Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Read Online Free PDF Page B

audibly marked in case of theft, and where nobody seemed to go to bed at all. When his clothes arrived he sought the Central Southern Syndicate for Torpenhow’s address, and got it, with the intimation that there was still some money waiting for him.
    ‘How much?’ said Dick, as one who habitually dealt in millions.
    ‘Between thirty and forty pounds. If it would be any convenience to you, of course we could let you have it at once; but we usually settle accounts monthly.’
    ‘If I show that I want anything now, I’m lost,’ he said to himself. ‘All I need I’ll take later on.’ Then, aloud, ‘It’s hardly worth while; and I’m going to the country for a month, too. Wait till I come back, and I’ll see about it.’
    ‘But we trust, Mr. Heldar, that you do not intend to sever your connection with us?’
    Dick’s business in life was the study of faces, and he watched the speaker keenly. ‘That man means something,’ he said. ‘I’ll do no business till I’ve seen Torpenhow. There’s a big deal coming.’ So he departed, making no promises, to his one little room by the Docks. And that day was the seventh of the month, and that month, he reckoned with awful distinctness, had thirty-one days in it!
    It is not easy for a man of catholic tastes and healthy appetites to exist for twenty-four days on fifty shillings. Nor is it cheering to begin the experiment alone in all the loneliness of London. Dick paid seven shillings a week for his lodging, which left him rather less than a shilling a day for food and drink. Naturally, his first purchase was of the materials of his craft; he had been without them too long. Half a day’s investigations and comparison brought him to the conclusion that sausages and mashed potatoes, twopence a plate, were the best food. Now, sausages once or twice a week for breakfast are not unpleasant. As lunch, even, with mashed potatoes, they become monotonous. At dinner they are impertinent. At the end of three days Dick loathed sausages, and, going, forth, pawned his watch to revel on sheep’s head, which is not as cheap as it looks, owing to the bones and the gravy. Then he returned to sausages and mashed potatoes. Then he confined himself entirely to mashed potatoes for a day, and was unhappy because of pain in his inside. Then he pawned his waistcoat and his tie, and thought regretfully of money thrown away in times past. There are few things more edifying unto Art than the actual belly-pinch of hunger, and Dick in his few walks abroad, — he did not care for exercise; it raised desires that could not be satisfied — found himself dividing mankind into two classes, — those who looked as if they might give him something to eat, and those who looked otherwise. ‘I never knew what I had to learn about the human face before,’ he thought; and, as a reward for his humility, Providence caused a cab-driver at a sausage-shop where Dick fed that night to leave half eaten a great chunk of bread. Dick took it, — would have fought all the world for its possession, — and it cheered him.
    The month dragged through at last, and, nearly prancing with impatience, he went to draw his money. Then he hastened to Torpenhow’s address and smelt the smell of cooking meats all along the corridors of the chambers. Torpenhow was on the top floor, and Dick burst into his room, to be received with a hug which nearly cracked his ribs, as Torpenhow dragged him tot he light and spoke of twenty different things in the same breath.
    ‘But you’re looking tucked up,’ he concluded.
    ‘Got anything to eat?’ said Dick, his eye roaming round the room.
    ‘I shall be having breakfast in a minute. What do you say to sausages?’
    ‘No, anything but sausages! Torp, I’ve been starving on that accursed horse-flesh for thirty days and thirty nights.’
    ‘Now, what lunacy has been your latest?’
    Dick spoke of the last few weeks with unbridled speech. Then he opened his coat; there was no waistcoat