The Grip of the Bookmaker

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Chapter II

Alf Harris, alias Mortimer Gordon in private life, had not been a bookmaker for nothing. On the August day on the downs when his son confronted him with a name which represented a part of him that he desired to be forgotten, he was already beginning to find another place for himself amid the shifting band of minor capitalists who skirmish in nondescript investments and grow rich by no visible means.

Gordon, for no one now had courage enough to address the formidable Mortimer as "Alf," had a genius for bargains, whether it was the lease of a licensed house in the centre of a hard-drinking neighbourhood or a new food for infants. A day came when the turf, professionally, at least, knew him no more. He intended to be a "Private Gentleman.' Alf had to be sacrificed at the altar of Mortimer's ambition. He tried to believe that it was not for himself, but for his son, that he was cultivating the respectable instincts. As the boy gfrew in good looks and intelligence the father's pride proportionately swelled. The lad, in the fancy of the ex-bookmaker, " was class enough for any stakes." Nothing

Z5 i6 in the way of schcx>Is and education was too good for him. When Phil got into the eleven at Rugeley the old man gave his friends — check-coated sportsmen of his own type — a dinner memorable even in the annals of their over-feeding; when, a few years later at the University, his son was awarded his athletic *' Blue/' the old man's ambition glowed like an arc-lamp at midnight

Here was a chap whom it was worth while making a swell of I

"The boy's got my grit and his mother's good looks/' said Mortimer to himself.

Meanwhile the old fellow endeavoured to shed his excrescences. He tried not to swear, and almost succeeded except with his " pals " ; he also made creditable efforts to improve his "table manners." In his time he had knocked up against not a few men of good-breeding ; he knew the counterfeit swell from the real thing in gentlemen. There was, he was convinced, no mistake about his son. " If/' he thought, " I had been a duke Phil couldn't have better manners."

Young Gordon accepted the situation without fully realising it His father, he knew, was rich ; the memory of Alf Harris might be socially obstructive, but he was enough of a philosopher to understand that it is not given to a youth to choose his own sire.

The name of Alf Harris had never been mentioned between them since the memorable drive to the Dyke, but one day at the Rugeley and Burchestcr

Match the old man was suddenly flung against it. He had an extraordinary respect for British sports, and for those who cultivated them with success. Philip had just made fifty-seven " not out," and his father, swelling with pride, was walking round the crowded ground with his son.

*^You played an innings any chap might be proud of, Phil," said his father. " You've nerve, my lad, and pluck ! '*

"I was lucky," said the lad, still warm with his triumph. " I ought to have been taken in the slips."

Suddenly, through the murmurs of the crowd, the words " There goes old Alf Harris and his boy ! " reached them. Mortimer Gordon turned purple.

"Did you hear?" he growled to his son, on fire in a moment " If any chap tells you you're son of Alf Harris the bookmaker, knock him down where he stands. There ain't no such chap. Gordon's my name, Mortimer Gordon, and always has been, though I did choose to race under another."

Philip blushed scarlet for his father, but said nothing.

"You'll understand, Phil," resumed the old man, " that I never want to hear ol Alf Harris again."

This was all the explanation that his father vouchsafed.

"Why did he tell me a lie about it, though?" wondered the boy when he was alone. He seemed to have discovered a new taint in the father of whom he longed, but so hopelessly, to be proud.

But, after all, this was merely a trifling incident. Every year was moving them farther from the vulgar shadow of the bookmaker and his dubious record. The old man continued to prosper and increase in all the influence that the command of money confers even on the feeblest ; and, among " sportsmen," only those with grizzled heads remembered that Mr. Mortimer Gordon, of Rutland Square, W., had once bellowed the odds in a white hat and a monstrous check coat at Epsom and Newmarket For the Square was reached over the bridge of foreclosed mortgages.

" Having acquired the property, Phil," he said to his son, "p'r'aps we'd better live there."

And so in due time they did.

Even his mother, whom he never knew, became one of the secret forces moulding the boy's character. A few old-fashioned photographs of a very pretty young woman, and the rapidly fading and ill-drawn pastel sketch that hung in his father's bedroom, were now the sole visible vestiges of her existence. But he knew — and this was another of his father's secrets — ^that she had once danced on the music-hall stage.

To conceal this, the old man once more adopted the crude policy of lying — bluffing, would have been his term for it.

One day Philip, when still a schoolboy, looking back to the dim lights at the beginning of his existence where he beheld the brown-haired, browneyed shadow who had played and laughed with him, found in an old battered writing-desk where they had lain forgotten for many years, a bundle of his mother's letters. Some were signed " Bella Bellamy," and pointed to the music-halls. Their tone chilled the boy's heart. Those of a later date addressed to "her dearest Alf," spoke of "the kiddy, who was doing nicely." There was evidence of less prosperous days ; one scrawl contained a request for "a couple more fivers to help out the housekeeping." These innocently vulgar letters of an uneducated woman dispelled the romantic visions that the lad had built up in his mother's honour. They also supplied another key for reading his father.

Poor Bella Bellamy spelt "affectionate" with a single f and without the final e, but whenever his father's memory drifted back to his dead wife he spoke of her as "a lady of high education and good family, who might 'a' done better than marry me, Phil, as I then was, at least."

These little touches of confidences, in the rare moments when the old man was inclined to talk, inflicted the keenest moral discomfort on his son.

" I've always been too fond of your mother, Phil to ever think of giving you a stepmother," his father once said.

It was not fear of his father, but an unconscious instinct of filial piety, which made the lad accept these confidences in respectful silence. He destroyed the letters, and never once let the old man suspect the knowledge which had scattered all the son's illusions and revealed the father as a robust variant of the British snob.

Poor Philip's helots were of his own household. Life, he learnt before he was fifteen, was only smooth on the top. At school, where he was popular although the shadow of " Alf Harris " had followed him there, he was regarded as a *' nice, bright, intelligent fellow." This meant that he was of the pure English sort, "good at games" and not too much bored by his lessons. When they gathered in the common-room and talked scandal, the junior masters rather pitied him for his father.

" But he's an only son," they said in extenuation, "and the old fellow has lots of money." Philip's house-master had so much respect for his batting that he urged his father to send him to Oxford, where this judicious estimate of his athletic aptitude received ample justification.

The adventures of the heart sometimes begin so early that the explorer, as he journeys wonderingly forward across the plains of youth, cannot trace the emotions to their first source.

For Philip the delicious, incomprehensible flutterings began during a summer vacation spent in Switzerland with his old friends the Miss Bassetts, who had abandoned Brighton for a small villa half-way up a mountain and overlooking the blue corner of a lake.

These were the days before his father had a fixed abode, when the Bassetts were still his only friends oiitside school. In Miss Laura, the younger, he confided as far as it is possible for a schoolboy to confide, in an amiable and kind-hearted old maid.

The villa stood in a sloping garden surrounded by high walls, one of which separated it from a more imposing residence where Madame Bard, a Genevese lady of some literary distinction, " received " in the words of her prospectus, "a few young ladies for the purpose of superintending their studies/'

At the farther end of Miss Bassetts' garden, hidden from the windows of the villa by the intervening orchard, gre%v an old mulberry-tree. Under its shade was an inviting seat, and here one pleasant August afternoon Philip sat reading " The Idylls of the Kings," the first poems he had ever cared for ; they swept him with a golden rush into the land of romance.

Soft white cloud.'^ were sailing over the valley, leaving spaces of liquid blue across which the black swifts were shooting, uttering petulant cries. The breeze, which rustled the leaves above him, was heavy with the scent of clove-pinks and roses- In a patch of long grass the grasshoppers ^^^^ ^ chirping intermittently. When they ceased, the quiet grew all pervading ; when they recommenced the aJr seemed very full of unseen cheerful life.

After a while, through the romantic visions of his book| hQ tccaine coitsdous of \*oices in the next garden. A little later something fell near him^ but he never raised his eyes, for —

"All day long the noise of battie roll'd Among the mountains by the winter sea—"

But from above a sweet voice addressed him in French.

Looking up he saw, leaning over the wall, a girl with shining hair falling over her shoulders from under a straw hat ; her eyes were grey, her lips red and smiling. He took in the charming picture at a glance — she was lovely ! sweet enough, he thought, to be maid-of-honour to Guinevere or sister of Elaine.

Again the vision addressed him in French, which, as he had only studied for five years at a public school, he did not understand. He heard the word balle^ however, and guessed the meaning of that Rising to his feet, cap in hand, he said :

" Something about a ball, isn't it ? "

"I've knocked a tennis-ball over, please. If you wouldn't mind looking," said the girl

From below some one giggled ; a voice said :

" Shut up, Gertie, can*t you ! "

" Have you any idea where it fell ? " asked Philip, recovering his presence of mind and his boyish dignity.

** Somewhere near the carnations, I think," was the reply. " I'm so sorry to trouble you."

'* Don't mention it, I beg," he answered.

Then he searched the flower-beds, glancing up every now and then furtively at the vision on the wall

** I did hear something drop," he said, ** but thought it was an apple."

"No doubt the sound is much the same," she observed encouragingly. " Would you mind looking in that long grass? If it isn't there, please don't bother about it any more."

Philip obeyed. The grasshoppers ceased singing as he brushed through their bower.

" Ah, here it is ! " he exclaimed. " Shall I throw it over to you?"

** Do, please," she answered. " Many thanks I I'm so sorry to have troubled you."

Then she disappeared. Suppressed laughter and chatter in French greeted her on the other side. That was all, but the magic circle was woven round him. He was in the land of dreams with Lancelot and Elaine.

How beautiful the garden seemed! The blazing carnations, the clambering roses wafted arrowy messages. Why was his heart beating?

He sighed without knowing why, and stood gazing where the vision had vanished like a goddess in Virgil

In the garden the girls' voices were silent.

« Tea is ready," Miss Laura called from the upper lawn.

Then he walked back to reality.

But the day came when he met his goddess and found her human, which only increased the spell.

It was a moment of relaxed discipline at Madame Bard's seminary, and she came to the Miss Bassetts' picnic accompanied by two pupils— one, a Miss MulHns, left no trace on Philip's memory, but the other was Constance Madryn.

He was even honoured with a formal introduction — quite, it seemed, as though he were grown up.

" Mr. Gordon," said Miss Bassett, ** let me present you to Miss Madryn ! "

The ceremony was to him one of fluttering solemnity, but Connie Madryn held out her hand in the friendliest manner and said, " How do you do?*' Philip murmured that it was rather a nice day for a picnic, and saw that she had taken off her right glove. How long and slender her fingers were ! how narrow her palm ! how pink her nails ! He never knew before how beautiful a girl's hand can be, and, ashamed of his own big, sunburnt paws, hid them in his pockets. But her easy chatter dispelled his embarrassment. Every word she said glowed in his memory afterwards, like diamonds against black velvet

The scene of the picnic was a rocky island crowned by an ivy-clad ruined tower, the haunt of a hundred dim legends. She told him how a jealous archduke had once shut up his wife in the tower, and how she had escaped to Italy with her lover.

"It's all in the guide-book," she said, smiling; "and I daresay it isn't true, but, like the story of Tell and apple, all invented."

"You must be awfully clever to remember all that!" he exclaimed, for he had not read the guide-book.

"We had a lecture about it last week from the history professor," she answered, amazed at his earnestness, "and were told it was all Ugendairer

This conversation occurred as they were walking down to the boats. Philip noticed that he was the only " man " present except the young English chaplain of frail health, who had the cure of British souls on Sunday and caught insects in a gauze-net for the remainder of the week. The sky was azure, the lake a shining sheet of sunlit blue; the road descended through fir-woods and thickets of hazel to the lower slopes where, in the vineyards, the grapes were growing purple. A sense of young pure life filled the world. The cow-bells, tinkling up in the mountain pastures, rang faint chimes of elfin melancholy.

When Madame Bard, walking behind with the elder Miss Bassett, glanced after the young couple and said, " lis sont trop jeunes pour avoir des id^es," she did not accurately describe the poise of feeling in the boy.

Where the others beheld a tall schoolgirl of th< awkward age but with the promise of beauty, he saw a lovely vestal diffusing the light of her enchantment

The discovery made him silent. His companion, however, was far from impressed by the solemnity of the meeting. She only saw ** a nice, manly looking boy," who seemed very respectful but rather "shy." She was even tempted to assume faint airs of condescension, and turned the conversation to " games ** as the subject best suited to his age and interest. She thus learnt that he was at Rugeley and in the fifth form. Did he know a boy named Elmsley, then ? Yes, he did ; they were in the same form. Elmsley, he believed, was Lord Dartfield's younger son.

"Yes," said Connie Madryn, "and my cousin,"

'* Oh 1 " exclaimed Philip.

Elmsley was considered rather a swell at school ; the relationship seemed to remove her further from Philip, who had already learnt that one is not son of Alf Harris for nothing.

" I don't think you care much for Willie Elmsley ? " she said encouragingly.

" Yes, I do. Why do you think so ? "

" You said ' Oh * as though you were disappointed. I think, myself, that Willie is rather conceited."

" I never noticed that," Philip replied. " Besides, he isn't at all a bad * half-back. ' "

" Is he clever ? "

"He isn't a 'swot' He's supposed to be going into the Army."

" Yes, I know. I've a brother at Sandhurst. Papa was in the Army, you know. He commanded the 30th Lancers. But there are the boats. I mean to row. Can you?"

" I scull a good deal at school," said Philip.

"Then we'll pull one of the boats— you and I. You arrange it"

" There's a light one ; let's take that. * Je prenny v6ter bateau ' ! " cried Philip, with an air of authority to the expectant owner of the craft.

And so, after some discussion as to the crew, Philip, Connie Madryn, Miss Laura, and a German lady embarked together, whilst the boatman, on whose presence Miss Bassett insisted, steered.

The day was a pageant of wonderful experiences, half-meaningless, but inexpressibly delightful to the boy. He wondered at the easy swing of the girl's lithe figure as she tugged at the sculls — was ever human being -so graceful? and yet her stroke was far from perfect measured by the standard of Rugeley. At her request he even dared " coach " her ; obediently she squared her slim shoulders and " reached well forward " towards the shining points of her brown shoes. Then, later, they clambered together among the pines, watching the green lizards as they darted off among the fallen masonry, and mounting together to the narrow chamber whence eight hundred years ago a mythic duchess had escaped from a tyrannous spouse.

"Just as I would," said the girl, " if I ever married a man who dared be cruel to me ! "

'* As if one ever would ! " exclaimed the boy.

Returning in the twilight, with a pale moon hanging low between the mountains and one star wistfully shining in the darkening blue — sl signal that the day was done, both of them were quiet.

** It has been such a jolly day that I'm sorry it's over," said the girl.

" That's what the star is saying," said he.

" Shall I ever see you again ? " he asked, when they separated before Miss Bassetts' garden door.

'^Come and see us at Fentash," said she. ''Get Willie Elmsley to bring you."

The moon was now high in the sky, and the shadows of the pines black on the grass. The boy saw everything with a sort of inner vision.

''Something strange must be about to happen," he thought as he fell asleep.

Chapter IV

Of the anticipations circling around Philip's charming friend with the untrained luxuriance of youthful fancy, not one was realised.

That same evening Madame Bard received a telegram directing her to send Miss Madryn home at once, and on the following day the girl had vanished.

** II paratt," Madame Bard explained, " que Madame Madryn est dangereusement malade."

Thus ended Philip Gordon's first raid into a realm created by the emotions and governed by fancy. The excursion, brief, but beautiful, had left its trophies in the sacred places.

But the vision soon began to wane. Six months later the memory of the sunlit girl seen over the clambering roses, and the picnic on the lake resembled the luminous impressions of a pleasant dream. A healthy English lad of sound appetite cannot breathe with comfort in such an attenuated atmosphere. This one descended to earth again after beating his wings for a spell among rosy clouds

At school he spoke of the meeting with Miss Madryn to her cousin, Willie Elmsley.

" She said something about a man from Rugeley," said Elmsley indifferently, "but never mentioned his name. Suppose she couldn't remember it I Her mother — that's my aunt, died, you know, at the end of the vac. That's whom I'm in mourning for."

Young Gordon, with the shadow of Alf Harris always across his path, took this omission to mention his name as a hint that she did not desire his friendship. In a year's time, except that he was never heard again to describe poetry as "rot" and that he took a deeper interest in the love entanglements with which classical literature abounds, the adventure left no visible traces in his mind.

As Philip grew older his influence over his father increased. The boy was such a ** dashed " gentleman, just the sort of chap the old man wanted to carry on the name which did not belong to him. It was to please him that the idea ol the Army was abandoned, for scarlet and gold lace at one moment had much attracted the youth.

" The law's the perfession for you, Phil, my lad," said Mortimer Gordon. " The 'varsity first, then the Bar, then Parliament ; for it 'ill run to that, Phil, and the deuce knows what besides. No training like the law. Nothing like it to teach a chap how far he can bluff in safety ! The law's the only thing to reg'late a chap's dealings with other men. If I'd had a little of it behind me I dessay I shu'd 'a' been better off by a thousand or two. The Army's a mug's game."

Ambitions of which the old man had never dared dream for himself seemed to come well within the range of the probable for his son.

Phil must marry a swell's daughter and found a family. Those were the stakes he was in training for. Old Gordon thought of this every morning of his life when he scraped his resolute chin with the razor.

"You expect a lot of me," Philip said, when his prospects were discussed.

"Well, old chap, not more than I've a right to," his father would reply.

Meanwhile at Oxford the young man had everything he wanted. To a certain point old Gordon read men like books.

" Let the lad get used to money," he said to his lawyer, Peter Davies, whose fortune he had helped to make, " then he won't make a mess of it when he gets full control."

In spite of the temptations with which indulgence was strewing the way, Philip Gordon left the University with some character for scholarship, a good reputation as a sportsman, and a wider acquaintance with men and things than is usual at his age. Perhaps his misgivings helped to make him modest. He felt that his luck, comfort, and success were all based on the spectral A If Harris, shut up in the Gordon cupboard. This revenant quenched presumption. " We are rather like respectable pirates," thought the philosophic youth, "licensed to sail under the Union Jack."

But he appreciated his father's affection, realised the scope and nature of the parental ambition, and felt the pathos of it. Altruistic ambition of the meaner sort has always melancholy and humorous sides ; to these young Gordon was not blind.

Sanguine and prosperous youth marches forward, head in air, seeking pleasure till the day comes when a touch stirs into agreeable undulations the delicate tentacles which feed the feelings.

The accident which had made Philip's boyish emotions vibrate years ago in Switzerland, stirred them again the year he left college. He was popular by nature rather than design. Amiable, intelligent, unaggressive, gifted with a sense of humour which allowed him to laugh even at himself, his prosperity scarcely excited envy. There was always Alf Harris for the ill-natured "to thank God upon." But it was agreed that ** the fellow never abused his luck," especially by Elmsley, who constantly basked in it. They had been " up " at Brazjnknob at the same time, but Elmsley, the younger son of an impoverished family with growing appetites but decreasing means, had spent money which he dared not ask his father to pay and "gone down " with his debts still on his back. Once when he was staggering in half a panic under their weight, Philip came to the rescue. Mr. Peter Davies, the old man's lawyer, was called in in secret, and the matter was settled without Elmsley's family hearing of it, and the creditors being appeased by the promise of annual contributions towards the liquidation of their debts.

But Peter Davies, who knew that there were ^ few things which old Mortimer Gordon didn't find out," who admired his friend's talents, and faithfully served his interests, told him the whole story.

" Only," said he, " you mustn't tell Philip."

" Not me ! " replied Mortimer. " Look here, Peter, young Elmsle/s a chap worth buying if not too dear. Phil meant it all in the way of friendship, of course, but the investment ain't a bad 'un."

It gratified the old man's vanity to remember that his son had helped the youngest son of a peer out of a " tight place," for he had a truly British respect for the social inequalities, and this transaction seemed to readjust the balance in his favour.

Philip was at this time living in convenient rooms off Piccadilly, and supposed to be reading for the Bar in his leisure moments, whilst his father was occupying temporarily an old house in Surrey, with big stables and wide paddocks. Here, in the eyes of. an appreciative neighbourhood, he shone as a sportsman of the old school. But a part of his conduct was still in the darkness. He loved liberty, and had not yet finished sowing that squalid second crop of wild-oats which widowers of his temperament secretly cultivate.

To his friend Peter Davies he admitted that " his pals weren't exactly the sort that he'd have Phil choose."

"You see," he explained, "we've been bred in difFrent schools. And my son and me needn't fall over one another. The course is big enough for both;'

The young man left his very vigorous sire to his own amusements, and tried to look in other directions. ♦

Whatever his conduct in secret, the old man's morals — ^so far, at least, as they found verbal expression for his son's benefit, were irreproachable. If he allowed himself much of the latitude of the Sultan of the popular imagination, he did his best to indulge himself in the obscurity that becomes the diversions of grey hairs.

One morning just after breakfast Elmsley walked into Philip Gordon's room and found him sitting by the open window reading a French novel.

Philip closed the book and offered him a cigarette. Elmsley said he had no taste for smoking paper and helped himself to a cigar. It was, he said, a ripping morning, much too fine to stick in town. He was going to play golf. Was Gordon free that evening ? if so, would he come to a dance — heaps of pretty girls and supper from Gunter's.

" Where is it ? " Gordon asked.

" Rutland Square, Mrs. Parkington's."

Then Elmsley explained that Mrs. Parkington, who was widow of General Parkington, had commissioned him to bring "a few nice young men."

"She has five married daughters and has three dangerous ones left, so before you say * Yes,' I warn you," Elmsley added. " They live next door to my cousins. I remember you met Connie Madryn years ago in Switzerland. She'll be there"

This decided Philip. His father was coming to town that afternoon! ; he had intended taking him to a music-hall, the one form of entertainment which diverted the old gentleman. This instinct of filial piety was now promptly suppressed.

"Til come like a shot," he said.

So they went, and young Gordon made his second serious plunge into enchanted streams. He drove to Rutland Square in a hansom with Elmsley, feeling as one about to revisit some charming but dimly remembered haunt of boyhood.

What should he see there ?

He recalled the fragrant garden, the scent of clove-pinks, the sunlit wall, the girl with the bright hair above the clambering roses and the background of mountains. The radiance was outside the world of fact, but a human touch might make it glow with life again.