CHAPTER X
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 andthe 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 couldbe 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 thework 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 coulddowith the newprovince. 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 ofEngland; the country clergy read in theStandardof 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 ofshares 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 themto Henry Bowling, the well-known trainer and proprietor ofEnglish 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), mightresult 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 theirbest 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 controlledthe 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 withan 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 businessto 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 onmuch 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 thePatagoniasails?”
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, leaningfamiliarly 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 beforehalf-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!”
“AND THEN THE BAND PLAYED”
“AND THEN THE BAND PLAYED”
“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 stairsagain, 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.