Mr American. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ the Safe Deposit the well-respected manager, Mr Evans, personally rented to Mr Franklin a private strong room for five guineas per annum. For an additional guinea he was given one of the company’s reliable safes, into which the bags were packed; the safe was then man-handled into the strong-room, securely locked, and Mr Franklin presented with the key.

      After such an important morning’s work he might have been forgiven for relaxing and basking in the reflection of treasure stored up upon earth, but he showed no such inclination. After a brisk bite at a public house he was afoot again by noon, to the biggest estate agent’s he could find; the senior partner, whom he asked to see in person, was engaged, and Mr Franklin spent the time of waiting in acquainting himself with the town and country properties advertised on the office walls.

      There was to be had, he noted, in the reasonably fashionable area of Cadogan Square, S.W.1, a Gentleman’s Apartment comprising a Full Ground Floor; Mr Franklin stood absorbed by the catalogue of luxury – the fitments and furnishings by Liberty, the crockery by Doulton with which the kitchen and pantry were stocked, the fine master-bedroom with its private dressing-room and bathroom, the cosy panelled study, the opulent drawing-room with its Afghan carpeting and French chandelier, the elegant breakfast-room with furniture by Chippendale, the spare bedroom and second bathroom, the servants” room at the back, the excellent storage space, the polished cedar floors, the embossed wallpaper, the newly-installed silent flush toilets from Stoke-on-Trent, the electric lighting throughout at 1,000 candlepower for a penny, the patent boiler ensuring constant hot water … and all for the moderate sum of £200, a mere thousand dollars, per annum …

       … Twelve cents a night for twelve square feet of Yancy’s shack in the Tonopah diggings and a place at the communal table, bring your own grub. fifteen cents if your space was against the wall – old Davis had rated a wall space, being over sixty, with Franklin on his unguarded side so that Yancy’s clientele couldn’t come creeping in the night to untie the blanket lashed around the old boy’s ankles and remove the precious poke from beneath it. One thing about London, S.W.1, you probably didn’t need to sleep with your goods tied to your legs. Twenty-seven cents a night all told, more than they could afford, but the old fellow’s chest couldn’t take the weather any longer; just a week in the mud under the tarpaulins would have curled him up for keeps – and even if it hadn’t, it would have left him unfit to dig on the ledges. And life without the ability to dig his stint wouldn’t have been worth living to Davis – “Hell, boy, I’m just an old gopher; ‘less I’m grubbin’ up the dirt I feel all deprived like. I shifted so much shit offn Mother Earth, she’s got a permanent tilt. Seen ’em all – Comstock, Australie, Cripple Creek, Sierra Madre, Klondyke – ten thousand dollars Jocky Patterson an ‘ me took into Dawson City, nuggets an ‘ dust, an ‘ the little bastard lost the whole dam ‘ pile in a stud game while I was drunk. Never did touch liquor since, ’cept for medicinal purposes…” And his old croaking voice had trailed into sleep, gradually murmuring into gentle snores in Yancy’s mouldy, flea-ridden, sweat-stinking shack, packed with scratching bodies, wet and filthy, and the Mex came slithering like a rattler, eyes glinting in the moonlight from the window, hand out towards old Davis’s blanket until Franklin’s Remington was thrust into his face, the muzzle resting on the olive cheek, and the eyes widened in terror, with gasping breath as the hammer clicked back: “Si, si … campadre!” Si, si, campadre, your greasy dago ass, stir a finger and I’ll blow your black head off! Vamos! Twelve cents a night for the privilege of lying awake against verminous thieves while old Davis babbled in his sleep in that leaky shed under the Big Smokies – and fifty dollars a night at the Bella Union after they came down singing together from the mountains with their saddle-bags plump with silver, soaking off the grime of months in their own private bath-tub, with French champagne being poured over old Davis’s matted grey locks by a squealing twenty-dollar whore, and the waiter feeding the old rascal cream cakes as he wallowed in the tub, yelling at the girls to get in beside him ’cos he was the richest son-of-a-rich-bitch and he was going to blow the whole danged pile in one riotous night and die in the morning, see if he wasn’t, and Franklin sitting on the tin trunk that held their goods, the Remingtons handy beneath his jacket and an eye on the waiters and bar-flies and raddled strumpets who abetted old Davis’s hooting celebrations and drunken staggerings – the wreckage of their private room had cost them a mint in damages, on top of the fifty-dollar rent for that single carousing night … Two hundred pounds a year in Cadogan Square, cheaper than the Bella Union, dearer than Nancy’s, and with silent flush toilets from Stoke-on-Trent thrown in …

      “A most desirable property, sir.” The senior partner was murmuring at his elbow; perhaps he would care to see over it that afternoon? One of the assistants would be most happy to … ah, the gentleman had something else in mind. Quite so – and Mr Franklin was borne off to the inner sanctum where he and the senior partner spent an hour in earnest discussion. Mr Franklin’s requirements were specific – unusually so, and while the result of their talk seemed to satisfy him, it is a fact that he left the senior partner in a state of some mystification, blended with satisfaction at the cheque which his visitor had paid over, sight unseen.

      Mr Franklin’s next call took him to the West End, and the discreet offices of one of those exclusive domestic agencies which specialised in supplying personal servants to the nobility and the more ancient nouveaux riches. Here Mr Franklin beat his own record for upsetting managers, for while he had caused concern at the American Express, and bewilderment at the estate agent’s, he caused in Mr Pride, director of the domestic agency, something close to outrage.

      “You wish to engage a personal attendant,” said Mr Pride, faintly, “for one afternoon only? One afternoon?”

      “Yes,” said Mr Franklin.

      “My dear sir,” said Mr Pride, recovering his normally austere composure, “I am afraid that is quite impossible. Indeed,” he went, on turning his cold eye-glass on this peculiar person and deciding, after a distasteful survey of his eccentric tweed cape (a disgusting garment, in Mr Pride’s opinion) that he might carry his refusal a stage farther in reproof – “indeed, I do not recollect ever to have heard of such a thing. There are, I believe, agencies which undertake to engage staff for limited periods and … ah … what I understand are called special engagements –” he said it in a way that suggested longshoremen being recruited to help out at carnivals “– but we … ah … do not.”

      Mr Franklin nodded sympathetically. “The commission isn’t worth it, I suppose. However, in this case I can assure you it will be.”

      Mr Pride’s eye-glass quivered as though it had been struck, but he mastered his emotion. Pointless to try to explain to this eccentric that managing an exclusive domestic agency, which dealt with clients even more sensitive and highly-strung than their noble employers, called for the combined qualities of a theatre manager, a sergeant-major, and a racehorse trainer; financial consideration was the least of it to one who, like Mr Pride, had had to contend with hysterical butlers, psychotic nannies, and on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, a Highland head stalker who had tried to assassinate an Indian potentate because he was teetotal. He contented himself now by saying icily:

      “Our personnel come to us in the hope of permanent employment, or at the very least, extended engagements. I may say that we have on our books three individuals whose families have served in the same establishments – the very highest establishments – since the eighteenth century.”

      He had no sooner said it than Mr Pride was uncomfortably aware that it sounded like defensive boasting, stung out of him by this person’s gross mention of “commission’; he was, however, gratified at the admiration it produced.

      “The eighteenth century? You don’t say!”

      Mr Pride smiled frostily. “So you see, Mr … ah … Franklin, that we can hardly –”

      “With a record like that, it СКАЧАТЬ