“Now,” said Brother Frank. “Now watch. Now he’s going to loop the loop.”
But the wheels of the aeroplane still pointed to the ground. It grew smaller and smaller. It was a mere speck.
“What the dickens?”
Far away to the West something showed up against the blue of the sky—something that might have been a bird, a toy kite, or an aeroplane traveling rapidly into the sunset.
Four pairs of eyes followed it in rapt silence.
THE EPISODE OF THE FINANCIAL NAPOLEON
Second of a Series of Six Stories [First published in Pictorial Review, June 1916]
Seated with his wife at breakfast on the veranda which overlooked the rolling lawns and leafy woods of his charming Sussex home, Geoffrey Windlebird, the great financier, was enjoying the morning sun to the full. His chubby features were relaxed in a smile of lazy contentment; and his wife, who liked to act sometimes as his secretary, found it difficult to get him to pay any attention to his morning’s mail.
“There’s a column in to-day’s Financial Argus,” she said, “of which you really must take notice. It’s most abusive. It’s about the Wildcat Reef. They assert that there never was any gold in the mine, and that you knew it when you floated the company.”
“They will have their little joke.”
“But you had the usual mining-expert’s report.”
“Of course we had. And a capital report it was. I remember thinking at the time what a neat turn of phrase the fellow had. I admit he depended rather on his fine optimism than on any examination of the mine. As a matter of fact, he never went near it. And why should he? It’s down in South America somewhere. Awful climate—snakes, mosquitoes, revolutions, fever.”
Mr. Windlebird spoke drowsily. His eyes closed.
“Well, the Argus people say that they have sent a man of their own out there to make inquiries, a well-known expert, and the report will be in within the next fortnight. They say they will publish it in their next number but one. What are you going to do about it?”
Mr. Windlebird yawned.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, dearest, the game is up. The Napoleon of Finance is about to meet his Waterloo. And all for twenty thousand pounds. That is the really bitter part of it. To-morrow we sail for the Argentine. I’ve got the tickets.”
“You’re joking, Geoffrey. You must be able to raise twenty thousand. It’s a flea-bite.”
“On paper—in the form of shares, script, bonds, promissory notes, it is a flea-bite. But when it has to be produced in the raw, in flat, hard lumps of gold or in crackling bank-notes, it’s more like a bite from a hippopotamus. I can’t raise it, and that’s all about it. So—St. Helena for Napoleon.”
Altho Geoffrey Windlebird described himself as a Napoleon of Finance, a Cinquevalli or Chung Ling Soo of Finance would have been a more accurate title. As a juggler with other people’s money he was at the head of his class. And yet, when one came to examine it, his method was delightfully simple. Say, for instance, that the Home-grown Tobacco Trust, founded by Geoffrey in a moment of ennui, failed to yield those profits which the glowing prospectus had led the public to expect. Geoffrey would appease the excited shareholders by giving them Preference Shares (interest guaranteed) in the Sea-gold Extraction Company, hastily floated to meet the emergency. When the interest became due, it would, as likely as not, be paid out of the capital just subscribed for the King Solomon’s Mines Exploitation Association, the little deficiency in the latter being replaced in its turn, when absolutely necessary and not a moment before, by the transfer of some portion of the capital just raised for yet another company. And so on, ad infinitum. There were moments when it seemed to Mr. Windlebird that he had solved the problem of Perpetual Promotion.
The only thing that can stop a triumphal progress like Mr. Windlebird’s is when some coarse person refuses to play to the rules, and demands ready money instead of shares in the next venture. This had happened now, and it had flattened Mr. Windlebird like an avalanche.
He was a philosopher, but he could not help feeling a little galled that the demand which had destroyed him had been so trivial. He had handled millions—on paper, it was true, but still millions—and here he was knocked out of time by a paltry twenty thousand pounds.
“Are you absolutely sure that nothing can be done?” persisted Mrs. Windlebird. “Have you tried every one?”
“Every one, dear moon-of-my-delight—the probables, the possibles, the highly unlikelies, and the impossibles. Never an echo to the minstrel’s wooing song. No, my dear, we have got to take to the boats this time. Unless, of course, some one possessed at one and the same time of twenty thousand pounds and a very confiding nature happens to drop from the clouds.”
As he spoke, an aeroplane came sailing over the tops of the trees beyond the tennis-lawn. Gracefully as a bird it settled on the smooth turf, not twenty yards from where he was seated.
Roland Bleke stepped stiffly out onto the tennis-lawn. His progress rather resembled that of a landsman getting out of an open boat in which he has spent a long and perilous night at sea. He was feeling more wretched than he had ever felt in his life. He had a severe cold. He had a splitting headache. His hands and feet were frozen. His eyes smarted. He was hungry. He was thirsty. He hated cheerful M. Feriaud, who had hopped out and was now busy tinkering the engine, a gay Provencal air upon his lips, as he had rarely hated any one, even Muriel Coppin’s brother Frank.
So absorbed was he in his troubles that he was not aware of Mr. Windlebird’s approach until that pleasant, portly man’s shadow fell on the turf before him.
“Not had an accident, I hope, Mr. Bleke?”
Roland was too far gone in misery to speculate as to how this genial stranger came to know his name. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Windlebird, keen student of the illustrated press, had recognized Roland by his photograph in the Daily Mirror. In the course of the twenty yards’ walk from house to tennis-lawn she had put her husband into possession of the more salient points in Roland’s history. It was when Mr. Windlebird heard that Roland had forty thousand pounds in the bank that he sat up and took notice.
“Lead me to him,” he said simply.
Roland sneezed.
“Doe accident, thag you,” he replied miserably. “Somethig’s gone wrong with the worgs, but it’s nothing serious, worse luck.”
M. Feriaud, having by this time adjusted the defect in his engine, rose to his feet, and bowed.
“Excuse if we come down on your lawn. But not long do we trespass. See, mon ami,” he said radiantly to Roland, “all now O. K. We go on.”
“No,” said Roland decidedly.
“No? What you mean—no?”
A shade of alarm fell on M. Feriaud’s weather-beaten features. The eminent bird-man did not wish to part from Roland. Toward Roland he felt like a brother, for Roland had notions about payment for little aeroplane rides which bordered upon the princely.
“But you say—take me to France with you–-“
“I know. But it’s all off. I’m not feeling well.”
“But it’s all wrong.” M. Feriaud gesticulated to drive home his point. “You give me one hundred pounds to take you away from Lexingham. Good. It is here.” He slapped his breast pocket. “But the other two hundred pounds which also you promise me to pay me when I place you safe in France, where is that, my friend?”
“I will give you two hundred and fifty,” said Roland earnestly, “to leave me here, and go right away, and never let me see your beastly machine again.”
A smile of brotherly forgiveness lit up M. Feriaud’s face. The generous Gallic nature asserted itself. He held out his arms affectionately to Roland.