CHAPTER XXXII

Dicky Pilkington did not belong to the aristocracy of finance.  Indeed, finance had not in any form claimed him at the first.

Under the grey frock-coat and gleaming shirt-front, hidden away behind the unapparent splendours of Dicky Pilkington’s attire (his undermost garments were of woven silk), in a corner of his young barbarian heart there lurked an obscure veneration for culture and for art.  When his day’s work was done, the time that Dicky did not spend in the promenade of the Jubilee Variety Theatre, he spent in reading Karl Pearson and Robert Louis Stevenson, with his feet on the fender.  He knew the Greek characters.  He said he could tell Plato from Aristotle by the look of the text.  Dicky had begun life as a Junior Journalist.  But before that, long, long before, when he was an innocent schoolboy, Dicky had a pair of wings, dear little cherubic wings, that fluttered uneasily under his little jacket.  The wings moulted as Dicky grew older; they shrank (in the course of his evolution) to mere rudimentary appendages, and poor Dicky flopped instead of flying.  Finally they dropped off and Dicky was much happier without them.  Rickman used to say that if you stripped him you saw the marks of them still quite plainly; and Dicky was always stripping himself and showing them.  They proved to these writing fellows what he might have been if he had only chosen.  He had begun by being a poet like the best of them, and in his heart of hearts Dicky believed that it was as a poet he should end.  His maxim upon this head was:  “When I’ve feathered my nest it will be time enough for me to sing.”

Dicky’s nest was not long in feathering, and yet Dicky had not begun to sing.  Still, at moments, after supper, or on a Sunday afternoon, walking in a green lane, Dicky would unbosom himself.  He would tell you touching legends of his boyhood and adolescence.  Then he would talk to you of women.  And then he would tell you how it was that he came to forsake literature for finance.

He had begun in a small way by financing little tradesmen, little journalists and actresses in temporary difficulties; lending small sums to distressed clergymen, to governesses and the mistresses of boarding-houses.  By charging a moderate interest he acquired a character for fairness and straight-forwardness.  Now and then he did what he called a really tip-top generous thing.  “Character,” said Dicky Pilkington, “is capital”; and at thirty he had managed to save enough of it to live on without bothering about earning any more.

Then, by slow degrees, Dicky extended his business.  He lent larger sums at correspondingly higher interest.  Then he let himself go.  He was caught by the glory of the thing, the poetry of finance.  He soared to all the heights and sounded all the depths of speculation.  He took risks with rapture.  He fancied himself lending vast sums at giddy interest.  “That,” said Dicky to his conscience, was to “cover his risk.”  He hadn’t forgotten that character is capital.  And when it occurred to him, as it sometimes did, that he was making rather a large hole in it, he would then achieve some colossal act of generosity which set him on his legs again.  So that Dicky Pilkington was always happy in his conscience as in everything else.