While Clementina, in her own fashion, was shattering an idyll to pieces, Quixtus under the tutelage of Billiter pursued the most distasteful occupation in which he had ever engaged. Had some Rhadamanthine Arbiter of his Destiny compelled him, under penalty of death, to choose between horse-racing and laborious practice as a solicitor, he would unhesitatingly have chosen the latter. Course and stand and paddock and ring, the whole machinery of the sport, wearied him to exasperation. Just as there are some men to whom, as the saying goes, music is the most expensive form of noise, so are there others to whom the racing of horses is merely the most extravagantly cumbersome form of gambling. Why train valuable animals, they ask; to run round a field, when the same end could be attained by making little leaden horses gyrate mechanically round a disk, at a millionth part of the cost? Of the delight of studying pedigree, of following form, of catching the precious trickles of information that percolate through the litter of stables, of backing their judgment thus misguided they have no notion. They cannot even feel a thrill of excitement at the sight of the far-off specks of galloping horses. They wonder at the futility of it all as the quadrupeds scrabble down the straight. An automobile, they plead, can go ten times as fast. That such purblind folk exist is sad; but after all they are God’s creatures, just the same as jockeys and professional tipsters. At first there was one feature of the race-course which fascinated Quixtus—the ring. Then he imagined he had come into contact with incarnate evil. Those coarse animal faces, swollen with the effort of bawling the odds, those hard greedy eyes bulging from purple cheeks, those voices raucous, inhuman, suggested to his mild fancy a peculiarly depraved corner of Tophet. But what practical evil resulted from this Masque of Hades was not quite apparent. Nobody seemed any the worse. The bookmaker smiled widely on those who won, and those who lost smiled on the world with undaunted cheerfulness. So, in the course of time, Quixtus began to regard the bookmakers with feelings of disappointment, which gave place after a while to indifference, and eventually to weariness and irritation.
Even Old Joe Jenks, thick-necked, fishy-eyed villain, to whom Billiter personally introduced him, proved himself, in all his dealings, to be a scrupulously honest man. The turf, in spite of its depressing ugliness, appeared but a man?uvring ground for the dull virtues. Where was its wickedness? He complained, at length, to Billiter.
Billiter seemed for the moment to be in a bad humour. He tugged at his heavy moustache.
“I don’t see what fault you can find with racing. You’re making a very good thing out of it.”
Which was true. Fortune, who had played him such scurvy tricks, was now turning on him her sunniest smile. He was winning prodigiously, fantastically. Billiter selected the horses which he was to back, he backed them to the amount advised by Billiter, and in most instances the horses won.
“If you think the mere gaining of money gives me any pleasure, my dear Billiter,” said he, “you’re very much mistaken. I have sufficient means of my own to satisfy my modest requirements, and to accept large sums of money from your friend, Mr. Jenks, is humiliating and repulsive.”
“If that’s the matter, you can turn them over to me,” said Billiter, “I don’t get much out of the business.”
They were walking about the paddock, between the races. Quixtus halted and regarded his morose companion with cold inquiry.
“You gave me to understand that you were betting on the same horses as I was.”
Billiter cursed himself for an incautious fool.
“Only now and then,” said he, “and for small stakes. How can I afford to plunge like you?”
“What is the dismal quadruped I am betting on for this next race?” asked Quixtus looking at his card.
“Punchinello. Forty-five to one. Dead cert.”
“Then,” said Quixtus, “here are five pounds. Put them on Punchinello and if he wins you will have two hundred and twenty-five.”
Billiter left him, made his way out of the paddock to that part of the race-course where the outside bookmakers have their habitation. Old Joe Jenks in the flaming check suit and a white hat adorned with his name and quality stood on a stool shouting the odds, taking bets and giving directions to the clerk at his side. Business for a moment was slack.
“Another fiver for the governor on Punchinello,” said Billiter.
Old Joe Jenks jumped from his stool and took Billiter aside.
“Look here, old friend,” said he, “chuck it. Come off it. I’m not playing any more. I poured a couple of quarts of champagne over your head because you told me you had got hold of a mug, and instead of the mug you bring up a ruddy miracle who backs every wrong ‘un at a hundred to one—and romps in. And thinking you straight, Mr. Billiter, sir, I’ve stretched out the odds—to oblige you. And you’ve damn well landed me. It’s getting monotonous. See? I’m tired.”
“It’s not my fault, Joe,” said Billiter, humbly. “Look. Just an extra fiver on Punchinello. He’s got no earthly—you know that as well as I do.”
“Do I?” growled the bookmaker angrily, convinced that Billiter was over-reaching him. “How do I know what you know? You want to have it both ways, do you? Well you won’t get it out of me.”
“I swear to God, Joe,” said Billiter, earnestly, “that I’m straight. So little did I expect him to win that I’ve not asked a penny commission.”
“Then ask it now, and be hanged to you,” cried the angry bookmaker, and leaping back to his stool, he resumed his brazen-throated trade.
Billiter kept his five-pound note, unwilling to risk it with another bookmaker on the laughing-stock of a Punchinello, and sauntered away moodily. He was a most injured man. Old Joe Jenks doubted his good faith. Now, was there a single horse selected for his patron to back upon which any student of racing outside a lunatic asylum would have staked money? Not one. He could lay his hand on his honest heart and swear it. And had he staked a penny on his selections? No. He could swear to that, too. He had not (fool that he was) asked Quixtus for a commission. Through his honourable dealing he was a poor man. The thought was bitter. He had run straight with Jenks. It was not his fault if the devil had got into the horses so that every shocking outsider, backed by Quixtus, revealed ultra-equine capacities. What could a horse do against the superhorse? Nothing. What could Billiter himself do? Nothing. Except have a drink. In the circumstances it was the only thing to do. He went into the bar of the grand stand and ordered a whisky and soda. It sizzled gratefully down a throat burning with a sense of wrong. His moral tone restored, he determined to live in poverty no more for the sake of a quixotic principle, and, proceeding to a ready-money bookmaker of his acquaintance, pulled out his five-pound note and backed Rosemary, a certain winner (such was his private and infallible information) at eight to one. This duty to himself accomplished, he went to the grand stand to view the race, leaving Quixtus to do that which seemed best to him.
The bell rang, the course was cleared, the numbers put up; the horses cantered gaily past. At the sight of Rosemary, a shiny bay in beautiful condition, Billiter’s heart warmed; at the sight of Punchinello, a scraggy crock who had never won a race in his inglorious life, Billiter sniffed scornfully. If Old Joe Jenks was such a fool as to refuse a free gift of two pounds ten—they had agreed to halve the spoils—the folly thereof lay entirely on Old Joe Jenks’s head.
The start was made. For a long time the horses ran in a bunch. Then Rosemary crept ahead. Billiter’s moustache beneath the levelled field-glasses betrayed a happy smile. Rosemary increased her lead. At the turn into the straight, something happened. She swerved and lost her stride. Three others dashed by, among them the despised Punchinello. They passed the post in a flash, Punchinello first. Billiter murmured things at which the world, had it heard them, would have grown pale, and again sought the bar. Emerging thence he went in quest of his patron. He had not far to go. Quixtus sat on a wooden chair at the back of the grand stand reading a vellum covered Elzevir duodecimo edition of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. When Billiter approached he rose and thrust the volume into the tail pocket of his frock-coat.
“Was that a race?” he asked.
“Race. Of course it was. The race. Didn’t you see it?”
“Thank goodness, no,” said Quixtus. “Did any horse win?”
The sodden and simple wit of Billiter rose like a salmon at this gaudy fly of irony. He lost his temper.
“Your damned, spavined, bow-legged, mule-be-gotten crock of a Punchinello won.”
Quixtus regarded him mildly; but a transient gleam of light flickered in his china-blue eyes.
“Then, my dear Billiter,” said he, “I have won nine hundred pounds, which, in view of my opinion of the turf, based on experience, I think I shall hand over to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to be earmarked for the conversion of the Mahommedans in Mecca. As for you, Billiter, you have won two hundred and twenty-five pounds”—Billiter quivered with sub-aspirate anathema—“which ought to satisfy the momentary cupidity of any man. Let us go. The more I see of it the more am I convinced that the race-course is no place for me. It is too good.”
Billiter glanced at him with wrathful suspicion. Was he speaking in childish simplicity or in mordant sarcasm? The grave, unsmiling face, the expressionless blue eyes gave him no clue.
Thus, however, ended Quixtus’s career on the Turf. To stand about wearily in all weathers in order to witness what, to his fastidious mind was merely a dull and vulgar spectacle, was an act of self-sacrifice from which he derived no compensating thrill. The injured Billiter having patched up a peace with Old Joe Jenks, convincing him of his own ingenuousness and of the inevitable change in his patron’s luck, in vain persuaded Quixtus to resume his investigations. He offered to introduce him to a fraternity of so-called commission agents and touts, in whose company he could saturate himself with vileness.
“I have no taste for disgusting society,” said Quixtus.
“Then I don’t know what the deuce you do want,” exclaimed Billiter in a fume.
“You can’t touch pitch without being defiled.”
“I thought that was just what you were trying to be.”
“In one way, yes,” replied Quixtus, musingly; “But I loathe touching the pitch.”
In spite of his confessed belief in the altruistic purity of the turf, he regarded as unspeakable defilement the cheques which he had received from Old Joe Jenks. He had kept them in his drawer, and the more he looked at them the more did the bestial face of Old Joe Jenks obtrude itself before his eyes, and the more repugnant did it become to his now abnormal fastidiousness to pay them into his own banking account. To destroy them, as was his first impulse, merely signified a benefit conferred on the odious Jenks, who would be only too glad to repocket his filthy money. What should he do? At last a malignant idea occurred to his morbidly and curiously working mind. He would cast all this pitch and defilement upon another’s head. Some one else should shiver with the disgust of it. But who? The inspiration came from Tartarus. He endorsed the cheques to the value of nearly two thousand pounds, and paid them into the banking account of his nephew Tommy Burgrave.
He would be as diabolically and defiledly wicked as you please, but the intermediary pitch he would not touch.
That was his attitude towards all the suggestions for wickedness laid before him by his three counsellors. They, for their part, although they recognised great advantage in fostering the gloomy humour of their mad patron, began to be weary in evil-doing. After they had taxed their invention for an attractive scheme of villainy, they found that it either came within the tabooed category of crime or, by its lack of refinement, failed to commend itself to the sensitive scholar. They were at their wits’ end. The only one to whose proposal Quixtus turned an attentive ear was Huckaby, who had suggested the heart-breaking expedition through the fashionable resorts of Europe. And, to the credit of Huckaby, be it here mentioned that, beyond certain fantastical and mocking suggestions, such as the devastation of old women’s wards in workhouses by means of an anonymous Christmas gifts of nitroglycerine plum-puddings, this was the only serious proposal he submitted. Anxious, however, lest the idea should lose its attraction, he urged Quixtus to start immediately. It is not every day that a down-at-heel wastrel has the opportunity of luxurious foreign travel, to say nothing of the humorous object of this particular excursion. But Quixtus, very sensibly, pointed out to his eager follower that the fashionable resorts of Europe, save the great capitals, are empty during the months of May and June, and that it would be much better to postpone their journey until August filled them with the thousand women waiting to have their hearts broken.
Vandermeer, unemployed since his embassy to Tommy Burgrave, unsuccessful in his suggestions and envious of Billiter and Huckaby, at last hit upon an ingenious idea. He brought Quixtus a dirty letter. It ran:
 
“Dear Mr. Vandermeer,—You, who were an old friend of my husband’s in our better days and know how valiantly I have struggled to keep the home together, can’t you help me now? I am ill in bed, my children are starving. The little ones are lying now even too weak to cry out for bread. It would break a wolf’s heart to see them. If you can’t help me, for I know how things are with you, can’t you bring my case before your rich friend, Mr. Quixtus, of whose kindness and generosity you have so often spoken? . . .
 “Yours sincerely,
“Emily Wellgood.”
 
It bore the address “2, Transiter Street, Clerkenwell Road, N.W.”
“What do you bring me this for?” asked Quixtus as soon as he had read it.
“I am satisfying my own conscience as far as Mrs. Wellgood is concerned,” replied Vandermeer, “and at the same time giving you an opportunit............