“You know what I mean by big things,” he said fiercely. “Millions and millions, and the lives and works of millions of people! Do you know why I come down here to this rotten little clearing? Because it sometimes reminds me of my office off Throgmorton Street. Look! It was just this size. I had my desk over there. Horswall, my secretary, had his desk here. Here was the fireplace. The press just here by the window. Here the shelves with all the files. Can you imagine what it’s like to have been there all those years, to have worked up what I did—all out of nothing, mark you!—to have got the whole rubber market in the hollow of my hand!—and then, oh, God! to be condemned to—this!” and he made a gesture of fierce contempt towards the Weald of Sussex.
“For nearly two years now,” he continued, “I’ve been living in this hole.”
“Nature has a way,” I said, in my most sententious manner, “of coming back on us.”
“Naycher! Naycher!” he almost screamed. “Don’t talk to me about Naycher! What sort of friend is Naycher to me or you? Naycher gives you inclinations, and then breaks you for following them! Two men fall into a pond—what does Naycher care that one man was trying to drown his enemy while the other was trying to save a dog? They both stand their chance of death. Naycher leads you up blind alleys and into marshes and lets you rot. Besides, isn’t man Naycher? Isn’t it Naycher for me to work and make money, as it is for these blighting birds to sing? Aren’t roll-top desks as much Naycher as—these blasted trees?”
He blinked savagely at the surrounding scene. The smoke from a distant hamlet drifted sleepily heavenwards, like incense to the gods of the Downs.
“My father was a turner in Walham Green, and he apprenticed me to the joinery, but I had my ambitions even in those times.” He nodded knowingly, and mopped his brow. “At eighteen I was a clerk in a wholesale house in St. Paul’s Churchyard. For three years I worked there underground, by artificial light. Then I got made sub-manager of a wharf at the South end of Lower Thames Street. I was there for five years, and saved nearly three hundred pounds out of a salary of £120 a year. Then I met Jettison, and we started that office together, Jettison & Gateshead, Commission Agents. Work and struggle, work and struggle, year after year. But it was not till I got on to rubber that I began to make things move. That was eight years after. Do you remember the boom? I got in with Gayo, who had lived out in the Malay Straits—knew everything—we got the whole game at our fingers’ ends. We knew just when to buy and just when to sell. Do you know, I’ve made as much as four thousand pounds in one afternoon, just talking on the telephone! And we done it all in that little room”—he gazed jealously round the little arbor in the hills, and scowled at me. Then he produced a packet of cigarettes and lighted one from the stump of the last.
“In those days, through Gayo’s friends, we followed the whole course of the raw stuff. Then Gayo went out to Malay, and he used to cable me every few days, putting me on to the right thing. My God, he was a man! It went on for two years, when suddenly a cable came to say he was dead—fever, or something, up-country. That was the end. The slump came soon after. I worked hard, but I never got control back. Down and down and down they went, as though Gayo was dragging them through the earth.” His lower lip trembled as he rolled the emaciated cigarette over.
“Lord, what a fight I had, though I sat in that office there, in my shirt-sleeves, day and night for months on end, checking tapes, cabling, lying, faking, bluffing”—he chuckled with a meditative intensity. “I’d have done it then, if they’d given me time. But they closed in; there were two Scotch firms, and a man named Klaus. I knew they meant to do me down. There was a set against me. I wasn’t there in the end. I was sitting in the office one night....” He passed his hand over his brow and swept away a wasp that had settled there. He sat silent for some moments, as though trying to recall things, and twice started to speak without framing a sentence.
“My brother was very good to me,” he said suddenly, waving his hand toward the red-brick gable in the trees. “He was very good to me all through.” Then he added, with a sort of contemptuous shrug, “In the cabinet-making he was; got a little works at Bow—made about four hundred a year—married, and five children.”
He sat for some minutes with his head in his hands, and then he sat up and gazed upon the joyous landscape with unseeing eyes.