Then with no deliberation, at once, the wires were set to work. The agencies which the clerk held in the hollow of his hand, the points on the map of Central London where he could press a button, the centers from which money could work anything, whatever it willed, all buzzed; all the wheels went round.
And upon the morning of the third day John Kosciusko, who had kept strictly to himself all the time, never so much as leaving his rooms, receiving the reports, coördinating them, mastering the thing like a man of thirty-five, and a genius in staff work at that—on the morning of the third day, I say, the whole thing was before him, shaken into shape, and presented as lucidly as a good diagram. He had got it all.
Five months ago, on the 3rd of April (the very day, by gosh! that he himself had looked on Plymouth before he had landed at Cherbourg!) a man of such and such appearance, perhaps twenty years younger than himself, utterly different from himself, stout, gray, in the early fifties (some said he might be American, and some said he might be English) had impersonated him in that very hotel, the Splendide. He had crossed the tracks of those very agencies, apparently to find out what the real John K. was doing and where he might be. He had moved to rooms in the Temple. He had lunched and dined at such and such a house; he had been the constant associate of one Terrard, of Blake and Blake, Brokers on ’Change in the City of London, and he had had the gall to make good!
It was said that he had begun with a deal in some stock. One line of inquiries made sure it was French African stock, but another that it was a Bear account in the External Loan. Anyhow, immediately after, he had bought the Paddenham Site and then sold it to the Government for some ten million dollars. Then he had gone in with the Trefusis crowd at fifty-fifty; but about three weeks after the Contract had gone through with the Commons he had sold out. What he had done after this it was too soon to know, as it was only a few days before; but he had gone out with half the capital. He had not been frozen out, or anything of that kind. He had it good and tight, mayhap in National Bonds.
John Kosciusko was in such a cold anger that the parchment of his skin showed white. For men of that energy can be very angry indeed, at and beyond their seventieth year.
The next thing—and it was all done the same morning—was an interview with the lawyer—the only lawyer whom he trusted on this side, and whom he had good reason to trust, for John Kosciusko had a method of his own, not only with his lawyers, but with his doctors; not only with his doctors but with the humble watchers, who saw to it that his rest was not disturbed by undue sounds. He paid them all regularly and largely; but the payments stopped dead when the service failed in the least point, and during his slightest indisposition the steady and satisfactory income of three excellent practitioners ceased suddenly; to resume as suddenly when John K. could honestly say he felt himself again.
The lawyer asked for a little time to turn the matter over. He was not given that time. He was told to decide, and he decided, naturally enough, that there was matter for fees—I mean for an Action. The dreadful Kosciusko forbade the ordinary courtesies, of warning, of acceptance.
Therefore it was that on the morning of the 15th of September a chirping young man in a rather dirty collar popped his head into St. James’s Place, put a not too clean envelope into Mr. Peter Blagden’s hand, uttered a few cabalistic words, and went out sideways. Mr. Blagden (of Harrington), opening the missive, was agreeably surprised to find a document partly in print, and partly in writing, and all in an English of its own which ran, or rather hobbled, as opposite.
In the High Court of Justice. 1953.—No. 42.
KING’S BENCH DIVISION.