Other trifles also conspired to gratify him at this time; such trifles as a man must have lived very quietly and very economically even to notice. But then it was many a long day since Arthur had lived otherwise than quietly and economically, and for that reason one or two journeys taken to town about this period with Mr. Black—when the pair went about London regardless of expense, rushed from one end of town to the other in hansoms, kept cabs waiting for them without a thought of the ultimate cost; tipped footmen, porters, watermen; took trains from all parts of London for all suburbs and country districts that could be mentioned; treated subordinates to wonderful luncheons, or else had them up for dinner to Stanley Crescent, and went with them afterwards to the play—made a curious impression on the mind of a man who had hitherto looked conscientiously at a sovereign before spending it; who had almost ever since he left college travelled second-class, affected omnibuses, shunned staying in great houses on account of needful gratuities, and generally pinched himself as much as an honest gentleman, left but with a small property and many incumbrances, was likely to do.
Of course, this recital of scraping, careful, unexciting poverty must prove as wearisome and unendurable in a book as the reality does, when your neighbour (a person to be shunned) says he has to count his sixpences carefully and walk to the station for the sake of his family. The least said is soonest mended in such cases, no doubt; and the terrible economics poor Squire Dudley had been guilty of are now reluctantly named only to render intelligible the reason why rattling about London, in company with Mr. Black, seemed to him pleasant by contrast.
To be sure—and this is really the singular part of the business—what was spent came out of Arthur’s pocket. Various heads of cattle speedily followed Nellie, and the money they yielded was distributed by Mr. Black with no niggardly hand.
He knew the means by which to float a company; he believed that the way to every man’s heart was through the palm of his right hand.
Mesmerism, he said, was a round-about way of putting yourself en rapport with any one, in comparison to slipping a sovereign between his fingers.
Further, to get up other people’s steam, it is necessary, first, to raise your own; and Mr. Black held, and held truly, that there is no easier way of doing this than to rush from office to office, from station to bank, from bank to private house, all at express speed.
“This is how we live,” he was wont to say to Arthur Dudley; and, on the whole, the Squire thought such a way of living far from disagreeable.
They did not ask or want money from anyone, I pray you recollect. The great ship was still on the stocks; there had not occurred a single hitch in the business; it was all fair weather work, so far, at least, as Arthur could see; all like ordering goods and writing cheques; giving employment and paying cash; and it never occurred to the Squire that there could be another side to the picture; that sometimes business assumed the form of selling goods, and asking for payment. He was but a novice, and believed implicitly their ship would glide smoothly into the water; that she would carry a good cargo; that the profits on her freight would be enormous; that the passengers would all have a fair voyage, and agree well by the way; that there would be plenty, and to spare, for everybody; and that he should never have any harder work to do than running up to town with Mr. Black, and holding interviews with all sorts and conditions of men.
They saw printers and got estimates; they ticked off the best advertising media in “Mitchell’s Newspaper Guide;” they looked at offices in the City, they had long and confidential discourses with auctioneers and house-agents; they drove to Stangate and went over the mills, which were in full work, and in and out of which went and came men covered with flour, and of a generally white and dusty appearance; they dined at Wandsworth with Mr. Bailey Crossenham, and at Sydenham with Mr. Robert Crossenham.
They netted their thousands and their tens of thousands easily enough, after the ladies left the room, over wine which could not have been better. Capital, the Messrs. Crossenham agreed, was all that any business needed to ensure success. They made fortunes by the aid of pen and ink. Hundreds of tons of wheat—millions upon millions of loaves; the merest gains, the slightest margin of profit, swelled up to something almost incredible per annum. The Messrs. Crossenham were in the highest spirits about the new undertaking; but then certainly one fact concerning those worthy brothers must be borne in mind, namely, that they had been tottering on the very verge of bankruptcy when Mr. Black rushed to the rescue. This, which of course remained a secret amongst the trio, accounted for much that even in those early days puzzled Arthur Dudley—as, for instance, the intense respect wherewith these apparently well-to-do men treated Mr. Peter Black; the deference they paid to his opinions; the readiness with which they fell into all his views; the rapidity with which they seized and acted on his suggestions. There was not that independence of manner about the brothers which Arthur considered their means and position might have warranted them in assuming; but the conclusion he drew from all this was that, clever as he thought Mr. Black to be, people who ought to know much more about the promoter than it was possible for him to do, thought him cleverer still; and, had anything been wanting to increase Squire Dudley’s confidence in his leader, the manner in which that individual was treated by those with whom they came into actual contact, must have raised Mr. Black considerably in his kinsman’s esteem.