Bones in London - Edgar Wallace [35]
“My dear old amalgamator,” said Bones reproachfully, “is that business? I ask you.”
“It may be good business,” said the other.
Bones looked at Hamilton. They and the elderly man, who had driven up to the door of the Wardour Street studio in a magnificent car, were the only three people, besides the operator, who were present.
Hamilton nodded.
“Well,” said Bones, “business, dear old thing, is my weakness. Buying and selling is my passion and hobby. From first to last, after paying jolly old Brickdust, this thing is going to cost me more than three thousand pounds – say, three thousand five hundred.”
The elderly man nodded.
“Let’s make a quick deal,” he said. “I’ll give you six thousand pounds for the whole concern, with the pictures as you have taken them – negatives, positives, cameras, etc. Is it a bargain?”
Bones held out his hand.
They dined together, a jubilant Bones and a more jubilant Hamilton, at a little restaurant in Soho.
“My dear old Ham,” said Bones, “it only shows you how things happen. This would have been a grand week for me if those beastly oil shares of mine had gone up. I’m holding ’em for a rise.” He opened a newspaper he had bought in the restaurant. “I see that Jorris and Walters – they’re the two oil men – deny that they’ve ever met or that they’re going to amalgamate. But can you believe these people?” he asked. “My dear old thing, the mendacity of these wretched financiers–”
“Have you ever seen them?” asked Hamilton, to whom the names of Jorris and Walters were as well known as to any other man who read his daily newspaper.
“Seen them?” said Bones. “My dear old fellow, I’ve met them time and time again. Two of the jolliest old birds in the world. Well, here’s luck!”
At that particular moment Mr Walters and Mr Jorris were sitting together in the library of a house in Berkeley Square, the blinds being lowered and the curtains being drawn, and Mr Walters was saying: “We’ll have to make this thing public on Wednesday. My dear fellow, I nearly fainted when I heard that that impossible young person had photographed us together. When do you go back to Paris?”
“I think I had better stay here,” said Mr Jorris. “Did the young man bleed you?”
“Only for six thousand,” said the pleasant Mr Walters. “I hope the young beggar’s a bear in oil,” he added viciously.
But Bones, as we know, was a bull.
A DEAL IN JUTE
It is a reasonable theory that every man of genius is two men, one visible, one unseen and often unsuspected by his counterpart. For who has not felt the shadow’s influence in dealing with such as have the Spark? Napoleon spoke of stars, being Corsican and a mystic. Those who met him in his last days were uneasily conscious that the second Bonaparte had died on the eve of Waterloo, leaving derelict his brother, a stout and commonplace man who was in turn sycophantic, choleric, and pathetic, but never great.
Noticeable is the influence of the Shadow in the process of money-making. It is humanly impossible for some men to be fortunate. They may amass wealth by sheer hard work and hard reasoning, but if they seek a shorter cut to opulence, be sure that short cut ends in a cul-de-sac where sits a Bankruptcy Judge and a phalanx of stony-faced creditors. “Luck” is not for them – they were born single.
For others, the whole management of life is taken from their hands by their busy Second, who ranges the world to discover opportunities for his partner.
So it comes about that there are certain men, and Augustus Tibbetts – or, as he was named, “Bones” – was one of these, to whom the increments of life come miraculously. They could come in no other way, be he ever so learned and experienced.
Rather would a greater worldliness have hampered his familiar and in time destroyed its power, just as education destroys the more subtle instincts. Whilst the learned seismographer