“It is a hundred to one Le Bas won’t come in,” said Stringham. “I should take a chance on it.”
“Take a chance on what?” Uncle Giles asked.
“On smoking.”
“You mean I really ought to put this out?”
“Don’t bother.”
“Most certainly I shall bother,” said Uncle Giles. “I should not dream of breaking a rule of that sort. Rules are made to be obeyed, however foolish they may sometimes seem. The question is where had I best put this, now that the regulation has been broken?”
By the time my uncle had decided to extinguish the cigarette on the sole of his shoe, and throw the butt into the fire, there was not much left of it. Stringham collected the ash, which had by now found its way into several receptacles, brushing all of this also into the cinders. For the rest of tea, Uncle Giles, who, for the time being at least, had evidently dismissed from his mind the question of discussing arrangements for meeting my father, discoursed, not very lucidly, on the possibility of a moratorium in connection with German reparations and the fall of the mark. Uncle Giles’s sympathies were with the Germans. “They work hard,” he said. “Therefore they have my respect.” Why he had suddenly turned up in this manner was not yet clear. When tea came to an end he muttered about wanting to discuss family matters, and, after saying good-bye — for my uncle, almost effusively — to Stringham, he followed me along the passage.
“Who was that?” he asked, when we were alone together.
As a rule Uncle Giles took not the slightest interest in anyone or anything except himself and his own affairs — indeed was by this time all but incapable of absorbing even the smallest particle of information about others, unless such information had some immediate bearing on his own case. I was therefore surprised when he listened with, a show of comparative attention to what I could tell him about Stringham’s family. When I had finished, he remarked:
“I used to meet his grandfather in Cape Town.”
“What was he doing there?”
“His mother’s father, that was. He made a huge fortune. Not a bad fellow. Knew all the right people, of course.”
“Diamonds?”
I was familiar with detective stories in which South African millionaires had made their money in diamonds.
“Gold,” said Uncle Giles, narrowing his eyes.
My uncle’s period in South Africa was one of the several stretches of his career not too closely examined by other members of his family — or, if examined, not discussed — and I hoped that he might be about to give some account of experiences I had always been warned not to enquire into. However, he said no more than: “I saw your friend’s mother once when she was married to Lord Warrington and a very good-looking woman she was.”
“Who was Lord Warrington?”
“Much older than she was. He died. Never a good life, Warrington’s. And so you always have tea with young Stringham?”
“And another boy called Templer.”
“Where was Templer?” asked Uncle Giles, rather suspiciously, as if he supposed that someone might have been spying on him unawares, or that he had been swindled out of something.
“In London, having his eyes seen to.”
“What is wrong with his eyes?”
“They ache when he works.”
My uncle thought over this statement, which conveyed in Templer’s own words his personal diagnosis of this ocular complaint. Uncle Giles was evidently struck by some similarity of experience, because he was silent for several seconds. I spoke more about Stringham, but Uncle Giles had come to the end of his faculty for absorbing statements regarding other people. He began to tap with his knuckles on the window-pane, continuing this tattoo until I had given up attempting, so far as I knew it, to describe Stringham’s background.
“It is about the Trust,” said Uncle Giles, coming abruptly to the end of his drumming, and adopting a manner at once accusing and seasoned with humility.
The Trust, therefore, was at the bottom of this visitation. The Trust explained this arrival by night in winter. If I had thought harder, such an explanation might have occurred to me earlier; but at that age I cannot pretend that I felt greatly interested in the Trust, a subject so often ventilated in my hearing. Perhaps the enormous amount of time and ingenuity that had been devoted by other members of my family to examining the Trust from its innumerable aspects had even decreased for me its intrinsic attraction. In fact the topic bored me. Looking back, I can understand the fascination that the Trust possessed for my relations: especially for those, like Uncle Giles, who benefited from it to a greater or lesser degree. In those days the keenness of their interest seemed something akin to madness.
The money came from a great-aunt, who had tied it up in such a way as to raise what were, I believe, some quite interesting questions of legal definition. In addition to this, one of my father’s other brothers, Uncle Martin, also a beneficiary, a bachelor, killed at the second battle of the Marne, had greatly complicated matters, although there was not a great deal of money to divide, by leaving a will of his own devising, which still further secured the capital without making it absolutely clear who should enjoy the interest. My father and Uncle Giles had accordingly come to a “gentleman’s agreement” on the subject of their respective shares (which brought in about one hundred and eighty-five pounds annually, or possibly nearly two hundred in a good year); but Uncle Giles had never been satisfied that he was receiving the full amount to which he was by right entitled: so that when times were hard — which happened about every eighteen months — he used to apply pressure with a view to squeezing out a few pounds more than his agreed portion. The repetition of these tactics, forgotten for a time and then breaking out again like one of Uncle Giles’s duodenal ulcers, had the effect of making my father exceedingly angry; and, taken in conjunction with the rest of my uncle’s manner of life, they had resulted in an almost complete severance of relations between the two brothers.
“As you probably know,” said Uncle Giles, “I owe your father a small sum of money. Nothing much. Decent of him to have given me the use of it, all the same. Some brothers wouldn’t have done as much. I just wanted to tell him that I proposed to let him have the sum in question back.”
This proposal certainly suggested an act to which, on the face of it, there appeared no valid objection; but my uncle, perhaps from force of habit, continued to approach the matter circumspectly. “It is just a question of the trustees,” he said once or twice; and he proceeded to embark on explanations that seemed to indicate that he had some idea of presenting through myself the latest case for the adjustment of his revenue: tacking on repayment of an ancient debt as a piece of live bait. Any reason that might have been advanced earlier for my becoming the medium in these negotiations, on the grounds that my father was still out of England, had been utterly demolished by the information that he was to be found in London. However, tenacity in certain directions — notably that of the Trust — was one of Uncle Giles’s characteristics. He was also habitually unwilling to believe that altered circumstances might affect any matter upon which he had already made up his mind. He therefore entered now upon a comprehensive account of the terms of the Trust, his own pecuniary embarrassment, the forbearance he had shown in the past — both to his relations and the world at large — and the reforms he suggested for the future.
“I’m not a great business expert,” he said, “I don’t claim to be a master brain of finance or anything of that sort. The only training I ever had was to be a soldier. We know how much use that is. All the same, I’ve had a bit of experience in my day. I’ve knocked about the world and roughed it. Perhaps I’m not quite so green as I look.”