Bones in London - Edgar Wallace [52]
“Then,” said Mr Seepidge impressively, “let us put our ’eads together.”
In emotional moments that enterprising printer was apt to overlook the box where the little “h’s” were kept.
Bones had indeed moved into the intellectual atmosphere of Devonshire Street. He had hired a flat of great beauty and magnificence, with lofty rooms and distempered walls and marble chimney-pieces, for all the world like those rooms in the catalogues of furniture dealers which so admirably show off the fifty-pound drawing-room suite offered on the easiest terms.
“My dear old thing,” he said, describing his new splendours to Hamilton, “you ought to see the jolly old bathroom!”
“What do you want a bath for?” asked Hamilton innocently. “You’ve only got the place for three years.”
“Now, dear old thing, don’t be humorous,” said Bones severely. “Don’t be cheap, dear old comic one.”
“The question is,” said Hamilton, “why the dickens do you want a new flat? Your old flat was quite a palatial establishment. Are you thinking of setting up housekeeping?”
Bones turned very red. In his embarrassment he stood first upon one leg and then the other, lifting his eyebrows almost to the roof of his head to let in his monocle, and lifted them as violently to let it out again.
“Don’t pry, don’t pry, dear old Ham,” he said testily. “Great Heavens and Moses! Can’t a fellow take a desirable flat, with all modern conveniences, in the most fashionable part of the West End, and all that sort of thing, without exciting the voice of scandal, dear old thing? I’m surprised at you, really I am, Ham. I am, Ham,” he repeated. “That sounds good,” he said, brightening up. “Am Ham!”
“But what is the scheme?” persisted Hamilton.
“A bargain, a bargain, dear old officer,” said Bones, hurriedly, and proceeded to the next business.
That next business included the rejection of several very promising offers which had arrived from different directors of companies, and people. Bones was known as a financier. People who wanted other people to put money into things invariably left Bones to the last, because they liked trying the hard things first. The inventor and patentee of the reaping machine that could be worked by the farmer in his study, by means of push keys, was sure, sooner or later, to meet a man who scratched his chin and said: “Hard luck, but why don’t you try that man Tibbetts? He’s got an office somewhere around. You’ll find it in the telephone book. He’s got more money than he knows what to do with, and your invention is the very thing he’d finance.”
As a rule, it was the very thing that Bones did not finance.
Companies that required ten thousand pounds for the extension of their premises, and the fulfilment of the orders which were certain to come next year, drafted through their secretaries the most wonderful letters, offering Bones a seat on their board, or even two seats, in exchange for his autograph on the south-east corner of a cheque. These letters usually began somehow like this: “At a moment when the eyes of the world are turned upon Great Britain, and when her commercial supremacy is theatened, it behoves us all to increase production…” And usually there was some reference to “the patriotic duty of capital.”
There was a time when these appeals to his better nature would have moved Bones to amazing extravagance, but happily that time was before he had any money to speak about.
For Bones was growing in wisdom and in wiliness as the days passed. Going through the pile of correspondence, he came upon a letter which he read thoughtfully, and then read again before he reached to the telephone and called a number. In the City of London there was a business-like agency which supplied him with a great deal of useful information, and it was to these gentlemen that he addressed his query: “Who are Messrs Seepidge & Soomes?”
He waited for some time with the receiver at his ear, a far-away look in his eyes, and then the reply came: “A little firm of printers run by a rascal named