Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (390 page)

“You did see him then?” I said with some curiosity.

“I did.  Strange, isn’t it?  It was only once, but as I sat with the distressed Fyne who had suddenly resuscitated his name buried in my memory with other dead labels of the past, I may say I saw him again, I saw him with great vividness of recollection, as he appeared in the days of his glory or splendour.  No!  Neither of these words will fit his success.  There was never any glory or splendour about that figure.  Well, let us say in the days when he was, according to the majority of the daily press, a financial force working for the improvement of the character of the people.  I’ll tell you how it came about.

At that time I used to know a podgy, wealthy, bald little man having chambers in the Albany; a financier too, in his way, carrying out transactions of an intimate nature and of no moral character; mostly with young men of birth and expectations — though I dare say he didn’t withhold his ministrations from elderly plebeians either.  He was a true democrat; he would have done business (a sharp kind of business) with the devil himself.  Everything was fly that came into his web.  He received the applicants in an alert, jovial fashion which was quite surprising.  It gave relief without giving too much confidence, which was just as well perhaps.  His business was transacted in an apartment furnished like a drawing-room, the walls hung with several brown, heavily-framed, oil paintings.  I don’t know if they were good, but they were big, and with their elaborate, tarnished gilt-frames had a melancholy dignity.  The man himself sat at a shining, inlaid writing table which looked like a rare piece from a museum of art; his chair had a high, oval, carved back, upholstered in faded tapestry; and these objects made of the costly black Havana cigar, which he rolled incessantly from the middle to the left corner of his mouth and back again, an inexpressibly cheap and nasty object.  I had to see him several times in the interest of a poor devil so unlucky that he didn’t even have a more competent friend than myself to speak for him at a very difficult time in his life.

I don’t know at what hour my private financier began his day, but he used to give one appointments at unheard of times: such as a quarter to eight in the morning, for instance.  On arriving one found him busy at that marvellous writing table, looking very fresh and alert, exhaling a faint fragrance of scented soap and with the cigar already well alight.  You may believe that I entered on my mission with many unpleasant forebodings; but there was in that fat, admirably washed, little man such a profound contempt for mankind that it amounted to a species of good nature; which, unlike the milk of genuine kindness, was never in danger of turning sour.  Then, once, during a pause in business, while we were waiting for the production of a document for which he had sent (perhaps to the cellar?) I happened to remark, glancing round the room, that I had never seen so many fine things assembled together out of a collection.  Whether this was unconscious diplomacy on my part, or not, I shouldn’t like to say — but the remark was true enough, and it pleased him extremely.  “It is a collection,” he said emphatically.  “Only I live right in it, which most collectors don’t.  But I see that you know what you are looking at.  Not many people who come here on business do.  Stable fittings are more in their way.”

I don’t know whether my appreciation helped to advance my friend’s business but at any rate it helped our intercourse.  He treated me with a shade of familiarity as one of the initiated.

The last time I called on him to conclude the transaction we were interrupted by a person, something like a cross between a bookmaker and a private secretary, who, entering through a door which was not the anteroom door, walked up and stooped to whisper into his ear.

“Eh?  What?  Who, did you say?”

The nondescript person stooped and whispered again, adding a little louder: “Says he won’t detain you a moment.”

My little man glanced at me, said “Ah!  Well,” irresolutely.  I got up from my chair and offered to come again later.  He looked whimsically alarmed.  “No, no.  It’s bad enough to lose my money but I don’t want to waste any more of my time over your friend.  We must be done with this to-day.  Just go and have a look at that garniture de cheminée yonder.  There’s another, something like it, in the castle of Laeken, but mine’s much superior in design.”

I moved accordingly to the other side of that big room.  The garniture was very fine.  But while pretending to examine it I watched my man going forward to meet a tall visitor, who said, “I thought you would be disengaged so early.  It’s only a word or two” — and after a whispered confabulation of no more than a minute, reconduct him to the door and shake hands ceremoniously.  “Not at all, not at all.  Very pleased to be of use.  You can depend absolutely on my information” — ”Oh thank you, thank you.  I just looked in.”  “Certainly, quite right.  Any time . . . Good morning.”

I had a good look at the visitor while they were exchanging these civilities.  He was clad in black.  I remember perfectly that he wore a flat, broad, black satin tie in which was stuck a large cameo pin; and a small turn down collar.  His hair, discoloured and silky, curled slightly over his ears.  His cheeks were hairless and round, and apparently soft.  He held himself very upright, walked with small steps and spoke gently in an inward voice.  Perhaps from contrast with the magnificent polish of the room and the neatness of its owner, he struck me as dingy, indigent, and, if not exactly humble, then much subdued by evil fortune.

I wondered greatly at my fat little financier’s civility to that dubious personage when he asked me, as we resumed our respective seats, whether I knew who it was that had just gone out.  On my shaking my head negatively he smiled queerly, said “De Barral,” and enjoyed my surprise.  Then becoming grave: “That’s a deep fellow, if you like.  We all know where he started from and where he got to; but nobody knows what he means to do.”  He became thoughtful for a moment and added as if speaking to himself, “I wonder what his game is.”

And, you know, there was no game, no game of any sort, or shape or kind.  It came out plainly at the trial.  As I’ve told you before, he was a clerk in a bank, like thousands of others.  He got that berth as a second start in life and there he stuck again, giving perfect satisfaction.  Then one day as though a supernatural voice had whispered into his ear or some invisible fly had stung him, he put on his hat, went out into the street and began advertising.  That’s absolutely all that there was to it.  He caught in the street the word of the time and harnessed it to his preposterous chariot.

One remembers his first modest advertisements headed with the magic word Thrift, Thrift, Thrift, thrice repeated; promising ten per cent. on all deposits and giving the address of the Thrift and Independence Aid Association in Vauxhall Bridge Road.  Apparently nothing more was necessary.  He didn’t even explain what he meant to do with the money he asked the public to pour into his lap.  Of course he meant to lend it out at high rates of interest.  He did so — but he did it without system, plan, foresight or judgment.  And as he frittered away the sums that flowed in, he advertised for more — and got it.  During a period of general business prosperity he set up The Orb Bank and The Sceptre Trust, simply, it seems for advertising purposes.  They were mere names.  He was totally unable to organize anything, to promote any sort of enterprise if it were only for the purpose of juggling with the shares.  At that time he could have had for the asking any number of Dukes, retired Generals, active M.P.’s, ex-ambassadors and so on as Directors to sit at the wildest boards of his invention.  But he never tried.  He had no real imagination.  All he could do was to publish more advertisements and open more branch offices of the Thrift and Independence, of The Orb, of The Sceptre, for the receipt of deposits; first in this town, then in that town, north and south — everywhere where he could find suitable premises at a moderate rent.  For this was the great characteristic of the management.  Modesty, moderation, simplicity.  Neither The Orb nor The Sceptre nor yet their parent the Thrift and Independence had built for themselves the usual palaces.  For this abstention they were praised in silly public prints as illustrating in their management the principle of Thrift for which they were founded.  The fact is that de Barral simply didn’t think of it.  Of course he had soon moved from Vauxhall Bridge Road.  He knew enough for that.  What he got hold of next was an old, enormous, rat-infested brick house in a small street off the Strand.  Strangers were taken in front of the meanest possible, begrimed, yellowy, flat brick wall, with two rows of unadorned window-holes one above the other, and were exhorted with bated breath to behold and admire the simplicity of the head-quarters of the great financial force of the day.  The word THRIFT perched right up on the roof in giant gilt letters, and two enormous shield-like brass-plates curved round the corners on each side of the doorway were the only shining spots in de Barral’s business outfit.  Nobody knew what operations were carried on inside except this — that if you walked in and tendered your money over the counter it would be calmly taken from you by somebody who would give you a printed receipt.  That and no more.  It appears that such knowledge is irresistible.  People went in and tendered; and once it was taken from their hands their money was more irretrievably gone from them than if they had thrown it into the sea.  This then, and nothing else was being carried on in there . . . “

“Come, Marlow,” I said, “you exaggerate surely — if only by your way of putting things.  It’s too startling.”

“I exaggerate!” he defended himself.  “My way of putting things!  My dear fellow I have merely stripped the rags of business verbiage and financial jargon off my statements.  And you are startled!  I am giving you the naked truth.  It’s true too that nothing lays itself open to the charge of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth.  What comes with a shock is admitted with difficulty.  But what will you say to the end of his career?

It was of course sensational and tolerably sudden.  It began with the Orb Deposit Bank.  Under the name of that institution de Barral with the frantic obstinacy of an unimaginative man had been financing an Indian prince who was prosecuting a claim for immense sums of money against the government.  It was an enormous number of scores of lakhs — a miserable remnant of his ancestors’ treasures — that sort of thing.  And it was all authentic enough.  There was a real prince; and the claim too was sufficiently real — only unfortunately it was not a valid claim.  So the prince lost his case on the last appeal and the beginning of de Barral’s end became manifest to the public in the shape of a half-sheet of note paper wafered by the four corners on the closed door of The Orb offices notifying that payment was stopped at that establishment.

Its consort The Sceptre collapsed within the week.  I won’t say in American parlance that suddenly the bottom fell out of the whole of de Barral concerns.  There never had been any bottom to it.  It was like the cask of Danaides into which the public had been pleased to pour its deposits.  That they were gone was clear; and the bankruptcy proceedings which followed were like a sinister farce, bursts of laughter in a setting of mute anguish — that of the depositors; hundreds of thousands of them.  The laughter was irresistible; the accompaniment of the bankrupt’s public examination.

I don’t know if it was from utter lack of all imagination or from the possession in undue proportion of a particular kind of it, or from both — and the three alternatives are possible — but it was discovered that this man who had been raised to such a height by the credulity of the public was himself more gullible than any of his depositors.  He had been the prey of all sorts of swindlers, adventurers, visionaries and even lunatics.  Wrapping himself up in deep and imbecile secrecy he had gone in for the most fantastic schemes: a harbour and docks on the coast of Patagonia, quarries in Labrador — such like speculations.  Fisheries to feed a canning Factory on the banks of the Amazon was one of them.  A principality to be bought in Madagascar was another.  As the grotesque details of these incredible transactions came out one by one ripples of laughter ran over the closely packed court — each one a little louder than the other.  The audience ended by fairly roaring under the cumulative effect of absurdity.  The Registrar laughed, the barristers laughed, the reporters laughed, the serried ranks of the miserable depositors watching anxiously every word, laughed like one man.  They laughed hysterically — the poor wretches — on the verge of tears.

There was only one person who remained unmoved.  It was de Barral himself.  He preserved his serene, gentle expression, I am told (for I have not witnessed those scenes myself), and looked around at the people with an air of placid sufficiency which was the first hint to the world of the man’s overweening, unmeasurable conceit, hidden hitherto under a diffident manner.  It could be seen too in his dogged assertion that if he had been given enough time and a lot more money everything would have come right.  And there were some people (yes, amongst his very victims) who more than half believed him, even after the criminal prosecution which soon followed.  When placed in the dock he lost his steadiness as if some sustaining illusion had gone to pieces within him suddenly.  He ceased to be himself in manner completely, and even in disposition, in so far that his faded neutral eyes matching his discoloured hair so well, were discovered then to be capable of expressing a sort of underhand hate.  He was at first defiant, then insolent, then broke down and burst into tears; but it might have been from rage.  Then he calmed down, returned to his soft manner of speech and to that unassuming quiet bearing which had been usual with him even in his greatest days.  But it seemed as though in this moment of change he had at last perceived what a power he had been; for he remarked to one of the prosecuting counsel who had assumed a lofty moral tone in questioning him, that — yes, he had gambled — he liked cards.  But that only a year ago a host of smart people would have been only too pleased to take a hand at cards with him.  Yes — he went on — some of the very people who were there accommodated with seats on the bench; and turning upon the counsel “You yourself as well,” he cried.  He could have had half the town at his rooms to fawn upon him if he had cared for that sort of thing.  “Why, now I think of it, it took me most of my time to keep people, just of your sort, off me,” he ended with a good humoured — quite unobtrusive, contempt, as though the fact had dawned upon him for the first time.