Very well, then. I have talked myself into it. I shall proceed at once to tell you something about how I set about making money. But just in case some of you may be tempted to skip this particular section and go on to juicier things, let me assure you that there will be juice in plenty dripping from these pages. I wouldn’t have it otherwise.
Great wealth, when uninherited, is usually acquired in one of four ways--by chicanery, by talent, by inspired judgement, or by luck. Mine was a combination of all four. Listen carefully and you shall see what I mean.
In the year 1912, when I was barely seventeen, I won a scholarship in natural sciences to Trinity College, Cambridge. I was a precocious youth and had taken the exam a year earlier than usual. This meant that I had a twelvemonth wait doing nothing, because Cambridge would not receive me until I was eighteen. My father therefore decided that I should fill in the time by going to France to learn the language. I myself hoped that I should learn a fair bit more than just the language in that splendid country. Already, you see, I had begun to acquire a taste for rakery and wenching among the London débutantes. Already, also, I was beginning to get a bit bored with these young English girls. They were, I decided, a pretty pithiess lot, and I was impatient to sow a few bushels of wild oats in foreign fields. Especially in France. I had been reliably informed that Parisian females knew a thing or two about the act of lovemaking that their London cousins had never dreamed of. Copulation, so rumour had it, was in its infancy in England.
On the evening before I was due to depart for France, I gave a small party at our family house in Cheyne Walk. My father and mother had purposely gone out to dinner at seven o’clock so that I might have the place to myself. I had invited a dozen or so friends of both sexes, all of them about my own age, and by nine o’clock we were sitting around making pleasant talk, drinking wine, and consuming some excellent boiled mutton and dumplings. The front doorbell rang. I went to answer it, and on the doorstep there stood a middle-aged man with a huge moustache, a magenta complexion, and a pigskin suitcase. He introduced himself as Major Grout and asked for my father. I said he was out to dinner. “Good gracious me,” said Major Grout. “He has invited me to stay. I’m an old friend.”
“Father must have forgotten,” I said. “I’m awfully sorry. You had better come in.”
Now I couldn’t very well leave the Major alone in the study reading Punch while we were having a party in the next room, so I asked him if he’d care to come in and join us. He would indeed. He’d love to join us. So in he came, moustache and all, a beaming jovial old boy who settled down among us quite comfortably despite the fact that he was three times the age of anyone else present. He tucked into the mutton and polished off a whole bottle of claret in the first fifteen minutes.
“Excellent vittles,” he said. “Is there any more wine?”
I opened another bottle for him, and we all watched with a certain admiration as he proceeded to empty that one as well. His cheeks were swiftly turning from magenta to a very deep purple and his nose seemed to be catching on fire. Halfway through the third bottle, he began to loosen up. He worked, he told us, in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and was home on leave. His job had to do with the Sudan Irrigation Service, and a very hot and arduous business it was. But fascinating. Lots of fun, y’know. And the wogs weren’t too much trouble so long as one kept the old shambok handy all the time.
We sat round him, listening and not a little intrigued by this purple-faced creature from distant lands.
“A great country, the Sudan,” he said. “It is enormous. It is remote. It is full of mysteries and secrets. Would you like me to tell you about one of the great secrets of the Sudan?”
“Very much, sir,” we said. “Yes, please.”
“One of its great secrets,” he said, tipping another glass of wine down his throat, “a secret that is known only to a few old-timers out there like myself and to the natives, is a little creature called the Sudanese Blister Beetle or to give him his right name, Cantharis vesiccitoria sudanii.”
“You mean a scarab?” I said.
“Certainly not,” he said. “The Sudanese Blister Beetle is a winged insect, as much a fly as a beetle, and is about three-quarters of an inch long. It’s very pretty to look at, with a brilliant iridescent shell of golden green.”
“Why is it so secret?” we asked.
“These little beetles,” the Major said, “are found only in one part of the Sudan. It’s an area of about twenty square miles, north of Khartoum, and that’s where the hashab tree grows. The leaves of the hashab tree are what the beetles feed on. Men spend their whole lives searching for these beetles. Beetle hunters, they are called. They are very sharp-eyed natives who know all there is to know about the haunts and habits of the tiny brutes. And when they catch them, they kill them and dry them in the sun and crunch them up into a fine powder. This powder is greatly prized among the natives, who usually keep it in small elaborately carved Beetle Boxes. A tribal chief will have his Beetle Box made of silver.”