by Alec Waugh
“But we have to pay our preference shareholders a dividend of eight per cent.”
“Such private arrangements,” said Charles Granta, “as you choose to make with your shareholders are not my concern. I have told you the terms, the only terms on which I am prepared to do business with you.”
And he leant back in his chair and smiled.
Mr Farquharson shifted uncomfortably. “That is not a very generous attitude,” he said.
“I’m here,” Charles Granta answered, “to do business.”
There was a silence.
“Well, Mr Farquharson,” Mr Granta said at last. Mr Farquharson gulped.
“We’ll let you have them for nine thousand five hundred,” he offered.
Charles Granta shook his head. “It’s no good, Mr Farquharson, I’m not a man who bargains. I’m a man who states my terms”
The blood came hotly into Mr Farquharson’s pale face. “You’re a bully, that’s what you are, Mr Granta. If you want to know what you are, that’s it. You are a bully, and you’re trying to beat us down to the last penny. You’re strong and we’re weak. And because we’re weak, you’re trying to make us take less than our fair share of profit for the work we’ve done. And that’s Prussianism—the thing we went to war to fight against.”
Charles Granta tapped impatiently with his penholder on the desk. “I am not here, Mr Farquharson,” he said, “to talk politics. We are doing business. I may be hard. I may be a bully, but I’ve fought my way up, and no one was particularly generous to me while I was doing it. I had to bargain then, and take cut prices where I could get them. I was bullied and Prussianised as you like to call it, but I stuck on. I hit back, and I’m stronger now than the men who hit me. But when you’ve fought your way up, Mr Farquharson, you don’t chuck away your weapons at the end of it. I fight with the same weapons that I’ve been fought with. Those are my terms. Nine thousand or nothing. Are you taking them?”
“No, Mr Granta, we won’t.” And Mr Farquharson drew himself up beside his chair. “We’d rather lose our money altogether than accept so unworthy an offer. For the principle of the thing we must refuse it.”
“Very well then,” said Charles Granta, “it doesn’t matter to me. Within half-an-hour I shall have been able to buy the same amount of stuff elsewhere, and at my price.” And his hand before Mr Farquharson had closed the door behind him had already lifted the receiver of the telephone. He did not, however, make a call. He had merely intended to impress his adversary. He replaced the receiver, leant back in his chair, and smiled.
“As a dramatic effect,” he said, “that dignified exit was an adequate gesture. I doubt, though, if he’ll be thinking in five minutes’ time that his dignity is worth five hundred pounds. And even if he may, I’m quite sure his colleagues won’t.”
He had indeed hardly begun the dictation of a memorandum for the next day’s board meeting when the bell of the telephone rang. “The Universal Asiatic Company speaking.”
“Yes,” he said.
“We’ll take nine thousand two hundred,” he was informed. “Too much,” was his reply, and the receiver was laid back. Three minutes later the bell had rung again. “Very well,” they said, “we’ll take nine thousand.”
He had the grace not to retort, “I thought you would.”
“Splendid,” he said instead. “You’ll get your cheque to-morrow.”
And a slow smile of satisfaction spread across his face. They said there were things that money couldn’t buy. What were they though? Position could be bought with it, and influence. And a man’s pride and a man’s honesty, and even if love were not for sale, you could buy a substitute that would satisfy most men. He had found the other kind easy enough to get with money when he had wanted it, and when the time had come for him to want a wife, his money had got that too for him. The things that money could not buy you were uncomfortable things that you had better do without.
There were times though certainly when he was a little doubtful about Manon, when he wondered whether his money had not so much bought him a wife as taken a lease of one. Without his money she would never have married him. That he had never for a moment questioned. Never for one moment had he had the vanity to assume that personal inclination had had the slightest influence on her acceptance. She had needed money and was prepared to accept it from such a person as she might find endurable. He had bought her as definitely as he had bought those other women that had preceded her. But for how long had he retained possession of his purchase?
He had been more than a little troubled during those eighteen months when the door had been locked that opened from her bedroom into his. Manon was a practical woman. She would not have behaved like that, he felt, unless she were in love with another man, whose love made his own loving of her repugnant. He had known during those eighteen months dark hours of agonised suspicion. And then one evening some three months back he had found the door unlocked. There had been no word spoken, no reference made to their changed relations; a door that had been locked was no longer locked. That was all.
With the unlocking of that door the greater part of his anxiety had passed. If she were in love still with another man, such a return to their old relations would be scarcely possible. Some such temporary attraction there might have been; but it was over now, and these things were left better unexplored. She had come to terms now with her position. Most of his anxiety had passed, not all though, not quite all. There were still some things that he did not understand. He knew so little really of the ways in which she spent her time. She would leave the house sometimes at ten o’clock and not return till seven. “What have you been doing?” he would ask her, and she would smile that slow, heavy smile of hers. “Things,’” she would say. “Just things.” Where was she during those long absences? And why did she go out so often without the car?” Why, my dear,” he would ask her, “when you’ve got a perfectly good Rolls-Royce, do you let yourself be made uncomfortable in taxis?”
“I don’t know,” she would say. “I don’t like to keep Merton waiting.”
“That’s what I pay him for.”
“Perhaps.”
You could not argue with a person who did not answer back, but he had noticed that on the occasions when she did take the car with her, she did not seem to mind how long she kept the chauffeur waiting. And Charles Granta was coming tardily and reluctantly to suspect that she did not always take the car with her, because she did not want Merton to know where she had gone. Nor could he seriously contend that the presence in a pawnbroker’s shop of a necklace similar in every detail to the one that he had given her was reassuring. “I must get,” he thought, “to the bottom of this business.” And he pressed the button of the bell that connected with his senior secretary’s room.
For the last twenty years he had employed a male secretary for his most confidential work. Unless you could trust a man, a woman was undoubtedly superior. Superior because work was a sideshow in her life, and she would not take the trouble to realise the importance of what was being dictated to her. A man whose life and livelihood depended on his work would take that trouble in the hope that he might one day be able to turn the information to some purpose. A male secretary whom you could trust was, however, without an equal.
Charles Granta handed his secretary an uncrossed cheque for six hundred pounds. “You will get this cashed,” he said. “You will then go to Lewisohn’s the pawnbroker in Camberwell. You know it? Good. You will say you want to buy a diamond brooch. You will examine a fair number of brooches, and will end by setting on one side a brooch valuing about five hundred pounds. But you will ask to see one or two more things; not necessarily brooches, you will say, earrings, or bangles, or necklaces; and not necessarily diamonds. Finally he will show you a pearl necklace, stringed on a gold chain, with a gold and enamel fastening. You will buy that necklace instead of the diamond brooch. If you can get it for less than six hundred do so. But you needn’t press him. He’s a good little man.”
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That evening he came into Manon’s room. She was reading, propped up in the corner of her bed by her two large, round, lace-fringed pillows. She let the book fall on to the pale blue covered quilt that had been drawn up beneath her shoulders. “Well, my dear,” she said. He walked across to her, sat down on the edge of the bed, and took in his her soft, white, unringed hand. “I wanted to know,” he said, “if you would allow me to take that pearl necklace of yours, the one I gave you, into town for a day or two.” Did there pass across her face a fleeting expression of alarm, or was it just suspicion only, or just her chin’s movement in the lamplight. He could not say. It had been so fleeting. As the shadow of a bird’s flight in the sunshine it had come and gone.
“What a funny thing to want,” she was saying. “Whatever are you going to do with it?”
Long experience of commercial angling had taught him to keep his voice at all times under complete control.
“A friend of mine,” he said, “is having some pearls restrung for his wife, and I was telling him about yours, and he thought he would like to have his done in the same way. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course not, dear,” she said. “When would you like to have it?”
“Might I take it in to-morrow?”
She pressed her lips together, then shook her head. “I’d rather not, my dear, if you can help it. I was thinking of wearing it at Mrs Johnston’s tea-fight. Would the day after do all right?”
“Splendidly,” he answered.
By nine o’clock next morning Manon had rung up Mr Lewisohn. “Is that Mr Lewisohn?” she was saying. “It’s Lady Manon Granta at this end. You remember that I left a pearl necklace with you some two or three months back. I want to redeem it if I may.”
“But, your ladyship, I am so sorry,” and the voice at the other end of the instrument was lifted in a wail of wretchedness. “Your ladyship did not redeem them within the three months stipulated.”
“In other words, Mr Lewisohn, they are sold.”
“I cannot say, milady, what a grief it was to me to part with them. Had I known that there was any likelihood of your ladyship redeeming them——”
“Oh, very well,” she said impatiently. “Who bought them?”
“I do not know, milady. A young man I have never seen before.”
“A young man you say?”
“Yes, milady, a quite young man.”
“Oh well, thank you very much, Mr Lewisohn,” and she rang off.
A young man had bought them. Was it or was it not $$$surd of her to connect the purchase of the necklace with Charles’ rather curious request? It was a coincidence. But was it more than that? She got out of bed, flung on a dressing-gown, walked over to her writing-desk, and took from a small drawer in it the red pawnticket. The seventh of November. And it was now the tenth of November. That necklace must have been bought then within the last three days. It was a very curious coincidence.
She wore the sham pearls that afternoon at Mrs Johnston’s tea-party, and still wearing them she went that evening into her husband’s bedroom. “Here are the pearls,” she said. “You might unfasten them,” and turning her back on him she waited for him to unclasp the catch. His fingers seemed to tremble against her skin. “You won’t keep them long, Charles, will you? I’m rather fond of them.”
The jeweller to whom Charles Granta took the necklace on the following morning gave him the answer he had feared and looked for. “Fakes,” he said with a smile. “Quite clearly fakes. And not really a particularly good fake. They wouldn’t deceive an expert for three seconds. They’re worth, I should say, between thirty and forty shillings.”
“Thank you,” said Charles Granta, and walked out of the shop. So it had been hers then, the necklace that he had bought from Lewisohn, and they had been false the pearls that she had been wearing for the last—well, for how many months? How long was one allowed to leave a thing in pawn? But even then this knowledge brought him no nearer to the truth. He did not know how they had got in pawn. He did not know why they had been put in pawn. He had not even known whether Manon knew they had been put in pawn. Her face when he returned the pearls to her that night expressed not the slightest recognition of such unfortunate discoveries as might have come from his temporary possession of them.
She turned them over in her hand. “Pretty things,” she said. “It was sweet of you to give them me,” and swinging them carelessly by the gold fastening she walked over to her jewel safe and tossed them into the bottom drawer.
Did she or did she not know they were false? And why if she did know had she preferred to pawn her jewels rather than come to him for money? She would only have refrained from coming to him because she had not wanted him to know for what cause she had needed money. And what such cause could there be but one? Did she know or did she not know? Her manner and behaviour had betrayed nothing. But one way or another a good many things had happened in the last three months. It was about three months ago that she had found herself in need of money, and three months ago that she had begun those long-while absences without her car. It was three months ago too that she had left her bedroom door unlocked. Had she left it unlocked simply to allay suspicion, because she had at last placed herself within the range of suspicion? Had it been a supreme finesse?
How could he tell? He knew really so little of her, of the essential Manon he was as ignorant as he had been on the day he had married her. There had been no real intimacy between them ever. If he had loved her he might through love have come to an understanding of her. But he had never loved her, he had only wanted her.
Did she know, or did she not know? Had she pawned the pearls? Why had she needed money? Where did she go on those long, whole-day absences? Question after question hammered insistently against his ignorance.
Chapter XXIII
In The Jermyn Galleries
The private view of Vernon Archer’s exhibition had been fixed for the third Tuesday in November; and on the Monday the gallery had been filled with the critics and the press reporters. On the whole, the pictures were generously received. “All those who have come,” wrote the critic of the Evening Sun, “to appreciate during the last few years the rich talents of Mr Vernon Archer will welcome with eagerness this, the latest opportunity of appraising his considerable gifts.” It was in that tone that the majority of papers wrote. They were short notices for the most part. There was not perhaps very much more to say about Vernon Archer. There rarely is of an established artist. You can only be the new thing once. It is not to be recaptured, the excitement and delight with which we acclaim the entrance of a new personality into literature and art. That unforgettable experience no artist has twice for giving. He can only be discovered once. Once only can he make on the attention of an audience the impact of an entirely fresh consciousness, an entirely fresh way of thinking, feeling, seeing, saying things. However subsequently he may develop or decline, he will remain familiar in essentials. Vernon Archer could not have expected, and indeed did not expect, a repetition of the enthusiasm and excitement that had made him for three weeks in the autumn of 1915 the most discussed personality in London. He did not worry about the reception of his work. As a matter of fact he never even read his press cuttings.
“It’s a great mistake,” he was explaining early on the Tuesday morning, before the gallery had begun to fill, to the novelist, Martin Kingsway, “a very great mistake to read press notices. You never learn anything from them. They are written for the most part by people who know far less about the job than you do yourself. They quite frequently annoy you. And there’s a danger always that they may side-track you. Do you know Carsway Philips, the man who wrote The Broken Fountain? I remember meeting him once when he was in a perfect fury about some review or other. Apparently they had called one of his novels squalid. ‘Squalid!’ he was saying. ‘Good heavens, if they call that squalid, I’ll give them something that really is.’ And he did too, which was a great pity. He never would have done it, but for that
review. There’s only one way to treat press notices. Don’t look at them.”
Kingsway smiled. He was a man of about forty-five, slightly bald, with a closely clipped dark beard. Before the War he had been one of a group of young novelists of whom much had been written and much prophesied. Of these ten or twelve young men, which, it had beer asked, was destined to prove the successor of Conrad, and Galsworthy, and Wells. In any comprehensive article on the modern novel Martin Kingsway had been always mentioned. That had been in 1912. To-day, although his sales were higher, although indeed the actual quality of his work was higher, Martin Kingsway’s reputation had declined. He no longer stood in the fields of promise.
He was reaching the limit of his tether. He would never, it was fairly certain now, be a great novelist. A sound craftsman, a cultured man of letters, a storyteller with a sense of values and a sense of the dramatic, he would produce for another twenty years novels that men of taste would be able to read with pleasure; but he would never be supreme. He was placed, in fact. And when a man is placed, there is no more to be said of him. He occupied in fact the sort of position that Archer would himself be occupying in six years’ time. Perhaps his smile was a recognition of this fact.
“Let’s have a look at the pictures,” he said.
They walked round the gallery in silence. On the whole it seemed to Kingsway to be a rather unexciting exhibition. Well enough done of course, anything of Archer’s would be that. Pleasant stuff. You’d always be glad of an Archer in your rooms; but unexciting. And that was exactly what Archer’s work had not been six years ago. There had been vigour in it then—vigour and noise; an emphatic statement. Or had it merely been that the subjects themselves had been emphatic. That all that war-time crowd of poets and painters were nothing more than an expression of the War and the emotions occasioned by the War. That it was the War, not any qualities peculiar to themselves, that had made their work for a few months seem so personal. It might be that: that Archer along with all those others had been caught up on the crest of a wave that had now subsided. Certainly, if that earlier work had been a statement, this was an acceptance. What was it exactly, though, that Archer was getting at, what had led him to choose these subjects; that tennis court, for instance, and the cinema, and that large five-foot canvas of the Piccadilly Tube. They were not particularly decorative; the subjects themselves could scarcely have had an emotional significance for him. He stood for several minutes before the picture of the tennis court at Queen’s, a curiously foreshortened view of it, taken as you looked down on it from the judge’s seat, so that the net seemed only a few inches high. Then he understood. It was not the thing itself that had attracted Archer, but the angle he had seen it from. It had amused him to set himself a difficult piece of drawing. And in the other pictures, now he came to re-study them, there was the same predilection for the unusual angle.