# The Four Philanthropists/Chapter 11
### CHAPTER XI ANOTHER LULL

Though Chelubai, to secure greater secrecy of movement, had come down to Aldley on the Hill on a motor-bicycle, he returned with us to town by train. He was crestfallen and melancholy, and heaped many reproaches on me for spoiling the execution of an admirably planned operation by what he called my childish fad.
Angel and I, on the contrary, were simmering with joy. Not only had we avoided a removal, of the propriety of which we were not entirely convinced, but also we had divested ourselves of the Old Man of the Sea with whom Chelubai had entwined us. The apparently trivial reason I had given for casting out Sir Reginald had made our breach with him far more difficult to repair than if I had alleged a more serious cause. But when I grew tired of Chelubai's melancholy injustice, with some malice I explained to Angel that though she and I were for ever free from the bridge and conversation of Sir Reginald, Chelubai and Bottiger would still endure both, would still have to suffer the penalty of the imprudent ​encouragement they had given him. Chelubai, I knew, could never bring himself to quarrel with a baronet of James I. creation; and Bottiger had some honest belief that in an age of Socialism baronets should hold together. Of course that belief had not prevented him from arranging the substitution of Sir Noel for Sir Reginald; but Sir Reginald still existing, Bottiger would stand by him against the world of commoners. I succeeded in bathing Chelubai in an even deeper gloom.
Bottiger, who had spent the earlier part of the afternoon showing himself at the club twenty miles from the scene of the expected fatal accident, was awaiting us at the Temple.
His first eager words were, "Did you out him?"
"We did not," I said. "At the very last moment I found that he had failed to comply with my conditions. He had left the £5,000 to the Mission to the Patagonians instead of to the Children's Hospital. That ended the matter."
Then the fun, or rather the fury, began. Bottiger raged and Bottiger stormed, and Chelubai, no longer unsupported, stormed with him. By a childish fad I had ruined a magnificent scheme.… I had rendered vain the labor they had given to it.… I had wasted the time they had spent on it.… I had brought it about that they had endured intolerable anxiety for ​nothing.… I was self-centred to the last shameless degree … my selfishness was disgusting.
They came to the end of their breath about the same time; then I took up the tale. "I like your cheek," I said sternly. "Your labor indeed! It was I and my sister who had the labor and anxiety for nothing! We perfected the scheme, and we labored at it. While you were taking your inglorious eases at the bridge table, she and I were sweating beneath the burden of Sir Reginald's conversation—we bore the brunt of his anecdotes. All we left to you was two simple details of the scheme, the bequest of £5,000 to my Children's Hospital, and the mere trivial detail of the actual removal. You bungled the scheme. You let Sir Reginald leave the £5,000 to the Mission to the Patagonians."
"Oh, damn the Patagonians!" said Bottiger; and with that they took their leave in cold furies.
For three days we saw nothing of them. I began to fear that they were engaged in removing Sir Reginald on their own account. My distrust of Chelubai's keen enthusiasm and Bottiger's bull-dog tenacity occasioned me grave anxiety lest they should be betrayed by them into some rash removal and be discovered. Then I learned with relief that Sir Reginald was confined to his bed with a severe attack of gout, the result doubtless ​of emotion, and out of their reach. On the fourth day Chelubai and Bottiger appeared sheepishly at tea-time, armed with a basket of peaches, a wonderful cake and a large box of exquisite chocolate creams—peace-offerings. We accepted the amend with dignity, and all was forgiven and forgotten.
Our ruined scheme for the removal of Sir Reginald Blackthwaite was followed by a long period of inactivity. We did not indeed relax in our philanthropic efforts to get a job. Severally we sounded, with great caution and delicacy, eleven promising persons, but to no purpose. Even Chelubai and I, who have acquired—he in Shanghai, I in London—a somewhat unfavorable opinion of the human race, were shocked at the false sentimentality, the callous indifference, to the crying needs of Humanity which prevail amongst heirs. I am bound to admit that these base qualities were often strengthened by cowardice, but the greater part of their reluctance to promote our enterprise arose from them. Bottiger seemed, indeed, to consider their behavior not unnatural; and I was grieved to observe that it did not excite in Angel the indignant scorn it should.
In the meantime, we went on buying little blocks of Quorley Granite Company Shares; and Morton in a quiet and quite unobtrusive way ​investigated the working of the quarries. They were indeed being worked in such a fashion as to produce but a tithe of what they could produce with a full equipment of labor and machinery.
Moreover, Morton had obtained another most useful piece of information. He learned that her dead trustee's housekeeper, the witness of the shares' transfer, had witnessed the signing of so many documents connected with Angel's affairs that she had no knowledge at all of the contents of any one of them. And of this forgetfulness he proposed to take the fullest advantage, in the interests less of the law than of justice.
He had very little fear that Pudleigh would fight the case, since a rising or risen King of Finance can hardly be got into a witness-box by anything weaker than a traction-engine. But I often conferred with him about the matter, for we were resolved, both the General Philanthropic Removal Company and Morton, to be prepared at every point, if it should come to a fight. When, presently, I found him greatly put about by the disappearance of Angel, at my suggestion he advertised for her, and at my suggestion she went to see him. He was relieved to learn that she was living with a friend, and in no want of money. She gave him an address at Battersea where I had once lodged, and I arranged with the landlady that all letters coming for her there ​should be forwarded to me at the Temple. It was probable, indeed, that I should know beforehand if Morton wanted to see her in an emergency, quickly; and she could anticipate his letter asking her to call on him.
I was glad to have this matter off my mind, for I had been no little afraid lest Morton should interrupt our domesticity; and since Angel and I fitted more and more into one another's lives, I was loth indeed that that should happen. I doubt that many brothers and sisters enjoy as close a kinship in interests and tastes as we did, or attain to as exact an understanding of one another. Insensibly I fell into the position of the complete elder brother—as was only natural seeing that she was but a child for all the keenness of her intelligence. I prevented her doing foolish things, with considerable firmness. I looked upon her, I fancy, as rather more of a child than she really was; for after all her days of loneliness and adversity had had a somewhat forcing effect on her development, and she was older than her sixteen years. However, she did not resent it; she liked me to look after her so carefully, and I liked doing it. I found her such a delightful child that I looked forward to her growing into a woman with no little displeasure. We were very well as we were, and any change could but be for the worse.
​We were affluent, too, after having endured hard times; an agreeable position. Our tastes were simple, and Angel grew a better and better housekeeper. A gentle, continuous stream of briefs began to flow in. I made Angel happier by letting her write the reviews of a good many of the novels sent to me. She had a natural good judgment, and I only had to rewrite or later correct them into the befitting English.
But if we, in our simplicity, were content, and disposed to be careless of the fact that the G. P. R. C. was doing no business, Chelubai and Bottiger shared neither our content nor our carelessness. The passion for practical philanthropy had taken hold of them. Their consciences were harassed by the need to be actively furthering the progress of Humanity. They were for ever harping on the question of removals, and kept me busy considering and rejecting their suggestions.
At last it fell to me to come to the aid of their distressed consciences. I was walking along Fleet Street late one bitterly cold December afternoon, when a very shabby young man gave me a glance of half-recognition, and hurried by me with a shame-faced air. For a moment I could not remember him, then knew him for Marmaduke Jubb, a son of Jubb and Symons' famous Ne Plus Ultra Pickles, whom I had coached for his Pass degree at Oxford some four years before. I called after him, "Hallo, Jubb!"
​He seemed half inclined to hurry on, changed his mind and stopped.
I shook hands with him, invited him to drink with me, and we turned into one of the numerous bars which are so surely ousting the newspaper offices from that neighborhood. In the bright light of the electric lamps I saw him more clearly, and I was surprised at the change in his air and dress. He had been a young man of a rounded, sleek and contented face, with an excellent opinion, hardly so well founded as it might have been, of his looks, deportment and intelligence. His taste in dress had been for the florid, and had found expression in boldly checkered tweeds and ornate cravats sustained by large jewelled pins—even Oxford had been unable to thin his massive gold Albert. Now on his gaunt and haggard face was the hunted air of a man at loggerheads with Fortune; his top-hat was brown with age and weather, and napless round the edge of the crown; his morning coat was green about the seams, and in the bitter cold he wore no overcoat.
He chose to drink port, and when it came he asked, with a timidity in strong contrast with the old buoyant self-confidence I remembered in him, if he might have a biscuit with it, lest, drinking on an empty stomach, the wine should get into his head. The waiter brought him four biscuits ​on a plate, and in a breath he had wolfed two of them. He had broken the third, and was putting half of it into his mouth, when he seemed to bethink himself, glanced round furtively and put the unbroken biscuit and the fragments of the broken one carefully into his breast pocket, saying with a pitiable air of affected carelessness: "I've just remembered how fond my little boy is of this particular kind of biscuit, and he doesn't get many. We're not very well off." And he gulped down a mouthful of the port
I stopped short in my favorite disquisition on the continuity of the English climate, and said: "Look here, my good chap, what's happened? Has your father lost his money, or what?"
"He's dead—and he—he left all his money to a woman he married just before he died," he said jerkily.
"Tell me," I said, with a good deal of sympathy in my voice.
"We quarrelled about my marriage—three years ago. I married a poor girl, an orphan, and he wanted me to marry a rich one, or at any rate a girl of good family. But he made me an allowance, and we lived on it all right. Then he married a widow who lived near him, and neither I nor my wife could get on with her at all. We and she grew to hate one another, as he very well knew. Soon afterwards he died, poor old chap, ​and left his money so that she has the use of it during her life, and when she dies it comes to me. I think he meant well, poor old chap; as far as I can make out he fancied that our being dependent on her money would somehow bring us together. But the devilish old beast collared the seven thousand a year, and allows me twenty pounds a year out of it—twenty pounds a year! And I have my wife and little boy to keep." He choked a little, and gulped down some more port.
"It's very hard luck. You must be hard up!" I said compassionately.
"Hard up?" he said in a kind of rasp. "We are hard up! You know how I was brought up—to have the spending of seven thousand a year. I can do nothing—nothing! I can't write even a good enough letter to be a clerk, and I've no arithmetic. I got two jobs, both at twenty-five shillings a week, and lost both because I couldn't do the work. I could—I could strangle myself for being such a fool! It isn't so much on my own account I feel it—it's—it's the boy!"
He caught up his glass, gulped at the wine and choked and spluttered over it. I saw but for it he would have sobbed.
"I'm very sorry to hear this," I said. "Let me help you a bit to go on with, and I'll see if I can find you something in the way of a job."
I pulled out my sovereign case, turned four ​sovereigns out of it on to the table and pushed them across to him.
I never saw such a curious look on a human face. It was half unbelieving joy, half absolute terror. He put out his hand and touched them with the tips of trembling fingers. Then he scrabbled them into his palm, jumped up and muttered hoarsely, "I must get home! They're hungry at home—hungry!" And he ran out of the bar.
"The old address!" I shouted after him, but I doubted that he heard me.