In “Marengo,” at breakfast, all alone, sat Mr. Charlbury. Opportunity breeds opportunity, and discovery, discovery; and the Dæmon found a fruitful soil.
If any one had told Mr. Charlbury three or four weeks before that he would pull off an amazing scoop in Touaregs and then, on the top of that, walk off with an enormous commission (come, to be accurate, two enormous commissions) on the Paddenham Site, he would have thought himself in fairyland.
But by this time he had already come to take such things for granted. He used to think in three figures; he was now thinking in five: and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
“He used to think in three figures; he was now thinking in five.”
If no brilliant scheme had illumined his life before Mr. Petre had so strangely blown into it by the really unexpected door of his partnership with Terrard, it was not because Mr. Charlbury lacked initiative, but because habit had put him upon a certain road whereon to exercise his initiative, and he had never been led to consider larger things. He had shown plenty of initiative quite early in life in the matter of a row of cottages near his father’s shop, and he prided himself—out of a hundred other successful ventures—in the purchase of Mrs. Railton’s interests after the divorce, and the subsequent sale of them to Mr. Railton. But to-day he had risen into another sphere, and what had moved him at this moment was a paragraph of half a dozen lines in small print coming at the end of a column in his daily paper.
The column had dealt with the enormities of the Polish People, and had threatened them with the vengeance of the journal if they continued to trample upon the rights of an oppressed German-speaking minority. Mr. Charlbury had as much patriotism as any man, and was free to indulge in hatred of all Poles, but the little paragraph at the foot of the column interested him in another fashion.
At a public indignation meeting of the ratepayers of Loosham a resolution had been unanimously passed condemning the new provisional licenses issued by the British Amalgamated Rotor Company, and a committee had been appointed to draft an alternative, which upon completion was to be submitted to the Board of Trade. This resolution, he remembered, followed upon a somewhat similar resolution passed by a considerable majority at a meeting at Paxton the week before.