on the last day of february, mrs. dabney was surprised if not exhilarated by a visit from her two children in the little book-shop.
“it's the last day in the world that i should have thought you'd 'a' come out on,” she told them, in salutation—and for comment they all glanced along the dark narrow alley of shelves to the street window. a gloomy spectacle it was indeed, with a cold rain slanting through the discredited remnants of a fog, which the east wind had broken up, but could not drive away, and with only now and again a passer-by moving across the dim vista, masked beneath an umbrella, or bent forward with chin buried in turned-up collar. in the doorway outside the sulky boy stamped his feet and slapped his sides with his arms in pantomimic mutiny against the task of guarding the book-stalls' dripping covers, which nobody would be mad enough to pause over, much less to lift.
“i don't know but i'd ought to let the boy bring in the books and go home,” she said, as their vague gaze was attracted by his gestures. “but it isn't three yet—it seems ridiculous to close up. still, if you'd be more comfortable upstairs—”
“why, mamma! the idea of making strangers of us,” protested julia. she strove to make her tone cheerful, but its effect of rebuke was unmistakable.
the mother, leaning against the tall desk, looked blankly at her daughter. the pallid flicker of the gas-jet overhead made her long, listless face seem more devoid of colour than ever.
“but you are as good as strangers, aren't you?” she observed, coldly. “you've been back in town ten days and more, and i've scarcely laid eyes upon either of you. but don't you want to sit down? you can put those parcels on the floor anywhere. or shall i do it for you?”
alfred had been lounging in the shadowed corner against a heap of old magazines tied in bundles. he sprang up now and cleared the chair, but his sister declined it with a gesture. her small figure had straightened itself into a kind of haughty rigidity.
“there has been so much to do, mamma,” she explained, in a clear, cool voice. “we have had hundreds of things to buy and to arrange about. all the responsibility for the housekeeping rests upon me—and alfred has his studio to do. but of course we should have looked in upon you sooner—and much oftener—if we had thought you wanted us. but really, when we came to you, the very day after our return, it was impossible for us to pretend that you were glad to see us.”
“oh, i was glad enough,” mrs. dabney made answer, mechanically. “why shouldn't i be glad? and why should you think i wasn't glad? did you expect me to shout and dance?”
“but you said you wouldn't come to see us in ovington square,” alfred reminded her.
“that's different,” she declared. “what would i be doing in ovington square? it's all right for you to be there. i hope you'll be happy there. but it wouldn't add anything to your happiness to have me there; it would be quite the other way about. i know that, if you don't. this is my place, here, and i intend to stick to it!”
julia's bright eyes, scanning the apathetic, stubborn maternal countenance, hardened beyond their wont. “you talk as if there had been some class war declared,” she said, with obvious annoyance. “you know that uncle stormont would like nothing better than to be as nice to you as he is to us.”
“uncle stormont!” mrs. dabney's repetition of the words was surcharged with hostile sarcasm. “but his name was stormont as much as it was joel,” broke in alfred, from his dark corner. “he has a perfect right to use the one he likes best.”
“oh, i don't dispute his right,” she replied, once more in her passionless monotone. “everybody can call themselves whatever they please. it's no affair of mine. you and your sister spell your father's name in a way to suit yourselves: i never interfered, did i? you have your own ideas and your own tastes. they are quite beyond me—but they're all right for you. i don't criticize them at all. what i say is that it is a great mercy your uncle came along, with his pockets full of money to enable you to make the most of them. if i were religious i should call that providential.”
“and that's what we do call it,” put in julia, with vivacity. “and why should you shut your doors against this providence, mamma? just think of it! we don't insist upon your coming to live at ovington square at all. probably, as you say, you would be happier by yourself—at least for the present. but when uncle st—when uncle says there's more than enough money for us all, and is only too anxious for you to let him do things for you—why, he's your own brother! it's as if i should refuse to allow alfred to do things for me.”
“that you never did,” interposed the young man, gayly. “i'll say that for you, jule.”
“and never will,” she assured him, with cheerful decision. “but no—mamma—can't you see what we mean? we have done what you wanted us to do. you sent us both to much better schools than you could afford, from the time we were of no age at all—and when uncle's money came you sent us to cheltenham. we did you no discredit. we worked very well; we behaved ourselves properly. we came back to you at last with fair reason to suppose that you would be—i won't say proud, but at least well satisfied with us—and then it turned out that you didn't like us at all.”
“i never said anything of the sort,” the mother declared, with a touch of animation.
“oh no—you never said it,” julia admitted, “but what else can we think you mean? our uncle sends for us to go abroad with him, and you busy yourself getting me ready, and having new frocks made and all that—and i never hear a suggestion that you don't want me to go——”
“but i did want you to go,” mrs. dabney affirmed.
“well, then, when i come back—when we come back, and tell you what splendid and generous plans uncle has made for us, and how he has taken a beautiful furnished house and made it our home, and so on,—why, you won't even come and look at the house!”
“but i don't want to see it,” the mother retorted; obstinately.
“well, then, you needn't!” said alfred, rising. “nobody will ask you again.” “oh yes they will,” urged julia, glancing meaningly from one to the other. all her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to mediate between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. from her earliest childhood she had understood, somehow, that there was a dabney habit of mind, which was by comparison soft and if not yielding, then politic: and set over against it there was a thorpe temper full of gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death. in the days of her grandfather thorpe, whom she remembered with an alarmed distinctness, there had existed a kind of tacit idea that his name alone accounted for and justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper. that old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody, suspected everybody, apparently disliked everybody, vehemently demanded his own will of everybody—and it was all to be explained, seemingly, by the fact that he was a thorpe.
after his disappearance from the scene—unlamented, to the best of julia's juvenile perceptions—there had been relatively peaceful times in the book-shop and the home overhead, yet there had existed always a recognized line of demarcation running through the household. julia and her father—a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of unsubstantial memories—julia and this father had stood upon one side of this impalpable line as dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable persons, who would not expect to have their own way.
alfred and his mother were thorpes—that is to say, people who necessarily had their own way. their domination was stained by none of the excesses which had rendered the grandfather intolerable. their surface temper was in truth almost sluggishly pacific. underneath, however, ugly currents and sharp rocks were well known to have a potential existence—and it was the mission of the dabneys to see that no wind of provocation unduly stirred these depths. worse even than these possibilities of violence, however, so far as every-day life was concerned, was the strain of obstinacy which belonged to the thorpe temper. a sort of passive mulishness it was, impervious to argument, immovable under the most sympathetic pressure, which particularly tried the dabney patience. it seemed to julia now, as she interposed her soothing influence between these jarring forces, that she had spent whole years of her life in personal interventions of this sort.
“oh yes they will,” she repeated, and warned her brother into the background with a gesture half-pleading half-peremptory. “we are your children, and we're not bad or undutiful children at all, and i'm sure that when you think it all over, mamma, you'll see that it would be absurd to let anything come between you and us.”
“how could i help letting it come?” demanded the mother, listlessly argumentative. “you had outgrown me and my ways altogether. it was nonsense to suppose that you would have been satisfied to come back and live here again, over the shop. i couldn't think for the life of me what i was going to do with you. but now your uncle has taken all that into his own hands. he can give you the kind of home that goes with your education and your ideas—and what more do you want? why should you come bothering me?”
“how unjust you are, mamma!” cried julia, with a glaze of tears upon her bright glance.
the widow took her elbow from the desk, and, slowly straightening herself, looked down upon her daughter. her long plain face, habitually grave in expression, conveyed no hint of exceptional emotion, but the fingers of the large, capable hands she clasped before her writhed restlessly against one another, and there was a husky-threat of collapse in her voice as she spoke:
“if you ever have children of your own,” she said, “and you slave your life out to bring them up so that they'll think themselves your betters, and they act accordingly—then you'll understand. but you don't understand now—and there's no good our talking any more about it. come in whenever it's convenient—and you feel like it. i must go back to my books now.”
she took up a pen at this, and opened the cash-book upon the blotter. her children, surveying her blankly, found speech difficult. with some murmured words, after a little pause, they bestowed a perfunctory kiss upon her unresponsive cheek, and filed out into the rain.
mrs. dabney watched them put up their umbrella, and move off strandward beneath it. she continued to look for a long time, in an aimless, ruminating way, at the dismal prospect revealed by the window and the glass of the door. the premature night was closing in miserably, with increasing rain, and a doleful whistle of rising wind round the corner. at last she shut up the unconsidered cash-book, lighted another gas-jet, and striding to the door, rapped sharply on the glass.
“bring everything in!” she called to the boy, and helped out his apprehension by a comprehensive gesture.
later, when he had completed his task, and one of the two narrow outlets from the shop in front was satisfactorily blocked with the wares from without, and all the floor about reeked with the grimy drippings of the oilskins, mrs. dabney summoned him to the desk in the rear.
“i think you may go home now,” she said to him, with the laconic abruptness to which he was so well accustomed. “you have a home, haven't you?”
remembering the exhaustive enquiries which the mission people had made about him and his belongings, as a preliminary to his getting this job, he could not but be surprised at the mistress's question. in confusion he nodded assent, and jerked his finger toward his cap.
“got a mother?” she pursued. again he nodded, with augmented confidence.
“and do you think yourself better than she is?”
the urchin's dirty and unpleasant face screwed itself up in anxious perplexity over this strange query. then it cleared as he thought he grasped the idea, and the rat-eyes he lifted to her gleamed with the fell acuteness of the dials. “i sh'd be sorry if i wasn't,” he answered, in swift, rasping accents. “she's a rare old boozer, she is! it's a fair curse to an honest boy like me, to 'ave—” “go home!” she bade him, peremptorily—and frowned after him as he ducked and scuttled from the shop.
left to herself, mrs. dabney did not reopen the cash-book—the wretched day, indeed, had been practically a blank in its history—but loitered about in the waning light among the shelves near the desk, altering the position of books here and there, and glancing cursorily through others. once or twice she went to the door and looked out upon the rain-soaked street. a tradesman's assistant, opposite, was rolling the iron shutters down for the night. if business in hats was over for the day, how much more so in books! her shop had never been fitted with shutters—for what reason she could not guess. the opened pages of numerous volumes were displayed close against the window, but no one had ever broken a pane to get at them. apparently literature raised no desires in the criminal breast. to close the shop there was nothing to do but lock and bolt the door and turn out the lights. at last, as the conviction of nightfall forced itself upon her from the drenched darkness outside, she bent to put her hand to the key. then, with a little start of surprise, she stood erect. someone was shutting an umbrella in the doorway, preparatory to entering the shop.
it was her brother, splashed and wet to the knees, but with a glowing face, who pushed his way in, and confronted her with a broad grin. there was such a masterful air about him, that when he jovially threw an arm round her gaunt waist, and gathered her up against his moist shoulder, she surprised herself by a half-laughing submission.
her vocabulary was not rich in phrases for this kind of emergency. “do mind what you're about!” she told him, flushing not unpleasurably.
“shut up the place!” he answered, with lordly geniality. “i've walked all the way from the city in the rain. i wanted the exertion—i couldn't have sat in a cab. come back and build up the fire, and let's have a talk. god! what things i've got to tell you!”
“there isn't any fire down here,” she said, apologetically, as they edged their way through the restricted alley to the rear. “the old fireplace took up too much room. sometimes, in very sharp weather, i have an oil-stove in. usually the gas warms it enough. you don't find it too cold—do you?—with your coat on? or would you rather come upstairs?”
“never mind the cold,” he replied, throwing a leg over the stool before the desk. “i can't stay more 'n a minute or two. what do you think we've done today?”
louisa had never in her life seen her brother look so well as he did now, sprawling triumphantly upon the stool under the yellow gas-light. his strong, heavily-featured face had somehow ceased to be commonplace. it had acquired an individual distinction of its own. he looked up at her with a clear, bold eye, in which, despite its gloss of good-humour, she discerned a new authority.
the nervous and apprehensive lines had somehow vanished from the countenance, and with them, oddly enough, that lethargic, heavy expression which had been their complement. he was all vigour, readiness, confidence, now. she deemed him almost handsome, this curious, changeable brother of hers, as he beat with his fist in a measured way upon the desk-top to emphasize his words, and fastened his commanding gaze upon her.
“we took very nearly twenty thousand pounds to-day,” he went on. “this is the twenty-eighth of february. a fortnight ago today was the first settlement. i wasn't here, but semple was—and the working of it is all in his hands. he kept as still as a mouse that first day. they had to deliver to us 26,000 shares, and they hadn't got one, but we didn't make any fuss. the point was, you see, not to let them dream that they were caught in a trap. we didn't even put the price up to par. they had to come to semple, and say there didn't seem to be any shares obtainable just at the moment, and what would he carry them over at? that means, to let them postpone delivery for another fortnight. he was as smooth as sweet-oil with them, and agreed to carry them over till today without any charge at all. but today it was a little different. the price was up ten shillings above par. that is to say, semple arranged with a jobber, on the quiet, d'ye see? to offer thirty shillings for our one-pound shares. that offer fixed the making-up price. so then, when they were still without shares to-day, and had to be carried over again, they had to pay ten shillings' difference on each of twenty-six thousand shares, plus the difference between par and the prices they'd sold at. that makes within a few hundreds of 20,000 pounds in cash, for one day's haul. d'ye see?”
she nodded at him, expressively. through previous talks she had really obtained an insight into the operation, and it interested her more than she would have cared to confess.
“well, then, we put that 20,000 pounds in our pockets,” he proceeded with a steady glow in his eyes. “a fortnight hence, that is march 14th, we ring the bell on them again, and they march up to the captain's office and settle a second time. now what happens on the 14th? a jobber makes the price for semple again, and that settles the new sum they have to pay us in differences. it is for us to say what that price shall be. we'll decide on that when the time comes. we most probably will just put it up another ten shillings, and so take in just a simple 13,000 pounds. it's best in the long run, i suppose, to go slow, with small rises like that, in order not to frighten anybody. so semple says, at any rate.”
“but why not frighten them?” louisa asked. “i thought you wanted to frighten them. you were full of that idea a while ago.”
he smiled genially. “i've learned some new wrinkles since then. we'll frighten 'em stiff enough, before we're through with them. but at the start we just go easy. if they got word that there was a 'corner,' there would be a dead scare among the jobbers. they'd be afraid to sell or name a price for rubber consols unless they had the shares in hand. and there are other ways in which that would be a nuisance. presently, of course, we shall liberate some few shares, so that there may be some actual dealings. probably a certain number of the 5,000 which went to the general public will come into the market too. but of course you see that all such shares will simply go through one operation before they come back to us. some one of the fourteen men we are squeezing will snap them up and bring them straight to semple, to get free from the fortnightly tax we are levying on them. in that way we shall eventually let out say half of these fourteen 'shorts,' or perhaps more than half.”
“what do you want to do that for?” the sister's grey eyes had caught a metallic gleam, as if from the talk about gold. “why let anybody out? why can't you go on taking their money for ever?”
thorpe nodded complacently. “yes—that's what i asked too. it seemed to me the most natural thing, when you'd got 'em in the vise, to keep them there. but when you come to reflect—you can't get more out of a man than there is in him. if you press him too hard, he can always go bankrupt—and then he's out of your reach altogether, and you lose everything that you counted on making out of him. so, after a certain point, each one of the fourteen men whom we're squeezing must be dealt with on a different footing. we shall have to watch them all, and study their resources, as tipsters watch horses in the paddock.
“you see, some of them can stand a loss of a hundred thousand pounds better than others could lose ten thousand. all that we have to know. we can take it as a principle that none of them will go bankrupt and lose his place on the exchange unless he is pressed tight to the wall. well, our business is to learn how far each fellow is from the wall to start with. then we keep track of him, one turn of the screw after another, till we see he's got just enough left to buy himself out. then we'll let him out. see?”
“it's cruel, isn't it?” she commented, calmly meditative, after a little pause.
“everything in the city is cruel,” he assured her with a light tone. “all speculative business is cruel. take our case, for example. i estimate in a rough way that these fourteen men will have to pay over to us, in differences and in final sales, say seven hundred thousand pounds—maybe eight hundred. well, now, not one of those fellows ever earned a single sovereign of that money. they've taken the whole of it from others, and these others took it from others still, and so on almost indefinitely. there isn't a sovereign of it that hasn't been through twenty hands, or fifty for that matter, since the last man who had done some honest work for it parted company with it. well—money like that belongs to those who are in possession of it, only so long as they are strong enough to hold on to it. when someone stronger still comes along, he takes it away from them. they don't complain: they don't cry and say it's cruel. they know it's the rule of the game. they accept it—and begin at once looking out for a new set of fools and weaklings to recoup themselves on. that's the way the city goes.”
thorpe had concluded his philosophical remarks with ruminative slowness. as he lapsed into silence now, he fell to studying his own hands on the desk-top before him. he stretched out the fingers, curved them in different degrees, then closed them tight and turned the bulky hard-looking fists round for inspection in varying aspects.
“that's the kind of hand,” he began again, thoughtfully, “that breaks the jew in the long run, if there's only grit enough behind it. i used to watch those jews' hands, a year ago, when i was dining and wining them. they're all thin and wiry and full of veins. their fingers are never still; they twist round and keep stirring like a lobster's feelers. but there aint any real strength in 'em. they get hold of most of the things that are going, because they're eternally on the move. it's their hellish industry and activity that gives them such a pull, and makes most people afraid of them. but when a hand like that takes them by the throat”—he held up his right hand as he spoke, with the thick uncouth fingers and massive thumb arched menacingly in a powerful muscular tension—“when that tightens round their neck, and they feel that the grip means business—my god! what good are they?”
he laughed contemptuously, and slapped the relaxed palm on the desk with a noise which made his sister start. apparently the diversion recalled something to her mind.
“there was a man in here asking about you today,” she remarked, in a casual fashion. “said he was an old friend of yours.”
“oh, yes, everybody's my 'old friend' now,” he observed with beaming indifference. “i'm already getting heaps of invitations to dinners and dances and all that. one fellow insisted on booking me for easter for some salmon fishing he's got way down in cumberland. i told him i couldn't come, but he put my name down all the same. says his wife will write to remind me. damn his wife! semple tells me that when our squeeze really begins and they realize the desperate kind of trap they're in, they'll simply shower attentions of that sort on me. he says the social pressure they can command, for a game of this kind, is something tremendous. but i'm not to be taken in by it for a single pennyworth, d'ye see? i dine with nobody! i fish and shoot and go yachting with nobody! julia and alfred and our own home in ovington square—that'll be good enough for me. by the way—you haven't been out to see us yet. we're all settled now. you must come at once—why not with me, now?”
louisa paid no heed to this suggestion. she had been rummaging among some loose papers on the top of the desk, and she stepped round now to lift the lid and search about for something inside.
“he left a card for you,” she said, as she groped among the desk's contents. “i don't know what i did with it. he wrote something on it.”
“oh, damn him, and his card too,” thorpe protested easily. “i don't want to see either of them.”
“he said he knew you in mexico. he said you'd had dealings together. he seemed to act as if you'd want to see him—but i didn't know. i didn't tell him your address.”
thorpe had listened to these apathetic sentences without much interest, but the sum of their message appeared suddenly to catch his attention. he sat upright, and after a moment's frowning brown study, looked sharply up at his sister.
“what was his name?” he asked with abruptness.
“i don't in the least remember,” she made answer, holding the desk-top up, but temporarily suspending her search. “he was a little man, five-and-fifty, i should think. he had long grey hair—a kind of quaker-looking man. he said he saw the name over the door, and he remembered your telling him your people were booksellers. he only got back here in england yesterday or the day before. he said he didn't know what you'd been doing since you left mexico. he didn't even know whether you were in england or not!”
thorpe had been looking with abstracted intentness at a set of green-bound cheap british poets just at one side of his sister's head. “you must find that card!” he told her now, with a vague severity in his voice. “i know the name well enough, but i want to see what he's written. was it his address, do you remember? the name itself was tavender, wasn't it? good god! why is it a woman never knows where she's put anything? even julia spends hours looking for button-hooks or corkscrews or something of that sort, every day of her life! they've got nothing in the world to do except know where things are, right under their nose, and yet that's just what they don't know at all!”
“oh, i have a good few other things to do,” she reminded him, as she fumbled again inside the obscurity of the desk. “i can put my hand on any one of four thousand books in stock,” she mildly boasted over her shoulder, “and that's something you never learned to do. and i can tell if a single book is missing—and i wouldn't trust any shopman i ever knew to do that.”
“oh of course, you're an exception,” he admitted, under a sense of justice. “but i wish you'd find the card.”
“i know where it is,” she suddenly announced, and forthwith closed the desk. moving off into the remoter recesses of the crowded interior, she returned to the light with the bit of pasteboard in her hand. “i'd stuck it in the little mirror over the washstand,” she explained.
he almost snatched it from her, and stood up the better to examine it under the gas-light. “where is montague street?” he asked, with rough directness.
“in bloomsbury—alongside the museum. that's one montague street—i don't know how many others there may be.”
thorpe had already taken up his umbrella and was buttoning his coat. “yes—bloomsbury,” he said hurriedly. “that would be his form. and you say he knew nothing about my movements or whereabouts—nothing about the company, eh?” he looked at his watch as he spoke. evidently the presence of this stranger had excited him a good deal.
“no,” she assured him, reflectively; “no, i'm sure he didn't. from what he said, he doesn't know his way about london very well, or anywhere else, for that matter, i should say.”
thorpe nodded, and put his finger to his forehead with a meaning look. “no—he's a shade off in the upper story,” he told her in a confidential tone. “still, it's important that i should see him,”—and with only a hasty hand-shake he bustled out of the shop.
by the light of the street lamp opposite, she could see him on the pavement, in the pelting rain, vehemently signalling with his umbrella for a cab.
