“Everything in the City is cruel,” he assured her with a light tone. “All speculative business is cruel. Take our case, for example. I estimate in a rough way that these fourteen men will have to pay over to us, in differences and in final sales, say seven hundred thousand pounds—maybe eight hundred. Well, now, not one of those fellows ever earned a single sovereign of that money. They've taken the whole of it from others, and these others took it from others still, and so on almost indefinitely. There isn't a sovereign of it that hasn't been through twenty hands, or fifty for that matter, since the last man who had done some honest work for it parted company with it. Well—money like that belongs to those who are in possession of it, only so long as they are strong enough to hold on to it. When someone stronger still comes along, he takes it away from them. They don't complain: they don't cry and say it's cruel. They know it's the rule of the game. They accept it—and begin at once looking out for a new set of fools and weaklings to recoup themselves on. That's the way the City goes.”
Thorpe had concluded his philosophical remarks with ruminative slowness. As he lapsed into silence now, he fell to studying his own hands on the desk-top before him. He stretched out the fingers, curved them in different degrees, then closed them tight and turned the bulky hard-looking fists round for inspection in varying aspects.
“That's the kind of hand,” he began again, thoughtfully, “that breaks the Jew in the long run, if there's only grit enough behind it. I used to watch those Jews' hands, a year ago, when I was dining and wining them. They're all thin and wiry and full of veins. Their fingers are never still; they twist round and keep stirring like a lobster's feelers. But there aint any real strength in 'em. They get hold of most of the things that are going, because they're eternally on the move. It's their hellish industry and activity that gives them such a pull, and makes most people afraid of them. But when a hand like that takes them by the throat”—he held up his right hand as he spoke, with the thick uncouth fingers and massive thumb arched menacingly in a powerful muscular tension—“when THAT tightens round their neck, and they feel that the grip means business—my God! what good are they?”
He laughed contemptuously, and slapped the relaxed palm on the desk with a noise which made his sister start. Apparently the diversion recalled something to her mind.
“There was a man in here asking about you today,” she remarked, in a casual fashion. “Said he was an old friend of yours.”
“Oh, yes, everybody's my 'old friend' now,” he observed with beaming indifference. “I'm already getting heaps of invitations to dinners and dances and all that. One fellow insisted on booking me for Easter for some salmon fishing he's got way down in Cumberland. I told him I couldn't come, but he put my name down all the same. Says his wife will write to remind me. Damn his wife! Semple tells me that when our squeeze really begins and they realize the desperate kind of trap they're in, they'll simply shower attentions of that sort on me. He says the social pressure they can command, for a game of this kind, is something tremendous. But I'm not to be taken in by it for a single pennyworth, d'ye see? I dine with nobody! I fish and shoot and go yachting with nobody! Julia and Alfred and our own home in Ovington Square—that'll be good enough for me. By the way—you haven't been out to see us yet. We're all settled now. You must come at once—why not with me, now?”
Louisa paid no heed to this suggestion. She had been rummaging among some loose papers on the top of the desk, and she stepped round now to lift the lid and search about for something inside.
“He left a card for you,” she said, as she groped among the desk's contents. “I don't know what I did with it. He wrote something on it.”
“Oh, damn him, and his card too,” Thorpe protested easily. “I don't want to see either of them.”
“He said he knew you in Mexico. He said you'd had dealings together. He seemed to act as if you'd want to see him—but I didn't know. I didn't tell him your address.”