Читать книгу Harvey Garrard's Crime - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

Table of Contents

It was very nearly five o'clock when Harvey re-entered the palatial warehouse of Garrard & Garrard in Bermondsey and mounted to his private office. Greatorex seeing him enter through the glass partition of his own room, hastily abandoned his work and followed him up.

"You have not forgotten, sir," he ventured a little nervously, "that to-morrow our acceptances must be advised?"

"I have not forgotten," was the calm reply. "I am endeavouring to make the necessary arrangements."

"We've had a matter of a thousand pounds in to-day, sir—nothing of any moment. There isn't a great deal, I'm afraid, to come in."

"While I think of it you had better let me have a few hundred to take home," Harvey instructed. "I shall not be going for some time, though."

"Certainly, sir. Do you require any of the clerks to wait, or can I be of any service?"

Harvey shook his head.

"Bring me the private ledger and all the rest of the trade journals you can find," he directed. "No one need wait. I suppose I can let myself out."

"There is a spring lock on the outside door, sir," Greatorex replied. "You will have nothing to do but to open it from this side and to close it firmly. The watchman will not be on duty till midnight. After that time he visits the place every hour. If you will excuse me, sir, I will get you the ledger and the journals."

The manager disappeared for a few minutes. When he returned his employer was smoking a cigarette and reading one of the trade papers. Anxious though the former was, there was something about Harvey's manner which precluded direct questioning.

"Are you sure that I could be of no assistance, sir?" he persisted. "There may be items in the private ledger which you would scarcely understand. My time is entirely my own, and I can stay as late as you wish."

Harvey shook his head.

"I have a few calculations to make," he said, "and I am rather a slow thinker. I should prefer to be alone. Everyone can leave as usual. I will let myself out."

Greatorex, with some reluctance, left the office, closing the door behind him. Harvey, for an hour or more, studied the private ledger and afterwards pored over the pile of trade journals which had been placed upon his desk. It was not until long after he judged from the silence below that the place was deserted, that he closed them with a little sigh, and, rising to his feet, made his way out into the warehouses. Aimlessly, without even conscious volition, he passed from one to the other of the great rooms, and mounted the stairs to the fourth storey where lighter descriptions of merchandise were covered with white wrappers, giving a ghostly effect in the dim light. Then, floor by floor, he descended to the cellars where great heaps of hides reached to the ceiling. Again he was conscious of the feeling which he had experienced on entering the place two days before—the sense of blight, of inaction, as though effort had become stayed and the very merchandise itself ossified. There seemed to be no signs of any recent disturbance of the huge piles of skins or of the endless stacks of cases. He entered the offices, handsome enough in their appointments and spacious enough for the offices of a Bank. The books had all been put away, the place was spotlessly neat, yet he had a fancy that here, too, lurked the atmosphere of inertia. The dust had collected on a little handful of carbon slips, many of the inkstands were empty, the blotting-paper upon some of the desks painfully unused. He mounted once more to his own office, sat in his high-backed chair and, turning on a single light, met the steady gaze of that row of sombrely painted men, the founders of the firm. There was not a weak face amongst them—men of commerce without a doubt, but men with ideals. As his eyes rested upon the central figure, a curious flood of memories seemed to become released within him. He remembered his father's solemn lecture to him on the day when he had left Oxford and the question of his future profession was mooted. Some even of his very words, or the sense of them, came back to his mind.

"No man should ever allow himself to be ashamed," the great merchant had declared, "of any connection with commerce. A nation's greatness and prosperity must always depend upon the ability of its citizens in the crafts of manufacture and barter. Each one of the professions is more or less egotistical. They lead to an individual end. The man who by means of brains and enterprise and industry succeeds in building up a great commercial undertaking is adding directly to the prosperity and welfare of the whole community. Your great-grandfather, your grandfather and I, have built up here the most renowned business of its sort in the country. We have done so honourably, with clean hands, and to the benefit not only of ourselves but of the country at large. Our object has been not only to make a fortune but to make it in such a way that no one is the worse for our prosperity. We have succeeded and we are proud of our success. Therefore your grandfather and I and all who have been associated with the development of this business regard it with veneration and respect. If it is your desire to join us, you must do so with something of the same spirit. You must throw away any unworthy ideas you may have imbibed as to the relative dignity of commerce, the professions, and an idle life, and you must come to your work with pride in it and of it. . . ."

A strange manner of talk, perhaps, to a young Oxonian, flushed with athletic triumphs, but, even in those dreary moments of retrospection, he remembered the curiously profound impression he had received at the time. Without the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort, he had elected to enter the business, had spent twelve months under his father's watchful eye, losing every day that little glow of enthusiasm with which he had taken up his task, finding the glamour of it fade before the incubus of routine work, filled with youthful and somewhat priggish intolerance of the men of coarser mould with whom he was continually being brought into contact. Then came the war, and release, his father's death, the proving of his great estate—a dazzling array of figures—money all invested in the great firm of Garrard & Garrard. He remembered his interview with Armitage, lately admitted a partner into the firm.

"If you care to take a definite post in the business," the latter had said, "it will mean an additional few thousand a year to you as salary—more, doubtless, later on, if you stick to it. Otherwise the interest on your capital, which you will remember your father desired you to leave in the firm, will amount to about twelve thousand a year."

He remembered his slight hesitation, due only to a momentary twinge of conscience. His decision, however, was in effect already made. He was young, fond of sport and every sort of adventure. His brief essay at commercial life had sickened him, and his five years' very distinguished soldiering had still further alienated him from it. He shook hands with Armitage, made over to him the sole control of the business, and passed at once into that world of pleasure in which he had lived ever since. . . .

His absorption in the past continued, leading him indeed into an almost lethargic state. He was back again in the old house in Bedford Square. He saw his father starting off every morning at half-past eight in silk hat and frock coat, driving in a brougham with a pair of horses. He remembered the day when the picture now opposite him came home from the artist. He raised his eyes and looked at it. It was fancy, of course, but as he sat there he suddenly seemed to see the fire of anger in those clear grey eyes so like his own. It was fancy again which led him to see in the picture a reflection of that expression which in real life it had never borne—of shame, of humiliation, amounting to agony. His fingers clutched the arms of the chair in which he was sitting. He felt his forehead and found it damp, rose from his chair with a little cry, back in the present, emerged from that flood of devastating memory. He walked the length of the office, to and fro, conscious of a sudden sense of suffocation. He paused for a moment before the picture.

"I have wasted my life," he confessed to himself. "I have broken my trust."

The walls of the room, notwithstanding their stately proportions, seemed suddenly to contract. He flung open the door and stepped out into the warehouse. He was in a state when any slight material event was in a sense a relief to him. In the waiting-room on the further side of the floor someone had left an electric light burning. He made his way towards it, entered and looked in. Decidedly here was something unexpected. Seated in an easy-chair, with a newspaper upon his knee, his hat and a small dispatch case upon the table by his side, was an elderly man, a complete stranger to him, apparently fast asleep. He racked his brains without being able to remember that any visitor had been announced.

"Hallo!" he exclaimed, taking a step forward. "If you've been waiting to see me I'm awfully sorry to have kept you like this."

There was no reply. He approached a little nearer and bent over the recumbent figure. His interest, at first casual enough, became suddenly acute. He made a brief examination, then drew back with a stifled exclamation of horror. The man whom he had thought asleep was dead.