"I'm afraid I don't exactly understand, Mr. Shayne."
The banker readjusted his glasses and swallowed a cocktail by tipping back his head. Then he rose, paced across the broad carpet, and faced Hugo. "Of course you don't understand. Well, I'll tell you about it. Once you did a favour for me which has no place in this conversation." He hesitated; his face seemed to flinch and then to be jerked back to its former expression. "In return I've done a little for you. And I want to add a word to the gift of your bank book. You have, if you're careful, leisure to enjoy life, freedom, the world at your feet. No more strife for you, no worry, and no care. Take it. Be a hedonist. There is nothing else. I've lain in bed nights enjoying the life that lies ahead of you, my boy. Vicariously voluptuous. Catchy phrase, isn't it? My own. I want to see you do it up brown."
Hugo rubbed his hand across his forehead. It was not long ago that this same man had sat at an estaminet and wept over snatches of a childhood which death had made sacred. Here he stood now, asking that a life be done up brown, and meaning cheap, obvious things. He wished that he had never called on Tom's father.
"That wasn't my idea of living—" he said slowly.
"It will be. Forget the war. It was a dream. I realized it suddenly. If I had not, I would still be—just a banker. Not a great banker. The great banker. I saw, suddenly, that it was a dream. The world was mad. So I took my profit from it, beginning on the day I saw."
"How, exactly?"
"Eh?"
"I mean—how did you profit by the war?"
Mr. Shayne smiled expansively. "What was in demand then, my boy? What were the stupid, traduced, misguided people raising billions to get? What? Why, shells, guns, foodstuffs. For six months I had a corner on four chemicals vitally necessary to the government. And the government got them—at my price. I owned a lot of steel. I mixed food and diplomacy in equal parts—and when the pie was opened, it was full of solid gold."
Hugo's voice was strange. "And that is the way—my money was made?"