The Man Who Bought London (7 page)

‘Will you entertain Mr Bray whilst I get ready to go out?’

Hermann muttered his sulky compliance. He would have liked to refuse point blank, to have indulged himself in a display of temper, if only to embarrass the girl; but he had sufficient command of himself to check his natural desire. He scowled at the young man with whom he was left alone, and answered in monosyllables the polite observations which Gordon Bray offered upon men and things. There was no evidence in either the attire or in the speech of the technical student to suggest that he was of any other class than that of the man who examined him so superciliously.

‘I gather you’re one of the people my sister is distributing prizes to,’ said Hermann rudely.

‘Not exactly,’ said the other quietly. ‘Miss Zeberlieff is very kindly giving the gold medal for drawing, but the Countess of Danbery is actually making the award.’

‘It doesn’t matter much who makes it so long as you get it,’ answered Hermann, summarizing his philosophy of life in one pregnant sentence.

‘As a matter of fact I am not even getting it,’ said the other. ‘I took this medal last year – it represents an intermediate stage of tuition.’ Hermann walked up and down the room impatiently. Suddenly he turned to the visitor.

‘What do you think of my sister?’ he asked.

Gordon went red: the directness of the question flung at him at that moment caught him unawares. ‘I think she is very charming,’ he said frankly, ‘and very generous. As you know, she interests herself in education and particularly in the schools.’

Zeberlieff sniffed. He had never set himself the task of keeping track of his sister’s amusements except in so far as they affected his own future. His own future! He frowned at the thought. He had had heavy losses lately. His judgement had been at fault to an extraordinary degree. He had been caught in a recent financial flurry, and had been in some danger of going farther under than he had any desire to go. He had plenty of schemes – big schemes with millions at their end, but millions require millions. He had put a proposition to the girl, which she had instantly rejected, that on the day of the inheritance they should pool their interests, and that he should control the united fortunes.

If the truth be told, there was little to come to him. He had anticipated his share of the fortune, which was already half mortgaged. In twelve days’ time Vera would be free to leave him – free to will her property wherever she wished. Much might happen in twelve days – the young man might also be very useful.

His manner suddenly changed. He was perfectly learned in the amenities of his class, and there were people who vowed that he was the ideal of what a gentleman should be. His sister was not amongst these.

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ he asked, and took up the thread of technical education with the convincing touch of the dilettante who has all the jargon of science with little backing of knowledge. He kept the young man pleasantly engaged till Vera returned.

Her car was waiting at the door, and he assisted her to enter. ‘My brother was very entertaining, I gather?’ she said.

‘Very.’

She glanced at him, reading his face.

‘You are very enthusiastic,’ she said mockingly.

He smiled. ‘I don’t think he knows much about architecture,’ he said. He had the habit of wholesome frankness, appreciated here, however, by one who lived in an atmosphere which was neither candid nor wholesome.

He thought he had offended her, for she did not speak again till the car was running over Westminster Bridge. Then – ‘You will meet my brother again,’ she said. ‘He will discover your address and invite you to lunch. Let me think.’ She knitted her forehead. ‘I am trying to remember what happened before – Oh, yes! he will invite you to lunch at his club, and encourage you to speak about me; and he will tell you that I am awfully fond of chocolates, and a couple of days afterwards you will receive a box of the most beautiful chocolates from an unknown benefactor, and, naturally, when you have recovered from your astonishment at the gift, you will send it along to me with a little note.’

Whatever astonishment such a happening might have had upon him, it could not exceed that which he now felt. ‘What an extraordinary thing you should have said that!’ he remarked.

‘Why extraordinary?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ he hesitated. ‘As a matter of fact, he has already asked me my address, and he did mention not once, but twice, that you were awfully fond – not of chocolates, but of crystallized violets.’

She looked at him a little blankly. ‘How crude!’ was all she said then; but later she half turned on the seat of the limousine and faced him.

‘When those violets arrive,’ she said quietly, ‘I want you to take the parcel just as it is – wrapping and string and postmark – to Mr King Kerry: he will understand.’

‘King Kerry?’

‘Don’t you like him?’ She asked quickly.

He hesitated. ‘I think I do,’ he replied, ‘in spite of his somewhat drastic methods.’

Elsie had told him the story of the arrest – indeed, King Kerry had half explained – and now he repeated the story of Elsie’s peril.

The girl listened eagerly.

‘What a perfectly splendid idea,’ she said enthusiastically, ‘and how like King Kerry!’

After the distribution, the speechmaking, the votes of thanks, and the impromptu concert which followed the function, the girl sought Bray out, the centre of a group of his fellow-students, who were offering their congratulations, for many prizes had come his way.

‘I want you to take me home!’ she said.

She was a lovely and a radiant figure in her long grey silk coat and her tiny beaver hat; but he saw with tender solicitude that she looked tired, and there were faint shadows under her eyes.

They had reached a point in their friendship where they could afford to be silent in one another’s society. To him she was a dream woman, something aloof and wonderful, in the world, but not of it – a beautiful fragile thing that filled his thoughts day and night. He was not a fool, but he was a man. He could not hope, but he could – and did – love. From the day she came into his life, an interested – and perhaps amused – visitor to the schools, his outlook had changed. She was very worshipful, inspiring all that is beautiful in the love of youth, all that is pure and tender and self-sacrificing.

She was, he knew, very wealthy; he dreamt no dreams of miracles, yet he did not regard her money as being an obstacle.
It was she, the atmosphere which surrounded her, that held him adoring but passive.

‘I want you to do something for me,’ she said.

‘I will do anything.’

There was no emphasis, no fervour in his voice, yet there was something in the very simplicity of the declaration which brought the colour to her cheek.

‘I am sure you would,’ she answered almost impulsively; ‘but this is something which you may find distasteful. I want you to meet me in Regent Street tomorrow evening,’ she said. ‘I – I am rather a coward, and I am afraid of people –’

She did not finish the sentence, and offered no further elucidation to the mystery of a meeting which, so far from being distasteful, set the young man’s heart aflutter afresh.

‘At nine o’clock, at the corner of Vigo Street,’ she said, when she left him, at the door of the Park Lane house, ‘and you will have to be very obedient and very patient.’

She offered her hand, and he took it. She raised it higher and higher, and for a moment he did not understand. Then he bent and kissed it.

She had taken off her glove in the car with that idea.

King Kerry reread a letter which had arrived by the morning post, and, contrary to his custom, placed it in the inside pocket of his coat. His secretary watched the proceedings with apprehension, as marking a return to the bad old days; but he smiled and shook his head. He had a habit of reading her thoughts which was at once uncanny and embarrassing.

‘This is a “really” letter,’ he said, referring to a passage at arms they had had whether a letter was ‘really private’ or just ‘private’ – she had opened a score bearing the latter inscription, only to find that they were of the really begging-letter variety. Henceforth he passed the private letters under review, and judged only by the handwriting or the crest whether it was a confidential communication within the meaning of the Act.

Kerry sat for a long time at his desk, thinking; then, by and by, he took out the letter again and reread it. Whatever were its contents, they worried him, and presently he called a number on the phone which she recognized as being a firm of detectives allied to Pinkerton’s. ‘Send a man to me for instructions!’ he said, and hung up the receiver.

For a long time he was writing furiously, and when the detective was announced, he had still a few more pages to write. He finished at last and handed the papers to the waiting man. ‘This paper is to be carefully read, digested, and destroyed,’ he said. ‘The instructions are to be carried out without reservation, and you are to tell your chief to draw upon me to any extent in the execution of my orders.’

When the man had gone, he turned to the girl. ‘It is a very hard world for women,’ he said sadly, and that was all the reference he made to the letter or its sequel.

On the wall of the office hung a remarkable map. It was a large scale map of London, which had been especially prepared for ‘The King’ (the Press called him ironically ‘The King of London’). Scarcely a day passed but an employee of the maker called to mark some little square, representing a shop or house, with green watercolour paint, King Kerry standing by and directing precisely where the colour patches were to be placed. The green was growing in the map. The Trust was buying up land and house property north, south, and west. Baling, Forest Hill, Brockley and Greenwich were almost all green. Kennington, Southwark, Wandsworth, Brixton, Clapham, and Tooting were well patched; but the object of the Trust was, apparently, to put a green belt around a centre represented by a spot midway between Oxford Circus and Piccadilly. Inside this circle, representing a mile radius, lay the immediate problem of the Trust.

The girl was looking across at the map, noting that the three new green patches which had been added that morning were almost dry, when she caught King Kerry’s amused eyes fixed upon her. ‘How would you like to pay a visit to the scene of your servitude?’ he asked good-humouredly.

‘Tack’s?’ she asked in wonder.

He nodded.

‘I don’t know,’ she demurred. ‘I should feel rather shy, I think.’

‘You must get over that,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Besides, you will find very few people in the same positions in which you left them.’

A few moments later the car came round, and she took her place by his side.

‘People are asking what I am going to do,’ he said, as if reading her thoughts, ‘and this old town is just shaking its hoary head at
me. Tack’s sold a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of goods last year – they will sell half a million pounds’ worth next year.’

She smiled, as at a good joke.

‘You doubt it?’ he asked, with a suggestion of that affectionate amusement which so often sent the colour to her cheeks.

‘Do you know anything about a drapery store?’ she asked, answering one question with another.

He shook his head; the word ‘drapery’ puzzled him.

‘Drapery? – we call them soft goods,’ he said. ‘No, I know no more than I know about boots or railway trucks. People who learn in compartments – there are hundreds of proud fathers who boast their sons are learning their business from office boy to manager; but my opinion is that they usually pass their true vocation halfway between top and bottom. You needn’t start life as a junior clerk to discover that you’re an excellent salesman, and because you’re an excellent salesman you needn’t necessarily be a heaven-born president – you call them managing directors.’

She loved to listen to him when he was in this mood. It was a pity that Tack’s was so near, but a block in the Regent Street traffic gave him time to expound his philosophy of business. ‘The man who watches the window to see the articles that are sold will learn a lot if he has patience and plenty of time; but he will get cold feet. You’ve got to go to the manufacturing end to judge sales, and you have got to go to the man who pulls money out of manufacturing to learn that Mrs So-and-So prefers four buttons on her kid gloves to three. It all comes back to the money behind the manufacturer. There are very few bank managers in Manchester who did not know when beads ceased to be a fashionable attire in the Fiji Islands.’

He went back to Tack’s and its future.

‘Half a million pounds’ worth of goods!’ he laughed quietly, ‘and all to be sold in a year at a little store that never had a bigger turnover than a hundred thousand – it means selling sixteen hundred pounds’ worth of goods a day; it means many other things. My child, you are going to witness some sale!’

She laughed in sheer glee.

There was a considerable change in the appearance of Tack’s even in the short space of time she had been away. The building was a fairly modern one. King Kerry was already reshaping it, and a small army of workmen was engaged day and night in effecting alterations which he had planned.

There had been a tiny little ‘annexe’, too small to dignify with the name. It had owed its existence to the discovery, after the building had been erected, that a piece of land, some twenty feet by twenty, which had been used by Goulding’s as a temporary dumping ground for old packing-cases, and for some extraordinary reason had not been built upon, was part of this freehold. Mr Leete had run up a tiny building on the site (this was before he had acquired a controlling interest in Goulding’s), and the place had been used as auxiliary storerooms. Workmen were engaged in removing the floors from the roof to the ground.

‘I am having two large lifts put in there,’ explained Kerry. ‘They will be about the same size as tube lifts, only they will be much faster.’

Tack had always set his face against the elevator system, adopting the viewpoint that, as it was, people did not get sufficient exercise, and that he had no intention of encouraging laziness.

‘But won’t they be very large?’ asked the girl. ‘I mean too large?’

Kerry shook his head. ‘Sixteen hundred pounds a day means about sixteen thousand purchasers a day, or a little under a thousand an hour.’

She thought she detected a flaw in his arithmetic, but did not correct him; he was surely calculating upon a twenty-four hour day!

Other re-arrangements included new dressing-rooms on the roof. Some of the counters had been taken away, and the broad window spaces upon which so much depended in the old days had been reduced by seventy-five per cent and the additional space afforded had been utilized for the erection of large flat trays. In place of the old window display, electricians were fitting long, endless belts of black velvet running the whole width of each window, upon which the lighter goods were to be displayed.

‘Each article will have a big number attached and the price in plain figures: there will be a sample-room on the ground floor, where all the customer has to do is to ask to see the number she wants to purchase. When she has decided what she wants, she goes upstairs to the first floor and it is handed to her ready wrapped. There will be no waiting. Every sample clerk will have a little phone in front of her. She will be in constant communication with the packing-room. She will signal the purchases, and the customer has only to go to the counter, or one of the counters, bearing her initial, mention her name, and take the parcel.’

The girl looked at him in amazement. It seemed remarkable to her that he had thought all this out and that she was unaware of the fact.

‘You are preparing for a rush?’ she asked, and she said it in such a tone that he laughed.

‘You don’t think we shall be so busy, eh? Well,
nous verrons
!’

Elsie caught many envious glances cast in her direction. Old acquaintances have a trick of remembering friendships which never existed – especially with those who have been fortunate in life. She had had no close friends in the business, but there were many who now regarded her as a sometime bosom confidante, and were prepared to harbour a grievance against her if she did not hold them in like regard. Some called her ‘Elsie’, who had never before taken that liberty, doubtless with the desire to establish their intimacy before she advanced too far along the golden road. This is the way of the world. But Elsie was too warm-hearted to be cynical, and responded readily to their overtures of friendship.

Their salaries had been substantially raised, so ‘Fluff’, a pretty little girl in the ‘White’ department, told her. ‘All the rotters have been sacked, three of the shop-walkers, and the manager of the “ready-mades”,’ said the girl enthusiastically. ‘Oh, Miss Marion, it was splendid to see that beast Tack walk out for the last time.’

‘Things are awfully comfortable,’ said another – Elsie had an opportunity for gossiping whilst King Kerry interviewed the new manager – ‘but there is going to be an awful rush, and those awful fines have been abolished. Oh! and they’re taking on an awful number of girls, though where they’re going to put ’em all heaven knows – we shall be awfully crowded!’

The girl bore the nickname of ‘Awful Agnes’, not without reason.

King Kerry rejoined Elsie, and they drove back to the office together. ‘Had to take a big warehouse to stock our goods,’ he explained. ‘We shall sell a few! Every other shop in the street for two hundred yards in each direction is engaged in the same business as us. I have offered to buy the lot, but I guess they’ve got an exaggerated idea of the value of things.’

Whether they had or not, there were some who were prepared to fight the ‘Big L’.

That same night there appeared in all the London evening papers the announcement that ‘The Federal Trades of London’ had been incorporated as a limited company. The list of the firms in the new combine included every store in Oxford Street engaged in the same business as Tack and Brighten’s.

‘The object of the Federation’ (said the announcement) ‘is to afford mutual protection against unfair competition. Each firm concerned will act independently so far as its finances are concerned, and the shareholders’ interests will remain undisturbed. By means of this combine it is hoped that the pernicious operations of a certain American Trust will be successfully checked.’

The list of directors included Hermann Zeberlieff, Esq. (independent gentleman), and John Leete (managing director of Goulding’s, Limited).

‘Pernicious operations!’ repeated King Kerry. ‘Say, this paper doesn’t like us!’ He turned over the sheets of the
Evening Herald
. ‘A bright little paper,’ he mused. Then he took out his cheque book and signed his name in the bottom right-hand corner.

He blotted the signature, and passed the slip across to the girl.

‘Elsie,’ he said, and the girl flushed, for he had never before called her by her first name. ‘The
Evening Herald
is on the market. They want sixty thousand pounds for the concern; they may take less. Here’s a blank cheque. Go down and buy that durned paper.’

‘Buy?’ the girl gasped. ‘I – but I don’t – I can’t – I’m not a business woman!’

‘It’s for sale – go and buy it; tell them you’re King Kerry’s partner.’ He smiled encouragingly and laid his hand on hers. ‘My partner,’ he said softly. ‘My dear little partner!’