There runs a mandate to chosen nations to govern upon earth as
vicegerents of the Divine. It has fallen upon peoples so separated
by time and customs that its essential unity is with difficulty
perceived; nevertheless, that unity is assured. The process whereby
dominion is achieved is called by different names: the names, and not
the events, deceive us; the names alone produce a false atmosphere of
change. First, perhaps, it was the vague loyalty to the tribe, the
marauding foray, the settlement; next the intense love of a city and
of its gods, the successful defence, the advance, the conquest and
organisation of lands beyond the boundary. Karl Unterwassen reverses
the order; it is a point of small importance.
To-day the registration of the Company, the lease of offices, the
prospectus, the flotation are the progressive revelations of such a
mandate. Of all these allotment is the Crown.
The M’Korio Delta Development Company opened its lists on the 9th of
July. By four o’clock of the 10th those lists were closed and the
capital had been subscribed; it is not known how many times over.
With the next day the allotment began.
* * * * *
Those of my fellow citizens who have been engaged in the active work
of Empire building, will know what I mean when I say that allotment
is among the hardest tasks which our country demands of us. Those
who have not been thus actively engaged in the expansion of our
civilisation (“they also serve who only stand and wait”) must take it
for granted.
Consider the care and judgment to be exercised! Not to disappoint
what is influential or what is strong: not to alienate the mass
of small subscribers—for the mass of small subscribers is Public
Opinion. Not to offend the proprietor of a great newspaper.
Yet also, not to offend the manager, the editor—sometimes the
papermaker. To consider the claims which good birth and a long
tradition of government will give to this man, a genius for affairs
to that. To remember (and sometimes it is only remembered at the
last moment) that such and such a name—almost passed over in its
insignificance—stands for another much greater name. To recollect
the power of this subscriber with men of his own religion, of this
other with men who cultivate honesty, of a third with those who
admire the capacity for intrigue. Monarchy must be remembered: it is
a permanent feature in our English life. The army must be remembered.
Politicians, some of whose names the public will ignore, must yet
be accurately gauged. Their power as managers and leaders must be
estimated. Even the foreigner must have his place, and must be known.
The foreign sovereign, the foreign negotiator, may help to wreck or
to make the thing. He may be turned from the ally to the enemy of our
beloved country by one involuntary error.
It is a task, I say, of awful responsibility, and one in which a man
may do more in a few moments to advance or retard the designs of
Providence than in any other of the modern world.
The work went on. Three hours of it, four hours, sometimes five.
On the second day Mr Burden nearly broke down, Lord Benthorpe was
actually absent for two days running, fallen ill from sheer fatigue.
It told even upon Mr Harbury. He got black patches under his eyes,
and he walked, a new thing for him, with some fatigue. Mr Barnett
alone seemed to be actually refreshed by the closeness of application
that was necessary.
The public outside grumbled; nothing could be done till the
allotment was declared. They would have grumbled less had they
seen the grinding work of those ten days. Every morning the mass
of letters was sorted, the list of names drawn up, and with strict
commercial probity every single application passed before each of the
directors.
On the fifth day Mr Burden’s head was lost, and Lord Benthorpe’s
assent had become mechanical. Mr Barnett, on the contrary, became
more and more eager, more and more exact as the work proceeded.
Before the close of the sixth day, his brain alone was sitting in
judgment over that mass of papers; it was fortunate, for on the
remaining four days the most delicate part of the work remained to
be done. There did indeed pass by Mr Burden one or two incongruous
things that troubled him. Canon Cone had sent no cheque. Mr Barnett
would make himself responsible for that. Major Pondo, whom Mr Burden
had always regarded as a poor, adventurous man, applied for fifteen
thousand shares. The secretary of that politician who had most
consistently denounced the financial side of our colonial expansion
applied for ten thousand.
There were perhaps a dozen incidents of this sort which Mr Burden
could not fit in with what he had known of the world. But the work
was too pressing and too exacting to leave energy for comment, or
even for hesitation. All these discrepancies made upon Mr Burden’s
mind only one general and blurred effect: to wit, that his own
judgment was doubtful, and that society around him was more complex,
and perhaps more perilous, than he had imagined.
On the 19th the allotment was declared. On the morning of the 21st,
though no sales had taken place, the anxious informal bidding,
which went on in the house, and afterwards in the street, and even
privately between individuals (rigorously as etiquette forbids such
things) was offering two and one-sixteenth, two and one-eighth, two
and a quarter before evening. The prices began to be talked of, and
the selling to be regular within three days; and the price then was
over four. The shares rose with the steady movement of a balloon,
up on an accelerating curve; “M. D. D.’s.” changing hands with such
rapidity, that it was no longer possible to come to any conclusion
with regard to the individual motives of the more important buyers
and sellers. The pace was the pace of a crusade. As religions take
men or the enthusiasms of war, so the public had come to believe in
themselves and the M’Korio; in what they could _do_ with the new
province. They saw the Delta already drained, already mined—as it
will be mined and drained—they saw that the nominal capital of this
new company was the petty ransom of a great kingdom in the future of
England. By Wednesday, the 26th, the shares were at seven.
It is the most fruitful and the most beneficent of exaltations. It
bridges the ford, as Kipling has so finely said; it imposes law;
it is creating a new and happy world from the west of Ireland to
Pùtti-Ghâl. There is something awful and mysterious about it. As it
sweeps by, this missionary creed, this determination and confidence
of a whole people, a plain man’s spirit feeling it comes very near to
the Hosts of the Lord. On Monday the 31st, the shares were at eight
and a quarter, and there they stopped, up, poised upon a summit, as
genius poises upon the columns of conquerors: hovering in bronze.
It is not in humanity—even in ours—to bear these moods for ever
undisturbed. Some moments of doubt, but not of despair—perhaps it
is juster to say some moments of repose will overtake the temper
of the firmest race. On Tuesday, the 1st of September, the shares
were at six and three-quarters. On Thursday, the 3rd, they were a
fraction below five. But something rallied in the soul of England;
the country clergy read in the _Standard_ of Saturday morning with
something of the throb a trumpet peal evokes, that M.D.D.’s had gone
’way up over seven at the close of the yesterday’s market.
By what avenue shall I approach the analysis of that vast
agglomeration of subconscious national forces? Any single method
seems crude and petty in the presence of such a complex and
Overpowering Whole ... perhaps it is most reasonable to follow
the fortunes of one block of shares. For, when great states are
fermenting towards ripeness, men are but atoms whirled hither and
thither. Economic necessities drive them, and these necessities in
their turn are but the expression of some historic will.... Yes, it
is better to follow the fortunes of a block of shares than of an
individual shareholder: for men pass, but the Company remains....
I will consider the one thousand shares originally allotted to the
first cousin of the Secretary for the Fine Arts.
He became the possessor of these upon the 19th, and had paid for them
£250; £250 more to be paid (as the prospectus directed) in three
months, and the remainder when called for. These were but a part of
his holding; but I am dealing with this one block of shares for
the sake of example. On the 23rd, I find them bought at the price
of three and a quarter by the Bishop of Ballycannon. On the 26th,
his lordship sells them at seven to young Lord Berpham, who had been
advised by his solicitor that they were a good thing: sincere advice,
for his solicitor was also his creditor and trustee. On the 31st,
when they touched eight and a quarter, Lord Berpham should have sold,
but that young disdainful spirit was too noble. He was too noble.
Had he sold, he would have realised no less a sum than £8250 (less
brokerage). He was too noble. The blood in him was confident of
England, and he held on for a rise. My readers know what followed.
The next day they had fallen to six and three quarters. On Thursday,
most reluctantly, by the advice, not to say the pressure, of his
solicitors, the young man sold at four and seven-eighths, having
lost no less a sum than £2100, which he could ill afford. The buyer
was Mr Zimmer, the broker, but as I find that Mr Barnett himself
acquired them in the same afternoon, I have no doubt that he was the
bona fide purchaser; my certitude becomes the more fixed when I find
that on Saturday morning, the 5th of September (the shares having
then touched seven and a half), Mr Barnett disposed of them to Henry
Bowling, the well-known trainer and proprietor of _English Racing_.
He, in his turn, sold them at the same price to Mrs Maidstone,
who disposed of them a fortnight later at the same price to her
sister-in-law, who sold them at a slight premium in the open market.
I see them receding into the distance, passing through the hands of
that fine old poet-patriot, Gaystone; then, a wofully disintegrated,
a mournful procession, as the winter wanes, they drift off into the
middle classes, sink, and are engulfed.
But Mr Burden, he neither bought nor sold. He was astounded at these
fluctuations, but more astounded at the permanently high level which
M.D.D.’s maintained, in spite of the rough sea upon which they
were tossed. Sudden fortunes sprang around him, sudden reputations
startled and but half convinced his sober mind. Even that Major
Pondo, whose face he thought he must have seen in dreams, was wealthy
now, and met him with an easy air.
Then it was, after a month of so much violence, that the old man’s
inner spirit, no longer confused or troubled, leant towards its end,
and was possessed by sadness continually.
One part of it, the strongest and the safest, the part that had so
sanely judged his people and their politics for fifteen years, still
dwindled.
That other, older part, was not so easily to be silenced, nor was
so readily content. Here suspicions had hardened (vain imaginary
suspicions without proof, born of a narrow knowledge and of an
ignorance of modern things) till they became like thorns, piercing
him. He began to notice every gesture, and the shifting of every
eye. He would talk to Cosmo more than Cosmo wished. Once or twice he
walked alone, and to no purpose, southward out of Norwood, until he
could find the fields. Once, all night, he lay awake. There was no
pain, but he met the next day in a spirit of awful tension, akin to
madness. Once he refused, for the first time, an invitation to Mr
Barnett’s house.
In such a mood he wasted his last midsummer. In such a mood death,
which needs all our preparation, found him not half prepared.
* * * * *
To return to Mr Abbott.
His name had not been mentioned for days and weeks, partly, of
course, because every guide in this adventure, from Cosmo to Mr
Barnett, was determined to give as little pain as might be to Mr
Burden, the oldest and weakest of their number; and partly also
because the giving of that pain (in itself, after all, only an
imaginary evil), might result in the most practical of evils to the
M’Korio.
Mr Abbott was best as a friend, nay, as a director; next best as
an enemy; but worst of all, as one neither enemy nor friend, but
contemptuous and perhaps influencing secretly a member of their own
group. They knew all this, and July had ended without a word being
said. Mr Abbott himself had neither spoken nor written; Mr Burden had
not approached the offices of the shipmaster. Mr Barnett and Cosmo
were both confident that he dreaded the road to that familiar room;
they were confident he had not met his friend. Nor had he.
On the other hand, neither was the younger nor the older of these two
active brains willing to temporise. It was not in their sound scheme
of business to temporise, and the moment seemed to them, of all
moments, the least fitting for delay.
Mr Abbott pressed.
The session was lagging to its end. Within a week or two the grouse
would be whirring, and the chance would come for the transference
of the M’Korio from the Government of the Foreign Office to that of
the Colonial; the moment approached when a few men, undisturbed by
the necessities or accidents of debate, could go right forward and
do their best for England. But if time was propitious, time also
urged them. Soon the great editors would have left their offices, the
heads of the great businesses would be abroad or in the provinces.
I have already alluded to the grouse; but a very few weeks and the
shadow of the partridge would appear between Mr Barnett and the best
laid of his plans. Already multitudes of the middle class were asleep
upon beaches of sand. Anxiety, a mood that cannot long disturb such
minds, had begun to cast a wing over Mr Barnett’s clear and creative
intelligence.
The necessity for Mr Abbott was clamorous.
It was not only as a principal authority with men as ordinary as
himself (and such men are often possessed of great influence or
wealth; sometimes of a voice in Parliament); it was not only as a
loud name, which the public had long connected with the M’Korio
Delta, nor only as the owner of the Abbott Line, that Mr Abbott’s
support was demanded in Broad Street. There were a number of other
considerations, each apparently of little importance, but forming
in the aggregate a strand which men like Mr Barnett are the last to
neglect.
Bowley depended more perhaps upon Abbott’s general judgment of
affairs than upon any other’s man’s: and Bowley controlled the two
groups of insurance which the M’Korio coast still had to reckon with.
A friendship, a trifle fantastic, was to be discovered between Abbott
and the Permanent Under-secretary for Malarial Districts. That in
itself might have been of little importance a month earlier; but,
with Lord Malham at the Malarial Office, it made a difference; he had
only been there three weeks (since the Postage Stamp scandal), he was
shy and new to office and the Permanent Under-secretary was still the
master of the show.
Mr Abbott’s own paper, _The Keelson_, was not perhaps of very great
influence in the City; but it was the oldest in the shipping-trade,
and, though it certainly lost money, and could obtain but very
few advertisements, it was read in every principal office in the
provinces, and could only be boycotted at a very considerable expense
in the London Press. Oddly enough, it had acquired an established
reputation (for its opinions at least) in America and the Colonies,
though its total circulation amounted to little more than two
thousand copies. To you and me, and Cosmo, and Mr Barnett, and anyone
who sees the world from the inside, the thing was a rag, the losing
fad of a man more faddist than anyone in our faddist time. But when
you are dealing with an investing public of millions, such fads must
be reckoned with: for they tell—men cannot all print but they can all
talk, and the wild rags tell.
Abbott at lunch, two months before, had sworn “by this and by
that” to go into the House of Commons. I will not repeat the
coarseness of his phrase. The man was so happy-go-lucky, that his
determination might mean nothing at all; but Mr Barnett knew, as well
as anyone, that if Abbott should so choose there were perhaps five
constituencies in which room would at once be made for him.
Lastly there was the fact of Abbott’s resistance. Such resistance of
itself demanded caution.
Therefore it was that, one morning, without so much as a note to
announce him, Cosmo walked straight into that little office, where
his father had suffered the chief pang of his life two months before.
* * * * *
It was eleven o’clock of an August morning, and London was as hot as
Rome. The energy had gone out of things; the streets were curiously
silent; many of the offices deserted. Mr Abbott sat sweltering in a
shirt and white breeches, which he had preserved from some Eastern
travel. He thought it his business to be there, and there he was;
but no work could he or any other man do on such a day.
Cosmo, rigidly dressed, and with an extreme neatness, cool in the
tropical weather, everything about him ordered, came in with a brief
recognition. In the few months of his training, he had advanced
years in the knowledge of conduct and of business, and was already
manifesting the material of which the great successes are made. To
almost any other man in London, he would have used the delicate art
which a great scheme demands; but he knew his man too well to attempt
any such art with Mr Abbott. Here and there, you will discover, even
in the modern world, the man that must be driven. You will not always
succeed in driving him; but there is only one method of approaching
the business. There was exact determination and aim in every gesture
of the young man: his vigour and directness were the more remarkable,
in that until this moment he had never used such an attitude—save
possibly to servants.
He sat down in a chair just opposite his father’s friend. He put down
his hat upon the table with a slight, hard rap; looked Mr Abbott
steadily and strongly in the eyes (an effort so unusual as to cause
him positive pain), and said:
“I think you know why I have come.”
To such gross simplicity as the shipmaster’s, all this was as yet
nothing but an annoyance. He took the young man’s hat off the table,
reached out so as to hang it on the gas bracket behind him (whence
it fell to the floor) and said “No.” And, as he said it, a very
unpleasing expression passed across his face.
Cosmo jumped up, picked his hat off the floor, brushed it with his
arm, rapped it down upon the table again and said, with admirable
self-restraint: “You know as well as I do why I have come.”
“Let me put it up safely for you,” said Mr Abbott, and he reached
forward again for the hat. Cosmo withdrew it and held it in his right
hand, and, even at that most incongruous moment, Mr Abbott could not
refrain from laughter.
“You will have it,” he said; and his amusement so far got the better
of his temper, that Cosmo thought for one moment inwardly whether it
would not be better to approach this coarse mind by another channel.
But his training wisely persuaded him that the most direct of methods
was the best. The method whereby men tame beasts; the masterly method
of fear.
“I have come,” he said, still keeping himself well in hand, “because
matters cannot go on much longer as they are doing now.” He paused a
moment to let the impression form. “It can’t go on, Mr Abbott, and I
have come to tell you so quite frankly.... Before I leave this room I
mean the business to be settled.... It can’t go on.”
Mr Abbott rang a bell.
A young and rather nervous clerk came in, and gazed anxiously from
one to the other, for Cosmo’s face was unfamiliar to him, and there
had been quarrels of late.
“Arthur,” said Mr Abbott, “is it Friday or Monday that the
_Patagonia_ sails?”
Cosmo looked up with something like a scare on his face; he knew from
his reading how often these irrelevant questions may be leading up to
some great move.
“Monday, sir,” said Arthur in a whisper.
“Then you can just have the box of cigars sent here,” said Mr Abbott
jovially; “I’ll give ’em to Cap’n Gunn meself. I’d prefer to do that.
Rather than he shouldn’t have had ’em o’ course I’d have sent ’em
aboard. I thought someowrother she sailed to-morrow. As ’tis, why
I’ll give ’em to him myself. That’s all right, Arthur.”
Mr Abbott nodded and Arthur disappeared, relieved.
“I’m sorry, Cosmo,” said Mr Abbott, leaning familiarly across
the table like a second-rate uncle, and wiping an enormous red
handkerchief over his face; I’m sorry; these things aren’t of much
importance, but if one don’t attend to ’em at a time, you know....”
I have had to praise Cosmo for many things in these pages, as I have
had to blame him for a few; for nothing was he more worthy of praise
than for his complete command of himself at this moment. The effort
of the severe strain was hardly perceptible; certainly not to so
brutish a nature as his opponent’s.
“You were just saying, lad,” said Mr Abbott, with increasing
coarseness and kindliness, “how the thing couldn’t go on. Well, I’m
sorry for it. But you can sell out, ye know, and so can your poor
old dad. Hasn’t come to see me for weeks and weeks!” Mr Abbott shook
his head. “You can sell out, you know. Of course, I dunno’ how it’ll
look, mind ye, but you can run the risk that there won’t be any
trial; safe risk to run now-a-days.”
Cosmo answered him in the clear measured voice of a man whose plan is
exactly defined, and who is dealing with forces as irresponsible as
those of nature.
“Mr Abbott,” he said, “it is twenty-five minutes past eleven; if I do
not know before half-past that you are coming in, I shall go, and
our plans will be made accordingly.”
“And then the band played,” answered Mr Abbott with exquisite
vulgarity.
It was his theory (a theory which had so far controlled him in this
exchange of views) that a man should never lose his temper. He gave
way to passion as little as possible. Three times a week, perhaps, or
five at the utmost. Upon this occasion he struggled with himself; in
less than a moment came what is inevitable with men of Mr Abbott’s
hopeless type; he exploded.
“And then the band played,” he repeated somewhat inconsequently, “and
then the—! —! —! band played!” With each repetition, his face got
redder and redder, and his voice rose: not very loudly, but soughing
as do the boughs of trees at the beginning of a storm.
“And then by —! the —! —! —! —! band played!!” (every adjective was
varied). “Oh Lord” (striking the desk), “if you weren’t his son!
And if I hadn’t—well known you ever since you were a little whining
prig of a boy, I’d throw you out of this little window; I would!
Out of this little — side window. This dirty little,—little—, —,
side window. As it is, I’ll do nothing more than throw you down the
stairs!”
[Illustration: “AND THEN THE BAND PLAYED”]
Towards the end of this extraordinary harangue, Mr Abbott’s
voice—huge in volume, rolling in tone, thunderously deep in note and
menacing every species of violence in its mere sound—was shaking the
walls of the old room; in the new, palatial offices without, clerks
were cowering; though they were not unused to the echoes of such
scenes.
Cosmo was standing up, he was very pale, and his voice was only just
master of itself; but he did not give way. He stepped backward and
felt, without looking round, for the handle of the door, as Mr Abbott
rose gigantic from beyond the table. And Cosmo said, very rapidly, as
a light gun retreating fires one last, sharp, angry shell:
“Then we will freeze you out.”
With the last syllable of that final phrase he slammed the door, and
rippled down the stairs into the street.
About three seconds after he had turned the nearest corner, there
was a roaring and a storm on the landing he had passed; there was
terror in all the floors above, great boots upon the stairs, and Mr
Abbott, still in his shirt-sleeves, was at the private door, glaring
up and down the street, half apoplectic in the heat, and fearful to
the passers-by. He turned, still holding all his rage, clanked up the
stairs again, burst through the door of his little room and on into
the splendid outer offices, all marble and mahogany, where his clerks
were shivering like the doves in Virgil. He stood tremendous in the
entry and roared at them all: “You heard that?—Freeze me out! Eh? You
heard it all of you? You heard it, I say?” The wretched head clerk
answered “Yes,” which was a lie. Mr Abbott’s voice sank a little, but
only a little, as the sea sinks when the tide turns in a gale. “Ah!
You heard it all. That’s better!” Then he went on again: “Freeze me
out! Freeze out Charles Abbott of the Abbott Line! I’ll wring all
their necks!”
With that last pitiful, unpracticable, boasting threat, this mass of
noise, this anachronism without strength or value, stooped to pass
the low door, regained his sacred den, assumed his ancient wooden
throne and sat there fuming for an hour.
Long after, at dinner that evening, he found himself muttering once
or twice: “Freeze me out!” and he felt blood coming up into his face.
But in the Plantagenet Club, westward four miles, wiser and stronger
men were deciding what had best be done for the M’Korio, for their
England, and indeed for Mr Abbott himself.
Far off in Norwood, Mr Burden slept.