”
“Cold beef, pickled walnuts, and gooseberry tart.”
“Excellent for the character. I shall have curry; they give you a very good Bombay duck here. I rather fancy we shall be fired, Michael. ‘Nous sommes trahis!’ used to be the prerogative of the French, but I’m afraid we’re getting the attitude, too. The Yellow Press has made a difference.”
Michael shook his head.
“We say it, but we don’t act on it; the climate’s too uncertain.”
“That sounds deep. This looks very good curry–will you change your mind? Old Fontenoy sometimes comes in here; he has no inside. It’ll be serious for him if we’re shown the door.”
“Deuced rum,” said Michael suddenly, “how titles still go down. There can’t be any belief in their business capacity.”
“Character, my dear fellow–the good old English gentleman. After all, there’s something in it.”
“I fancy, sir, it’s more a case of complex in the shareholders. Their parents show them a lord when they’re young.”
“Shareholders,” said Sir Lawrence; “the word is comprehensive. Who are they, what are they, when are they?”
“This afternoon,” said Michael, “and I shall have a good look at them.”
“They won’t let you in, my dear.”
“No?”
“Certainly not.”
Michael frowned.
“What paper,” he said, “is sure not to be represented?”
Sir Lawrence gave his whinnying laugh.
“The Field,” he said; “The Horse and Hound; The Gardener’s Weekly.”
“I’ll slide in on them.”
“You’ll see us die game, I hope,” said Sir Lawrence, with sudden gravity.
They took a cab together to the meeting, but separated before reaching the door of the hotel.
Michael had thought better of the Press, and took up a position in the passage, whence he could watch for a chance. Stout men, in dark suits, with a palpable look of having lunched off turbot, joints, and cheese, kept passing him. He noticed that each handed the janitor a paper. ‘I’ll hand him a paper, too,’ he thought, ‘and scoot in.’ Watching for some even stouter men, he took cover between two of them, and approached the door, with an announcement of ‘Counterfeits’ in his left hand. Handing it across a neighbouring importance, he was quickly into a seat. He saw the janitor’s face poked round the door. ‘No, my friend,’ thought Michael, ‘if you could tell duds from shareholders, you wouldn’t be in that job!’
He found a report before him, and holding it up, looked at other things. The room seemed to him to have been got by a concert-hall out of a station waiting-room. It had a platform with a long table, behind which were seven empty chairs, and seven inkpots, with seven quill pens upright in them. ‘Quills!’ thought Michael; ‘symbolic, I suppose–they’ll all use fountain-pens!’
Back-centre of the platform was a door, and in front, below it, a table, where four men were sitting, fiddling with notebooks. ‘Orchestra,’ thought Michael. He turned his attention to the eight or ten rows of shareholders. They looked what they were, but he could not tell why. Their faces were cast in an infinity of moulds, but all had the air of waiting for something they knew they would not get. What sort of lives did they lead, or did their lives lead them? Nearly all wore moustaches. His neighbours to right and left were the same stout shareholders between whom he had slipped in; they both had thick lobes to their ears, and necks even broader than the straight broad backs of their heads. He was a good deal impressed. Dotted here and there he noticed a woman, or a parson. There was practically no conversation, from which he surmised that no one knew his neighbour. He had a feeling that a dog somewhere would have humanised the occasion. He was musing on the colour scheme of green picked out with chocolate and chased with gold, when the door behind the platform was thrown open, and seven men in black coats filed in, and with little bows took their seats behind the quills. They reminded him of people getting up on horses, or about to play the piano–full of small adjustments. That–on the Chairman’s right–would be old Fontenoy, with a face entirely composed of features. Michael had an odd conceit: a little thing in a white top-hat sat inside the brain, driving the features eight-inhand. Then came a face straight from a picture of Her Majesty’s Government in 1850, round and pink, with a high nose, a small mouth, and little white whiskers; while at the end on the right was a countenance whose jaw and eyes seemed boring into a conundrum beyond the wall at Michael’s back. ‘Legal!’ he thought. His scrutiny passed back to the Chairman. Chosen? Was he–or was he not? A bearded man, a little behind on the Chairman’s left, was already reading from a book, in a rapid monotonous voice. That must be the secretary letting off his minute guns. And in front of him was clearly the new manager, on whose left Michael observed his own father. The dark pothooks over Sir Lawrence’s right eye were slightly raised, and his mouth was puckered under the cut line of his small moustache. He looked almost Oriental, quick but still. His left hand held his tortoiseshell-rimmed monocle between thumb and finger. ‘Not quite in the scene!’ thought Michael; ‘poor old Bart!’ He had come now to the last of the row. ‘Old Forsyte’ was sitting precisely as if alone in the world; with one corner of his mouth just drawn down, and one nostril just drawn up, he seemed to Michael quite fascinatingly detached; and yet not out of the picture. Within that still neat figure, whereof only one patent-leather boot seemed with a slight movement to be living, was intense concentration, entire respect for the proceedings, and yet, a queer contempt for them; he was like a statue of reality, by one who had seen that there was precious little reality in it. ‘He chills my soup,’ thought Michael, ‘but–dash it! – I can’t help half admiring him!’
The Chairman had now risen. ‘He IS’–thought Michael; ‘no, he isn’t–yes–no–I can’t tell!’ He could hardly attend to what the Chairman said, for wondering whether he was chosen or not, though well aware that it did not matter at all. The Chairman kept steadily on. Distracted, Michael caught words and words: “European situation–misguided policy–French–totally unexpected–position disclosed–manager–unfortunate circumstances shortly to be explained to you–future of this great concern–no reason to doubt–”
‘Oil,’ thought Michael, ‘he is–and yet–!’
“I will now ask one of your directors, Mr. Forsyte, to give you at first hand an account of this painful matter.”
Michael saw Soames, pale and deliberate, take a piece of paper from his breast-pocket, and rise. Was it to the occasion?
“I will give you the facts shortly,” he said in a voice which reminded Michael of a dry, made-up wine. “On the eleventh of January last I was visited by a clerk in the employ of the Society–”
Familiar with these details, Michael paid them little attention, watching the shareholders for signs of reaction. He saw none, and it was suddenly borne in on him why they wore moustaches: They could not trust their mouths! Character was in the mouth. Moustaches had come in when people no longer went about, like the old Duke, saying: “Think what you damned well like of my character!” Mouths had tried to come in again, of course, before the war; but what with majors, shareholders, and the working classes, they now had little or no chance! He heard Soames say: “In these circumstances we came to the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to wait and see.” Michael saw a sudden quiver pass over the moustaches, as might wind over grass.
‘Wrong phrase,’ he thought; ‘we all do it, but we can’t bear being reminded of it.’
“Six weeks ago, however,” he heard Soames intone, “an accidental incident seems to have warned your late manager that Sir Lawrence and I still entertained suspicions, for I received a letter from him practically admitting that he had taken this secret commission on the German business, and asking me to inform the Board that he had gone abroad and left no property behind him. This statement we have been at pains to verify. In these circumstances we had no alternative but to call you together, and lay the facts before you.”
The voice, which had not varied an iota, ceased its recital; and Michael saw his father-inlaw return to his detachment–stork on one leg, about to apply beak to parasite, could have inspired no greater sense of loneliness. ‘Too like the first account of the battle of Jutland!’ he thought: ‘He mentioned all the losses, and never once struck the human note.’
A pause ensued, such as occurs before an awkward fence, till somebody has found a gate. Michael rapidly reviewed the faces of the Board. Only one showed any animation. It was concealed in a handkerchief. The sound of the blown nose broke the spell. Two shareholders rose to their feet at once–one of them Michael’s neighbour on the right.
“Mr. Sawdry,” said the Chairman, and the other shareholder sat down.
With a sonorous clearing of the throat, Michael’s neighbour turned his blunt red face towards Soames.
“I wish to ask you, sir, why you didn’t inform the Board when you first ‘eard of this?”
Soames rose slightly.
“You are aware, I presume, that such an accusation, unless it can be fully substantiated, is a matter for criminal proceedings?”
“No; it would ha’ been privileged.”
“As between members of the Board, perhaps; but any leakage would have rendered us liable. It was a mere case of word against word.”
“Perhaps Sir Lawrence Mont will give us ‘is view of that?”
Michael’s heart began to beat. There was an air of sprightliness about his father’s standing figure.
“You must remember, sir,” he said, “that Mr. Elderson had enjoyed our complete confidence for many years; he was a gentleman, and, speaking for myself, an old schoolfellow of his, I preferred, in common loyalty, to give his word preference, while–er–keeping the matter in mind.”
“Oh!” said Michael’s neighbour: “What’s the Chairman got to say about bein’ kept in the dark?”
“We are all perfectly satisfied, sir, with the attitude of our co-directors, in a very delicate situation. You will kindly note that the mischief was already done over this unfortunate assurance, so that there was no need for undue haste.”
Michael saw his neighbour’s neck grow redder.
“I don’t agree,” he said. “‘Wait and see’–We might have ‘ad that commission out of him, if he’d been tackled promptly.” And he sat down.
He had not reached mahogany before the thwarted shareholder had started up.
“Mr. Botterill,” said the Chairman.
Michael saw a lean and narrow head, with two hollows in a hairy neck, above a back slightly bent forward, as of a doctor listening to a chest.
“I take it from you, then, sir,” he said, “that these two directors represent the general attitude of the Board, and that the Board were content to allow a suspected person to remain manager. The gentleman on your extreme left–Mr. Forsyte, I think–spoke of an accidental incident. But for that, apparently, we should still be in the hands of an unscrupulous individual. The symptoms in this case are very disquieting. There appears to have been gross over-confidence; a recent instance of the sort must be in all our minds. The policy of assuring foreign business was evidently initiated by the manager for his own ends. We have made a severe loss by it. And the question for us shareholders would seem to be whether a Board who placed confidence in such a person, and continued it after their suspicions were aroused, are the right people to direct this important concern.
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