The Human Boy and the War Part 22

THE LAST OF MITCh.e.l.l

There is a great deal of difference between being expelled and "invited to find another sphere for your activities." In fact, as my father said, if Dr. Dunston had expelled me, he would certainly have made a row about it, and very likely have written to the newspapers.

But old Dunston was a jolly sight too wily for that. He wrote to my father when the event happened, and said that circ.u.mstances had come to his ears which made him think, etc., etc., that I had better leave Merivale.

I am Mitch.e.l.l, and my father is a financier, and I may say that this profession embraces a great many branches.

Sometimes, after dinner in holidays, he has allowed me to stop and smoke a cigarette while he talked to friends, and so I have got a gradual inkling of what it means to be a financier; and, in a way, this inkling was my downfall. Not that I felt it a downfall really to be hoofed out of Merivale; for it was rather a potty sort of show, and I should have gone to a far more swagger place if my father had been flusher just at the time when I had to go somewhere, owing to a trifling bother at another school.

But I went to Merivale, and just because I tried to take advantage of what my father had said about finance and apply it to school life, the difficulties arose.

I gathered off and on from my father, when he was in a talkative frame of mind, that one of the great arts of a financier is to do deals between other people.

For instance, you have something to sell, and my father knows it. And he routs about and leaves no stone unturned, as they say, until he finds somebody who wants to buy just what you want to sell. Then, having found you a customer, my father arranges all the details of the business, and everybody is satisfied, and my father, for all his time and trouble, gets richly rewarded.

Then, again, another fine branch of the financier's art is the floating of public companies. To float a company requires great skill and nerve.

The first thing is to find a place a long way off, far beyond the reach of intending shareholders, in fact. Then you discover this far-off country is extraordinarily rich in minerals, or india-rubber, or manure, or some other useful material which everybody wants. You send out a mineral or manure expert to the far-off country, and he is delighted to find these things in enormous quant.i.ties, and sees at a glance that, if properly managed, they will produce dividends of very likely a hundred per cent. for the first year, and much more afterwards.

Then my father, or whoever it might be, is glad, and he goes about to other skilful men who understand companies, and they collect together and make a board. The more famous financiers there are upon this board the better the public likes it; and so the company is floated, and the public is invited to put in money.

This the public is only too thankful to do, because, of course, the thing promises so well; and then the shares are quoted on the Stock Exchange, and the papers are suddenly full of the company some morning, and the board sits and has a champagne luncheon and arranges its salaries and so on.

Of course, the people who have found that happy, far-away land, flowing with minerals and manure and such like, are richly rewarded, as they deserve to be; and sometimes they take it in money and sometimes in shares, and sometimes in both.

And all may or may not go well; but the financier, whose business it is to do these things and float the company, takes care to come out of it all right in any case--otherwise it is no good being a financier.

There was once a very fine company floated by my father and several of his scientific friends, for extracting gold from salt water.

It was based on thoroughly sound principles; because science has proved that there is so much gold in every ton of salt water; and, of course, if it is there, it can be extracted by modern inventions. So my father and others of even greater renown were filled with the idea of promoting a company to do this.

It was a brilliant and successful company in a way, but did not last long for some reason.

They started at a place near Margate, I think, with pumps and tubes to draw in the water, and machinery and professional chemists to get the gold out of it, and a staff of twenty skilled men, who understood the complicated mechanism. And they easily got enough gold from somewhere to make the prospectus, and also enough to make a brooch for the manager's wife; and no doubt they would have got much more in course of time, but something failed--the water in the English Channel was a bit off, or some other natural cause--and my father said it would have been far better for everybody concerned if the works had been put up in the Isle of Skye, or perhaps in Norway, or in the West Indies, or the Fiji Islands, where conditions might have been better suited to success.

But gold was none the less made for my father and one or two others, "though not from the sea," as my father said thoughtfully when discussing the winding up of the affair.

There is another and even higher branch of the financier's art--the loftiest of all in fact. This consists in floating loans for hard-up monarchs, and it is absolutely the biggest thing the financier does. It wants great skill and delicacy.

You can also float loans for hard-up nations if you understand how to do it, but there are hundreds of financiers who never reach these dizzy heights of the profession, just as there are hundreds--you may say millions--of soldiers who never get above being colonels, and thousands of clergymen who fall short of becoming bishops.

My father, of course, understood these high branches of his profession, and once even went so far as to be interested in a loan for a South American Republic; but before the thing was matured, one side of the Republic was destroyed by a volcano and the other side by insurgents, who shot the President and all his best friends; and these events so shook investors in general that they would not subscribe to that loan, though the Republic, in its financial extremities, offered fabulous rates of interest.

I mention my father at such great length just to show the man he was and to explain my own bent of mind, which lay in the same direction. He said once, in a genial mood, that no man had ever made more bricks without straw than he had. It seemed to me a very dignified and original profession, because you are on your own, so to say, and you go out into the world single-handed, and by simple force of a brilliant imagination and hard work, win to yourself an honourable position. You may even get knighted or baroneted, if your financial genius is crowned with sufficient success to give away a few tons of money to a hospital, or the "party chest," whatever that is.

So, understanding all these things fairly well, it was natural that I took the line I did in the affair of Protheroe minimus and young Mayne.

And, whatever the Doctor thought, my father didn't see any objection to the operation; and, of course, his opinion was the only one I cared about.

It was like this.

Young Mayne, though very poor, had a most amazing knack of prize-winning. He was in a cla.s.s where all the chaps were a year older than him, and yet he always beat them with the greatest ease. He was good all round, and thought nothing of raking in prizes term after term.

In fact, it seemed a thousand pities, seeing that he was very poor and the only son of a lawyer's clerk, that his great prize-winning powers were not yielding a better return. For, not to put too fine a point upon it, as they say, the prizes at Merivale were piffle of the deepest dye, and of no money value worth mentioning. Dr. Dunston went on getting the same books term after term, and simply unreadable slush was all you could call them.

The few things that were good were all back numbers, like "Robinson Crusoe"--all right in themselves, but n.o.body wants to read them twice; and then there were school stories that would have made angels weep, especially one called "St. Winifred's," in which boys behaved like girls and blushed if anybody said something das.h.i.+ng. Then there were books about birds and animals and insects, and for the Lower School the Doctor used to sink to "Peter Parley" and the "Peep of Day," and such-like absolute mess of a bygone age.

These things were all bound in blue leather and had a gold owl stamped upon them, which was the badge of Merivale.

I believe the owl was supposed to be the bird of Athena, and stood for wisdom, or some such rot. Anyhow, it wasn't a bad idea in its way, for a more owlish sort of school than Merivale I never was at.

And young Mayne got more of these books than anybody; but to him they were as gra.s.s, and he thought nothing of them. Whereas Protheroe minimus had never won a prize in his life, and wanted one fearfully--not for itself, but for the valuable effect it would have on his mother.

She was a widow and loved Protheroe minimus best of her three sons. The others had taken prizes and were fair fliers at school; but Protheroe min. was useless except at running. So, woman-like, just because he couldn't get a prize anyhow, his mother was set on his doing so, and promised him rare rewards if he would only work extra hard, or be extra good, or extra something, and so scare up a blue book with a gold owl at any cost.

Well, if you have a financial mind, you will see at a glance that here was a possible opportunity. At least, so it looked to me. Because on the one hand was young Mayne, always fearfully hard up and always getting prizes at the end of each term as a matter of course; while on the other hand was Protheroe min., never hard up but never a scholastic success, so to say, from the beginning of the term to the end--and, of course, never even within sight of a prize of any sort.

Here it seemed to me was the whole problem of supply and demand in a nutsh.e.l.l; and the financier instinct cried out in me, as it were, that I ought to be up and doing.

So I went to young Mayne and said that I thought it was a frightful pity all his great skill was being chucked away, and bringing no return more important than the mournful things that he won as prizes. And he said:

"A time will come, Mitch.e.l.l."

And then I told him that a time had come.

"I know you sell your prizes for a few bob at home, and that you think nothing of them," I said. "But I had a bit of a yarn with that kid Protheroe yesterday, and it seems that what is nothing to you would be a perfect G.o.dsend to him. You may not believe it, but his mother, who is a bit dotty on him, has promised him five pounds if he will bring home a prize."

"Five pounds!" said Mayne. "The best prize old Dun ever gave wasn't worth five bob."

"She doesn't want to sell it--she wants to keep it for the honour and glory of Protheroe min.," I explained. "And the idea in my mind in bringing you chaps together for your mutual advantage was, firstly, that you should let Protheroe have one of your prizes to take home in triumph to his mother; and, secondly, that he should give you a doc.u.ment swearing to let you have two pounds of his five pounds at the beginning of next term."

Mayne was much interested at this suggestion, and, knowing that he must be a snip for at least two prizes, if not three, at the end of the summer term, he had no difficulty whatever in falling in with my scheme.

We were allowed to walk in the playing-fields on Sunday after chapel before dinner, and then Mayne and Protheroe minimus and myself discussed the details.

Funnily enough, they were so full of it between themselves that they did not exactly realize where I came in; so I had to remind Protheroe that it was I who had arranged the supply when I heard about his demand; and I had also to remind him he had certainly said that if anybody could put him in the way of a prize, he would give that person a clear pound at the beginning of next term.

I also had to remind Mayne that he had promised me ten s.h.i.+llings on delivery of his two pounds.

In fact, before the day was done I got them both to sign doc.u.ments; because, as I say, when they once got together over it, they seemed rather to forget me. So I explained to them that my part was simply that of a financier, and that many men made their whole living in that way, arranging supplies for demands and bringing capitalists together in a friendly spirit. But not for nothing.

They quite saw it, but thought I asked too much. However, I was older than they were, and speedily convinced them that I had not.

There was only one difficulty in the way after this, and Protheroe came to me about it, and I helped him over it free of charge. He said:

"When I take home the prize, what shall I say it's for? You know what my school reports are like. There's never a loophole for a prize of any kind."