The Salzburg Tales (32 page)

“Abie, we've been done: we're getting weak in the head in our old age.”

But they found out from the professors that they had been paid; they were filled with remorse, and yet they looked for a catch. Soon Rosenthal told them, during a long, lively discussion on the Exchange, that he had been capable of singular generosity to a poor scholar; and the murder was then out. In a short time the ten or twelve benefactors of Isidor gathered in conclave and there was some passionate declamation: but after half an hour of laughter and
shouting, Mendelssohn (who had been a good choice after all), got up and said:

“Boys, we were taken in and basted, as is right where three yards of credulity cover a nitwit. We are ten men, a minyon of bright jewels, and we may as well pray for brains on the spot. But I still stake—my word—on the future of that young scapegrace: consider that he is only fourteen. We are fools, we have been fooled: every fool to his folly. We arc rich, he is poor, he has mulcted us in the space of sixty days of enough
geld
for any smart boy to start with: he can probably pay us back, and I admit that his manner of delivering his speech was simply irresistible. That boy is a smart boy: we could do worse than to take him into business with us.”

And with some little dissent this opinion was accepted, and the steadier among the benefactors began presently to tell it against themselves, as a joke: for after all, it reflected a certain amount of credit on them.

Thus, and not otherwise, did Isidor find himself at the age of twenty-four literate, rich and honest as the world goes: and it is to be said to his credit that no orphan's curse was recorded against him on high, nor had he seen the curse in a dead man's eye. But now, although he was a doctor of civil law and was no longer poor, he was still without a wife, “and” (said Isidor to himself as he looked into the salons of richer men and saw through panes glistening like silver, some beautiful woman presiding over board and hearth), “a beautiful woman brings into the life of a man all the amenities.”

He was living at this time in a small flat in a tranquil street opposite a grand mansion, which was closed during the summer. A few months after he took the flat he looked out of his window, while the gramophone was playing a Beethoven quartet, and saw the yellowing leaves blowing over the macadam, melancholy and irresolute.

“Ah,” he said, profoundly sad at heart, “to live way up north in the dark winter of the German Ocean, almost under the Aurora Borealis, in the melancholy slow death of brief summer, under the pale gleam of the sun of these waterlands where the women are tall
and cheerless and arthritic pessimism fills their eyes—” but at this moment, he was startled by seeing the great shutters opposite flung open; and a domestic, in a striped apron, hurriedly withdrawing from the bitter breeze, struggled for some minutes with the catch on the windows. The windows were of great size, as if they lighted a ballroom, and were of leaded glass. The pale apron and vest of the servant retired from behind the panes, but Isidor, still watching, saw the windows flutter for a moment and once more burst open. The house was very old and the catches, no doubt, were breaking away in the wood. The servant came flying back in his soft house- shoes and once more adjusted the catch. Half-an-hour afterwards, as Isidor passed his window on his way out, he saw the windows opposite break open once more. He imagined the luxury of the great uninhabited house.

For several days the windows stayed shut, and the shutters on the top floor were irregularly opened, apparently in the servants' quarters. It seemed that the masters were about to return from their summer resort. And it happened that Isidor, lonely the next Sunday morning, gazed out of his bedroom window and saw the large windows again fly inwards and disclose, seated at a fine polished table on which were numerous volumes, an old gentleman of about sixty years of age, with white hair and a lofty bony forehead: his nose was hooked and his eyes youthful and brilliant.

“One of the glaubensgenossen,” said Isidor softly, and immediately went downstairs and asked the maid, whom he saw at the front door shaking the hall carpet, the name of the owner.

“Sir Solomon Perez, it is, sir,” she said with pride.

“A doctor?”

“A
benker
, a big benker, sir,” said the maid, and feeling that she might have in some way undermined the dignity of her master, she went indoors, not without a last glance round the edge of the door at Isidor, who was a young man of pleasing exterior (and in using this phrase I am not making moral reflections).

Isidor's occupations at this moment were various and multi- farious, but they brought him into touch with plenty of bankers: therefore the following day, he made inquiries and discovered that Sir Solomon Perez was a millionaire, and had a beautiful young wife from Buda-Pesth, whose father had made a fortune in steel-mills during the war, had turned a private into a public company before the end of the war, and had sold out his entire interest at a great profit six months before the business failed. He discovered also that Sir Solomon was an amateur and connoisseur of pictures, a poet and musician in his own right: that Sir Solomon, interested in barley, had presented a fine Russian wolfhound to the Prime Minister, who contemplated a measure on cereals, that the Prime Minister had come to conceal his ignorance in front of Sir Solomon's valuable collection of Boucher and Fragonard, and that the Prime Minister had admired much more evidently the young beauty from Buda-Pesth.

Isidor went to bed that evening, after scrutinizing the closed shutters of the mansion opposite, with his head full of the collections of Sir Solomon, both in art and banking, and his heart burning to see the wife. As for affairs, he and Sir Solomon's had nothing in common at present, but he would go on sedulously collecting all the information and tittle-tattle about the town till he found an excuse for presenting himself to the old man.

There was nothing he longed for so much as a portion of the stored-up treasure of the world, enough to decorate himself with those beauties and that culture which counted for nothing in the marshes of Lithuania and would have made a figure of carnaval in the Mile End Road. The mere making of money (he told himself ) would never have attracted him had it not promised for him a long series of halcyon days in the prime of life, sweetened by the comforts of luxury, amidst which he could pore over manuscripts, drawings and books, recognize a painter by a stroke of the brush, a musician by a strain, speak with a polished accent and enjoy the delightful solace of a beautiful wife, who should be elegant, cultivated and musical in voice.

The next morning he dressed without looking in the glass, for he was busy looking at the house across the street: and he had dreamed that a beautiful young woman sitting on a first mortgage debenture had swum across the street to him during the night. He saw nothing worth mentioning for a week or more. Then, on a Sunday morning, the leaded panes flew open again and he saw opposite the old man at the table a swarthy young woman gesticulating violently, who, at that moment, turned to the clattering window, threw up her white arm and showed her teeth in a paroxysm of anger. The old man, leaning over his books, continued to read: the servant ran in, struggled with the lock, and then placed a chair against the framework so that the wind should burst in so rudely and without introduction, no more.

“I understand it all,” thought Isidor: “an old man with a young wife, in an old and decaying mansion. An old scholar with a passionate young beauty in his libraries: she only wishes to dazzle her contemporaries with the fire in her veins. How beautiful she is and how indifferent he is! She would make a much better wife for a young ambitious man, one like me, for example, if only I had the money. She is certainly not more than twenty-four, and probably much younger;” thus he arranged the scene to suit his convenience.

He was, therefore, disagreeably surprised to see Sir Solomon assisting his young wife into the automobile the next evening, and to observe that they behaved towards each other with the unmistakable looks and gestures of love; and that the old man (he persisted in calling him an old man), kissed the hand of his beauty tenderly as they seated themselves.

And he was, therefore, delighted to see the young woman on another occasion stamp her foot and refuse to drive out with her husband, who stood waiting for her under the
porte cochère
; but he pretended to himself that the sight made him melancholy, and that he was full of commiseration for the young woman “evidently married against her heart by a businesslike father”. He began to lose sleep over this rare young woman. When he saw himself in this state he resolved to see her and speak with her and set his heart at peace.
He cast about for ten days more, finding the Spineless Pineapple, the Bahamas Breadfruit Plantation, the Copenhagen Cork-matting and the Three-Dimensional Photograph promotions all too speculative for Sir Solomon, but on the eleventh day he was offered the business of promoting a subsidiary company for a flour mill twenty miles out of London: the mill was really antiquated but it could be furbished up for the time being.

He presented his card next morning at the offices of Sir Solomon Perez, with an introduction from an influential broker in London Wall. When he entered the office he suffered a slight nervous shock, for the glance that Sir Solomon gave him not only dashed his hopes of getting the banker to participate in his questionable business, but made him despair of coming out of the interview with the proper respect of Sir Solomon. Isidor was a first-class business man, and it is not to be imagined that he dealt only in bad propositions or that his usual occupations were discreditable. He made his money by the exercise of very sharp wits, by understanding the true nature of money-making, by picking up affairs that had been dropped by duller men at the critical moment, and by judicious changes in his associates, so that he always dropped a meaner man for a more generous, and a poorer for a richer, and a foxier for a wiser. Also he had a small circle of friends out of whose purses he would never take more than one per cent, and two sponsors, rich men, whom he never plagued with his plans. These fidelities paved the way for him to a solid future. In consideration of his position, his reputation as a likely man, and his own sleep at night, it was necessary, then, that the banker should respect him; the more so, that he had come precisely to win Sir Solomon's heart and confidence, and that the fate of his passion perhaps depended on this interview.

Isidor hesitated a moment and then said cheerfully,

“Sir, I am empowered to offer you a major participation in a small but safe business: I may say that the profits are absolutely secured to the promoters, and that profits may even possibly accrue to the owners and shareholders.”

Sir Solomon waved his hand. Isidor continued,

“Twenty miles from London, in Surrey, on the small streamlet the Wyenotte, are the flour-mills of the well-known firm of Jones and Backslide, Ltd., whose products are sold all over the British Empire: they manufacture cornflour, starch, self-raising flour, and so forth. We have approached these people and they are willing, after considerable persuasion, to permit a subsidiary company to be floated for the marketing of a new type of fine flour, various cereal foods, exploded, baked, boiled, scorched, scoured, dehydrated, whole and partial meals which will be advertised as much better for the digestion and teeth than the ordinary porridges sold till now. In the advertisement we intend to use the opinion of the Government Committee of Enquiry that the teeth of Scottish children are defective because they eat the Scotch oatmeal.”

Isidor began to give Sir Solomon full accounts and details of the business, and mentioned that the promoters might expect to take as much as 60 per cent, of the proceeds of the flotation.

Sir Solomon said,

“You offer me a profit of 60 per cent, in this business?”

Isidor said modestly,

“You have seen the estimated figures, sir, which show 60 per cent, a figure arrived at in various ways.”

Sir Solomon sat up energetically, and said,

“Young man, you do not seem to be a fool, but you understand very little of the sort of business I do. Your offer does not interest me and I will tell you why.”

He beckoned Isidor to him and went to the great uncurtained window which looked out on to the street, a narrow London street, heavily trafficked, full of small shops and hucksters along the pavements.

Sir Solomon pointed to a miserable shop with the sign “Boulanger Sisters”, and to another, a large store of many departments, which was known for its regular advertisement of bargain sales and price-reductions.

“The Boulanger Sisters have little money, buy poor stuff, expect a margin of profit of 60 per cent on each piece of stuff they sell, and are therefore always behind, from quarter-day to quarter-day, facing with diminishing receipts a gradually increasing debt: the “Palace Emporium” makes a profit of 5 per cent, on everything it sells, and even sometimes sells a line at cost price to get rid of it: they have plenty of money and only buy the best stuff in the market. Bring me a 5 per cent profit and I take it, but a 60 per cent profit on poor goods, no, I can't afford it.” This was a serious check, but Isidor did not despair; and in the meantime, partly to avenge his honour in his interior courts, he took the cereals flotation to Henry Van Laer, who had an office in Poultry.

Henry Van Laer had one of those Arabian Nights reputations for wealth, genius and diabolic intuition which only arise among hardheaded businessmen. He had arrived in London perhaps ten years before, had established himself in a small office, and by a series of daring manipulations, all operated according to principles opposed to those enunciated by Sir Solomon Perez, by a number of brilliant coups such as all financial speculators dream of, he had accumulated plenty of money and an elastic credit with the largest banks in the country: he was credibly reputed to be worth anything from three to twenty million pounds sterling.