“I must wait,” Mr. Petre had almost added, when he checked himself. Why should he tell any of these people anything? He hated these Magnas. He hated the sunburned wastes and the blackamoors. He wanted to get away. One thing he was determined on: he wouldn’t give reasons. That way catechism lay and in catechism exposure, and the end of all. He repeated doggedly: “I have made up my mind not to touch them! I won’t touch them! I won’t have anything to do with them!”
“Certainly, Mr. Petre, certainly,” said the Manager. “I quite understand. But you will let us know if anything....”
“Of course, of course,” said Mr. Petre, whatever the devil “anything” might be.
“Well then, my dear sir, it is quite understood, is it not? I need hardly say that you may draw upon us with perfect freedom,” and he laughed, a conventional laugh, as though the thing were too absurdly obvious to need saying.
“Yes, oh yes,” said Mr. Petre. His host made the slightest movement to rise; Mr. Petre took advantage of it, and rose himself to go. Indeed, he was in such haste to go that he left his hat behind him, and the Manager with a human gesture followed him almost quickly, and handed it to him before he got to the door. Mr. Petre thanked him, shook hands quite warmly and was gone. He went so fast that the conductor who acted as usher or dog for so great a man only just caught him up at the end of the corridor and bowed him out. And as he went out at top speed through the main building to the great swing doors of the Bank he was followed by fifty pairs of eyes from behind the grille which divides the Priests and Acolytes of Finance from the profane, and one man and another by pairs exchanged short sentences upon the judgment and the power and the glory of so many millions.
Mr. Petre could not escape, what no man can escape, the influence of his activities, even though these activities had been thrust upon him. He had fallen, alas! to looking at the financial columns of his paper. It had become a daily habit, though he was doing nothing with those regiments of names and figures; therefore on the day after his visit to the bank parlor his eyes caught the words “Magna Development,” and he read what they had to say. It seemed that Magnas were moving. It did not read like a puff, it read like sober chronicle.
There was the new report, and as he read it a faint breath—oh, a mere zephyr—of the Holy Spirit of Business, which he so gravely lacked, ruffled the surface of Mr. Petre’s soul. But the scent of that fetid air nauseated him. He read the prices as a decent man reads, from a kind of itch and against his better instincts, the exploitation of the gallows by our great modern Lords in their newspapers. He reads: but hates it the more as he reads. Till at last he burns the rag.
So felt Mr. Petre as he watched Magnas moving.
When a big thing moves it does not move like Touaregs, that flighty Gallic-African stock; it moves as moves the mighty Pachyderm, in a solemn ascentional surge like a herd of elephants breasting a hill; it moves as a great volume of water might move, as a tide flooding into harbor. So moved Magnas all that day, and I cannot conceal it from you that Mr. Petre went so far as to buy an evening paper at what I might call the close of play; he had not looked at a tape as yet—and, indeed, he never came to that. The interest was momentary; the disgust permanent. He soon relapsed into his fixed mood of anxious inward searching, and when buying and selling obtruded themselves they were soon swallowed up in that repeated torturing riddle the Sphinx had set him. Who am I? Who are mine?
That same evening he was to meet Terrard in order to hear the last details of the Paddenham Site scheme, and they were to dine together.