was excessively unjust of Priam. Nobody had asked Priam to die. Nobody had asked him to give up his identity. If he had latterly been receiving tens instead of thousands for his pictures, the fault was his alone. Mr. Oxford had only bought and only sold; which was his true function. But Mr. Oxford's sin, in Priam's eyes, was the sin of having been right.
It would have needed less insight than Mr. Oxford had at his disposal to see that Priam Farll was taking the news very badly.
"For both our sakes, cher maître," said Mr. Oxford persuasively, "I think it will be advisable for you to put me in a position to prove that my guarantee to Witt was justified."
"Why for both our sakes?"
"Because, well, I shall be delighted to pay you, say thirty-six thousand pounds in acknowledgment of--er--" He stopped.
Probably he had instantly perceived that he was committing a disastrous error of tact. Either he should have offered nothing, or he should have offered the whole sum he had received less a small commission. To suggest dividing equally with Priam was the instinctive impulse, the fatal folly, of a born dealer. And Mr. Oxford was a born dealer.
"I won't accept a penny," said Priam. "And I can't help you in any way. I'm afraid I must go now. I'm late as it is."
His cold resistless fury drove him forward, and, without the slightest regard for the amenities of clubs, he left the table, Mr. Oxford, becoming more and more the dealer, rose and followed him, even directed him to the gigantic cloak-room, murmuring the while soft persuasions and pacifications in Priam's ear.
"There may be an action in the courts," said Mr. Oxford in the grand entrance hall, "and your testimony would be indispensable to me."
"I can have nothing to do with it. Good-day!"
The giant at the door could scarce open the gigantic portal quickly enough for him. He fled--fled, surrounded by nightmare visions of horrible publicity in a law-court. Unthinkable tortures! He damned Mr. Oxford to the nethermost places, and swore that he would not lift a finger to save Mr. Oxford from penal servitude for life.
Money-getting
He stood on the kerb of the monument, talking to himself savagely. At any rate he was safely outside the monument, with its pullulating population of midgets creeping over its carpets and lounging insignificant on its couches. He could not remember clearly what had occurred since the moment of his getting up from the table; he could not remember seeing anything or anyone on his way out; but he could remember the persuasive, deferential voice of Mr. Oxford following him persistently as far as the giant's door. In recollection that club was like an abode of black magic to him; it seemed so hideously alive in its deadness, and its doings were so absurd and mysterious. "Silence, silence!" commanded the white papers in one vast chamber, and, in another, babel existed! And then that terrible mute dining-room, with the high, unscalable mantelpieces that no midget could ever reach! He kept uttering the most dreadful judgments on the club and on Mr. Oxford, in quite audible tones, oblivious of the street. He was aroused by a rather scared man saluting him. It was Mr. Oxford's chauffeur, waiting patiently till his master should be ready to re-enter the wheeled salon. The chauffeur apparently thought him either demented or inebriated, but his sole duty was to salute, and he did nothing else.
Quite forgetting that this chauffeur was a fellow-creature, Priam immediately turned upon his heel, and hurried down the street. At the corner of the street was a large bank, and Priam, acquiring the reckless courage of the soldier in battle, entered the bank. He had never been in a London bank before. At first it reminded him of the club, with the addition of an enormous placard giving the day of the month as a mystical number--14--and other placards displaying solitary letters of the alphabet. Then he saw that it was a huge menagerie in which highly trained young men of assorted sizes and years were confined in stout cages of wire and mahogany. He stamped straight to a cage with a hole in it, and threw down the cheque for five hundred pounds--defiantly.
"Next desk, please," said a mouth over a high collar and a green tie, behind the grating, and a disdainful hand pushed the cheque back towards Priam.
"Next desk!" repeated Priam, dashed but furious.
"This is the A to M desk," said the mouth.
Then Priam understood the solitary letters, and he rushed, with a new accession of fury, to the adjoining cage, where another disdainful hand picked up the cheque and turned it over, with an air of saying, "Fishy, this!"
And, "It isn't endorsed!" said another mouth over another high collar and green tie. The second disdainful hand pushed the cheque back again to Priam, as though it had been a begging circular.
"Oh, if that's all!" said Priam, almost speechless from anger. "Have you got such a thing as a pen?"
He was behaving in an extremely unreasonable manner. He had no right to visit his spleen on a perfectly innocent bank that paid twenty-five per cent to its shareholders and a thousand a year each to its directors, and what trifle was left over to its men in rages. But Priam was not like you or me. He did not invariably act according to reason. He could not be angry with one man at once, nor even with one building at once. When he was angry he was inclusively and miscellaneously angry; and the sun, moon, and stars did not escape.
After he had endorsed the cheque the disdainful hand clawed it up once more, and directed upon its obverse and upon its reverse a battery of suspicions; then a pair of eyes glanced with critical distrust at so much of Priam's person as was visible. Then the eyes moved back, the mouth opened, in a brief word, and lo! there were four eyes and two mouths over the cheque, and four for an instant on Priam. Priam expected some one to call for a policeman; in spite of himself he felt guilty--or anyhow dubious. It was the grossest insult to him to throw doubt on the cheque and to examine him in that frigid, shamelessly disillusioned manner.
"You are Mr. Leek?" a mouth moved.
"Yes" (very slowly).
"How would you like this?"
"I'll thank you to give it me in notes," answered Priam haughtily.
When the disdainful hand had counted twice every corner of a pile of notes, and had dropped the notes one by one, with a peculiar snapping sound of paper, in front of Priam, Priam crushed them together and crammed them without any ceremony and without gratitude to the giver, into the right pocket of his trousers. And he stamped out of the building with curses on his lips.
Still, he felt better, he felt assuaged. To cultivate and nourish a grievance when you have five hundred pounds in your pocket, in cash, is the most difficult thing in the world.
A Visit to the Tailors'
He gradually grew calmer by dint of walking--aimless, fast walking, with a rapt expression of the eyes that on crowded pavements cleared the way for him more effectually than a shouting footman. And then he debouched unexpectedly on to the Embankment. Dusk was already falling on the noble curve of the Thames, and the mighty panorama stretched before him in a manner mysteriously impressive which has made poets of less poetic men than Priam Farll. Grand hotels, offices of millionaires and of governments, grand hotels, swards and mullioned windows of the law, grand hotels, the terrific arches of termini, cathedral domes, houses of parliament, and grand hotels, rose darkly around him on the arc of the river, against the dark violet murk of the sky. Huge trams swam past him like glass houses, and hansoms shot past the trams and automobiles past the hansoms; and phantom barges swirled down on the full ebb, threading holes
