles got huffy. He said he was a fool by proxy if that were so, and since we had pledged him to this folly he thought it incumbent on us to steer him out again before we foundered.

Wilks, who is an incurable optimist where other people’s money and troubles are concerned, said the new and improved system of drainage would greatly add to the value of Troddles’s property, and if we put a hundred pounds on to the valuation we should be better off than on the original proposition. We had to remember that the five hundred pounds was bringing in nothing from the bank, and the first twenty pounds we had dropped only on paper. If we had bought the house in December instead of when we did, our position would have been exactly the same.

There is one great advantage in owning your house, I discovered: it makes you careful of it. At least, it did Murray and Wilks. Troddles is not careless ordinarily; lazy and a bit forgetful, perhaps, but nothing more, and I don’t stand in need of any personal and selfish considerations to enable me to pay a due and just regard for other people’s property. But care became almost a disease with Murray, and a besetting sin with Wilks. They would trot upstairs after us to make sure we had turned off the taps in the bath-room, and the way they would follow us about the house when we went to find things with a match was funny until it became a nuisance.

“Steady on with that light,” Wilks would say nervously. “This is our house, you know”; or Murray would say, “Do be careful with that kettle; you are wiping it all along the wall, and paper costs money.” It was true as a statement, but I believe it was the first time Murray realized it, or at any rate mentioned it. And from the fuss they both made because Troddles broke a window when he got accidentally locked out in the back garden and couldn’t make us hear him, you would have thought it was they who owned the place and we were pensioners on their bounty.

All the same, it was good exercise for them, and I couldn’t help thinking that when, if ever, I got back to Mrs. Bloggs the lessons taught by greed and meanness would have a distinct value in enabling me to live pleasantly and peacefully with a lady who is even more touchy about her paper and ceilings than they were becoming about Troddles’s.

The first suggestion of coming trouble came to us from the man next door, and, though I didn’t want to be unjust, I couldn’t help thinking that he had a good deal to do with precipitating the financial wash-out which swept away Troddles’s nest-egg and sent us all swimming desperately to reach solvency. It was a silly, mean thing to do if he did do it, and the fact that Murray provoked him is no excuse. He provokes us, if it comes to that. The occasion of the quarrel—and it was a quarrel—was the party fence, which now belonged to us by right of purchase. Our neighbour was nailing up his beans to it one evening in the gloaming, when everything was still and peaceful, except the hammer at the back and the cat’s-meat man out in front; and more with an idea of being irritating and getting a rise out of a notoriously ratty subject, Murray called out to him from an upper window.

“Hi, there!” he said, “You mustn’t do that; you will spoil the fence.”

The man told Murray where he might go to, and as an afterthought he added: “What if I do? It isn’t your fence.”

“Oh, yes it is,” retorted Murray promptly. “We bought it along with the house.”

“Why, the former landlord of course,” retorted Murray. “Who do you think we got it from—the green-grocer?”

“No, but it might have been the Official Receiver,” said the other coldly. “What did you pay for it, may I ask?”

“It’s rather rude, but you may,” said Murray. “Four hundred and seventy-five pounds, and cheap enough, too.”

“Not so very,” said our neighbour maliciously. “I refused mine at three hundred.”

“Oh!” said Murray. “Short of cash, I suppose. But surely it would have been worth your while to have borrowed that amount on a mortgage. You could have, you know.”

“Thank you,” retorted the other tartly. “I had the money, but, having some brains as well, I didn’t consider the offer good enough.”

“Because we are living here and you fancy you may prefer to live somewhere else?” asked Murray sharply. “That wasn’t necessary; we are only here until my cousin returns.”

“Not altogether,” was the disconcerting reply. “I happened to know that our landlord’s affairs were in a very shaky condition, and at the time he made the offer a receiving order had been applied for against him. It must have been granted before you bought, and I shouldn’t be surprised if you find your title questioned by the creditors.”

“I shall,” said Murray firmly, “and so will they. I don’t know much about law, but I know how to hang on to what I have bought and paid for.”

“Then you’ve got a knowledge that would be worth a fortune to you in the City,” retorted our neighbour. “I trust, if the need should arise, you will be successful in applying it. They do say ‘a fool and his money are soon parted,’ but I have known a good many shrewd business men who couldn’t withstand the parting in cases like yours.”

“Ah! Now you are trying to be nasty because I wouldn’t let you nail your darn old beans to our fence,” said Murray. “I was only chipping you. Nail away.”

Wilks laughed when Murray reported the conversation to us. He said the house was bought in market overt—whatever that might mean—and, of course, there could be no question of taking it away from us. It wasn’t like a bicycle or something that had been stolen and sold chancewise to any casual purchaser. Troddles said he hoped there wasn’t going to be any more trouble. There had been more loss than profit in the affair so far, and if there was going to be a lot of worry as well, he would return the house and put the money back in the bank and try to forget all about it.

Wilks made some inquiries and found out that a lot of our neighbour’s information was correct. The landlord had gone bust and skipped with whatever he could realize on, leaving his creditors to find the least common multiple of his assets in Carey Street and glean it in due season. But nobody interfered with us, and for nearly a month we lived in a fool’s paradise before the blow fell. Then the property was impounded by the Official Receiver, and Troddles was called upon to produce the lease and injuncted under severe threats from receiving and applying to his own use any rents, receipts, or moneys paid him on account of it.

Troddles said “Darn the house!” and went off to sleep again, as though that disposed of the whole matter quite cosily and effectually; but we couldn’t allow him to be rooked without making some sort of a fight for cash and conscience, and we carried it on without him. The solicitor who had drawn the lease pulled a face like a hatchet when he heard the details. He didn’t want to discourage us, he said, but if he were acting for the creditors he wouldn’t give us five shillings for our chance of keeping the property. Very much would depend upon the view the Court took of the transaction, seeing that it was perfectly bona-fide on our part, and the purchase price was reasonably proportionate to the value of the property; but the bankruptcy laws were very strict and without any sentiment in their administration, and the fact was undoubted that the property had been disposed of hastily by the bankrupt in order to cheat his creditors.

That is about the substance of all we received for a pound, and the upshot of Troddles’s investment was we were cleaned out and left without so much as a brick to call our own. The house was taken and we ranked as creditors of the estate, and were entitled to two-and-ninepence in the pound on four hundred and seventy-five pounds, which it realized. The Court, though hard, was just, and on Murray’s representation it held that, as Troddles was not the rightful owner of the property, he could not be called upon to pay any charges in connexion with it, and in return for his outlay of four hundred and seventy-five pounds he received back the sixteen pounds ground rent, forty-seven pounds odd we had paid on account of the new drainage system, and twenty-five pounds ten shillings for “improvements” and repairs, which Wilks put in for. He forgot somehow to mention how this expense was incurred, and that little lot, with a matter of sixteen pounds we put up between us, settled the claim on the mortgage with the bank and left us free—and skinned.

CHAPTER XIII.
WILKS’S FOLLY.

That’s what we called her; I don’t know why. There was nothing particularly foolish about it—on our side—and, considered as a piece of shrewd business dealing, Wilks had surpassed himself. And he knew it, and he never let us forget it. Anyway, we had to call her something, and Troddles objected to “Troddles’s Joy,” which we thought of first. He said it might hamper him later on when the novelty wore off, and it would seem such a mockery to have the thing called his “joy” when he would give ten years of his life and a month’s screw to get away from her.

He, she, or it was a houseboat, or alleged to be one, and the reason why we were sprawling over the deck with our pipes in the cool grey of twilight and wondering at our luck instead of being cooped up in Tooting cussing it, was fried fish. That sounds extraordinary as a reason, I know, though cheap, nutritious, and not unpleasant as an occasional delicacy; but, as Shakespeare or somebody says, “such great events from little causes spring,” and so we sprang from our white elephant, which wasn’t even ours, to the dirty, dun-coloured dream of bliss which we entitled “Wilks’s Folly” on eight-pennyworth of fried fish—twopenny pieces—and Troddles picked out the best for himself and gave me skate, which I hate. “Skate, which I hate!” That’s verse! One of these days I’ll be a poet.

Murray began it, Troddles continued it, and Wilks did it. Murray’s share in the affair was slight. All he did was to break a teacup, and when remonstrated with for his levity and unconcern he said he did it to hasten our descent, so that he could find out for himself whether workhouses were so bad as they were made out to be. He said it was a time of tribulation and sorrow with us, and it jarred him to see us wasting it as we were doing—Troddles snoring away like an obese pig on the couch, myself coopering up the few remaining sound notes on the piano, and Wilks forgetting that he ought to be miserable with his everlasting “Patience.”

An hour later Wilks, who had been helping Troddles arrange the supper-party in the kitchen, called to us excitedly that he had made a discovery.

“I know, it’s a pearl,” said Murray. “You won’t get anything for it.”

“You don’t find pearls in fried fish,” retorted Wilks. “You are thinking of oysters, aren’t you?”

Murray admitted he might have been; it was a fish of some sort, he knew—mussels, or mackerel, or something—and he asked Wilks to tell us what his wonderful discovery was, and not keep us any longer in suspense.

I told him not to be personal. Quite likely Murray hadn’t been serious, and if he had been, a man is not necessarily a fool because he is deficient in knowledge of natural history.

Murray thanked me somewhat shortly for my championship, and Wilks got exasperated. He said he hadn’t meant Murray at all, or any one of us, and if we were going to misapply everything he said, he would dry up, and then we should be sorry. Wilks has an unfortunate way of expressing himself at times. I didn’t like that “any one of us” at all; but I could see that he was labouring under really great excitement, so I didn’t press for an explanation.

“It’s a fine house in the country and a houseboat on the river near Hampton, wrapped up in the fish,” said Wilks.

“Gosh!” said Murray. “That’s a lot to get for twopence. Whose piece is it in—mine?”

“I should take it back,” I advised. “There’s obviously some mistake, and there will be trouble about it if we keep them. I wonder you didn’t notice it, Troddles.”

Wilks turned purple in trying not to say what he badly wanted to; but before Troddles had done explaining that he was absolutely certain the country house and houseboat had not been in the parcel when it was given to him at the shop, he made up his mind that we were chipping him, and decided not to gratify us by losing his temper.

“Oh, if you are going to play the ass, I’m done!” he said with lofty disdain.

“In the face of such competition, Wilks retires before the unequal contest,” commented Murray soothingly. “Don’t you mind them, old man. They are not bright naturally, and all we have gone through together has intensified their dottiness. Never mind grammatical construction or probability, whichever is at fault. They have never read the ‘Arabian Nights,’ but I have, and there’s a bigger fish story than that recorded there—a little red codfish, which a poor but honest fisherman caught in the Red Sea—that’s why it was red, I suppose—and he got palaces and jewels and no end of things out of it.”

Murray dodged the cushion which Wilks slung at him. It broke the gas globe instead, and, in picking the bits of glass out of our supper, the original cause of dissension was forgotten, and when Wilks returned to the subject he was as genial and hearty as a man can be after fried fish and two glasses of ale and is half-way through what Murray, who affects them, and occasionally succeeds in getting us to help him work them off, calls a cigar.

“Now this matter of the country house and a houseboat,” he said, “advertised on a sheet of yesterday’s paper in which the fish was wrapped—to satisfy Bob’s sense of grammatical construction, which is nearly as pedantic as his spelling is rotten—is one which may be of interest and profit to us. The owner wishes to exchange it, for holiday purposes, for a suitable house in the near suburbs—South-West preferred.”

“We don’t want any more houses,” said I firmly. “We haven’t paid for this one yet.”

“No; but we could do with the houseboat,” retorted Wilks, “and the advertiser says he would be willing to rent. Up to four guineas a week, it says. He must have plenty of money.”

“And a fool and his money are soon parted,” suggested Murray. “Send him a wire: ‘Come at once and all will be forgiven.’ How long does he want it for?”

“It sounds all right,” I admitted cautiously. “It will be awkward if Murray’s people make up their minds to come back in the middle of the ‘let.’ ”

“Very—for them,” said Murray coolly. “They won’t have anywhere to go; but very probably we shall be tired of the houseboat by then, and we will rent them that for another four guineas a week. I can see myself making money over this. Of course I shall share up.”

Wilks said “Of course” with a singular intonation, and I said I thought it probable. Troddles thought the matter over, and then he said he supposed if we let the house we couldn’t do any more damage to it, and we should save money by not having to spend it. It was clever reasoning, and we applauded him for it, and being thus encouraged he elaborated it, and said we couldn’t do much damage to a houseboat, and perhaps we should find it jolly enough to spend our summer holidays down there, and so be able to come out on top, financially speaking, after all.

I have often wanted to live on a houseboat. They look such jolly, comfortable, free-and-easy places, and Murray said he had never sat on the wall at Hampton Court and watched the fellows messing about in their punts and flirting with all the pretty girls without feeling jealous and resentful. It was wrong and wicked, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. He felt like running up to the barracks and borrowing an eighty-one ton gun and blowing the lot to smithereens and then going over and taking possession of their houseboat.

We got quite excited in talking over the plan, and even Troddles stopped awake long enough to tell us that his main and abiding purpose would be fishing. And then pessimistic thoughts began to creep in, and in proportion to the rise of our desire to get that houseboat our belief in our chances of doing so fell. We couldn’t find the date of the paper containing the advertisement, and Murray said it was pretty certain to be an old one. He was so impressed with this that he wanted to go up to the office and search the files; and he would have gone, only Wilks pointed out that he could call at the address given in Fenchurch Street in the morning and find out with more satisfaction, because even, if we found the date of the paper, we couldn’t tell whether the man wasn’t already suited.

Wilks fixed it all up by telephone the next morning, and then went along and lunched with the advertiser and let our house, subject to his approval, for three pounds ten and the use of the houseboat, that of course being subject to ours. It suited him very well that we wouldn’t have anything to do with his house, which was at Sunbury, because he had an offer of six guineas a week for it, and to enable him to close with that he wanted us to rush the business through. He evidently was no fool!

Wilks arranged to bring him down to tea with us that evening, and he gave Murray and myself a hint to slip off early and get the place in show order while he saved an hour on pretence of having work to do which detained him in the City. The manœuvre and the visit were successful, and in the end we let the house and gave up the key then and possession the next morning, and instead of returning to Tooting we trained to Hampton, where a gentleman of lowly calling named Togs was waiting with instructions to put us in possession of the agglomeration of planks and pitch which, in default of a name of its own, we eventually termed “Wilks’s Folly.”

She might have been chaste; she certainly wasn’t handsome. When we first saw her we didn’t recognize her for a houseboat at all, much less our houseboat. Mr. Togs, who found walking difficult on account of age aided by “rheumatiz,” was a long way in the rear with Troddles, and Murray identified our new home in a swagger roof-gardened turn-out, all white enamel and polished brass, which really belonged to a riverside magnate. Wilks said it wasn’t as big as he expected, but it would do very well, and I said I thought it was really quite a nice houseboat, and would be as big and showy as we required.

Right opposite where we were standing, moored up under a spreading beech or banyan or something, was a quaint contrivance which made us laugh. We were young and thoughtless, and we laughed long and loud, and had there been anyone on board we should have hurt their feelings. Wilks said it was a mud-dredger belonging to the Thames Conservancy. They had them all over the river, he said, and the men who kept the riverbed clear of mud and weeds lived on them often for months at a time. We felt sorry for those men; but I thought it was more likely a store-house for coal and vegetables, belonging to our own houseboat. Murray said it wasn’t anything of the sort, and anybody who knew the river would know it was a floating morgue, where they kept the corpses and held inquests on those who were found drowned. He said there was a surprising number, especially after regattas and during the swimming season, and it was more convenient for the police to have a mortuary on the river than to go walking all over the country looking for one.

We had an argument over it and backed our respective fancies heavily, and then Mr. Togs limped up and we turned to him. Could he tell us whether that thing opposite was a coal-cellar, a mud-scow, or a mortuary? Two shillings to lose or to win depended on his answer and naturally we were a bit eager and excited.

At first we thought he was a silly old man on whom our tobacco and Troddles’s sympathy had been entirely wasted. He said it was none of these things, but a houseboat—our houseboat, in fact.

“We don’t mean the houseboat at all,” said Murray impatiently. “We mean that thing over there under the tree.”

He pointed it out this time so that there should be no mistake, and then from being foolish Mr. Togs became malicious in our sight. He said he wasn’t “blind as I know on,” and in sober truth and solemn seriousness it was our houseboat. Troddles began to laugh, and, after looking inclined to swear, Wilks joined in. He told us these old country fellows were rare gay wags and quite funny when you got used to their style of humour; but when Mr. Togs unmoored a flat-bottomed boat in the last stage of decrepitude and started to row us over he thought the joke had gone far enough, and sought to end it.

“We will see the houseboat first,” he said. “You needn’t show us over the other at all, especially if it is a mortuary. We have come down here to enjoy ourselves, and that won’t help. We have a bet on it, that’s all, and we want you to tell us—not show us.”

“Tell or show, it be all one to Oi,” said the man sturdily. “It be the houseboat you’ve come to live on; leastways, there bean’t non tother.”

Troddles laughed again. He has an aggravating sense of humour sometimes, and on this occasion he didn’t stand to lose anything, as we thought we did, until it occurred to Murray that if we didn’t any of us pay anything we should receive and meet our obligations in full.

I supposed it was the houseboat. Murray said it might be, and Troddles hadn’t the least doubt of the matter. It hadn’t any corpses on board, anyhow, so it couldn’t be a morgue, and as it had no coals or potatoes and not enough mud to play the part with, we agreed that it was not a store-house or a mud-dredge. Really she was very tidy and complete and comfortable enough inside—plain and a trifle Spartan, but sufficient for our simple needs. Outside she was unattractive, and had rather a home-made suggestion about her, and Murray, who spends a lot of time and thought on improving everything and everybody except himself, said we should have to set about her with paint and brushes.

“Cream and duck’s-egg blue and a narrow gilt line, I fancy,” he said, and we agreed that the effect would be lovely if he knew anyone who would take it on.

“We have not come down to paint barges,” said Wilks bluntly. “We have come for dulce far niente.”

“Who’s she?” asked Troddles plaintively, and when I explained that Wilks probably meant “dolce,” and that she was a sweet do-nothing, he said “Oh!” and looked more puzzled than ever.

We put Mr. Togs—“Ragged Togs,” Murray would persist in calling him—ashore on his own side of the river after he had formally delivered the houseboat and all she contained—which wasn’t much—over to us, and gave him a couple of shillings as a bribe for his future good-will. Also we gave him a list of things for our immediate requirement, and asked him to leave it at the local Whiteley’s and have them sent down to us without fail immediately.

“We don’t need to waste our first evening running errands,” said Wilks. “We shall get enough of that sort of thing before we have finished, and I’m beginning to look askance at that two mile up and two back trot already.”

“We had better have a bike for emergency runs,” said Murray. “It will be a tidy drag of mornings when we are pressed for time; and when the bloom is off the rye, so to speak; and the rain is coming down in torrents, I can see ourselves enjoying the trip immensely.”

“We might move down closer to Molesey,” I suggested. “There’s good enough mooring to be had there within ten minutes’ walk of the station.”

“It is sweetly pretty up here—so restful and secluded that that would be a pity, I think,” Troddles objected. “If we put up five shillings apiece, surely we could find somebody with a cart who would be willing to fetch and carry us on contract. It would be cheaper than buying a bicycle, and much more comfortable. We could buy what stores we required and bring them in the cart.”

“Why, so we could, Trod,” said I enthusiastically, for the suggestion simply resolved all our difficulties, and I was anxious and annoyed with myself for giving Murray and Wilks an idea that might cause them to set us adrift and go tagging up and down the river doing no end of expensive damage looking for the “somewhere else” which we are always seeking and never find.

“Five bob and another five or six for a season ticket,” said Wilks carpingly. “It’s going to cost us a bit for travel.”

“Well, it’s not costing us much for anything else,” said Murray practically. “I reckon we’re making a profit on this deal, and getting something for it too.”

It was so calm, so peaceful, on the roof of that houseboat. The sun set and the shadows lengthened over the still waters; the birds twittered as they sank to rest in the surrounding woods, and Troddles, sunk to rest on the surrounding wood, snored; Wilks and Murray played farthing nap in subdued voices, and I smoked and mused! To see us then, no one would have believed we were the same young men who two hours afterwards were running up and down the opposite bank raving and cussing in a way that shocked a respectable old family cow and made her lead her calf off where the feeding wasn’t so juicy but the moral atmosphere was sweeter. As Troddles pathetically complained, we can’t do anything without doing something. It sounded involved, but we could make good sense out of it. We wouldn’t have believed it ourselves, and if a prophet with a first-class certificate and licensed by the Board of Trade had come along just then and told us we were living fool’s Paradise fashion on the edge of the crater of trouble—good phrase that, “crater of trouble”—we should have bid him go to for a sinful, hoary-headed perverter of truth.

It was Wilks’s fault all through—Wilks’s fault and Wilks’s folly. He didn’t want the credit, but he got it without standing out for it, and what there was over we gave to Murray. It began when the light failed and Murray played twos and threes of anything and claimed they were aces of trumps, which was cheating, and justified Wilks in refusing to go on with the game. They couldn’t sleep as Troddles did, and they couldn’t sit and think high-class, helpful, ennobling thoughts as I did. They said it was humpy doing nothing, and after mouching about in a restless, aimless fashion Wilks insisted on going in to Hampton and seeing what we could do about arranging for our conveyance. Troddles didn’t want to go. He said he would stop and mind the houseboat for us in case anyone stole her while we were away; but they overruled him, and got him into the boat and across the river before he could fall asleep again.

We found a man who was willing to undertake the contract on a shilling-a-journey basis, and as we saved eight shillings weekly there, Wilks said he thought we ought to spend a bit for the good of the town.

It seemed very light and bright and cheerful in the bar-parlour after the silent, dark river, with its mysterious shadows and its awesome solitude, and we stayed longer than we need have done, and consequently it was very late when we got back to the river bank, and we were very tired and anxious to be in bed, so that we might rise refreshed and strong in the morning early enough to have a swim and a breakfast worthy of the occasion.

We couldn’t find the boat. She was a rotten old tub worth about five shillings on a generous estimate; but her value to us at that moment was not to be reckoned in cash. We hunted about in every possible and impossible place, and Troddles, whose brain was beginning to give way under the strain and anxiety, whistled and called; but the boat didn’t take any notice, and then Murray said it was pretty clear that she had been stolen, and unless we were going to swim over, we had better go back and find a hotel.

Wilks said we couldn’t swim clothes and all, and he thought it would be absurd for us and our apparel to be on opposite sides of the river. His frugal mind jibbed at incurring hotel expenses on the very first night as well, and as an alternative he proposed that we boarded the swagger houseboat and left our clothes there. That would give us a useful saving in distance so far as Troddles, who is not a strong swimmer, was concerned, and we could help it by going straight across and running down the bank on the other side to our floating home. In the morning, he pointed out, we could reverse the process without much trouble or inconvenience, and very likely we should find our boat drifting about the river somewhere.

It was a possible way out of the difficulty, and we adopted it, making our clothes up into a bundle and stowing it under the veranda facing the river—out of observation, and in safety should it chance to rain during the night.

“Keep near me,” he spluttered. “I don’t like this sort of thing in the dark.”

Murray and Wilks headed straight for the houseboat, which was mean and selfish of them. I looked after Troddles; but who was going to look after me if I got the cramp or anything? They dodged the stinging-nettles in which we landed, too, and I didn’t think that was fair. And the walk along the bank over prickly herbage wasn’t enjoyable.

We had a nip round to ward off malaria and counteract chill and turned in. It must have been shortly after eleven, and just as I was falling asleep I heard the chug-chug of a motor launch passing us with a merry party on board. Some one was playing a guitar, and voices—girls’ voices—were mingling in the chorus. I remember thinking how well it sounded, and I was about to comment on it when Murray shouted in my ear that I was a lazy devil, and it was eight o’clock.

I sat up and defended myself. I said I hadn’t been asleep, and, allowing for the dragging of time, if it was past twelve I would eat my boots.

Murray agreed it might be; as it was across the river with the rest of his things he couldn’t say. But he had heard a church clock strike seven “hours ago,” and he didn’t think the sun would be six hours fast in any case.

I got up then. I didn’t want to, but I got up, which just shows how good-natured and obliging I am. Being up, I naturally wanted the others to be up. It pained me to see Wilks and Troddles wasting their time in soul-clogging slumber, and I went and yelled in Wilks’s ear while Murray snatched the clothes off Troddles and got in a couple of healthy spanks with a slipper before he could turn out and go at him and run him out and overboard for his pains.

The very first thing we saw when we followed them out was our boat moored up just where we had left her. Wilks wanted to make out that some scoundrel who had some shreds of conscience still lingering had borrowed her, or else he had brought her back in sick disgust when he found how little worth stealing she was. I inclined to the belief that we had not looked in the right place. It is confusing in the dark, and easy to make a mistake in locality when you are strange to the parts.

Troddles had a dip for health and sociability; but he wouldn’t cross the river again, so we left him to get breakfast ready while we raced each other over to the boat. Wilks won, and sneaked off with it, with Murray clinging to the stern, leaving me standing out on the bank very bare to tell them what I thought of them.

They only jeered, and I had to swim back and join Troddles. We were running round, chastely attired in our mackintoshes, getting out plates and cups and things, when the boat came back, and Wilks, looking very sick and silly, shouted: “I say, our things have gone!”

Troddles’s jaw dropped a couple of pegs, and, seeing my look of incredulity and suspicion, Murray fluttered in with his testimony.

“They have, honour bright!” he said brokenly. “The deck is as bare as we are.”

I told them of the launch I had heard passing us. Could they, for a lark, and not knowing what they did, have stolen our things? It seemed difficult to believe that beautiful maidens with lovely voices could be guilty of such a dastardly deed, but—where were our clothes?

Wilks got frantic, and in doing so demolished my hope that they were trying to fool us, and plunged me into despair.

“I’ve got to be in the City by ten,” he shouted, “and how the deuce can I turn up in an overcoat and a pair of slippers?”

We dropped domestics, and all rowed back and hunted that houseboat from stem to stern; but not so much as a necktie rewarded our efforts. We went back sad—and broke our fast. It wasn’t a merry meal; in fact it reminded me of a funeral feast where the corpse has died bankrupt, and every one of the mourners has backed a bill for him.

The cart came for us as per arrangement, and the driver, who had a diseased sense of humour, laughed heartily when we mounted it clad in our overcoats and slippers.

We asked him not to laugh—it hurt—and Murray explained the situation to him. In doing so another and more revolting realization came to him. We had no money! We couldn’t buy tickets, let alone—as we intended—purchase a cheap set of flannels to go on with.

“We can’t go, that’s obvious,” said Wilks with a groan. “This will mean another wigging. I’m doing it so often.”

Murray said he didn’t mind a wigging, and he could do with the holiday, but he objected to being forced into a thing, and how were we going to live without a sixpence between us?

“There’s some one on board. Why don’t you go and ask them about your things?” said the driver practically.

We looked across to where he was pointing, and saw a fair damsel wringing out a towel from the upper deck of the houseboat.

The maid had a Vere de Vere cast of countenance; but it broke up into smiles when she caught sight of the quaint procession advancing on her, and when Murray boldly asked for his trousers she rippled and roared. A man came out from below and joined her, and she told him that we were modern Jasons in search of our fleeces.

“Chucked ’em in the river,” said John heartlessly. “Pretty good cheek, wasn’t it, coming on board a strange houseboat and leaving your things about like that?” he demanded, turning to us.

I made sure there was going to be a row. Wilks was fighting mad, and John missed hearing some home-truths pithily put only because his companion wouldn’t go away and let Wilks say them. We were short and very angry; but we had to acknowledge that there was something to be said on the other side, and when John explained that he hadn’t recognized the bundle as good and valuable wearing apparel, and we detailed the cause of our action, a common understanding was arrived at, and we had a day’s fishing together.

By the afternoon most of the missing property was recovered, coming up limp and dejected at the end of boat-hooks and poles with meathooks lashed to them, but I never got back my boots and socks, and Troddles’s jacket is still buried somewhere in the bed of the river.

CHAPTER XIV.
MURRAY’S TANGLED WEB.

That’s what it was, a tangled web of lies and deceit and vanity and a dozen other varieties of foolishness, and Murray wove it. He didn’t do it deliberately, of course; he never does; but he bragged about the splendid houseboat we had got and the jolly lives we were leading up the river, and he threw out invitations right and left—those vague you-must-run-up-and-see-us-some-day-old-man sort, which don’t mean anything. He knew as well as we did that we were not in a position to accommodate guests, and we were too selfishly contented with the simple, lazy life we were enabled to lead to desire to be forced to entertain half-a-dozen noisy and beastly energetic young men, who would keep us stirring from daybreak to midnight, and run us into no end of trouble and expense.

Wilks had been as reckless and prodigal in his invitations and brag. Troddles and I had contented ourselves with the simple and dignified statement that we were living on a houseboat up the river when we were constrained to meet friendly overtures with a revelation of our whereabouts and occupation. We couldn’t postpone the explanation, and as we have many acquaintances, and there is something alluring to most young City men about life on a houseboat and the chance of getting a holiday for nothing, it was not necessary to suppose that there was any collusion in bringing nine men, all well known to each other and to us, on to the Middlesex bank of the river one fine Saturday afternoon almost as soon as we had finished lunching. Murray and Wilks were clearing up, Troddles had gone to sleep with his line overboard, as usual, and I was engaged in fastening a fresh herring—which I had procured at some expense and trouble—to his hook, so as to ensure that for once he should really catch something, when I noticed a crowd of young men coming across the railings and down the bank on the other side of the river. They were gay and light-hearted, and had bags with them, and at first I took them to be a boating party or a cricket team come down to play a match against a local eleven.

They passed right opposite us, and I recognized a fellow called Pennington, who is in Murray’s office, and a couple from Wilks’s place. I slipped out of sight then, puzzled but apprehensive, and a bit suspicious that what I had taken to be a beanfest was a surprise party to ourselves. But they didn’t pay any attention to us, and, peeping round the corner, I saw them making for the houseboat on their own side.

“Murray,” I called softly, “there’s Pennington and Salter and a whole mob of fellows we know going on to that other houseboat. Do they know the people, or are they making a mistake?”

There was no real need for any such precaution; they were too far off for us to distinguish them, or they us; but we could see them bunched up on the bank, and we could hear them a mile off.

“Let’s keep out of sight and they’ll probably think we are away and go off,” said Murray hopefully, though he didn’t look as though he found much comfort in the idea. And then Wilks came out.

“A whole mob of our chaps have come down—to pay us a visit, I suppose,” Murray explained. “They’ve gone on to that boat across the river.”

“Why should they go there?” said Wilks. “I told them we were on the Surrey side.”

“Perhaps they thought it more the style of thing we should be on,” said Murray, with a sickly grin.

“Been cracking it up, eh?” I inquired sharply. “All right, my young-man-ashamed-of-his-houseboat! Now I understand the panic.”

Murray said it was nothing of the sort, but I knew it was, and, judging by their look of vexed concern, I pretty easily guessed that both he and Wilks had been painting our river home out of all resemblance to what she really was. They both denied it strenuously, and to prove their innocence of all vanity and conceit, they went and took up conspicuous positions on our upper deck. By and by the others spotted them, and, trooping back to ask for information, they recognized each other with surprise and pleasure splendidly simulated on the part of Wilks and Murray.

“We’ve come to pay you a visit and stop till Sunday night, if you’ll have us,” said Pennington.

“With pleasure, if you don’t mind roughing it,” said Wilks heartily. “How do, Green? How do, Nodley? Half a minute, and I’ll come over for you.”

He fetched one lot and I another, and we shook hands with each other and smiled genially and told charming lies, we thinking “What a beastly nuisance!” They thinking “What swankers—to call this thing a houseboat!” I could see that in the reflective way they looked at Murray and Wilks and round at our cramped and unpretentious quarters. Murray and Wilks could see it too, but Troddles and I were able to stand apart from all of that. At least, I was, and did it. Troddles was unsuspicious of the position when we woke him up later and reproved him for discourtesy to our guests in going to sleep and leaving them to amuse themselves. But Murray was equal to a greater emergency than that.

“You should have let us know you were coming down,” he said off-handedly. “We would have done you in better style. But then you don’t care about style, I know, and we rather prefer this old tub. For a small party there’s not so much to polish and look after.”

Murray laughed outright and talked. I don’t know how he did it; he didn’t tell any obvious lies, but the impression he left on the minds of our guests was that the swagger houseboat across the river was really our property, and she was over there being repainted and done up for us while we made shift with the one they were on. It rehabilitated us in the eyes of our visitors, and when Murray casually mentioned a punt and skiff at Molesey being repaired, and a motor launch at Teddington that we weren’t sufficiently satisfied with to purchase outright, but which, when we did get it or another, was going to enlarge our pleasures very considerably, they got quite respectful, all except young Green, who was obviously sceptical of everything, not because he had any reason, but because he knew Murray’s methods better than the rest.

Troddles was looking as though he weren’t quite satisfied too, and seeing this Murray bustled the chaps into the life they had come to lead, and promptly made us accomplices to facts which were not.

“You must take us as you find us,” he said breezily. “Now, what? We must have something to get about in, and our crafty little boat won’t be much good. We only use her ordinarily for going backwards and forwards in. I say, Troddles, you are slim and agile; you might slip over and see if they haven’t got our skiff mended. Tell them we must have it. If they can’t do it properly tell them to cobble it up pro tem. We don’t mind it looking ugly or leaking a trifle.”

Troddles is not quick in understanding in ways that are guileful. He stood there with his mouth ajar, wondering how he was even to pretend to fetch something that didn’t exist, and then he almost gave the game away by blurting out, “Why, we haven’t got any skiff.”

“I know we haven’t, gaby,” retorted Murray, with a menacing frown, which changed into a sweet and engaging smile as Pennington and Green swung round and began to take an indecent interest in the dialogue. “I know we haven’t when they have got it up at the yard to repair. But we want one, and if ours isn’t ready or they can’t get it patched so that we can use it to-day they had better lend us one.”

You would have thought that was lead enough for an inmate of a lunatic asylum to catch up; but Troddles only looked more bewildered than ever. He didn’t like to say anything for fear of giving us away, and seeing the danger that threatened Murray rushed to the rescue.

“I’ll go myself,” he said. “Troddles is afraid they will jeer at him for sticking his boot through the side. He isn’t used to boating ways yet, are you, Trod?”

Troddles said he wasn’t—not very. He said there were a good many ways that he wasn’t used to, which our guests thought was honest simplicity, but which I had a strong suspicion was sarcasm.

I went with Murray, leaving Wilks and Troddles to entertain our visitors. Pennington and Nodley offered to accompany us, but we staved them off adroitly, and got away without any inconvenient witnesses of a transaction which was bound to be deceitful.

Murray excused himself as we went along. He hadn’t told any wilful, deliberate untruths, he explained; but the fellows at his place had displayed a curiosity almost impertinent, and he was a man who always liked to make the best showing possible, and be cheerful and optimistic.

“And so you filled them up to the brim,” said I, with a chuckle. “Why not own up? You’ll never be able to make good.”

“Think not?” said Murray. “I have shown them the houseboat. Fortunately I took her for a model when I sketched ours, and they are just as much impressed as if we were actually living on her. I forget how much it has cost us to do her up. But there are four men and a boy working on her, and she won’t be habitable for a month, remember.”

“Unless the owners come along and inhabit her to-night or to-morrow,” said I, chuckling again. I was enjoying myself.

Murray looked disconcerted; he hadn’t thought of that, and now he did he couldn’t think of any way out, so he relied on luck to carry him through.

Murray’s methods of deceiving though reprehensible are not without ingenuity and a certain amount of cleverness. He didn’t go and hire a boat and take it back and throw it at our visitors, metaphorically speaking, and say in effect, “There! there is our boat, which you didn’t believe we possessed.” We should have done it that way; but Murray has a crafty nature, and he holds that the only sin of deceit is crudity, and the province of art is to disguise truth. He claims to have got that out of Ruskin, though I have never been able to find it. We trekked along the tow-path to Molesey. What we required could have been got nearer; but Murray said it would be better not to kennel the fox and the hounds too close, and, besides, he was on friendly terms with a boat-builder near Hampton Court, and in matters of credit knowledge and trust are helpful.

We picked out a good serviceable punt without any distinguishing marks on it; but all the skiffs were labelled, and even Murray was not equal to claiming as our property a boat branded with the name and address of the real owner. So he selected one that looked sound and fairly showy, and hired both on reasonable terms over Sunday.

“Well, short of accidents, you should be able to keep your credit intact,” said I, as we rowed back with the punt in tow.

“I’ll try,” retorted Murray. “Anyhow, I’ve made good on the houseboat, and the supplementaries are coming along.”

We eased up at the bend of the river a few hundred yards from where the “Wilks’s Folly” was moored. A boat, leisurely rowed by an oldish man, who evidently used the river for a living rather than for pleasure, was coming after us, and as it drew level Murray hailed the occupant. He was a simple, benevolent-looking old chap, with weak blue eyes and a watery smile. You felt you could trust him anywhere, and would like to do it, and reward him for being so truthworthy and free from guile if only you were wealthy and had positions of trust to give away.

The poor old man said “care” was a totally inadequate way of expressing it; he implied that it would be as reasonable to ask a starving man if he would like to have a dinner, or a convict if he would fancy his liberty. To hear him, you would have thought that he had been yearning all his life for a chance to earn a shilling, and had pretty well made up his mind to die heartbroken and despairing over it.

“Very well,” said Murray in business-like tones to conquer his inclination to cry; “we want you to tow this outfit to the houseboat just ahead on the left bank. Ask for Mr. Wilks and say this to him: ‘Your punt is all right now, sir, but as your skiff can’t be finished till Tuesday, master sends his compliments and would be very much obliged if you will make use of this one.’ Can you remember all that?”

The old man said it was a good long while since he left the infant school, but he thought he could. As an afterthought he added that there was a tidy lot to do and remember for a shilling.

“They’ll take a bit of pulling, too,” he said persuasively, “and I ain’t as young as I used to be.”

“Light as a feather and all on your way,” said Murray; “but still——”

He sprang another sixpence, and we sat on the bank and reflected on how easily eighteenpence can be earned if you are old and look deserving, while Murray soliloquized on the cheapness of owning, or seeming to own, luxurious means and appliances. He drew his face into an expression of regret and sorrow, tempered by fortitude and Christian resignation, when we got within sight of our houseboat, and Wilks hailed us from the upper deck.

“It’s no go,” he shouted; “yard’s shut and every one gone. I’m awfully sorry, you chaps.”

Wilks shrieked with mirth and joyful knowledge. “They’ve sent them up,” he said.

“No—really? Don’t fib,” said Murray, stopping short and letting hope and elation fight it out with doubt and disappointment.

“It’s a fact,” said Pennington kindly. “They were left barely ten minutes ago. It’s not your own boat, but it’s good enough for anything.”

Murray allowed himself to be persuaded, then he expressed his gratification and pleasure in a dignified, self-contained way; not like Wilks, who overdid the thing altogether, and would have made me suspicious that he knew very well he had no expectation of getting anything at all, and no right to any.

That was before our guests, but when he got us away by ourselves his face lengthened and wore a worried look.

“Beastly cheek to make me pay five bob for delivery,” he said. “Why couldn’t you bring them up yourselves? You can row.”

“Five bob,” said Wilks. “The man said he didn’t belong to the yard, but had brought them up as a favour, and if I didn’t pay him five bob he would have to take them back again, because they had told him that he was to get five bob for his service.”

I told Wilks that he had been done easily and neatly, but it was no use making a fuss about it now, and we were being watched somewhat curiously by Green and Nodley. They came forward as Wilks clumsily turned to see if I was speaking truth.

“Nothing wrong, is there?” asked Nodley sympathetically; and Wilks contorted his face into a ghastly grin and said there was nothing wrong. It was only that our “accounts were out by five——”

“Pounds,” put in Murray, who likes to do everything on a large scale, even his losses, and would have made it fifty if he could have seen his way.

Wilks accepted the amendment, and intimated that he had been vexed momentarily because Murray and I were so grossly careless; but five pounds was a small matter to men who ran houseboats.

For all his brave show of cheerfulness, Murray was in a very nervous and jumpy condition, I could see, in case anything transpired that might reveal the reckless, impudent way he had been spoofing them. It wasn’t moral rectitude at work, but a dead certain knowledge that life in the same office as Pennington and Green would be intolerable for him if ever they detected the fraudulent imposition. I thought it was good for him to suffer a bit; but when, in his agony, he suggested running up to London and putting in the time at a hall as a pleasing and novel method of getting through a lovely day in the country, I thought he had better risk being bowled out as a humbug than pose as a fool, and called him to order.

“It’s as Pennington and the others please, of course,” I said; “but I don’t imagine they came down to get a music-hall performance.”

“Well, we must do something; we can’t loaf about this hutch all day,” said Murray desperately. He heard a motor launch coming up the river, and it was from the river and in a launch we expected the danger to arrive.

“Don’t worry about us, Murray; we are jolly,” said Green. “But why not come over on your houseboat? She looks comfortable, and anyway there is more room on her for our big party.”

“Oh, you’d get smothered in paint,” said Murray readily, darting a furious look at Troddles, who was eyeing him with a grin of sympathetic amusement. “She’s too wet, don’t you think, Wilks?”

“Come down again later on,” he said. “You may not mind messing up your clothes, but we decidedly mind messing up our paint. It’s an expensive job enough as it is, and we don’t want to waste the effect. There’s nothing to see, really, and it will be rather fine up above Sunbury Lock. What do you say if we put the stove and things in the boats and go up and picnic?”

The idea was received with enthusiasm, and ten minutes later Murray lost his worried look and tipped Troddles’s hat overboard in sheer exuberance of spirits at getting beyond the zone of danger for that day. He knew it would be late when we returned, and he intended our guests should be too tired for anything but the best substitute for a bed we could offer them.

We got a lot of praise and admiration for our property, which wasn’t ours, as we rowed past it. Troddles accepted it blushingly, and Wilks and Murray with their tongues in their cheeks. They even pretended to an indifference, and Wilks said, with perfect truth, we got far more use and pleasure out of the smaller and less pretentious one.

We went up past Shepperton and had a splendid time, and because they found it all enjoyable Murray had no difficulty in carrying out his scheme. He succeeded a bit too well. In fact, it was past eleven when we got back, and it was only when we were going to get supper that Wilks remembered we were not stocked and provisioned for such a large party. We had to cross the river again then, and go shopping on a large scale; but we got what we most required, and, as Murray said, a little incident like that is part of the fun.

It was a mild sweet night, and there was no risk and very little discomfort sleeping out; but I don’t think our visitors enjoyed it greatly. I didn’t, I know. What we grandiloquently term the upper deck was just the flat oblong roof of our house. It had no rail, was ribby and hard to look at, and harder still to sleep on. We gave up our bunks, as in duty bound, to our guests, and they packed themselves two in each, with a rug apiece to make them look homely. It was a tight squeeze, and we chuckled every now and again as a dull thud, followed by dismal complaining or heated dialogue, indicated that an overflow on to the floor had taken place.

We weren’t exactly happy. It was hours before I could get to sleep, and when I did I dreamt that we had gone on to the houseboat over the way, and the owners came back and made a fuss about it. They wanted to pitch me into the river. I resisted strenuously, and while Murray was trying to persuade them not to, because I was such a rotten swimmer, I managed to break away from them, and woke up and found myself there with half a gallon of Thames water inside me. The yell I gave woke up Troddles, and forgetting where he was he started up and came blundering down on top of me.

We rescued each other and got on board again just as the others were swarming out from all directions to find out what the row was about. Wilks thought we had done it for a lark at first, and he was annoyed with us.

“You don’t want to go swimming in the middle of the night,” he complained. “And if you did you needn’t have made all that row. Going to sleep up there isn’t a natural process at all; it is a science, and I managed it by sheer luck. I shall never be able to do it again.”

I undeceived him and told them my dream. Not being any Joseph I couldn’t interpret it for them, unless it was the superior bedding accommodation in that other houseboat had set my soul longing after her, and it had taken advantage of my unconscious state to try and fly over. Murray said he thought a man who had gone to bed on three-quarters of a pound of ham, half a bushel of tomatoes, and seven cold potatoes, not to mention bread and cheese and cake and beer, didn’t need to look as far as all that for an interpretation. We had quite a long argument as to why I had tumbled in the river, during which Troddles sneaked off, and, regardless of the laws of hospitality, took possession of his own bunk, and was fast asleep and snoring when we went to hunt him up for his views.

We left him alone, and, being up, the others proposed going swimming too. I would have persuaded them to leave it until the morning, but they wouldn’t be persuaded, so I annexed another of the bunks, and fell asleep to the accompaniment of splashing and revelry.

Early next morning the blow fell, and Murray, rendered reckless by immunity and anxious to impress his colleagues, precipitated it. We were all in the river, and just off the object of his fraudulent claim, and finding himself pumped, Troddles swung himself on to the veranda, and sat there with his legs dangling in the water.

“That paint’s dry enough, Murray,” said Green. “Come on; I want to have a look at her.”

Before Murray could expostulate he was up beside Troddles, and seeing retreat was impossible, and evasion would only beget suspicion, Murray not only gave way, but took the lead.

“Come on, then,” he said. “Another pot of paint won’t ruin us, and you won’t be happy until you are envious.”

Two minutes later they were swarming all over the place, prying into corners, and admiring everything with generous, hearty enthusiasm.

Murray and Wilks led them round and touched up the bare places in their imaginations, and spoke casually of fittings and accessories that no man out of Bedlam would have thought of in connexion with a houseboat.

“The painters have the keys, and I expect it’s all locked up,” said Murray, as they came round to the front door. He caught hold of the handle, and, somewhat to our surprise, the door opened quite easily, and they all trooped in just as a couple of very determined-looking men came round from the side door.

I drew back, and there was no one in sight excepting Troddles, who had got on his feet to follow the mob.

“What the deuce are you doing here?” said one of the men. Troddles was about to explain, when the other burst in roughly:

“Oh! don’t waste time yapping, Jack; chuck him overboard,” he said, rushing upon innocence disguised. Troddles heroically submitted to his fate, and the next minute he was out in midstream and setting a steady pace for his own territory.

“My dream!” I thought to myself, and I gave it the most comfortable finish I could for myself by unostentatiously slipping overboard and halting at a safe distance to see how the others got on. They were caught and brought to bay in the drawing-room, all except Green, who was intercepted entering it and promptly flung into the river, and Murray who sneaked behind the piano and from there beat an inglorious retreat into the kitchen, and so won his way to us.

The lust of conquest was upon those men, and they were in no mood to listen to explanations, even if it had been forthcoming. Wilks, who could have given them, was in no mood either. He was using a considerable knowledge of boxing and an unholy delight in a scrap to emphasize his objection to being hauled out and soused, and the others in ignorance of the real position were backing him up. Wilks didn’t come out; but a good deal of glass from the windows did, and they fought all through the room and over the lower deck, making a sad mess of a refined and comfortable home.

I couldn’t see the utility of resistance and only a police court finish, and it was with a sinking sensation that I saw Pennington break through the chains and go overboard, carrying with him one of the brave defenders of his temporary hearth and home.

Wilks came to his senses then, and not before it was time. He drew away from the man he was wrestling with, and reached out a helping hand to his companion in the water.

“Clear off, you chaps,” he said. “Be getting breakfast ready. I’ll be over in a minute. This is all a mistake.”

Linklater and all the others obeyed reluctantly, and as soon as they were off the deck, Wilks turned to the enemy, who were looking grim and not at all inclined to be mollified, particularly the man who had been sent swimming in his flannels.

“Sorry,” he said. “But you began it, you know. We’re off that houseboat over there, and if you’ll allow me I’ll go and get some things on, and row back with my friends and help you put this straight.”

“Darn fresh, I call it,” said Wilks equably. “About our intrusion; well, you see, we didn’t want to come on board at all; but we have some fellows from the City staying with us, and they made such a point of it that we gave way.”

“You had no business to do that,” retorted the other quickly. “It isn’t your houseboat.”

“And if the owner had been with you we should have shaken hands and introduced our friends,” Wilks countered. We knew the man vaguely by sight; but Wilks had to take chances and make his game! “We thought the place was deserted,” he continued. “And you didn’t give us much chance to explain matters, did you?”

The others began to grin, and by and by one of them admitted that, perhaps, they had been a bit hasty. The amazing cheek of our proceedings, as they then understood them, had caused them to lose their tempers, they said, and, of course, if we were friends of their friend, it seemed that they should apologize.

Wilks wouldn’t let them do that. It was impertinent on the part of our visitors, he maintained, and we, of course, were responsible. Only it was such a trivial thing, and now that they understood each other, he would shake hands with them and go. In ten minutes he would be back with a companion and help to clear up the wreckage. They thanked him and he came away glad to have got so cheaply out of an affair which might have been ugly.

Murray didn’t seem likely to clear himself so easily. The roasting process was in full swing when Wilks returned. Nothing had been said directly, but Green was lying on the deck on his back with his eyes fixed on a guileless and innocent thrush on a bough just over him chanting dreamily:

Troddles and the rest were on the broad grin, and Murray was looking mad enough to eat somebody, and, to get time for reflection and out of an uncomfortable place, he seized on the chance offered by Wilks’s call for volunteers to go over and assist in the work of restoration.

“But aren’t you going to prosecute?” asked Salter slyly. “I should. It’s bad enough to sneak your place and go camping in it, but when it comes to mobbing the owners and doing no end of damage I think leniency is wasted.”

“Oh, it’s all right; we know them,” said Murray desperately, turning a fiery red. “Don’t yap! Get the breakfast started.”

We did so, and it was all ready and waiting before they returned. They weren’t long gone, either; in fact, it didn’t seem to me that they could have been of any practical service whatever, and the haste they brought back with them never left them until we were away from the “Wilks’s Folly” and half a mile upstream. They were irritable and impatient over the meal, and kept urging us to hurry in a most unreasonable way.

“Why, the river won’t run off and leave us, will it?” Troddles complained at last. “What’s the rush? We’ve got all day.”

Wilks said it would be cooler and pleasanter rowing in the early morning, and Murray said it was all so beautiful anywhere except where we were just then that he hated to think of us missing any of it.

The truth of it was that those men had let out that the owner of the houseboat we had crumpled up was coming down with a party on his launch that morning, and they promised to come over to us with him and repay the call. Wilks didn’t want to be at home when he came, and neither did we, and we weren’t. But we couldn’t get away from our friends, and Green, who is a coarse little beast, got quite offensive in his allusions to modern Quixotes keeping houseboats for the benefit of others and living in washing trays for their own, until Murray couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Well,” said he brazenly, “if you want the truth, have it and make all you can of it. It isn’t much—just sorrow and misfortune. Troddles, whom we loved and trusted, went and lost all his money speculating in house property, and we had to rent our fine houseboat to a gilded popinjay. Those men on it are friends of his; he pretends he owns it, and anyway, of course, we had no right to be there. Now pass me over a beer bottle and a pouch somebody, and respect our sorrow and our secret.”

“Pretty fair—twenty pounds a month,” said Murray, at which Pennington said he wasn’t going to waste any more sympathy on us, and Troddles laughed hysterically and begged him not to.

CHAPTER XV.
AT THE RACES WITH TRODDLES.

We had nothing to do and all day to do it in, and Murray said we would go to the races. He said every man should attend a racecourse at least once in his life, and he thought this would be as good as any time to gain our experience. Wilks agreed with him that the visit would be educational. Troddles said he had heard from somebody that racecourses were terribly wicked places, or else he had read it; but Wilks objected to that as being a gross misstatement of the plain facts of the case. He admitted that anything like a close search might reveal a certain amount of vice and foolishness about a racecourse, but he thought if we only betted a very little, and were careful not to sneak the petty cash to do it with, we might come away unscathed. Troddles said it was an easy method of preservation as far as he was concerned, because he always made a practice of not sneaking the petty cash; at which we laughed and bade him go and wash himself nicely and put on a clean collar to be taken to the races.

I don’t know what races they were—Hurst Park, or Kempton Park, or Waterloo Park, or Gower Street, or something, Murray said—but I don’t think he knew very much about it himself. Anyway, it wasn’t the Derby, and I was rather sorry for that, because it seemed to me that if we were going to do this thing at all we ought to do it large, and it is a sort of reproach for men like ourselves, who have lived in London nearly all their lives, to have to say that they have never seen the Derby or the Tower of London, and only been once to the Boat Race.

We had rowed up to Richmond in the morning, and were loafing round the town, looking for amusement or trouble, when the idea of going to see a real race occurred to Murray. Quite a lot of people had been seized with the same idea. Vehicles of every description, from swagger coaches to donkey-barrows, were streaming through the town, and as we paused pensively to watch them the conductor of a private ’bus, which had come down from London with a couple of leaders for effect, and a bunch of ribbons on the driver’s whip for festivity, collared Murray.

“This way, me noble sport,” he said. “A bob a time right on to the course. We’ve been waiting for you.”

“How did you know we were going?” asked Murray, visibly flattered by the suggestion.

“Easy enough, capting, that,” the conductor said. “Anyone with half an eye could tell you was for the races, and if you ain’t better posted than I am here’s a tip for you that will cover your expenses. I’ve had it straight from the stable from a friend of mine, and it’s sound. Don’t so much as look at Billso, but put all you’ve got on Coffee Stall. You’ll get good odds, and she’s going to romp home.”

Murray said he didn’t, as a rule, fancy coffee stalls, but he liked the idea of a romp, at which the conductor poked him in the ribs with a grubby forefinger and said he was a “deep ’un,” and the idea of being considered “deep” so pleased Murray that he determined we would go and see the races. Wilks was also eager, and we had no serious objections to offer beyond those I have already recorded, and so we went.

A motley crowd was pouring on to the ground, and we paid our entrance fee and poured in with it, feeling very reckless and sporting, and trying to look as though attending a race meeting was an everyday affair with us. That was a matter of artfulness dictated by policy with us, because coming along Murray told us crowds of sharpers always infested these places, and if we looked any way simple and unaccustomed to our surroundings we should be marked out for rooking.

Troddles fell a victim at the very first go off. We got separated from him in the crowd, and when we discovered he was missing we had, of course, to go back and hunt him up. But too late! Despite our warnings and long years we had spent in endeavouring to conquer fixed and ingrained habits of belief and simple trust, he had actually gone and lent a perfect stranger half a crown. We found him leaning against a rail, gaping with pleasure and surprise on the gay scene surrounding him. He couldn’t come away just then, he informed us, because he was waiting to get his half-crown back; and when we heard the details, and Wilks advised him to call it a bad debt, and not go and lose all the fun as well, he got quite indignant with us.

“That’s your nasty suspicious nature, Wilks,” he said. “The man looked honest enough, and who’d go and do a dirty thing like that for the sake of half a crown? He wanted to back a horse and hadn’t got change.”

“Well, you’re asking for it, and you’ll get it,” said Murray impatiently. “It will be a useful lesson to you, and we’ll stay until you’ve had it. How long do you propose to give him?”

Troddles said ten minutes was the time asked for, and it was nearly up then. He wouldn’t back his faith in human nature and the general honesty of everybody, although we offered him long odds against his chance of ever recovering that half-crown, which was as well for us, because even while we were pressing him to take a mild flutter to get his hand in for the coming events, a wizened, foxy-looking fellow sidled up and displayed evident pleasure and satisfaction in recognizing Troddles.

“Oh, here you are!” he exclaimed. “I was afraid I had lost you, and in this crowd it wouldn’t be easy to pick you up again. Take your half-dollar out of this can you? And if you want to make a bit put the rest on Corncutter. He’s a cert. Only don’t spread it round. It’s special to you for being obliging.”

“There you are, Murray, what did I say?” said Troddles triumphantly, as he raked through his pockets for the change. “This” was a sovereign, and as we helped him make up the amount due we acknowledged that he had said the truth, and Murray looked remorseful.

“Been telling you that I shouldn’t come back, I suppose?” commented the sprig of honesty tied up horsey.

Wilks laughed. It hadn’t been quite so bad as that, he said; but we certainly had been giving our friend a few necessary warnings against the sharpers who do frequent racecourses.

“Well, I’ve attended them on and off for the last twenty odd years, and I’ve never come against anyone worse than myself,” said the man thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’d swallow all those yarns if I was you. They are told in Sunday schools mostly by chaps who have a prejudice against racing, and have never been on a course in their lives.”

Wilks said he hadn’t got his prejudice entirely from Sunday schools. He spoke sharply, because he had an idea that we were being jeered at, and I don’t think he was far wrong. For answer the man took out another sovereign and handed it to Murray.

“Lend me five bob,” he said simply. “I don’t know you or anything about you. I’ll be back here in half an hour, you can bet; you may not be, but I think you will. There’s practical proof of what I believe, which is worth more than any amount of words.”

Murray tried to protest, but the man insisted on showing his confidence in the integrity of strangers on racecourses, so he handed over the five shillings, and, with a brief nod, the other walked briskly off, leaving us feeling very cheap and somehow snubbed. Troddles said it served us right for having such mean, suspicious natures; and, to defend himself, Wilks said the man was a fool, and it would serve him very right if we didn’t come back. He saw the dangerous weakness of his line of argument, and stopped suddenly and in confusion, not being prepared to prove all men are rascals by turning rascal himself. So instead he told Troddles severely that he was always doing something silly, and he should feel thankful to think that this time it had not cost him half a crown. But we felt safer and more kindly as the result of that episode, and relaxed the mental severity which we had adopted under the belief that we were in dangerous company.

Coffee Stall was a horse. I think Murray took it to be a perambulating refreshment booth. He said he didn’t, but that’s what he led us round in search of; and when Troddles asked him what he wanted to put a shilling on a coffee stall for he confessed he didn’t know exactly, but the ’bus conductor had advised it as a safe and easy road to wealth. Corncutter was a horse too. Funny names racehorses have! A military-looking gentleman told us they were purposely selected, so as to avoid confusion and be distinctive and easily remembered. He explained the principles of betting to us too; but either we were very dense, or else it was a much more difficult and intricate subject than we had thought. We tried to figure it out, and made some curious and interesting discoveries. I am afraid we hadn’t got the hang of it properly, because I came to the conclusion that you simply couldn’t win, and Murray that you simply couldn’t lose.

Wilks, who worked on an independent formula, said we were both wrong. We couldn’t make any big coup, he admitted, but if we put a shilling on every horse running it must result in a win of four shillings. I asked him how people ever came to be ruined on the turf if that were so, and he said he supposed it was because they hadn’t thought of his plan. We resolved to do our betting that way, and Murray said we would just run back and settle with Troddles’s confiding friend and then find a bookie and have a four-shilling profit flutter apiece and see how Wilks’s theory worked out.

We were a few minutes late when we got to the trysting-place, and, rather to our surprise, we were the first to keep the appointment. Wilks, who was still a bit sore over the business, said it was done to aggravate us, and he hadn’t the slightest doubt that we had been shadowed the whole of the time, and never had a ghost of a chance of making off with the money. Murray said, in that case, the man evidently didn’t know us, and he who did would have come early to the accounting and breathed more freely when he got back his sovereign for the five shillings.

Troddles smiled on them, and said he hoped we wouldn’t mind, but he had a strong, even depraved, fancy to put ten shillings on Boshem. He didn’t know anything about Boshem, and he quite agreed with our conclusions and much riper experience of betting and horse-racing affairs—which was wonderful, seeing that Murray’s theory and mine were absolutely contradictory, and Wilks’s controverted both of ours in several important details. He said he thought the name of Boshem was sweetly fanciful and romantic, and he should encourage it to the tune of ten shillings. If he lost it would be his contribution to the sport, and if he won it would be a seventy shilling contribution from the sport to himself.

We waited ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, but the confiding gentleman didn’t turn up, and Murray got severe. He said he would wait the full half-hour, and then he should consider the sovereign his unless a chance meeting robbed him of it, which, he added hopefully, didn’t seem likely in such a crowd.

“Perhaps he had a weak heart and the strain and anxiety has proved too much for him,” said Wilks nastily. “Or he may have rushed to overtake us, on realizing what he had done, and fallen down in a fit.”

We waited till five minutes past the half-hour, and when Wilks generously told Murray he could keep the sovereign for himself, and we moved off in search, of a benevolent-looking bookie whose appearance would give us confidence in starting out on the easy road to fortune.

Bookmakers are very conservative in their methods of doing business, and not very enterprising or original, or else they were too busy just then to give proper attention to us. Anyway we found plenty who were vociferously ready to let us “back our fancy,” or lay us “five to one on the field”; but we couldn’t discover one who would come and talk to us quietly and let us lay our proposition out fairly. I hadn’t a great deal of confidence in it myself, and even Troddles, dense and slow-witted as he is, was moved to remark that since we were bound to win by Wilks’s method, unless it was based on entirely wrong premises, he couldn’t see that there was any need to wait for a race to be run at all. All we required to do was to give a bookie sixteen shillings, say, and he would give us a pound, and the gamble was complete.

Wilks seemed to think we were more than normally foolish that day, and he said it was a mistake for us to try and talk about things we didn’t understand. It seemed that the successes of his system depended on keeping the bookmaker in ignorance of the fact that it was such an absolute certainty, because, of course, no sane man would try and make a competence by giving away a pound for sixteen shillings to every applicant. I said I hoped it would work, though I had my doubts, and I was going to explain why more fully than I had done when Troddles caught sight of the man to whom he had lent half a crown. Murray was rather cross about it, but he couldn’t deny the identity or the debt, and so he went across to make restitution.

It was a most extraordinary thing, we considered. Had it been the other way round we could have understood it better. The man not only refused to recognize us, but he denied Murray’s indebtedness and disclaimed all knowledge of it or of having had any dealings with us. When Murray tried to insist he got quite huffy and ran off in a hurry and lost himself in the crowd. I thought it the most wonderful instance of loss of memory I had ever heard of; but Wilks said there was nothing wonderful about it. The man had been drinking, anyone could see that, and, being fuddled, he hadn’t the sense to see that we were trying to give him something and not take it.

Anyway, Murray said, it clearly established our right to keep the money, and he had no fault to find with the deal if the other hadn’t. He had never been inclined to condone habits of hard drinking before, he said, but now he thought he could see some utility in them.

We walked about a lot among the crowd, parting with shillings here and there and getting bits of cardboard in exchange, and Troddles found a bookie who was at “the old stand,” and went nap on Boshem.

“You’re a wide ’un, capting,” said the merchant of hopes, at which Troddles blushed and looked pleased.

“It’s just a fancy of mine,” he said. “Do you think he’s going to win?”

The man said he did rather, though he wouldn’t admit that to every one, and he strongly advised Troddles to double his bet. He seemed awfully anxious to lose his money, and he implored us hoarsely to follow the lead of a man whom, with singularly poor judgment, he had “twigged” for a “deep ’un” the moment he set eyes upon him. Troddles does know a horse when he sees one, and that is about as much as he does know about them. I doubt whether he had ever seen a racehorse, and certainly he had never seen Boshem or heard of him until half an hour ago; but such is the influence of flattery deftly applied that he weighed out the only bit of money he had left, a sovereign, and agreed to take another ten-shilling plunge on his fancy.

“Best put it all on, capting,” said the bookie. “It’s seven to one, and it’s fair chucking money away to refuse. If I had many as knowing as you I’d be broke on this—— Here, what’s this you’re giving me?”

Something suspicious about the sovereign caught his experienced eye, and he applied his teeth to it, and tasted that it was rank and bad. His tone changed marvellously, and he grew aggressive before Troddles could grasp the fact that he was being charged with trying to take advantage of a simple and unsuspicious bookie by working off bad money on him.

“Don’t try that game on with me, young feller-me-lad,” said the gamester; “I ain’t quite as soft as all that.”

Troddles protested his innocence in intention and fact, and to save a row which was threatening Murray took the suspected coin and tendered a sovereign from his own pocket. But according to the bookie that was as bad as the other, and what annoyed him particularly was a belief he was nourishing that it wasn’t another at all, but the same one palmed by Murray and represented as another. When he found he was wrong in that direction he grew sarcastic.

“Did you sit up all night making these?” he asked, and when Murray somewhat foolishly told him he was an offensive fool who didn’t know a good sovereign when he saw one, he advised us frankly to boot off, in case his sense of duty, which was wrestling hard with a naturally kind disposition, conquered, and he sent for a policeman.

We wouldn’t do that, and Murray was contemplating putting up a very vigorous defence of our morals and manners when it suddenly struck him that in both cases the doubtful coins had been obtained from a strange and untried source, and he began to fear that that stranger might have had some stronger reason for refusing to receive back his sovereign than a mere casual glimpsing of the wine cup when it was red. We had not a great deal of money with us, and there was no doubt that the sovereigns, good or bad, had been obtained from the man who had confidence in his fellow-men—and very little doubt that they were bad.

I was sorry, though not surprised, that Troddles should have been swindled like that; but I was surprised, and not sorry, that Murray got roped in. It would do him good, I fancied, and he doesn’t often give anybody or anything a chance to do him any really useful improving service. I did wish Wilks had been bitten too; he needs it, if anything, more than Murray does; but, as I tell him, his turn will come round one of these days.

Unfortunately, a good deal of time was taken up in trying to explain matters to the bookie and ourselves, and while we were still debating on the precise loss involved in giving a good five shillings for a bad sovereign, plus experience, the bell rang for the course to be cleared, and we were, like Troddles’s selection, rank outsiders. The rails were lined everywhere six or seven deep with a rough and expectant mob, and in the interest of Troddles, who was keenly eager to see Boshem come in last but one, and his half-sovereign go out with scarcely a flutter, we ran round looking for a chance to shove our way through the crowd to the rails. We could hear much but see nothing, and in endeavouring to better this state of things we came round to a railed enclosure, planted with flowers, and across this was a huge wooden structure, which Murray said he thought must be the grand stand or something. There was a little wicket door to it standing ajar, and no one seemed to be on guard, so Murray suggested making use of it and having a seat in the dress circle.

“We can plead ignorance at the worst,” he urged, “and they can only chuck us out. Quite likely they won’t notice us, and they’ll be too intent on watching the race to bother, if they do, until we have seen as much as we want to see. Slip in sharp before a bobby comes round and drifts us off.”

He dodged across the enclosure and slipped in. I and Wilks followed, and Troddles coming last, in an excess of caution, closed the wicket after us. It was pitch-dark then, and when Murray told me to leave the door ajar as we had found it, so that we could see where we were going, I tried and found that the wicket was locked fast, and there was no means provided for opening it on the inside. At first this didn’t seem to matter, because, as Wilks said, we wanted to get in and avoid being turned out; but when we had groped our way along, with the assistance of an occasional match, until we came to another barrier in the shape of a solid balk of timber, we began to think it mattered a good deal.

Just then we were only concerned because we were missing the racing, and it is a foolish and unsatisfactory thing to come miles and waste money to see a race, and then not see it. Every now and again a dull, hoarse roar penetrated to our impromptu dungeon, and that made us all the more eager to get out and see what was going on. We were annoyed with Murray for leading us into such a fool’s trap. He was annoyed with himself if it came to that, but that didn’t help us or him; and when, by the aid of our last match, Wilks came to the conclusion that we couldn’t find any door that would admit us to the sacred enclosure, because there wasn’t one to find, we began to think that we had something worse to fear than missing a horse race.

“I wish you hadn’t shut that door, Trod,” I observed. “It will be deuced awkward if we can’t get it open. It will be the rarest chance in the world if we can attract anyone’s attention in all this excitement and racket.”

Troddles said he wished he hadn’t, too, and he added somewhat vaguely that he wouldn’t have done it if he had known. In the dark, and flustered as we were, it was a long while before we could find the wicket at all. We each found it for ourselves in various places, and wasted quite a lot of useful time in trying to push our way through a solid wall of timber, until Troddles was lucky enough to find a stray match in the corner of his waistcoat pocket, and enable us to identify the object of our search. It was more satisfactory, but of no great practical utility; the door was fast, and, do what we would, we couldn’t open it, and couldn’t bring anybody to open it for us.

Half an hour later Troddles sat down with his back to the wall and said he didn’t think much of race meetings, they are so dull and unexciting. I sat down, too, and agreed with him. In a couple of days’ time, I said, I thought it would be more stirring, mentally at least, and I asked Wilks about how long it took for a healthy man, starting in fairly plump condition, to starve to death. Wilks said about three days should do it, but Murray took a more optimistic view and said he thought if we were got out inside the week they might be able to pull us round. He told us of one case he remembered reading about where a man had tumbled into a quarry and couldn’t get out, and was rescued and lived after nine days’ privation; but he rather thought there was a pond or something which he drank from, and of course that might have made a difference.

These reminiscences naturally begot a desire for something cheerful to talk about, and Wilks wandered off into a long dissertation on the subject of starvation and its attendant horrors. Troddles would last the longest, he said, and the worst thing in store for him was the dotty period, which would set in as soon as we were gone and he was left alone in his misery to think of the awful results which his carelessness had brought about. Troddles said he expected he should be thinking too much of other things by then to worry unduly about that, and already he was beginning to ponder on steaks; it had never struck him quite so forcibly before what lovely things steaks really are.

Our chief hope was that some attendant would come along and open the door for us. The place didn’t seem to be serving any useful purpose, but clearly it must have one, and the fact that we found the door open indicated that it was in use. If not—— Wilks said then we should have to use Troddles as a battering ram and force our way out by rushing him against the wicket feet first, like the savages do with tree trunks when they want to get into a stockade.

We sat there in the dark for hours, it seemed to us, and it was about the gloomiest and most depressing experience I can recall. If we had only been able to smoke it wouldn’t have been so bad, but we couldn’t find any more derelict matches, though we hunted most carefully and minutely for one. Troddles, by reason of being able to sleep at any time and under any condition, fared better than we, though we managed to slip an occasional hour out of the tally by dozing through it. Later we came to the conclusion that we had done more dozing than we knew of, and on the last occasion I woke up with a well-defined sense of requiring nourishment, and a deeply-rooted idea that we were not going to be rescued.

It is one thing to jest lightly about old oak chests, and slow starvation, and things of that sort, but it is quite another to contemplate them as being not only possible, but in the direct line of succession, so to speak. I listened intently for a few moments; outside it was ominously silent and still—the darkness seemed to have substance. It was like being in a vault before you are quite ready for vaulting, only Troddles’s snoring happily spoilt that grisly idea. I got out my watch, and by the sense of feel made the time somewhere between eight and eleven. I shifted the little hand in trying to make sure of the hour, and broke the big one in locating the fractions.

Anyway, it was late. I was hungry, and, as there was no sense and much unpleasantness in wasting any more time, I stirred up the others and told them, when they were sufficiently awake to be sensible, that I had had all the racing I cared about, and wanted to go home.

Troddles wouldn’t let us use him as a battering ram. He said he was afraid it would not be effective, and he was sure it would hurt. I didn’t see how he could tell either without trying; but he said in some cases he preferred intuition to positive knowledge, and that was one of them. We couldn’t very well force him to make the experiment, but we lay on our backs and pounded the wicket with our feet in unison, and, as it jarred every single tooth we had in our heads and produced no other effect whatever, we were constrained to admit that he might have been right.

It seemed futile to call, but we yelled all the same, and deafened ourselves with the noise we made. But we didn’t attract anybody’s attention, chiefly because there was nobody’s attention to attract; and then, just as we were giving up all hope and preparing to die bravely and with the fortitude of Christians who are up against it, Troddles remarked musingly: “I wonder what’s in that box?”

At first we thought the dotty stage had already set in; but there was a box up against the wall where he had been resting. It was a chest, a biggish wooden chest, and Murray forced the lid up and groped round in it, and cut his finger, and found that it was a tool-chest and full of tools. Rendered cautious by his experience, he searched carefully, and found a hammer and a saw. He took those, and went off to see what he could do with them. Wilks found a cold chisel, and went off to see what he could do with that, and then I searched and found a crowbar. Between us we dug a hole in the frame against the lock—and in our hands, incidentally—and two minutes later we were picking ourselves up and sorting ourselves out from each other, and the door was open.

We didn’t particularly want to attract attention once we were outside. We should have to waste time in explaining things, we thought, and there were other things we would sooner be doing, so we pushed the door to, covered the course on the run, and scrambled over a fence and got into a lane. Troddles tore his trousers very badly getting over the fence, and that, in conjunction with other and even more pressing considerations, drove us into a hotel on the Richmond road just on closing time, where we decided to put up for the night and worthily finish up the day we had spent with Troddles at the races.

CHAPTER XVI.
AN IMPROMPTU ENTERTAINMENT.

We returned to the house at Tooting early in August on a date which corresponded nicely with the close of our holidays and a desire we held to dodge the expense of renewing our season tickets. We were glad to be back, which Wilks said was a natural and healthy sign, auguring, as it did, that our instincts were not dwarfed and our imaginations blunted by living like pigs on a floating sugar-box. You may gather from that that the early ideal of life on a houseboat being a dream of bliss had slumped considerably.

Troddles said the difficulty in his case had been the absolute inability to sleep at all, let alone dream, and, after all, there was nothing like a roomy, decently-furnished house, with a couch and easy-chairs in it, for comfort. He said he had never before realized what the voyage in the Ark had been like, or felt so much sympathy with Noah, as when he had to take his meals squatting on a crocky mineral water case, and go to bed on a narrow plank in a cupboard.

We all had some pet aversion to feel grateful over escaping, and Murray said he thought we ought to express it and take the neighbours in and give them a treat by way of a thanksgiving. When he gave us the details of his scheme I saw at once there would be amusement in it—for us—but I doubted very much whether the neighbours would find any pleasure or satisfaction in it, and Wilks said he was jolly sure they wouldn’t.

Murray’s idea was this. He had turned musical on the houseboat to help pass the time, and the instrument he had chosen was the phonograph. He played it rather well, considering he was self-taught, and is entirely devoid of taste, knowledge, and ear. But Murray’s joy in his new instrument of torture didn’t consist so much in rendering sweet strains as in obtaining novel and generally entirely objectionable records. He had one—a monologue by Troddles on finding his last clean pair of socks in the pail, where they had been placed by Murray in his ruthless quest of novelty records—beginning, “Oh, I say, you chaps, this is too darn bad!” which had a wonderful effect on any audience—and on Troddles, who has already made a dozen desperate attempts to get hold of it and smash it. There is another, a dialogue between Wilks and an elderly and respectable-looking gentleman, who was fishing from a punt moored out in the river, when we ran him down. We only allow grey-bearded scientists, who come armed with a licence from the County Council, to hear that, and I have strongly counselled Murray to keep it in a box by itself, labelled dangerous, and flying a red flag to warn off the thoughtless and unsuspecting.

But the gem of Murray’s collection is a cat fight. He got it one night when we looked in at a little pub up at Sunbury. It wasn’t a real fight and there weren’t any cats; but I never heard a better imitation, and Troddles laughed so much that he grew hysterical and rolled off the cider barrel on which he had been sitting, and had to be led outside and given brandy before he could recover himself.

It was given—the show, I mean, not the brandy—by a couple of burnt-cork minstrels, who were beating their way to a regatta up at Cookham somewhere, and the chap who did the wall-eyed Tom was a born actor. He must have studied cats all his life. The “spss spss” was the most marvellous imitation I have ever heard, and in fire and elocutionary force was beyond anything even any ordinary cat could have done. The man who took the part of the ginger cat wasn’t so good; his “riaous” were all right, but he was weak on the spit and his snarl didn’t ring true. That is expert criticism, of course! As a simple, plain, straightforward, noisy imitation of a cat fight the whole thing was superb, and as soon as Murray heard it he said, “By Jove, I must have a record of that!”

A few judicious words of flattery, aided by a shilling and a couple of mugs of beer, obtained an encore, and we had a cat fight on board every night for nearly a week, until the people on the houseboat opposite stopped it by lodging a complaint with the local Cruelty to Animals Inspector, who came down and threatened us with a summons. He wouldn’t believe us when we told him we hadn’t any cats on board to set fighting. When Murray turned on the record to convince him that we were speaking the truth he apologized for his doubt; but he said it seemed to him a more awful offence than the one he had come about, only it was out of his jurisdiction, and he was too just and honest to take the job away from the Inspector of Nuisances, to whom it rightfully belonged.

And it was with that record Murray proposed to celebrate our return, and make the neighbours feel glad and grateful they had got us back to stir things up and make them lively.

Of course he didn’t put it that way or think of it quite like that. We had had a quiet, uneventful evening reviewing our position and taking satisfaction in the profit we had made and the misadventures we had kept out of when Murray remarked casually, “I say, it would be a lark to try that cat fight record on some of the people round here.”

“Good idea; let’s!” said Wilks, jumping up. “We’ll give that chap at the back a treat. He hates cats, and is certain to rise to the bait.”

We didn’t tell Troddles what we were going to do. He doesn’t take much interest in scientific experiments, and he would be sure to consider it a waste of time and a possible gain of trouble and worry, and he holds that there is no need for a man to rise early or stay up late to glean that sort of harvest, which comes without seeking, particularly when men like Murray and Wilks are the gleaners. Besides, he was placidly sleeping on the couch as usual, and trying to make up for many long and unutilized hours of arrears, when he could only be asleep, if at all, on planks or, at best, in a canvas chair; and it didn’t seem worth disturbing him for the short half hour or so we intended the experiment to last.

Our next-door neighbour on the left, on whom we might have relied for amusement and education in plain and fancy swearing, was still away on his holidays, with his house locked up, and not so much as an old charwoman left to be annoyed if all the animals in the Zoo came and fought in the back garden; but the man at the back would be good for as much excitement and diversion as would be good for us, Murray considered, and so, accordingly, we clambered after him over the fence and set the infernal machine going under a bush of rosemary for remembrance. The record never sounded better, and no cat fight more provocative of boots and water jugs and cuss words thrown out of upper windows, but we didn’t raise the feeblest protest in any direction. It was very disappointing, and half way through the third rendering of the “piece” Murray asked us if it could be that our long absence had reduced our neighbours to a condition of such listless apathy that they couldn’t even rise to a cat fight.

I was about to suggest that the reducing might have been done before we went away, and that we hadn’t been absent long enough to allow of a complete convalescence, when I thought I heard a window being cautiously raised, and at the same moment Wilks said “Hist!”

“It isn’t here; it’s next door,” I whispered back, and Wilks nodded comprehension, and was going to chuckle when an old-nail brush came flying through the air and caught him on the ear, and changed the nature and direction of his remarks. At the same moment an irascible voice snarled, “Get out, you beasts!” Murray switched off the fight, and made a rustling in the bushes in a very realistic imitation of the beasts getting out. The man at the window chuckled as he shut it again and went back, evidently very well pleased with himself.

We allowed him five minutes to get comfortably settled, and then we made those cats come back and fight as they had never fought before. Mindful of his last experience, Wilks kept out of the line of fire this time, and I had taken up a safe and unobtrusive position behind a fruit tree of some kind when we heard a door being unbolted.

“Look up, Murray, he’s coming out,” I whispered softly. Murray nodded and stopped the machine, and then he dropped it in a hurry and joined me behind the tree. We hurt each other in seeing who could climb it first. I won by the fraction of a second, because Murray was handicapped by a great brindle bulldog, who attached itself to the seat of his trousers and made climbing difficult. Fortunately the garment was old, and as Murray was swarming into safety over the first branch it parted, and he went up and the dog went down, and each the more easily and swiftly for travelling separate. That dog had strong business instincts, and Wilks, who had been doubling up in paroxysms of mirth, which he dared not vent in any more noisy way, grew serious all at once and sought refuge on top of a chicken-run. It was the quickest move I have ever seen him make, and, having made it, he was not so fortunate as we. That chicken shed was a flimsy home-made concern, and with an ominous crack the roof parted and let him through.

It was our turn to smile then, and we would have, only we were too worried and anxious about other things. Our position was a suspicious one, we felt, and whatever explanation we offered was bound to be awkward for us. By and by it began to dawn on us that we were not going to be asked for an explanation—not until the morning, anyway. It seemed to me an extraordinary careless thing to do to go and leave a valuable dog like that out all night, and I asked Murray if he didn’t think it a case for the Prevention of Cruelty Society. Murray said from what he had seen of it he thought that dog was quite capable of looking after itself, and as an afterthought he expressed his opinion of our neighbour.

“The idea of turning a ferocious brute like that on to us, and then calmly going back to bed and not caring a hang if we get torn to pieces,” he complained.

“Well, of course, he thought it was only cats,” I pointed out, “and if you ask me the joke is not with us this time.”

“The dog is,” he growled. “He’ll sit there till morning. I know those brutes, and if you aren’t already aware of it our position is about as serious as it is silly.”

I had feared as much; but Murray’s definite statement seemed to bring it away from the regions of idle speculation, and force it upon me as a solid and unpleasant fact. I called over to Wilks and asked him if he felt equal to throwing himself into the breach. Bulldogs only bite once, I assured him, and if he watched his chance he could be out and half-way up the garden before he was overtaken. He refused promptly, although I urged upon him that there was no danger, and quite likely it wouldn’t hurt him a great deal.

Murray said he didn’t believe the dog was dangerous at all, only playful; but he took darn good care not to try, I noticed, even though Wilks and I both pointed out to him that it was his place to provide the martyr, since we were, in a sense, his guests, and the enterprise belonged to him entirely.

We tried coaxing and flattery, and we tried apples. We were in an apple tree, we discovered, and the boughs were well laden with fruit somewhat hard and immature for eating purposes, but very well adapted for ammunition. We flung bushels, but the dog didn’t seem to mind. Quite likely we didn’t hit him once in a dozen shots; we couldn’t see at all clearly to aim or mark results, and if we did have any luck at all it only resulted in making our custodian more grimly and savagely determined to have us if it waited until breakfast-time for us.

Fortunately it was a calm night and not a bit cold or damp; but, all the same, we were glad when we heard Troddles whistling us up an hour or so later from our own premises.

He whistled back and Troddles called out of the darkness: “Bob, Murray, where are you? I’m off to bed. It’s nearly twelve.”

I whistled again, and this time he located us and came ambling down to the dividing fence, and sat on top of it while we outlined our position and predicament to him.

“A bulldog!” he exclaimed. “Phew! you’re in a bit of a hole, aren’t you?”

I said Wilks was, if you could rightly term a chicken-run with half the roof smashed in a hole; but we were up in an apple tree, and having tried it and found it wanting in several directions essential for comfort and rest, we were fain to leave it and try bed for a change.

Troddles said he didn’t feel equal to tackling bulldogs, and unless he went round and knocked up the owner of the beast to come and release us he didn’t see what he could do.

“Playing cats,” I said with a grin, and Troddles grinned back, and said in that case he didn’t think he would bother the owner of the dog. He was going on to tell us that we mustn’t hurt the dog either, who was only a dumb, faithful beast, doing its duty; only Wilks got impatient about it, and pointed out other duties owing to ourselves so shortly and sourly that Troddles was forced to realize that we hadn’t brought him down there at midnight merely to sit on a fence and advocate kindness to aggressive bulldogs and consideration for their owners.

This view of his responsibilities or something else disturbed Troddles, and while he was finding a solution or an easier position the fence caved in under his weight and shot him into the garden and fell across him. The dog went for him straight away, but, being bewildered by the rapidity with which things were happening, it looked for him on the fence instead of under it. Troddles saw his chance and took it, or else it was sheer luck. Anyhow, he raised the fence on his shoulders and sent the dog flying off into our garden, and the next moment Murray and I were down beside him, and helping him to wedge up the good and efficient barrier between ourselves and sudden death.

“Thanks, old man,” said Murray gratefully. “That was a darn smart trick. You’ve saved us from the dog, but how do we get home?”

Troddles said he wasn’t able to realize that he was quite as far out as he had inadvertently come, and all he could say with certainty yet was that it wouldn’t be past that dog as far as he was concerned. He helped us to wedge up the fence, and while we were doing it Wilks extricated himself, and suggested that in this case the longest way round would be the shortest way home. If we cut across half-a-dozen gardens we could get out into a lane and so round to our own road, and that was the route we took.

Murray retrieved his phonograph, and we had a horribly nervous pilgrimage over rhubarb and rhododendron plantations, cutting our hands and tearing our clothes until we were able to get on to a wall and make an easier passage along it to the back lane.

Murray, who can never let well alone, complained that we had had much toil and misery for singularly small results, and to quiet him we allowed him to give one more entertainment, which we said must positively be the last. It was! Murray slipped in by a side gate of a house at the corner, and planted his machine on the lawn and turned it on and came and joined us. We were hiding behind the wall, and peeping over to see the fun or hear it. It was a brief entertainment and soon over on both sides, for a sturdy, determined-looking man turned into the lane just as the fight was over and Murray was going to start it off again. We moved off so as not to arouse suspicion, and to our dismay he entered the garden we had been operating in and locked the gate after him. When we sneaked back to recover the phonograph it had gone.

“There goes seven-and-six,” commented Wilks. “Perhaps it is as well. I had a presentiment that we should be getting into trouble over that record, and now we can’t.”

In the morning the man who had sneaked the phonograph came round to see us on his own account. He hadn’t come to apologize and he didn’t bring our property back. He didn’t know then that it was our property, and if he had he couldn’t make restitution, because it had been stolen in the night along with things of less bulk and greater value. He had seen us hanging about his place, and recognized us, and although he didn’t make any charge or insinuate anything, we must own that it looked singular, and so on.

Quite a lot of our neighbours had lost quite a lot of things that night, including the man who had turned his dog into a neighbour’s garden to worry and mangle poor, inoffensive cats, at which Murray whooped in sheer joy.

“And the first night of our return, too,” said Wilks coolly. “It looks fishy. Best own up, Murray.”

So Murray owned up. He said we hadn’t been out for spoons and plated silverware, but on a sort of Midsummer’s Night Dream, and to help it and ourselves we had taken with us, and had had taken from us, the most wonderfully realistic imitation of a cat fight ever recorded.

“Well, what was it doing in my garden?” persisted our visitor, somewhat densely I thought.

Murray explained as gently as he could that it was intended to bring him out of bed and make him stand at his window in his nighty and swear and chuck things into the garden and gratify us who were at once the audience and the actors.

“My garden isn’t,” retorted the other coldly. “If your phonograph hadn’t been stolen I think I should have felt constrained to put it on the fire.”

He had obviously got his back up about something, and he took a lot of unnecessary pains to represent us to our neighbours as men of irresponsible minds, who were given to playing jokes of a malicious and disturbing nature, thereby attracting the attention of burglars and causing them—the neighbours, I mean, not the burglars—much sorrow and loss. The man who owned the bulldog came round to see us four times, and twice we were out and twice we pretended to be, and then he sent a letter full of abuse and defamatory statements, for which he must have been properly ashamed, and repenting two days later, when we became heroes and our name and fame were on every one’s tongue, and Troddles had to scurry down the road with agitated haste and flaming face to get out of sight of beautiful maidens and admiring servant girls who would point him out and say to their friends, “That’s one of the men who caught the burglars.”

The phonograph did it; the phonograph and Troddles and us, of course, though we certainly came in at the end. Troddles had got on the track of Godolphin by means of advertisement. The loss of the dog worried him for sentimental reasons, more than all the other losses he or we had sustained of our own or other people’s property, and a night or two after our impromptu entertainment, which did not entertain and was not entertaining, he took his pipe and set off to somewhere out Wimbledon way, where a collie, which had been found straying and impounded, was waiting identification. It was not Godolphin I may as well say at once, and we didn’t suppose it was.

Troddles walked back, fueling disappointed and sore over it, and somewhere in the mean, dirty streets between Merton and Tooting he lost himself in trying to take a short cut. It wasn’t a very serious blunder; but it entailed a good deal of extra walking, and incidentally it brought him within reach of a coincidence too curious to be overlooked even by Troddles. In a small, unobtrusive villa, one of a pair in a quiet, unobtrusive thoroughfare, he heard a cat fight going on in the front room, and something about the higher notes of the tenor cat brought vividly to his mind a little old-world, sanded bar-parlour, with two men garbed ridiculously, spitting and snarling, and Murray prancing round them in a state of frantic excitement and glee, and exhorting them to “keep it up.” Troddles is not of a suspicious nature, and it was only by the merest chance that he noticed the house enough to identify it when called upon later to do so, and he wasn’t even sure of the name of the road. What he did notice was that Murray had been making a quite unnecessary fuss about the lost record, seeing that they must be fairly common and doubtless to be bought anywhere at stores’ price.

“I say, Murray,” he said, half an hour later, when he arrived home footsore and weary, and still glooming over the ill-success of his mission, “that old cat fight thing you are making such a song over is as cheap as dirt. Those fellows had you. I heard one quite as good, in fact the very duplicate of yours, in a house I passed coming back.”

We thought he was perturbed over the information, because it reflected on his standing and judgment as a business man and a man of taste; but it wasn’t that altogether, and he told us it wasn’t. Allowing that Troddles really had heard a cat fight being done on a phonograph he, Murray, was ready to bet long odds that it was his record, and it seemed to him that a close inquiry as to how the man who owned it came by it might be interesting to some of our neighbours, who had lost things of greater value, not to mention our own names and reputations.

Wilks jumped at the possibility immediately, and he bullied Troddles for not being sharper-witted and realizing that the record was more likely to be Murray’s under the circumstances than a duplicate.

“Well, what could I have done if I had?” Troddles demanded helplessly. “I couldn’t go in and take it away and say, ‘Oh! excuse me, but that’s ours,’ could I?”

“Oh! well, you have the address,” said Murray soothingly. “It will want careful handling, and perhaps it is as well you didn’t try and bring it off on your own.”

But Troddles hadn’t the address; he hadn’t even put a cross on the gatepost. He believed he could find the place again, he said, and he was willing to try, although he was very tired, and would much sooner rest quietly on the couch with his pipe until supper was ready.

Wilks and Murray didn’t hear him out; they were getting into their boots, and looking out stout, serviceable walking-sticks in case there should be a shindy, which they rather anticipated and hoped for.

“We’ll pick up that chap at the corner and take him with us if he’s at home,” said Wilks. “There may be some of his property to identify. I wonder if we had better go into the police station and give information.”

I thought we had better, but Murray disagreed. He said we should look precious foolish if Troddles couldn’t find the house again, and they might even consider we were having a lark with them and resent it accordingly. He said:

“Let’s find the house first and hear that record, and then we can get a policeman and a search warrant and break in and arrest the lot.”

“But suppose they don’t play?” I objected. “They may not be musical or they may, and in any case they won’t want to sit listening to a cat fight all the evening.”

The decision didn’t rest with us, after all. We found the subject of Murray’s intended experiment in patience and sweetness of temper at home, and at first he failed to understand the deeper significance of Troddles’s discovery. In fact, he seemed bored, and was inclined to be cold and unresponsive, until Murray asked him if, in finding the cat fight record, we didn’t stand a likely chance of finding other things in which he had more interest.

“At any rate, they were all stolen together,” said Murray, “and it won’t be out of place to ask the present owner precisely how he came by it.”

“That’s true,” said the other thoughtfully. “You have no doubt about it being your record?”

Troddles had; but Murray and Wilks had not. The things had been made by us and we had found the performers and paid for their services. Had it been “Home Sweet Home,” or an operatic selection they wouldn’t have felt so sure, but a cat fight they could swear to. It convinced the other man, too, and rather to our annoyance he whistled over the policeman on duty, who had been very much on duty since the night of the burglary, and did what I considered should be done.

The policeman said he did. He said it somewhat sadly, as though he would like to give half a week’s pay to be allowed to forget it.

“Well, among the things taken was a phonograph with a very special and curious record. One of these gentlemen heard this record in a private house near Merton as he was passing this evening. There may not be anything in it, but it is certainly curious, and we’re going there to investigate. Is it worth telling them at the station?”

The policeman said it wasn’t so much a question of “worth” as a distinct and obvious duty, and that being the case, of course we did it. The police were almost flattering in the attention they paid us, and Troddles began to believe he was somebody, and confided to me that he wished he had never heard the beastly record. He is a modest, unassuming fellow, and this sudden popularity frightened him, particularly when he remembered the hazy recollection he had of street and house on which it was based. Policemen are notoriously fickle in their affections, and he didn’t want to be a policeman’s pet for half an hour and his scorn and suspicion ever after.

A plain clothes and plainer visaged and still plainer spoken man came with us, and we all went together in a cab to Merton, where we got out and Troddles started to guide us to what Murray idiotically persisted in calling “The Burglars’ Lair.” By that time he was considerably rattled, and he is never very strong on points of observation; but I don’t think we walked more than five unnecessary miles before he came to a street which he positively identified as the street he required, and a house which he “rather believed” was the one we were in search of.

As a matter of fact, it was, but the inmates were not obliging enough to play Murray’s record and so afford us positive evidence, and we came to a standstill. The detective didn’t seem to know how to go on, for all that it was his business; but Wilks did. He went across the road and knocked and told the gentleman who answered him that he had been informed that he had a very rare and curious phonograph record, and as he was making a collection of such records he would be very much obliged if he would sell it, or at least permit him, Wilks, to hear it. The man said he was sorry that he couldn’t accommodate Wilks, who had evidently been misinformed. He hadn’t a phonograph. But the people over the road had something of the sort, though it sounded more like a couple of cats fighting to him than music.

He came back to us with the intelligence, and we knocked, and a cripple, a mere boy, answered the door.

The detective asked him as a favour which must not be refused to show us his phonograph. He broke down then and began to cry, which argued a guilty knowledge to my mind, and that is how the policeman read it. There was no one else in the house; but there was a wonderful accumulation of stolen property, including much belonging to our neighbours, and later on, after we had left, two elderly and seemingly respectable City men were waylaid and captured on their return from a business outing by which they supplemented their incomes and endeavoured to provide for their old age. They had never been suspected, let alone convicted, and on that account they got off with eighteen months apiece, and the boy altogether. It was the boy who was the unwitting cause of their betrayal. The phonograph was a novelty to him, and he beguiled the long hours of solitude by having an impromptu entertainment all to himself just as Troddles happened to pass by.

CHAPTER XVII.
A THOROUGH CLEAR OUT.

One morning in late September, Murray got a letter with a foreign stamp which seemed to cause him a good deal of uneasiness. He didn’t say anything at the time—being afraid of worrying us probably—but as we were crossing the Common on our way to the station he blurted out the news which was having such a depressing effect on him. His long-distance relatives were in Paris winding up their holiday, and any day now, even that one, they might arrive in London.

Troddles said, “Oh, gosh!” and looked unhappy. Wilks whistled thoughtfully, and I began to reproach myself for my callous neglect of Mrs. Bloggs and to wonder if time, in conjunction with an olive branch disguised as a plated teapot, would be sufficient to induce her to empty my old rooms in my favour.

“The house isn’t so very bad,” observed Murray tentatively. “With a thorough clear out and a little tasteful decoration—a few flowers or something put about—it will make as good a showing as most suburban places do.”

“There are several gaps which can hardly be filled adequately with a pot of geraniums,” said I. “We can tidy it up, if we have time, but I think the clearing out process has been pretty well done already. What you want is a Maple or a Whiteley, not a florist, and even then I doubt whether you can lay in a dog, a canary, those fowls, and a governess-car, not to mention re-covering the dining-room suite and getting that confounded billiard-table upstairs again. That will take time, as well as cash, and at the best you can only make it a case of simple restitution.”

“Oh, don’t croak!” said Murray impatiently. “I didn’t guarantee the rotten things, and what’s the good of them, anyway, if they are not to be used? If the place looks all right it will do, and a little energy and ingenuity and a few shillings judiciously expended on crockery and pots and pans will work wonders. The chickens were stolen and the dog ran away, and as I’m going to run away too, and all the other things will only be missed or discovered by degrees, there’s no need for you to set up as a Cassandra, Bobby A., and preach desolation and ruin.”

“Perhaps you will get on better if we keep out of it,” suggested Troddles hopefully.

“And perhaps I shan’t,” retorted Murray. “You sprint for home and three hours’ graft with a slop-pail and a coarse apron to-night, Trod. I’ll explain the dilapidations, but I won’t apologize for a pigsty. ‘Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,’ and if my cousin caught sight of his as we have left it he might be inclined to say he hoped not.”

“Why don’t you turn a charwoman on?” asked Wilks. “Run back now, there’s time, and charter old Mother Slop for a full day at double rates.”

Murray hesitated; but the chance of finding a charwoman disengaged and ready to work on such short notice and the dead certainty of getting late induced him to decline.

“It’s a jolly good idea, though,” he said. “Tonight we’ll get in two or three, or six if necessary, and keep them at it. They’ll be able to do it all down in an evening, and that will set us free to straighten and mend.”

“I suppose we shall have time?” said Troddles, joy at the prospect of dodging domestic duties struggling with dread at the idea of returning to find an indignant householder waiting for an explanation of things which simply couldn’t be explained.

It was all very well for Murray to talk glibly of cleaning up and straightening out, but we couldn’t clean up a two-foot oily patch on a nearly new Brussels carpet where Wilks knocked over a bottle of salad oil, or straighten a four-inch hole on the drawing-room couch where Troddles rested his pipe inadvertently before it was properly out. Some people, too, prefer a piano with all the notes intact, and, although I am not a player, I found five broken hammers a decided handicap. Wilks said he could fix them all right with a touch of glue, and also fake up the castors on the couch and one of the easy-chairs which had given way at odd times when they wanted Troddles to go for a walk and Troddles didn’t want to. Murray said he could mend all the windows that were more than just cracked a bit, and if I and Troddles were men enough to do our share there was nothing in the proposition to cause us the least uneasiness or concern.

He showed a good deal of both himself as we drew near the house that evening; but no demented man was waiting for us on the doorstep with a coal hammer, as we half expected, and when we got inside and found the house empty and untidy as we had left it, we began to take courage and accept the wildly optimistic speculations of Wilks and Murray as reasonable possibilities, and to believe that four young men without family or influence could turn themselves into practical cabinet makers, glaziers, upholsterers, and several other things all in a minute. Only we couldn’t charter any female assistance, and that threw a dampness on Troddles and myself. We had a shrewd suspicion that the scrubbing-brush and house-flannel would come our way, after all, and they would have done if Troddles had not had the brilliant inspiration of engaging a jobbing gardener and his wife, with whom he had made friends during a violent attack of horticultural fever. They were an energetic and honest couple, who valued the chance of making half a sovereign above a quiet and restful evening, and hustled after the job as though they really wanted it.

We had a busy evening, and did a great deal, though not all of it to our advantage, or to the improvement of the furniture, as far as I could see. Wilks made an awful mess of the piano. He began by taking out the front to get at the works, and laid it on the floor. Then just as he was gluing the hammers together in a very crocky and insecure way Troddles strolled in to see how he was getting on, and promptly put his foot through the front panel. Wilks yelled at him, but too late to save the panel, and in his excitement he tipped over the glue pot, and the contents ran down and stuck the keys together in groups. In the middle octave you could play eight notes at once by striking any one of them, and sometimes two would play, and sometimes more. It was very quaint, and reminded me of those old barbaric Eastern tunes, only, of course, it would never do for ordinary modern pieces, and Wilks got hot and very bad tempered as he settled down with a knife and a kettle of boiling water to make the notes play individually, as is usual.

Murray wasn’t enjoying himself over much either. There were four panes of glass that were too fragmentary to be useful or slightly, and he got them out with a hammer quite easily. He bent up half-a-crown’s worth of new glass and cut his hand badly in trying to replace them, and I was saved from revealing my own incapacity to glaze a window, after I had sworn I knew all about it and had done scores, by the fact that we had no more glass, and it was too late to get any.

The gardener took it on. That man was a treasure, and he saw himself in the direct line of succession to all of ours. He promised to be round the first thing in the morning and have the windows mended before we left. He mended the castors, helped Wilks botch the piano, cleaned out the grease spot from the carpet, and, crowning triumph, cut a piece of plush from somewhere where it wouldn’t be missed and patched the hole in the couch with it so deftly that you would never have noticed it unless you knew it was there.

In the matter of cleaning and tidying, his wife, with his assistance, also worked wonders; but at twelve o’clock there was still much to be done, and we engaged them both for the whole of the next day, and left them hard at it when we went off to business in the morning.

“Given another day and we’ll do it yet,” said Murray triumphantly, and we really thought we should. We were given another day and another, and then when everything it was possible to do had been done, we began to complain. These people were not keeping faith with us, we considered, and although really we didn’t care if we never did see them, the knowledge that we had got to see them, and should never be better prepared for the ordeal got on our nerves when we found they didn’t come. We had spent a couple of pounds over cleaning and restoring alone, mostly in wages, and I for one felt we had had good value for our money. Not only in the house, but the garden and sheds and fittings had all been touched up and made to look natural, and the house would bear quite a close inspection. We who knew what it had been when we took possession could not deceive ourselves. The house we were waiting to hand over bore as much resemblance to that as a prize-fighter does to himself ten minutes after a punishing fight in which he has been beaten—still useful but not so decorative. But also it was as marked in the difference it bore to the state in which we had started out to remedy our carelessness and disorderly habits.

And still those people did not come, nor write to explain why they didn’t and when they would. We felt as though we were being imposed upon, and even Troddles got impatient and was heard to observe more than once that he could not stand the strain much longer. I think that was the trouble really with us all. We had keyed our surroundings and style of living a thought too high for comfort and everyday use, and we couldn’t live up to it. As Wilks said, somewhat scoffingly, fancy having to cook bacon with one eye on the pan and the other on the door in case some one should come home and catch you using the cooking utensils. And the idea of having to clean out the pan and hang it up before eating the bacon was bound to be anathema to men like Wilks and Murray, not to mention Troddles.

I myself had an idea that we were rather overdoing it, and might attract suspicion by the very orderliness we were at such pains to maintain. It wasn’t natural—for men, anyhow—and I couldn’t help thinking that a little informality, a little dirt and litter which suggested use and homeliness, would look far more effective. I thought that way most when I had to go and clean saucepans.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we waited and those silly people did not come to claim their house while there was enough of it left to be worth troubling about. Murray ran backwards and forwards to the front gate to gaze wistfully down the road like a demented understudy to Sister Anne, and, like her, he couldn’t see anybody coming. Troddles slept placidly, and we played noughts and crosses, which was considered a safe game and one which could not possibly do any damage to the house or furniture. It was a horrible period of suspense and expectation, and rather than face another such I would sooner allow any fools enough to let Murray mind their houses come home and find them burnt down, and ourselves dancing gleefully round the smoking ruins.

We felt sure of them on Friday. I don’t know why, except that Friday is a proverbially unlucky day, and I reckoned the day of their return was going to be counted as the blackest and most unlucky of their lives by Murray’s confiding relations; but they didn’t come, and we became anxious as well as vexed. Anarchism was rather rife in Paris just then. One or two bombs had exploded and a café had been blown up, and the dead silence made it seem not impossible to our heated imaginations that Murray’s relatives had been made accidental sacrifices on the altar of liberty.

Murray said, “No such luck.” I don’t know what he meant precisely, and he wouldn’t explain, though Wilks, following out a train of thought conjured up by Murray’s remark, somewhat crudely observed that while, of course, we did not want these people to be blown up, it was fairly obvious that if they had been we shouldn’t be. Also, he said we had done our best and all that could be reasonably expected from us, and he had stood his ground, prepared to face the music like a man; but this delay and suspense was beyond toleration, and on Monday morning he should wash his last teacup in that house and go out with bag and belongings and never more return.

“I suppose that will have to be attended to,” he said. “What are you going to do? You are not reckoning on returning to Bloggy, are you? She won’t have you.”

“She’ll have to for three months, anyhow,” said I cheerfully. “Mrs. Bloggs, or Bloggy as you disrespectfully call her, is taking a holiday at Margate. I found that out and planned accordingly. The relative who is running the house during her absence is young and unsuspicious, and being anxious to show her aunt what a clever business woman she is she accepted my offer to take rooms for myself and friend, whose name is Troddles, for three months, and in writing too. I can claim it in law.”

“Murray,” said I sternly, “Mrs. Bloggs is Wesleyan Methodist and very strict. She never swears. That she will curse, in the Biblical sense, I haven’t the slightest doubt unless, as I hope, time has allowed my own sterling qualities as a lodger to loom from out the vices and follies of my friends, and become apparent in her sight.”

“She’ll need to take to drink before they do that,” said Murray crudely. “Well, it’s twelve o’clock. Put up the shutters, Troddles, and go to bed. The wanderers will not come to-day. I might send them a telegram in the morning, ‘return at once and all will be forgiven,’ only I don’t know the address. Anyway, they are sure to come home to-morrow.”

But they didn’t! We took a lot of trouble to leave the house tidy and clean, and we fed out and went to a theatre in the evening so as to give it and ourselves every chance; but it was all wasted effort. Murray said we needn’t look for them now until Monday, because his cousin’s wife was religious and wouldn’t cross the water on any account on a Sunday, and he thought we might relax a bit and have a quiet, restful day. Of course, we should have to be careful, but there would be no need to wash up with such scrupulous fidelity, and if any of us wanted to smash a plate or a teacup we might do so. Just one to keep our hand in in case we got out of practice and lost the art of breaking crockery altogether.

Sunday broke bright and fresh and fair. There was nothing to warn us, no sign in the heavens, no earthquake, not so much as a thunderstorm. We rose late, tubbed, and left the bath-room as we shouldn’t like to find it, breakfasted, and cheerfully turned away to our pipes and papers, leaving a muddle of dirty crockery and littered tables for later attention. Housework is a sickening thing, anyhow. Here for a week past we had been making our beds and dusting and washing up with scrupulous regularity, and that one neglect made all the past efforts of no service or utility whatever.

Troddles went to sleep over his pipe in the dining-room, Wilks was checking accounts on the table, and I sat with a book between them. We were all in our shirt-sleeves and very peaceful and happy, and the atmosphere was like that of a third-class smoker on a wet day with the windows up. Murray had gone out to the gate partly from force of habit, and partly because he is restless by nature and can’t sit down quietly for half an hour in case a chance of getting into trouble or causing it misses him and goes to some one else.

He said he went to look for a paper boy, but what he found was something vastly different. It was a patriarchal Billy-goat belonging to Sniggs, the sweep, wandering leisurely along the road, and a long way down Sniggs himself was standing in chatty converse with a belated milkman. To slip in and get a lettuce, which Troddles had laid in for a special tea-time treat for himself, was the work of an instant. Murray took a cautious peep down the road. The sweep’s attention was still engaged so he opened the gate and lured Billy up the path and into the house. Then he shut the door and went back to see what would happen.

Sniggs was celebrated for something more than his usefulness when dirty chimneys were in question. He was a character in his way, and was noted for three things—a ferocious temper, a wonderfully fluent and profane vocabulary, and an inordinate pride in his goats. Murray’s trick, he reasoned, was calculated to touch up all three at once, and just as a quiet Sunday morning experiment, when there was nothing else doing or to be done, he made it. It succeeded to an extent. Sniggs missed his goat at once, and his temper soon after. Murray said he believed he had seen a goat in the road a few minutes before, when he was appealed to, and the irascible owner went off swearing and flourishing his stick, and vowing that there would be dead goat on sale within the hour. What Murray did not know and Sniggs did was that that goat possessed a temper more deadly ferocious than its owner’s. Being only a goat it couldn’t compete in the matter of profanity; but when it came to slaughter in a fair stand-up tussle, without swords or firearms, the goat was more likely to provide dead chimney sweep, which is no earthly use to anyone, than Sniggs to lay in a stock of goat which is said to taste like venison.

You never would have thought it to look at him. He had a face like a benevolent Mephistopheles grieving over the sin and folly of mankind—I am referring to the goat, of course, not Sniggs—and when Wilks first looked up by chance and caught sight of it, wistfully surveying us round the door, he laughed musically and said: “Just look what’s blown in. Choof, Charlie, choof, this isn’t your stable.”

Charlie didn’t choof (whatever that may be) to any appreciable extent, and Wilks got up and went to drive him out—kindly and good-naturedly, you understand, because Wilks knows you should always be kind and good-natured towards poor dumb things. He got half way across the room, and then something in Charlie’s eye caught his attention and made him hesitate and draw back. As he drew back the goat came on; he had a waggishly ferocious air as though he would say, “If you’re on for a gamble I’ll toss you for your pants.”

Wilks slid round the table in something of a hurry, and Billy bolted after him. Wilks yelled and woke up Troddles; Troddles jumped up, and the goat butted him into the fireplace, and did in a hand-painted screen, which we had somehow contrived to avoid smashing, though Murray had thrown a match at it once and singed one corner. I thought I might be in the way, so I climbed on to the sideboard and refereed from there. I told Wilks to catch hold of its horns, but before Wilks could grasp my meaning the horns caught him two lovely swats that sent him sprawling.

Then it was Troddles’s turn for refreshment, and while he was being served Wilks got on the table and said I was a coward not to come and assist him with the fire shovel. I said I didn’t think the animal was dangerous, only just playful as yet, and the very worst thing we could do would be to go and aggravate him with a fire shovel before we knew his intentions. Wilks thought I was unnecessarily cautious, and said so. “You saw him chase me all round the room and butt Troddles into the fireplace,” he complained. “What do you suppose he wanted us for—to kiss us? You want one of us to get killed before you can believe we are not amusing ourselves, I suppose.”

I told him not to be foolish—any more foolish than he could help, that is—and, at any rate, not to exaggerate his own danger or asperse my intelligence. I knew the moment I saw Troddles’s show that they were not out for fun, though I thought the goat was. By then Troddles had recovered his breath, and woke up sufficiently to take an intelligent interest in things.

To the first query I, of course, could give no answer; but the reply to the second was obvious, smashing up the furniture and doing it darn well. There were a lot of shiny reflective surfaces in that room—not so shiny or reflective possibly as when their owners were in residence, with knowledge and a serving-maid to bring up the polish—and the goat evidently thought they were reflections cast at him, and resented them accordingly. He wasn’t a big animal compared with a cow or a camel; but I was surprised at the way he disintegrated that room. He did more solid damage inside five minutes than all four of us together could have accomplished in as many months by ordinary usage, and we who would have to stand the racket could do nothing but perch on high, and expostulate vainly.

In the meantime Murray, blissfully unconscious of what was going on indoors, was having a pleasant Sunday morning out by the gate watching Sniggs, now in the last stage of exasperation, play hide-and-seek in the front gardens after his goat, and listening to and enjoying language that was not fitting or proper for him to hear. Of course we didn’t know what he was up to, or he would have stood a good chance of having another display of fluent and forcible language with a more personal application. We wondered what had become of him, vaguely and more because we were sorry he should be losing his share of this new and novel experience than because we really wanted him. But when Billy began to get really destructive we thought Murray might serve other and more useful purposes than those of merely self-interest—with a gun or an axe or something, for instance; and in default of Murray, Wilks said we’d have to tackle the proposition ourselves before it got serious. He said it was absurd for three strong men to be afraid of one ordinary-sized goat, however fierce and aggressive it was, and we must all jump down and tackle it together.

“That will confuse it,” he explained, quite needlessly, I thought; “and as it won’t know which to go for first it will quite likely give us a safe opportunity of running in and securing it before it can do any more damage.”

“Will you take the business end?” I queried doubtfully, for I didn’t believe that goat was so mentally slow as Wilks implied, and, anyhow, the man who got the first prop wouldn’t find much consolation in the fact that he couldn’t get a second. He wouldn’t need it, having died to save his friends.

Wilks said we ought to toss for it; so we tossed, and he won, or lost, whichever way you look at it, and then he pretended he had been going to all along, only he wanted to see if we were really as cowardly and selfish as we seemed to be. He spoke rather bitterly, and when Troddles counted us off and said “Three—jump!” he lingered just a thought too long to finish what was on his mind, and consequently the manœuvre was not successful.

Troddles and I met and jammed in the drawing-room doorway after a brief but exciting sprint round the dining-room, and hurt each other in both trying to squeeze through at once. Billy unwedged us, and followed us in to see fair play, and we had another game of catch, in which we caught all that was going, and Billy fed us all the time.

Having wrecked the drawing-room we thought we’d give another apartment a turn, and leading the way out I met Wilks in the passage, and we both sat down together, and the unspeakable goat butted Troddles on top of us and said “Ba-a-h!” whether in derision or contempt, I cannot say.

Wilks is all right, really, and no coward. He just wants stirring up, and then he will tackle anything. Perhaps the goat knew this, and perhaps he didn’t; but he did it. He caught him a bracing smack square and low down just as Wilks was getting on to his feet, and sent him flying along the hall. Wilks scrambled up, fighting mad, and grabbed the goat by his horns and tried to wring his neck. Troddles and I got half-way up the stairs and watched the combat, until Wilks caught sight of us and expostulated.

“Here, come down and do something,” he gasped. “This isn’t a circus turn. I’m fighting for my life and not for your amusement. Go and get a bit of rope, one of you—you, Bob, and you come and help me hold on, Troddles.”

We would far sooner have stayed where we were and applauded; but Wilks spoke determinedly, and as we didn’t like to be disobliging I slipped over the banisters and made for the kitchen, while Troddles reluctantly descended and caught the plunging intruder by as much of his horns as Wilks was not requiring. I think they learnt a good deal of the strength and determination of he-goats when they are vexed and spiteful. They both looked very warm and harassed when I returned, and Wilks snarled at me for being such a long time, from which I concluded that they were in no mood to profit by natural history lessons.

I lassoed Billy and fastened him up on a short tether to the newel post, and then Troddles and Wilks jumped away, and we went to get a drink while we puzzled out the next move, which must obviously be to move the goat outside. I thought Murray’s people might object to having to climb up over the scullery roof every time they wanted to go to bed; and, besides, some one must own the goat and be wanting it for other uses than watch-dogging in a strange house.

We met Murray coming in as we entered the kitchen. He had a six-inch grin, and before we could say anything he told us, if we wanted a treat, we should slip out to the front and hear old Sniggs swearing about his lost goat.

“Where did he go?” he added, looking round casually. “I turned him in here for a lark. Have you seen him?”

Wilks gazed at him in speechless disgust and wrath. I was just going to admit that a goat was somewhere about, and Troddles had got as far as, “Oh, I say, Murray, that’s too bad of you!” when there was a rending crash in the hall, and the next moment that calm, contemplative Mephistophelian face appeared round the door. Whoever built that house should be ashamed of it. We agreed upon that later—after we had got in the scullery and shut the door while we considered what was next to be done. Billy trailed through the kitchen, dragging the newel post after him, and came over to tell us not to be so much afraid, he only wanted to kill us a bit, and then his attachment caught in the table-legs and pulled it over.

“He’s cleared away most things,” said I. “You haven’t seen the drawing- and dining-rooms yet, Murray. When you do I think you’ll admit that jokes with goats are beyond our means.”

Murray didn’t understand me altogether, because he had not then seen just how much damage and destruction one small goat could accomplish; but he agreed that the jest had gone far enough and was getting tiresome. The only trouble was we didn’t see how to end it; but when we heard the goat patter off and a desolating smash follow from the hall immediately after, we decided that it would have to be stopped, and Wilks got a shovel and Troddles got a broom, and Murray and I armed ourselves with whatever came handy, and we set out to end it.

I don’t like at this stage to describe the battle that followed. It sounds extravagant, and if I told you half of the details of the campaign you wouldn’t believe me. It was Homeric, it was grand, it was ruinous. The goat was a more clever fighter than we had anticipated. He knew how to retreat as well as how to charge, and we were hampered by our numbers and too excited to attack warily and with the best effect. Troddles always loses his head at such times, and, having a broom, he was bound to spank something with it, if it was only Wilks’s ear or Murray’s shins. Wilks’s shovel didn’t always come down on the enemy either, and so we fought each other and the goat all over the house, wrecking and ruining everything in the way. And right in the middle of the fray Murray’s silly relatives came home.

We were on the stairs, beating the enemy into the open, when they opened the door and walked in as casually as though they had only been out for a brief walk. Believing himself to be exposed to a frontal attack, and with the line of retreat cut off, Billy charged the invaders pluckily and bolted over them to the street. We were surprised at the intrusion, but when Murray dropped his weapon and said “Oh, gosh!” a sickening fear of the truth came over us, and I sneaked upstairs to my room and began to dress myself for a quick and unostentatious retreat.

Troddles came up shortly afterwards and reported that there was an awful row on; but Murray was holding his own very well, and was putting everything on to the goat, including things which it had not done.

“I suppose it’s mean,” he said, “but I’m going to skip. It’s a darn shame, when we had got everything so nice too; but there’s no sense in waiting, and Murray will be able to lie better without me. Are you coming?”

“No,” said I. “I am going as sharp as I know how. I don’t know these people, and I don’t want to—now. They won’t want to know me either. I feel sure of that.”

Quietly and rapidly we got ourselves dressed and gathered together all our belongings within reach, resolving to sacrifice the rest or take the chance of Murray’s being able to retrieve them for us; and then, when the coast seemed clear, we sneaked down to the kitchen and round the garden to the front. Querulous, plaintive voices were rising from the dining-room as we passed the window, and the last we heard was a wicked swear-word, followed by “I don’t care a hang about that: you are responsible.”

Murray told us afterwards that he breathed more freely when he found we were gone. Wilks and he had had an exceedingly uncomfortable time, but in a sense we had gained by the episode of the goat. The greater had swallowed up the lesser, and he and Wilks had absolved themselves at the expense of the goat for everything that had been done or left undone, including Godolphin, who had been frightened away, and the canary, who had flown off on religious grounds. His cousin couldn’t deny the goat, having been butted by it, and as he didn’t see how to get adequate compensation from a chimney sweep, he was in a difficulty and a very bad temper.

“So much so,” said Murray with a grin, “that I told him I would never come near his place again.”

“That’s as well,” said I. “You won’t have a chance when the neighbours begin to talk. Anyway, you are well out of your difficulties, and as Troddles and I are only just beginning on ours, and Mrs. Bloggs returns to-morrow, would you mind hooking it and keeping away for a week, so that we can do the penitential act without having it marred, and manage to infuse sufficient of hope and trust in our unwilling landlady to induce her not to break the contract and pay forfeit?”

———————————————

Printed by Jarrold & Sons, Ltd., Norwich, England.

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

[The end of The Same Old Troddles—A Book of Laughter, by R. Andom (ps. of Alfred Walter Barrett).]

CONTENTS.


CHAPTER		PAGE
I.	FOLLY AND A FRYING-PAN	9
II.	TRODDLES’S MILLIONAIRE	26
III.	THE SACRIFICE OF PHRYNE	39
IV.	FIFTY UP AND SEVERAL DOWN	56
V.	FOUR MEN AND A MULE	71
VI.	A THOROUGH CLEAN UP	86
VII.	THE TALE OF A CAR	102
VIII.	ARRYSORYER	117
IX.	TRODDLES’S BURGLAR	134
X.	MURRAY AND A CAMERA	148
XI.	THE FIRE CALL	162
XII.	TRODDLES’S INVESTMENT	176
XIII.	WILKS’S FOLLY	190
XIV.	MURRAY’S TANGLED WEB	205
XV.	AT THE RACES WITH TRODDLES	221
XVI.	AN IMPROMPTU ENTERTAINMENT	236
XVII.	A THOROUGH CLEAR OUT	251

The Same Old Troddles.

CHAPTER I. FOLLY AND A FRYING-PAN.

CHAPTER II. TRODDLES’S MILLIONAIRE.

CHAPTER III. THE SACRIFICE OF PHRYNE.

CHAPTER IV. FIFTY UP AND SEVERAL DOWN.

CHAPTER V. FOUR MEN AND A MULE.

CHAPTER VI. A THOROUGH CLEAN UP.

CHAPTER VII. THE TALE OF A CAR.

CHAPTER VIII. ARRYSORYER.

CHAPTER IX. TRODDLES’S BURGLAR.

CHAPTER X. MURRAY AND A CAMERA.

CHAPTER XI. THE FIRE CALL.

CHAPTER XII. TRODDLES’S INVESTMENT.

CHAPTER XIII. WILKS’S FOLLY.

CHAPTER XIV. MURRAY’S TANGLED WEB.

CHAPTER XV. AT THE RACES WITH TRODDLES.

CHAPTER XVI. AN IMPROMPTU ENTERTAINMENT.

CHAPTER XVII. A THOROUGH CLEAR OUT.