This sort of talk frightened me. I knew Marbran meant mischief. He was a bad man to cross. I was desperately afraid he would waylay Parrish and bring down disaster on the three of us. I did my utmost to put the idea of violence out of his mind. I begged him to content himself with trying to frighten Parrish into paying up before trying other means.
My suggestion seemed to awaken some old memory in Marbran’s mind.
“By Gad, Jeekes,” he said, after a moment’s thought, “you’ve given me an idea. Parrish has a yellow streak. He’s scared of a gun. I saw it once, years ago, in a roughhouse we got into at Krugersdorp on the Rand. Damn it, I know how to bring the yellow dog to heel, and I’ll tell you how we’ll do it ...”
He then unfolded his plan. He would send Parrish a last demand for a settlement, threatening him with death if he did not pay up. The warning would reach Parrish on the following Saturday. Marbran would contrive that he should receive it by the first post. As soon as possible thereafter I was to go to Parrish boldly and demand his answer.
“And you’ll take a gun,” Marbran said, peering at me with his cunning little eyes, “and you’ll show it. And if at the sight of it you don’t get the brass, then I don’t know my old pal, Mister Hartley Parrish, Esquire!”
The proposal appalled me. I knew nothing of Hartley Parrish’s “yellow streak.” I knew him only as a hard and resolute man, swift in decision and ruthless in action. Whatever happened, I argued, Parrish would discharge me and there was every prospect of his handing me over to the police as well.
Marbran was deaf to my reasoning. I had nothing to fear, he protested. Parrish would collapse at the first sign of force. And as for my losing my job, Marbran would find me another and a better one in his office at Rotterdam.
Still I held out. The chance of losing my position, even of being sent to gaol, daunted me less, I think, than the admission to Parrish of the blackly ungrateful role I had played towards him. In the end I told Marbran to do his dirty work himself.
But I spoke without conviction. I realized that Marbran held me in a cleft stick and that he realized it, too. He wasted no further time in argument. I knew what I had to do, he said, and I would do it. Otherwise ...
He left me in an agony of mental stress. At that time, I swear to Heaven, Miss Trevert, I was determined to let Marbran do his worst rather than lend myself to this odious blackmailing trick, my own suggestion, as I bitterly remembered. But for the rest of the week his parting threat rang in my ears. Unless he heard by the following Sunday that I had confronted Parrish and called his bluff, as he put it, the British police should have word, not only of Parrish’s activities in trading with the enemy, but of mine as well.