Part 14 (2/2)
”Well,” said Priam, ”I want an ounce of the usual.”
”Thank _you_, sir,” said the tobacconist, putting down three-halfpence change out of sixpence as Priam thanked him for the packet.
Nothing whatever in such a dialogue! Yet Priam left the shop with a distinct feeling that life was good. And he plunged into High Street, lost himself in crowds of perambulators and nice womanly women who were bustling honestly about in search of food or raiment. Many of them carried little red books full of long lists of things which they and their admirers and the offspring of mutual affection had eaten or would shortly eat. In the High Street all was luxury: not a necessary in the street. Even the bakers' shops were a ma.s.s of sultana and Berlin pancakes. Illuminated calendars, gramophones, corsets, picture postcards, Manilla cigars, bridge-scorers, chocolate, exotic fruit, and commodious mansions--these seemed to be the princ.i.p.al objects offered for sale in High Street. Priam bought a sixpenny edition of Herbert Spencer's _Essays_ for four-pence-halfpenny, and pa.s.sed on to Putney Bridge, whose n.o.ble arches divided a first storey of vans and omnibuses from a ground-floor of barges and racing eights. And he gazed at the broad river and its hanging gardens, and dreamed; and was wakened by the roar of an electric train shooting across the stream on a red causeway a few yards below him. And, miles off, he could descry the twin towers of the Crystal Palace, more marvellous than mosques!
”Astounding!” he murmured joyously. He had not a care in the world; and Putney was all that Alice had painted it. In due time, when bells had pealed to right and to left of him, he went home to her.
_Collapse of the Putney System_
Now, just at the end of lunch, over the last stage of which they usually sat a long time, Alice got up quickly, in the midst of her Stilton, and, going to the mantelpiece, took a letter therefrom.
”I wish you'd look at that, Henry,” she said, handing him the letter.
”It came this morning, but of course I can't be bothered with that sort of thing in the morning. So I put it aside.”
He accepted the letter, and unfolded it with the professional all-knowing air which even the biggest male fool will quite successfully put on in the presence of a woman if consulted about business. When he had unfolded the thing--it was typed on stiff, expensive, quarto paper--he read it. In the lives of beings like Priam Farll and Alice a letter such as that letter is a terrible event, unique, earth-arresting; simple recipients are apt, on receiving it, to imagine that the Christian era has come to an end. But tens of thousands of similar letters are sent out from the City every day, and the City thinks nothing of them.
The letter was about Cohoon's Brewery Company, Limited, and it was signed by a firm of solicitors. It referred to the verbatim report, which it said would be found in the financial papers, of the annual meeting of the company held at the Cannon Street Hotel on the previous day, and to the exceedingly unsatisfactory nature of the Chairman's statement. It regretted the absence of Mrs. Alice Challice (her change of condition had not yet reached the heart of Cohoon's) from the meeting, and asked her whether she would be prepared to support the action of a committee which had been formed to eject the existing board and which had already a following of 385,000 votes. It finished by a.s.serting that unless the committee was immediately lifted to absolute power the company would be quite ruined.
Priam re-read the letter aloud.
”What does it all mean?” asked Alice quietly.
”Well,” said he, ”that's what it means.”
”Does it mean--?” she began.
”By Jove!” he exclaimed, ”I forgot. I saw something on a placard this morning about Cohoon's, and I thought it might interest you, so I bought it.” So saying, he drew from his pocket the _Financial Times_, which he had entirely forgotten. There it was: a column and a quarter of the Chairman's speech, and nearly two columns of stormy scenes. The Chairman was the Marquis of Drumgaldy, but his rank had apparently not s.h.i.+elded him from the violence of expletives such as ”Liar!” ”Humbug!” and even ”Rogue!” The Marquis had merely stated, with every formula of apology, that, owing to the extraordinary depreciation in licensed property, the directors had not felt justified in declaring any dividend at all on the Ordinary Shares of the company. He had made this quite simple a.s.sertion, and instantly a body of shareholders, less reasonable and more avaricious even than shareholders usually are, had begun to turn the historic hall of the Cannon Street Hotel into a bear garden. One might have imagined that the sole aim of brewery companies was to make money, and that the patriotism of old-world brewers, that patriotism which impelled them to supply an honest English beer to the honest English working-man at a purely nominal price, was scorned and forgotten. One was, indeed, forced to imagine this. In vain the Marquis pointed out that the shareholders had received a fifteen per cent, dividend for years and years past, and that really, for once in a way, they ought to be prepared to sacrifice a temporary advantage for the sake of future prosperity. The thought of those regular high dividends gave rise to no grat.i.tude in shareholding hearts; it seemed merely to render them the more furious. The baser pa.s.sions had been let loose in the Cannon Street Hotel. The directors had possibly been expecting the baser pa.s.sions, for a posse of policemen was handy at the door, and one shareholder, to save him from having the blood of Marquises on his soul, was ejected.
Ultimately, according to the picturesque phrases of the _Financial Times_ report, the meeting broke up in confusion.
”How much have you got in Cohoon's?” Priam asked Alice, after they had looked through the report together.
”All I have is in Cohoon's,” said she, ”except this house. Father left it like that. He always said there was nothing like a brewery. I've heard him say many and many a time a brewery was better than consols. I think there's 200 5 shares. Yes, that's it. But of course they're worth much more than that. They're worth about 12 each. All I know is they bring me in 150 a year as regular as the clock. What's that there, after 'broke up in confusion'?”
She pointed with her finger to a paragraph, and he read in a low voice the fluctuations of Cohoon's Ordinary Shares during the afternoon. They had finished at 6 5s. Mrs. Henry Leek had lost over 1,000 in about half-a-day.
”They've always brought me in 150 a year,” she insisted, as though she had been saying: ”It's always been Christmas Day on the 25th of December, and of course it will be the same this year.”
”It doesn't look as if they'd bring you in anything this time,” said he.
”Oh, but Henry!” she protested.
Beer had failed! That was the truth of it. Beer had failed. Who would have guessed that beer could fail in England? The wisest, the most prudent men in Lombard Street had put their trust in beer, as the last grand bulwark of the nation; and even beer had failed. The foundations of England's greatness were, if not gone, going. Insufficient to argue bad management, indiscreet purchases of licences at inflated prices! In the excellent old days a brewery would stand an indefinite amount of bad management! Times were changed. The British workman, caught in a wave of temperance, could no longer be relied upon to drink! It was the crown of his sins against society. Trade unions were nothing to this latest caprice of his, which spread desolation in a thousand genteel homes.
Alice wondered what her father would have said, had he lived. On the whole, she was glad that he did not happen to be alive. The shock to him would have been too rude. The floor seemed to be giving way under Alice, melting into a sort of bog that would swallow up her and her husband.
For years, without any precise information, but merely by instinct, she had felt that England, beneath the surface, was not quite the island it had been--and here was the awful proof.
She gazed at her husband, as a wife ought to gaze at her husband in a crisis. His thoughts were much vaguer than hers, his thoughts about money being always extremely vague.
<script>