CHAPTER X.

MR. FORDE TAKES HIS HAT.

The stores, warehouses, and offices of the General Chemical Company (Limited), are situated, as all City folks know, on St. Vedast Wharf, Vedast Lane, Upper Thames Street.

Landing stages and railway bridges, which have altered the aspect of so many other places of business, have left St. Vedast Wharf untouched. And the curious inquirer will find it still presenting precisely the same appearance as it did in those early summer days of a few years back when it was still optional with Mortomley to do what he liked under certain conditions with his own estate.

Excepting Lower Thames Street, there is not probably in the city a thoroughfare so utterly given over to business and business doing, as Thames Street above bridge.

What Hyde Park is for carriages, it is for vans and carts. If timid people elect to walk along it, they must do so crossing from side to side, under the heads of great cart-horses to avoid the bales of goods, the reams of paper, the huge barrels, the heavy castings that come swinging down from the loop-holes of third and fourth stories, indifferent as to whether any-body or nobody is passing beneath.

All the lanes leading from it to the river are narrow and dingy and sunless, and Vedast Lane seems probably narrower and dirtier than most of its fellows, because many carts and waggons pass down it on their way to various huge warehouses, occupied by persons following different trades.

During all the working hours of the day, shouting and swearing and the lumbering of vans, and the trampling and slipping about of horses, cease not for one single instant; and it is notorious that the traffic of the whole lane was once stopped for four hours by a jibbing horse, who would probably have remained there until now, had a passer-by not suggested throwing a truss of straw under him and then setting fire to it, which produced such celerity of movement that the driver found himself in Bridge Street, having threaded the vehicles crowded together by the way, without let or hindrance, before he had sufficiently recovered his presence of mind to search about for his whip.

Arrived, however, at St. Vedast Wharf, the scene changes as if by magic. One moment the foot-passenger is in the gloom and dirt and riot of a narrow City lane, the next all clamour and noise seem left behind. Before him lies the Silent Highway, with its steam-boats, barges, and tiny skiffs threading their way in and out amongst the heavier craft.

Facing the river the imposing-looking warehouses of the General Chemical Company rear themselves story on the top of story. To the left lies London Bridge, the masts of the larger vessels showing at uncertain intervals between the stream of vehicles flowing perpetually over it, while to his right the old bridges and the new confuse themselves before him, so that he has to pause for a moment before answering the eager inquiries of a country cousin.

To look at the wharf, to look at the warehouses, to enter the offices, most people a few years back would have said,

"Here is a solvent Company. It must be paying large dividends to its shareholders."

Whereas the true history and state of the General Chemical Company chanced to be this:

When in the palmy days of "promoting," long before Black Friday was thought of, while the Corner House was a power in the City, the old and long established business (_vide_ prospectus of the period) of Henrison Brothers was merged into the General Chemical Company, Limited, with a tribe of directors, manager, sub-manager, secretary, and shareholders,--probably no one, excepting Mr. Henrison and his brothers and the gentlemen who successfully floated the venture, was aware that the old and highly respectable house was as near bankruptcy as any house could well be.

Such, however, was the case, but a considerable time elapsed before the directors and the shareholders found that out.

Mr. Henrison "consented" to remain as manager for one year after he and his brothers put the purchase-money in their pockets, (the shares they sold at discreet intervals), and it is unnecessary to say _he_ did not enlighten the Company he represented about that part of the business.

Neither did the sub-manager, who hoped to succeed Mr. Henrison, and who did succeed him. Neither did the secretary, whose ideas of the duties connected with his office were exceedingly simple.

To do as little work as possible, and to draw as much money as he could get, was the easy programme he sketched out for his own guidance; and that the programme pleased his audience may be gathered from the fact, that whilst shareholders varied, and directors resigned, and managers were supplanted, that fortunate official's name remained on the prospectus of the Company.

He beheld Henrison fulfil his year. He was on friendly terms with the sub who succeeded him. He still nodded to that ex-sub and manager when he was discharged for malpractices. He preserved his equanimity when the next manager, also discharged, brought his action against the Company for wrongful dismissal, and the Company, their eyes beginning to open, compromised the matter rather than let the public light of day in on the swindle Henrison Brothers had practiced.

He was there when Delaroche making on his own responsibility a bad debt which shook the concern to its rotten foundations, was turned off penniless and characterless; he was there when various other managers and subs obtained, who either in due course of time shifted themselves, or were shifted by the powers then supreme; and, to cut short a long list, he was there when the united wisdom of the directors appointed Forde, General in command.

One of the directors had looked with exceeding favour upon Forde. Having known him fill various subordinate positions in the trade creditably, he concluded he was precisely the man wanted at that period at the General Chemical Company.

Outwardly Mr. Forde made little of the honour conferred; inwardly he was uplifted.

If men and women, who, having been to the manner born, are able to bear worldly promotion without entirely losing whatever small amount of sense God may have seen fit to give them, could only understand the mental effect, the fact of being placed in a position of power produces upon those who have hitherto served in the rank and file of life's army,--I fancy managers and housekeepers and confidential employés of all descriptions would be chosen from a far different rank than is the case at present.

You, sir, who having had the use of a carriage all your life, would much rather walk to your destination than be driven thither,--do you suppose you can comprehend what driving even in another person's carriage means to the man who has all his life looked upon an equipage of the kind with mingled feelings of admiration and envy.

No, you cannot! But I, who have been practically taught the lesson, may inform you that it is utter folly to open the door and let down the steps, and permit the poor simpleton I have indicated to fancy himself a great fellow, lounging on your cushions, or the cushions you have helped to place for him.

If he is able, in God's name let him buy a carriage for himself if nothing less will content him. By the time he has done so, he will have conjugated all the moods and tenses connected with its possession, and may, perhaps, go on safely to the end; otherwise he is very apt to loll back with legs outstretched and arms crossed on his way to that place the name of which on earth is, beggary.

Was it the fault of Forde that he was placed in a square hole, he being essentially fitted to fill a round one; that he, being poor, should have visions of opulence thrust upon him; that he, being in a very settled and respectable and useful rank of society, should, _nolens volens_, have visions of a far different rank presented to him.

I think not. A man is scarcely responsible for his weakness and his folly.

The credulity of those who believed in Forde, may be open to wonder; that Forde failed to verify their belief, seems to me the most natural thing in the world.

If a country squire, accustomed to horses and their vagaries, accustomed likewise to stiff fences, broad watercourses, and awkward bullfinches, mounted a cockney, who says he can ride, on a hunter acquainted with his business, would he be surprised to see that cockney carried home crippled or dead.

Certainly, he would not; and why in business a man who has hitherto only ambled along on the back of a spiritless old cob, should be considered fit to control a thoroughbred passes my comprehension.

When Forde accepted the situation offered to him, he undertook a task too great for his abilities. It was a repetition of the old fable of the ox and the frog, and with a like ending; the frog burst his skin.

Into the offices of the General Chemical Company, Limited, Mr. Forde walked, determined to do his duty and push the concern.

He saw at a glance where others had failed; it does not require long sight for this operation. Naturally, he was tolerant of their errors, since to those errors he owed his own preferment; and he meant, so he declared, to send up the dividend to something which should astonish the shareholders. It is only just to state he at first performed this feat; as a true chronicler, it saddens me to add, that eventually he brought down the shares to something which astonished them still more.

Mr. Forde caught at any and all business which offered. At first he believed in the legitimacy of many schemes with which the General Chemical Company was connected; when enlightenment came he had to make the illegitimate children pass muster by some means; and so at length--the downward descent is one neither pleasant nor profitable to follow--step by step the General Chemical Company, Limited, became a sort of refuge for the destitute--a place where rogues and vagabonds did congregate to transact very suspicious business; a concern with which voluntarily no solvent man dealt; which was in a fair way of becoming in the City a by-word and a reproach.

And all the time, Forde, incompetent, miserable, was keeping a brave face to the world and a false one to his employers,--was fighting a losing game with all the strength he possessed, and calling it to himself, and every one who cared to listen to him, success.

Failure meant a great deal to him. It does to most men who have risen to what may be called in their own station, eminence, through adventitious circumstances, instead of their own cleverness, or roguery, or force of character.

If a person be possessed of energy, or plausibility, or cleverness, or enormous industry, it is utterly impossible for any reverse short of broken health to crush him so utterly that he may not hope to come up in the front some day again; but if a fellow have got a chance, merely through a fluke, and have sense enough to know this, how he will cling to it with tooth and nail and hand and foot, till he and it drop down unpitied together. For my own part, I cannot tell why such men receive no pity. They never do. The only reason which presents itself to account for this is that in their descent they spare nor friend nor foe. Into their abyss they would drag the nearest and dearest, could he retard the striking of the inevitable hour by five minutes.

To Mr. Forde further failure meant more than it does to the generality of men in his position. He had been raised so high that he could not even contemplate the other side of the canvas. He knew the General Chemical Company was rotten, root, branch, and leaf, but he thought, if he could keep up the appearance of prosperity long enough, he might obtain some other appointment before the crash came.

In a very ancient book there is a parable written concerning an unjust steward.

According to his light, Mr. Forde tried to emulate the tactics of that old world swindler, but with indifferent success.

Those who owed money to my Lords the Chemical Company had taken Mr. Forde's measure tolerably accurately at an early period of his stewardship; and when the end came it turned out that no one, except the rogues, had made much of the falsifying of their accounts; which was all very hard on Mr. Forde who had really worked with might and main for himself and his employers; only, as seemed natural, for himself first.

Afternoon had arrived, and Mr. Forde sat alone in that office which, so long as he remained manager at St. Vedast's Wharf, he had a right to call his.

It was a handsomely-furnished if somewhat comfortless-looking room. All new offices smell for an unconscionable time of paint, varnish, French polish, and new carpets.

That office was no exception to the general rule, but to Mr. Forde, the smell of newness had a sweet savour in his nostrils.

As the business happened about that time to be doing about as badly as it could, it had been deemed expedient to spend a considerable sum of money in renovating the premises; and the varnish and the polish, and the newly-laid carpets and the sticky oil-cloths in and leading to the manager's office were parts of the result.

So long as the precipice was fringed with flowers, the manager could not realize it hung over an abyss, and he therefore, on the afternoon in question, sat before his table writing with a marvellous serenity, though he had that day received two warnings of evil to come that might well have shaken a braver and wiser man.

But they were over. To a certain extent Mr. Swanland had been right when he said, "Forde is mentally short-sighted," but he would have proved a more correct delineator of character had he styled him, "wilfully short-sighted."

The natural sequence of events Mr. Forde utterly declined to study; in the chapter of accidents he was as much at home as in the fluctuations of the Stock Exchange.

Still two alarming events had occurred that day--first, a new director had given him to understand he intended personally to examine the accounts and securities of three customers whose solvency he doubted.

Amongst the directors, however, disunion meant safety to the manager; and as no two of them ever agreed, Mr. Forde had found it a matter of little difficulty to set the whole of them so utterly by the ears on some utterly unimportant point that the unsatisfactory clients were for the time forgotten.

Still Mr. Forde knew that the subject must crop up again sooner or later, and he meant to lead the tardy debtors a weary life until "he had something tangible to show his directors."

The second matter was more serious. After the last of his directors had left, a gentleman tall, dignified, and elderly, inquired in the outer office if he could speak to Mr. Forde.

"Certainly not," Mr. Forde said in answer to the clerk who asked if he were at liberty, "I can see no one at present."

Mr. Forde was not engaged in any matter of the slightest importance, but this was one of his devices for maintaining the dignity of position.

Amongst the recent chronicles of St. Vedast's Wharf was a legend that on one occasion an entire stranger to the Company and the manager, finding the outer office unoccupied, penetrated to the inner _sanctum_ and there surprised Mr. Forde industriously reading the 'Times.'

Whereupon the manager rose and said, "How dare you sir, come in here? I must request you to leave my office immediately."

But the stranger stood his ground. "Don't excite yourself, pray. I have come to speak to you about a little matter of business, and I can wait until you are cool. I am going to take a seat, and if you follow my advice you will do the same."

And suiting his action to the word, the madman, as Mr. Forde afterwards called him, pulled forward a chair, sat down and calmly eyed the manager until that gentleman asked, "What the----he wanted?"

Mr. Forde's present visitor was, however, a man of a different stamp.

"Take my card to Mr. Forde," he said, "and ask him to name an hour this afternoon when he will be at leisure."

Now the name engraved on the card was that of a City magnate, and Mr. Forde at once with many apologies came out to greet him.

In the revulsion of his feelings he would have shaken hands, but the visitor failed to perceive his intention; neither did he make any answer to Mr. Forde's inquiries as to what he could do for him until they stood together in the private office with the door shut.

With great effusion of manner, Mr. Forde pressed one of the highly-polished, hair-stuffed, morocco-covered chairs upon the magnate's attention, and the magnate seated himself upon it, put his hat and gloves on the table, placed his gold-headed cane between his knees, and then after deliberately drawing out a pocket-book remarked,

"I have come to speak to you about a rather unpleasant piece of business, Mr. Forde."

"I am very sorry to hear it," said the manager. And for once he said what was not false. He did not want any more unpleasant subjects presented to his notice at that time than those he was already obliged to contemplate.

"After all," he thought, "what Kleinwort says is quite true; it is never the thing you expect but the thing you do not expect which proves the trouble."

Prophetic words, though spoken only mentally; words he often recalled in the evil days that were then to come.

As if he had caught some echo of his muttered sentence, the stranger went on,

"In the way of business a bill indorsed by your Company and a certain Bertrand Kleinwort came into our hands some time since. We intrusted a correspondent to make some inquiries concerning the drawer and acceptor of that bill, and I have thought it my duty to communicate the result of those inquiries to you. We find the drawer is a poor man in a very small way of business in a remote German village, whilst the acceptor's address is at an empty house in Cologne."

"Impossible, sir!" retorted Mr. Forde. "You have been deceived, vilely deceived. Mr. Kleinwort is a most respectable merchant, a gentleman whose character is above reproach, and he assured us he was personally acquainted with both acceptor and drawer, and that their names were good as the Bank of England."

"I am sorry to say," was the reply, "I should not feel inclined to take Mr. Kleinwort's word concerning the solvency of any person whose bill he wished to negotiate. I felt you must have been deceived, and I therefore considered it only right to inform you what are the nature of the acceptances you have indorsed."

"Very kind of you, I am sure," was the half-sneering reply, "but I repeat, sir, you have been deceived. In their own country the men who drew and accepted those bills stand as well as the General Chemical Company does here."

A very dubious smile hovered about the lips of Mr. Forde's visitor as he answered,

"I have no means of disproving your last assertion; indeed, I fear it is perfectly true in every particular. I may add, however, I shall give orders that for the future no bill of any kind or description which bears the indorsement of your Company is to be taken by our house. Good morning, sir."

But Mr. Forde did not answer. With a defiant air he strode to the window and turned his back on his visitor, who opened the door for himself, walked through the outer office, and so made his way to Vedast Lane, shaking the dust of the General Chemical Company off his feet as he went.

As for Mr. Forde, he sat down and wrote a letter to a certain "Dear Will" residing at Liverpool, in which he told him in strict confidence that the work at St. Vedast Wharf was beginning to tell on his health, and that if he (Will) chanced to hear of any good situation likely to fall vacant, his correspondent would take it as a great favour if he would let him know. In a postscript Mr. Forde added he should have no objection to go to Spain as superintendent of a mine if an adequate salary were offered. "Bess and the children," he explained, "could take a nice little place near Eastbourne or Southampton till affairs were more settled in Spain, or they might even go to the south of France. He believed education there was very good and very cheap, and the children could acquire the language without expense."

By the time he had finished this epistle Mr. Forde looked upon his future as almost settled. He had taken the first step, and would be certain to get some good berth.

Out of England he trusted it might be. Had any one offered him an appointment at that moment in the West Indies, I think he would have taken it.

Small as the man's power of realizing future ills happened to be, he would have said unhesitatingly that under some aspects he considered "Yellow Jack" a less formidable enemy than John Bull.

He would go; he made up his mind to that, but not until Will had got something good for him, something he should not feel it derogatory to his dignity to accept.

With this letter lying sealed before him, tracing idle lines on his blotting-paper Mr. Forde sat dreaming dreams of future fortune, seeing visions of cork trees and gitanas, of veiled señoras and haughty hidalgos, hearing the plash of fountains and the tinkling of guitars, when a clerk disturbed his reverie.

"Mr. Halling wishes to speak to you, sir," said the youth.

"Show Mr. Halling in," was the reply, and Rupert accordingly entered arrayed in that velveteen suit which Mr. Forde secretly admired, and one like which he longed to don, and would in fact have donned had he not dreaded the displeasure of his directors.

Mr. Forde had light hair and fair florid complexion, small dark blue eyes, so dark, indeed, that when he was angry or excited they might have been taken for black, and he considered that these peculiarities of appearance would show to enormous advantage against sable velveteen.

As red-haired men always affect blue neck-ties, as dark complexioned men choose light coloured garments, as stout men like coats which button tight round their waists; so on the same inexplicable principle of selection, Mr. Forde would have liked to strut about St. Vedast Wharf arrayed in a similar suit to that which made Rupert Halling look in the eyes of City men so handsome and disreputable a vagabond.

"I was expecting to see you earlier," remarked Mr. Forde.

"Yes," Rupert assented, waiting his opportunity to make the communication he had been over-persuaded to convey all by himself into the enemy's camp.

"Anything new?" continued Mr. Forde.

"One thing, which I fear it will not much please you to hear," was the reply.

Mr. Forde looked up from the purposeless tracings he had resumed after the first greetings were over. He looked up, his face darkening with the approach of one of those tempests of passion Rupert, as well as every other person who chanced to be unpleasantly connected with the General Chemical Company's Manager, had felt sweep over him.

Well, it was all nearly at an end. He had stood many a cannonade without flinching, and another broadside could not much matter.

"I have come to tell you," he went on hurriedly, without giving the other time to speak, "that Mr. Mortomley cannot go on any longer. He must call a meeting of his creditors."

Holding the arms of his chair with both hands, Mr. Forde rose, gasping, literally gasping with rage.

"Where is he now?" he asked hoarsely. His voice was so strange and choked, Rupert could scarcely have recognized it.

"He is at his solicitor's."

"The villain, the cowardly unprincipled vagabond--the thief--the cur; but I won't stay to face my directors over it. I won't stand between him and them. I will send in my resignation within the hour. He has ruined me."

And having delivered himself of this sentence in a _crescendo_ of fury, Mr. Forde took his hat, thrust it down over his forehead, and walked out of the office.

"Well, that is one way of cutting the knot, certainly," thought Rupert, who was, by the manager's move, left standing in the middle of the new carpet more utterly astounded than he had ever before been in the whole course of his life.

"I may as well go too," he thought, after a minute's consideration; and he was moving towards the door with this intention, when Mr. Forde came back again, took off his hat, flung himself into his chair, and asked--

"Now, what is the meaning of all this?"