Case VI
The Business Minister
Phase I
The Scandal
“ ‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s here,’ ” said Reggie Fortune as, trying to hide himself in his coat, he slipped and slid down the gangway to his native land. The Boulogne boat behind him, lost in driving snow, could be inferred from escaping steam and the glimmer of a rosette of lights. “The Flying Dutchman’s new packet,” Reggie muttered, and hummed the helmsman’s song from the opera, till a squall coming round the corner stung what of his face he could not bury like small shot.
He continued to suffer. The heat in the Pullman was tinned. He did not like the toast. The train ran slow, and whenever he wiped the steamy window he saw white-blanketed country and fresh swirls of snow. So he came into Victoria some seven hours late, and it had no taxi. He said what he could. You imagine him, balanced by the two suitcases which he could not bear to part with, wading through deep snow from the Tube station at Oxford Circus to Wimpole Street, and subsiding limp but still fluent into the arms of Sam his factotum. And the snow went on falling.
It was about this time, in his judgment 11 p.m. on , that a man fell from the top story of Montmorency House, the hugest and newest of the new blocks of flats thereabouts. He fell down the well which lights the inner rooms and, I suppose, made something of a thud as his body passed through the cushion of snow and hit the concrete below. But in the howl of the wind and the rattle of windows it would have been extraordinary if anyone had heard him or taken him for something more than a slate or a chimney pot. He was not in a condition to explain himself. And the snow went on falling.
Mr. Fortune, though free from his coat and his hat and his scarf and his gloves, though scorching both hands and one foot at the hall fire, was still telling Sam his troubles when the Hon. Stanley Lomas came downstairs. Mr. Fortune said, “Help!”
“Had a good time?” said Lomas cheerily. “Did you get to Seville?”
“Oh, Peter, don’t say things like that. I can’t bear it. Have the feelings of a man. Be a brother, Lomas. I’ve been in nice, kind countries with a well-bred climate, and I come back to this epileptic blizzard, and here’s Lomas pale and perky waiting for me on the mat. And then you’re civil! Oh, Sophonisba! Sophonisba, oh!”
“I did rather want to see you,” Lomas explained.
“I hate seeing you. I hate seeing anything raw and alive. If you talk to me I shall cry. My dear man, have you had dinner?”
“Hours ago.”
“That wasn’t quite nice of you, you know. When you come to see me, you shouldn’t dine first. It makes me suspect your taste. Well, well! Come and see me eat. That is a sight which has moved strong men to tears, the pure ecstasy of joy, Lomas. The sublime and the beautiful, by R. Fortune. And Sam says Elise has a timbale de foie gras and her very own entrecôte. Dine again, Whittington. And we will look upon the wine when it is red. My Chambertin is strongly indicated. And then I will fall asleep for a thousand years, same like the Sleeping Beauty.”
“I wish I could.”
“Lomas, old dear!” Reggie turned and looked him over. “Yes, you have been going it. You ought to get away.”
“I dare say I shall. That is one of the things I’m going to ask you—what you think about resignation.”
“Oh, Peter! As bad as that?” Reggie whistled. “Sorry I was futile. But I couldn’t know. There’s been nothing in the papers.”
“Only innuendoes. Damme, you can’t get away from it in the clubs.”
They had it out over dinner.
Some months before a new Government had been formed, which was advertised to bring heaven down to earth without delay. And the first outward sign of its inward and spiritual grace was the Great Coal Ramp. Some folks in the City began to buy the shares of certain coal companies. Some folks in the City began to spread rumours that the Government was going to nationalize mines district by district—those districts first in which the shares had been bought. The shares then went to a vast price.
“All the usual nauseating features of a Stock Exchange boom,” said Reggie.
“No. This is founded on fact,” said Lomas. “That’s the distinguishing feature. It was worked on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Whoever started the game had exact and precise information. They only touched those companies which the Government meant to take over; they knew everything and they knew it right. Somebody of the inner circle gave the plan away.”
“ ‘Politics is a cursed profession,’ ” said Reggie.
Lomas looked gloomily at his Burgundy. “Politicians are almost the lowest of God’s creatures,” he agreed. “I know that. I’m a Civil servant. But I don’t see how any of them can have had a finger in this pie. The scheme hadn’t come before the Cabinet. Everybody knew, of course, that something was going to be done. But the whole point is the particular companies concerned in this primary provisional scheme. And nobody knew which they were but the President of the Board of Trade and his private secretary.”
“The President—that’s Horace Kimball.”
“Yes. No politics about him. He’s the rubber king, you know. He was brought in on the business men for a business Cabinet cry. He was really put there to get these nationalization schemes through.”
“And he begins by arousing city scandal. Business men and business methods. Well, well! Give me the politicians after all. I was born respectable. I would rather be swindled in the quiet, old-fashioned way.
