A Man of Means Page 2

  When the Coppins wanted anything, they asked for it; and it seemed to Roland that they wanted pretty nearly everything. If Mr. Coppin had reached his present age without the assistance of a gold watch, he might surely have struggled along to the end on gun-metal. In any case, a man of his years should have been thinking of higher things than mere gauds and trinkets. A like criticism applied to Mrs. Coppin’s demand for a silk petticoat, which struck Roland as simply indecent. Frank and Percy took theirs mostly in specie. It was Muriel who struck the worst blow by insisting on a hired motor-car.

  Roland hated motor-cars, especially when they were driven by Albert Potter, as this one was. Albert, that strong, silent man, had but one way of expressing his emotions, namely to open the throttle and shave the paint off trolley-cars. Disappointed love was giving Albert a good deal of discomfort at this time, and he found it made him feel better to go round corners on two wheels. As Muriel sat next to him on these expeditions, Roland squashing into the tonneau with Frank and Percy, his torments were subtle. He was not given a chance to forget, and the only way in which he could obtain a momentary diminution of the agony was to increase the speed to sixty miles an hour.

  It was in this fashion that they journeyed to the neighboring town of Lexingham to see M. Etienne Feriaud perform his feat of looping the loop in his aeroplane.

  It was Brother Frank’s idea that they should make up a party to go and see M. Feriaud. Frank’s was one of those generous, unspoiled natures which never grow blasé at the sight of a fellow human taking a sporting chance at hara-kiri. He was a well-known figure at every wild animal exhibition within a radius of fifty miles, and M. Feriaud drew him like a magnet.

  “The blighter goes up,” he explained, as he conducted the party into the arena, “and then he stands on his head and goes round in circles. I’ve seen pictures of it.”

  It appeared that M. Feriaud did even more than this. Posters round the ground advertised the fact that, on receipt of five pounds, he would take up a passenger with him. To date, however, there appeared to have been no rush on the part of the canny inhabitants of Lexingham to avail themselves of this chance of a breath of fresh air. M. Feriaud, a small man with a chubby and amiable face, wandered about signing picture cards and smoking a lighted cigaret, looking a little disappointed.

  Albert Potter was scornful.

  “Lot of rabbits,” he said. “Where’s their pluck? And I suppose they call themselves Englishmen. I’d go up precious quick if I had a five-pound note. Disgrace, I call it, letting a Frenchman have the laugh of us.”

  It was a long speech for Mr. Potter, and it drew a look of respectful tenderness from Muriel. “You’re so brave, Mr. Potter,” she said.

  Whether it was the slight emphasis which she put on the first word, or whether it was sheer generosity that impelled him, one can not say; but Roland produced the required sum even while she spoke. He offered it to his rival.

  Mr. Potter started, turned a little pale, then drew himself up and waved the note aside.

  “I take no favors,” he said with dignity.

  There was a pause.

  “Why don’t you do it.” said Albert, nastily. “Five pounds is nothing to you.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Ah! Why should you?”

  It would be useless to assert that Mr. Potter’s tone was friendly. It stung Roland. It seemed to him that Muriel was looking at him in an unpleasantly contemptuous manner.

  In some curious fashion, without doing anything to merit it, he had apparently become an object of scorn and derision to the party.

  “All right, then, I will,” he said suddenly.

  “Easy enough to talk,” said Albert.

  Roland strode with a pale but determined face to the spot where M. Feriaud, beaming politely, was signing a picture post-card.

  Some feeling of compunction appeared to come to Muriel at the eleventh hour.

  “Don’t let him,” she cried.

  But Brother Frank was made of sterner stuff. This was precisely the sort of thing which, in his opinion, made for a jolly afternoon.

  For years he had been waiting for something of this kind. He was experiencing that pleasant thrill which comes to a certain type of person when the victim of a murder in the morning paper is an acquaintance of theirs.

  “What are you talking about?” he said. “There’s no danger. At least, not much. He might easily come down all right. Besides, he wants to. What do you want to go interfering for?”

  Roland returned. The negotiations with the bird-man had lasted a little longer than one would have expected. But then, of course, M. Feriaud was a foreigner, and Roland’s French was not fluent.

  He took Muriel’s hand.

  “Good-by,” he said.

  He shook hands with the rest of the party, even with Albert Potter. It struck Frank that he was making too much fuss over a trifle—and, worse, delaying the start of the proceedings.

  “What’s it all about?” he demanded. “You go on as if we were never going to see you again.”

  “You never know.”

  “It’s as safe as being in bed.”

  “But still, in case we never meet again–-“

  “Oh, well,” said Brother Frank, and took the outstretched hand.

  The little party stood and watched as the aeroplane moved swiftly along the ground, rose, and soared into the air. Higher and higher it rose, till the features of the two occupants were almost invisible.

  “Now,” said Brother Frank. “Now watch. Now he’s going to loop the loop.”

  But the wheels of the aeroplane still pointed to the ground. It grew smaller and smaller. It was a mere speck.

  “What the dickens?”

  Far away to the West something showed up against the blue of the sky—something that might have been a bird, a toy kite, or an aeroplane traveling rapidly into the sunset.

  Four pairs of eyes followed it in rapt silence.

  THE EPISODE OF THE FINANCIAL NAPOLEON

  Second of a Series of Six Stories [First published in Pictorial Review, June 1916]

  Seated with his wife at breakfast on the veranda which overlooked the rolling lawns and leafy woods of his charming Sussex home, Geoffrey Windlebird, the great financier, was enjoying the morning sun to the full. His chubby features were relaxed in a smile of lazy contentment; and his wife, who liked to act sometimes as his secretary, found it difficult to get him to pay any attention to his morning’s mail.

  “There’s a column in to-day’s Financial Argus,” she said, “of which you really must take notice. It’s most abusive. It’s about the Wildcat Reef. They assert that there never was any gold in the mine, and that you knew it when you floated the company.”

  “They will have their little joke.”

  “But you had the usual mining-expert’s report.”

  “Of course we had. And a capital report it was. I remember thinking at the time what a neat turn of phrase the fellow had. I admit he depended rather on his fine optimism than on any examination of the mine. As a matter of fact, he never went near it. And why should he? It’s down in South America somewhere. Awful climate—snakes, mosquitoes, revolutions, fever.”

  Mr. Windlebird spoke drowsily. His eyes closed.

  “Well, the Argus people say that they have sent a man of their own out there to make inquiries, a well-known expert, and the report will be in within the next fortnight. They say they will publish it in their next number but one. What are you going to do about it?”

  Mr. Windlebird yawned.

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, dearest, the game is up. The Napoleon of Finance is about to meet his Waterloo. And all for twenty thousand pounds. That is the really bitter part of it. To-morrow we sail for the Argentine. I’ve got the tickets.”

  “You’re joking, Geoffrey. You must be able to raise twenty thousand. It’s a flea-bite.”

  “On paper—in the form of shares, script, bonds, promissory notes, it is a flea-bite. But when it ha
s to be produced in the raw, in flat, hard lumps of gold or in crackling bank-notes, it’s more like a bite from a hippopotamus. I can’t raise it, and that’s all about it. So—St. Helena for Napoleon.”

  Altho Geoffrey Windlebird described himself as a Napoleon of Finance, a Cinquevalli or Chung Ling Soo of Finance would have been a more accurate title. As a juggler with other people’s money he was at the head of his class. And yet, when one came to examine it, his method was delightfully simple. Say, for instance, that the Home-grown Tobacco Trust, founded by Geoffrey in a moment of ennui, failed to yield those profits which the glowing prospectus had led the public to expect. Geoffrey would appease the excited shareholders by giving them Preference Shares (interest guaranteed) in the Sea-gold Extraction Company, hastily floated to meet the emergency. When the interest became due, it would, as likely as not, be paid out of the capital just subscribed for the King Solomon’s Mines Exploitation Association, the little deficiency in the latter being replaced in its turn, when absolutely necessary and not a moment before, by the transfer of some portion of the capital just raised for yet another company. And so on, ad infinitum. There were moments when it seemed to Mr. Windlebird that he had solved the problem of Perpetual Promotion.

  The only thing that can stop a triumphal progress like Mr. Windlebird’s is when some coarse person refuses to play to the rules, and demands ready money instead of shares in the next venture. This had happened now, and it had flattened Mr. Windlebird like an avalanche.

  He was a philosopher, but he could not help feeling a little galled that the demand which had destroyed him had been so trivial. He had handled millions—on paper, it was true, but still millions—and here he was knocked out of time by a paltry twenty thousand pounds.

  “Are you absolutely sure that nothing can be done?” persisted Mrs. Windlebird. “Have you tried every one?”

  “Every one, dear moon-of-my-delight—the probables, the possibles, the highly unlikelies, and the impossibles. Never an echo to the minstrel’s wooing song. No, my dear, we have got to take to the boats this time. Unless, of course, some one possessed at one and the same time of twenty thousand pounds and a very confiding nature happens to drop from the clouds.”

  As he spoke, an aeroplane came sailing over the tops of the trees beyond the tennis-lawn. Gracefully as a bird it settled on the smooth turf, not twenty yards from where he was seated.

  Roland Bleke stepped stiffly out onto the tennis-lawn. His progress rather resembled that of a landsman getting out of an open boat in which he has spent a long and perilous night at sea. He was feeling more wretched than he had ever felt in his life. He had a severe cold. He had a splitting headache. His hands and feet were frozen. His eyes smarted. He was hungry. He was thirsty. He hated cheerful M. Feriaud, who had hopped out and was now busy tinkering the engine, a gay Provencal air upon his lips, as he had rarely hated any one, even Muriel Coppin’s brother Frank.

  So absorbed was he in his troubles that he was not aware of Mr. Windlebird’s approach until that pleasant, portly man’s shadow fell on the turf before him.

  “Not had an accident, I hope, Mr. Bleke?”

  Roland was too far gone in misery to speculate as to how this genial stranger came to know his name. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Windlebird, keen student of the illustrated press, had recognized Roland by his photograph in the Daily Mirror. In the course of the twenty yards’ walk from house to tennis-lawn she had put her husband into possession of the more salient points in Roland’s history. It was when Mr. Windlebird heard that Roland had forty thousand pounds in the bank that he sat up and took notice.

  “Lead me to him,” he said simply.

  Roland sneezed.

  “Doe accident, thag you,” he replied miserably. “Somethig’s gone wrong with the worgs, but it’s nothing serious, worse luck.”

  M. Feriaud, having by this time adjusted the defect in his engine, rose to his feet, and bowed.

  “Excuse if we come down on your lawn. But not long do we trespass. See, mon ami,” he said radiantly to Roland, “all now O. K. We go on.”

  “No,” said Roland decidedly.

  “No? What you mean—no?”

  A shade of alarm fell on M. Feriaud’s weather-beaten features. The eminent bird-man did not wish to part from Roland. Toward Roland he felt like a brother, for Roland had notions about payment for little aeroplane rides which bordered upon the princely.

  “But you say—take me to France with you–-“

  “I know. But it’s all off. I’m not feeling well.”

  “But it’s all wrong.” M. Feriaud gesticulated to drive home his point. “You give me one hundred pounds to take you away from Lexingham. Good. It is here.” He slapped his breast pocket. “But the other two hundred pounds which also you promise me to pay me when I place you safe in France, where is that, my friend?”

  “I will give you two hundred and fifty,” said Roland earnestly, “to leave me here, and go right away, and never let me see your beastly machine again.”

  A smile of brotherly forgiveness lit up M. Feriaud’s face. The generous Gallic nature asserted itself. He held out his arms affectionately to Roland.

  “Ah, now you talk. Now you say something,” he cried in his impetuous way. “Embrace me. You are all right.”

  Roland heaved a sigh of relief when, five minutes later, the aeroplane disappeared over the brow of the hill. Then he began to sneeze again.

  “You’re not well, you know,” said Mr. Windlebird.

  “I’ve caught cold. We’ve been flying about all night—that French ass lost his bearings—and my suit is thin. Can you direct me to a hotel?”

  “Hotel? Nonsense.” Mr. Windlebird spoke in the bluff, breezy voice which at many a stricken board-meeting had calmed frantic shareholders as if by magic. “You’re coming right into my house and up to bed this instant.”

  It was not till he was between the sheets with a hot-water bottle at his toes and a huge breakfast inside him that Roland learned the name of his good Samaritan. When he did, his first impulse was to struggle out of bed and make his escape. Geoffrey Windlebird’s was a name which he had learned, in the course of his mercantile career, to hold in something approaching reverence as that of one of the mightiest business brains of the age.

  To have to meet so eminent a man in the capacity of invalid, a nuisance about the house, was almost too much for Roland’s shrinking nature. The kindness of the Windlebirds—and there seemed to be nothing that they were not ready to do for him—distressed him beyond measure. To have a really great man like Geoffrey Windlebird sprawling genially over his bed, chatting away as if he were an ordinary friend, was almost horrible. Such condescension was too much.

  Gradually, as he became convalescent, Roland found this feeling replaced by something more comfortable. They were such a genuine, simple, kindly couple, these Windlebirds, that he lost awe and retained only gratitude. He loved them both. He opened his heart to them. It was not long before he had told them the history of his career, skipping the earlier years and beginning with the entry of wealth into his life.

  “It makes you feel funny,” he confided to Mr. Windlebird’s sympathetic ear, “suddenly coming into a pot of money like that. You don’t seem hardly able to realize it. I don’t know what to do with it.”

  Mr. Windlebird smiled paternally.

  “The advice of an older man who has had, if I may say so, some little experience of finance, might be useful to you there. Perhaps if you would allow me to recommend some sound investment–-“

  Roland glowed with gratitude.

  “There’s just one thing I’d like to do before I start putting my money into anything. It’s like this.”

  He briefly related the story of his unfortunate affair with Muriel Coppin. Within an hour of his departure in the aeroplane, his conscience had begun to trouble him on this point. He felt that he had not acted well toward Muriel. True, he was practically certain that she didn’t care a bit about him and was in love with
Albert, the silent mechanic, but there was just the chance that she was mourning over his loss; and, anyhow, his conscience was sore.

  “I’d like to give her something,” he said. “How much do you think?”

  Mr. Windlebird perpended.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll send my own lawyer to her with—say, a thousand pounds—not a check, you understand, but one thousand golden sovereigns that he can show her—roll about on the table in front of her eyes. That’ll console her. It’s wonderful, the effect money in the raw has on people.”

  “I’d rather make it two thousand,” said Roland. He had never really loved Muriel, and the idea of marrying her had been a nightmare to him; but he wanted to retreat with honor.

  “Very well, make it two thousand, if you like. Tho I don’t quite know how old Harrison is going to carry all that money.”

  As a matter of fact, old Harrison never had to try. On thinking it over, after he had cashed Roland’s check, Mr. Windlebird came to the conclusion that seven hundred pounds would be quite as much money as it would be good for Miss Coppin to have all at once.

  Mr. Windlebird’s knowledge of human nature was not at fault. Muriel jumped at the money, and a letter in her handwriting informed Roland next morning that his slate was clean. His gratitude to Mr. Windlebird redoubled.

  “And now,” said Mr. Windlebird genially, “we can talk about that money of yours, and the best way of investing it. What you want is something which, without being in any way what is called speculative, nevertheless returns a fair and reasonable amount of interest. What you want is something sound, something solid, yet something with a bit of a kick to it, something which can’t go down and may go soaring like a rocket.”

  Roland quietly announced that was just what he did want, and lit another cigar.