THE MAKING OF A MAN.
“Heureux celui qui n'est forcée de sacrifier personne à son devoir.”
“You know,” said Marguerite the next morning, as she and Cornish rode
quietly along the sandy roads, beneath the shade of the pines--“you
know, papa is such a jolly, simple old dear--he doesn't understand
women in the least.”
“And do you call yourself a woman nowadays?” inquired Cornish.
“You bet. Bet those grey hairs of yours if you like.
I see them! All down one side.”
“They are all down both sides and on the top as well--my good--woman.
How does your father fail to understand you?”
“Well, to begin with, he thinks it necessary to have Miss Williams, to
housekeep and chaperon, and to do oddments generally--as if I couldn't
run the show myself. You haven't seen Miss Williams--oh, crikey!
She has gone to Cheltenham for a holiday, for which you may thank your
eternal stars. She is just the sort of person who _would_ go to
Cheltenham. Then papa is desperately keen about my marrying. He keeps
trotting likely _partis_ down here to dine and sleep--that's why you
are here, I haven't a shadow of a doubt. None of the _partis_ have
passed muster yet. Poor old thing, he thinks I do not see through his
little schemes.”
Cornish laughed, and glanced at Marguerite under the shade of his straw
hat, wondering, as men have probably wondered since the ages began, how
it is that women seem to begin life with as great a knowledge of the
world as we manage to acquire towards the end of our experience.
Marguerite made her statements with a certain careless _aplomb_, and
these were usually within measurable distance of the fact, whereas a
youth her age and ten years older, if he be of a didactic turn, will
hold forth upon life and human nature with an ignorance of both which
is positively appalling.
“Now, I don't want to marry,” said Marguerite, suddenly returning to
her younger and more earnest manner. “What is the good of marrying?”
“What, indeed,” echoed Cornish.
“Well, then, if papa tackles you--about me, I mean--when he has done
the _Times_--he won't say anything before, the _Times_ being the first
object in papa's existence, and yours very truly the second--just you
choke him off--won't you?”
“I will.”
“Promise?”
“Promise faithfully.”
“That's all right. Now tell me--is my hat on one side?”
Cornish assured her that her hat was straight, and then they talked of
other things, until they came to a ditch suitable for some jumping
lessons, which he had promised to give her.
She was bewilderingly changeable, at one moment childlike, and in the
next very wise--now a heedless girl, and a moment later a keen woman of
the world--appearing to know more of that abode of evil than she well
could. Her colour came and went--her very eyes seemed to change.
Cornish thought of this open field which Marguerite's father had
offered, and perhaps he thought of the hundred and fifty thousand
pounds that lay beneath so bright a surface.
On returning to “The Brambles,” they found Mr. Wade reading the _Times_
in the glass-covered veranda of that eligible suburban mansion. It
being a Saturday, the great banker was taking a holiday, and Cornish
had arranged not to return to town until midday.
“Come here,” shouted Mr. Wade, “and have a cigar while you read the
paper.”
“And remember,” added Marguerite, slim and girlish in her riding-habit;
“choke him off!”
She stood on the door-step, looking over her shoulder, and nodded at
Cornish, her fresh lips tilted at the corner by a smile full of gaiety
and mysticism.
“Read that,” said Mr. Wade, gravely.
But Mr. Wade was always grave--was clad in gravity and a frock-coat all
his waking moments--and Cornish took up the newspaper carelessly. He
stretched out his legs and lighted a cigar. Then he leisurely turned to
the column indicated by his companion. It was headed, “Crisis in the
Paper Trade: the Malgamite Corner.”
And Tony Cornish did not raise his eyes from the printed sheet for a
full ten minutes. When at length he looked up, he found Mr. Wade
watching him, placid and patient.
“Can't make head or tail of it,” he said, with a laugh.
“I will make both head and tail of it for you,” said Mr. Wade, who in
his own world had a certain reputation for plain speaking.
It was even said that this stout banker could tell a man to his face
that he was a scoundrel with a cooler nerve than any in Lombard Street.
“What has occurred,” he said, slowly folding the advertisement sheet of
the _Times_, “is only what has been foreseen for a long time. The world
has been degenerating into a maudlin state of sentiment for some years.
The East End began it; a thousand sentimental charities have fostered
the movement. Now, I am a plain man--a City man, Tony, to the tips of
my toes.” And he stuck out a large square-toed foot and looked
contemplatively at it. “Half of your precious charities--the societies
that you and Joan Ferriby, and, if you will allow me to say so, that
ass Ferriby, are mixed up in--are not fraudulent, but they are pretty
near it. Some people who have no right to it are putting other people's
money into their pockets. It is the money of fools--a fool and his
money are soon parted, you know--but that does not make matters any
better. The fools do not always part with their money for the right
reason; but that also is of small importance. It is not our business if
some of them do it because they like to see their names printed under
the names of the royal and the great--if others do it for the mere
satisfaction of being life--governors of this and that institution--if
others, again, head the county lists because they represent a part of
that county in Parliament--if the large majority give of their surplus
to charities because they are dimly aware that they are no better than
they should be, and wish to take shares in a concern that will pay a
dividend in the hereafter. They know that they cannot take their money
out of this world with them, so they think they had better invest some
of it in what they vaguely understand to be a great limited company,
with the bishops on the board and--I say it with all reverence--the
Almighty in the chair. I would not say this to the first-comer because
it would not be well received, and it is not fashionable to treat
Charity from a common-sense point of view. It is fashionable to send a
cheque to this and that charity--feeling that it is charity, and
therefore will be all right, and that the cheque will be duly placed on
the credit side of the drawer's account in the heavenly books, however
it may be foolishly spent or fraudulently appropriated by the payee on
earth. Half a dozen of the fashionable charities are rotten, but we
have not had a thorough-going swindle up to this time. We have been
waiting for it ... in Lombard Street. It is there....”
He paused, and tapped the printed column of the _Times_ with a fat and
inexorable forefinger. He was, it must be remembered, a mere banker--a
person in the City, where honesty is esteemed above the finer qualities
of charity and beneficence, where soul and sentiment are so little
known that he who of his charity giveth away another's money is held
accountable for his manner of spending it.
“It is there, ... and you have the honour of being mixed up in it,”
said Mr. Wade.
Cornish took up the paper, and looked at the printed words with a vague
surprise.
“There is no knowing,” went on the banker, “how the world will take it.
It is one of our greatest financial difficulties that there is never
any knowing how the world will take anything. Of course, we in the City
are plain-going men, who have no handles to our names and no time for
the fashionable fads. We are only respectable, and we cannot afford to
be mixed up in such a scheme as your malgamite business.” Mr. Wade
glanced at Cornish and paused a moment. He was a stolid Englishman, who
had received punishment in his time, and could hit hard when he deemed
that hard hitting was merciful. “It has only been a question of time.
The credulity of the public is such that, sooner or later, a bogus
charity must assuredly have followed in the wake of the thousand bogus
companies that exist to-day. I only wonder that it has not come sooner.
You and Ferriby and, of course, the women have been swindled, my dear
Tony--that is the head and the tail of it.”
Cornish laughed gaily. “I dare say we have,” he admitted. “But I will
be hanged if I see what it all means, now.”
“It may mean ruin to those who have anything to lose,” explained Mr.
Wade, calmly. “The whole thing has been cleverly planned--one of the
cleverest things of recent years, and the man who thought it out had
the makings of a great financier in him. What he wanted to do was to
get the malgamite industry into his own hands. If he had formed a
company and gone about it in a straightforward manner, the paper-makers
of the whole world would have risen like one man and smashed him.
Instead of that, he moved with the times, and ran the thing as a
charity--a fashionable amusement, in fact. The malgamite industry is
neither better nor worse than the other dangerous trades, and no man
need go into it unless he likes. But the man who started this
thing--whoever he may be--supplied that picturesqueness without which
the public cannot be moved--and lo! We have an army of martyrs.”
Mr. Wade paused and jerked the ash from his cigar. He glanced at
Cornish.
“No one suspected that there was anything wrong. It was plausibly put
forth, and Ferriby ... did his best for it. Then the money began to
come in, and once money begins to come in for a popular charity the
difficulty is to stop it. I suppose it is still coming in?”
“Yes,” said Cornish. “It is still coming in, and nobody is trying to
stop it.”
Mr. Wade laughed in his throat, as fat men do. “And,” he cried, sitting
upright and banging his heavy fist down on the arm of his chair--“and
there are millions in your malgamite works at the Hague--millions. If
it were only honest it would be the finest monopoly the world has ever
seen--for two years, but no longer. At the end of that period the
paper-makers will have had time to combine and make their own
stuff--then they'll smash you. But during those two years all the
makers in the world will have to buy your malgamite at the price you
chose to put upon it. They have their forward contracts to
fulfil--government contracts, Indian contracts, newspaper contracts.
Thousands and thousands of tons of paper will have to be manufactured
at a loss every week during the next two years, or they'll have to shut
up their mills. Now do you see where you are?”
“Yes,” answered Cornish, “I see where I am, now.”
His face was drawn and his eyes hard, like those of a man facing ruin.
And that which was written on his face was an old story, so old that
some may not think it worth the telling; for he had found out (as all
who are fortunate will, sooner or later, discover) that success or
failure, riches or poverty, greatness or obscurity, are but small
things in a man's life. Mr. Wade looked at his companion with a sort of
wonder in his shrewd old face. He had seen ruined men before now--he
had seen criminals convicted of their wrong-doing--he had seen old and
young in adversity, and, what is more dangerous still, in
prosperity--but he had never seen a young face grow old in the
twinkling of an eye. The banker was only thinking of this matter as a
financial crisis, in which his great skill made him take a master's
delight. There must inevitably come a great crash, and Mr. Wade's
interest was aroused. Cornish was realizing that the crash would of a
certainty fall between himself and Dorothy.
“This thing,” continued the banker, judicially, “has not evolved
itself. It is not the result of a singular chain of circumstances. It
is the deliberate and careful work of one man's brain. This sort of
speculative gambling comes to us from America. It was in America that
the first cotton corner was conceived. That is what the paper means
when it plainly calls it the malgamite corner. Now, what I want to know
is this--who has worked this thing?”
“Percy Roden,” answered Cornish, thoughtfully. “It is Roden's corner.”
“Then Roden's a clever fellow,” said the great financier. “The sort of
man who will die a millionaire or a felon--there is no medium for that
sort. He has conducted the thing with consummate skill--has not made a
mistake yet. For I have watched him. He began well, by saying just
enough and not too much. He went abroad, but not too far abroad. He
avoided a suspicious remoteness. Then he bided his time with a fine
patience, and at the right moment converted it quietly into a
company--with a capital subscribed by the charitable--a splendid piece
of audacity. I saw the announcement in the newspaper, neatly worded,
and issued at the precise moment when the public interest was beginning
to wane, and before the thing was forgotten. People read it, and having
found a new plaything--bicycles, I suppose--did not care two pins what
became of the malgamite scheme, and yet they were not left in a
position to be able to say that they had never heard that the thing had
been turned into a company.” The banker rubbed his large soft hands
together with a grim appreciation of this misapplied skill, which so
few could recognize at its full value.
“But,” he continued, in his deliberate, practical way, as if in the
course of his experience he had never yet met a difficulty which could
not be overcome, “it is more our concern to think about the future. The
difficulty you are in would be bad enough in itself--it is made a
hundred times worse by the fact that you have a man like Roden, with
all the trumps in his hand, waiting for you to throw the first card. Of
course, I know no details yet, but I soon shall. What seems complicated
to you may appear simple enough to me. I am going to stand by
you--understand that, Tony. Through thick and thin. But I am going to
stand behind you. I can hit harder from there. And this is just one of
those affairs with which my name must not be associated.
So far as I can judge at present, there seems to be only one course
open to you, and that is to abandon the whole affair as quietly and
expeditiously as possible, to drop malgamite and the hope of benefiting
the malgamite workers once and for all.”
Tony was looking at his watch. It was, it appeared, time for him to go
if he wanted to catch his train.
“No,” he said, rising; “I will be d----d if I do that.”
Mr. Wade looked at him curiously, as one may look at a sleeper who for
no apparent reason suddenly wakes and stretches himself.
“Ah!” he said slowly, and that was all.