ON the last day of February, Mrs. Dabney was surprised if not
exhilarated by a visit from her two children in the little book-shop.
“It's the last day in the world that I should have thought you'd 'a'
come out on,” she told them, in salutation--and for comment they all
glanced along the dark narrow alley of shelves to the street window. A
gloomy spectacle it was indeed, with a cold rain slanting through the
discredited remnants of a fog, which the east wind had broken up, but
could not drive away, and with only now and again a passer-by moving
across the dim vista, masked beneath an umbrella, or bent forward with
chin buried in turned-up collar. In the doorway outside the sulky boy
stamped his feet and slapped his sides with his arms in pantomimic
mutiny against the task of guarding the book-stalls' dripping covers,
which nobody would be mad enough to pause over, much less to lift.
“I don't know but I'd ought to let the boy bring in the books and go
home,” she said, as their vague gaze was attracted by his gestures. “But
it isn't three yet--it seems ridiculous to close up. Still, if you'd be
more comfortable upstairs--”
“Why, mamma! The idea of making strangers of us,” protested Julia.
She strove to make her tone cheerful, but its effect of rebuke was
unmistakable.
The mother, leaning against the tall desk, looked blankly at her
daughter. The pallid flicker of the gas-jet overhead made her long,
listless face seem more devoid of colour than ever.
“But you are as good as strangers, aren't you?” she observed, coldly.
“You've been back in town ten days and more, and I've scarcely laid eyes
upon either of you. But don't you want to sit down? You can put those
parcels on the floor anywhere. Or shall I do it for you?”
Alfred had been lounging in the shadowed corner against a heap of old
magazines tied in bundles. He sprang up now and cleared the chair, but
his sister declined it with a gesture. Her small figure had straightened
itself into a kind of haughty rigidity.
“There has been so much to do, mamma,” she explained, in a clear, cool
voice. “We have had hundreds of things to buy and to arrange about. All
the responsibility for the housekeeping rests upon me--and Alfred
has his studio to do. But of course we should have looked in upon you
sooner--and much oftener--if we had thought you wanted us. But really,
when we came to you, the very day after our return, it was impossible
for us to pretend that you were glad to see us.”
“Oh, I was glad enough,” Mrs. Dabney made answer, mechanically. “Why
shouldn't I be glad? And why should you think I wasn't glad? Did you
expect me to shout and dance?”
“But you said you wouldn't come to see us in Ovington Square,” Alfred
reminded her.
“That's different,” she declared. “What would I be doing in Ovington
Square? It's all right for you to be there. I hope you'll be happy
there. But it wouldn't add anything to your happiness to have me there;
it would be quite the other way about. I know that, if you DON'T. This
is my place, here, and I intend to stick to it!”
Julia's bright eyes, scanning the apathetic, stubborn maternal
countenance, hardened beyond their wont. “You talk as if there had been
some class war declared,” she said, with obvious annoyance. “You know
that Uncle Stormont would like nothing better than to be as nice to you
as he is to us.”
“Uncle Stormont!” Mrs. Dabney's repetition of the words was surcharged
with hostile sarcasm. “But his name was Stormont as much as it was Joel,”
broke in Alfred, from his dark corner. “He has a perfect right to use
the one he likes best.”
“Oh, I don't dispute his right,” she replied, once more in her
passionless monotone. “Everybody can call themselves whatever they
please. It's no affair of mine. You and your sister spell your father's
name in a way to suit yourselves: I never interfered, did I? You have
your own ideas and your own tastes. They are quite beyond me--but
they're all right for you. I don't criticize them at all. What I say is
that it is a great mercy your uncle came along, with his pockets full
of money to enable you to make the most of them. If I were religious I
should call that providential.”
“And that's what we DO call it,” put in Julia, with vivacity. “And why
should you shut your doors against this Providence, mamma? Just think of
it! We don't insist upon your coming to live at Ovington Square at all.
Probably, as you say, you would be happier by yourself--at least for
the present. But when Uncle St--when uncle says there's more than enough
money for us all, and is only too anxious for you to let him do things
for you--why, he's your own brother! It's as if I should refuse to allow
Alfred to do things for me.”
“That you never did,” interposed the young man, gayly. “I'll say that
for you, Jule.”
“And never will,” she assured him, with cheerful decision. “But
no--mamma--can't you see what we mean? We have done what you wanted us
to do. You sent us both to much better schools than you could afford,
from the time we were of no age at all--and when uncle's money came you
sent us to Cheltenham. We did you no discredit. We worked very well; we
behaved ourselves properly. We came back to you at last with fair reason
to suppose that you would be--I won't say proud, but at least well
satisfied with us--and then it turned out that you didn't like us at
all.”
“I never said anything of the sort,” the mother declared, with a touch
of animation.
“Oh no--you never said it,” Julia admitted, “but what else can we think
you mean? Our uncle sends for us to go abroad with him, and you busy
yourself getting me ready, and having new frocks made and all that--and
I never hear a suggestion that you don't want me to go----”
“But I did want you to go,” Mrs. Dabney affirmed.
“Well, then, when I come back--when we come back, and tell you what
splendid and generous plans uncle has made for us, and how he has taken
a beautiful furnished house and made it our home, and so on,--why, you
won't even come and look at the house!”
“But I don't want to see it,” the mother retorted; obstinately.
“Well, then, you needn't!” said Alfred, rising. “Nobody will ask you
again.” “Oh yes they will,” urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one
to the other. All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to
mediate between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. From her
earliest childhood she had understood, somehow, that there was a Dabney
habit of mind, which was by comparison soft and if not yielding, then
politic: and set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full of
gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death. In the days
of her grandfather Thorpe, whom she remembered with an alarmed
distinctness, there had existed a kind of tacit idea that his name alone
accounted for and justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper.
That old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody, suspected
everybody, apparently disliked everybody, vehemently demanded his own
will of everybody--and it was all to be explained, seemingly, by the
fact that he was a Thorpe.
After his disappearance from the scene--unlamented, to the best of
Julia's juvenile perceptions--there had been relatively peaceful times
in the book-shop and the home overhead, yet there had existed always a
recognized line of demarcation running through the household. Julia and
her father--a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a
pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as
an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of
unsubstantial memories--Julia and this father had stood upon one side
of this impalpable line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable
persons, who would not expect to have their own way.
Alfred and his mother were Thorpes--that is to say, people who
necessarily had their own way. Their domination was stained by none
of the excesses which had rendered the grandfather intolerable. Their
surface temper was in truth almost sluggishly pacific. Underneath,
however, ugly currents and sharp rocks were well known to have a
potential existence--and it was the mission of the Dabneys to see that
no wind of provocation unduly stirred these depths. Worse even than
these possibilities of violence, however, so far as every-day life was
concerned, was the strain of obstinacy which belonged to the Thorpe
temper. A sort of passive mulishness it was, impervious to argument,
immovable under the most sympathetic pressure, which particularly tried
the Dabney patience. It seemed to Julia now, as she interposed her
soothing influence between these jarring forces, that she had spent
whole years of her life in personal interventions of this sort.
“Oh yes they will,” she repeated, and warned her brother into the
background with a gesture half-pleading half-peremptory. “We are your
children, and we're not bad or undutiful children at all, and I'm sure
that when you think it all over, mamma, you'll see that it would be
absurd to let anything come between you and us.”
“How could I help letting it come?” demanded the mother, listlessly
argumentative. “You had outgrown me and my ways altogether. It was
nonsense to suppose that you would have been satisfied to come back and
live here again, over the shop. I couldn't think for the life of me what
I was going to do with you. But now your uncle has taken all that into
his own hands. He can give you the kind of home that goes with your
education and your ideas--and what more do you want? Why should you come
bothering me?”
“How unjust you are, mamma!” cried Julia, with a glaze of tears upon her
bright glance.
The widow took her elbow from the desk, and, slowly straightening
herself, looked down upon her daughter. Her long plain face, habitually
grave in expression, conveyed no hint of exceptional emotion, but the
fingers of the large, capable hands she clasped before her writhed
restlessly against one another, and there was a husky-threat of collapse
in her voice as she spoke:
“If you ever have children of your own,” she said, “and you slave your
life out to bring them up so that they'll think themselves your
betters, and they act accordingly--then you'll understand. But you don't
understand now--and there's no good our talking any more about it. Come
in whenever it's convenient--and you feel like it. I must go back to my
books now.”
She took up a pen at this, and opened the cash-book upon the blotter.
Her children, surveying her blankly, found speech difficult. With some
murmured words, after a little pause, they bestowed a perfunctory kiss
upon her unresponsive cheek, and filed out into the rain.
Mrs. Dabney watched them put up their umbrella, and move off Strandward
beneath it. She continued to look for a long time, in an aimless,
ruminating way, at the dismal prospect revealed by the window and the
glass of the door. The premature night was closing in miserably, with
increasing rain, and a doleful whistle of rising wind round the corner.
At last she shut up the unconsidered cash-book, lighted another gas-jet,
and striding to the door, rapped sharply on the glass.
“Bring everything in!” she called to the boy, and helped out his
apprehension by a comprehensive gesture.
Later, when he had completed his task, and one of the two narrow outlets
from the shop in front was satisfactorily blocked with the wares from
without, and all the floor about reeked with the grimy drippings of the
oilskins, Mrs. Dabney summoned him to the desk in the rear.
“I think you may go home now,” she said to him, with the laconic
abruptness to which he was so well accustomed. “You have a home, haven't
you?”
Remembering the exhaustive enquiries which the Mission people had made
about him and his belongings, as a preliminary to his getting this job,
he could not but be surprised at the mistress's question. In confusion
he nodded assent, and jerked his finger toward his cap.
“Got a mother?” she pursued. Again he nodded, with augmented confidence.
“And do you think yourself better than she is?”
The urchin's dirty and unpleasant face screwed itself up in anxious
perplexity over this strange query. Then it cleared as he thought he
grasped the idea, and the rat-eyes he lifted to her gleamed with the
fell acuteness of the Dials. “I sh'd be sorry if I wasn't,” he answered,
in swift, rasping accents. “She's a rare old boozer, she is! It's a
fair curse to an honest boy like me, to 'ave--” “Go home!” she bade him,
peremptorily--and frowned after him as he ducked and scuttled from the
shop.
Left to herself, Mrs. Dabney did not reopen the cash-book--the wretched
day, indeed, had been practically a blank in its history--but loitered
about in the waning light among the shelves near the desk, altering the
position of books here and there, and glancing cursorily through others.
Once or twice she went to the door and looked out upon the rain-soaked
street. A tradesman's assistant, opposite, was rolling the iron shutters
down for the night. If business in hats was over for the day, how much
more so in books! Her shop had never been fitted with shutters--for what
reason she could not guess. The opened pages of numerous volumes were
displayed close against the window, but no one had ever broken a pane
to get at them. Apparently literature raised no desires in the criminal
breast. To close the shop there was nothing to do but lock and bolt the
door and turn out the lights. At last, as the conviction of nightfall
forced itself upon her from the drenched darkness outside, she bent
to put her hand to the key. Then, with a little start of surprise,
she stood erect. Someone was shutting an umbrella in the doorway,
preparatory to entering the shop.
It was her brother, splashed and wet to the knees, but with a glowing
face, who pushed his way in, and confronted her with a broad grin. There
was such a masterful air about him, that when he jovially threw an arm
round her gaunt waist, and gathered her up against his moist shoulder,
she surprised herself by a half-laughing submission.
Her vocabulary was not rich in phrases for this kind of emergency. “Do
mind what you're about!” she told him, flushing not unpleasurably.
“Shut up the place!” he answered, with lordly geniality. “I've walked
all the way from the City in the rain. I wanted the exertion--I couldn't
have sat in a cab. Come back and build up the fire, and let's have a
talk. God! What things I've got to tell you!”
“There isn't any fire down here,” she said, apologetically, as they
edged their way through the restricted alley to the rear. “The old
fireplace took up too much room. Sometimes, in very sharp weather, I
have an oil-stove in. Usually the gas warms it enough. You don't find
it too cold--do you?--with your coat on? Or would you rather come
upstairs?”
“Never mind the cold,” he replied, throwing a leg over the stool before
the desk. “I can't stay more 'n a minute or two. What do you think we've
done today?”
Louisa had never in her life seen her brother look so well as he did
now, sprawling triumphantly upon the stool under the yellow gas-light.
His strong, heavily-featured face had somehow ceased to be commonplace.
It had acquired an individual distinction of its own. He looked up at
her with a clear, bold eye, in which, despite its gloss of good-humour,
she discerned a new authority.
The nervous and apprehensive lines had somehow vanished from the
countenance, and with them, oddly enough, that lethargic, heavy
expression which had been their complement. He was all vigour,
readiness, confidence, now. She deemed him almost handsome, this
curious, changeable brother of hers, as he beat with his fist in a
measured way upon the desk-top to emphasize his words, and fastened his
commanding gaze upon her.
“We took very nearly twenty thousand pounds to-day,” he went on. “This
is the twenty-eighth of February. A fortnight ago today was the first
settlement. I wasn't here, but Semple was--and the working of it is all
in his hands. He kept as still as a mouse that first day. They had to
deliver to us 26,000 shares, and they hadn't got one, but we didn't make
any fuss. The point was, you see, not to let them dream that they were
caught in a trap. We didn't even put the price up to par. They had to
come to Semple, and say there didn't seem to be any shares obtainable
just at the moment, and what would he carry them over at? That means,
to let them postpone delivery for another fortnight. He was as smooth
as sweet-oil with them, and agreed to carry them over till today without
any charge at all. But today it was a little different. The price was up
ten shillings above par. That is to say, Semple arranged with a jobber,
on the quiet, d'ye see? to offer thirty shillings for our one-pound
shares. That offer fixed the making-up price. So then, when they were
still without shares to-day, and had to be carried over again, they had
to pay ten shillings' difference on each of twenty-six thousand shares,
plus the difference between par and the prices they'd sold at. That
makes within a few hundreds of 20,000 pounds in cash, for one day's
haul. D'ye see?”
She nodded at him, expressively. Through previous talks she had really
obtained an insight into the operation, and it interested her more than
she would have cared to confess.
“Well, then, we put that 20,000 pounds in our pockets,” he proceeded
with a steady glow in his eyes. “A fortnight hence, that is March 14th,
we ring the bell on them again, and they march up to the captain's
office and settle a second time. Now what happens on the 14th? A jobber
makes the price for Semple again, and that settles the new sum they have
to pay us in differences. It is for us to say what that price shall be.
We'll decide on that when the time comes. We most probably will just put
it up another ten shillings, and so take in just a simple 13,000 pounds.
It's best in the long run, I suppose, to go slow, with small rises like
that, in order not to frighten anybody. So Semple says, at any rate.”
“But why not frighten them?” Louisa asked. “I thought you wanted to
frighten them. You were full of that idea a while ago.”
He smiled genially. “I've learned some new wrinkles since then. We'll
frighten 'em stiff enough, before we're through with them. But at the
start we just go easy. If they got word that there was a 'corner,' there
would be a dead scare among the jobbers. They'd be afraid to sell or
name a price for Rubber Consols unless they had the shares in hand. And
there are other ways in which that would be a nuisance. Presently, of
course, we shall liberate some few shares, so that there may be some
actual dealings. Probably a certain number of the 5,000 which went to
the general public will come into the market too. But of course you see
that all such shares will simply go through one operation before they
come back to us. Some one of the fourteen men we are squeezing will
snap them up and bring them straight to Semple, to get free from the
fortnightly tax we are levying on them. In that way we shall eventually
let out say half of these fourteen 'shorts,' or perhaps more than half.”
“What do you want to do that for?” The sister's grey eyes had caught a
metallic gleam, as if from the talk about gold. “Why let anybody out?
Why can't you go on taking their money for ever?”
Thorpe nodded complacently. “Yes--that's what I asked too. It seemed to
me the most natural thing, when you'd got 'em in the vise, to keep them
there. But when you come to reflect--you can't get more out of a man
than there is in him. If you press him too hard, he can always go
bankrupt--and then he's out of your reach altogether, and you lose
everything that you counted on making out of him. So, after a certain
point, each one of the fourteen men whom we're squeezing must be dealt
with on a different footing. We shall have to watch them all, and study
their resources, as tipsters watch horses in the paddock.
“You see, some of them can stand a loss of a hundred thousand pounds
better than others could lose ten thousand. All that we have to know. We
can take it as a principle that none of them will go bankrupt and lose
his place on the exchange unless he is pressed tight to the wall. Well,
our business is to learn how far each fellow is from the wall to start
with. Then we keep track of him, one turn of the screw after another,
till we see he's got just enough left to buy himself out. Then we'll let
him out. See?”
“It's cruel, isn't it?” she commented, calmly meditative, after a little
pause.
“Everything in the City is cruel,” he assured her with a light tone.
“All speculative business is cruel. Take our case, for example. I
estimate in a rough way that these fourteen men will have to pay over
to us, in differences and in final sales, say seven hundred thousand
pounds--maybe eight hundred. Well, now, not one of those fellows ever
earned a single sovereign of that money. They've taken the whole of
it from others, and these others took it from others still, and so on
almost indefinitely. There isn't a sovereign of it that hasn't been
through twenty hands, or fifty for that matter, since the last man who
had done some honest work for it parted company with it. Well--money
like that belongs to those who are in possession of it, only so long
as they are strong enough to hold on to it. When someone stronger still
comes along, he takes it away from them. They don't complain: they don't
cry and say it's cruel. They know it's the rule of the game. They accept
it--and begin at once looking out for a new set of fools and weaklings
to recoup themselves on. That's the way the City goes.”
Thorpe had concluded his philosophical remarks with ruminative slowness.
As he lapsed into silence now, he fell to studying his own hands on
the desk-top before him. He stretched out the fingers, curved them
in different degrees, then closed them tight and turned the bulky
hard-looking fists round for inspection in varying aspects.
“That's the kind of hand,” he began again, thoughtfully, “that breaks
the Jew in the long run, if there's only grit enough behind it. I used
to watch those Jews' hands, a year ago, when I was dining and wining
them. They're all thin and wiry and full of veins. Their fingers
are never still; they twist round and keep stirring like a lobster's
feelers. But there aint any real strength in 'em. They get hold of most
of the things that are going, because they're eternally on the move.
It's their hellish industry and activity that gives them such a pull,
and makes most people afraid of them. But when a hand like that takes
them by the throat”--he held up his right hand as he spoke, with the
thick uncouth fingers and massive thumb arched menacingly in a powerful
muscular tension--“when THAT tightens round their neck, and they feel
that the grip means business--my God! what good are they?”
He laughed contemptuously, and slapped the relaxed palm on the desk with
a noise which made his sister start. Apparently the diversion recalled
something to her mind.
“There was a man in here asking about you today,” she remarked, in a
casual fashion. “Said he was an old friend of yours.”
“Oh, yes, everybody's my 'old friend' now,” he observed with beaming
indifference. “I'm already getting heaps of invitations to dinners and
dances and all that. One fellow insisted on booking me for Easter
for some salmon fishing he's got way down in Cumberland. I told him I
couldn't come, but he put my name down all the same. Says his wife will
write to remind me. Damn his wife! Semple tells me that when our squeeze
really begins and they realize the desperate kind of trap they're in,
they'll simply shower attentions of that sort on me. He says the
social pressure they can command, for a game of this kind, is something
tremendous. But I'm not to be taken in by it for a single pennyworth,
d'ye see? I dine with nobody! I fish and shoot and go yachting with
nobody! Julia and Alfred and our own home in Ovington Square--that'll
be good enough for me. By the way--you haven't been out to see us yet.
We're all settled now. You must come at once--why not with me, now?”
Louisa paid no heed to this suggestion. She had been rummaging among
some loose papers on the top of the desk, and she stepped round now to
lift the lid and search about for something inside.
“He left a card for you,” she said, as she groped among the desk's
contents. “I don't know what I did with it. He wrote something on it.”
“Oh, damn him, and his card too,” Thorpe protested easily. “I don't want
to see either of them.”
“He said he knew you in Mexico. He said you'd had dealings together. He
seemed to act as if you'd want to see him--but I didn't know. I didn't
tell him your address.”
Thorpe had listened to these apathetic sentences without much interest,
but the sum of their message appeared suddenly to catch his attention.
He sat upright, and after a moment's frowning brown study, looked
sharply up at his sister.
“What was his name?” he asked with abruptness.
“I don't in the least remember,” she made answer, holding the desk-top
up, but temporarily suspending her search. “He was a little man,
five-and-fifty, I should think. He had long grey hair--a kind of
Quaker-looking man. He said he saw the name over the door, and he
remembered your telling him your people were booksellers. He only got
back here in England yesterday or the day before. He said he didn't know
what you'd been doing since you left Mexico. He didn't even know whether
you were in England or not!”
Thorpe had been looking with abstracted intentness at a set of
green-bound cheap British poets just at one side of his sister's head.
“You must find that card!” he told her now, with a vague severity in
his voice. “I know the name well enough, but I want to see what he's
written. Was it his address, do you remember? The name itself was
Tavender, wasn't it? Good God! Why is it a woman never knows where
she's put anything? Even Julia spends hours looking for button-hooks or
corkscrews or something of that sort, every day of her life! They've
got nothing in the world to do except know where things are, right under
their nose, and yet that's just what they don't know at all!”
“Oh, I have a good few other things to do,” she reminded him, as she
fumbled again inside the obscurity of the desk. “I can put my hand on
any one of four thousand books in stock,” she mildly boasted over her
shoulder, “and that's something you never learned to do. And I can tell
if a single book is missing--and I wouldn't trust any shopman I ever
knew to do that.”
“Oh of course, you're an exception,” he admitted, under a sense of
justice. “But I wish you'd find the card.”
“I know where it is,” she suddenly announced, and forthwith closed the
desk. Moving off into the remoter recesses of the crowded interior, she
returned to the light with the bit of pasteboard in her hand. “I'd stuck
it in the little mirror over the washstand,” she explained.
He almost snatched it from her, and stood up the better to examine it
under the gas-light. “Where is Montague Street?” he asked, with rough
directness.
“In Bloomsbury--alongside the Museum. That's one Montague Street--I
don't know how many others there may be.”
Thorpe had already taken up his umbrella and was buttoning his coat.
“Yes--Bloomsbury,” he said hurriedly. “That would be his form. And you
say he knew nothing about my movements or whereabouts--nothing about the
Company, eh?” He looked at his watch as he spoke. Evidently the presence
of this stranger had excited him a good deal.
“No,” she assured him, reflectively; “no, I'm sure he didn't. From what
he said, he doesn't know his way about London very well, or anywhere
else, for that matter, I should say.”
Thorpe nodded, and put his finger to his forehead with a meaning look.
“No--he's a shade off in the upper story,” he told her in a confidential
tone. “Still, it's important that I should see him,”--and with only a
hasty hand-shake he bustled out of the shop.
By the light of the street lamp opposite, she could see him on the
pavement, in the pelting rain, vehemently signalling with his umbrella
for a cab.