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‘It is quite O.K., Mr Joolby,’ said Ikey when the door was closed again, and it could have been noticed that he spoke neither so ceremoniously nor in such very audible tones as those which had passed on the threshold. ‘If you want him he’s upstairs now and there isn’t nothing different going on anywhere.’
Joolby grunted what was doubtless a note of satisfaction and wagged assurance at Mr Bronsky.
‘There you see,’ he remarked consequentially, ‘it’s exactly as I told you. This isn’t the land of domiciliary visits and if the police are coming they will always send you printed form giving twenty-four hours notice.’
‘No; is that rule?’ asked Mr Bronsky innocently, and repeated: ‘Good! good! It is comical,’ when he saw that the other two were being silently amused at his literalness. ‘Come, come,’ he hastened to add, thinking that it was time to reassert some of the authority that seemed to have become temporarily eclipsed by the progress of the unfortunate journey, ‘this is no business however, and we are not here for evers.’
‘Tell George to come down and bring pulls of his latest plates,’ confirmed Joolby. The narrow rickety stairs leading to the floor above—little better than a permanent ladder—were impractical for him and scarcely more inviting to Mr Bronsky. Ikey apparently had some system of conveying this message by jerking an inconspicuous cord for almost at once George Larch appeared at the top of the steps, recognising the two visitors as he descended.
‘Peace be with you, persecuted victim. The day dawns!’ exclaimed the comrade, bustling forward effusively and kissing Mr Larch on both cheeks—an indignity to which he had to submit or lose his balance among the jam jars.
‘That’s all right, Mr Bronsky,’ protested George who had as much prejudice against ‘foreign ways’ as most of his country-men. ‘But please don’t start doing that again—I told you about it once before, you may remember.’
‘But—but, are we not as brothers?’ stammered Mr Bronsky, uncertain whether or not to be deeply hurt. ‘In spirit of all-union greeting—’
‘Well, I shouldn’t like the wife to catch you at it, that’s all, Mr Bronsky. I should never think of carrying on like that with a grown-up brother.’
‘Catch me “at it”,’ managed to voice the almost dumbfounded Bronsky. ‘“Carrying on”! Oh, the pigs Englishmen! You have no—no—’ At this emotional stress words really did fail him.
‘Come, come, you two—what the hell,’ interposed Mr Joolby judicially. ‘We’re here to see how you’ve got on, George. May as well go into the room where we can have a decent light. Did you bring pulls of the latest plates down? Bronsky here needs to be satisfied that you can do all I’ve claimed for you.’
At the back of the evil-smelling vault Mr Ikey had his private lair, a mixture of office and, apparently, a living-room in every function. It was remarkably garnished with such salvage from the cruder stock as had been considered worthy of being held over and, as Joolby had foreseen, it possessed a light vastly superior to the dim glimmer that hung over the cavernous store. Here the three chiefly concerned drew close together, the old man remaining behind to stand on guard, while Larch, with the outward indifference that merged his pride as a craftsman and an ineradicable shame to be so basely employed, submitted an insignificant sheaf of papers. Some of the sheets were apparent Bank of England notes in the finished state, others proofs of incomplete plates and various details; both the visitors produced pocket lenses and Mr Bronsky smoothed out a couple of genuine notes that he extracted from a well-stocked wallet. A complete absorption testified their breathless interest.
‘Well?’ demanded Joolby when every sheet had been passed under review. ‘Say what you like, Bronsky, this is as near the real article as—’ and he instanced two things which might be admitted to be essentially the same although the comparison was more forcible than dainty.
‘It could certainly deceive me, I confess,’ admitted Bronsky, ‘and yet in ill-spent youth I have experience as bank official. But see,’ he added, as though anxious to expose some flaw, and wetting across one corner of a sheet with a moistened finger he demonstrated that it could easily be severed.
‘Ah, but you mustn’t judge the result by this paper, Mr Bronsky—of course it’s no good,’ put in Larch, carefully securing the fragments. ‘But if we get some of the genuine stuff, as Mr Joolby will tell you he means to do, not even the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England could be dead certain which was which—except for one thing, of course.’
‘And that is what?’
‘Why, the numbers to be sure. They can refer to their issue.’
‘Not so fast, George,’ objected Joolby, ‘how is that going to help them? Suppose we duplicate actual numbers that are out in circulation, and perhaps hold over the originals? We can triplicate, quadruple, multiply by a hundred times if it suits our purpose.’
‘Well, by hokey that’s an idea,’ admitted simple George Larch. ‘Why, they’d have to pay out on all that come in then or risk repudiating their own paper. It’s lucky for the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street that we aren’t in the wholesale business.’
‘Yes, to be sure,’ replied Joolby, favouring the other conspirator with a meaningful sideways look. ‘Lucky, isn’t it, Bronsky?’
‘I should think to smile,’ agreed Mr Bronsky, combing his luxuriant beard for the mere pleasure of verifying that dignified appendage. ‘Notwithstanding however.’
‘There’s one thing I should like to mention, Mr Joolby, while you’re here,’ said Larch, getting back to practical business. ‘Do you really mean me to go on with plates for all the high values up to the thousand pound printing?’
‘Why not?’ demanded Joolby, turning on his props to regard George with the blank full-faced stare that presented his disconcerting features in their most pronounced aspect. ‘What’s the difficulty?’
‘None at all so far as I’m concerned. Of course I can do them just the same as the others—technically there’s nothing whatever against it. Only no one ever heard of soft flims for anything like that—only for fives or tens or at the most a twenty.’
‘All the more reason why the big ones will go through then. As a matter of fact, George, our friend here has struck special facilities for putting stuff of that sort about in the East. There’ll be no risk to any of us at this end whatever happens.’
‘But you don’t mean that it’s going to be negotiable for anything like at value? Why if—?’
‘A profitable use will be found for all of them, never fear,’ replied Mr Joolby, evincing no intention of pursuing the subject. ‘Yes, we’re through now, Ikey. You can come off. Well, what is it then?’
‘It was Mrs Larch outside at the door,’ bleated Ikey in his ancient falsetto. ‘I assure her that the place is all locked up and no one here and she laugh at me through the keyhole. She says she will come inside and see for herself.’
‘Then she will,’ remarked George, who might be supposed to know. ‘So you may as well unlock the door and let her.’
‘If she is I had perhaps better as well go back into the room,’ suggested Mr Bronsky—they were again in the front shop on their way to leave. ‘Your wife, for some reason, cannot endure my presence.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t go as far as that, Mr Bronsky,’ protested George guiltily, for he knew well enough that he could go exactly that far. ‘There must he some sort of a mistake … Still, if you think so, perhaps it would be as well at the moment.’
Mrs Larch came breezily in, paying no more attention to the now obsequious Ikey than if he had been one of his own commercial assets—an emaciated thigh-bone. A woman smartly turned out (as she would herself have complacently said) and—if a little floridly—handsome still, she might bear slight resemblance now to the simple angel of George’s early dreams, but it was possible to trace something of that unfortunate pilgrim’s progress in her rather defiant front, her meretricious embellishment, and in an eye that was not devoid of material calculation. For the moment it was only the unwieldy form of Mr Joolby that stood out in that place of continual shadow.
‘Oh, good evening, Mr Joolby,’ she exclaimed, sparkling triumphantly over her success at the doorway. ‘Of course I guessed that Mr Ikey was telling fibs but I didn’t know that I should find you here. I suppose that George is up in the attic as usual? He might just as well be a member of the Carlton for all that I see of him nowadays.’
‘No, my dear, here I am,’ proclaimed George, emerging from his particular shadow. ‘Only you oughtn’t to be, after the place is shut up, you know. It isn’t prudent.’
‘Well, someone had to do something about it. I did go round to Padgett Street first and Mr Peke there—no, that isn’t right, is it? but I know that it’s some kind of a fancy dog. Anyhow, he seemed to be telling the truth when he said that you “not is” there, so there was nothing for it but to come on here and chance it.’
‘But what’s the matter, Cora?’ asked Larch. ‘Has anything happened?’
‘Only the landlord this time, my lad—the gas-man was yesterday and the furniture people—oh, you’ve been home since then, haven’t you, and know all about those beauties.’
‘But I thought that I left enough to tide over the most pressing. We figured it out, if you remember, and it seemed—’
‘So I thought, but unfortunately it didn’t turn out quite as we figured, boy, and some of the others got more pressing,’ said Mrs Larch calmly. ‘At all events I left the landlord sitting on the landing.’
‘He means it?’
‘I’m afraid he most decidedly does. There was that nasty little air of finality about the way he picked his teeth with a bus ticket as he talked—I think he must save them up for it—that, as the Sunday school poem says: “Is a certain forerunner of sorrow”. “Come now, Mrs Larch,” he said, running his suety eye over everything I’d got on, “you can’t be hard up you know and you’ve had a cart-load of warnings. Doesn’t your husband make good money?” “Better than most husbands at his job do, I will say,” I replied, “but, you know, it’s always the cobbler’s wife who has the worst shoes, and just at the moment—”’ She finished up with the conventional little laugh and held out a hand towards him.
‘Come, George, fork out. I’m sorry if you’re rocky too but it’s an absolute that it’s no good going back without it.’
‘“Rocky”, my God!’ said George, echoing her shallow laugh. ‘Well—but how much do you need to square it?’
‘Oh, a couple might do just to carry on—and of course as many more as you can spare me.’
‘A couple, eh, my girl?’ he replied, fishing deeply into both his trouser pockets. ‘You don’t mean tanners by any chance? Well, that’s the state of the exchequer.’ Two sixpences and a few coppers were the result of his investigation.
‘I see. No winners among them today, I suppose, and you’d rather gone it? I might have guessed as much. Well, that being that, Mr Joolby will have to advance you a trifle.’
‘What me? Two quids?’ exclaimed Mr Joolby aghast. ‘You can’t be serious. Everyone know that I never advance anything until afterwards and your husband has been paid for a full week and this is only Friday. Oh, I couldn’t—’
‘All right; only if you don’t our place will be sold up and then where are you going to find George when you want him?’
This was so plainly common sense that there could be only one outcome (to say nothing of the pressure of another development that was duly formulating) but even as he would have capitulated one of the freakish impulses, that occasionally brought out the shifty grin, moved Joolby to change his purpose. Instead of the amount required he slyly picked out another paper and Cora found herself being offered a wholly unexpected five-pound note—in point of fact one of George’s most recent productions.
‘Oh, Mr Joolby, that is kind—’ she began gratefully and then flashed to what it was—sensed it in Larch’s instinctive frown, in Joolby’s half averted face, creased with foolish enjoyment. She bit on to the unpleasant tremor: very well, only Joolby should never again enjoy at her expense that particular satisfaction.
‘Well, of all the—’ she mock-indignantly declared, and entering into the spirit of the thing crumpled up the note and playfully flung it back at the ogre. ‘Nice fix it would be for you, Mr Joolby, if I was nicked for planting a snide ’un. They’d be here after George like one o’clock and then what would become of all the work you’ve paid him for doing?’
‘That’s all right, Mrs Larch—it was only our fun,’ protested Mr Joolby, leering like his ancestral satyr. ‘It isn’t likely that we’d risk anything of the sort just now, is it? But I will tell you this: when we get the right stuff you needn’t be afraid of walking into the Bank of England with your paper.’
‘I daresay. But in the meantime I am afraid of the bailiff walking into our flat with his paper. George there knows well enough. I must have something before I can go back and that’s all there is about it.’
‘Well, so you shall have,’ promised Mr Joolby, calling up all the blandishment of his suavest manner. ‘And that is not all; I may as well tell you now, though I hadn’t intended to until it was quite settled. Very soon we shall have a nice regular job for you with good wages—oh, a splendid position in a beautiful house with very little to do and everything found that you require.’
If Mr Joolby expected the enchanted lady to fall upon his neck (metaphorically, of course, for physical contact was a thing sheerly inconceivable) he was a little out of his reckoning. Cora Larch had experience of considerable slices of life in various aspects. During periods of George’s compulsory withdrawal it had been necessary for her to fend for herself, nor, in truth, had she ever found any particular difficulty in so doing. But as a result of the education that had thereby accrued she now approached Mr Joolby’s surprising proposal in the spirit that prompts a creature of the wild to walk all round a doubtful morsel before venturing to touch it.
‘Oh, and what sort of a job is it, may I ask?’ she guardedly inquired. ‘And for that matter, what sort of a house where everything is going to be so fairy-like?’
‘Well, you see, it’s like this,’ explained Mr Joolby. ‘The time’s come when we must have another place—it’s getting too risky for all of them to be in and out so often of my shop, to say nothings about coming direct here when at any time one might be followed. Then very soon there will be others—foreign gentlemen—that we may want to put up for a few nights at a time. Oh, I can tell you it won’t be altogether money wasted.’
‘No, I’m sure it won’t if you are doing it, Mr Joolby,’ agreed the lady. ‘Still, I don’t see—’
‘Well, as I’m telling you I’ve taken a private house in a different name—a furnished house right across the other side of London. It must be conducted quietly on highly respectable lines so that it would never occur to anyone outside that it wasn’t thoroughly dull and bourgeois. With the milkman and the baker calling every day that oughtn’t to be difficult. Nothing impresses the neighbourhood so favourably as two or three bottles of milk taken in regularly every morning and put out again at night. It must be that crooks aren’t supposed to drink it. And any account of yourself that you want to put about—we will make that up—you can safely pass on to the baker.’
‘Well?’ Mr Joolby seemed to think that everything necessary had been said, but Mrs Larch was still expectant.
‘Well; don’t you understand? You are to be as housekeeper, manage the place and arrange for whoever we send to stay there. All the bills will be paid—only don’t be extravagant of course. Deal at the multiple shops and there’s a nice street market—and you will have a pound a week for wages.’
‘H’m; it sounds promising,’ admitted Mrs Larch. The prospect of being able to cap it by giving notice when the insufferable landlord made his next caustic remark was not without an influence. Still, she had not quite completed the cautionary circle. ‘But is it part of the—the arrangement that you are going to take up your abode there, Mr Joolby?’
‘I?’ replied Joolby, with just the flicker of an instinctive glance in the ingenuous George’s direction. ‘What has that got to do with it? I live at my own place as usual, of course. I may have to come occasionally—’
‘Oh, all right. I only wanted to understand—and have it understood—from the start. Let me know when I’m to begin and I’ll take it on for you.’
‘Of course you will. It’s a holiday that you’re being paid for having, not a job. What do you say, eh, George?’
‘I say that if Cora wants to do it she will,’ contributed Mr Larch with tempered loyalty. ‘It’s her affair after all, Mr Joolby.’
‘Eh? Oh yes, of course; but that’s settled. Well, what about putting this paper out of the way now that Bronsky is satisfied; and you don’t leave any of the plates where they can be found at night I hope? We can’t be too careful.’
‘I’ll see to that you may be sure,’ undertook Larch and he proceeded to satisfy himself that no dangerous paper had been left about and then climbed up to his quarters. Meanwhile Cora lingered on in the cavernous gloom, waiting for Joolby to redeem his promise—a small detail that seemed to have escaped his memory.
‘What sort of a house is it that you’re taking, Mr Joolby?’ she said at last, finding the man’s eyes repeatedly upon her and speaking to break a silence that threatened to become awkward.
‘Oh, a very nice house in a first-class neighbourhood and quite the swell side of London. There’s a garden all round so we can’t be overlooked and a back way out into another street, which is always a convenience. It’s costing me a lot of money.’
‘Costing your Bolshie friends, I suppose you mean? What size is this house—it sounds rather a handful?’
‘Quite a good size. Ten or a dozen rooms, I daresay, and then there are cellars and attics besides. Oh, plenty of room for all that we require.’
‘Plenty of work for me more likely. I can’t do all that myself you know, Mr Joolby. I must have a maid of some sort if the place is to be kept at all decent.’
‘What? A servant to feed and pay wages into the bargain!’ cried Mr Joolby in dismay. ‘Well, well; you shall have one, Cora. I daresay we can find one of those devoted, hard-working little scrubs who are glad to come for nothing and live on the table leavings. And when there’s nothing else for her to do she can always put in some time working in the garden—I have to keep it in order.’
‘She shall, Mr Joolby; you can have my word on that. Now what about the rent for me to take back? You said you would, you know—’
‘So I did, my dear,’ amorously breathed Mr Joolby, coming nearer as he took out his wallet to comply and dropping his voice almost to a whisper, ‘and I’m not going back on it or anything else I promise you … You think me a bit—careful I dare say, now don’t you, Cora? But if only you’ll be sensible and meet me half way you’ll have no reason to complain that you’re short of money. There’s the two pounds, and I’ll make it five more—well, say three more for a start; that’s five altogether—if you’re reasonable—’ Amid all this tender eloquence, in which Mr Joolby’s never very dulcet voice assumed an oddly croaking tone as the combined outcome of the exigencies of caution and his own emotional strain, Mrs Larch realised that her hand was being held and increasingly caressed under the cloak of passing her the money.
‘Oh, you beastly old toad!’ she impulsively let out, and tore herself away from those fumbling paws, though, characteristically enough, her fingers tightened on the two notes that were already in her possession. ‘So it was that, after all!’
Whatever had been Joolby’s delusion a moment before, that one word Cora had used brought him crashing back to earth as effectually as if it had been a bullet. For a short minute his contorted face and swelling form grew more repellent still, his hands beat the air for help, and swaying then, with his props laid by, it seemed as though he must have fallen. The effect was sufficiently alarming to blur Mrs Larch’s disgust, while fearful of lending any physical aid she began to babble, lamely enough, to turn the edge of her incautious outburst.
‘Oh, well; of course I didn’t mean anything personal, Mr Joolby. You quite understand that I hope, but you ought to be more careful—steadying yourself by clutching hold of one in this dark hole like that. I declare I thought it was a bogie. Now I’d better be getting on I think. You’ll let me know when I’m to start housekeeping, won’t you?’
‘Go; go; get out! Clear off, you harpy. Never show your ugly face again. I’ve done with you, do you hear?’ spat out the stricken creature, hurling the words like missiles. ‘Go before I have you thrown out—’ Gasping for breath he continued to gesticulate and threaten.
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