But week followed dreary week and nothing could be done. The foreign exchange market seemed to have gone mad. The mark had fallen away to millions, as the Austrian crown had done two years before. The lira seemed to be going the same way. Sterling exchange on New York alone was struggling back to its prewar position. Even the franc was dropping steadily. Before the war it was little more than twenty-five; now it was over a hundred, and it was being hammered slowly lower and lower. Mr. Marble watched the market and hesitated. If the franc and the lira were to drop with a crash as the mark had done, and a wise man had sold in advance, he could look for a profit to be reckoned in terms of thousands percent. And the brokers with whom Mr. Marble in the course of his daily duties conversed over the telephone all seemed to think it likely. In the foreign exchange department of the National County Bank (Head Office) all the clerks were convinced of the same thing. Some of them had already made minute sums of money by cautious speculation, helped by their friends the clerks in the brokers’ offices. They had sold tiny sums in advance, got out hurriedly immediately afterwards, and then cursed their faint-heartedness as the franc still went on dropping. Mr. Marble saw all this, and was tempted. Twice he nearly ventured, but each time that keen judgement of his which was always somewhere in the background ready to be called upon held him back. There was something doubtful somewhere.
And then one morning it happened. Chance flung a fortune within Mr. Marble’s reach, and only asked from him in return the effort to grasp it.
It was ten o’clock in the morning. Mr. Marble was at his desk farthest from the entrance to the room, and close beside the partitioned cubbyhole that housed the superior majesty of Henderson, chief of the department. In front of Mr. Marble lay the opened letters sent across by the correspondence department, and he was casually glancing through them to see that there was nothing that the department could not cope with without troubling Mr. Henderson, or even higher authority still. They were all just ordinary routine letters; notifications mainly, from the various continental branches, of credits given and of drafts honoured. Nothing of any import; the staff of the department could handle them nearly all. Four of them he picked out that he would have to answer; two must go in to Henderson. The last letter was the most ordinary of them all. It was the biweekly letter from the Paris branch confirming the actions reported already by cable and telephone. Mr. Marble looked through it. Still there was nothing of any interest. For a wonder the Paris staff had made no mistake in decoding cables. Everything had been done as ordered, and no hasty cable would have to be sent countermanding some ridiculous blunder. No forgeries, no failures. Yet Mr. Marble read the letter to the end, because the man who had written it was known to him personally; it was Collins, who had worked under him in that very department for a couple of years before being sent out to Paris. He was a voluble fellow—“chatty,” Mr. Marble described him to himself—and his volubility was noticeable even in this official correspondence, for at the end of the letter he had inserted a paragraph that was quite unnecessary by all rules of routine. It was quite brief for Collins, and merely said that more steadiness might be noticed in the French franc in future, as it was rumoured that the Government were taking the matter in hand, and might even resort to “pegging” on the London exchange.
Mr. Marble laid the letter down and gazed through the dusty window at the uninviting view of other dusty windows across the ventilation shaft. There might be something in it. The franc was a point higher this morning than at the close of yesterday. So much the trained foreign clerk’s brain told him—Mr. Marble could at two minutes’ notice give the rate of exchange on anywhere at any time within the last two years—but Mr. Marble was capable, strange though it may seem, of doing more than that if sufficiently stimulated. If the Republic took a hand in restoring its foreign credit, it would do more than merely keep it steady. Mr. Marble suddenly recollected a nebulous idea he had framed some time ago as to the best means that would bring this about. He turned this idea over in his mind. If they were to do that, the franc would recover like a skyrocket. It would easily go to sixty; it might even reach fifty, or perhaps even forty. It would never be better than forty, decided Mr. Marble, weighing the chances with an acuteness of perception that would have astonished him
