Big Money

by P. G. Wodehouse

  'The Dream Come True?'

  'Yes.'

  Mr Frisby sat forward in his chair and stared at his fountain pen. He seemed to have fallen into a trance again.

  'It has never produced any copper,' Berry went on in a rather apologetic voice. 'But I was talking to a man at lunch, and he said that if one looked round one could always find someone to buy a mine.'

  Mr Frisby came to life.

  'Eh?'

  Berry repeated his remarks.

  Mr Frisby nodded.

  'So you can,' he said, 'if you pick the right sort of boob. And there's one born every minute.'

  'I was wondering if you could advise me as to the best way of setting about—'

  'You say this mine has never yielded?'

  'No.'

  'Well, you can't expect to get much for it, then.'

  'I don't,' said Berry.

  Mr Frisby took up his fountain-pen, gazed at it, and put it down again.

  'Well, I'll tell you,' he said. 'Oddly enough, I know a man – Hoke's his name. J. B. Hoke – he might make you an offer. He does quite a bit in that line. Buys up these derelict properties on the chance of some day striking something good. If you like, I'll get in touch with him.'

  'Thank you very much, sir.'

  'I believe he's in America just now. I'll have to find out. Of course, he wouldn't look at the thing unless he could get it cheap. Well, anyway, I'll get in touch with him.'

  'Thank you very much, sir.'

  'You're welcome,' said Mr Frisby.

  Berry withdrew. Mr Frisby took up the receiver and called a number.

  'Hoke?' he said. 'Frisby speaking.'

  'Yes, Mr Frisby?' replied a voice deferentially.

  It was a fat and gurgly voice. Hearing it, you would have conjectured that its owner had a red face and weighed a good deal more than he ought to have done.

  'Want to see you, Hoke.'

  'Yes, Mr Frisby. Shall I come to your office?'

  'No. Grosvenor House. About six.'

  'Yes, Mr Frisby.'

  'Be on time.'

  'Yes, Mr Frisby.'

  'Right. That's all.'

  'Yes, Mr Frisby.'

  IV

  People summoned by Mr Frisby to interviews in his apartment at Grosvenor House always exhibited a decent humility. They seemed to indicate by their manner how clearly they realized that in this inner shrine they were standing on holy ground. The red-faced man who had entered the sitting-room at six precisely almost grovelled.

  J. B. Hoke was one of those needy persons who exist on the fringe of the magic world of Finance and eke out a precarious livelihood by acting as 'Hi, you!' and Yes-men in ordinary to any of the great financiers who may wish to employ them. Willingness to oblige was Mr Hoke's outstanding quality. He would go anywhere you sent him and do anything you told him to do.

  'Good evening, Mr Frisby,' said J. B. Hoke. 'How are you?'

  'Never mind how I am,' said Mr Frisby. 'Got something I want you to do for me.'

  'Yes, Mr Frisby.'

  'You know I'm President of the Horned Toad Copper Corporation.'

  'Yes, Mr Frisby.'

  'Well, next door to it there's a small claim called the Dream Come True. It's been derelict for years.'

  'Yes, Mr Frisby.'

  'I've had a letter from my directors. They seem to want to take it over for some reason. We're putting in some developments on the Horned Toad and maybe they need the ground for workmen's shacks or something. They didn't say. I want you—'

  'To trace the owner, Mr Frisby?'

  'Don't interrupt,' said T. Paterson curtly. 'I know the owner. The thing belongs to my secretary, a man named Conway. He was left it by someone, he tells me. I want you to go to him and buy it for me. Cheap.'

  'Yes, Mr Frisby.'

  'I can't appear in the matter myself. If young Conway thought that Horned Toad Copper was after his property, he'd stick his price up at once.'

  'Yes, Mr Frisby.'

  'And there's no hurry about buying it. I told him I would mention it to you, and I said you were in America. You don't want to seem too eager. I'll tell you when to shoot.'

  'Yes, Mr Frisby.'

  'Right. That's all.'

  T. Paterson Frisby gave a Napoleonic nod, to indicate that the interview was concluded, and J. B. Hoke, just falling short of knocking his forehead on the floor, retired.

  Having left the presence, Mr Hoke went downstairs and turned into the passage leading to the American bar. A man who was sitting on a stool, sipping a cocktail, got up as he entered.

  'Well?' he said.

  He eyed Mr Hoke woodenly. He was one of those excessively smoothly shaved men of uncertain age and expressionless features whom one associates at sight with the racing world. It was on a racecourse that J. B. Hoke had first made his acquaintance. His name was Kelly, and in the circles in which he moved he was known as Captain Kelly, though in what weird regiment of irregulars he had ever held a commission nobody knew.

  He drew Mr Hoke into a corner, and once more inspected him with a wooden stare.

  'What did he want?' he asked.

  J. B. Hoke's manner had undergone a change for the worse since leaving Mr Frisby's sitting-room. His gentle suavity had disappeared.

  'The old devil,' he said disgustedly, 'simply wanted me to act as his agent in buying up some derelict copper mine somewhere.'

  He chewed a toothpick morosely, for Mr Frisby's summons had excited him and aroused hopes of large commissions. He had come away a disappointed man.

  'What does he want with a derelict mine?' asked Captain Kelly, his fathomless eyes still fixed on his companion's face.

  'Says it's next door to his Horned Toad,' grunted Mr Hoke, 'and they want the ground for putting up workmen's shacks.'

  'H'm!' said Captain Kelly.

  'He didn't need me. An office-boy could have done all he wanted. Wasting my time!' said J. B. Hoke.

  Captain Kelly transferred his gaze to a fly which had alighted on his sleeve and was going through those calisthenics which flies perform on these occasions. One could gather nothing from his face, but from the fact that he had ceased to speak Mr Hoke presumed that he was thinking.

  'Well?' he said, not without a certain irritation. His friend's inscrutability sometimes irked him.

  The Captain dismissed the fly with a jerk of the wrist.

  'H'm!' he said again.

  'What do you mean?'

  'Sounds thin to me,' said the Captain.

  'What does?'

  'What he says he wants that property for.'

  'Seemed all right to me.'

  'Ah, but you're a fool,' the Captain pointed out dispassionately. 'If you want to know what I think, I'd say at a guess that a new reef of copper had been discovered.'

  'Not on this claim,' said Mr Hoke. 'I happen to know the one he means. I was all over those parts a few years ago. I know this Dream Come True, which is its fool name. A fellow named Higginbottom, a prospector from Burr's Crossing, staked it out a matter of ten years back. And from that day to this no one's ever had an ounce of copper out of it. I shouldn't say it had ever been worked after the first six months.'

  'But they've been working the Horned Toad.'

  'Of course they've been working the Horned Toad.'

  'Suppose they had struck a vein and found that it went on into this property next door?'

  'Chee!' said Mr Hoke, his none too active brain stirring for the first time.

  'I've heard of cases.'

  'I've heard of cases,' said Mr Hoke.

  He stared at his companion emotionally. Rainbow visions had begun to rise before him.

  'I believe you're right,' he said.

  'That's the way it looks to me.'

  'There may be big money in this!'

  'Ah!' said the Captain.

  'Now, see here—' said Mr Hoke.

  He lowered his voice cautiously and began to talk business. From time to time Captain Kelly nodded wooden approval.
<
br />   CHAPTER 2

  And so in due course, in the blue and apricot twilight of a perfect May evening, Ann Moon arrived in England with a hopeful heart and ten trunks and went to reside with Lady Vera Mace at her cosy little flat in Davies Street, Mayfair. And presently she was busily engaged in the enjoyment of all the numerous amenities which a London Season has to offer.

  She lunched at the Berkeley, tea-ed at Claridge's, dined at the Embassy, supped at the Kit-Kat.

  She went to the Cambridge May Week, the Buckingham Palace Garden Party, the Aldershot Tattoo, the Derby, and Hawthorn Hill.

  She danced at the Mayfair, the Bat, Sovrani's, the Café de Paris, and Bray's on the River.

  She spent week-ends at country-houses in Bucks, Berks, Hants, Lincs, Wilts, and Devon.

  She represented an Agate at a Jewel Ball, a Calceolaria at a Flower Ball, Mary Queen of Scots at a Ball of Famous Women Through the Ages.

  She saw the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Madame Tussaud's, Buck's Club, the Cenotaph, Limehouse, Simpson's in the Strand, a series of races between consumptive-looking greyhounds, another series of races between goggled men on motor-cycles, and the penguins in St James's Park.

  She met soldiers who talked of horses, sailors who talked of cocktails, poets who talked of publishers, painters who talked of sur-realism, absolute form and the difficulty of deciding whether to be architectural or rhythmical.

  She met men who told her the only possible place in London to lunch, to dine, to dance, to buy an umbrella; women who told her the only possible place in London to go for a frock, a hat, a pair of shoes, a manicure and a permanent wave; young men with systems for winning money by backing second favourites; middle-aged men with systems that needed constant toning-up with gin and vermouth; old men who quavered compliments in her ear and wished their granddaughters were more like her.

  And at an early point in her visit she met Godfrey, Lord Biskerton, and one Sunday morning was driven down by him in a borrowed two-seater to inspect the ancestral country-seat of his family, Edgeling Court in the County of Sussex.

  They took sandwiches and made a day of it.

  CHAPTER 3

  There are those who maintain that the inhabitants of Great Britain are a cold, impassive race, not readily stirred to emotion, and that to get real sentiment you must cross the Atlantic. These would have solid support for their opinion in the sharply contrasting methods employed by the Courier-Intelligencer of Mangusset, Maine, and its older-established contemporary, the Morning Post of London, Eng., in announcing – some six weeks after the date on which this story began – the engagement of Ann Moon to Lord Biskerton.

  Mangusset was the village where Ann's parents had their summer home, and the editor of the Courier-Intelligencer, whose heart was in the right place and who had once seen Ann in a bathing-suit, felt – justly – that something a little in the lyrical vein was called for. This, accordingly, was the way in which he hauled up his slacks – and he did it, which makes it all the more impressive – entirely on buttermilk. For, though the evidence seems all against it, he was a life-long abstainer.

  'The bride-to-be' (wrote ye Ed.) 'is a girl of wondrous fascination and remarkable attractiveness, for with manner as enchanting as the wand of a siren and disposition as sweet as the odour of flowers and spirit as joyous as the carolling of birds and mind as brilliant as those glittering tresses that adorn the brow of winter and with heart as pure as dewdrops trembling in a coronet of violets, she will make the home of her husband a Paradise of enchantment like the lovely home of her girlhood, so that the heaven-toned harp of marriage, with its chords of love and devotion and fond endearments, will send forth as sweet strains of felicity as ever thrilled the senses with the rhythmic pulsing of ecstatic rapture.'

  The Morning Post, in its quiet, hard-boiled way, confined itself to a mere recital of the facts. No fervour. No excitement. Not a tremor in its voice. It gave the thing out as unemotionally as on another page it had stated that the Boys and Girls of Birchington Road School, Crouch End, had won the championship and challenge cup for infant percussion bands at the North London Musical Festival held in Kentish Town.

  Thus:

  MARRIAGE ANNOUNCEMENTS

  'The engagement is announced between Lord Biskerton, son and heir of the Earl of Hoddesdon, and Ann Margaret, only child of Mr and Mrs Thomas L. Moon of New York City.'

  Sub-editors get that way in London. After a few years in Fleet Street, they become temperamentally incapable of seeing any difference between a lot of infants tootling on trombones and a man and a maid starting out hand in hand on the long trail together. If you want to excite a sub-editor, you must be a Mystery Fiend and slay six with hatchet.

  But if the Morning Post was blasé, plenty of interest was aroused among the public that supports it. In a hundred beds a hundred young men stopped sipping a hundred cups of tea in order to give that notice their undivided attention. To some of these the paragraph had a sinister and an ominous ring. They concentrated their minds, such as they were, on the frightful predicament of the bridegroom-elect: and, muttering to themselves 'My God!' turned to the Racing Page with an uneasy feeling that nowadays no man was safe.

  But there were others – and these formed a majority – who sank back on their pillows and stared wanly at the ceiling – silk pyjama-clad souls in torment. They mused on the rottenness of everything, reflecting how rotten, if you came right down to it, everything was. They pushed aside the thin slice of bread and butter: and when their gentleman's personal gentleman entered babbling of spats, were brusque with them – in eleven cases telling them to go to the devil.

  For these were the young men who had danced with Ann and dined with Ann and taken Ann to see the penguins in St James's Park, and who, if they had happened to read the Mangusset Courier-Intelligencer, would have considered the editor a writer of bald and uninspired prose who did not even begin to get a grasp of his subject.

  Ann Moon, in her progress through the London Season, had undoubtedly made her presence felt. A girl cannot go about the place for a month and a half with a manner as enchanting as the wand of a siren without bruising a heart or two.

  In the dining-room of The Nook, Mulberry Grove, Valley Fields, S.E.21, Berry Conway came on the notice while skimming the paper preparatory to the morning dash for London on the 8.45. He was finding some difficulty in reading, owing to the activities of the Old Retainer, who had a habit of drifting in and out of the room during breakfast, issuing the while a sort of running bulletin of matters of local interest.

  Mrs Wisdom was plump and comfortable. She gazed at Berry with stolid affection, like a cow inspecting a turnip. To her, he was still the infant he had been when they had first met. Her manner towards him was always that of wise Age assisting helpless Youth through a perplexing world. She omitted no word or act that might smooth the path for him and shield him against life's myriad dangers. In winter, she thrust unwanted hot-water bottles into his bed. In summer, she would speak freely, not mincing her words, of flannel next to the skin and of the wisdom of cooling off slowly when the pores had been opened.

  'Major Flood-Smith,' said the Old Retainer, alluding to the retired warrior resident at Castlewood, next door but one, 'was doing Swedish exercises in his garden early this morning.'

  'Yes?'

  'And the cat at Peacehaven had a sort of fit.'

  Berry speculated absently on the mysteries of cause and effect.

  'I hear Mr Bolitho's firm are sending him to Manchester. Muriel-at-Peacehaven told me. He wants to let Peacehaven, furnished. I think he ought to put an advertisement in the papers.'

  'Not a bad idea. Ingenious.'

  Something in the passage attracted Mrs Wisdom's attention. She drifted out, and Berry heard umbrella-stands falling over. Presently she drifted in again.

  'After the Major had gone, his niece came out and picked some flowers. A sweetly pretty girl, I always say she is.'

  'Yes?'

  'And what's funny is, s
he was looking quite happy.'

  'Why was that funny?'

  'Why, Master Berry! Surely I told you about her? Her sad story?'

  'I don't think so,' said Berry, turning the pages. She probably had, he thought, but she told him so much local gossip – taking, as she did, a ghoulish relish in every disaster that happened to everybody in the suburb – that he had developed a protective deafness.

  Mrs Wisdom clasped her hands and threw up her eyes, the better to do justice to the big scoop.

  'Well, really, I can't imagine how I came not to tell you. I had it all from Gladys-at-Castlewood, and she got it partly by listening while waiting at table and the rest of it one evening when the young lady came down to the kitchen and wanted to know if the cook could make something she called fudge and then she stayed on herself and made this fudge which seems to be a sort of soft toffee and told them her sad story while stirring up the sugar and butter.'

  'Ah!' said Berry.

  'The young lady has come over from America. Her mother is the Major's sister, who married an American, and they live in a place near New York which is called, though you can hardly believe it, Great Neck. Well, I mean, what a name to call a place. And Great Neck, it seems, Master Berry, is full of actors and the young lady, her name is Katherine Valentine, was foolish enough to think she had fallen in love with one of them and wanted to marry him and he wasn't anybody really as he only acted small parts and her father, of course, was furious, and he sent her over here to stay with the Major in the hope that she might be cured of her infatuation.'

  'Ah?' said Berry. 'Good Lord! Look at this! The Biscuit has gone and jumped off the dock! Biskerton. Fellow I was at school with.'

  'Committed suicide?' cried Mrs Wisdom, delightedly. 'How dreadful!'

  'Well, not exactly suicide. He's engaged to be married to an American girl. Ann Margaret, only child of Mr and Mrs Thomas L. Moon of New York.'

  'Moon?' Mrs Wisdom wrinkled her forehead. 'Now I wonder if that is the same young lady Gladys-at-Castlewood told me Miss Valentine told her about. Miss Valentine travelled over on the boat with a Miss Moon, and I feel sure Gladys told me that she told her that her name was Ann. They became great friends. Miss Valentine told Gladys that her Miss Moon was a very nice young lady. Very pretty and attractive.'