"Never mind about us, dear boy. We won"t tell a soul."
"So vot did you do?" the German amba.s.sador asked. "You say you haff dem and you didn"t steal dem?"
"I made them myself," I said.
"Brilliant!" they cried. "_Magnifique!_"
"Having a.s.sisted the Professor at every stage," I said, "I naturally knew exactly how to manufacture these pills. So I . . . well . . . I simply made them in his laboratory each day when he was out to lunch." Slowly, I reached behind me and took one small round box from my tail-coat pocket. I placed it on the low table. I opened the lid. And there, lying in its little nest of cotton-wool, was a single scarlet pill.
Everyone leaned forward to look. Then I saw the plump white hand of the German amba.s.sador sliding across the surface of the table toward the box like a weasel stalking a mouse. Sir Charles saw it, too. He smacked the palm of his own hand on top of the German"s, pinning it down. "Now, Wolfgang," he said, "don"t be impatient."
"I vant zee pill!" Amba.s.sador Wolfgang shouted.
Sir Charles put his other hand over the pill-box and kept it there. "Do you have more?" he asked me.
I fished in my tail-coat pockets and brought out nine more boxes. "There is one for each of you," I said.
Eager hands reached across, grabbing the little boxes. "I pay," said Mr. Mitsouko. "How much you want?"
"No," I said. "These are presents. Try them out, gentlemen. See what you think."
Sir Charles was studying the label on the box. "Ah-ha," he said. "I see you have your address printed here."
"That"s just in case," I said.
"In case of what?"
"In case anyone wishes to get a second pill," I said.
I noticed that the German amba.s.sador had taken out a little book and was making notes. "Sir," I said to him, "I expect you are thinking of telling your scientists to investigate the seed of the pomegranate. Am I not right?"
"Zatt iss exactly vot I am tinking," he said.
"No good," I said. "Waste of time."
"May I ask vy?"
"Because it"s not the pomegranate," I said. "It"s something else."
"So you lie to us!"
"It is the only untruth I have told you in the entire story," I said. "Forgive me, but I had to do it. I had to protect Professor Yousoupoff"s secret. It was a point of honour. All the rest is true. Believe me, it"s true. It is especially true that each of you has in his possession the most powerful rejuvenator the world has ever known."
At that point, the ladies returned, and each man in our group quickly and rather surrept.i.tiously pocketed his pillbox. They stood up. They greeted their wives. I noticed that Sir Charles had suddenly become absurdly jaunty. He hopped across the room and splashed a silly sort of kiss smack on Lady Makepiece"s scarlet lips. She gave him one of those cool what-on-earth-was-that-for looks. Unabashed, he took her arm and led her across the room into a throng of people. I last saw Mr. Mitsouko prowling around the floor inspecting the womanflesh at very close quarters, like a horse-dealer examining a bunch of mares on the marketplace. I slipped quietly away.
Half an hour later, I was back at my boarding-house in the avenue Marceau. The family had retired and all the lamps were out, but as I pa.s.sed the bedroom of Mademoiselle Nicole in the upstairs corridor, I could see in the crack between the door and the floor a flicker of candlelight. The little trollop was waiting for me again. I decided not to go in. There was nothing new for me in there. Even at this early stage in my career, I had already decided that the only women who interested me were new women. Second time round was no good. It was like reading a detective novel twice over. You knew exactly what was going to happen next. The fact that I had recently broken this rule by visiting Mademoiselle Nicole a second time was beside the point. That was done simply to test my Blister Beetle powder. And by the way, this principle of no-woman-morethan-once is one that I have stuck to rigorously all my life, and I commend it to all men of action who enjoy variety.
5.
THAT NIGHT I slept well. I was still fast asleep at eleven o"clock the next morning when the sound of Madame Boisvain"s fists hammering at my door jerked me awake. "Get up, Monsieur Cornelius!" she was shouting. "You must come down at once! People have been ringing my bell and demanding to see you since before breakfast!"
I was dressed and downstairs in two minutes flat. I went to the front door and there, standing on the cobblestones of the sidewalk, were no fewer than seven men, none of whom I had ever seen before. They made a picturesque little group in their many-coloured fancy uniforms with all manner of gilt and silver b.u.t.tons on their jackets.
They turned out to be emba.s.sy messengers, and they came from the British, the German, the Russian, the Hungarian, the Italian, the Mexican, and the Peruvian emba.s.sies. Each man carried a letter addressed to me. I accepted the letters and opened them on the spot. All of them said roughly the same thing: _They wanted more pills_. They begged for more pills. They instructed me to give the pills to the bearer of the letter, etc. etc.
I told the messengers to wait on the street and I went back up to my room. Then, I wrote the following message on each of the letters: _Honoured Sir, these pills are extremely expensive to manufacture. / regret that in future the cost of each pill will be one thousand francs_. In those days there were twenty francs to the pound, which meant that I was asking exactly fifty pounds sterling per pill. And fifty pounds sterling in 1912 was worth maybe ten times as much as it is today. By today"s standards, I was probably asking about five hundred pounds per pill. It was a ridiculous price, but these were wealthy men. They were also s.e.x-crazy men, and as any sensible woman will tell you, a man who is very wealthy and grossly s.e.x-crazy both at the same time is the easiest touch in the world. I trotted downstairs again and handed the letters back to their respective carriers and told them to deliver them to their masters. As I was doing this, two more messengers arrived, one from the Quai d"Orsay (the foreign minister) and one from the general at the Ministry of War or whatever it is called. And while I was scribbling the same statement about the price on these last two letters, who should turn up in a very fine hansom cab but Mr. Mitsouko himself. His appearance shocked me. The previous night he had been a bouncy, dapper, bright-eyed little j.a.p. This morning he hardly had the strength to get out of his cab, and as he came tottering toward me, his legs began to buckle. I grabbed hold of him just in time.
"My dear sir!" he gasped, putting both hands on my shoulders for support. "My dear, dear sir! It"s a miracle! It"s a wonder pill! It"s . . . it"s the greatest invention of all time!"
"Hang on," I said. "Are you feeling all right?"
"Of course I am all right," he gasped. "I am a little bit jiggered, that"s all." He started to giggle, and there he stood, this tiny Oriental person dressed in a top-hat and tails, clinging to my shoulders and giggling quite uncontrollably now. He was so small that the top of his top-hat came no higher than my lowest rib. "I am a little bit jiggered and a little bit pokered," he said, "but who would not be, my dear boy, who would not be?"
"What happened, sir?" I asked him.
"I molested _seven women!_" he cried. "And these were not our d.i.n.ky-tinky little j.a.panese women! No, no, no! They were enormous strong French wenchies! I took them in rotation, _bang bang bang!_ And every one of them was screaming out _camarade camarade camarade!_ I was a giant among these women, do you understand that, my dear young sir? I was a giant and I swung my giant club and I sent them all squiggling in every direction!"
I led him inside and sat him down in Madame Boisvain"s parlour. I found him a gla.s.s of brandy. He gulped it down and a faint yellowish colour began returning to his white cheeks. I noticed that there was a leather satchel suspended by a cord around his right wrist, and when he took it off and dumped it on the table, there was the clinking of coins inside it.
"You must be careful, sir," I said to him. "You are a small man and these are large pills. I think it would be safer if you took only half the normal dose each time. Just half a pill instead of one."
"Bunk.u.m, sir!" he cried. "Bunk.u.m and horseradish sauce, as we say in j.a.pan! Tonight I propose to take not one pill but three!"
"Have you read what it says on the label?" I asked him anxiously. The last thing I wanted was a dead j.a.p around the place. Think of the outcry, the autopsy, the enquiries, and the pill-boxes with my name on them in his house.
"I examine the label," he said, holding his gla.s.s out for more of Madame Boisvain"s brandy. "And I ignore it. We j.a.panese, we may be small in body but our organs are of gigantic size. That is why we walk bow-legged."
I decided I would try to discourage him by doubling the price. "I"m afraid they are terrifically expensive, these pills," I said.
"Money no object," he said, pointing to the leather satchel on the table. "I pay in gold coins."
"But Mr. Mitsouko," I said, "each pill is going to cost you _two thousand_ francs! They are very difficult to manufacture. That"s an awful lot of money for one pill."
"I take twenty," he said without even blinking.
My G.o.d, I thought, he _is_ going to kill himself. "I cannot allow you to have them," I told him, "unless you give me your word you will never take more than one at a time."
"Do not lecture me, young buckeroo," he said. "Just get me the pills."
I went upstairs and counted out twenty pills and put them in a plain bottle. I wasn"t going to risk having my name and address on this lot.
"Ten I shall send to the Emperor in Tokyo," Mr. Mitsouko said when I handed them to him. "It will put me in a very hot position with His Royal Highness."
"It"ll put the Empress in some pretty hot positions, too," I said.
He grinned and took up the leather satchel and emptied a vast pile of gold coins onto the table. They were all onehundred-franc pieces. "Twenty coins for each pill," he said, starting to count them out. "That is four hundred coins altogether. And well worth it, you young magician." When he had gone, I scooped up the coins and carried them up to my room.
My G.o.d, I thought. I am rich already.
But before the day was done, I was a lot richer. One by one, the messengers started trickling back from their respective emba.s.sies and ministries. They all carried precise orders and exact amounts of money, most of it in gold twenty-franc pieces. This is how it went: Sir Charles Makepiece, 4 pills= 4,000 francs The German amba.s.sador, 8 pills= 8,000 francs The Russian amba.s.sador, 10 pills = 10,000francs The Hungarian amba.s.sador, 3 pills = 3,000 francs The Peruvian amba.s.sador, 2 pills = 2,000 francs The Mexican amba.s.sador, 6 pills = 6,000 francs The Italian amba.s.sador, 4 pills4,000 francs The French foreign minister, 6 pills= 6,000 francs The Army general, 3 pills = 3,000 francs 46,000 francs
Mr. Mitsouko, 20 pills (double price) 40,000 francs Grand Total 86,000 francs
Eighty-six thousand francs! At the exchange rate of one hundred francs to five pounds, I was all of a sudden worth four thousand three hundred English pounds! It was incredible. One could buy a good house for money like that, with a carriage and a pair of horses thrown in, as well as one of those dashing newfangled automobiles!
For supper that night, Madame Boisvain served oxtail stew, and it wasn"t at all bad except that the sloshiness of it all encouraged Monsieur B to suck and swig and gulp in the most disgusting fashion. At one point, he picked up his plate and tipped the gravy straight into his mouth, together with a couple of carrots and a large onion. "My wife tells me that you had a lot of peculiar visitors today," he said. His face was plastered with brown fluid and strands of meat were hanging from his moustache. "Who were these men?"
"They were friends of the British amba.s.sador," I answered. "I am doing a little business for Sir Charles Makepiece."
"I cannot have my house turned into a market-place," Monsieur B said, speaking with his mouth full of fat. "These activities must cease."
"Don"t worry," I said. "Tomorrow I am finding alternative accommodation."
"You mean you"re leaving?" he cried.
"I"m afraid I must. But you may keep the advance rent my father has paid you."
There was a bit of an uproar around the table about all this, much of it from Mademoiselle Nicole, but I stuck to my guns. And the next morning I went out and found myself a quite grand ground-floor apartment with three large rooms and a kitchen. It was on the avenue Jena. I packed all my possessions and loaded them into a hackney coach. Madame Boisvain was at the front door to see me off. "Madame," I said, "I have a small favour to ask of you."
"Yes?"
"And in return I want you to take this." I held out five gold twenty-franc pieces. She nearly fell over. "From time to time," I said, "people will call at your house asking for me. All you have to do is tell them I have moved and redirect them to this address." I gave her a piece of paper with my new address written on it.
"But that is too much money, Monsieur Oswald!"
"Take it," I said, pushing the coins into her hand. "Keep it for yourself. Don"t tell your husband. But it is very important that you inform everyone who calls where I am living."
She promised to do this, and I drove away to my new quarters.
6.
MY BUSINESS FLOURISHED. My ten original clients all whispered the great news to their own friends and those friends whispered it to other friends and in a month or so a large s...o...b..ll had been created. I spent half of each day making pills. I thanked heaven I had had the foresight to bring such a large quant.i.ty of powder from the Sudan in the first place. But I did have to reduce my price. Not everyone was an amba.s.sador or a foreign minister, and I found early on that a lot of people simply couldn"t afford to pay my absurd original fee of one thousand francs per pill. So I made it two hundred and fifty instead.
The money gushed in.
I started buying fine clothes and going out into Paris society.
I purchased a motor car and learnt to drive it. It was De Dion Bouton"s brand-new model, the Sports DK, a marvellous little mon.o.bloc four with a three-speed gearbox and a pull-on handbrake. Top speed, believe it or not, was as much as 50 mph, and more than once I took her to the limit up the Champs Elysees.
But above all, I rolicked and frolicked with women to my heart"s content. Paris in those days was an exceptionally cosmopolitan city. It was filled with ladies of quality from practically every country in the world, and it was during this period that a curious truth began to dawn upon me. We all know that people of different nations have different national characteristics and different temperaments. What is not quite so well recognized is the fact that these different national characteristics become even more marked during s.e.xual, as opposed to merely social, intercourse. I became an expert on national s.e.xual characteristics. It was extraordinary how the women of one nation or another ran true to form. You could take, for example, half a dozen Serbian ladies (and don"t think I didn"t) and you would find, if you were paying close attention, that every one of them possessed a number of very definite common eccentricities, common skills, and common preferences. Polish women also, because of certain habits they all had in common, were easily recognizable. So were the Basques, the Moroccans, the Ecuadorians, the Norwegians, the Dutch, the Guatemalans, the Belgians, the Russians, the Chinese, and all the rest of them. Toward the end of my stay in Paris, you could have put me on a couch blindfolded with any lady from any country, and within five minutes, though she never uttered a word, I would have told you her nationality.
Now for the obvious question. Which country produced the most exhilarating females?
I myself became rather partial to Bulgarian ladies of aristocratic stamp. They had, amongst other things, the most unusual tongues. Not only were these tongues of theirs exceptionally muscular and vibrant, but they had a roughness about them, a kind of abrasive quality that one normally finds only in cats" tongues. Get a cat to lick your finger sometime and you will see exactly what I mean.
Turkish ladies (I think I"ve mentioned them before) were also high on my list. They were like water-wheels. They never stopped turning until the river dried up. But by gad, you had to be fit before you challenged a Turkish lady, and I personally never allowed one into my house until after I"d had a good breakfast.
Hawaiian women interested me because they had prehensile toes, and in almost any situation you care to mention, they used their feet rather than their hands.
As far as Chinese women went, I learned by experience to tamper only with those that came from Peking and the neighbouring province of Shantung. And even then, it was essential that they were from n.o.ble families. In those days, it was the custom among the n.o.bility of Peking and Shantung to put their girls into the hands of wise old women as soon as they reached the age of fifteen. For two years thereafter, these girls were subjected to a rigorous course of instruction designed to teach them only one thing-- the art of giving physical pleasure to their future husbands. And at the end of it all, after a severe practical examination, certificates were issued indicating a pa.s.s or a failure. If the girl was exceptionally dexterous and inventive, she might get what was called Pa.s.s with Distinction, and most prized of all was the Diploma of Merit. A young lady with a Diploma could virtually pick her own husband. Unfortunately though, at least half the Diploma girls were whisked away at once into the Emperor"s palace. I discovered only one Chinese lady in Paris who had earned a Diploma of Merit. She was the wife of an opium millionaire and she had come over to select a wardrobe. She selected me as well, and I must admit it was a memorable experience. She had developed into a sublime art the practice of what she called _so-far-and-no-further_. Nothing ever quite finished. She didn"t allow it to. She took one to the brink. Two hundred times she took me to the brink of the golden threshold, and for three and a half hours, which was the duration of my suffering, it felt as though a long live nerve was being drawn very very slowly and with exquisite patience out of my burning body. I hung onto the edge of the cliff with my fingertips, screaming for succour or release, but the blissful torture went on and on and on. It was an amazing demonstration of skill and I have never forgotten it.
I could describe if I wished the curious feminine habits of at least fifty other nationalities, but I am not going to do so. Not here anyway, because I really must proceed with the main theme of this story, which is how I made money.
During my seventh month in Paris, a lucky incident took place that doubled my income. This is what happened. One afternoon, I had a Russian lady in my apartment who was some sort of a relation to the Tsar. She was a slim, whiteskinned little herring, rather cool and casual, almost offhand she was, and I had to stoke her up pretty vigorously before I succeeded in raising a good head of steam in her boilers. That sort of blase att.i.tude only makes me more determined than ever, and I can promise you that by the time I"d finished with her, she"d had a fair old roasting.
When it was over, I lay back on the couch sipping a gla.s.s of champagne as a cooler. The Russian was languidly dressing herself and wandering round my room looking at this and that.
"What are all these red pills in this bottle?" she asked me.
"They"re none of your business," I said.
"When am I going to see you again?"
"Never," I said. "I told you my rules."
"You are being disagreeable," she said, pouting. "Tell me what these pills are for or I also will become disagreeable. I will throw them all out the window." She picked up the bottle that contained five hundred of my precious Blister Beetle pills just made that morning and she opened the window.
"Don"t," I said.
"Then tell me."
"They are tonic pills for men," I said. "Pick-me-ups, that"s all."
"Why not for women also?"
"They"re only for men."