The Ha-Ha Case

by J. J. Connington

  And with slight touches of emphasis here and there he read out the letter, watching the effect as he accentuated the unintentional cruelty of the wording.

  3rd August, 1924.

  MY DEAR FATHER,

  Thanks for your letter of Tuesday, which I have received. I am indeed very sorry if I have pained you in any way; for of course I had no intention of hurting your feelings in the slightest degree. But I still feel that no useful purpose would be served by my coming to London at the present juncture. It would merely be an extra expense for you, and you say you are short of money. I am afraid we shall all be hard up until I come of age and we can get matters put in better order.

  Besides, I am working hard at present with Mr. Laxford, and he thinks it would be a grave mistake to interrupt my studies at this particular moment. I must get some real training in book-keeping and estate management generally, as soon as possible.

  I think you do Mr. Laxford injustice by some of the things you say in your letter. He has, I am quite sure, never misrepresented matters to me, and I am convinced that he has been perfectly straightforward with us all. I see nothing wrong with the negotiations he has been conducting in the matter of the estate; and I think it is very bad policy to pick a quarrel with him, as you seem anxious to do.

  I am sorry to disappoint you, and you know I am not finding fault with you; but the plain truth is that you were letting me grow up entirely without any proper education whatsoever; and it is only since Mr. Laxford took me in hand that I have learned anything about subjects which I ought to know, in view of my future. I owe him a great deal for that, all the more since he has not received the remuneration agreed upon between you.

  You cannot expect me to break into my studies by rushing up to London every now and then. I must have some education. I should feel ashamed to go about, all my life, in utter ignorance of important things.

  Your affectionate son,

  JOHNNIE.

  Jim Brandon folded up the letter deliberately, slipped it into its envelope, and replaced it in his pocket.

  “Well, Johnnie? Hear how it reads? A bit sore on the poor old Governor’s feelings, eh? That cut about his not having paid Laxford, I think you might have left it out. And you needn’t have dragged in that about your education. These things sting, rather. I’m not defending his way of doing things. If a man’s left an income of thousands a year and manages to spend half as much again each year, he can’t expect much sympathy from his family on that account. Still, you needn’t bear a grudge over it, if I don’t. You’ll come out on velvet at the end of it all.”

  “I don’t bear any grudge at all,” Johnnie protested frankly. “I’m downright sorry if I hurt the Governor’s feelings, really, Jim. I didn’t mean to. Only . . . I don’t think any good would come of my going up to town to see him.”

  “Interrupt your valuable studies too much, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  The rather grudging tone of the reply gave the elder brother an opening.

  “Then why,” he demanded, “did you go up to town not so long ago?”

  Johnnie was plainly confused by this home-thrust. He bit his lip and busied himself with his gun.

  “Who told you I was up in town?” he asked rather shamefacedly after a moment or two.

  “My detective agency, of course: Messrs. Pry and Trailem . . . No expense spared. . . . As a matter of fact I was told by Laxford’s governess—what’s her name? Menteith, I think. Nice girl, that. It was she who let out that you’d been up in town with Laxford.”

  “Oh, Una told you, did she?” said Johnnie rather blankly.

  “If that’s her name. Well, it seems you spent a whole day in London not so long ago. And never looked near the Governor. How did you fill in your time?”

  “We went to a show,” Johnnie admitted haltingly.

  “Must have given you value for money, there, if you sat in it from ten in the morning until you had to sprint for your last train. What else did you do?”

  Johnnie seemed to have some good reason for evading a discussion of his doings in London. Instead of answering the question, he took up fresh ground.

  “I’m not your kiddie-brother now, Jim. It’s my own affair, how I spend my time.”

  The unwonted asperity of Johnnie’s tone gave warning that his brother had overstepped the bounds of diplomacy. Jim saw that he might lose points by pursuing the subject further. He harked back to the sentimental argument, which put Johnnie morally in the wrong.

  “Well, you might have looked the Governor up, Johnnie. Kindness would have cost nothing more than a bus-fare.”

  Then, without a change in tone, he edged in a fresh subject:

  “Besides, you’re on the edge of twenty-one now, and we ought all to be putting our heads together to see what can be done about the estate.”

  This was evidently the last topic that Johnnie wished to discuss. He turned awkwardly in his chair, stared out of the window, and muttered that he understood nothing about financial transactions.

  “Then it’s time you waked up and took some notice,” his brother retorted rather sharply. “Is this just a pose of yours, or do you really not understand?”

  “If I can’t understand money matters, whose fault is it?” Johnnie countered, without heat. “I’m like the Governor, I’ve no head for them. The Governor has talked to me often enough about it all; but you know what he’s like, Jim. He just burbles along without making it any clearer, and if you ask him to explain anything he just goes back to the beginning and muddles it up worse than ever, until my head begins to go round. It’s not my fault if he hasn’t made me understand.”

  “There’s something in that,” his brother admitted in a less impatient tone. “The Governor’s no flyer at making anything clear, least of all finance. Perhaps I can do better. But listen, Johnnie, for it’s a thing you ought to know the ins and outs of. Something will have to be done about it.”

  He paused momentarily as though a suspicion had crossed his mind.

  “Has Laxford talked to you about it all?”

  “He did, once or twice,” Johnnie confessed honestly. “But somehow he didn’t make it any clearer than the Governor did. Usually he explains things plainly enough, but he seemed to slip a cog in this affair. Or perhaps I was extra dull that day. All I’ve got out of the two of them is some notion about barring the entail and getting control of the estate again. Is that right?”

  Jim Brandon nodded thoughtfully. He was not surprised to learn that Laxford had lost his usual clarity when he came to elucidate the estate question for Johnnie’s benefit. It would hardly have suited the Laxford book if Johnnie mastered all the ins and outs of that complex problem. Johnnie was anything but bright; and it must have been easy enough for Laxford to muddle his ideas, already sufficiently confused by doses of his father’s explanations which explained nothing.

  “That’s the main idea: barring the entail and getting control of the estate again. You’ve picked up the backbone of the thing, anyhow. It’s the only way out, so far as I can see. Now just listen carefully, Johnnie. Stop me if you don’t grip it. I want you to have the thing clear.”

  Johnnie apparently resigned himself to the inevitable. He put down his gun-barrels and turned towards his brother with at least an outward semblance of attention.

  “Here’s the thing in a nutshell,” his brother began. “The Governor’s life-tenant of Burling Thorn. That means he can’t sell the estate, no matter how hard up he is. All he can do is to draw the rents during his lifetime. When he passes in his checks, the next heir steps in, draws the rents during his lifetime, and when he goes out, the next heir steps into his shoes. The estate remains in the family, no matter what happens.”

  “Oh, I knew that well enough,” Johnnie interjected. “It’s the rest of it I can’t make head or tail of.”

  Jim made a gesture as though asking for time.

  “We’re coming to that. You know what the Governor did. He went the pace, horses and the Stock Ex
change, ran up the devil’s own debts which he couldn’t pay out of income. And then the creditors came down on him. That was before your time, of course. You never lived at Burling Thorn.”

  Johnnie shook his head regretfully.

  “No, I wish I had. It was one London suburb after another, when I was a kid. And we never seemed to stay long enough in one place to get used to it.”

  “True enough,” Jim confirmed with a wry expression. “But let’s stick to the point. The creditors came down and demanded their money. The Governor had no cash. You can’t collect rents twenty years in advance, and rents were all he had. Somehow or other he had to raise the wind to the tune of thousands and thousands in spot cash. The Osprey Insurance people helped him out of the mess—at a price.”

  “This is a bit I never really got hold of,” Johnnie volunteered. “The Governor always slid over it as if he hardly understood what it was all about himself. He just said the lawyers arranged it, and then he used to damn the lawyers and say it was all their fault, and I never got the thing clear yet.”

  “Don’t you worry. I’ll make it clear enough,” his brother assured him confidently. “Here’s what happened. The Osprey people advanced enough in hard cash to pay off the creditors. I’m not going to muddle you up with figures, Johnnie, but it was a hell of a sum. Now that, of course, didn’t really help to better the Governor’s position. He was just as much in debt as ever. All it meant was that he owed the cash to the Osprey people instead of to a whole flock of duns.”

  “I see that, all right,” said Johnnie hopefully. “But I don’t see what good it did the Governor if he was still up to the ears in debt.”

  “I’m coming to that. Of course the Osprey people aren’t philanthropists, and they wanted two things. They wanted interest on the money they lent the Governor, and they wanted to be sure of seeing their capital back again in the long-run. They’d no claim on the estate itself, you see? All the Governor had was the income from rents. And that only lasted, so far as they were concerned, as long as the Governor lived.”

  “I think I see that,” Johnnie admitted with a certain pride. “Nobody ever put it to me like that before. It isn’t so bad as I thought. Go on.”

  Jim Brandon felt it worth while to throw out a sprat of flattery at this point.

  “I knew you’d see it all right if it was put plainly,” he said in an encouraging tone. “Now here’s what the Osprey crowd did. They made the Governor take out an insurance policy on his life, for a figure that covered the money they’d lent him. That means that when he dies they’ll collect the insurance money and get their capital back again, all O.K. Of course this means the devil’s own insurance premium to pay each year, and the Governor had to find that somehow. Besides that, he had to pay interest to the Osprey people, interest on the capital they’d lent him; and that was no small beer either, though I needn’t give you the figures. Of course they had to get some guarantee that these payments would be made. They couldn’t take the estate itself as security, because it belongs to the family and not to the Governor personally. So they took a mortgage on his life-interest in the estate.”

  “Hold on a mo’,” Johnnie interrupted. “What d’you mean, exactly? I’m not quite clear about mortgages and such-like.”

  Jim Brandon reflected sourly that Laxford’s tuition had tactfully omitted mortgages from the course of training in estate-management. He could guess the reason for that easily enough, he thought.

  “It’ll be quite clear in a moment or two,” he assured Johnnie. “Just take it as it comes. When the Governor got his rents in he had to pay away ever so much cash to the Osprey people to cover the interest on the loan and the insurance premium on that life policy. That meant, of course, that there wasn’t enough left over to keep up Burling Thorn any longer. It had to be leased and all of us had to skip to London. It meant living on a pittance compared with the income the Governor had before he began playing the fool. And, of course, being the Governor, he couldn’t realise the position even then, and he made a further muddle of his affairs. That mightn’t have been fatal. But unfortunately income tax began to go up and land began to go down, just then. It didn’t pay. Tenants cleared out. Rents didn’t come in as they used to do. Between that and the Governor’s extravagance, things got to a crisis. An instalment wasn’t paid when it fell due. The Osprey people got the wind up and they foreclosed immediately.”

  “I don’t see what they got by that,” Johnnie interjected with a puzzled air. “They couldn’t touch the estate, you said.”

  “What happened was that they stepped in—legally, of course—and collected the rents themselves from the estate. The Governor lost any claim he had to the rent-moneys. The Osprey people gave him something to live on. You know for yourself what it amounts to, and you know the sort of life the Governor’s been leading on it. It killed the Mater. Since then, the Governor’s been drifting from one set of shabby digs to another, pursued by clouds of duns after him for five bob or ten bob accounts which he never seems able to square off. And he’s a very sick man, Johnnie.”

  Jim paused, as though hoping that this sentimental touch would produce an effect, but Johnnie had returned to his cleaning and made no remark. The elder brother frowned slightly. He was coming to the really important step in his negotiation, and he had hoped for a more favourable atmosphere. Johnnie had certainly shown some interest, but it was not the kind of interest that Jim wanted. However, he had to go through with the business now.

  “Well, that’s the mess the Governor got into and stayed in,” he continued. “Question is: how can we clean it up? One thing’s to the good. You know that disease of his? Well, he’s been overhauled by two of the best men in London in that line, and there’s no doubt about his being what the lawyers call ‘a tenant with possibility of issue extinct,’ so far as the future goes.”

  “I don’t understand that,” Johnnie interrupted. “What does it mean, exactly?”

  Jim’s lips curved in a sardonic smile.

  “It means you needn’t expect any more little brothers or sisters in our family, even if the Governor found anyone who’d marry him after this. That’s that.”

  Johnnie seemed to shy away from this subject.

  “Go on,” he said rather gruffly. “I’ve understood all that, so far.”

  Jim Brandon pitched the end of his cigarette on to the hearth and pulled his case from his pocket. He had reached the crucial stage of this interview. Everything depended on convincing Johnnie now. There might be no other opportunity before it was too late, for on the following day Johnnie was to come of age and anything might happen then. Laxford might move suddenly, and the whole affair might be complicated beyond unravelment. Jim lit his fresh cigarette with unnecessary care, in order to give himself time to think. When he spoke again it was in a more deliberate tone than before, for he wanted every word to sink in.

  “This is what we ought to do, Johnnie. You’re the youngest, and there aren’t going to be any more of us. So when you come of age we can bar the entail by agreement and convert the estate into a fee-simple. That means we can do anything we like with it, sell it if we choose, for all the present restrictions will go by the board if the entail’s barred. Suppose it’s sold. The cash it fetches will pay off the Osprey people completely and leave us with a big surplus, even at the present value of land. The Osprey people naturally left a wide margin for contingencies when they lent the money. Besides that, we don’t need to go on paying the premiums on the Governor’s insurance policy. He can take the surrender value of that. Between what he gets for his policy and what surplus is left after the Osprey people are paid off, there’ll be a tidy little fortune in hand. Do you follow that?”

  Johnnie, too, seemed to recognise that they had reached the crisis in the interview, but his reaction was not encouraging. He shifted awkwardly in his chair, glanced despairingly out of the window, and seemed a prey to minor fidgets which ill suited his bulky figure. At last he screwed himself up to a decision and s
poke out.

  “Mr. Laxford doesn’t seem to think that scheme would be fair to me,” he declared rather unwillingly, though with a certain obstinacy in his tone.

  So Laxford had primed the boy after all, Jim reflected angrily. Damn the fellow! If it hadn’t been for him they could have got Johnnie to agree to anything. This initial proposal was an extreme one. If Johnnie had accepted it, well and good. If not, then something more moderate would have to be substituted instead. But Laxford, playing his own game, had been cute enough to foresee their tactics. His objection, voiced by Johnnie, was a sound one, for the scheme certainly involved a certain unfairness to Johnnie.

  Jim Brandon thought he had better discover whether his brother really grasped the arguments against the proposal.

  “What’s Laxford’s objection?” he asked suavely.

  Johnnie was obviously a little embarrassed by this demand for details.

  “I didn’t understand what Mr. Laxford said about it, except this: that if we did what you say, the Governor might make hay of any money he got, just as he did before; and his share would be a dead loss.”

  “There’s something in that,” Jim conceded in a conciliatory tone. “Well, then, I suppose we could go on paying the premiums on the life insurance policy. Then, when the Governor dies, there’ll be just as much cash as there was when he came into the estate at the very first. But it’ll mean a good deal less money in the meantime, Johnnie. Still, if you want to have it that way, I don’t mind.”

  But Johnnie was not to be bribed by the concession.

  “Mr. Laxford doesn’t think I ought to come in on that arrangement at all.”

  Jim Brandon stifled a desire to say what he thought of Laxford’s interference in very blunt language. Instead, he tried a fresh line of persuasion.

  “I’ve given you the Governor’s side of the thing, Johnnie, first of all; but the fact is, I’ve got an axe of my own to grind in the matter. It would suit me down to the ground if the affair could be fixed up as I explained to you. I’m rather keen on a girl, as it happens. She’s not the sort to marry on the miserable pittance I draw from my office. I haven’t asked her. I know she wouldn’t look at the prospect. If I had an extra hundred or two on my income it might make all the difference. We’ve always been good pals, Johnnie. Doesn’t that make some difference in your ideas? It means a hell of a lot to me.”