People who live in the country can satisfy some needs,
especially for food, without money. But city people need money for everything. Money is
their preoccupation. Both “Dusk” and “The Umbrella Man” are about money. As Wordsworth
wrote:
The
world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste
our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our
hearts away, a sordid
boon!
Those at the bottom beg
for money. Most panhandlers barely survive.They can only obtain small sums and a lot of
rejections. The interesting similarity between the tricksters in “Dusk” and “The
Umbrella Man” is that both have devised ways of getting money without working and
without begging.
Gortsby’s trickster poses as a gentleman
of leisure because he fancies himself in that role and is trying to live comfortably
without working. He talks of foreign cities and going to “one’s Consul.” The notion of
having to go out to buy special soap is a nice touch: it shows refined tastes and broad
experience with traveling. Gortsby tries to keep up with
him:
“I
remember doing exactly the same thing once in a foreign capital, and on that occasion
there were two of us, which made it more
remarkable.”
Gortsby was not
planning to give the stranger money, regardless of whether or not his story was true.
When he finds the soap, however, he pursues him. He is embarrassed about insulting a man
he takes to be a social superior. He gives the stranger his card, not only in order to
have his loan repaid by mail, but probably hoping to become better acquainted with a
member of the upper class. From the beginning there is a suggestion that if Gortsby
lends the stranger a sovereign he might get invited for a weekend at one of those ugly
country mansions where the hunting dogs sleep on the furniture. This is never explicitly
stated, but the con man’s story contains many suggestions and
implications.
readability="6">
“Unless I can find some decent chap to swallow my
story and lend me some money I seem likely to spend the night on the
Embankment.”
“Decent chap” is
a nice touch. Sounds like Oxford and Eton.
The “umbrella
man” also poses as a member of a superior social class. After all, he can afford to own
an umbrella worth twenty pounds and virtually give it away for one pound, whereas the
girl-narrator’s mother says:
readability="5">
“Aren’t we lucky. I’ve never had a silk umbrella
before. I couldn’t afford
it.”
In fact, mother and
daughter were standing there getting drenched by the downpour because they didn’t have
any umbrella at all.
readability="9">
“A real gentleman,” she went on. “Wealthy, too,
otherwise he wouldn’t have had a silk umbrella. I shouldn’t be surprised he if isn’t a
titled person.”
This
trickster also has aspirations to a higher standard of living than he can afford. When
mother and daughter follow him to the pub, they see him order a triple whiskey and
probably leave enough of a tip to use up the entire one-pound note, before helping
himself to another silk umbrella.
Both Saki’s youthful
trickster and Roald Dahl’s elderly trickster are getting money by posing as members of
the upper class rather than as needy panhandlers. Both are living out fantasies of
actually being such gentlemen of independent means.
The
elderly "umbrella man" will probably drink himself to death or die of pneumonia from
walking around in the rain. Gortsby’s young trickster will go on to bigger scams and end
up in prison or in Parliament.
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