"A senior gynaecologist, madam. It would all be most carefully planned."
"And my husband would never find out?"
"How could he? He"d think he"d done it himself."
"I suppose he would, wouldn"t he?" She giggles.
"Bound to, madam."
"It _would_ be rather nice to have a child by the King of Spain, wouldn"t it?"
"Have you considered Bulgaria, madam? Bulgaria is a bargain at twenty thousand."
"I don"t want a Bulgar brat, Mr. Cornelius, even if he is royal."
"I quite understand, madam."
"And then of course there"s Mr. Puccini. _La Boheme_ is absolutely my favourite opera. How much is Mr. Puccini?"
"Giacomo Puccini is sixty-seven thousand five hundred, madam. He is strongly recommended. The child would almost certainly be a musical genius."
"I play the piano a bit myself."
"That would help the baby"s chances enormously."
"I expect it would, woudn"t it?"
"Confidentially, madam, I can tell you that a certain lady in Dallas, Texas, had a Puccini boy three years ago and the child has already composed his first opera."
"You don"t say."
"Thrilling, isn"t it?"
I was going to have a lot of fun once the selling started. But right now I had before me one whole month in which to do nothing except enjoy myself. I decided to remain in London. I"d have a real fling. I deserved it. Throughout most of the winter I"d been chasing after kings all over Europe and the time had come for some serious wenching.
And what wenching it was. I went on a proper bender. For three weeks out of the four, I had a glorious time (see Vol. III). Then suddenly, at the beginning of the fourth and final week of my vacation, when I was really in full blood and churning the ladies of London to such purpose you could hear the bones rattling all over Mayfair, a devilish incident occurred that put an immediate stopper on all my activities. Terrible it was. Diabolical. Even to _think_ about it at this distance causes me sharp physical pain. Nonetheless, I feel I ought to describe this sordid episode in the hope that it may save a few other sportsmen from a similar catastrophe.
I do not usually sit in the bathtub at the wrong end with my back to the taps. Few people do. But on this particular afternoon, the other end, the comfortable slopey end, was occupied by a saucy little imp who possessed hyperactive carnal proclivities. That"s why she was there. The fact that she happened also to be an English d.u.c.h.ess is not entirely beside the point either. Had I been a few years older, I would have known what to expect from a female of high rank, and I"d have been a good deal less careless. Most of these women have acquired their t.i.tles by ensnaring some poor benighted peer or duke, and it takes a very special kind of mendacity and guile to succeed at that game. To become a d.u.c.h.ess you must be a prime manipulator of men. I have tangled with a fair number of them in my time and they"re all alike. Marchionesses and countesses are not quite so ghoulish, but they run the d.u.c.h.ess a close second. Daily with them by all means. It is a piquant experience. But for heaven"s sake keep your wits about you while you"re at it. You never know, you positively never can tell when they"re going to turn and bite the hand that strokes them. Watch out, I say, for the female with a grand t.i.tle.
Anyway, this d.u.c.h.ess and I had been jouncing for an hour or so in the bathtub, and now that she had had enough she threw the soap at my face and stepped out of the water. The large slimy missile caught me on the mouth but as none of my teeth were dislodged or even loosened I ignored the incident. In point of fact, she had done it simply to quieten me down and to give her a chance to get away, which it did.
"Come back in," I said, wanting a second helping.
"I"ve got to go," she answered. She was keeping her distance as she dried her trim little body with one of my huge towels.
"It"s only half-time," I pleaded.
"The trouble with you, Oswald, is you don"t know when to stop," she said. "One day someone"s going to lose patience with you."
"Frigid b.i.t.c.h," I said. It was a silly thing to say and quite untrue, but I said it.
She went into the next room to get dressed. I remained sitting in the bath, silent and feeling thwarted. I didn"t like it when others called the tune.
"Good-bye, darling," she said, coming back into the bathroom. She was wearing a short-sleeved silk dress, dark green.
"Go home, then," I said. "Go back to your ridiculous duke."
"Don"t be so grumpy," she said. She walked over to me and bent down and began to ma.s.sage my back under the water. Then her hand slid around to other areas, caressing and teasing gently. I sat still, enjoying it all and wondering whether she wasn"t perhaps going to start melting all over again.
Now you won"t believe this, but all the time the little vixen was pretending to play around with me, what she was actually doing was surrept.i.tiously and with consummate stealth removing the plug from the plughole in the bottom of the bathtub. As you know, when the plug is withdrawn from a bath that is brimful of water, the suction down the plughole is immensely powerful. And when a man is sitting astride that plughole as I was at that moment, then it is inevitable that the two most tender and valuable objects in his possession are going to be sucked very suddenly into that dreadful hole. There was a dull _plop_ as my s.c.r.o.t.u.m took the full force of the suction and flew into the neck of the hole. I let out a scream that must have been heard clear across Kensington Square.
"Good-bye, darling," said the d.u.c.h.ess, sweeping out of the bathroom.
In the excruciating moments that followed I learned exactly what it must feel like to. fall into the hands of those Bedouin women who delight in depriving a traveller of his masculinity with blunt knives. "Help!"! screamed. "Save me!" I was impaled. I was glued to the tub. I was clutched in the claws of a mighty crab.
It seemed like hours but I don"t suppose I was actually stuck in that position for more than ten or fifteen minutes. It was quite long enough though. I don"t even know how I eventually managed to prize myself free all in one piece. But the damage was done. Powerful suction is a terrible thing and those two precious jewels of mine, which were normally no bigger than a couple of greengages, had suddenly a.s.sumed the size of cantaloupe melons. I think it was old Geoffrey Chaucer way back in the fourteenth century who wrote
Ladies with t.i.tles Will go for your vitals
and those immortal words, believe me, are now engraved upon my heart. For three days I was on crutches and for G.o.d knows how long after that I walked about like a man who was harbouring a porcupine between his thighs.
It was in this crippled condition that I made my way up to Cambridge on May 15th to keep my appointment with Yasmin at Dunroamin. As I got out of the car and hobbled toward the front door, my marbles were still on fire and throbbing like the devil"s drum. Yasmin, of course, would be wanting to know what had happened to me. So would Woresley. Should I tell them the truth? If I did, Yasmin would fall all over the room laughing, and I could already hear Woresley in his silly pompous way saying, "You are altogether too carnal, my dear Cornelius. No man can debauch himself the way you do without paying a heavy price." I didn"t think I could stand that sort of thing right then, so I decided to tell them I had strained a ligament in my thigh. I had done it while helping an old lady after she had stumbled and taken a heavy fall on the pavement outside my house. I had carried her indoors and looked after her until the ambulance came, but it had all been a bit too much for me, etc., etc. That would do it.
I stood under the little porch outside the front door of Dunroamin and fished for my key. As I was doing this, I noticed there was an envelope pinned to the door. Someone had fixed it on firmly with a drawing-pin. d.a.m.n silly thing to do. I couldn"t get the pin out so I ripped the envelope away. There was no name on it so I opened it. Foolish not to put a name on the envelope. Was it for me? Yes, it was.
_Dear Oswald,_
_Arthur and I got married last week_ . . .
Arthur? Who the h.e.l.l was Arthur?
_We have gone far away and I hope you won"t mind too much but we"ve taken The s.e.m.e.n"s Home with us, at least all of it except Proust_ . . .
Jesus Christ! Arthur must be Woresley! Arthur Woresley!
_Yes, we have left you Proust. I never did like the little b.u.g.g.e.r anyway. All fifty of his straws are safely stored in the travelling container in the bas.e.m.e.nt and the Proust letter is in the desk. We have all the other letters with us safe and sound_ . . .
I was reeling. I couldn"t read on. I unlocked the door and staggered inside and found a bottle of whiskey. I sloshed some into a gla.s.s and gulped it down.
_If you stop and think about it, Oswald, I"m sure you"ll agree we"re not really doing the dirty on you and i"ll tell you why. Arthur says_ . . .
I didn"t give a d.a.m.n what Arthur said. They"d stolen the precious sperm. It was worth millions. I was willing to bet it was that little sod Woresley who"d put Yasmin up to it.
_Arthur says that after all it was him who invented the process, wasn"t it? And it was me who did all the hard work of collecting it. Arthur sends you his best wishes._
_Toodle-oo_
_Yasmin Woresley_
A real snorter, that. Right below the belt. It had me gasping.
I roared round the house in a wild fury. My stomach was boiling and I"m sure steam was spurting out of my nostrils. Had there been a dog in the place I"d have kicked it to death. I kicked the furniture instead. I smashed a lot of nice big things and then I set about picking up all the smaller objects, including a Baccarat paperweight and an Etruscan bowl, and flinging them through the windows, yelling b.l.o.o.d.y murder and watching the window-panes shatter.
But after an hour or so, I began to simmer down, and finally I collapsed into an armchair with a large gla.s.s of malt whiskey in my hand.
I am, as you may have gathered, a fairly resilient fellow. I explode when provoked, but I never brood about it afterwards. I scrub it out. There"s always another day. What"s more, nothing stimulates my mind so much as a whopping disaster. In the aftermath, in that period of deadly calm and absolute silence that follows the tempest, my brain becomes exceedingly active. As I sat drinking my whiskey during that terrible evening amidst the ruins of Dunroamin, I was already beginning to ponder and plan my future all over again.
So that"s that, I told myself. I"ve been diddled. It"s all over. Need a new start. I still have Proust and in years to come I shall do well with those fifty straws (and don"t think I didn"t), but that isn"t going to make me a millionaire. So what next?
It was at this point that the great and wonderful answer began trickling into my head. I sat quite still, allowing the idea to take root and grow. It was inspired. It was beautiful in its simplicity. It couldn"t fail. It would make me millions. Why hadn"t I thought of it before?
I promised at the beginning of this diary to tell you how I became a wealthy man. I have taken a long time so far in telling you how I did not succeed. Let me therefore make up for lost time and describe to you in no more than a few paragraphs how I did in the end become a real multimillionaire. The great idea that came to me suddenly in Dunroamin was as follows: I would go back at once to the Sudan. I would negotiate with a corrupt government official for a lease of that precious tract of land where the hashab tree grows and the Blister Beetle flourishes. I would obtain sole rights to all beetle hunting. I would gather the native beetle hunters together and form them into an organized unit. I would pay them generously, far more than they were getting at present by flogging their Beetles in the open market. They would work exclusively for me. Poachers would be ruthlessly eliminated. I would, in fact, corner the market in Sudanese Blister Beetles. When all this was arranged and I was a.s.sured of a large and regular supply of Beetles, I would build a little factory in Khartoum and there I would process my Beetles and manufacture in quant.i.ty Professor Yousoupoff"s Famous Potency Pills. I would package the pills in the factory. I would then set up a small secret underground sales unit with offices in Paris, London, New York, Amsterdam, and other cities throughout the world. I told myself that if a callow seventeen-year-old youth had been able to earn himself a hundred thousand pounds in one year in Paris all by himself, just think what I could do now on a world-wide basis.
And that, my friends, is almost exactly what happened. I went back to the Sudan. I stayed there for a little over two years, and I don"t mind telling you that although I learned a great deal about the Blister Beetle, I also learned a thing or two about the ladies who inhabit those regions. The tribes were sharply divided and they seldom mixed. But I mixed with them all right, with the Nubians, the Ha.s.sanians, the Baggaras, the Shilluks, the Shukrias, and the curiously light-colored Niam-Niams, who live west of the Blue Nile. I found the Nubians especially to my taste and I wouldn"t be surprised if that was where the word _nubile_ originated.
By the end of 1923, my little factory was going full blast and turning out a thousand pills a day.
By 1925, I had agents in eight cities. I had chosen them carefully. All, without exception, were retired army generals. Unemployed generals are common in every country, and these men, I discovered, were cut out for this particular type of job. They were efficient. They were unscrupulous. They were brave. They had little regard for human life. And they lacked sufficient intelligence to cheat me without being caught.
It was an immensely lucrative business. The profits were astronomical. But after a few years I grew bored with running such a big operation and I turned the whole thing over to a Greek syndicate in exchange for one half of the profits. The Greeks were happy, I was happy, and hundreds of thousands of customers have been happy ever since.
I am unashamedly proud of my contribution to the happiness of the human race. Not many men of business and certainly very few millionaires can tell themselves with a clear conscience that the acc.u.mulation of their wealth has spread such a high degree of ecstasy and joy among their clients. And it pleases me very much to have discovered that the dangers to human health of _Cantharis vesicatoria sudanii_ have been grossly exaggerated. My records show that not more than four or five dozen a year at the most suffer any serious or crippling effects from the magic substance. Very few die.
Just one more thing. In 1935, some fifteen years later, I was having breakfast in my Paris house and reading the morning paper when my eye was caught and held by the following item in one of the gossip columns (translated from the French):
_La Maison d"Or at Cap Ferrat, the largest and most luxurious private property on the entire Cote d"Azur, has recently changed hands. It has been bought by an English couple, Professor Arthur Woresley and his beautiful wife, Yasmin. The Woresleys have come to France from Buenos Aires where they have been living for many years, and very welcome they are. They will add great l.u.s.tre to the glittering Riviera scene. As well as buying the magnificent Maison d"Or, they have just taken delivery of a superb ocean-going yacht which is the envy of every millionaire on the Mediterranean. it has a crew of eighteen and cabin accommodation for ten people. The Woresleys have named the yacht SPERM. When I asked Mrs. Woresley why they had chosen that rather curious name, she laughed and said, "Oh, I don"t know. I suppose because it"s such a whale of a ship."_
Quite a girl, that Yasmin. I have to admit it. Though what she ever saw in old Woresley with his donnish airs and his nicotine-stained moustache I cannot imagine. They say a good man is hard to find. Maybe Woresley was one of those. But who on earth wants a good man? Who, for that matter, wants a good woman?
Not me.