The Man Who Bought London (14 page)

‘Are you learning something?’

She heard the deep, rich note of King Kerry, and turned, smiling.

‘Headache better?’ he asked.

‘Quite all right, I feel awfully guilty – I’ve only just got up.’

He led the way down to the end of the warehouse where the men were working with that fervour which is equally induced by piecework and the proximity of the employer.

‘There’s a case of wonderful lace being unpacked over there,’ he said; ‘you ought to see it.’

‘I should love to!’ she said, and picked her way through the cases to where a number of women were lifting the narrow trays from the big cabinet.

In her eagerness she failed to notice a rope that lay on the ground: her toe caught, and she went sprawling and would have injured herself but for her presence of mind to catch at the edges of a small case that lay in her path.

Her arms took the strain, and her face just touched the top of the case.

‘My God, she’s hurt!’ King Kerry leapt nimbly over the packages toward her. He was justified in his mistake, for she lay for some time with her head on the box where she had fallen.

But it was a smiling face she turned to him as she rose unassisted to her feet.

‘Are you sure you aren’t hurt?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

A man came to move the little packing-case upon which she had rested. It was the case of gloves which she had seen arrive.

‘Don’t touch that, please!’ she said quickly.

‘What is it?’

King Kerry looked at her in amazement.

‘Ask the men to lift that case on to the wharf,’ she said, ‘and tell them to be very careful with it.’ Wonderingly, he turned to give the order, and followed the men to the wharf without.

‘Whatever is wrong?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know quite,’ she said, ‘but put your ear to that box, and listen!’

He obeyed, and rose up with a frown. He put his nose to the box, and sniffed.

‘Open the box carefully!’ he said.

For he heard the loud tick-tick-tick, as plainly as she.

‘It may be an infernal machine,’ she said; but he shook his head.

‘I think I know what it is,’ he said quietly.

Under a powerful arc light, lowered from its standard to afford a better view, the box was opened. On the top was a layer of paper carefully folded, but under that the case seemed to be packed tightly with shavings of some transparent material.

‘Celluloid!’ said King Kerry briefly, ‘an old cinema film cut up in short lengths.’

They cleared this out before they came to the machine itself.

It was screwed to the bottom of the case, and enclosed in a wicker-work cage of flimsy material. It consisted of a clock, a small electric battery, and few shavings.

‘Set for two o’clock,’ said King Kerry; ‘the hour our men finish. The alarm key soldered to a piece of metal so that when the alarm goes off the strip of metal turns with the key, a contact is made, and a spark sets the celluloid ablaze – highly ingenious! I’ll show you how it is done!’ He carried the machine to the edge of the water, where there was no danger of the fire spreading, placed it upon a steel plate, and buried the machine in the celluloid shavings after manipulating the alarm hand.

They waited, and in a minute they heard the whirr of the alarm as it spun; then there was a tiny flicker of light amongst
the celluloid shavings, a sudden roar of flame, and the wharf was illuminated with a tongue of fire that leapt up from the blazing film.

They watched it in silence until it died down to the molten red of something which had been a clock.

‘I could have kept that clock for evidence,’ said King Kerry, ‘but he will have covered his tracks. How can I thank you, Elsie?’ he asked. He turned and faced her; they stood in the shadow of a great stack of cases piled in the centre of the wharf.

‘Thank me?’ she said tremulously. ‘Why, it is I who have to thank you.’

He laid both his hands on her shoulders and looked down into her face. She met his gaze fearlessly.

‘Once there was a girl like you,’ he said softly, ‘and I loved her as a man may love a child – too young to be shadowed with the thing we men call love. And the thing I loved was a husk – just an outward mask, and when she lifted the mask it nearly killed me. And here is Elsie Marion with the face and laughing eyes – and the heart of a woman behind the face, and the brain of a comrade behind the eyes –’

He dropped his hands suddenly, and he fell forward as though weighted with infinite weariness.

‘What is the matter?’ she asked in alarm.

‘Nothing!’ his voice was hard. ‘Only I wish I hadn’t been a fool – once.’

She waited with a beating heart; she knew something dreadful was coming.

‘I am married to the worst woman in the world. God help me!’ he said brokenly.

‘What the dickens do you want to go to the City for?’ grumbled John Leete, ‘at this hour?’

He looked at his watch. It wanted a quarter to two o’clock in the morning, and the club was an inviting place, for Leete was an inveterate gossip.

‘I love the City at this hour,’ said Hermann calmly. ‘Let us come along and see the enemy’s stronghold.’

‘Fat lot of good that will do,’ growled Leete.

‘Sometimes your vulgarity appals me,’ said Zeberlieff with a little smile, ‘and I think of all vulgarity there is none quite so hopelessly appalling as the English variety.’

His car was waiting outside, and Leete, still grumbling, allowed himself to be led to its interior.

‘It is better to breathe good fresh air than fill your lungs with the poison of a beastly smoke-room,’ he said as the car went its noiseless way eastward.

Mr Leete made a noise of dissent. ‘I never do things that are unnecessary,’ he said.

‘It is necessary to propitiate the new proprietor of Goulding’s,’ said Hermann softly.

Leete grinned in the darkness. He regarded himself as ‘well out’ of that concern. Let Zeberlieff make his million and welcome – if he could.

‘I’ll send you the papers tomorrow,’ he said as a thought struck him. ‘By the way, you might give me a line tonight to the effect that you agree –’

‘Certainly!’ said the other easily. He stopped the car in King William Street. ‘Walk across London Bridge and pay homage to the genius of King Kerry,’ he said.

Leete grunted disrespectfully, and let himself down from the car. ‘Well?’

They had stopped in one of the stone recesses on the bridge, and were gazing intently across the river. A passing policeman, walking on noiseless soles, eyed them, and stopped at Hermann’s friendly nod.

‘I suppose, constable, that big building with the lights is Mr Kerry’s famous warehouse?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the man, stretching himself from the belt upward in the manner of policemen, ‘that is the King of London’s magazine, so to speak.’

A ghost of a smile nickered over the features of Zeberlieff. ‘A rare fright he gave my mate tonight,’ the policeman went on, ‘he was on the bridge between ten and eleven and suddenly the whole of the wharf seemed burning.’

‘Burning?’ Zeberlieff’s voice expressed interest.

‘It was only a packing case – something was wrong with it, and Mr Kerry himself touched it off. My mate is serving a summons on him tomorrow; it’s against the law to light bonfires on a wharf.’

‘So he found something was wrong with it and touched it off, did he?’ repeated Hermann, without a tremor of voice. ‘How like Kerry to be there when something was wrong.’ He offered the constable a tip, and was a little surprised when it was courteously refused.

‘Queer people, these City police,’ said Leete.

‘Not so queer as Kingy,’ said the other cryptically.

Not a word was spoken as they drove back westward.

Nearing Piccadilly, Leete seized the opportunity to make his bargain solid.

‘Come in, and we’ll fix up that agreement,’ he said as the car stopped, and he stepped heavily to the pavement.

‘Which agreement?’ asked Hermann coolly.

‘The sale of Goulding’s,’ said the other.

He caught the flash of Zeberlieff’s white teeth as he smiled. ‘Don’t be silly!’ he said good-naturedly. ‘I was joking.’

To say that Leete was staggered is to express in a relatively mild phrase a most tremendous emotion.

‘But – but –’ he stammered.

‘Good night!’ said Hermann as he slammed the door of the car and pressed the electric signal to his driver.

He left Mr Leete, a helpless figure, standing on the kerb, and looking stupidly after the fast-vanishing car.

The secret was out. London was amazed and staggered. It went about its several avocations, its head whizzing with figures. The Press devoted columns to the extraordinary story.

‘King Kerry has bought London!’ ran a flaming headline across a whole page of the
Examiner
.

It was an excusable exaggeration. If he had not bought London he had dug into the heart of it. He had belted it with a broad belt of business areas.

London was to be reshaped. He had laid his plans with extraordinary genius, avoiding the Crown property as being unpurchasable, and the adamantine ground landlord’s domain. Here was the plan admirably summarized in the columns of the
Evening Herald
, which spoke with authority –

‘I intend,’ said Kerry in an interview, ‘to create on the south side of the river a new Champs Élysées. Between Westminster Bridge Road and Waterloo Road I shall erect a noble avenue flanked by the houses of the wealthy. It will run almost to the water’s edge, and will terminate at either end in a triumphal arch which shall be worthy to rank with the Arc de Triomphe.’

It was to an interested crowd of reporters which had gathered in his office.

‘What will you do with the people you displace, Mr Kerry?’ asked one of the journalists. ‘I refer, of course, to the slum people who are entitled, if they possibly can, to live near their places of livelihood.’

‘I have provided for that,’ said Mr Kerry. ‘I recognize the necessity of making very ample provision in that respect. I shall create my own slums,’ he smiled. ‘It is a hateful word, and it is only one which I employ to designate a congested area occupied by the poor. I shall not, of course, attempt to make any provisions for the mendicant, the semi-mendicant, or for what I might term the casual itinerant class. My idea of a poor family is one in which the combined efforts of all its adult members do not produce enough money to provide the necessities of life. For these at intervals in my residential belt, I am erecting co-operative flats.’

He took from a large portfolio a series of drawings, and laid them on the table before the crowding pressmen.

‘You will see,’ he said, ‘that in point of design we have copied the elevation of some of the most beautiful hotels in London. Indeed, I think we may say that we have gone beyond that. These buildings will be absolutely complete in themselves. Tenants will only be admitted who agree to the co-operative system. Stores providing every commodity will be found in the building itself. There will be
baths, gymnasia, playgrounds, a hospital, a crèche, and a free library. Each building,’ he said briefly, ‘will be self-governed, will contain its doctor, its dentist, and its trained nurses, all of whom will be at the disposal of the citizens of this little community free of all charge.

‘A system of elevators will make the highest floor as accessible as the lowest – indeed, the highest rents will be for the top floors. All the employees in the community will be subject to the discipline of a committee which will be elected by the tenants themselves. Although we shall provide fireplaces, the whole of the building will be run on a system of central heating; hot water and electric light will be included in the rent, and we hope to give every family six thousand cubic feet of space. Each building,’ he concluded, ‘will have accommodation for a thousand families.’

‘What is your object, Mr Kerry,’ asked a curious reporter, ‘in buying so much valuable property in the centre of the West End and then destroying it? Isn’t it so much money thrown away?’

Kerry shook his head.

‘What happens,’ he asked, ‘when a policeman rides his horse into the centre of a crowd? Is it not a fact that the crowd swells out and covers almost a third as much space as before? At any rate, this is a fact: that a thousand square feet stolen from the heart of London means that ten thousand feet more are occupied on its outskirts. Briefly,’ he went on, ‘in the heart of London you are restricted as to space. There are many businesses which would willingly and gladly extend their present premises to twice the size they at present occupy but for the prohibitive cost, and very often the absolute impossibility of securing adjacent premises renders this impossible. We have said “You have got to get out of this anyway,” and now we have given the firms which have been disturbed – and which generally are now mine,’ he said with
a smile, ‘an opportunity of taking space adequate to their needs. People are coming to the centre to shop – do not doubt that – this is the rule of all towns. We merely extend the boundaries of the exclusive shopping district and give an incentive to private enterprises to assist us in our work of beautifying London.

‘I am satisfied as to this,’ he said. ‘That we shall have the satisfaction of knowing that we shall enrich thousands and impoverish none by what we have done. You may now understand my action in regard to my sales. It was necessary. Tack and Brighten, Modelson and Goulding, they abutted into the square of my dreams; they are now my exclusive property. I bought Goulding’s this morning,’ he said with a little twitch of his mouth at the recollection of an agitated and almost tearful Mr Leete, making his unconditional surrender.

‘My sale will continue until the end of the year, until, in fact, I am ready to pull down and start rebuilding. And in the meantime,’ he added, ‘I have guaranteed the dividends of all the firms which I have not purchased, but which are directly affected as a result of my action.’

Here was enough for London to discuss; sufficient to set heads shaking and nodding and tongues wagging from one end of London to the other. Here began, too, the London land boom which was the feature of the memorable year. It was found that King Kerry had acquired great blocks of property here and there. Sometimes they comprised whole streets, but he had left enough for the land speculator to build his fortunes upon. Automatically, the value of land rose in certain districts by one hundred and two hundred per cent, and it is said, though there is little evidence to support the fact, that in one week King Kerry himself, on behalf of his syndicate, made a profit of over a million pounds from the
sale of land which he had recently included in his purchases, but for which he himself had no immediate use.

It is a fact that when his plan became generally known he received the heartiest co-operation from the Government, and, though he might not touch Crown freehold, every facility was given to him to further his scheme.

He had planned a garden city to extend in an unbroken line from Southwark to Rotherhithe and on to Deptford – a new City Beautiful, rising out of the dust of squalid, insanitary cottages and jerry-built dwellings. His plan was given in detail in an issue of the
Evening Herald
, which attained a circulation limited only by the capacity of its output.

It was obvious now that money had flowed like water into London, and that it was not alone the six men who had set out to accomplish so much who had assisted in the fulfilment of King Kerry’s plans, but all the great insurance companies of America, all the big railways, all the great industrial concerns had contributed largely.

It was computed by a financial authority that the big ‘L Trust’ had incurred liabilities (and presumably they were in a position to meet those liabilities) amounting to eighty million pounds. Somebody asked King Kerry if this were so.

‘I will tell you,’ he answered good-humouredly, ‘after I have counted the change in my pocket.’

King Kerry rented a little house in Cadogan Square. It is characteristic of the man that he lived on the property of others. It is also remarkable that he – the owner of millions – should have hired the house furnished, but his action may be explained by his favourite dictum, ‘Never buy what you don’t want, and never hire what you need.’

He did not want either the house or furniture. The house was situated in a region beyond the scope of his speculations.

Here, with an elderly housekeeper to attend to him during the few hours he was at home, he secured the quiet that was necessary to him. The house was not taken in his name, and none of the people who dwelt in the Square had the slightest idea of the identity of the tenant who usually returned in the middle of the night and afforded them no greater opportunity for recognition than the few seconds it took him to step from his front door into his closed car.

Even Elsie Marion, who knew the whereabouts of the house, had never been there, nor addressed him there. So that when he sat at his frugal dinner, and his elderly servitor brought a message that a gentleman wished to see Mr Kerry, he was pardonably annoyed.

‘I told him there wasn’t any such person living here, sir,’ said the housekeeper, who was as ignorant of her master’s identity as the rest of the Square.

Possibly a reporter who had hunted him down, thought Kerry. ‘Show him into the drawing room,’ he said, and finished his dinner at leisure. The irritation quickly passed – after all, there was no longer any necessity for concealment. In a week’s time he would be on his way to the Continent to take the rest which he felt was so necessary. All things were shaping well.

The magnates of Oxford Street had fallen, the plan for the rebuilding of London was public property; now was the time, if ever, to take things easy.

He put down his serviette, walked upstairs to the first landing and entered the little drawing room.

A man was standing by the mantelpiece with his back to Kerry, and as the ‘man who bought London’ closed the door he turned.

It was Hermann Zeberlieff. For the space of a minute the two faced each other, neither speaking.

‘To what am I indebted?’ began Kerry.

Hermann interrupted him, almost roughly. ‘Let us cut all that out,’ he said, ‘and come right down to business.’

‘I do not know that I have any business that I wish to discuss with you,’ said King Kerry, quietly.

‘Oh, yes, you have, Mr Kerry,’ drawled Hermann, mockingly, ‘you probably know that I am in a very bad place. What opportunity I had you most ruthlessly destroyed. I was in your infernal syndicate.’

‘Not by my wish,’ said the other. ‘I did not know of it until you were in.’

‘And then you took the earliest opportunity of getting me out,’ said Hermann with his twisted smile. ‘I’m afraid,’ he went on with a show of regret, ‘I’m a vain beggar – vanity was always my undoing. The temptation to let all the world know that I was figuring in this great combination was too strong. However, we won’t discuss that. What I do wish you to understand is that at the present moment I have a few thousand between me and absolute beggary.’

‘That is no business of mine.’ King Kerry was brief; he wasted no words with his visitor.

‘But it is very much a business of mine,’ said Hermann quickly. ‘Now, you have to assist me – you’ve put me into an awful mess, and you must please lend a helping hand to pull me out. You are, as I happen to know, a particularly soft-hearted man, and you would not desire to see a fellow-creature reduced to living within his income.’

There was little softness in King Kerry’s face. The humour of the other, such as it was, made no appeal to him. His lips were set hard, his eyes cold and forbidding.

‘I will do nothing for you,’ he said. ‘Nothing – nothing!’

Hermann shrugged his shoulders.

‘Then I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that I shall have to force you.’

‘Force me?’ A contemptuous smile played about the grim face of the grey-haired man.

‘Force you,’ repeated the other. ‘You see, Mr King Kerry, you have a wife –’

‘We will not discuss her,’ said King Kerry harshly.

‘Unfortunately, I must discuss her,’ insisted Hermann. His tone was soft and gentle, almost caressing. ‘You see, she has some claim on me. I feel a certain responsibility towards her, remembering the honoured name she bore before she married you, and,’ he added carefully, ‘before you deserted her.’

The other made no reply.

‘Before you deserted her,’ repeated Hermann. ‘It was a peculiarly unhappy business, was it not? And I fear you did not behave with that genial courtesy, that largeness of heart, which the Press today tell me are your chief characteristics.’

‘I behaved fairly to her,’ said Kerry steadily. ‘She tried to ruin me, even went into competition against me behind my back and used the knowledge she had secured as my wife to that end. She was an infamous woman.’

‘Is,’ murmured the other.

‘She is, then,’ said King Kerry. ‘If you come to appeal in her name, you may as well appeal to this wall.’

Hermann nodded.

‘But suppose I produce your wife to the admiring gaze of London; suppose I say “This person is Mrs King Kerry, the unbeloved wife of Mr King Kerry,” and so-and-so and so forth?’

‘That would not shake my determination,’ said Kerry. ‘You cannot use that lever to force me into giving you money.’

‘We shall see!’ said the other. He picked up his hat and favoured Kerry with a little bow and walked from the room.

King Kerry stood as if rooted to the ground long after the door had slammed upon his visitor, and the face of the millionaire was blanched and old.