“But Mr. Ilam——”
“Go to the other end of the room, up there at that corner,” Jetsam commanded sternly, adding, “or I’ll blow your idiotic brains out! Do you hear?”
The clerk was in love with a girl who lived with her mother in a pretty little semi-detached villa at Weybridge. He thought of her; he thought of all the evenings he had spent with her; he conjured her up in all her different dresses; he heard her voice in all its tones—and all this in the fraction of a second. Then he put down the boxes and discreetly betook himself to the corner indicated by Mr. Jetsam, thinking obscurely and slangily that to be a bank-clerk was not all jam.
“And you, too!” ordered Jetsam, raising a finger to Mr. Gloucester.
Mr. Gloucester was not in love with a charming young thing at Weybridge. He never had been in love; he had never lived with anyone except himself and a bull-terrier; but he was fond of playing chess at night at Simpson’s; and he suddenly saw Simpson’s and the chess-boards, and the foamy quart, and the bull-terrier lying under the table. Life and Simpson’s seemed infinitely precious to him in those instants. And he put down his boxes and followed the bank-clerk to the suggested corner.
“I must really——” he began protestingly.
“Silence!” exploded Mr. Jetsam; and there was silence.
You must picture the large, low room, with its concrete lining and its half-dozen sixteen candle-power electric lights burning in the ceiling; and underneath these lights the four men—Ilam leaning against the gigantic safe which rose out of the floor in the middle of the apartment; Jetsam still nonchalantly swinging his legs as he sat on the table, facing him directly; and the democracy, somewhat scared and undecided, in a corner. Jetsam had his back to the door, and since the two piles of coffers were near the door they were out of his field of vision.
Jetsam winked at Ilam—deliberately winked at him.
“Simple as a, b, c, isn’t it?” he pleasantly remarked.