Hilaire Belloc

“ Charlbury conducted from the base in the City, while Terrard skirmished in the West—and between them they were doing very well: were the firm of Blake and Blake, known to the gods as Charlie Terrard but to men as Old Charlbury.
Deep in the heart of London on the edge of that Square Mile of the Very Rich who are the delight of the millions they defile, stands a wild patch of loneliness known as “The Paddenham Site.” It is some acres of abandoned ground worth—it should be—sums untold: but none will buy. ”

“ Blagden wearily. “None at all.”
“My dear sir,” said Mr. Wilkins, shocked, “do consider what you are saying! Two millions! More than two millions!”
“I assure you I mean it,” said Mr. Blagden sincerely and simply. “What on earth does a man want with more than sixty thousand a year? I’ve got that now, apart from all this last detestable nonsense.”
The image of Mr. Trefusis rose in his mind and nauseated him; for the morbid mood of those last days remained as a strong impression, although he was now back again in his right mind. ”

“ The eager judgment and counter-judgment, argument, affirmation, bluff, falsehoods, tips, went back and forth in an amazing game: for it is a game where every one plays his own hand, and where the number of relations is the square of all those present. But it is a game which works to a climax and then halts or languishes; it is a fire of thorns, burning very quickly to ash; and Mr. Petre, dazed in the babel and thanking his stars that it prevented questions which might have destroyed his peace, was alarmed to find that the subject drooped and that gaps of silence appeared. ”

“ They lunched. They proceeded. And Mr. Petre gazed for a good ten minutes on sodden grasses waving in the wind, tall and dirty stalks and broken palings; the poor abandoned acres of bare land lying there doing nothing, with the enormous wealth of London all around. It was like seeing a hole in the middle of the sea, and wondering why the water did not pour in and flood it; wondering why the huge appetite of London did not snap up such a morsel, why the jostle of London didn’t crowd that vacancy with London once again.
It was an odd ritual, this looking at the nothingness of the Paddenham Site. ”

“ Charlie Terrard had done better. Better than the banker’s wife, better than the kindly old Cabinet Minister, better than the two ex-Lord Chancellors, better than Mrs. Cyril herself; better even than Marjorie Kayle; better, far better, than the solid banker himself, who as he trudged manfully back to his office had turned the thing over in his mind and had determined with sound business sense that when a man like John K. Petre said publicly that he was buying it meant quite certainly that he was unloading. ”

“ Mr. Petre delved down again into the depths of his mind. Whatever he may have been in that past life of his, he had evidently been courteous, for he felt the necessity of answering by writing and by messenger, and not by telephone. The more he thought of the affair, the more he discovered at once its possibilities and its dangers. In the last few hours the shrinking from humiliation had become an obsession. He was now fixed in a mood such that he would rather have died than admit his hidden trouble. ”

“ They strolled southward, and in a leisurely conversation full of simplicity and good humor and good sense Charlie Terrard with his frank blue eyes and frank yellow hair (that curled) had discovered before they reached Piccadilly that Mr. Petre had fixed on no broker in town: not one more than another; it was just like his eccentricities to buy at random and refuse to be bound; it was another millionaire eccentricity to buy through Charlie, and Charlie was only too happy to oblige. ”

“ Petre rapidly turned over the score of pages. There was a huntsman in a red hat with a feather in it, a very large muzzle-loading gun under his arm, holding a dead fox up by the tail, while his companion blew a horn; there was a lion with a human-looking face holding up his paw to a young man with gooseberry eyes who was pulling a thorn out; there was an old gentleman in a gray tunic pointing towards a star, his gaze followed by a young gentleman in a blue tunic whose face was fatuous beyond the dreams of avarice ”

“ Terrard shook his head. “It can’t be that. He’s offering them to Trefusis,” he said.
Mr. Charlbury smiled pitifully. “That’s the bait,” he remarked. “He’ll buy in later, after the slump.”
Terrard respected his partner’s judgment in High Finance now, as he had for so long in lesser things of the sort. But he had seen Petre’s face with his own eyes that evening; Petre’s bewildering appeal was still in his ears. He was confident there was something much deeper than so obvious a maneuver. Perhaps a man like Petre, one of the masters of the world, had heard of coming war; of plague. ”

“ Petre across the table and making his points distinctly with just that touch and gesture which helps such a catalogue.
“It’s about a bit of land called ‘The Paddenham Site.’”
Mr. Petre sat beside him, leaning back a little in his chair, and wearing that look which he himself felt to be a betrayal of complete incapacity, and which all who met him and knew his name (but none more than Charlie Terrard) revered as the mask of financial genius. Indeed, a sudden terror seized the young broker at the thought of his own audacity, but he conquered it and went ahead. ”

“ Then with infinitely greater force, with a thud like a battering ram, came the consideration that he was by way of meeting a sum the like of which was fantastic beyond the powers of any but one man in millions. Under the deadening blow of that fairly obvious discovery he reeled back into the consolation which he had already found on that day, not so long past, when he had ordered with perfect simplicity in the corner of Berkeley Square the purchase of fifty-thousand barbarous things called Touaregs of which he knew not anything at all. ”

“ That same night a young and guileless constable of Division Phi, his head relieved of its preposterous helmet and his hands swinging at ease between his knees as he sat on a bench with betters, enjoying a brief and well-earned leisure, said: “That foreign millionaire at the Splendide, him as they call....”
“Never mind what they call him, me lad,” broke in a voice of authority, years and stripes, “the less you call him anything the better for you. Them’s orders.” ”

“ Charlbury’s patient but ingenious fancy one more good, great and thumping Petre deal. For John K. Petre was the master of American Rotors—and the opportunity lay patent. Mr. Charlbury long wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. But the Dæmon knew why.
The Rotor has come to enter into nearly everything that a man sees, and does, to-day. The last generation, that of the Great War, never dreamt of it. Ours will remember how it came, first in the modest form of a toy with an outlandish name, and put upon the market in London and Paris by the Japanese. ”

“ His Lordship could be terribly firm; and Batterby thought of the little house in Golder’s Green and the nagging, dissatisfied wife, and inwardly trembled.... No, he couldn’t risk it.... At least, not unless Arthur would guarantee him, and Arthur wouldn’t. Arthur had sworn he would know nothing about it.... So there was an end of it. But it was astonishing how full Batterby’s mind was of John K. Petre; almost as though he had him there by his side, arm in arm. It is said that very great men thus permeate the air of the cities through which they pass. It may be so. ”

“ Cyril went through them one by one in their exact order of greatness, and shouted at the kind old Cabinet Minister again, to give Mr. Petre some impression of the way in which one had to talk to him.
Never was a man more deeply impressed than was Mr. Petre by the solemn deference he received. One after another each of those men and each of those women spiritually knelt before him, and there was manifest in their eyes and in their gestures all the spirit of religion. He who showed it least was young Terrard; yet even he showed it plentifully, and Marjorie Kayle exceeded. ”

“ It was in no very happy mood that he returned to his rooms and awaited his guest.
But men in those moods are compelled to abrupt decisions. It is the only escape from their torture, and to such a second decision was Mr. Petre led upon this enormous occasion.
Charlie Terrard came in all breeze and happiness, with a dancing light in his honest blue eyes—I had almost added, in his honest curling hair. He seemed ready to talk of anything but business, and he came to business only as a little tedious frill, necessary, and soon to be dismissed. ”

“ When Mr. Petre reached his room he realized that panic is a bad adviser.
In his terror and shame lest that roomful should guess his misfortune, he had not only put himself in peril—he did not know the law on these things, but he thought that he might very well have committed a crime—but he had also brought in, with that peril, the peril of a complete discovery. ”

“ Petre’s soul. But the scent of that fetid air nauseated him. He read the prices as a decent man reads, from a kind of itch and against his better instincts, the exploitation of the gallows by our great modern Lords in their newspapers. He reads: but hates it the more as he reads. Till at last he burns the rag.
So felt Mr. Petre as he watched Magnas moving.
When a big thing moves it does not move like Touaregs, that flighty Gallic-African stock; it moves as moves the mighty Pachyderm, in a solemn ascentional surge like a herd of elephants breasting a hill ”

“ He had tried gently to suggest a little going out into the world, a little relief from such strange isolation; but he had met with so fierce and unaccustomed a refusal to discuss the thing at all, that he had shrunk back—and he let some weeks go by without troubling that inhuman loneliness.
Mr. Petre was suffering after a fashion which Terrard could not understand. The original gnawing tooth of self-ignorance, the now maddening, now despairing and numbing presence of an impotent self that was not a self, had been reënforced as an agent of decay by a new and surely morbid mood ”

“ John K. Petre was already in Paris, and on his way to the warmer ports of the South, and so by an Italian boat to his home. All thought of our Island was doubly abhorrent to him now and for ever.
As for Mr. Blagden, he had paid and paid and paid, without the least regret, delay or protest; and now that all was over, he sat with Buffy Thompson in the dear library at Harrington settling his plans.
“I’ve made up my mind, Buffy,” he said. “I thought I could have stayed here till the end of my life. But it needs a poorer man to do that.” ”

“ Petre’s entrance, but very courteously motioned him to a chair, on which that financier sat down uncertainly, awaiting inquisition. The Great Specialist looked at him for a moment, and he at the Great Specialist. He felt sure that the Great Specialist was searching the very inwards of his soul, while as for himself, he could not even search, but only very generally receive the most external, the most superficial impression of that eminent man before him. ”

“ When a little later one of his innumerable hostesses had taken Charlie Terrard aside, and had implored him to tell her what Petre was doing (“You are the only man who knows,” she had said, archly, damn her!) Terrard with a look of too much wisdom had protested that he didn’t know. When the private deal in Magnas was over and the general appreciation of the stock and the benefit it had produced to the house he served was discussed in the Bank parlor, the Master of that place smiled meaningly at his subordinate and said that Petre was a curious man. ”

“ Yes; he must, he must, he must discover; but he must discover before any fatal guess, any frightened random answer of his to some chance question, should destroy him.
One thing consoled him; the valiant loyalty of that Registration Clerk at the Splendide, whom now he felt to be his own brother in a world of misery and fear. For as Mr. Petre had leaped into that cab he had shot a glance at the dreadful Mephistopheles, and had seen him asking a question at the desk, and had seen the noble official, who had all power in his hands, shake his read resolutely and turn away. ”

“ Mr. Wilkins heard patiently the details; of the sudden loss of memory, the name Petre, the financial dealings, the writ. He showed not the faintest surprise at any part of the extraordinary story of lost identity (which he entirely disbelieved) , he jotted down dates and then gave tongue.
He used the customary string of technicalities, to each of which was attached a customary payment. He took for granted, in that clear-cut professional manner which was part of his job, that his client had done something quite amazingly astute; that he had been running very close to the wind. ”

“ Marjorie Kayle was a matter of shillings, and she would have to borrow those. They might make their little profits. He didn’t grudge them. It wasn’t things of that sort that affected a market. It was something very different; it was a mighty rumor, and the confirmation of that rumor: that was what moved a stock. And Charlie Terrard now had the lever of that solidly between his hands.
Charlie Terrard was wrong; not in his judgment of the non-effect of Mrs. Cyril’s purchase and the rest in such a big market—that any fool could have judged. ”

“ It was the first time he had broken the wall of his isolation with any human being. It had been a human being, humble, poor and loyal; to be trusted, if any one could be. But the doctor was another matter. Mr. Petre—he knew not why, some impression perhaps received in the old days of which he knew nothing and which yet remained with him—Mr. Petre distrusted all professions, all corporations; for he feared that their members would always be more loyal to their Guild than to the private citizen with whom they dealt. ”

“ When he was off and away no man should know where he might be; save when, at rare intervals, he cabled a code word during his travels, awaited the reply, and then moved off again. In these annual bouts of leisure John Kosciusko Petre improved his mind, and he read, and read, and read, and read, and read. ”

“ He was tall, bald, as strong and energetic as any man twenty years his junior. He was silent, and prided himself on being silent; and he prided himself also on this, that he never had a suit of clothes built for him in his life, but had always bought what was necessary from the hook.
As for his blood, it was very good. He knew his ancestry right away back a good deal longer than most people do who boast of blood in Europe. And it was good blood, for those who prefer the blood of New England. Nor was there poverty in his lineage, nor, until his own opportunities had come, great wealth ”

“ They know their way about! All they want to know is that Petre’s up against ’em, and they won’t be up against Petre long. They’ll be arm in arm with the enemy before he fires.”
“It wants thinking about,” said Charlie Terrard.
“It does,” said Charlbury grimly, “I’ll do the thinking.”
And he proceeded to do so. And as he unwound the tale his young partner stared and marveled and at last grew wise in one more chapter of the wisdom of this world.
First came a few words on Trefusis’s false security, his certitude that nothing could come in to touch his monopoly. ”

“ He floated on a sea of Petre. But Petre himself had grown invisible. Terrard saw him frequently enough, putting all his business through and winding up the Paddenham Site affair. But that was not enough. Terrard wanted to display the animal; he boasted of him. All the smart women regarded Charlie as the keeper. They pestered him with their invitations. They put down the silence and absence of the millionaire to some scheme of poor Charlie’s own, whereas poor Charlie was dying to trot him out. ”

“ Then indeed his monopoly, the monopoly of the British Amalgamated Rotors, of “B.A.R.” would be secure.
Such were the prospects of B.A.R.’s in this month of July, 1953, when Mr. Petre, rather perhaps by good fortune than by the talent which his contemporaries so freely ascribed to him, had just banked (and left on current account) the ready moneys of the Paddenham purchase.
In “Marengo,” at breakfast, all alone, sat Mr. Charlbury. Opportunity breeds opportunity, and discovery, discovery; and the Dæmon found a fruitful soil. ”

“ His boots were shameful, and even his collar was dubious.
“Well, Arthur?” said he to the young man.
“Well, Batterby, he’s come here.”
“Oh, he has, has he? I told you so!” said Batterby, not without pride.
“Yep,” answered the more elegant Arthur. “There’s the name right enough. John K. Petre. But you know what I told you. He makes it a point to keep low and dark. I’d use it—but I wouldn’t print it. I’ve heard what he does when he’s given away. Oh! He’s savage! The clerks are paid in all these places to keep it quiet whenever he does come over. ”

“ The water was alive, and London had half forgotten its native misery.
It was an air in which new thoughts and clear ones should naturally come to a man; but none came to Mr. Petre. He was pondering upon that interview which he had to face, and went round it in his thoughts, coming no nearer to a center, but still remaining as he had been since the blow fell upon him, attendant upon Fate. It was to be about some horrid business called the Paddenham Site. ”

“ Something in the man which made him great, but which, to Terrard as to every one else, also made him inexplicable. He had to propose to-day a deal upon a scale quite out of the common—far above the humdrum of the Paddenham Site—and he dreaded a scene. Besides which, Mr. Petre seemed to him to have got odder and odder in all these last few months, imprisoning himself absurdly. It made the young man nervous to think of it. ”

“ He remembered the rebuff over Magnas, and though he didn’t understand the motive or the mood, he had noted that curious indifference which had spread over Mr. Petre’s mind like a veil as they went together over the figures of the Government purchase of the Paddenham Site. It’s all very well to be a millionaire, and an American millionaire at that, and a fantastic American millionaire into the bargain; but you weren’t going to tell Charlie Terrard that any living man was indifferent to something well over a million pounds. ”

“ It was again so like the man, with his reputation for indifference to wealth, oddly coupled with a passion for accumulation, to leave it almost at a hazard how much he would buy and to affect indifference to the hour at which he bought. He seemed (really it was monstrous) not to know the price that day, and to have no idea of what they would open at on the morrow. It was Charlie Terrard who spoke tentatively of fifty thousand shares, “I think I shall make it fifty thousand,” he said. Did he say “shall” or “should”? Mr. Petre passed the figure almost with boredom. ”

“ Now this same humble individual had come, through Lady Gwryth, to know everybody—an excellent form of knowledge even in an educationalist. In the serious drawing-rooms a counter-offensive developed against the Anonymous Benefactor.
It was as well; for had the Anonymous Benefactor had it all his own way, it is terrible to think what would have happened to Mr. Charlbury, to Charlie Terrard, to the hard-faced man, and to all the host of little people who were ready for their pickings. As for what would have happened to Mr. Petre I dare not think of it. ”