The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More Read online

  He picked up the bundle. It was all in twenty-pound notes, three hundred and thirty of them to be exact. He walked on to the balcony of his flat, and there he stood in his dark-red silk pyjamas looking down at the street below him.

  Henry's flat was in Curzon Street, which is right in the middle of London's most fashionable and expensive district, known as Mayfair. One end of Curzon Street runs into Berkeley Square, the other into Park Lane. Henry lived three floors above street level, and outside his bedroom there was a small balcony with iron railings that overhung the street.

  The month was June, the morning was full of sunshine, and the time was about eleven o'clock. Although it was a Sunday, there were quite a few people strolling about on the pavements.

  Henry peeled off a single twenty-pound note from his wad and dropped it over the balcony. A breeze took hold of it and blew it sideways in the direction of Park Lane. Henry stood watching it. It fluttered and twisted in the air and eventually came to rest on the opposite side of. the street, directly in front of an old man. The old man was wearing a long brown shabby overcoat and a floppy hat. and he was walking slowly, all by himself. He caught sight of the note as it fluttered past his face, and he stopped and picked it up. He held it with both hands and stared at it. He turned it over. He peered closer. Then he raised his head and looked up.

  "Hey there!" Henry shouted, cupping a hand to his mouth. "That's for you! It's a present!"

  The old man stood quite still, holding the note in front of him and gazing up at the figure on the balcony above.

  "Put it in your pocket!" Henry shouted. "Take it home!" His voice carried far along the street, and many people stopped and looked up.

  Henry peeled off another note and threw it down. The watchers below him didn't move. They simply watched. They had no idea what was going on. A man was up there on the balcony and he had shouted something, and now he had just thrown down what looked like a piece of paper. Everyone followed the piece of paper as it went fluttering down, and this one came to rest near a young couple who were standing arm in arm on the pavement across the street. The man unlinked his arm and tried to catch the paper as it went past him. He missed it but picked it up from the ground. He examined it closely. The watchers on both sides of the street all had their eyes on the young man. To many of them, the paper had looked very much like a bank-note of some kind, and they were waiting to find out.

  "It's twenty pounds!" the man yelled, jumping up and down. "It's a twenty-pound note!"

  "Keep it!" Henry shouted at him. "It's yours!"

  "You mean it?" the man called back, holding the note out at arm's length. "Can I really keep it?"

  Suddenly there was a rustle of excitement along both sides of the street and everyone started moving at once. They ran out into the middle of the road and clustered underneath the balcony. They lifted their arms above their heads and started calling out, "Me! How about one for me! Drop us another one, guv'nor! Send down a few more!"

  Henry peeled off another five or six notes and threw them down.

  There were screams and yells as the pieces of paper fanned out in the wind and floated downward, and there was a good old-fashioned scrimmage in the streets as they reached the hands of the crowd. But it was all very good-natured. People were laughing. They thought it a fantastic joke. Here was a man standing three floors up in his pyjamas, slinging these enormously valuable notes into the air. Quite a few of those present had never seen a twenty-pound note in their lives until now.

  But now something else was beginning to happen.

  The speed with which news will spread along the streets of a city is phenomenal. The news of what Henry was doing flashed like lightning up and down the length of Curzon Street and into the smaller and larger streets beyond. From all sides, people came running. Within a few minutes, about a thousand men and women and children were blocking the road underneath Henry's balcony. Car-drivers who couldn't pass got out of their vehicles and joined the crowd. And all of a sudden, there was chaos in Curzon Street.

  At this point, Henry simply raised his arm and swung it out and flung the entire bundle of notes into the air. More than six thousand pounds went fluttering down towards the screaming crowd below.

  The scramble that followed was really something to see. People were jumping up to catch the notes before they reached the ground, and everyone was pushing and jostling and yelling and falling over, and soon the whole place was a mass of tangled, yelling, fighting human beings.

  Above the noise and behind him in his own flat, Henry suddenly heard his doorbell ringing long and loud. He left the balcony and opened the front door. A large policeman with a black moustache stood outside with his hands on his hips. "You!" he bellowed angrily. "You're the one! What the devil d'you think you're doing?"

  "Good morning, officer," Henry said. "I'm sorry about the crowd. I didn't think it would turn out like that. I was just giving away some money."

  "You are causing a nuisance!" the policeman bellowed. "You are creating an obstruction! You are inciting a riot and you are blocking the en-tire street!"

  "I said I was sorry," Henry answered. "I won't do it again, I promise. They'll soon go away."

  The policeman took one hand off his hip and from the inside of his palm he produced a twenty-pound note.

  "Ah-ha!" Henry cried. "You got one yourself! I'm so glad! I'm so happy for you!"

  "Now you just stop that larking about!" the policeman said. "Because I have a few serious questions to ask you about these here twenty-pound notes." He took a notebook from his breast pocket. "In the first place," he went on, "where exactly did you get them from?"

  "I won them," Henry said. "I had a lucky night." He went on to give the name of the club where he had won the money and the policeman wrote it down in his little book. "Check it up," Henry added. "They'll tell you it's true."

  The policeman lowered the notebook, and looked Henry in the eye. "As a matter of fact," he said, "I believe your story. I think you're telling the truth. But that doesn't excuse what you did one little bit."

  "I didn't do anything wrong," Henry said.

  "You're a blithering young idiot!" the policeman shouted, beginning to work himself up all over again. "You're an ass and an imbecile! If you've been lucky enough to win yourself a tremendous big sum of money like that and you want to give it away, you don't throw it out the window!"

  "Why not?" Henry asked, grinning. "It's as good a way of getting rid of it as any."

  "It's a damned stupid silly way of getting rid of it!" the policeman cried. "Why didn't you give it where it would do some good? To a hospital, for instance? Or an orphanage? There's orphanages all over the country that hardly have enough money to buy the kids a present even for Christmas! And then along comes a little twit like you who's never even known what it's like to be hard up and you throw the stuff out into the street! It makes me mad, it really does!"

  "An orphanage?" Henry said.

  "Yes, an orphanage!" the policeman cried. "I was brought up in one so I ought to know what it's like!" With that, the policeman turned away and went quickly down the stairs towards the street.

  Henry didn't move. The policeman's words, and more especially the genuine fury with which they had been spoken, smacked our hero right between the eyes.

  "An orphanage?" he said aloud. "That's quite a thought. But why only one orphanage? Why not lots of them?" And now, very quickly, there began to come to him the great and marvellous idea that was to change everything.

  Henry shut the front door and went back into his flat. All at once, he felt a powerful excitement stirring in his belly. He started pacing up and down, ticking off the points that would make his marvellous idea possible.

  "One," he said, "I can get hold of a very large sum of money each day of my life.

  "Two. I must not go to the same casino more than once every twelve months.

  "Three. I must not win too much from any one casino or somebody will get suspicious. I suggest I keep it down