Chapter III

It was certain, as the month of April 1910 proceeded, that a demand would suddenly be made upon English capital for the exploitation of the Manatasara Syndicate's concession upon the Upper Congo.

I mention the matter only to elucidate what follows, for Mr. Clutterbuck was neither of the social rank nor of the literary world in which the salvation of the unhappy natives of the Congo had been the principal theme for months and years before.

That salvation had been only recently achieved, but the hideous rule of Leopold no longer weighed upon the innocent and unfortunate cannibals of equatorial Africa; dawn had broken at last upon those millions whom Christ died to save, and whom so many missionaries had undertaken hasty and expensive voyages to free from an exploitation odious to the principles of our Common Law.

But though the consummation of that great event, which history will always record as the chief achievement of modern England, was but freshly written upon the tablets of our age, there were not a few in the financial and ecclesiastical world of London who could read the signs of the times, and could appreciate the material results which would follow upon the advent of Christian liberty for these unhappy men. I have but to mention Sir Joseph Gorley, the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Shoreham, Sir Harry Hog, Mrs. Entwistle, Lord Barry, the Dean of Betchworth, Lord Blackwater, and his second son, the Hon. I. Benzinger, to show the stuff of which the reformers were composed.

There were some, indeed, to whom the financial necessities of the unhappy natives were but a second consideration, absorbed as they were in the spiritual needs of the African; but there were others who saw, with the sturdy common sense which has led us to all our victories, that little could be done even upon the spiritual side, until marshes had been drained, forests cleared, fields ploughed, and the most carefully chosen implements imported from as carefully chosen merchants in the capitals of Europe. The directing hand and brain of the European must be lent to raise the material position of those unhappy savages in whom the Belgian had almost obliterated the semblance of humanity.

For this purpose had been chosen, after long thought by those best acquainted with the district, Mr. Charles Hatton, brother of that Mr. Sachs whose name will be familiar to all as the originator of the Society for the Prevention of the Trade in Tobacco to the Inhabitants of Liberia, and the successful manager of Chutes Limited.

Mr. Hatton, who, upon his marriage with Amelia, daughter and heiress of Sir Henry Hatton, of Hatton Hall, Hatton, in Herefordshire, had adopted his father-in-law's name and had lent the whole of his considerable fortune, and of his yet more considerable talents, to the uplifting of the equatorial negro. Mr. Hatton it was who successfully carried through the negotiations with the Colonial Committee of the Belgian Parliament, and who obtained for his syndicate the concession of the Manatasara district for twenty-one years.

The first act of the concessionaires was to take advantage of the new regulations whereby future chartered rulers in the Congo might declare the native to be the owner of his land. The soil to which these poor blacks were born was restored to them. The hideous system of forced labour was at once ended, and in its place one uniform hut tax was imposed upon the whole community. All were free, and though the actual amount of labour required to discharge the tax was perhaps triple the old assessment, yet as it fell equally upon the whole tribe, no complaint of injustice could be made, nor, to judge from the absence of complaint in the London papers, was any felt.

In many other ways the new _régime_ witnessed to the great truth that business and righteousness are not opposed in the Dark Continent. Where the native had been permitted to run free at every risk to his morals and to ours, he was now segregated in neat compounds under a tutelage suitable to his stage of development. The early marriages at which the fatuous Continental friars had winked, were severely repressed. The adoption of Christianity in any of its forms (except Mormonism), was left to the free exercise of individual choice, but the pestilent folly of ordaining native priests was at once forbidden. Most important of all, the abominable restriction of human liberty by which, under the accursed rule of King Leopold the native's very food and drink had been supervised, was replaced by an ample liberty in which he was free to accept or to reject the beverages of civilisation. The natural temptation which gin at a penny the bottle offers to a primitive being was not met as of old by slavish prohibition, but by the wiser and more noble engine of persuasion, and the temperance leagues already springing up in the coast towns, gave promise of deep effect upon the general tone of the native community.

To all this beneficent endeavour, capital alone was lacking. To look for it in the hardened and worldly centres of the continent was hopeless. Those who in our own country would some years ago have been the first to come forward, had recently so suffered through the necessary initial expense of Rhode's glorious dream, that with all the good will in the world they hesitated to embark upon novel ventures in Africa.

More than one godly woman, persuaded by the eloquence of those who had heard of the atrocities, was willing to venture her few hundreds; and more than one wealthy manufacturer bestowed considerable donations of fifty pounds and more upon the spiritual side of the new enterprise: one high spirit of fire endowed a bishopric with £300 a year for three years. But the attempt to float a company upon the basis of the concession was still in jeopardy, and it seemed for a moment as though all those years of effort to destroy the infamy of Leopold's control had been thrown away.

The concessionaires, eager as they were to work in the vineyard, could hardly be expected to go forward until the general public should take something of the burden off their hands. It was under these circumstances that the Manatasara Syndicate and its offspring the company stood in the spring of 1910.

Put in terms of Eternal Life, the shares in the new company of the Manatasara Syndicate which was to uplift so many poor negroes and to free so many human souls, were more precious than pearl or ruby and above the price of chrysoprase,[3] but in the cold terms of our mortal markets this month of April found them utterly unsaleable. Yet the capital required was small, one considerable purchase would have been enough to start the sluggish stream; and if it be asked why, under these circumstances, Mr. Hatton did not use his considerable financial influence to obtain the first subscriptions, the answer is that he was far too high-minded to persuade any man, even for the noblest of ideals, to the smallest risk for which he might later seem responsible. As to his own means, ardent as was his enthusiasm for the cause of our black brothers, he owed it to his wife, to his bright-eyed boy, and to his aged father-in-law, Sir Charles Hatton of Hatton Hall, who was penniless, to risk no portion of the family fortune in any speculation no matter how deserving.

The public, though their ears were ringing with the name of Manatasara, and though the Press spoke of little else, held back; there was an interval--a very short one--during which the reconstruction of the whole affair was seriously considered in secret, when the Hand which will so often be observed in these pages, visibly moved for the benediction of Mr. Clutterbuck and of the great Empire which he was destined to serve.

The Municipal Council of Monte Zarro, in southern Italy, had in that same spring of 1910 determined upon the construction of new water-works; and in the true spirit of the men who inherit from Garibaldi, from Crispi, and from Nathan,[4] they had put the contract up to the highest--or rather, to the most efficient--tender. I need hardly say that the firm of Bigglesworth, of Tyneside, the Minories, and Pall Mall East, obtained the contract; a firm intimately connected both with the Foreign Office and with the Cavaliere Marlio, and one whose name is synonymous with thorough if expensive workmanship. The bonds to be issued in connection with this progressive enterprise were to bear an interest of four and a half per cent., and in view of the comparative poverty of the town and the extensive nature of the investment (which was designed for a town of at least 50,000 inhabitants, though Monte Zarro numbered no more than 15,000), in view also of the high cost of municipal action in Italy, was to be issued at some low figure; the precise price was conveyed privately to a few substantial clients of Barnett and Sons' Bank who all precipitately refused to touch the security: all, that is, with the exception of Mr. Clutterbuck.

He, with the unerring instinct that had now guided him for nearly eight long years, decided to take up the issue. It was not until he had twice dined, and generously, with a junior partner of the bank that he was finally persuaded to support the scheme with his capital, nor did his loyal nature suspect the bias that others were too ready to impute to the banker's recommendation.

Indeed, Mr. Clutterbuck was led to this determination not so much by the extremely low price at which the bonds were offered him, or the considerable interest they were pledged to bear, as by the implied and, as it were, necessary guarantee of the Italian Government which Barnett and Sons assured him were behind them. Of the two things, as the junior partner was careful to point out, one must occur: either the interest upon the outlay would be too much for the Municipality, in which case the Government would be bound to intervene, or the interest would be regularly paid, at least for the first few years, in which case the price of eighty-three at which the bonds were offered was surely so low as to ensure an immediately profitable sale.

Mr. Clutterbuck was in no haste, however; the issue still had some days before it, he was still considering what precise sum he was prepared to furnish, when he felt, during one of the later and more bitter mornings of that April, an unaccountable weakness and fever which increased as the day proceeded.

He at once consulted an eminent physician of his recent acquaintance, and was assured by the Baronet that if he were not suffering from the first stages of influenza, he was either the victim of a feverish cold or possibly of overwork.

This grave news determined him, as a prudent man, to leave his business for some days and to take a sea voyage, but before doing so, with equal prudence he put a power of attorney into the hands of a confidential clerk and left witnessed instructions upon the important investment which would have to be made in his absence.

Unfortunately, or rather fortunately--such are the mysterious designs of Heaven--he dictated these full and minute instructions which he was to leave behind him, and in the increasing discomfort which he felt toward evening, he neglected to read over the typewritten copy presented him to sign.

That evening at Croydon, the symptoms being now more pronounced, it was patent even to the suburban doctor that Mr. Clutterbuck was the prey of a Diplococcus, not improbably the hideous Diplococcus of pneumonia.

* * * * *

The confidential clerk heard with regret next morning by telephone of the misadventure that had befallen his master; but he was a man of well-founded confidence in himself; he had now for five years past conducted the major part of Mr. Clutterbuck's affairs, under his superior's immediate direction, it is true, and his proficiency had earned him a high and increasing salary. Save for an active anxiety as to Mr. Clutterbuck's ultimate recovery, the terms of his will, and other matters naturally falling within his province, he knew that he had all the instructions and powers upon which to act during the next few days.

He spent the first of those days in visiting, in company with his second cousin Hyacinth, the charming old town of Rye; the second, which was also the first of Mr. Clutterbuck's delirium, he occupied in perusing and digesting at length the detailed instructions which had been left in his hands.

With the fact that a large investment must of necessity be made in a few days he was already familiar: his master had sold out and had placed to his current account at Parr's the important sum destined to meet it. But he was necessarily in ignorance of the precise security in which that sum was to be placed, for Mr. Clutterbuck had come to his final determination but a little while before his illness had struck him.

The instructions would, he knew, contain his orders in every particular, and it was mainly with the object of discovering what he was to do in this chief matter that he studied the lines before him.

The directions given covered a multitude of points; they concerned the buying and selling of a certain number of small stocks, especially the realisation of certain Siberian Copper shares, which still stood high, but which Mr. Clutterbuck, having heard upon the best authority that the copper was entirely exhausted, had determined to convey to some other gentleman before the general public should acquire, through the Press, information which he had obtained at no small expense in advance of the correspondents.

There followed several paragraphs relative to the installation of certain improvements in the office, upon which Mr. Clutterbuck was curiously eager; next, in quite a brief but equally clear passage, was the order--if the merchant were not himself able to attend to the matter by the 25th at latest--to take up 15,000 shares in the Muntsar issue; an investment, the instructions added, on which the fullest particulars would be afforded him, if he were in any doubt, by Messrs. Barnett and Sons.

The Confidential Clerk was in very considerable doubt. The word as it stood was meaningless. He sent for Miss Pugh, the shorthand writer, and her notes; they appeared together with hauteur, and the Confidential Clerk, who in humbler days had done his 120 words a minute, carefully examined the outline. It was not very neat, but there was the "Mntsor" right enough. He complained of the vowels, and received from Miss Pugh, whom he openly admired, so sharp a reprimand as silenced him.... Yet his experience assured him that "Mnt" was not an English form. He began to experiment with the vowels. He tried "e" and "a" and made Muntusare, which was nonsense; then he tried "a" and "u"; then "a" and "e"; and suddenly he saw it.

In a flash he remembered a friend of his who was employed in the offices of a syndicate; he should surely have guessed! Manatasara!

More than once that friend had hinted at the advantage of "setting the ball rolling." More than once had he spoken in flattery of the Confidential Clerk's ascendency over his master and with unmerited contempt of that master's initiative.... He had even let it be known that the introduction of Mr. Clutterbuck's name alone would be regarded with substantial gratitude by Mr. Hatton.... The more he thought of it the more he was determined that Manatasara was the word ... and he needed no help from Barnett and Sons now.

He considered the habits of his friend, and remembered that he commonly lunched at the Woolpack. To the Woolpack went the Confidential Clerk a little after two, and found that friend making a book with Natty Timpson, Joe Buller, and the rest upon the approaching but most uncertain Derby. He joined them, drew him aside, briefly told him his business, and asked him how he should proceed.

His friend, who was a true friend and a little drunk, conveyed to him, in language which would certainly be tedious here and probably offensive, the extreme pleasure his principals would find in Mr. Clutterbuck's determination: the probability that the Confidential Clerk himself would not go unrewarded. He spoke of his own high hopes; then, as he contemplated the opportunity in all its greatness, it so worked upon his own enthusiasm as to make him insist upon accompanying the reluctant Clerk to the office itself, and introducing him in a flushed but articulate manner to Mr. Hatton's private secretary.

The two were closeted together for something less than an hour; it was not four o'clock when they parted. Mr. Hatton's secretary, forgetting all social distinctions, shook hands warmly at the door with the Confidential Clerk, who passed out heedless of his friend's eager pantomime in the outer office. And thus it was that by the morning of the next day, while poor Mr. Clutterbuck's temperature was hovering round 104° (Fahrenheit), no small portion of his goods were already earmarked for the Great Crusade to Redeem the Negro Race.

Mr. Clutterbuck's illness reached its crisis and passed; but for many days he was not allowed to hear the least news, still less to occupy himself with business. The Confidential Clerk was far too careful of his master's interests to jeopardise them by too early a call upon his energies. He wrote a daily report to Mrs. Clutterbuck to the effect that nothing had been done beyond the written instructions left by her husband, that all was well, and the office in perfect order. He was at the pains of dictating a daily synopsis of the correspondence he had opened and answered; and though the offer of marriage which since his new stroke of fortune he had made to Miss Pugh for the second time had for the second time been rejected, he continued to utilise her services, both on his own account and on that of his absent principal.

He dictated considerable reports upon the movements of his favourite stocks to greet Mr. Clutterbuck's eye upon his recovery, and in a hundred ways gave evidence of his discretion and his zeal now that he could look forward to his master's early return.

Meanwhile Barnett and Sons, after assuring themselves by certain general questions that Mr. Clutterbuck had said nothing with regard to any Italian investment, held the parcel over till it could be dealt with in person, and were satisfied of the tenacity of purpose of their client.

In the first week of May Mr. Clutterbuck, his crescent of a moustache untrimmed, his hair quite grey, but the broad fan of it still clinging to his large, bald forehead, was permitted for the first time after so many days to see the papers and hear news of the world.

He was languid and utterly indifferent, as convalescents are, to what had hitherto been his chief interests, but as a matter of wifely duty Mrs. Clutterbuck felt herself bound to read him at full length the City article in the _Times_, and as she did so on the third day her philanthropic and evangelising eye was caught, in the midst of names that had no meaning for her, by the one name Manatasara. It was the feature of the moment that the new company had been successfully launched.

A strong Imperialist, like most women of the governing classes and of the Established Faith, whether in this country or in Scotland, she naturally rejoiced to observe securely forged yet another bond with the Britains Overseas. She could comprehend little of the technicalities of promotion, but she was aware that another of these achievements, of which the Chartered Company of South Africa had for so many years been the brilliant type, was upon the eve of its success, and she rejoiced with a joy in which the love of country stood side by side with a pure and sincere attachment to her religion.

As one day of convalescence succeeded to another, this item of news began to grow so insistent that the wan invalid could not but take some heed of it. Although the long list of shares and prices recited like a litany had carried with it, when it had approached him through his wife's lips, something more than tedium, yet when he was permitted to read and select in it for himself and with his own eyes, the prominence given to Manatasara's interwove with his reviving interest in life the story of Charles Hatton's creation.

The capital was not large: the district was but one of many, but the strong interest which the place had aroused and the very restriction in the number of available shares had roused the public.

The allotment had been followed by a sharp rise. There were dealings in the new quotation so continual and so vigorous as to recall the great days before the South African War. The premium upon "Congoes," as they were affectionately called, rose without ceasing--and just at the moment when Mr. Clutterbuck was beginning, but only beginning, to grasp the story of the company, he was permitted, somewhat doubtfully, by his doctor to return for an hour or two to the City.

He reached his office, where a warm and cordial welcome awaited him; his correspondence had already been opened, and an abstract made by his Clerk and Secretary, when, before he had fully mastered what had happened, that admirable assistant remarked to him in a tone more deferential than he had expected, that he had received full allotment for his application in consideration of the very early date on which he approached the Syndicate.

"What allotment?" said the enfeebled Mr. Clutterbuck, as he looked up in some astonishment from the paper before him.

"The allotment in Congoes, sir. I understood I was to apply. I kept the money ready, sir."

"You've paid nothing I hope," said Mr. Clutterbuck in a testy voice too often associated with convalescents. "You haven't been such a fool as to pay anything on your own?"

"Well, sir----" said the Clerk hesitatingly. Then he waited for a moment for the full effect of his good fortune to penetrate Mr. Clutterbuck's renewed conceptions of the outer world.

Mr. Clutterbuck read the letter before him twice over, slowly. He had received allotment to the full amount; the call had been for a half-crown on 60,000. He did not appreciate how he stood. His mind, always rather sane than alert, was enfeebled by illness and long absence from affairs.

"You've been doing something silly," he said again peevishly, "something damned silly. I don't understand. I'll repudiate it. I don't understand what you've done--I don't believe it's meant for me at all."

"I humbly did my best, sir; I was assured, really and truly, that a quarter was the most they'd allow, sir; I truly believed I wasn't risking more than 15,000 of yours, sir; I did truly."

"Oh! do be quiet," said his principal, as he turned again to the letter. His head hurt him, and he had a buzzing in the ears. He felt he wasn't fit for all this. It was a cruel injustice to a man barely on his feet after a glimpse of the grave.

The Clerk had the wisdom to hold his tongue and to wait. And as he waited it dawned upon Mr. Clutterbuck that he held 60,000 Congoes; the Congoes he had heard talked of in the train; the Congoes of which the papers had been full during the long listless days when he had lain beside his window looking out into the little sunlit garden; the Congoes with which every feature of the repeated view from that window had become grotesquely associated in his invalid imagination. He was just about to speak again, perhaps to say the something which his Clerk most dreaded, when he was swamped by a realisation of what had happened.

What Mr. Clutterbuck in health would have seen in five or ten minutes, Mr. Clutterbuck in convalescence at last grasped, at least as to its main lines. He remembered two men in the train as he went in, and their angry discussion: how one who pooh-poohed the whole affair and said they would not go beyond three before next settling day; and the other, who was equally confident, swore that they could not fail to pass five and might touch seven. At the lowest the paper ready to his hands was 60,000 of those same.

He deliberately settled his face and said to the Clerk in an impassive and altered tone:

"Have you heard what people are offering?"

"Well, sir, it's all talk so far," answered the Clerk. "Some were saying two and a half, and I heard one gentleman say two and five-eighths; but it's all talk, sir."

He watched his master narrowly, standing a little behind him and scrutinising his face as he bent over the letter and read its short contents for the fourth time. He was well content with the result of that scrutiny.

As for Mr. Clutterbuck, he now perceived quite clearly (and was astonished to discern his own quiet acquiescence in the discovery) that he was at that moment--by some accident which mystified him--the possessor of over £200,000 in one department of his investments alone. He sighed profoundly, and said in something like his old voice:

"I supposed they've had their cheque?"

"Yes, sir, undoubtedly," said the clerk rapidly.

Mr. Clutterbuck called for the cheque-book on Parr's, casually asked the balance, turned to the counterfoil and, initialled the £7500 sacrifice, he rose from the table a man worth a quarter of a million all told.

The air was warmer with the advent of summer. It was a pleasant day, and Mr. Clutterbuck, throwing open the window and letting in the roar of the sunlit street, leant for awhile looking out and taking deep draughts of air. He noted all manner of little things, the play of the newsboys, the ribbons upon the dray horses, the chance encounters of passers-by, and the swirl and the eddy of men. Then he drew in again, more composed, and said to the clerk:

"Well, I suppose there's nothing more to be done to-day." Then it occurred to him to add: "If any one comes round from Barnett's, tell 'em 'certainly.'"

"Certainly what, sir?" said the clerk. They had been round more than once, and lately a little anxiously, but he did not like to trouble Mr. Clutterbuck at that moment with such details.

"Why," said that gentleman with a touch of his invalid's testiness returning, "tell 'em I'm ready to do what they want. I promised them something before--before my illness. Tell them 'certainly.' Tell them I'll be here again to-morrow."

The clerk helped him on with his heavy fur coat and saw him carefully to the carriage he had hired. He urged him to drive back the whole way. But Mr. Clutterbuck shook his head, and drove to the station. He would soon be well again.

That afternoon, just after hours, another anxious message came from Barnett's, but this time they were satisfied. Mr. Clutterbuck was entirely at their service; he would be at the office next day.

This revolution--for it was no less--acted like a tonic upon the man into whose life it had come. His health was restored to him with a rapidity which the doctor, who had repeatedly urged him to seek a particular hotel upon the English Riviera, marvelled at and frequently denied. There is no better food for a man's recovery than the food of his vigorous manhood, and this, with Mr. Clutterbuck, was the food of affairs. To venture, to perceive before another, to seize the spoil, is life to men of his kind; and he could now recognise in himself one of those whose foresight and lightning action win the great prizes of this world.

He was at his office every day, first for a short spell only, but soon for the old full working hours; and in the midst of twenty other interests which were rather recreations than labours, he watched Congoes. In the eagerness of that watch he neglected all the marvels the newspapers had to tell him of an energy that was transforming the old hell of the equator into a paradise. He even neglected the great spiritual work which Dr. Perry and his assistant clergy had so manfully begun. It must honestly be confessed that he watched nothing but the fluctuation of the Company's shares.

Mrs. Clutterbuck went to the seaside without him. He saw them touch seven in the heat of the summer; he was confident they would go further. They fell to six before the opening of August, to five a week later. His sound commercial instinct bade him beware; at four and a half he sold. Then and then only did he take his long holiday away from the strain of business; a holiday marred to some extent by the observation that the moment he had disposed of them Congoes rose like a balloon to a point still higher than that at which he might himself much earlier have realised.

But though this secret thorn remained in his own side, to the world he was a marvel; first Croydon talked of him, then the City, then Mayfair, and the sportsmen, and even the politicians. In ever-increasing circles, at greater and greater distances from himself, fantastically exaggerated even in his own immediate neighbourhood and growing to be a legend in the mouths of great ladies, the story of his one fortune, among the others of that flotation, expanded into fame.

The story rose beneath him like a tide; it floated him out of his suburb into a new and a greater world; it floated him at last into the majestic councils of the nation. It all but bestowed upon him an imperishable name among the Statesmen of England.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: Habakkuk xvi. 8.]

[Footnote 4: The sometime Mayor of Rome; not to be confounded with Sir Henry Nathan, whom we recently came across in the matter of the eggs.]