Table d'Hôte

“BOOTS!” he roared, for the second time. His wife, opening the kitchen door, looked in, and surveyed him.

“If I have to order you,” said Mr. Baynes, speaking with great distinctness, “to come and take off my boots again, I shall dock half a crown off your weekly allowance to-morrow.”

She did not answer.

“My best plan,” he went on, “will be to draw it all up in black and white, so that we can have a clear and proper understandin’ one with the other. We must have a proper system of fines, same as they do in every well-regulated business. Fetch the pen and ink and paper.”

“How would it be to fetch it for yourself?”

He stared at her amazedly. Searching his pockets, he found there a small memorandum-book and a short piece of pencil.

“I’m going to keep calm with you,” he said deliberately, “because, so far as I can see, you’ve taken leave, for the present, of your senses. You’ll be sorry for it when you come back to ’em. Now then, let’s make out a list. ‘For not answering when called, one shilling.’”

He wrote this carefully on a page, regarding it with satisfaction at the finish. “See what that means? That means, for every time you pretend to be deaf when I shout at you, you’ll be docked a bob at the end of the week.”

“I see.”

“Just as well you do,” remarked Baynes threateningly. “We will now proceed to the next item: ‘Food not cooked to W. B.’s satisfaction, one-and-six.’ How many t’s in ‘satisfaction’?”

“Many as you like.”

“Impudence,” he continued, writing as he spoke, “one-and-three. Wait a bit; I haven’t finished yet. ‘Clean collar not ready when required, sixpence.’”

“There won’t be anything left,” mentioned his wife, “if you put many more down.”

“Rests with you,” giving a careless gesture. “All you’ve got to do is to see that none of these rules are broken. I shall take the trouble presently of copying out the list, and you’ll do well to stick it up on the wall in some prominent position, so that you can be reminded of it several times in the course of the day.”

“And when any of my relatives look in they can see it too?”

“Reminds me,” he said, taking his pencil again. “‘Relations, two a month. All in excess of this number, fourpence per relation.’ Take the list and read it out to me, and then kneel down and take off my boots as I ordered you to do some considerable time ago.”

Mrs. Baynes accepted the list, inspected it; then tore the page into several pieces and threw these into the fireplace. In the pocket of an underskirt she found a purse, and from this brought four new banknotes.

“Have a good look at them, William,” she said. “You won’t get a chance of seeing them again. I’m just going along to the Post Office to put them away before it closes.”

“How—how did you come by them?”

“I’m not bound to answer you,” remarked Mrs. Baynes, “but perhaps I may as well. The money has come to me from poor Uncle Ernest, who popped off last month. He’s left a sim’lar amount to my two sisters.”

“You was his favourite,” said Baynes, “and if he’d got money to leave—and this is the first I’ve heard of it—he ought to have left it all to you. I must have a glance at his will and see whether we can’t dispute it.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind.”

“In any case,” he went on, “there is, I’m bound to admit, a very decent little nest-egg for us.”

“Not for us. For me,” corrected Mrs. Baynes. “It belongs to me and only to me. You haven’t anything to do with it.”

“I’ve heard,” he remarked, “of sudden riches affecting the brain, but this is the first time I’ve actually come across such an instance.” He bent and started to unlace his boots. “We’ll talk the matter over again later on. By the by,” relacing his boots, “there’s no reason why you should go out on a wet night like this and catch your death of cold. I’ll trot along to the Post Office for you. I’m more used to handling money than what you are.”

“That’s been the case hitherto,” she admitted, “but I must learn how to do it now. You stay here and enjoy your pipe, and when I come back I’ll tell you how you’ve got to behave to me in the future.”

“I suppose,” he inquired with some bitterness, “I’ve got your precious sisters to thank for all this?”

“No,” she answered, “poor Uncle Ernest.”

Baynes, on the following morning, before proceeding to work, denied himself the luxury of issuing commands to his wife from the front gate in a tone of voice that could be heard by neighbours; instead he blew a kiss in her direction and walked off, whistling in a thoughtful way. Later in the day he brought home the proportion of his weekly wage and placed it on the mantelpiece, announcing no deductions and giving no warning to make it last out. He tried to assist his wife in the performance of domestic duties, persisting in this until she begged him to go out into the park and give her a chance of finishing the work. On the next day he accompanied her to chapel in the evening, and borrowed threepence from her to put into the plate. Meeting two or three friends on the way back, he declined their invitations and went home with his wife, discussing the sermon and the singing. In response to her appeal he agreed to abstain on future occasions from joining in the hymns. The Sunday paper was still on the hat-stand, and on entering the house he asked whether she would mind if he had a look at it during supper, his general habit being to secure the journal and keep it for his own use throughout the day.

“This is very nice and comfortable,” he said, after the meal. “Somehow, that little legacy of yours, if you’ll pardon the expression, my dear, seems to me likely to prove a blessing in disguise.”

“No disguise about it.”

“You don’t quite follow me,” he remarked patiently. “What I mean is that it’s going to have bigger results than I at first anticipated. Of course, it’s a pity there isn’t more of it.”

“Seeing that I never expected nothing—”

“Quite so, quite so. Only that the Post Office pays such a trifling rate of interest.”

“The money’s safe there,” she interrupted, “that’s the great thing.”

“I should be the last to recommend anything that wasn’t perfectly and absolutely sound,” declared Baynes. “We’re on good terms with each other now, and your interests are my interests. We two are one, so to speak. Only that, getting about as I do, I keep my ears open—”

“Listeners never hear any good of themselves.”

“But sometimes they hear good about other matters. Two chaps were talking on the tramcar last week, and I was sitting just at the back. Jockeys from the look of ’em. They didn’t know I was taking in all they were saying, and they talked quite freely to each other, just as I might to you in this room. Vinolia was what they were chatting about.”

“Old Brown Windsor is as good as anything.”

“Vinolia, it appears,” he continued, “is being kept very dark, but the owner’s made an arrangement, so far as I could gather, for it to win the race it’s running in next week, and no one except those that are in the stable— Why, bless my soul, if this isn’t the rummiest coincidence I ever come across in all my born days. I’m talking to you about Vinolia, and here my eye lights on the very name. Thirty-three to one. Let’s see what it says about it. ‘Vinolia appears to stand no earthly chance, and we are at a loss to comprehend why the owner should take the trouble to run him.’”