CHARLES REPTON, manifold as were his financial interests, knew nothing of Popocatapetls, and cared less. The manner in which his life was to be influenced by that very distant cataclysm was hidden from him; as (for that matter) it would be hidden from the reader also had not this book been most boldly published.
Yet another thing the full import of which may escape the reader, is the fact that Sir Charles Repton was extremely tender just behind the ears; but for this the reader herself alone and not the author is to blame, for if the reader had any knowledge of Caryll’s Ganglia she would have guessed at twenty things. But no matter: Caryll’s Ganglia and their effect upon self-control very much interrupt the chain of those absorbing adventures which, if she will continue, the reader will presently peruse.
Anyhow, those regions of the head which lie behind either ear were for some reason or other very tender, large, sensitive to pressure, and in a way abnormal in Sir Charles Repton.
When, therefore, somewhere about the corner of[42] Tottenham Court Road (on that March day on which we left him walking to his Board meeting), his hat blew off: when he had run after it: when in doing so he had ruffled his fine crop of white hair; and when, to have it all set right, he had gone into a second-rate barber’s, it may well be imagined that he gave the man who served him minute instructions that the head rest upon the back of the chair should be made comfortable—and so it was. And on to it Sir Charles Repton leant gingerly the head upon whose clear action depended the future fortunes of Van Diemens.
The man in brushing his hair with an apparatus of singular power, turned the monologue on to the commonplaces of the moment, which included the bestiality of the Government and the abhorrent nature of the Italian people, of whom at that particular moment in 1915 the people of London stood in abject terror.
Whether it was the pressure of the violent rotating brush or some looseness in the screw that held the support behind him, with a shock and a clang that support slipped, and Sir Charles Repton’s head came smartly down, first through nothingness and then on to two iron nuts which exactly corresponded to those processes of the skull just behind either ear, in which, as I have taken pains to remark, he was peculiarly sensitive: for they were largely developed in him and nourished it would seem by an unusual supply of blood.
[43]Sharp as was the pain, Charles Repton controlled himself, listened to the explanations and apologies of the barber, and submitted himself again to the grooming for which he had entered.
When he went out again into the street he had almost forgotten the accident. The two places where his head had been struck swelled slightly and he touched them now and again, but they soon passed from his mind; within ten minutes they were no longer painful; yet was there set up in them from that moment, an irritation which was to have no inconsiderable consequence.
He went on into the City, ordered one or two things which he had set down in his memorandum before starting, looked in at a City Club where he knew one or two items of news were awaiting him, and slowly betook himself to the offices of the Van Diemens Company. He had thoroughly planned out the scheme of that morning’s work; it needed no recapitulation in his mind, yet as his habit was, just before opening the door of the Board Room, in the few seconds of going up the stairs, he briefly presented his scheme of tactics to his own mind.
The Directors must ask the shareholders for fresh capital; a nominal million, an increase of 25 per cent. upon the value of the shares at par. That was the first point.
The second point was the object for which this levy should nominally be demanded. On that also he had made up his mind. Paton had quite unconsciously[44] suggested to him the master idea; a little belt of untravelled and unknown country (locally known as the “Out and Out”) wherein the degraded Kawangas—so Paton had told him, and after all Paton had been there—held their orgies in Mutchi-time, alone separated Perks’ Bay from the Straits, and the long detour which all traffic must now make between the coaling station and the high road to the East, could be cut off by a line crossing that region. Paton had assured him with immense enthusiasm that such a line would give its possessor the strategic key to the gate of everything East of the Bay of Bengal, and, what was more important in Sir Charles’ eyes than Paton’s own opinion, a vast mass of gentlemen in the suburbs of London and perhaps five-sixths of the journalists in Fleet Street, were ready to rally to the idea. It had been well preached and well dinned in.
These two points were clear: they must ask for a million and they must ask it for the purpose of building a railway that would at last ensure the Empire against the nightmare of foreign rivals.
There was a third point. The shareholders would not or could not subscribe a million but that was easily turned. They should be asked for no more than 200,000,—a shilling a share—in cash down, “the remainder to be paid,” etc. etc.
Had not Sir Charles possessed an iron control of his face, the strong set smile which he wore as he entered the Board Room would have broadened at[45] the recollection of that last detail. On the other hand had he not possessed such self-control some movement of annoyance might have escaped him to discover present at the table, among his other colleagues, the late-rising and impervious Bingham. The sight was sufficient to exasperate a man of less balance. The hour had been carefully chosen to avoid such an accident, and that accident meant perhaps another half-hour or more of close argument and of subtle effort.
For his colleague Bingham added to a native idiocy of solid texture and formidable dimensions, the experience of extensive travel; and he was in particular well acquainted with the district with regard to which the Board must that day make its decision. It was certain, therefore, that his fellow-Directors would listen to him with peculiar respect, not only on account of his stupidity which necessarily commanded a certain attention, but also on account of his intimacy with plain matters of fact: he had been upon the spot: he was the man who knew.
It was just as Repton had feared. Business that might have been done in a quarter of an hour and a decision which contained no more than the issue of pieces of paper was turned into a long practical discussion by the intolerable ponderance of Bingham, who would wait until every one had had his say, and then would bring in some dreadful little technical point about a marsh, a rainy season or a fly; he was careful to pepper his conversation with local terms a[46] hundred times more remote than the Kawanga and Mutchi-time; in every conceivable manner he put his spoke into the wheels of business.
So considerable was the effect produced by the redoubtable Bingham at that table that, were C?sarism a common political theory in elderly men, the whole conduct of Van Diemens would for the future have been put into his hands. Luckily for the Company its forms were not so democratic.
Charles Repton waited patiently. When he spoke his point was as simple as falling off a log: what was wanted was not a railway in itself, it was a new issue of capital. He was profoundly indifferent what label should be tied onto that issue, so long as it was a label good enough to get the original shareholders to come in. The public would never come in as things were: its pusillanimity was increased by the fact that the Company had been in existence for now eleven years and had hitherto failed to pay a dividend of any kind. After some thought he had decided, in company with one or two others upon the Board, that a railway through a certain district of the concession, locally known as “The Out and Out,” and remarkable for the fact that no white man had yet visited it, would be the best attraction he could offer. He was prepared to show by the aid of maps upon which should be marked all favourable things, that a line driven through this district would unite with the world two provinces teeming with inexhaustible wealth, of a heavenly climate, and hitherto by the mere accident[47] of the Out and Out belt, cut off from the longing embraces of commerce. More; he could show that this single line of railway would bestow upon his beloved country so vast a strategic superiority over all other nations as would ensure her immediate success in any campaign, no matter what the quality of the troops she might employ. To this he added the attractions of touring in the tropics and the allurements of big game for those wealthy gentlemen whom he designed in the new prospectus to term Shikaris.
With the new capital subscribed and long before the line was surveyed, there was little doubt that the shares which had fallen from over ￡9 to the comparatively low quotation—but oh! not price—of 16/3 (at which quotation he had first consented to tender his services to the Company) would rise to certainly over ￡1, perhaps to nearer ￡2, and what was more to the point they would be readily saleable. He was prepared in that event to transfer his property in them to others, a course which he sincerely hoped his fellow-shareholders would also follow, though of course he would not take it upon himself to advise any one of them.
Bingham, like the practical man he was, pinned himself to the railway. He knew the Out and Out; not that he’d ever been there,—no white man had,—but he had talked to several of the Kawanga in Mutchi-time, and he shook his head despondently. There was one continuous line of precipice 3000 feet deep; there was a river which was now a stream[48] five miles broad, now a marsh and now again dry—, sometimes for years on end. There was a dense mass of forest; there was that much more difficult thing, a belt of shifting sand dunes; there were nearly 300 miles without water through these. He was prepared to speak all day upon the difficulties of building a railway which none but the least intelligent had ever designed to build.
Sir Charles Repton could ride himself on the curb, and more than anything else this mastery had given him his present great position; but that day he had to exercise his will to the full, and in that exercise he felt slight twinges behind the ear where the barber’s rest had struck him. It was all he could do to prevent himself from drumming on the table or from making those interruptions which only serve as fuel to the slow criticisms of the dull.
At last—and heaven knows with what subtlety and patience—he conquered. There was a vote (a thing he had wished to avoid), but he carried it by two; and it was agreed that the issue of new capital should be made, that a General Meeting of the shareholders should be called for Tuesday the 2nd of June, and that he, Repton, should have the task of laying the scheme before them. The new prospectus, which he had already drafted, was passed round and with a very few emendations accepted. Then, after as heavy a bit of work as had ever been undertaken in the way of persuasion, the principal brain in that company was at last free for other things.
[49]It was half-past one. He had just time to meet and to convince yet another fool upon another matter: the foreigner acting as agent for his Government, on the matter of the bridge: a bridge which the Foreign Government might or might not build, and, if they built, might or might not order from a firm which Repton had reason to befriend. Repton must lunch with that foreigner: he must persuade him to build: he must get the order—then he must be in his place in the House in time for questions.
The foreigner was as wax in his hands: not as good warm wax, adulterated wax, candle wax, but rather as beeswax, very ancient and hard. It was a full hour before that wax was pliable, but once again the unceasing, managed, strict watchfulness, the set face which had always in it something stern but never anything aggressive, the balance of judgment, conquered. Down to the smallest detail of that conversation Repton was the artist, his host at the lunch was the public, accepting and gradually convinced, and the bridge was ordered for the Foreign Government, though it was a useless bridge leading from nowhere to nowhere, and though it could have been built much more solidly and much better by the people of the place than by the English firm.
Then Repton went on to the House of Commons, and there, as in every duty of the day, the weight of his character told.
The questions were slight, there were not half a[50] dozen that concerned his Department, but he answered them all with that curious restraint of tone which somehow made it difficult to cross-examine his Department. And he faced the House with such a poise and expression that one almost wondered, as one looked at him, upon which side he was sitting, or whether indeed the mere game of In’s and Out’s entered into his brain at all.
He seemed to be quite above the divisions of party. He seemed a sort of Ambassador from the permanent officials and to carry into the House of Commons an atmosphere at once judicial and experienced which no one could resist. When he had first accepted the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry it had been wondered that he should take so secondary a post. Now, after these four years, it was rather wondered why no one had seen till then the possibilities that lay in the position.
After that typical and decisive day, Repton, for more than a month, refrained from debate.
He was ever in his seat on those two days in each week when it was his business to answer questions: he never let his understrapper appear for him; for one full fortnight he was permanently in attendance, watching the fortunes before a select committee of a certain Bill, for which the public cared nothing but which he knew might change in a very important particular the public fortune—but in general he seemed to be in retirement. He was planning hard.
A mixture of Imperial sentiment and personal[51] pride urged him to put Van Diemens on their legs, and all April, all through the Easter Recess, he remained in London working. He worked right on into May; for the first week after Parliament met again he was seen but little; one thing only troubled him, that at long intervals—sometimes as long as ten days, an uneasy twinge behind the ears, the result of that little half-forgotten accident, incommoded him. These twinges came a trifle more frequently as May advanced. After the last of them he had felt a little dazed—no more. And still he worked and worked, holding twenty reins in his hands.
Before the end of May the fruit of all this labour began to appear. Camptons were reconstructed, arbitration had been forced upon the Docks combination in the North just in time to prevent a wholesale transference of shipping abroad, and more important than all, perhaps, there had begun to crop up in the papers, here, there, and everywhere, the mention—and the flattering mention—of Van Diemens, and the wealthy were already familiar with the conception of a certain railway in the land which was under the Van Diemens charter.
The wealthy, but as yet only the wealthy; it is as fatal to be too early as to be too late, and that brain which knew how to drive and compel, had also known so well how to restrain, that the shares still remained unsaleable with the meaningless quotation of sixteen shillings and a few fluctuating pence still attached to them in the market lists.
[52]So Repton stood in the middle of May, 1915, when he became aware that an obscure member (obscure at least in the House of Commons—and Repton noticed little of, and cared nothing for, the merely luxurious world of London), an aristocrat of sorts, one of the Demaine,—George Demaine it seemed, was being talked about. He was being pushed somehow. Repton hardly heeded so commonplace a phenomenon, save perhaps to wonder what job was on:—he continued to push Van Diemens.