Chapter 22

The Fat Man

It was notorious that the Three J's (or, to be more exact, Ikey) not only had their scouts out all over the world, seeking what Monkey Brand called "black diamonds," but that they had their eyes everywhere in the Old Country, watching enemy stables. And Joses was the Eye that watched all the stables on the South Downs from Beachy Head to the Rother--and Putnam's most of all.

When tackled further on the subject by Monkey Brand, the tout admitted the fact without demur and even with pride.

"Yes," he swaggered. "I'm a commission agent. A very honourable profession, too."

"Not ha hartist at all?" queried Monkey, chewing his quid.

Joses laughed and spread himself, throwing back his gingery curls.

"I was at Oxford," he said, "and I've all the tastes of a gentleman. Art and poetry are my specialties--when my professional duties allow me time."

The little dark jockey turned in his lips, eyeing the other with bland interest.

"'Ark to him!" he said. "Don't he talk. Learned the patter at Oxford College, I expect." He turned on his lame leg. "Anyway, we know now where we are, Mr. Moses Joses."

* * * * *

After the incident in the Post Office Joses dropped his easel and went about with field-glasses unashamed. To give him his due, there were few better watchers in the trade. A man of education and great natural ability, he was quite unscrupulous as to how he achieved his end.

As Chukkers said of him:

"He gets there. Never mind how."

Joses indeed was out early and late, and he was horribly alert. Nobody knew when and where his fat body and brown face might not be turning up.

"Crawls around like a great red slug," said Old Mat; and it was seldom a horse did a big gallop but the fat man was there to see.

The morning Boy went for her first dip he was at the lighthouse on the cliff above the Gap. Whether he had slept there, or risen with the dawn, it was hard to say. The lighthouse marked the highest point in the neighbourhood, and was therefore useful for the watcher's purpose. From there with his glasses he could sweep The Mare's Back and The Giant's Shoulder and neighbouring ridges on which the horses of the stables in the district galloped.

The Paris Meeting was the next big event; and Ikey Aaronsohnn's horse Jackaroo--the waler Chukkers had just brought back with him from the other side--was to make his first appearance at it. There was only one English horse of which the Dewhurst stable had not the measure, and that was the Putnam mare Make-Way-There. Jaggers, in that curt, sub-acid way of his, had instructed Joses to report on her form, and "to make no mistake about it."

The tout had touched his hat and answered:

"Very good, sir."

Now it was well known that a man had to be up very early in every sense if he wanted to keep an eye on a Putnam horse. Mat Woodburn might be old, but he was by no means sleepy; and Joses could not afford to blunder.

Last night two telegrams had come to Cuckmere: one was to Silver from Chukkers, and the other to Joses from Jaggers. They had been written at the same moment by the same man. And the one to Joses ran--

_Make-Way-There to-morrow._

Standing under the lee of the lighthouse, seeing while himself unseen, the tout kept his eyes to his glasses.

Little escaped him. He saw the badger moving on the hillside, and watched the girl on her pony come over the crest from Putnam's, a slight figure black against the sky. He followed her as she dropped down the hill and scampered along the valley, marked her hang her pony's rein over the post, and disappear down the gap.

Joses closed his glasses. His face became a dirty red. It was as though the mud in him had been stirred by an obscene hand.

In a moment a slight figure in a blue gown appeared from under the cliff and entered the sea.

Shoving his glasses into his pocket, Joses began to shuffle down the hill toward the Gap. The kittiwakes flashed and swept and hovered in the blue above him. The sea shone and twinkled far beneath. A great, brown-sailed barge lolled lazily by under the cliff.

He was unaware of them, shuffling over the short, sweet-scented turf like some great human hog, snorting as he went, his eyes on that little bobbing black dot on the face of the waters beneath him.

There was no cover. The turf lifted its calm face to the naked sky. And he crept along, crouching in himself, as though fearing detection from on high.

The girl was in and out of the water again with astonishing speed. By the time the tout had reached the foot of the hill she was under the cliff again and out of sight. He peered over stealthily. There was nothing much to see but a dark blue gown spread on a rock to dry, and behind the rock the bob of a bathing cap.

The Gap was three hundred yards away. A sleepy coastguard had emerged from one of the cottages and was washing at a tub of rain water.

Where Joses stood the cliff was low, scarcely twenty feet above the beach, and was not entirely precipitous.

He pocketed his glasses and scrambled panting down to the beach.

Then he began to stalk the rock decorated with the bathing gown; and he did not look pretty.

His hot red face perspired, and he panted as he crawled.

It is hard to say what was in his heart, and better perhaps not to inquire.

One thing only stood out clearly in his mind.

He owed that girl behind the rock _two_; and Joses rarely forgot to pay his debts.

There was first the affair of the wood. He suffered pain and inconvenience still as the result of that incident, and the doctor told him that he might expect to continue to suffer it. And what mattered more, there was the sense of humiliation and the disfigurement. His nose, never a thing of beauty, was now a standing offence. The children ran from it, and Joses was genuinely fond of children. The little daughter of Mrs. Boam, his landlady, Jenny, once his friend, had now deserted him.

And there was the matter of the young man, which he found it even harder to forgive. That young man was Silver, and he was a Mug. A mug was made to be drained; and Joses had dreamed that to him would fall the draining of this singularly fine specimen of his class. His attachment to the firm of the Three J's, based largely on fear, was not such but that he would break it at any moment could he do so with security and profit.

He had known all about Silver long before he had turned up at Putnam's; it was part of his business to know about such young men. Indeed, he had made an abortive, determined, and characteristically tortuous attempt to sweep the young man and his horses into Jaggers's capacious net.

Silver indeed had hesitated awhile between the two stables. Then he had met Jaggers, and had decided at once--against Dewhurst. When the game was finally lost, and it was known that Putnam's had come out top again in the struggle that had lasted between the two stables for thirty years, the tout changed his method but never lost sight of his ideal; yearning over the rich young man as a mother yearns over a child.

His dreams had been shattered finally in the wood a month back, and for that dêbâcle the girl behind the rock must be held responsible.