The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Still, the activity all around him was reassuring, for every yard was another step nearer a payment to him.

  For Nora, whose daily landscape was that endless to-and-fro of paper, there could be no such comfort. The office servants were cheerful, knowing they were in a thriving company at a time when others were tottering; she had to run an endless gauntlet of their cheer. She had to endure the congratulations of Jackson on the steady increase in the firm's wealth. And all the time she knew it in no way matched the reckoning, whose day could not much longer be postponed.

  In mid-October the Bank of England raised its discount rate—a belated attempt to stem the flood of credit it had itself created. The rise was a mere token, from 2½ to 3 per cent, but people were so nervous they clutched at straws, assuring each other that now all would be well. In case Chambers should catch this new form of laughing sickness, Nora decided to pay him a visit.

  Chambers was a tall, lithe, powerful man. Something about him, and about his movements, reminded Nora of a leopard—not the leopards in zoos, but those on Egyptian papyruses. Semitic leopards. He had the same flat back to his head and angularity of neck, and his walk was tense and silent. At thirty-eight he was certainly a very handsome man, but there was nothing in that to endear him to her. His eyes, dark and set deep beneath a firm, unfurrowed brow, were sleek and watchful; one's first impression that they twinkled with a friendly mirth soon vanished. His lips too seemed to smile; but they were so mobile, even when he was silent—especially when he was silent—as to cancel out the cheer and leave instead the impression of a man unwilling to reveal how he might appear if he allowed himself to relax.

  His office had changed greatly since John and Nora had first seen it. Six years ago, Chambers had been in a very small way of trade, on the outer fringe of the dozens of banks that belonged to the London Clearing House. He had risen, however, with Stevenson's. As a Jew, he would never penetrate the very inner circles of the City; but, also as a Jew, he knew more European bankers and understood their ways better than any other London bank of his size. This and his link with Stevenson's had served him well over the last few years, and he had become something of an expert in railway funding, especially in European railways. Millions in British capital had gone into overseas lines, and Chambers had managed a greatly disproportionate share of it.

  So the delicate gilded furniture and the rococo mirrors had gone from his office; and in their place were desks and chairs that renaissance princes might have sat on in perfect safety, even had they topped three hundredweight. His inkwell was a silver replica of Kitson's new long-boiler locomotive, Hector, the gift of George Hudson and the York & North Midland. The quills stood in its funnel and the lid of the "boiler" hinged up to reveal the ink well.

  "Isn't that pretty," he said. "I'm so pleased with it. And how kind of Hudson."

  "Hudson is a one-man disaster," she said evenly. "It will take a generation for this country's railways to recover from what he has done in this one year."

  This opinion was so absolutely contrary to the general view of the man that Chambers merely laughed, as anyone might laugh at eccentricity.

  "You've done well enough," he said. "Stevenson's, I mean."

  She looked puzzled. "What d'you mean?"

  Her sharp tone startled him. "Your account, Mrs. Stevenson. That's what I mean. Your funds. Never better." He spoke as if to placate her.

  Now it was she who looked astonished. "You have no idea what it is all about?" she asked.

  He shook his head.

  "You really don't know why we've done it?"

  "I assumed…" He faltered.

  "That it was an attack of prosperity, plain and simple?"

  He laughed. "Nothing to do with you is 'plain and simple,' ma'am."

  She did not laugh. "Then I must tell you, Mr. Chambers. In eighteen-thirty-six Sir Charles Knightley, one of the richest men in England, had to ride twenty miles to break open his daughter's money box and borrow a few sovereigns before he could…"

  "Yes, yes!" Chambers was impatient. It was a well-known story among City men and was often told as an example of what used to happen in the bad old days of ten years ago—and what, by implication, could never happen now.

  "Then I tell you, Mr. Chambers, I tell you most particularly, the money crisis of thirty-six is going to seem like a high feast when people look back on eighteenforty-five—and forty-six and forty-seven…and more for aught I know."

  He pretended to believe her. He pretended to take her analysis seriously. But he turned the conversation to the actual sum they had amassed. It was far too much for their daily operations, he thought. Why didn't they put it into something solid and endurable? Property, for instance? No doubt he thought the suggestion would please her.

  She persisted in saying that the wondrous new banking system was about to collapse and that only those with gold-in-the-hand were going to survive. She could see him growing quite testy beneath that polished urbanity of his. But she kept her best argument to last—until he was driven to assure her that "we people in the City have all these matters perfectly under control now, you know."

  "Then consider these facts, Mr. Chambers," she warned. "There are now over twelve hundred would-be companies looking for capital. And the total they seek is now around five hundred and sixty million pounds—of which they must deposit ten per cent by the thirtieth of this month. Fifty-nine million pounds!" she stressed. "Where on earth will they find it?" Even to name the sum brought a sinking feeling to her stomach. She knew only too well where they'd find some of it.

  "How can you be certain of these figures?" Chambers asked. "You'd have to comb through a year's issues of about thirty different railway magazines to be…"

  "Or keep a running total in your mind," she said. "All year."

  He laughed in agreement, thinking she was speaking in irony; then he realized she was not. "You have done that?" he asked.

  She stood up, smiling acidly, and bade him good day.

  Early in November the Bank of England moved again, another half per cent. But confidence had gone. Government securities, which had started the year at

  67 premium, were now down to 19. The trust fund Chambers administered for her and the children was now worth less than half the thousands that had gone into it.

  "I doubled the value of what you gave me," Nora told John. "He halved what you gave him."

  He looked at her with hunted eyes. "You are pitiless," he said.

  She threw her arms around him and buried her head on his huge chest, loving the solidity there. "I'm sorry!" she repeated, several times. "I'm not really pitiless. You've no idea how many times I've willed myself not to say that—and won."

  He laughed.

  "Tighter!" she said, wriggling deeper into his embrace.

  He obeyed. "We're bound to be on edge," he said, speaking into her hair. "I live through each day in a silent terror." Her hair tickled his nose as she nodded. "We must try not to be short with each other."

  She remained silent, content to hold him and be held.

  "Aren't you terrified?"

  "Not yet," she had to admit. "There's still one more action we have to take. We have to move all that money away from Chambers, back to all those little provincial banks. And then we have to start the biggest hudsoning of all. That's when I'll be terrified—when there's nothing more we can do but wait."

  "When? When should we begin, d'you think?"

  She broke free then, biting her lip. "I don't know," she admitted. "That's what worries me. I don't want to start haunting Chambers's doorstep, yet I want to be absolutely sure that the moment we pick is the right one."

  In the event, Chambers saved them the trouble of deciding. He came to them.

  It was their habit to take lunch several times a week at Dolly's Chop House, by Saint Paul's Churchyard, one of the few places in the financial district that would allow a woman in. On this particular day, the seventeenth of November, they had barely started their lunch when
Chambers, who rarely ate there, came in, saw them, and made straight for their end of the table.

  "Have you seen this?" he asked, putting a copy of The Times before them. He grinned.

  They had, of course. The article on the Railway Bubble by Spackman was the talk of the City that day.

  "Join us," John said, pointing to the empty seat next to Nora.

  Chambers accepted with as little formality as he had shown on coming in. "It's terrible," he said, quite cheerfully.

  The main feature of Spackman's article was a set of tables showing railways completed, in course of construction, and projected. There were 47 lines completed, 118 in construction, and 1,263 seeking capital—seeking, to be precise, £566,019,006. "Can we," thundered the leading article, "add onetenth of this vast remainder? We cannot, without the most ruinous, universal, and desperate confusion."

  "It's as bad as can be," Chambers said. He rubbed his hands and ordered half a dozen mutton chops.

  "When I tell you," Nora chided, "you don't believe me. It seems you prefer your news three weeks cold."

  He smiled and lowered his head, good-naturedly accepting her rebuke.

  "You're cheerful company anyway," John said. "Have you acquired some shares in Disaster?"

  "Any man who is banker to the great John Stevenson has a right to be happy at this hour," he said.

  Nora felt the pressure of John's foot on hers. She could sense his delight. But something in the way Chambers kept glancing sidelong at her kept her on her guard.

  "You're going to need all that confidence in the next few months, Mr. Chambers," she warned. "They will be extraordinary times and we will be taking some extraordinary measures to deal with them."

  His hands waved permissive circles before him, like a blessing upon the chops. "Dear lady, you have carte blanche! You especially." He turned to John as if introducing Nora. "Do you know what treasure is here?"

  Her wariness turned to deepest mistrust. He had never spoken like this.

  She told herself to clear all thought of their bankruptcy from her mind, to think like the rich he still believed them to be. That was the thought in Chambers's mind: These people are rich. Now where did it lead him?

  "I owe you an apology," Chambers was saying to her. Yes—to her ! "I think it was last March when you first pointed out that a madness in railway dealings was growing." Nora nodded, still watching every move. "March, eh? And it was not until June that The Times began to ruffle its feathers and not until today that we get this." He had the paper out again and he tapped Spackman's tables with his spoon. "Well, when it's five hundred million, it's obvious to any fool, even"—he grinned wryly—"to a City banker. But you saw the danger when the figure was one-tenth of that. And I'll tell you what I find even more impressive: The figures you gave me accord exactly with Spackman's. And you told me you've kept a running total in your head all the year. Is that really so?"

  She nodded, watching him all the while with an unblinking gaze.

  He still found it difficult to believe. "But why?"

  How do you tell a child why two and two make four? "It never occurred to me not to," she said. "I do it as a matter of course. All the time."

  Chambers merely stared. Nora, not knowing whether he had taken it in or not, tried another approach. "This man"—she took John's arm—"could shut his eyes and walk yard by yard in his mind down any line he's built. He could tell you the geology underfoot—every hedge—every feature, every boundary. He could date each milepost. Am I right?"

  "Near enough," John admitted diffidently. "Give or take."

  Nora returned to Chambers. "Well, if you could wander like that behind here"—she ran a finger over her brow—"you'd find it ordered just like that with figures. I can't explain it better than that."

  Chambers breathed in and out; at last his eyes left Nora's and he turned to John. "Have you any notion," he said ponderously, "of the value of a mind that works like that?"

  "I hope so," John said uncomfortably.

  "I doubt it. It's incalculable. You realize that there are probably only half-adozen big firms in this country who could actually laugh at a money panic now. Five of them are in that happy position by chance; one, just one, is there by deliberate design, carefully phased and executed over months. And why?" He pointed toward Nora. "Because it never occurred to one person not to keep that running total."

  "Oh, come, Mr. Chambers," she said, embarrassed.

  He turned full face to her. "I don't believe even you know what I'm really talking about."

  She became deliberately vapid and girlish. "Indeed? Do tell me." She wanted him to be mocked into silence or at least into changing the subject. The conversation was not taking the line she wanted.

  "I have never been more serious," he said. "I freely confess I have often dismissed your opinions as mere intuition. But it was I who was blind. Believe me, I have thought a lot about this since your last visit. I think that you, without fully realizing it, have a way of ordering or arranging that internal landscape of figures that amounts almost to—clairvoyance."

  Nora burst into dismissive laughter; she was sure now that Chambers was up to something very subtle.

  "I don't mean anything mystical, at all," he went on stolidly. "If you stand in a real landscape and pick out with your eyes a path ahead, then walk the path and find it was a good route to have chosen, why, that is nothing mystical. I think you do that too, in this mathematical landscape. I'll go further: I think it doesn't even occur to you not to do it!"

  Nora stared at him, hoping her confusion did not show. It was true! Every word he spoke was true; but she fought with all her will against the impulse to agree to his face. What was his game?

  John had no such inhibitions. "Eay!" he said. "I'd never thought of it that openly. But there's aught in what Chambers says, love."

  It was as if Chambers had been waiting for this admission. "And how often do you use it?" he asked, turning to John. "This extraordinary faculty? One of the biggest assets any business could have? Yet when did you last use this talent?"

  Now she was certain he was out to do mischief. Never once in all the years they had known each other had Chambers gone further than a grudging admission that she had a certain flair for bookkeeping. Yet now he was praising her to the skies. It did not fit—not even in these extraordinary times, when the unexpected performed twice daily. She could not guess why or how, but she knew that in some way he was out to drive a wedge between herself and John.

  She decided then that the conversation had gone Chambers's way long enough. She saw too that they would never get a better moment to start the final, grand hudson. Chambers had freely walked into the trap, now she would spring it. Taking his last rhetorical question to John—"When did you last use this talent?"—she answered: "This very morning, Mr. Chambers. We are not so silent at home as this panegyric of yours has forced us to be here."

  He grinned an apology and listened.

  "My 'faculty,' such as it is, inclines me to advise that we withdraw all our funds from the centre and spread them in their due proportion among the banks nearest to each contract."

  The silence that followed became almost unendurable. This was the keystonemoment in the strategy they had followed all that summer and autumn; if it failed, the entire structure would fall.

  Chambers swallowed a morsel of chop he had forgotten to chew. It made his eyes water. "Leave nothing here?" he said. "Nothing with me?"

  "Five years of goodwill," Nora reminded him, supremely gracious.

  "I don't pretend," John broke in, "to understand all of Mrs. Stevenson's reasoning—not all the time. But, by Jupiter, I understand her here! If there is to be a money famine."

  "And if there isn't?" Chambers was clutching at straws.

  "We'll know that by the new year," John said.

  "And come back to you, filled with gold and gratitude," she promised.

  Chambers shrugged.

  "We'd still want you to discount our bills over that
time," John warned, as if it were a mere afterthought.