I was reeling. I couldn’t read on. I unlocked the door and staggered inside and found a bottle of whiskey. I sloshed some into a glass and gulped it down.
If you stop and think about it, Oswald, I’m sure you’ll agree we’re not really doing the dirty on you and i’ll tell you why. Arthur says . . .
I didn’t give a damn what Arthur said. They’d stolen the precious sperm. It was worth millions. I was willing to bet it was that little sod Woresley who’d put Yasmin up to it.
Arthur says that after all it was him who invented the process, wasn’t it? And it was me who did all the hard work of collecting it. Arthur sends you his best wishes.
Toodle-oo
Yasmin Woresley
A real snorter, that. Right below the belt. It had me gasping.
I roared round the house in a wild fury. My stomach was boiling and I’m sure steam was spurting out of my nostrils. Had there been a dog in the place I’d have kicked it to death. I kicked the furniture instead. I smashed a lot of nice big things and then I set about picking up all the smaller objects, including a Baccarat paperweight and an Etruscan bowl, and flinging them through the windows, yelling bloody murder and watching the window-panes shatter.
But after an hour or so, I began to simmer down, and finally I collapsed into an armchair with a large glass of malt whiskey in my hand.
I am, as you may have gathered, a fairly resilient fellow. I explode when provoked, but I never brood about it afterwards. I scrub it out. There’s always another day. What’s more, nothing stimulates my mind so much as a whopping disaster. In the aftermath, in that period of deadly calm and absolute silence that follows the tempest, my brain becomes exceedingly active. As I sat drinking my whiskey during that terrible evening amidst the ruins of Dunroamin, I was already beginning to ponder and plan my future all over again.
So that’s that, I told myself. I’ve been diddled. It’s all over. Need a new start. I still have Proust and in years to come I shall do well with those fifty straws (and don’t think I didn’t), but that isn’t going to make me a millionaire. So what next?
It was at this point that the great and wonderful answer began trickling into my head. I sat quite still, allowing the idea to take root and grow. It was inspired. It was beautiful in its simplicity. It couldn’t fail. It would make me millions. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
I promised at the beginning of this diary to tell you how I became a wealthy man. I have taken a long time so far in telling you how I did not succeed. Let me therefore make up for lost time and describe to you in no more than a few paragraphs how I did in the end become a real multimillionaire. The great idea that came to me suddenly in Dunroamin was as follows:
I would go back at once to the Sudan. I would negotiate with a corrupt government official for a lease of that precious tract of land where the hashab tree grows and the Blister Beetle flourishes. I would obtain sole rights to all beetle hunting. I would gather the native beetle hunters together and form them into an organized unit. I would pay them generously, far more than they were getting at present by flogging their Beetles in the open market. They would work exclusively for me. Poachers would be ruthlessly eliminated. I would, in fact, corner the market in Sudanese Blister Beetles. When all this was arranged and I was assured of a large and regular supply of Beetles, I would build a little factory in Khartoum and there I would process my Beetles and manufacture in quantity Professor Yousoupoff’s Famous Potency Pills. I would package the pills in the factory. I would then set up a small secret underground sales unit with offices in Paris, London, New York, Amsterdam, and other cities throughout the world. I told myself that if a callow seventeen-year-old youth had been able to earn himself a hundred thousand pounds in one year in Paris all by himself, just think what I could do now on a world-wide basis.