I went up to the Hardingham through a dense London fog to see how
things really stood. Before I had talked to my uncle for ten minutes I
felt like a man who has just awakened in a bleak, inhospitable room out
of a grandiose dream.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
HOW I STOLE THE HEAPS OF QUAP FROM MORDET ISLAND
I
“We got to make a fight for it,” said my uncle. “We got to face the
music!”
I remember that even at the sight of him I had a sense of impending
calamity. He sat under the electric light with the shadow of his hair
making bars down his face. He looked shrunken, and as though his skin
had suddenly got loose and yellow. The decorations of the room seemed
to have lost freshness, and outside the blinds were up—there was not so
much fog as a dun darkness. One saw the dingy outlines of the chimneys
opposite quite distinctly, and then a sky of such brown as only London
can display.
“I saw a placard,” I said: “‘More Ponderevity.’”
“That’s Boom,” he said. “Boom and his damned newspapers. He’s trying to
fight me down. Ever since I offered to buy the _Daily Decorator_ he’s
been at me. And he thinks consolidating Do Ut cut down the ads. He
wants everything, damn him! He’s got no sense of dealing. I’d like to
bash his face!”
“Well,” I said, “what’s to be done?”
“Keep going,” said my uncle.
“I’ll smash Boom yet,” he said, with sudden savagery.
“Nothing else?” I asked.
“We got to keep going. There’s a scare on. Did you notice the rooms?
Half the people out there this morning are reporters. And if I talk
they touch it up!... They didn’t used to touch things up! Now they put
in character touches—insulting you. Don’t know what journalism’s coming
to. It’s all Boom’s doing.”
He cursed Lord Boom with considerable imaginative vigour.
“Well,” said I, “what can he do?”
“Shove us up against time, George; make money tight for us. We been
handling a lot of money—and he tightens us up.”
“We’re sound?”
“Oh, we’re sound, George. Trust me for that! But all the same—There’s
such a lot of imagination in these things.... We’re sound enough.
That’s not it.”
He blew. “Damn Boom!” he said, and his eyes over his glasses met mine
defiantly.
“We can’t, I suppose, run close hauled for a bitstop expenditure?”
“Where?”
“Well,—Crest Hill”
“What!” he shouted. “Me stop Crest Hill for Boom!” He waved a fist as
if to hit his inkpot, and controlled himself with difficulty. He spoke
at last in a reasonable voice. “If I did,” he said, “he’d kick up a
fuss. It’s no good, even if I wanted to. Everybody’s watching the
place. If I was to stop building we’d be down in a week.”
He had an idea. “I wish I could do something to start a strike or
something. No such luck. Treat those workmen a sight too well. No, sink
or swim, Crest Hill goes on until we’re under water.”