IV—MR BARKER’S FLAIR
1
Jasper Thrale, in the partial exposition of his philosophy (if that description is not too large for such vague imaginings), had included very definite reference to certain “higher forces” to which he had attributed peculiar powers of interference in humanity’s management of its own concerns. Doubtless these powers had control of various instruments, and were able to exercise their influence in any direction and by any means. In the present case it would seem that they were working in devious and subtle ways—and in this at least they differed not at all from the methods attributable to that we have called Providence, or the Laws of Nature; any assumed guide or irrefragible, incomprehensible ordination. It is a common characteristic of these forces that they seem able to control the inconceivably great and the inconceivably small with equal certitude.
Not that George Gosling touched any limits. He was moderately large in body and small in intellect, but neither the physical excess nor the mental deficiency marked him out from his fellow men. In the office, indeed, he was regarded by the firm and his colleagues as a capable man of business whose embonpoint was quite consistent with his employment by a firm of wholesale provision merchants.
On the Thursday morning that saw the announcement in the morning papers that a case of the new plague was reported in Berlin, Gosling was called into the partners’ private office on some matter of accountancy.
The senior partner of Barker and Prince was eager, grasping and imaginative; his name had originally been German, and ended, in “stein,” but he had changed it for the convenience of his English connexion. Prince was a large rubicund man, friendly and noisy in his manners, but accounted a shrewd buyer.
It was not until Gosling was about to depart that the higher forces turned their attention to Barbican and then they suddenly urged Gosling to say, without premeditation on his part,
“I see there’s a case of this ’ere new plague in Berlin.”
Mr Prince laughed and winked at his subordinate. “Some of us’ll have to start a hareem, soon; who knows?” he said, and laughed again, more loudly than ever.