He had the neatest and smallest and most resolute mouth, from which came speech so finished that I never heard a slurred word fall from it. He made it a little bud now, and whistled.
"Sixteen and a——! I say, you'd better sign on at one of those shows I saw over there!"
"Well, with you as showman I dare say we should make it pay," I answered, falling in with this conception of our respective rôles.
His smile vanished as magically as it had come.
"Well, that's what we're going to talk about," he said; "but after lunch will do.... What sort of a tree do you call that, now?"
That was one of Judy's little affectations. He knew as well as I did that the tree at which he pointed was a birch, and I had thought, the first time I had exposed this dissimulation in him, that he would not try it on again. Fond hope! Though you knew that Pepper was laughing in his sleeve at you, and let him see you knew it, his face remained translucent and impenetrable as adamant.... So he took it as a piece of new and interesting information that the tree was a birch, and we walked on....
I had first met Pepper, or rather he had first spotted me, at the F.B.C., and we were both still at the offices in Waterloo Place. But while Pepper still moved his little wooden blocks (representing trains and ships) about vast box-enclosed maps with glass lids that shut down and locked, solving for the Company intricate problems of transport and the distribution of produce and manufactured stuff, he had already crossed the line that divides the Mercantile from the Political, or at least from the Administrative. Already that highly tempered cutting-point of manner had made a way for him into circles where I have never been at my ease; and dining once a month or oftener with the President and a Permanent Official of the Board of Trade, he was a valuable channel of information in such matters as Arbitration and the settlement of Trade Disputes. And he had been quicker than I to see the Achilles' heel of our complicated mercantile economy. Hitherto this vulnerable spot had been conceived to lie in Production, as in the last resort it certainly does; but short of that and actual industrial war, there was the equally effective and less perilous paralysis, the secret of which lay in Distribution. Shipping lines, railways and the postal organisation were the real nervous system; and Judy Pepper, strike-preventer rather than strike-breaker, was getting the ju-jitsu of it at his finger ends long before Syndicalism became aware of one of its most potent weapons.
You will see the manifold bearings of this on a Democratic Age.
And it was no less bold a move than our secession together from the F.B.C. and setting up on our own account that we were to discuss at lunch at the Bull and Bush that day.