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The Lucky Month
by
“You’re looking very fit,” said my solicitor. “No, not fat, fit.”
“You don’t think I’m looking thin?” I asked anxiously. “People are warning me that I may be overdoing it rather. They tell me that I must be seriously on my guard against brain strain.”
“I suppose they think you oughtn’t to strain it too suddenly,” said my solicitor. Though he is now a solicitor he was once just an ordinary boy like the rest of us, and it was in those days that he acquired the habit of being rude to me, a habit he has never quite forgotten.
“What is an onyx?” I said, changing the conversation.
“Why?” asked my solicitor, with his usual business acumen.
“Well, I was practically certain that I had seen one in the Zoo, in the reptile house, but I have just learnt that it is my lucky month stone. Naturally I want to get one.”
The coffee came and we settled down to commerce.
“I was just going to ask you,” said my solicitor–“have you any money lying idle at the bank? Because if so—-“
“Whatever else it is doing, it isn’t lying idle,” I protested. “I was at the bank to-day, and there were men chivying it about with shovels all the time.”
“Well, how much have you got?”
“About fifty pounds.”
“It ought to be more than that.”
“That’s what I say, but you know what those banks are. Actual merit counts for nothing with them.”
“Well, what did you want to do with it?”
“Exactly. That was why I rang you up. I–er—-” This was really my moment, but somehow I was not quite ready to seize it. My vast commercial enterprise still lacked a few trifling details. “Er–I–well, it’s like that.”
“I might get you a few ground rents.”
“Don’t. I shouldn’t know where to put them.”
“But if you really have fifty pounds simply lying idle I wish you’d lend it to me for a bit. I’m confoundedly hard up.”
(“Generous to a fault, you have a ready sympathy with the distressed.” Dash it, what could I do?)
“Is it quite etiquette for clients to lend solicitors money?” I asked. “I thought it was always solicitors who had to lend it to clients. If I must, I’d rather lend it to you–I mean I’d dislike it less–as to the old friend of my childhood.”
“Yes, that’s how I wanted to pay it back.”
“Bother. Then I’ll send you a cheque to-night,” I sighed.
And that’s where we are at the moment. “People born in this month always keep their promises.” The money has got to go to-night. If I hadn’t been born in January, I shouldn’t be sending it; I certainly shouldn’t have promised it; I shouldn’t even have known that I had it. Sometimes I almost wish that I had been born in one of the decent months. March, say.