CHAPTER IV
At the time we met, this friend of mine had been out from Oxford—New College, I think—a year or so, and with a Cambridge man about his own age, had been running a sporting goods shop in King Street. They sold the paraphernalia of cricket, tennis, boxing and the like, but with no marked success. The considerable money invested by the pair of them earned no interest. John Kay was impatient and dissatisfied; the other had leanings towards the brokering trade, as offering better opportunities. Both were ready to cut their losses, realize, and get out. They did so, remaining the best of friends. And it was one day, while these preliminary negotiations were being discussed in the back office, where they muddled away the day between rare sales, that Kay said to me mysteriously: "Look here, I say—I've got a wonderful scheme. Have you got any money left?"
I mentioned the £600.
"I call it a rotten shame," he went on. "Of course, you've been swindled. These people look upon us as their natural prey"—and he proceeded to describe his "scheme"—to buy a small hotel which, owing to its bad name, was going cheap; to work up a respectable business and a valuable goodwill; then to sell out at a top price and retire with a comfortable fortune. Kay was twenty-three, two years my senior; to me, then, he seemed an experienced man of business, almost elderly. The scheme took my breath away. It was very tempting. The failure of the dairy farm had left me despondent; I felt disgraced; the end of life, it seemed, had come. I was ready to grasp at anything that held out hopes of a recovery of fortune. But an hotel! I hesitated.
