He sits not a dozen yards away. If I glance over my shoulder I can see
him. And if I catch his eye--and usually I catch his eye--it meets me
with an expression.
It is mainly an imploring look--and yet with suspicion in it.
Confound his suspicion! If I wanted to tell on him I should have told
long ago. I don't tell and I don't tell, and he ought to feel at his
ease. As if anything so gross and fat as he could feel at ease! Who
would believe me if I did tell?
Poor old Pyecraft! Great, uneasy jelly of substance! The fattest clubman
in London.
He sits at one of the little club tables in the huge bay by the fire,
stuffing. What is he stuffing? I glance judiciously and catch him biting
at a round of hot buttered tea-cake, with his eyes on me. Confound
him!--with his eyes on me!
That settles it, Pyecraft! Since you WILL be abject, since you WILL
behave as though I was not a man of honour, here, right under your
embedded eyes, I write the thing down--the plain truth about Pyecraft.
The man I helped, the man I shielded, and who has requited me by making
my club unendurable, absolutely unendurable, with his liquid appeal,
with the perpetual “don't tell” of his looks.
And, besides, why does he keep on eternally eating?
Well, here goes for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth!
Pyecraft--. I made the acquaintance of Pyecraft in this very
smoking-room. I was a young, nervous new member, and he saw it. I was
sitting all alone, wishing I knew more of the members, and suddenly
he came, a great rolling front of chins and abdomina, towards me, and
grunted and sat down in a chair close by me and wheezed for a space, and
scraped for a space with a match and lit a cigar, and then addressed
me. I forget what he said--something about the matches not lighting
properly, and afterwards as he talked he kept stopping the waiters one
by one as they went by, and telling them about the matches in that thin,
fluty voice he has. But, anyhow, it was in some such way we began our
talking.
He talked about various things and came round to games. And thence to
my figure and complexion. “YOU ought to be a good cricketer,” he said. I
suppose I am slender, slender to what some people would call lean, and
I suppose I am rather dark, still--I am not ashamed of having a Hindu
great-grandmother, but, for all that, I don't want casual strangers to
see through me at a glance to HER. So that I was set against Pyecraft
from the beginning.
But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.
“I expect,” he said, “you take no more exercise than I do, and probably
you eat no less.” (Like all excessively obese people he fancied he ate
nothing.) “Yet,”--and he smiled an oblique smile--“we differ.”
And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness; all he did
for his fatness and all he was going to do for his fatness; what people
had advised him to do for his fatness and what he had heard of people
doing for fatness similar to his. “A priori,” he said, “one would think
a question of nutrition could be answered by dietary and a question of
assimilation by drugs.” It was stifling. It was dumpling talk. It made
me feel swelled to hear him.
One stands that sort of thing once in a way at a club, but a time came
when I fancied I was standing too much. He took to me altogether too
conspicuously. I could never go into the smoking-room but he would come
wallowing towards me, and sometimes he came and gormandised round and
about me while I had my lunch. He seemed at times almost to be clinging
to me. He was a bore, but not so fearful a bore as to be limited to me;
and from the first there was something in his manner--almost as though
he knew, almost as though he penetrated to the fact that I MIGHT--that
there was a remote, exceptional chance in me that no one else presented.
“I'd give anything to get it down,” he would say--“anything,” and peer
at me over his vast cheeks and pant.
Poor old Pyecraft! He has just gonged, no doubt to order another
buttered tea-cake!
He came to the actual thing one day. “Our Pharmacopoeia,” he said, “our
Western Pharmacopoeia, is anything but the last word of medical science.
In the East, I've been told--”
He stopped and stared at me. It was like being at an aquarium.
I was quite suddenly angry with him. “Look here,” I said, “who told you
about my great-grandmother's recipes?”
“Well,” he fenced.
“Every time we've met for a week,” I said, “and we've met pretty
often--you've given me a broad hint or so about that little secret of
mine.”
“Well,” he said, “now the cat's out of the bag, I'll admit, yes, it is
so. I had it--”
“From Pattison?”
“Indirectly,” he said, which I believe was lying, “yes.”
“Pattison,” I said, “took that stuff at his own risk.”
He pursed his mouth and bowed.
“My great-grandmother's recipes,” I said, “are queer things to handle.
My father was near making me promise--”
“He didn't?”
“No. But he warned me. He himself used one--once.”
“Ah!... But do you think--? Suppose--suppose there did happen to be
one--”
“The things are curious documents,” I said.
“Even the smell of 'em.... No!”
But after going so far Pyecraft was resolved I should go farther. I was
always a little afraid if I tried his patience too much he would fall
on me suddenly and smother me. I own I was weak. But I was also annoyed
with Pyecraft. I had got to that state of feeling for him that disposed
me to say, “Well, TAKE the risk!” The little affair of Pattison to which
I have alluded was a different matter altogether. What it was doesn't
concern us now, but I knew, anyhow, that the particular recipe I used
then was safe. The rest I didn't know so much about, and, on the whole,
I was inclined to doubt their safety pretty completely.