Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

Outside the storm went on like some senseless lunatic symphony. Now the long steady note of a horn would blow weirdly in the chimney, and a choir of shrieking gusts like the violins would break in upon it, rising and rising higher and higher as if leading to some stupendous climax. But no climax came; they would die down again with nothing gained, and the slow sobbing of ‘cellos would answer them. Then for a moment there was hail mixed with the snow, and the sudden tattoo of the kettle-drums upon the window would seem to announce something, but nothing came except a long chromatic passage from the strings, leading nowhere, portending nothing. Then the horn in the chimney would have a bar or two, repeating its motif, as if to emphasize it, and strings and horns came in simultaneously in crazy music. Then for a moment there would be a dead, tense pause; the conductor seemed to stand with raised baton collecting the orchestra for the finale, but, instead of some immense riot of sound, only a flute would wail a broken note, and the whole movement begin again.

  The noise maddened Kit; it seemed to her that her own thoughts were being made audible. Like the blind, senseless blasts, she would take up one meaningless strand of her life and try to weave it into some sort of pattern. But before she could hit on any idea, she would drop it again, and her mind would fly off now to that evening when she had cheated Alington at baccarat, now to the week at Aldeburgh, now to the affairs of Carmel East, and again, and yet again, to the week at Aldeburgh. It was all in fragments, loud, jangling, terrifying, with hysterical bursts of false feeling.

  Then, for the first time in her life, the horror of the days that were gone, the horror of the moment, the horror of the future, seized Kit in their threefold grip, and shook her. She looked back on the years in which, day after day, she had clutched greedily, ravenously, at the pleasure of the moment; with both hands she had torn the blossoms off life, making herself great nosegays like a child in a hayfield, and now when she looked at them there was not a flower that was not withered and wilted. Through the past she had arrived at this awful present. She looked forward; the future was a blank, save for one red spot of horror in it, which would come closer and closer every day till it was on her. There was no escape for her.

  Just then there was a lull in the mad symphony outside, and in the stillness she heard the soft thud of snow-clogged wheels pass by the windows. With a sense of relief, almost painful in its intensity, she ran to the door and flung it open, letting in a great buffet of snow-stifled wind that extinguished the lamps, and left only the misshapen shadows from the fire leaping monstrously on the walls. But instead of the omnibus she had expected, there was only a postman’s cart, from which the man had already descended, blanketed in snow, with a telegram in his hand. He had just rung the bell.

  Kit ran with it to the fire, and read it by the blaze. It was from Conybeare, sent off from two stations up the line.

  “Blocked by snow,” it said. “Line will not be clear till to-morrow morning.”

  A footman had come in answer to the bell. He found the door wide open, the snow blowing dizzily in, and on the hearthrug Kit, in a dead faint.

  CHAPTER II. THE FIRST DEAL

  Mr. Alington was an early riser, and it was barely half-past eight when he finished his plain but excellent breakfast the morning after he had received Jack’s telegram about Kit’s venture in Carmel East. A certain instinct of perfection was characteristic of him; all his habits of living were of a finished character. He lived plainly, and he would sooner have his simple eggs and bacon off fine china, with alternate mouthfuls of admirably crisp toast and the freshest butter, than have rioted in the feasts of Caligula with a napkin ever so slightly stained. The same snowfall which had blocked the line between Tilehurst and Goring had not spared London, and the streets on this Sunday morning were dumb and heavy with snow. Gangs of men were out at work clearing it away, and streaks and squares of brown, muddy pavement and roadway of contrasted sordidness were being disclosed in the solid whiteness of the street. Mr. Alington, looking from his window, was afraid that these efforts were likely to prove but lost labour, for the sky was still thick and overlaid with that soft, greasy look which portends more snow, and in spite of the hour, it was but an apology for twilight on to which he looked out. This thought was an appreciable pang to him. The street was empty but for the street-clearers, and had attained that degree of discomfort only realized in London after a snowfall. The gaunt, gray-faced houses opposite showed lights twinkling in their windows, and the yellow, unluminous atmosphere was like a jaundiced dream. The palace clock at the bottom of the street was still lit within, but it was no more than a blurred moon through the clogged air.

  But Mr. Alington, after his first comprehensive glance, gave but little attention to these atrocities of climate. His reading-lamp shone cheerily on his desk, and on the very satisfactory papers lying there, and Carmel basked in a temperate sunshine. For up till now the ways of the new group had entirely fulfilled his expectations, which from the beginning had been sanguine, and the best, so he hoped, was yet to be. The scheme which he had formed in the summer, and which he had talked over with Jack in September, had been simple, ingenious, and on the safe side of excessive sharpness. The dear, delightful public, as he had foreseen, was quite willing to fall in with his scheme, and had seconded his plans for general enrichment — particularly his own — with openhanded patronage. The scheme in brief was as follows, had the public only known:

  It will be remembered that he had formed two companies, Carmel, and Carmel East and West, with capitals respectively of three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand pounds. Carmel East and West had exhibited remarkable fluctuations, as Kit knew to her loss, Alington, and Jack following his advice, to their gain, and the way in which this had been worked was simplicity itself. The shares had been issued at par, and had risen almost immediately to twenty-five shillings. This Alington was disposed to put down partly to his own reputation and as the result of reports from the mine, but chiefly — for he was modest even when alone — to the effect of his noble body of directors. He as vendor had fifty thousand shares fully paid, and at this point he sold out, unloading very carefully under several names, and taking a very decent little profit for a man of simple tastes and butler-like appearance. The natural effect of this extensive sale was to cause the shares to drop, and the downward tendency was accelerated by unpromising news from the mine, which followed immediately on his sale. The ore, as stated in the prospectus, was refractory, and extracting it was both costly and yielded a very small percentage of gold. Mr. Alington, whom several large holders and substantial City men consulted about this time, was not sanguine. The results were bad, there was no denying it. Three weeks of a dropping market brought the shares to the condition they were in on that day of November on which Kit sold out for the first time, and they closed at thirteen and ninepence sellers, fourteen and threepence buyers. This seemed to Alington to be low enough for his second step, as he did not want the market to lose confidence altogether. He sent a telegram out to his manager in Australia, Mr. Linkwood, laconic, but to that intelligent fellow perfectly comprehensible:

  “New process. — Alington,” it ran.

  He also sent one to Mr. Richard Chavasse:

  “Invest.”

  The next morning he received from Mr. Linkwood the following reply:

  “Carmel East. Ninety per cent. of gold extracted by Bülow process. Strong support by Australian markets. — Linkwood.”

  Now, the evening before certain large purchases in Carmel East had been made in England, not by the names under which Mr. Alington had previously unloaded, for the weakness of such a course was obvious, and he followed them up the next morning by a very large purchase in his own name, and by the publication of his telegram from Mr. Linkwood. He also saw several business men, to whom he gave a full explanation. He had telegraphed, he said with absolute truth, to his manager to try the Bülow process, and, as they saw, it had yielded admirable results. Instead of twenty, they got ninety per cent. of the gold out. Concerning
the strong support of the Australian markets, they would no doubt receive further news by cable. He had no information later than that telegram which he had published.

  The effect of this on a market already predisposed to go a-booming after Westralians was natural and inevitable. The shares went up nearly a half during the day, and next morning when a further private cable, instantly made public, recorded that that shrewdest of financiers, Mr. Richard Chavasse, had bought to the extent of forty thousand pounds, they ran past thirty shillings.

  A week later they stood at two pounds, owing to steady support from private investors. There was a spurious report that a dividend might be expected, so extraordinary successful had the month’s crushing proved to be, and this was the unfortunate moment selected by Kit to make her second purchase. Simultaneously Alington, who for a week past had been very carefully unloading, telegraphed to Jack to do the same, and sold out largely under his own name. A week passed, and the shares moved slowly back, depressed by these large sales, though there was still a considerable demand for them in England. Then came another telegram from Australia, saying the mine looked much less hopeful. The vein which they had been working so successfully for the past two or three months came suddenly to an end, owing to a dip in the strata, and if struck again, it could probably be struck only at a much deeper level. This would entail considerable development. Following on this came large sales in Australia, Mr. Richard Chavasse (in consequence of a wire from England) being among them, and the shares went down to nineteen shillings. Then the possibility of a war between England and France depressed them still further, and they subsided quietly to fourteen shillings, where, for all that Mr. Alington at present cared, they were at liberty to remain. Thus closed the first act of the great deal, leaving a suspicious market.

  Such was the position on this Sunday morning with regard to Carmel East and West when Mr. Alington looked out on the snow-muffled street. He had been to a concert the afternoon before, where they had performed Palestrina’s Mass in B flat and fragments of those sweet, austere melodies still haunted his head. Like many men who have a great aptitude for figures, he had a marvellous musical memory, and sitting down at his piano, he recalled gently several of the airs. That was the music which really appealed to him, pure, simple melody of a sacred kind. No one regretted more than he the utter decadence of English music, its fall from its natural genius, which came to perfection, so he considered, under the divine Purcell. It had become déclassé, in the most awful sense of that awful word. An exotic German growth had spread like some parasitic plant over it; the native taste was still there, and every now and then Parry, or some of his immediate school, would give one an air which was worthy of the English best, but otherwise everyone seemed emulous of indefinitely multiplying the most chaotic of Wagner, or the music of those people whose names ended in “owski.” Then, and still from memory, by an act of unconscious cerebration, he played the last chorus out of “Blest Pair of Syrens,” and, closing the piano, got up and went to his desk with tear-dimmed eyes, in harmony with himself.

  He had anticipated events with the precision of a great general. The market had rushed, like starving folk when a granary is opened, at Carmel East and West, and after they had reached their highest point, and the big sales began, there had followed something like a panic. West Australian mines were still new to the public, and the greater financiers viewed them with suspicion. This sudden scare over Carmel East and West suited Mr. Alington exactly, for it would be sure to bring down the price of the second Carmel group — namely, the North, South, and Central mines. He had seen this six months ago, and had worked for this very end. At present he had no holdings in Mount Carmel, except those shares which he held to qualify as a director, and he had delayed any purchase in them till the panic created by the mercurial behaviour of the sister group should have brought down the price. The lower it went, the better would he be pleased, for he intended to make a coup over this compared to which what he had pocketed over Carmel East and West should be a mere bagatelle. But for Carmel he required no adventitious aid from marquises, and consequently the sudden resignation of Tom Abbotsworthy from his board, which event had taken place the day before, did not trouble him at all, nor did he care to know what cause “his regret to find that press of work prevented him” covered. The mine he knew was a magnificent property, quite able to stand on its own feet, and in the prospectus he had purposely understated its probable value. In doing so, he was altogether free from possible censure; the mine had seemed to him promising, and he had said so, and when the shares were suitably low he intended to buy all he could lay hands on. Purposely, also, he had undercapitalized it; eventually he meant to issue fresh shares. The five hundred thousand pounds already subscribed was not more than sufficient to work Carmel North, and both Mount Carmel and Carmel South of the same group he believed to be as remunerative as the others. The panic over Carmel East and West had already affected the other group, and yesterday evening the one-pound shares, after a week’s decline, stood at fifteen shillings. He proposed to let them go down, if they kindly would, till they had sunk to ten shillings or thereabouts, then buy for all he was worth, and send a telegram to Mr. Richard Chavasse to do the same. And at the thought of Mr. Richard Chavasse he put his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, leaned back in his chair, and laughed aloud with a great mellowness of sound.

  In certain respects Mr. Alington, for all his staid conversation and butler-like appearance, was a true humorist; in this instance, at any rate, that he alone should appreciate his own joke was sufficient for him, and he required no sympathizer. Indeed, it would have spoiled it all if other people had been able to appreciate it. Though a modest man, he considered the Chavasse joke very entertaining, and the Chavasse joke was all his own, and the point of it as follows:

  Some years ago, out in Australia, he had a Swiss valet, a clever, neat-handed rogue in his way, who one night was sufficiently ill-advised to open the house to burglars. But the alarm was given. Mr. Alington, with a revolver and pyjamas, came mildly but firmly downstairs, and though the burglars escaped, he held his valet in the hollow of his hand. The man stood detected, and, hoping to make the best of his miscarried job, confessed his complicity to his master. Mr. Alington made him give his confession in writing, and sent it to his bank for safe keeping, but for the time took no further steps.

  But not long before the formation of this new company, four or five months only before his own departure for England, he parted company with his servant, who left Melbourne at once. Three months afterwards a gentleman with a fine moustache and a short beard appeared — a personal friend, it would seem, of Mr. Alington’s, and a man of wealth, interested in Australian mines. A few weeks only after his arrival Mr. Alington left for England. Mr. Richard Chavasse, however, remained, cultivated and linguistic, and lived in Alington’s house at, it was supposed, a suitable rent. Altogether he may be best described as a creation.

  Here, again, as in so many of the dealings of Providence with man, Mr. Alington often marvelled to see the working of all things together towards good. In the first instance there had not been wanting to his forbearance to give Mr. Richard Chavasse over to the police a vague feeling of compassion at the thought of those deft, shirt-studding hands given over bleeding to oakum-picking and the sewing of mail-bags; and how amply was that sweet pity rewarded! A man bound to him by fear was a far safer repository for the large sums of money, amounting sometimes to forty or fifty thousand pounds, over which Mr. Chavasse had control, than someone over whom he held no such check. Should Mr. Chavasse attempt to get off with the money, or even — so stringent were Alington’s regulations for the strict and sober conduct of his life — leave the colony, a wired word from him to the bank would place the ex-valet’s confession of complicity in the burglary in the hands of the police. Alington, in fact, had speculated largely in Chavasses, and he had the wit to see from the beginning that the more comfortable position he gave him, the more man of wealth and m
ark he made him, the securer he himself would be. A beggar with power of attorney may easily decamp with the spoils, and possibly baffle pursuit, but for the solid man interested in mines, though slightly recluse and exclusive, it is hardly possible to evade capture. Besides, who in their senses would not prefer to live delicately than to dodge detectives? Certainly Mr. Chavasse was completely in his senses, and did not attempt escape. What Alington meant to do with him after the grand coup in Carmels he had not yet certainly determined.

  In the interval Mr. Chavasse, ex-valet, lived in his house in Melbourne rent-free, and cost Mr. Alington perhaps eighty pounds a month. But how admirable an investment was that; and how small a percentage of his coinings for his master did that eighty pounds a month represent! Already it had often happened, as in the case of Carmel East, that Alington in England wanted to run up the price of some mine, and strong support in Australia was exactly what was needed to give a hesitating market confidence. Thus he exercised a dual control: here in England, no doubt, many investors followed his lead, for he was known to be an extremely shrewd man, with the instinct bred of knowledge equalled by none, and invariably his purchases seemed to herald a general advance. For as surely as Mr. Alington bought in London, so surely did a cable go out to Mr. Chavasse, “Invest balance,” or “Invest half balance,” and in due course came the answer, not necessarily to Alington — indeed, seldom to him— “Strong support in Australia.” The plan was simple — all practical plans are: the valet had his choice between two courses of life — the one to live extremely comfortably in Alington’s delightful house in Melbourne, passing pleasant, independent days, and occasionally, as the telegram came from England, making large purchases for this mine or that, or selling still in obedience; the other, to leave his comfortable house, and start off in an attempt to outrun the detectives: for as surely as he tried to escape, so surely would his confession lying at the bank pass into the hands of the police. Once a month, indeed, he had to send to England the statement of his accounts, and now and then he had been told that his cigar-bill was too large, or that whisky-and-soda for lunch would be a pleasant change from an expensive Moselle. On leaving Australia, Mr. Alington had transferred to him absolutely certain shares, certificates and balance at the Melbourne bank in payment, it was supposed, of some large purchase; and not infrequently he could, if he chose, draw a cheque for as much as fifty thousand pounds to self. Thus, for a few weeks, perhaps, he would be able to career over the world; but from that moment he would be Mr. Richard Chavasse no longer, that solid, linguistic gentleman, but the man Chavasse, earnestly wanted by the police for burglary.