'Have you got something better, Mr. Cascade?’
'I sure have!. It seems to me!’. never come straight out with it in England. they think you’re scatterbrained!. 'If I may say so, I’d put something on Micky instead, Inspector! After all, there’s a better jockey up, isn’t there?…I’m not giving you any advice, Inspector!.. bear that in mind!.. I wouldn’t allow myself!.. Look, I’m putting six down for you!.. But on Micky to win! All or nothing!.. ’
He looks as if he doesn’t understand me!.. I lay down my six pounds!.. Bim! Bam! he sweeps up all the tokens! Like that, no gabbling! and bye-bye!.. I see that he catches on without a word! Total loss six pounds!.. because of you, you big fatheads!.. you! for your damned extravagances! Otherwise he’d have taken me away!.. Just an act! hot air! Just a song and dance in his pocket! Blackmail pure and simple!.. That’s the crap I’ve got to take! And you’re the cause of it!.. I can tell it to you straight to your face! Isn’t it a damned pity? Isn’t it a perfect shame that at my age I’m still knocking around for ass-holes like you?.. My gang?.. My gang?.. So it seems! Ah! hello, my gang!.. Pianists who raise hell in Mile End at four in the afternoon!. Swell! my gang!.. Yours!. God damn it! In a jam for stinkers like that! Ah! it’s awful! I’m telling you!. Justice is dead! I saw the cop in a stew!.. He was saying to himself, 'I’m waiting for you, Cascade! If you don’t cough up, you’ll get it in the neck!.. I’ll yank you in and whoops!. love!.. ’ He was picking on me!”
"You’re too good-natured, Cascade!.. You’re too good-natured!”. Angele was at it again!. a downpour. big sobs!.. hearing such stories, all the troubles of her poor man!
She can’t resist!. She leaps to his neck again! She hugs and kisses him wildly!. She gets another smack. She plops down on the couch again..
"I lose out every time!.. That’s my affair!.. I always get it in the neck!.. But I want you to stop giving me a pain in the ass!”
That’s Cascade for you!.. He lets it out! and now right away it’s poetry!..
For don’t you see that every day I love you more and more?
Today more than yesterday And less than tomorrow!
He reels it straight off.
"I learned it, you know, in Rio!”.. and oops! he flies off the handle again.
"I’ve been getting the dirty end of it, guys! I don’t dare stick my nose outside! Things are bad, boys!.. Things are bad!.. Cascade here!. Cascade there!. They want me!. They’re looking for me!. Maybe I stink?. All the dicks sniffing at me!.. And her, always yowling!.. In manilla I lose like all sixty!. At the races my nags dash backwards.. Only girls keep coming in!. There I’ve got all I want!. I’ve got to admit!..”
Berthe and Mimi were enjoying it, sprawled in the cushions choking with laughter.. Berthe, the skinny green-looking one, and Peg-leg Mimi were beneath the lamp splitting with giggles..
"Either they’re yowling or nagging, they can’t keep quiet!”
They were getting on his nerves.
"Go get the Calva! You hear me, Mimi?”
He was sending Mimi downstairs. The two of them bounce down.. Angele was sobbing with her head in her hands from the clout she’d just got, she made the whole table shake.. Cascade didn’t want to look at her.. He turned his back on her on purpose, sitting astride his chair, that’s the way he grouses… He was rocking. He was burning up inside..
At bottom, he’s proud, no doubt about it, that Matthew let him have it as if he were a big shot… it puts him up there with the real moguls!. Even so, for his six pounds!. He doesn’t give much of a damn about the six pounds!.. doesn’t come to much these days! Us, his gang! and some gang!.. Gives him real class!. Not just an ordinary guy!.. Arranging things was a little weakness of his.. He’d have gladly forked over a hundred pounds to take on that kind of weight!. With his stable?. A hundred pounds more or less!.. And ten and twelve and a hundred fifty? What the hell was that?. Matthew had taken him!. Especially with the reinforcements!. We sure were living in style!. Open house!.. fat of the land at the Leicester.. piles and piles of food!
Phonies, spongers and tramps!. A real perpetual parade!. A real boarding school..You didn’t know who or why. Someone always dropping in!. bringing others along.. pals traveling through.. girls arriving… no more chalking it up in twenty-five pubs!. always just because he was a big-timer… he didn’t know from where or how… he always settled right off!.. Man’s reputation! And then the races and the Derby where he bet damned high.. and poker with the sky the limit and the cost of medicines. That came to something! Beauty care, hairdressers, settings, all the little whatnots for women who didn’t deny themselves a thing, fancy-priced massages, Houbigant perfume! and heavier expenses, hush money for the cops who were snotty and blackmailers and devoured his money, one after the other, six, seven pounds at a clip! weekly! monthly! just in so-called small fines! In the theatres up to a dozen pounds! Week-end dough for the big jobs! And it was never enough! In short, a whale of an outlay!
It kept dribbling the hell out in all directions! Especially since the year 1914–1915 when it had become a real massacre, a gold rush, a parade of profits, since the suckers were just handing it out all over the place! Cascade was positive. Dough had to keep rolling in or he’d fold!
"The war! the war!. It’s driving ’em wild! Just take a look at ’em!.. They don’t know what they’re crapping about!.. They want all the dough!. Then they don’t want anything! They all want to leave! They can’t see straight! Their pants are on fire! Their dough’s on fire! Just take a look at my pimps! They did the damnedest things, committed crimes to bring their girls to London… If you’d said to them a year ago, 'Pal, got to beat it! Be heroic! Go back to the Bastille! Business is dead! London’s finished! ’.. they’d’ve called you King of the Loonies!. Today trumpets and tata!. You tell ’em, 'Get going, soldier-boy! Bullets a penny a dozen! Up and at ’em!’ Off they fly! They’re all raving bughouse! They can’t stop running! Just tearing off like mad! Does it make sense?.. You tell me!. They leave their women and kids behind!.. They won’t have ’em for all the money in the world! Completely nuts!.. Making dough hand over fist!.. and a couple of sure-fire rackets, besides!.. Gold galore right now! It’s being spoiled that’s killing ’em!. Pity the poor pimp! He can’t stand being stuffed with dough!.. Take my word for it!
I’m not scratching!. 'Tatave, you make me sick! your woman’s bringing in twelve pounds a day!.. It’s a crime to kill the golden goose! ’
'You!’ he says. 'Look who’s talking!. You got it easy!.. You got your albumin!
'Albumin or not! You’re just plain dumb!’ It drives me haywire listening to ’em!.. I can’t take any more of it!.. It’s not Verdun, it’s the Somme! and so on and so on!. and citations, look, like him!. You’d think they were kids!. In school! That they’d swallowed cannon!.. and they claim to be smart Frenchmen! Ah! damn my balls! I’m going to explain to you!. They read the papers too much!. Oh, I eat up all the articles! and quack quack! and parrots!. Do I read them? shitzoff! the magazines and their crap!.. That’s what sends ’em off their nut! the jabber! the jabber!.. Do you read the sheets, you, huh?. Admit, Boro! admit, you dirty yegg!.. In the first place, I’ve seen you!. You start drooling!.. Here’s my penny! The Mirror1….the Sketch1….the Star1 please!.. What crap.. Look, you can look around here, you’ll never see a single one of ’em around!. Even in the toilet I won’t have ’em!. I tell the girls, 'Just let me see one of ’em here and I’ll clout you!’.. You can look all around! You’ve got a mug like a client! I want you to be less idiotic! All the same it gets you! no stopping you. War here!. War there!