CHAPTER VIII
The public came after those debentures very kindly, very willingly; as kindly and willingly as cows galloping into a new pasture. The Government Contracts were enough to make certain of that. The House had left them alone as a matter of course, and the Service Departments were thoroughly reassured; now that—as their controllers knew—the two great names of the Rotor world were working together.
The critics were voluble, as they always are; diverse, as they always are; variously ill-informed—and, in the issue, proved quite wrong.
Those who had said that there would be opposition in the House were obviously wrong; they didn’t know what they were talking about; they were thinking in terms of an imaginary House of Commons long ago: old-fashioned academic fools like the editor (and owner) of The City, who had run in their groove for forty years and still talked of the “Constitution,” “the Watchdog at the Treasury,” “the great spending departments,” “the power of the Purse.”
Those who said the new purchase would be voted down at the General Meeting were ridiculously wrong. They hadn’t even analyzed the nominal holdings, let alone the real ones. The Locals got one hundred of the new fully-paid-up shilling shares for their old 4¾-⅞ sagging pound shares (with a 2s. 6d. call on them), and the new stuff was quoted at 112 within a fortnight. But after all, who were the Locals? When you dug out realities from under such names as the Imperial Adjustment Corporation, and Percival and Co., and Benezra Bros., who were they? Trefusis. There were a few hundred investors with tufts of fifty to five hundred, a few dozen larger insignificants, a handful of real investors (every one of them come in through the Trefusis crowd), a dust of little gamblers; all the rest were Trefusis—with Cassleton for his little necessary tail.
The new ordinaries, five million of them, were half and half: Petre (with Blake and Blake and certain appendages) stood for fifty per cent. of the lot, and Trefusis and his crowd for more than seven-eighths of the other half. And there you had it.
They could shake out the small fry and tie up the bundle to themselves any day they chose. General meeting indeed! It was a walk-over—and enthusiastic at that.
Those who said the Public wouldn’t take up the Debentures (and who pitied such underwriters as Honest Tim Hulker of The Needle-Filers, the working-man member for Parrett) were utterly wrong. They said it was the wrong time of year, with so many out of town; that no one would be such a fool as to make Trefusis a present of his own property at their expense. That debenture sum for buying out the Locals was too large altogether; that the eight per cent. offered was of itself a danger signal and would warn off even the worst fools: that for once Trefusis had overreached himself.
