Wealth & Money Quote by Peter Porter

Evasion dressed up as candor: Porter’s sentence performs ignorance the way a good officer performs neutrality. The line is a masterpiece of bureaucratic fog, built to sound like a modest admission while quietly refusing responsibility for the truth. “Supposedly” does heavy lifting, planting doubt about the official story without committing to an alternative. Then the syntax piles on: “were supposedly to put up the money and did put it up or whether...” The repetition loops the reader back into uncertainty, as if the facts themselves are too slippery to hold.

Porter’s profession matters here. A soldier’s career runs on chains of command and plausible deniability, especially when money intersects with logistics, patronage, or a potentially improper arrangement. By naming “Arthur” but not clarifying who Arthur is, he narrows accountability to a convenient ambiguity: close enough to hint at insider knowledge, distant enough to avoid an accusation. The phrase “is something which I shall never know” lands like fate, not choice. It implies the matter is unknowable in principle, not merely undiscovered in practice, which conveniently absolves the speaker from investigating further.

The intent feels less like confession than inoculation. Porter signals he has heard the allegations, even understands the sensitive fork in the story (investors’ funds vs. Arthur’s own), and then seals off further inquiry with a genteel shrug. The subtext: if there was financial impropriety, he wants it recorded that he was adjacent to the rumors but never legally, morally, or administratively implicated.