Читать книгу A Little Way Ahead - Alan Sullivan - Страница 3

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AN off-hand and very fair opinion of Felix Marbury would be that he was—well, indeterminate. At thirty-two he was anchored, and had for some years been anchored, to a desk in the office of Burk and Dibdin, the latter being an old-fashioned and very reputable firm of brokers in King William Street.

Looking at Felix as he sat, his lean head tilted a bit on one side, there would be presented one of those commonplace individuals that the City swallows in thousands every morning, and disgorges at the end of the day looking rather fagged, their countenances reflecting the fixed belief that the next day will be exactly like the last one—if not a little worse.

They are very often right, the reason being that they are only the human adjuncts of business set on foot and maintained by others more able, more far-sighted than themselves. They are in business, but only relative to it. Their responsibility is limited, their pay is very moderate, and the only opportunities that come their way are those which, occasionally, they have stuff enough to make for themselves.

Of such was Felix. He had restless and rather discontented eyes, a large and not over-firm mouth, sandy hair that gave evidence of no very long life, a thin neck, rounded shoulders, and delicate, sensitive fingers that penned a wonderful copperplate script. Burk and Dibdin, especially Dibdin, being old-fashioned, the firm discouraged typewriting machines, generally used the antique press for making copies of letters, and thus it came that to Felix fell the inscribing of much of the correspondence. He also made out the firm’s advices to their clients of market transactions.

Sighing a little, he didn’t know why, he filled out a form advising John Carthew, Esq., of 27 Portman Square, W.1, that there had been bought to his account that afternoon two hundred shares of Steels Limited at £2. Then, his brain playing for a moment with the thought of John Carthew, he glanced across the office at Frances King. Felix was married, and had been for several years, to a good woman a little older than himself. But there was something about Frances that—well——! Privately he had no intention of being a fool, though there was something about Frances that drew his glances very often.

He jerked himself back to Carthew. Lucky devil, that! Or was it more than luck? From a sort of envious backwater he had, of late, been keeping tabs on this man’s transactions. Eight times out of ten he made money. Now, why was that? Felix looked him up in the Directory of Directors, found that he was on no Boards; and Who’s Who said nothing about any business interests. But he made money. Felix took the trouble to look up his account, and discovered that Burk and Dibdin had sent him thousands in the last two years. Now, why? Why in the world was the man so often right?

Felix, giving it up after a while because his brain felt twisted, sent his restless gaze back to Frances, and fell to picturing what he would do himself if things, on a big scale, came his way. Of course they wouldn’t, but these mental excursions helped to tide him over the day and did no one any harm, he thought. He’d show the world—if he had money. First, he’d get out of Brixton. He loathed Brixton, considered himself a bit above his neighbours, and acted accordingly.

That made it difficult for Anne, his wife. He loved Anne in a sort of detached, unemotional, matter-of-fact way, but had occasional dreams of being thrown in contact with some wonderful woman who would so fire him with ambition and power that for her sake he would become a Colossus. He always felt a little ashamed after these dreams, never mentioned them in Brixton, and argued that no man was responsible for what went on when he was asleep. But the woman often reminded him of Frances.

Frances was, he thought, twenty-four. Perhaps twenty-three. Hard to tell. She was secretary to both Burk and Dibdin, and doubtless knew a good deal that she never mentioned. A shrewd girl, this Frances, with bright, quick, intelligent eyes, very clear skin, a large capable mouth that Felix secretly thought was passionate, and a figure that any man would look at twice. She was not beautiful, but had that about her which expressed a certain inexhaustible quality. Resources—resources of body and brain—that was it—and a shoulder that any man, were he lucky enough, might put his head on and forget all else. But Frances didn’t look easy. Not at all. He wondered if she had had any affairs. He thought not, then concluded that it would be a whale of a one when it did come. Enough to shake any man. That was her sort!

It was on this afternoon, and when he had got so far as imagining himself to be Carthew—and a bachelor—and about to have an affair with Frances—that there happened the most dramatic event in Felix’s life. Perhaps one other, later on, was equally dramatic. It is hard to tell. To all outward appearances the hour was like the same hour on any other day. Half a dozen men at their tall desks. Old Pumphrey at his desk, which was on a slightly raised platform in one corner. Pumphrey had a very handsome nose, beautiful manners, and should really have been a Bishop. Frances at her desk, the fine profile outlined against the opaque glass of the private office. A murmur from beyond the glass where Burk was talking to Dibdin. Horns of cars sounding faintly in the street, and the rumble of buses. Everything absolutely as usual, and the ink still wet on the memorandum to Carthew.

Then it all stopped! Everything! Felix seemed to be floating in a gulf of silence. Pumphrey and the rest nowhere. He wasn’t Felix any more, but just something. No Frances in sight! No walls to the office, and not even any office. No scratch of pens. He tried to gather his brain up into a ball, and think. He couldn’t. He could only wait and wonder. It was during this extraordinary detachment that he thought he saw something.

It was large and white. It waved a little, or, rather, it shook. Felix screwed up his eyes and stared. It was a big thing, and must have been very light because it had nothing supporting it that he could make out. He wondered if he were sick. He knew he wasn’t drunk. And just at that moment he couldn’t feel his body at all. Had he died suddenly—heart disease—and was this the beginning of things on the other side?

Presently he made out that the thing was a paper—or a sheet of a paper—or the ghost of a sheet of a paper. He could read its name, The Financier. Of course! It came to the office every day. Good sound paper, too. No financial blather about it. But what was it doing up there in the air? Something whispered that it was not there for nothing.

He peered and made out figures. They swam a bit, but were legible, and he read Silks Preferred £1 15s. Now, it happened that Silks Preferred had been dealt in by his firm that very day and stood at one pound even. Burk didn’t think much of them. They carried the right to subscribe to any further issue of common stock, but the common didn’t earn enough to make this privilege inviting.

Felix frowned. “That’s wrong,” he said to himself. “Queer thing for The Financier to make a bloomer like that.” Then he pulled himself together, arguing in an aimless way that the thing wasn’t real at all. He was dreaming. Funny that a man should know he was dreaming. He looked again, and saw something more. The date—there was another mistake! The date was a week out. A week ahead of time!

Something clicked inside him. In later days he often went back to this moment, and tried to analyse it, but could get no nearer than this. Something clicked. Also something was born—the sudden blinding conviction that this thing, whatever it was, had a meaning. And exclusively for him, because he was oddly assured that no one else saw what he did. His private property!

He gulped convulsively, looked again—and saw only the graceful head of Frances against the opaque glass. Pumphrey back on his platform. The other chaps scribbling away. And then he heard the horn of Dibdin’s car—they all knew that horn—giving its three mellow little toots down on King William Street.

He went home on top of a bus, leaning forward on his umbrella, unaware of the traffic jam in Ludgate Circus, his eyes rather vacant, the brain of him buzzing—buzzing. Did Carthew have visions like this? Was that the secret? Then why Carthew—or himself—and not a lot of others? And if it was the real thing—if he had actually been given a bit of inside information about the future—what was the use without capital? And even if he had a little money, and took a flyer, and it was found out, he’d be fired. The stock market was out of bounds for stockbrokers’ clerks. In the middle of this quandary something gave his thinking machine a jolt, and he took a long, long breath.

“I wonder if I dare,” he whispered, staring at the scrawny neck of the man in front. It was exactly like his own neck.

Brixton—identical rows of identical small brick houses—and all cooking practically identical meals at the same moment for a tide of homecoming men who were also a bit identical. The fact used to hurt Felix at first, but now he only sniffed.

“Mutton—oh, yes—Tuesday—stewed mutton—I forgot.” The odour brought him back with a jerk, and he hung his rather seedy bowler on a yellow oak stand they had bought six months previously on the instalment plan. It was a wooden slab, looking like an up-ended coffin with projecting pegs. Seventeen and six still to pay. He glanced into the tiny oval mirror, smoothed his scanty hair, gave his tie a hitch, and followed the odour.

Anne looked up with a smile. She was hot, and her good-natured face shiny. Little beads of perspiration had gathered under her eyes. She had large features, a very white skin, a thoroughly good temper, and, in spite of being married to Felix, was putting on a little weight. She loved him completely, but at times sent him odd, wondering looks. Why was he content to fold his hands and wait till things came his way? They never would, till he made a move.

“It’s just ready, dear. What sort of a day did you have?”

“Nothing unusual,” he said automatically—and instantly realized that it was the most wonderful day of his life.

“Not much doing in the City?”

She asked this every now and again, hoping that he would tell her some interesting news. There he was in the middle of things, with his finger, so to speak, on the pulse of London. But he never got much farther than to say, “Mr. X cleaned up a thousand in American rails,” or “Mr. Y has switched from rubber into tin.” Anne would listen a bit enviously, and wonder why Felix, knowing what he must know, couldn’t find some legitimate means of profit thereby. But of those thoughts she never gave the slightest hint. Disloyal, she considered them.

“Ready, dear.”

He followed the stew into the diminutive dining-room, and she filled his plate. A tail in the massive coil of her hair came loose, and dangled before his nose as she leaned over him. He brushed it pettishly aside. The time had been when he would have kissed it, and this action was more eloquent than any words. She stared at him, lips trembling. Then, without a word, she carried the saucepan back into the kitchen, and shut the door.

Felix made a sound in his throat. He felt guilty. He had not meant to wound her; but mutton stew, and that odour, and the size or lack of size of the house, and the drab, brick-covered acres all round him, and the dinginess of the darn place—all this had brought him back to earth with such a jolt that as yet he was only half conscious of these all too actual actualities. He got up feeling distinctly sheepish, and followed into the kitchen. Anne had her head down on her arms, and another tail had come loose. He put his hand on her shoulder.

“Sorry, Anne, I didn’t mean to be rude. Feeling a bit off.”

She dabbed at her eyes and looked up at him, and it came to him in that moment, in the way things come at the most unreasonable and unjustifiable moments, that she was losing the attraction he had found in her large fair face just seven years ago. He was a rotter that this should occur to him now; but it did.

“What’s the matter?” she asked vaguely. He looked as he always did, and she was almost sorry. Change of any kind—even his feeling a bit off—would be of interest.

“Oh, nothing special. Fed up, perhaps.”

Only that! What right had he to be fed up in comparison with herself? It was her turn to scrutinize him now, and she did, with a tense, unfaltering earnestness. Something about him that she missed. The chance of a decent future—the determination to succeed—the average amount of resolution—she had read these into his face when they were married. But she couldn’t find them any more. Fed up! What about her end of it?

“Do you think it’s any fun for me to spend my life buying three pound joints on a Saturday and hounding them out of one form into another till at the end of the week there’s nothing left but a dry bone? What about my being fed up, too?”

She was sorry the minute she said it—the next minute, not so sorry—and the next rather glad. It might do him good. His face wore such an extraordinary expression, that it was without doubt doing something already. He drew himself up, got quite red, seemed about to speak, then made a gesture by which he appeared to dismiss the point as though it were of no present importance. That was so unusual for him that it sobered her.

“I’m sorry, my dear, but I didn’t know you felt that way. I may say that I don’t like this sort of life any more than yourself. I’ll see what I can do.”

He left it there. Not another word. He went back to his stew, now rapidly congealing, ate it without tasting it, declined a further helping, and spent the rest of the evening in an abstraction she did not venture to disturb. She fussed about him, and put his pipe at his elbow. He did not smoke. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, and noted a look on his face that she had not seen before. She did not know whether to laugh or cry. But it was a new look.

That night he went to bed early, and when she came up and got in beside him, he moved over so that they did not touch.

An uncomfortable breakfast. Felix sipping his tea and stabbing indifferently at a stringy rasher. He generally talked while he was shaving, but this, morning had scraped away at his lean chin in a sort of oracular silence. “Damn the razor,” was all he said. Presently he drew a little design on the cloth with his spoon.

“That house money—what about it?”

Anne didn’t understand.

“Well, I said I’d try and do something, didn’t I? That money is all I’ve got to do it with.”

She gaped at him. Four hundred pounds—the savings of seven years. Only those who lived as they did could realize what that four hundred meant, the grind, the sacrifice, the strangling of natural little impulses that give the taste to life, such life as is led in districts like Brixton. Now it came over her in a wave that he was going to speculate.

“Felix!” she breathed. “You’ll lose it! Have you any information—something safe?”

Safe! He didn’t know whether it was safe or not. Nor could he explain without seeming quite mad. It came over him in that moment that this thing, whatever it was, must always be his secret. Utterly secret! And, in any case, Anne hadn’t the kind of imagination before which one could put the affair and expect to be understood. Frances might—but not Anne.

“I’ve got a hunch,” he said. “I wouldn’t buy on margin, but outright. And I won’t do it unless you agree. Well?”

Anne was tired. She had not slept that night, and often through the dragging hours had leaned on her elbow and looked at his face, which she could see quite clearly by the street lamp at the front door. She had pictured waking every morning and seeing that face getting older and leaner, with less and less suggestion of anything new or hopeful or stimulating, while she herself became merged in the vast herd of women to whom nothing worth while ever happens.

She loved Felix—perhaps because she never had had the chance to love anyone else. There were no children. Her father, a draper in a small way, was threatened by the competition of the big stores. He couldn’t help. Life was settling into a sticky, unemotional, unprofitable morass. And now Felix said he had a hunch.

“Do whatever you think best, dear,” she said faintly.

At that he kissed her quite affectionately, grabbed his hat from the coffin-shaped stand, and dashed for a bus. Silks at thirty-five bob! His throat felt dry already.

The office received and engulfed him—but only part of him. He worked mechanically, with furtive glances into mid-air lest the thing should be there again. It wasn’t. It had dried up—evaporated. At noon Silks were nineteen and six. Thank God he hadn’t done anything. Then he became nervous. It was an active stock. Bound to fluctuate. When he went out for lunch, he, so to speak, put himself at another marble-topped table, and addressed himself thus:

“Get busy, darn you, Marbury. You’ve got the biggest hunch you ever had in your life. You may never have another. You can’t prove anything, but you know. You needn’t deny it—you know. If you want to lift yourself out of the sink of insignificance, now’s your chance. If you don’t, you can live on mutton in Brixton till the end of your days.”

That, practically, was what he said to his other self, then went out, and bumped into Frances.

It is often the small and seemingly uneventful occurrences that shape the destiny of men. If he had not run into Frances, he might not have acted as he did within the next half-hour—in which case it would have been mutton and Brixton for him. But Frances made him hungry. That was it—hungry! Not exclusively for her—though she was included—but for a thousand indescribable things that she, at this moment, seemed to represent. He couldn’t recapitulate, them, but they were utterly different from everything he had—including Anne.

That afternoon he got leave from Pumphrey to go out on urgent private business, and after a little difficulty which was only met by getting his Brixton banker on the telephone, he bought four hundred Silks Preferred at nineteen and nine. Ten minutes before the market closed they lost the odd ninepence.

He went home feeling very sick. Fifteen pounds poorer—on paper! Two months’ savings! Fool—fool—fool! Miserable little punter! Anne looked at him hastily as he came in, then looked away. So that was what he thought best! She said nothing, arguing that it was as much her fault as his, and she should have opposed anything so wild and unjustified. At the same time, was this the best he could do after years of deliberation? She wondered if the whole four hundred had gone, and was afraid to ask. It was a silent house that night. Why, she pondered, was there so little point in being alive?

Felix heard from his broker next morning. “We have purchased, etc.——” Queer, after making out so many thousands of the things to get one himself. He felt a shade more important, though it was rotten news. Also he was distinctly disconcerted when Steels opened away down, which looked like a thumping loss for Carthew. If Carthew had the same source of private information as himself, the future looked fishy. Then he argued that Carthew could afford to hold on. That was the secret. Have sufficient resources to wait for the psychological moment. Losses—on paper—meant nothing to Carthew, but were serious things in Brixton.

He fell to wondering what Anne would say when she knew, and spent the rest of the day between correspondence and following the course of Silks on the tape. This varied a good deal, the market talk being that an alliance with some French company was considered probable, and opinions differed as to the advantage.

At noon he managed to have lunch with Frances. He felt tired, and glanced more than once at her shoulder, wondering who the man would be. Lucky devil! These mental explorations didn’t really mean anything—for several reasons. Felix, for instance, was saturated with the morality that is based on fear—if that is morality. Also, he couldn’t quite imagine himself being a man of the world. And he knew perfectly well that if he got gay, or a bit intimate, Frances would go into fits of laughter and tell every one in the office. But, nevertheless, these mental explorations made him feel a bit more of a he-man. And that helped.

“I’d like to make a clean-up,” he said.

“Well, why don’t you?”

It sounded a little cruel, but she didn’t mean it that way. She was very ambitious, rather restless, and had decided to try and better herself. Burk and Dibdin were too slow for her blood. No financial fireworks. If only she were a man!

“Suppose I made a lot of money and started on my own, would you pull out, and come to me?” He asked this, his eyes bright, his head a little on one side.

She looked at him and experienced a faint thrill. Something seemed to be peeping out of the man. It was new, distinctly surprising, interesting. Obviously he was not aware of it himself. But she saw it, and it made her think. Queer things were happening to people all the time—so why not to him. That would be just like the City—to-day, nobody—a turn of the wheel—to-morrow, very much somebody. Again she caught the odd light in his eyes. And just what did he mean by “come to me”? She knew he was married. That’s all.

“There’s no reason you shouldn’t, if you once get a start. Most men seem to be so afraid that they spend their lives trying to make up their minds. They envy those who are not afraid, but aren’t able to cut themselves loose.”

“You’re not afraid?”

“Give me the chance—and see.”

“Then buy a few Silks Preferred.”

He shot this out, vastly surprised at himself, and felt greatly fortified after he said it. He didn’t know why he said it, but put it, quite unconsciously, in a tone that later on he used very often. The tone had a snap in it.

Frances blinked at him. “Why?”

“Can’t give you any reasons. I haven’t got any. But you buy ’em.” He got up, lifted his hat and left her, staring.

Nothing could have been more expressive, and he went, alone, back to the office. He was secretly conscious that between Frances and himself something had been established that brought her, in one sense, closer than his own wife. He liked that. He argued, as do a good many men, that he could accomplish a great deal more than he was accomplishing if he but had the support and understanding of some woman who was not his wife. And in his particular case of mental infidelity the woman happened to be Frances.

At half-past three that afternoon she came over to his desk, apparently about some letter in her hand. She pretended to read it.

“I sold my War Loan and bought two hundred Silks,” she said in a low voice. “That’ll show you whether I’m afraid.”

At first he was very frightened. Then enormously flattered. It meant a very great deal that he should have established this link, and he was sure that it didn’t exist between her and any other man in the office. Not even Burk, or old Dibdin himself. They would have lots of little talks together now. It also meant—and he thought of this with a touch of characteristic timidity—that if Silks went phut he would be able to tell Anne that others were in it besides himself. In that moment he took a definite step away from Anne. But he did not dream that he would never retrace it.

“Splendid!” he whispered. “Lunch together to-morrow.”

It was not a request, but an announcement. He felt that as he spoke, and there was no surprise when she nodded.

This was on Thursday. On Friday Silks wobbled about, closing with a thud two shillings down. Felix felt sick, and could hardly hold a pen. The drop took place late in the day. He avoided Frances’ glance, but, when he did meet it, found to his amazement that she was smiling. When Pumphrey put away his big ledger she came over to Felix’s desk.

“Don’t worry. I’m not afraid yet. It’s that French business—some man in Paris is bearing the market before he jumps in. I heard Mr. Burk say so.”

Felix gulped and went home. Anne got nothing out of him that night, and concluded that he was trying to summon up courage to tell the truth. But she wouldn’t help him. This was what came of his doing what he thought best. Thought best! Brixton—for ever!

On Friday nothing much happened. No market on Saturday. On Sunday he and Anne took a bus to Cobham, but the thing fell flat. She had not much taste in dress, and he contrasted her with the picture Frances would have made. He felt that he wanted to hold somebody’s hand under the trees that afternoon. But not Anne’s. It was too hot and moist. The gulf had widened perceptibly when they reached home.

On Monday Silks wobbled above and below seventeen shillings. Felix stood to lose sixty pounds. Frances half as much. Her face looked strained, and she slipped away for lunch by herself. That night Felix didn’t sleep at all, and came to the office feeling like a rag.

“Oh, Lord!” he kept asking himself—“Oh, Lord! What am I going to do now? Five hours will see my finish.”

The thing happened at midday—with a bang. Word came in that the Frenchman had jumped in, got control of Silks, would expand and develop, and, first of all, increase the capital by millions. The market went wild. Its tremors ticked in to Burk and Dibdin’s on the tape, and there was general excitement. Felix and Frances blinked at each other in silence. She looked cool enough, but he was trembling. Up climbed Silks, half a crown between transactions. They passed thirty bob, while the spirit of Felix Marbury discarded his body and soared with them. He gave Frances a long, bold, masterful stare that brought the colour to her cheeks. But she was not angry. He knew that.

The closing and make-up price was thirty-five shillings, even.

He had to stay later that afternoon, it being ticket day, and was almost the last to go. In the passage outside the general office he found Frances waiting. Her face was rather pale, her eyes unusually large.

“It means so much to me that I can’t say anything but thank you to-night,” she stammered. Then, very swiftly, she kissed him—and ran.

Felix stood for a moment, rubbing his foot against the concrete floor, and presently descended to King William Street. London was dipped in a faint glory. He heard snatches of conversations, mostly about Silks. There was nothing coherent in his mind on the way home, and it was not till the odour of stew greeted him on his own doorstep that he came to himself. Tuesday! Stew!

He went into the kitchen. Anne, who had been waiting anxiously, seemed about to kiss him, but he pretended not to notice it. He wanted to keep that other kiss as long as he could, and the face of Frances appeared to swim in between.

“Anything to tell me, dear?” she asked gently.

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

Something had been born in Felix that day. A quality of secrecy. He recognized it at once, tried to account for it, and could only put it down to a sort of admiration he had always had for the type of man whose face reveals nothing of his thoughts. Now it seemed important—very important—that he cultivate the same immobility.

Following this line, his first action was typical.

“Anne,” he said next morning, “I’m banking that four hundred, with another fifty, to your credit on Friday. It’s house money, so you’d better keep it after this.”

“You made fifty pounds?” she breathed.

Felix nodded. He didn’t want to say more, and couldn’t say less.

“You—you wonderful man!”

He escaped, his mind full of matters from which she seemed remote. He asserted to himself that he was wonderful—and meant to be more so. Something electric passed between him and Frances when they met, but he held on to himself, adopting a curt manner. Perfectly polite, but curt. It masked, very effectively, what he really felt about her.

“Any more hunches?” she asked, looking at him curiously.

Felix, having thought the thing out, shook his head. He didn’t want her to get away from him. The future—providing that the vision came again—was beginning to take shape in his brain, and he proposed that Frances should be part of it. It never occurred to him that he was considerably over-estimating that kiss.

“You’ll tell me when you have, won’t you?”

“I’ll not forget you,” he said. And she had to be content with that.

There now began what Felix looked back to as his probation period, and it seemed as though some invisible power, which he did not in the least understand, was deliberating whether he were worthy of further confidence. He was always on the look-out for the phantom paper, but didn’t see a vestige of it for a week. Then just a flicker—with nothing legible.

He was bitterly disappointed till, very gradually, it became clear that he was playing his old waiting game—waiting for something to turn up. It had turned up once, and he could find no reason why it shouldn’t again, but it didn’t. That made him angry, so he adopted other tactics. He, so to speak, went after it.

The process was, for him, peculiar. Something like compressing his brain into a ball, and hurling it in a given direction, a small, solid lump that in a way gave his body a rebound when it started. In these moments the mental part of him really became detached from his body. He usually shut his eyes so as to see nothing that might divert him, and, curiously enough, the range of his vision seemed to be increased thereby. It was hard work nevertheless, since he was making his brain do something it had never done before. He could in no way analyse what went on in these periods, but it practically amounted to the mastery of his own will. In the middle of one of them something clicked. He opened his eyes, and heard himself whisper: “Prospectors forty-two bob.”

He looked up Prospectors at lunch time. A Canadian Exploration Company. No market for shares. Last dealt in at two shillings two months previously. Never paid any dividend.

Felix smiled to himself. Dividends had nothing to do with it. He had never heard of Prospectors before, but now, and in a great calm, he knew that he would hear of them again. He said nothing to Frances, but scraped about and began to buy in very small lots. Two thousand shares averaged him about two shillings. This, he admitted, was a wilder gamble than the other, there being nothing whatever behind the shares.

In exactly three days they jumped. Cable advices from Canada stated that on the company’s mining concession there had been discovered a silver-bearing lode that ran eight thousand ounces a ton. The deposit was a nature-made mint of apparently great depth. Thus ran the opinion of a well-known mining engineer.

Felix, with his tongue in his cheek, gave an order to sell at forty-two bob. He had reasons for this, being naturally sceptical about mines, and remembering that such undertakings have been described as “a hole in the ground with a liar on top.” So he did not worry when, after he sold, the shares climbed to fifty shillings. But he did smile when a month later the mint was proved to be a surface deposit only.

He rested his brain for a while, saying nothing to Anne of what had happened, his idea being to lift her suddenly and for ever out of Brixton. He’d do the decent thing there. But he wanted a certain sum in hand before he took the plunge. The possession of four thousand pounds did not excite him. He merely went after more.

The next time he went off half-cock—and lost. It frightened him badly. He admitted, looking back at it, that the information—or conclusion—or revelation—whatever it might be, was not so sharp and definite. The click in his brain wasn’t so clean. So then and there he vowed not to hurry this thing, and never to act unless his thinking machine had worked like the snap of a camera shutter. Also he was very thankful that he had said nothing to Frances.

Four months to a day after the Silks Preferred affair, he drove up to the Brixton house in a very shiny car, and Anne, who happened to be at the window, nearly fainted. She knew nothing—nothing whatever—and this was his way of telling her. He strode in, patted her on the shoulder, and jerked his thumb at the front door.

“Come along! I’ll tell you on the way.”

“But, Felix, I——”

“Come on, Annie! I’m in a hurry.”

She obeyed, her heart beating violently. Something strange had been going on, because Felix was completely changed of late. But that was all she knew. For the first time in her life she stepped into an owner-driven car. Felix handled his gears very neatly, and began to talk.

“Look here, Anne. I’m independent now. Understand? I’ve got money. I’m going to have more. Needn’t worry about how it happened, but it’s a fact.” He paused, cast a contemptuous glance at the house, and the car slid forward. “Forget that hole, tell me where you’d like to live—I mean what part of London—and we’ll go there now to have a look round. When you see what you like, I’ll buy it for you. Then furnish it in any way you please. I don’t care what it costs. Get that?”

She was frightened, and could hardly speak. His tone had sharpened to hardness. It was imperious. No feeling in it! Nothing about sharing this good fortune, whatever it was. He seemed to be throwing money at her from a million miles away.

“Felix,” she protested faintly, “won’t you please——”

“Explain—no—I can’t—except that I’ve been very successful in the market. I’ve resigned from Burk’s, and am opening an office of my own. I thought it best not to say anything till the thing was finally decided. Pumphrey, who was Burk’s chief clerk, is coming to me, also another of the office staff. That’s that. Your end of it is that you can have anything you like, so you’d better find a house first. What about Onslow Square?”

He suggested this because always since he was a boy Onslow Square had sounded aristocratic. He didn’t really care where the house was, but knew this would be a good address.

“I’m sorry, Felix,” her voice was small and weak, “but I couldn’t decide to-day. It’s not fair to you. I—I don’t feel very well.”

“Then the air ought to do you good. We’ll go round by Onslow Square first.”

It was significant, this announcement. Even while he thus endowed her with infinitely more than she ever dreamed of having, he bullied her. He imposed his will upon her. She perceived this, and felt strangely distant. But she ventured another question.

“Felix, while you were making all the money you didn’t say anything—or do anything else. Couldn’t you have prepared me a little; couldn’t we have done all this gradually? A woman can’t change her life overnight.”

“Look here,” he said in a tone not unkindly and very thoughtful, “I had to do it in a certain way. I didn’t want to talk about it till I had a certain sum. Now I’ve got it. I didn’t like living in Brixton while the thing was going on. You can buy your house, furnish it as you please, then ask your friends in. The house we’re going to see—well, I looked at it yesterday, and the agent’s there waiting for us. You needn’t worry about the price. That’s my end of it.”

She glanced at him helplessly. “Friends—in Onslow Square!”