Contango (Ill Wind) (10 page)

Not that Brown distrusted Parceval. On the contrary, he felt towards him
an admiration that positively throve on their private antipathies. Sir George
was most things that Brown was not. He was brisk, intense, and possessive;
always immaculately turned out, he presided at board-meetings like the high-
priest of some excessively stately ritual. He knew more about finance than
engineering, and his arrangements of the combine’s balance-sheet had
certainly put it beyond the comprehension of most people except accountants.
Brown was hopelessly fogged; he had long since ceased to wonder how much he
himself was worth, except that he knew he had exchanged Government securities
for shares in the combine—a bad bargain, as revealed by 1930 stock-
market valuations. But if he ever expressed misgiving, Parceval would say, in
that boomingly bland way of his: “My dear Brown, the combine has saved
you already. If you’d stayed out of it, it would have undercut and
bankrupted you by now.” Which seemed to Brown a rather depressing
argument.

During that first board-meeting after his return, Brown had as much of a
tiff with Parceval as was possible between two persons of such differing
temperaments. It arose out of the Italian debts which Brown had failed to
collect. Brown asserted that the debtors, though unable to pay, were
perfectly honest; Furnival appeared doubtful.

“But damme, man,” Brown exclaimed, heatedly,
“they’ve been clients of ours for thirty years, and their fathers
before them!”

To which Parceval responded: “They owe us fifty-six thousand pounds,
and it was on your recommendation that we allowed them credit to such an
amount. I don’t think I need say any more.”

And Brown, after that, both looked and felt like a rebuked schoolboy.

Parceval, however, had one more thing to say that was of importance; an
announcement that the current year’s preference dividend would have to
be passed. Brown, hardly calm after his previous outburst, was again
indignant. “Surely—” he began, and then found that he
could think of nothing to express his feelings but another reference to
history. “For half a century Brown’s have paid the dividends on
their six per cent preferences. Never have they defaulted once! And the
shareholders were induced to exchange into the combine’s seven per
cents by being assured that their dividends were going to be even safer!
It’s scandalous!”

“The money cannot be paid,” answered Parceval coldly, and a
few of the other directors, whose companies could not boast of such a record
as Brown’s, supported him. “With large sums of money owing to us,
we are bound to protect ourselves, and we shall do so in future, I hope, by
greater care in the extension of credits to customers overseas.”

Brown subsided again. “Oh, have it your own way, then,” he
muttered, under his breath. Parceval always did have his own way, anyhow.

After the meeting, however, the great man seemed anxious to make any
necessary amends. He accompanied Brown in the lift and to a taxi, chatting
affably meanwhile. “I was glad to hear you had a good time in
Switzerland,” boomed the voice that had squashed so many awkward
interruptions at shareholders’ meetings. “Mathers was telling me.
He also said you met a young Roumanian on the way home—chap with some
kind of aeroplane gadget he wanted to sell— wasn’t that
it?”

Brown forced himself to explain the matter briefly.

“Well,” answered Parceval, “I’m connected with a
company that manufactures aeroplanes, you know, and I don’t want to
miss anything good.”

“I don’t think his idea was at all good. Quite impracticable,
it seemed to me.”

“MIGHT have something in it, though—you never can be sure
with these inventor fellows. I don’t know if you could get in touch
with him easily, but if he cared to call at my office in London I
wouldn’t mind hearing him talk.”

“I’ve only got his address in Bukarest. He’s probably
back there by now.” Brown searched a moment in his pocket-book and
found the visiting-card, “Here you are, if it’s any use to
you.”

“Thanks. When I write, if I do, I’ll mention your name and
your meeting with him, if you don’t mind.”

“The devil you will,” thought Brown, gloomily, but he lacked
the energy to dissent, nor was there really much reason why he should. It
had, however, suddenly occurred to him that he and his wife were the joint
holders of forty-eight thousand preference shares in Amalgamated Engineers,
Limited, and that the passing of the dividend would reduce their income
during the current year from about six thousand to a little over four.

That evening, at the club, he wrote a long letter to her, emphasising the
poor state of trade, but avoiding the mention of any particular item of bad
news. Time enough for her to learn the truth when she got home, he thought.
After he had posted the letter he went to the second house of a music-hall,
drank plenty of whisky, and went to bed. It was an unsatisfactory world, he
decided, trying to sleep. He thought of his father and his grandfather and
his great-grandfather, all living their lives quite comfortably in a more
ordered age—buying raw material and labour, selling the finished
product, and pocketing the difference as neatly and as regularly as
clockwork. All plain sailing in those days. You just made some useful
article, charged a fair price for it, and there you were—with a steady
income for life. And, what was more, you could go on making and selling
without worry. Golden days! But now, with passed dividends and bad debts
abroad and currency losses and income- tax…. Good God, what were things
coming to? And he thought, for one supremely mournful moment: “Perhaps
it’s as well my boy didn’t survive to carry on the firm, since
the firm may not survive to be carried on.”

What troubled him most were the family and household economies that would
have to be made. His own personal wants were simple, but his wife and
daughter spent a good deal; he would have to be unpleasantly frank with them
when they came home. Perhaps one of the three cars could be dispensed with;
his wife might use the big Daimler in future and he himself could make do
with a season- ticket on the railway… But by this time his natural tendency
to look on the brighter side of things had begun to reassert itself, and he
fell asleep tranquilly, hopefully, and a little drunk.

About a fortnight later Brown was still in London and Parceval rang him up
at the club one morning. “Oh, hello, Brown. I’ve just arrived in
town again after a flying visit to Paris. Literally a flying visit. I had to
meet the steel cartel… . By the way, I took the chance of looking up your
Roumanian friend. Nice fellow, as you said.”

“He was still in Paris?”

“Yes, and very glad to see me. It seems the French firm had just
told him there was nothing doing, so he was pleased enough to try his luck
somewhere else.”

“Well, what did you think of his idea?”

“Oh… interesting, you know. And probably no good. Most interesting
ideas are like that. But I told him he could make a model of his tin-can
arrangement down at my works at Chelmsford, if he cared to come over, so I
expect he’s quite happily packing now.”

“But you surely don’t think there’s anything in it, do
you?”

“Well, we shall know more about that when he shows us how it works,
shan’t we?”

“D’you mean to say he’s going to let himself be thrown
out of an aeroplane in the thing?”

“I suppose he is. He won’t find anyone else in a hurry to
volunteer.”

“I—I don’t much like it. He’ll kill
himself.”

“I wouldn’t say that. He needn’t take a very big
risk—he can make his trial descents over some lake, with boats to
bring him in if anything goes wrong.”

“I should hope so.”

“Of course—oh, of course. I like him very much, I may say. A
delightful personality. …”

But Brown had little time to think of the charming Roumanian during the
next few weeks. Further cuts into his already straitened income seemed quite
likely; added to which there came a rather peremptory request from his
bankers to reduce a loan secured on shares of the combine. They had evidently
got wind of the Italian and other losses, and were playing for safety. He
couldn’t blame them, but he thought it was damned bad luck for
everything to come crowding on top of him all at once. Of course he must meet
them somehow—offer them some more shares or give them a mortgage on
his Cheshire establishment, or something. He interviewed various high bank
officials and found them sympathetic but definitely unwilling to accept any
but gilt-edged securities as further cover for the loan, while his
stockbrokers were even pessimistic about being able to dispose of some of his
other shares at all. As for the house, the utmost he could raise on it was
four thousand, and the bank people were asking for fifteen thousand
immediately. Like most men who do not habitually worry, the sensation, being
unfamiliar, turned quickly to panic. He tried to borrow from Mathers and
several other friends, but either they didn’t possess the money or
wouldn’t take the risk of lending. Finally, in complete desperation, he
went to Furnival. But Sir George, though rich enough, did not by any means
whip out a cheque-book and scribble with the alacrity of the copybook friend
in need. He asked many questions with great minuteness and merely said, at
the end: “I shall have to think it over, Brown, and let you know.
It’s rather a big thing to ask, in these days… though of course
I’d like to help you, naturally. By the way, your Roumanian friend is
nearly ready. Could you possibly manage to come over to Chelmsford on Friday?
There might be something to show you.”

Brown promised to go. He spent most of the intervening days in a state of
persistent and devitalising worry over his money affairs. It was not like him
to fear the worst, but he could not subdue the waves of occasional despair
that passed over him. His wife and daughter had already left Virginia on
their way home, and the imminence of his meeting with them and of subsequent
confessions reduced him to even deeper depression. For years he had had the
habit of smiling cheerfully whenever his fellow business men were doleful;
now he wondered if his cheerfulness had been based on a privately sheltered
financial position which he had been lucky enough to occupy, and whether he
would be any less doleful than the rest as soon as the tide of his personal
ruin began to lap at his own doors. The newspapers, with their chatter of
rationalisation and improved selling methods, made him feel sick. How the
devil could he COMPEL customers to buy oil-pumps and water-tube boilers and
reciprocating engines and all the other things that the firm manufactured?
And how could he, as an ordinary man, be expected to pick his way amidst such
pitfalls as frozen credits, depreciated exchanges, high tariffs, and
defaulting clients?

“Really, Parceval,” he exclaimed, in the car to Chelmsford,
“it’s not enough to be a mere business man in these days.
You’ve damned well got to be a Svengali and a Sherlock Holmes in
addition.”

Parceval laughed. “Quite true. Anyone can make things, but it often
requires genius to sell them.”

“Well, I’m not a genius, and I can’t help wishing
I’d been born fifty years ago, when one could do a decent day’s
work and draw a decent day’s pay for it without any worries.”

“Come now, Brown, you know you’ve never done a decent
day’s work in your life, for all your talk.” Parceval laughed
again; such frankness, but slightly insolent, was a favourite manner of his
with those whom he need be at no particular pains to conciliate. He went on,
enjoying himself still more: “What you’re sighing for is a
comfortable income without working for it at all, and you’re cross
because the world’s beginning to wonder why you should have it.
You’ve got to face facts, my dear chap—the easy-going days are
all over. And that celebrated ancestor of yours would have said
‘Hooray’ to that, I fancy.”

“I often wonder what he would have done in times like
these.”

“I can tell you. He’d have done now what he did
then—adapted himself to the circumstances of the age and made a
fortune…. Well, here we are—this is the spot I’ve chosen for
our young friend to make his hit or miss. And, by the way, I haven’t
arranged it as a public spectacle. There’s only you here, myself,
Mathers, and a few workmen pledged to secrecy. Time enough for the flourish
of trumpets, if any, later on.”

The car pulled into the side of a narrow lane in rather pleasantly rural
country. Parceval led the way across a few fields to a prettily situated
sheet of water fringed with tall reeds. Amidst the sudden tranquillity of the
scene, and under that cloudless October sky, Brown felt happier than he had
been for days. Perhaps money did not matter so much, after all, so long as
there were still such things as fields and sunshine. He wondered how much of
England there was, secret and lovely like this, within a few hundred yards of
the roads along which he so often motored. He sniffed the warm, hay-scented
air and felt all his worries relax in almost muscular contentment.

Presently Mathers joined them and Parceval explained his plans for the
afternoon’s experiment. “The plane’s taking off from a
field several miles away; I said we’d all be here by three
o’clock. I don’t think the fellow will want to waste time.
He’s very keen and plucky. Of course it’s a chancy business, but
if he keeps over the water I think he can’t hurt himself much. The
thing’s airtight enough to come to the surface.”

To Brown the waiting, the shimmer of sunlight on the lake, and the
spaciousness of that unknown countryside, seemed all a part of some very
strange dream. He could hardly believe he was about to witness an actual and
perhaps exciting event, and he missed even the approaching aeroplane till his
attention was drawn to it by Parceval. Then, as he heard it zooming overhead,
he felt a tense agitation rising in him. Twice the machine made a circuit of
the lake, while the three principal spectators stared upwards.