The Angel of Pain

by E. F. Benson

THIRTEENTH

Y Monday morning when he returned to town, Philip had quite made up his mind that all thought of travel by way of distraction was futile, and had determined to find in work, the hardest and most continuous, a succession of hours of forgetfulness, so far as he could secure it, of this blow that had fallen on him. Forgetfulness itself, he knew well he could not hope to secure, but by hard application of the brain to work, he hoped that for this hour and for that he would be able to put that which had so stricken and embittered him on a second and more remote plane of consciousness. True, at any relaxation, at any interval in which his brain was not actively employed, it would start out again like the writing on the wall; but for the working hours of the day, and these he determined should be long and fully filled, he believed he could to some extent crush the other out of his consciousness. In work, at any rate, he believed his best chance lay, and the attempt, though perhaps desperate, was one which none but a strong man could have made.

He occupied at present while in London a flat in Jermyn Street, modest in dimensions, but containing all he wanted. There was a spare room there which his mother always used on her rather rare visits to town, but otherwise it held only the necessary accommodation for two servants and himself. He had already given his landlord notice that he was going to quit, but to-day he went to the estate office to ask if he could renew his tenancy since his bachelor days were not yet over. All this was horribly uncomfortable; he felt that the clerk in the office knew what had happened, and would, after his departure, talk it and him over with the other clerks, and though their criticism and comments could not possibly matter to him, he felt that some deformity, some malformation or scar of his own body was being publicly shown the world, and he hated the world for looking at it. Then also he had to say that he should not require the house for which he was in contract in Berkeley Square, to complete which nothing really remained except the signing of the lease. It was all a business so unexpectedly disagreeable that he wished he had conducted it by letter.

To-day promised to be very busy; he was to have dined that night with Lady Ellington, but that engagement was automatically cancelled, and he left word at his flat that he would be there that night, and would dine alone. That done, he drove straight down to the City, where he expected that there would be awaiting him a report of an agent of his with regard to certain South African mining properties on which he held an extremely large option which he must take up before the end of the week, when it expired. He had not been able to make his mind up about it hitherto, and had wired for the report, putting off his decision until the last possible minute.

The report in question had arrived, and, without further delay, he proceeded to master it. The problems it contained were of a complicated order; the dip and depth of the reef, the assay value of it, the cost of working, the reduction which might be obtained in this by the use of Chinese labour, all these were things which had to be considered. Should he not exercise his option, the right, that is, of buying his shares at the figure agreed on, he would lose, of course, what he had spent in purchasing that right. It was by a careful study of this rather voluminous report on the property that he had to make up his mind whether he would exercise it or not.

Now the problems of finance, that extraordinary and ubiquitous game in which the most acute brains in the world are pitted against each other for the acquisition of those little yellow metal counters, which in this present world are so undeniably potent to procure for their owner a comfortable journey through it, had at all times an immense attraction for Philip, and he found that even to-day they were no less absorbing than they had ever been. He found, too, that, in spite of the frightful shock that he had undergone, his reasoning and deductive faculties had not been shaken or dulled, and he felt himself as capable as ever of weighing the evidence which should decide his course. The report itself was fairly satisfactory, and he was inclined to believe that the shares which he could call up were worth the price, which to-day stood steady at the figure which he would have to pay for them. His money, which ran into six figures, would perhaps be locked up for a time, but he did not particularly object to that. On the other hand, supposing he bought, the effect on the market would certainly be to send the value of the shares up, so that he could probably, if he wished, clear out again, realising a small profit. This was all plain sailing enough; the report was good enough to justify his exercising his option. But the market altogether, as he well knew, was, in consequence of the Russo-Japanese war, in a rather excitable and nervous state, and the more difficult problem must claim his attention—what would be the effect on it if he did not buy? It was known, of course, that his option was a considerable one, and dealers in these shares were awaiting any news as to his movements with some anxiety.

The report had fallen rustling to the ground, and Philip sat there staring in front of him, with his elbows on the table and eyes fixed intently on nothing. Every now and then some clerk came in with a paper for his signature, or a letter for his consideration; every now and then he was rung up on the telephone that stood by his elbow. But he had that rarest of gifts, a mind that can detach itself from one thing and attach itself in its entirety to another, and he gave his whole attention to these interruptions when they occurred, and transferred it all back to the problem he was digging at when he had dealt with them. The way he pursued was narrow and winding, but step by step he traced it out.

It took him not less than an hour of hard thinking to make up his mind definitely on the point: there were so many things to consider, for, as he always held, there was hardly an event that took place in the world which did not have its definite and certain effect on the money-market; and the sole and only office of the financier was to be able, on the basis of what had happened before, to conjecture what was going to happen now (for things followed an invariable rule), and estimate what the effect of his conjectured events would be. And nothing in the world was more engrossing than that; there was no bit of knowledge a man might possess concerning human nature, however fragmentary and hard to fit in, that did not have its place in the puzzle he had to put together. Above all, Philip did not believe in chance in these affairs; it might, indeed, be chance whether he himself correctly estimated how future events would shape themselves, but the element of luck here was only, if one ran it to the ground, his own ignorance; for if his knowledge of the past could be complete, so also would his knowledge of the future be, for in the City of all places is it most true that the future is only the past entered through another door.

His mind, then, was made up, but once more he ran through the data upon which his conclusion was based. These goldfields of Metiekull on which he held an option, were a company that had aroused a good deal of comment when brought out, and it had been held in level-headed quarters that the shares which had been run up to 4 had reached that figure without there having been produced any guarantee that they were worth half that. But, as is the inscrutable way of the Stock Exchange, they had, for no particular reason, been turned into a gambling counter, and there was no venture which enjoyed a freer or more fluctuating market. Things, however, had steadied down when it was known that Philip Home had bought this option of 30,000 shares, and just at this moment, as has been stated, there was considerable interest felt in the question of whether he would exercise it or not. If he did not, it meant a loss to him of about £7,000; whereas if he did, it might be regarded as certain that the shares, since gambling in them was just now, like bridge, a favourite method of losing money, would enjoy a very substantial rise, and, as usual, it was highly likely that Philip would reap a profit worth reaping, should he choose to sell during this.