Читать книгу The Usurper - William J. Locke - Страница 4

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It was half-past nine, a few days afterwards, and Jasper and Cudby sat at opposite sides of the library table dealing with the morning’s correspondence. Letters lay in long stacks before them, and the table was covered with baskets into which the letters were sorted. Between them sat a young woman typist, with pencil and note-book, taking down short-hand replies. Envelopes strewed the ground. The post was immense. Circulars of every trade and industry under heaven; prospectuses of every bubble company; unsolicited press-cuttings from every agency in London; begging letters from all over the empire, some genuine, telling piteous stories of want, some obviously impudent frauds, the majority doubtful; letters in scented envelopes addressed in feminine handwriting which turned out to be invitations to subscribe to bazaars and charity concerts; bills; receipts; business-letters from architects, solicitors, bankers, stock brokers, secretaries of companies, financiers; invitations to public dinners and functions; a few invitations to private parties; and fewer still, pathetically so, the private notes from friends.

His affairs required a large staff of clerks and agents. He had taken one of the adjoining houses in Gower Street, for office accommodation and thrown it practically into one with his residence. And here, in the centre of things he sat, controlling everything, working from morning to night, giving his personal attention to the smallest detail. From here he directed the vast mining enterprise in Australia and the petty charities of every day. The begging letters were so numerous, it is true, that he had been forced to organise an enquiry department to report upon the various cases; but he considered these reports himself, and delegated to no one his authority. Then there were hours of close thought over financial operations of great responsibility. He could deal in large figures, and his individual buying or selling of shares affected the stock-market and thereby the fortunes of unknown thousands. He had far-reaching philanthropic schemes of which he alone held the threads. His interviews took up two or three hours of his day, and if he were disengaged he denied no man access, however poor. And this life of strenuous and incessant toil was the life of a man worth many millions.

During one of the intervals between the going and coming of a typist, a clerk entered the room with a telegram. It was a cypher cable from his broker in New York. It ran: “Rock oil new springs found. This morning 120. Acting on instructions, sold.” Jasper tossed it over to Cudby.

“Will this avalanche never stop increasing—will it go on infinitely?” he said wearily.

“This means that you’re worth a million of dollars more than you were yesterday. I wouldn’t be sad about it, you know. After all, vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin. You told Odgers peremptorily to sell when the shares reached 120. I wrote the cable myself.”

“That was when they were at 75, and he was worrying me to sell. I bought them at 40. I named a fantastic figure. Told him practically to sell on the Day of Judgment. I know these things. A boom to-day. To-morrow they would have fallen. Next week they would have been at the same steady price. My sale will ‘bear’ the whole thing down. You’ll see. This gain of mine is others’ loss. Oh, Tommy, I hate it!”

“Well, my dear old chap, you can’t say to it like Flaminius in ‘Timon of Athens,’ ‘Fly, damned baseness, to him that worships thee.’ ”

“For once in my life I can cap one of your infernal quotations. You were reading me the passage the other night, after the North Ham affair. He goes on to say, ‘Let molten coin be thy damnation.’ By Heaven, it has been mine. There was a heathen king,—I forget his name,—he had the gift of turning everything he touched to gold. It was a curse on him for his impiety. And the flowers he plucked turned to gold, and the hands of friends he shook, and the food he ate, and the wine he drank turned to solid gold, and he starved—I read it as a boy—and the curse is on me for my wrongdoing and I’m starving.”

“Rot,” said Cudby. “The royal gentleman’s name was Midas, and he had ass’s ears. You haven’t. That makes all the difference. As for the million dollars you can easily find use for it. Here’s a letter from Blaine at Rio. Two dead-beats shipped per homeward steamer, consigned to Jasper Vellacot, Esq.,—this side up with care,—lest all the whisky should run out of them before they arrive. You can divide the dollars between them, and send them away to play Trinculo and Stephano in this little island. They’ll find a Caliban to show them round at the first street corner.”

He turned the matter into a jest, glancing in his anxious bird-like way at his patron, eager to see a smile dispel the gloom on his face. It was his constant preoccupation to present to Vellacot the lighter aspect of things. In this instance he was successful.

“You are talking drivel and wasting time, Tommy,” said Jasper, with a laugh. “Note the names and details and let me see the men when they come. Now ring the bell and let us get on.”

This “Agency for the Propagation of Wasters,” as Cudby irreverently termed it, was one of Jasper’s pet schemes, which he had been able only lately to bring into complete working order.

“We have been wasters ourselves, Tommy,” he used to say deprecatingly, “with no one to stretch us out a helping hand. We’ve been there and know what it is.”

For want of a better name, he had called it a Repatriation Agency. He had appointed agents in many of the great parts of the world, Sydney, Rio Janeiro, Hong Kong, Cape Town, San Francisco, from whom dead-beats, men who had mistaken their vocation in choosing a colonial or adventurous career, and were evident forlorn failures, could obtain a free passage home, a little ready money, and an introduction to himself. They had to be British subjects and obvious incapables. When they arrived in London, he helped them and found work for them, and put them under the kindly eye of his little enquiry department. Cudby, in a teasing mood, would sometimes rail against this importation of congenital drunkards, criminals, and idiots, and prophesy horrible catastrophes.

“I myself am a case in point. You could get a smart young fellow, trained in business, to do my work infinitely better for £120 a year. How do you know what latent criminal instincts I may have just waiting for occasion to develop them? You are too confiding, Jasper. You think that there’s a good solid stratum of the angelic in every ruffian you meet, and that kindness is the way to get at it. You are sitting on the highest mound of the Hill of Illusion, and one of these days it will burst like an egg-shell, and down you’ll come flop and hurt your spine awfully.”

At which Jasper would smile indulgently, and with the wistful look in his eyes would thank God for the illusions left to him.

The morning’s work proceeded. Jasper opened a letter from Major Sparling. He had sounded the committee. They were unanimous in their desire that Mr. Vellacot should stand for North Ham when the vacancy occurred; would give him freedom of action in dealing with the proletariat, consistent, of course, with constitutional methods. He handed the letter to Cudby, who glanced through it, nodded, murmured an inaudible quotation from the Third Part of “King Henry VI.,” and threw the letter into the “private” basket. Then he continued the reply he was dictating to the typist. Jasper, leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head, went off into a daydream. He saw himself standing amid the green benches passionately declaiming, working the House up to rapt enthusiasm, sitting down amid a storm of applause and cries of “Divide! Divide!” Then suddenly he leaned forward again, rubbed his eyes, and broke into a laugh.

“You are wrong. I’ve got the ears,” he said across the table.

Cudby looked up for a moment perplexed. Then his quick perception and instinctive knowledge of Jasper came to his aid.

“Visions about?” he asked.

Jasper nodded. Cudby pointed to the mass of correspondence still unread.

“ ‘Stay we no longer dreaming of renown,

But sound the trumpets, and about our task,’ ”

he quoted.

“If I hear any more Shakespeare this morning, I’ll call in a policeman,” said Jasper, in a lighter mood. And as the typist, having got her complement of notes, retired, he rose and stretched himself and walked about the room.

“Do you know, Tom,” said he, coming to a halt, and putting his hands in his pockets, “if things were different I could be as light-hearted a fellow as ever lived. I’ve longed all my life to be light-hearted. In old days, save with the dear old parson, poverty made it heavy; now wealth does—and other things.”

He went to the window and looked out into the street. The golden July sunshine flooded the pavements, and the strip of sky above the roofs of the houses opposite gleamed gloriously blue. A great craving for happiness welled up within him, a desire to escape from the formalism of humanity, from the constraining streets and the restricting laws of conduct, a nostalgia of wide rolling distances, and the smell of the eucalyptus, and the peace of a soul at rest. By nature a visionary, by will a man of action, he seemed to be maintained stationary by the continuous and equal impulse of the two opposing forces, like a ball in the jet of a fountain. That was why the superficial judged him to be a man of no individuality. But when one or other of the forces slightly preponderated, the man’s personality leaped forth. He acted quickly, definitely, masterfully. Or he showed himself to be a dreamer of dreams, an inarticulate poet brooding tenderwise over the world’s misery that he could not relieve, or yearning after its loveliness that he dared not clasp.

He gazed at the golden sunshine and the radiant strip of blue, and he longed for the wide rolling distances and the smell of the eucalyptus. He turned away with a sigh.

“Do you know what I should like to do this afternoon?” he said meditatively. “I should like to go down to Kew Gardens on a penny steamboat.”

“You can reasonably afford it,” replied Cudby.

“Perhaps, if I get through the letters, I may go after lunch,” replied Jasper, resuming his seat. “Are there any more that I need see?”

“I’ve put them in your basket while you have been street-gazing,” said Cudby, rising and taking up the basket containing the letters with which he was to deal in his own office. “I’ll see all the cranks who come, so that you can get off on your treat this afternoon.”

Jasper acquiesced. He would be inaccessible to everybody save the two dead-beats from Rio Janeiro. It was to be clearly understood that he made a point of interviewing all the dead-beats. Cudby winged an ironical remark Parthian-wise and retired. His master turned to his correspondence. After an hour’s work he came upon a card in his basket he had not previously noticed. It bore the announcement that Lady Alicia Harden would be At Home on Friday evening a week hence. His name was written in the left-hand top corner. The letters R. S. V. P. were below. The writing was dainty, feminine, characterful. It gave an odd air of strength to the name “Jasper.” It evoked the woman in whose presence he had found the heart-rest he had craved for many years. She stood before him and looked at him with her kind eyes, and her eyes stabbed.

He took a sheet of note paper, wrote thereon that Mr. Jasper Vellacot very much regretted that a previous engagement did not allow him to accept Lady Alicia Harden’s kind invitation. He addressed an envelope, closed it, and threw it aside for post. Then he resumed his work. A clerk came in, collected such letters as were ready, and disappeared. A short while afterwards the clock struck twelve, and he knew that, by the rule of the house, his note to Lady Alicia had been posted at the pillar-box outside in time for the midday collection.

The thing was done. He was glad. He would not see this woman again. Intimacy with her was doubly dangerous. His life had already been too much the sport of the irony of circumstance for him not to recognise the preliminaries of the game. Besides, what had he to do with high-born women? What, for the matter of that, had he to do with women at all? The love of them and the sound of children’s feet in his house were things within that Paradise whose gates he himself had barred and locked; and he had thrown the key irrevocably into the abyss. He stood outside for ever. Yes; he was glad. Had he not been expecting, with some irritation, during the past few days, to have to make this decision? Now it was over and done with, and could be relegated to the limbo of other resisted temptations.

Still, when he walked to the window again, the sunshine did not seem quite so golden nor the sky quite so blue. And later, at luncheon, he told Cudby that he thought his desire to go to Kew Gardens on a penny steamboat was rather childish, and that he proposed to attend to some business in the city.