Читать книгу Seven Men Came Back - Warwick Deeping - Страница 14

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Mr. Bernard Bastable, of Affleck, Jeans & Bastable, Challis House, E.C.2, rang for his secretary.

“I want that Universal Match prospectus, James. I told you to put it on my desk.”

Mr. James was elderly and grey and full of the propitiatory politeness of an employee who feels himself shivering on the edge of forcible retirement. He glanced nervously at Mr. Bastable, the firm’s potential Corsican. Circumstances had yet to prove whether young Bastable was a bandit or a great man, but to Mr. James he was Minos.

“I thought I put it there, sir, in the tray.”

“It isn’t there.”

Mr. James legged it into an outer room rather like an elderly and ragged rooster alarmed by some strange pother in the farmyard. He returned with a white paper in his hands.

“I’m extremely sorry, sir, I had put it aside—ready for you.”

Bastable was laconic.

“All right. I don’t want to be disturbed for twenty minutes.”

The secretary had retrieved his own narrow niche in the scheme of things when the Silence fell. He sat very still. He was conscious of his heart beating hard and fast, his own particular alarm signal. He was sixty-one and married, and with three children still to be placed in the world, and his accumulated capital amounted to £735 10s. 0d.

He sat and reflected.

“I was too old for the war. I’m getting too old for this job. Youth—bustle! Mr. Jeans didn’t put me out of my stride—but this—youngster! A holy terror. He gives me indigestion.”

Bastable, sitting well back in his padded chair, was scanning the prospectus. His room was silent, but not with the silence of a people’s sacrament. He read, and the prospectus provoked him to a little, sneering smirk.

O, yes, a copy of this nice proposition had been filed with the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies. And the directors! Among them Old Carbut, and Sir Nathaniel Bertram, Bart! Bertram, indeed! Notorious guinea-pig? Flotation costs estimated at £50,000. Humbug! Somebody was being comfortably floated. And the brokers? O, those people! Regular shysters. The company proposed to acquire the assets—but what were the assets? The statement with regard to the assets was both vainglorious and vague. Probably this document would read quite nicely in a country parsonage. It might appeal to credulous old maids.

Mr. Bastable sat up and dropped the thing into his waste-paper basket. At the age of thirty-one he knew as much about waste-paper as any man in the City.

And then his telephone rang.

Loviebond? Yes, Loviebond had got those shares, and the margin was excellent.

Dine at the Hallam with those rowdy asses? O, yes, he was going to teach men like Sherring and Steel a thing or two.