The Green Overcoat . Hilaire Belloc
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Название: The Green Overcoat
Автор: Hilaire Belloc
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4064066383534
isbn:
Professor Higginson leant lovingly upon that word "cleared." It had a technical, salutary sound. It was his haven of refuge. Cheques had to go up to London, hadn't they? and to go to a place called a Clearing House? He knew that much, though economics were not his department of learning. He knew that much, and he was rather proud of it—as Professors are of knowing something outside their beat.
While the Mystery of Evil was thus pressing its frontal assault on poor Professor Higginson's soul, that soul was suddenly attacked in flank by a brilliant thought: the cheque would enable him to trace his tormentors!
Come, that really was a brilliant thought! He was prouder of himself than ever. He would be actually aiding justice if he signed! The police could always track down someone where there was paper concerned. No one could escape the hands of British Law if he had once given himself away in a written document!
This flank attack of the Evil One determined the Philosopher. In a subdued voice he broke the long silence. He said—
"Give me the pen!"
Jimmy solemnly dipped the pen in the ink and handed it to him, not releasing the chequebook, but tearing out the cheque form for him to sign; and as he did so the unseen Serpent smiled. In a hand as bold as he could assume Professor Higginson deliberately wrote at the bottom right hand-corner the fatal words "John Brassington."
He was beginning to fill in the amount, when to his astonishment the cheque was snatched from his hands, while Jimmy thundered out—
"Do you suppose, sir, that you can deceive us in such a childish way as that? Does a man ever sign his cheque like a copybook?"
He glared at the signature.
"It 's faked! That 's no more your signature, Old Brassington, than it 's mine!" he shouted. "That 's how you write."
With the words he pulled a note from his pocket and tossed it to the unhappy man.
Melba made himself pleasant by an interjection—
"What a vile old shuffler it is!" he said.
And Mr. Higginson saw written on the note, dated but a week before—
James Macaulay, Esq.,
"Sir,
"I will have no further correspondence with you upon the matter.
"I am,
"Your obedient Servant,
"J. Brassington."
It was a strong, hard but rapid hand, the hand of a man who had done much clerk's work in his youth. It had certainly no resemblance to the signature which the Psychologist had appended to the cheque form, and that form now lay torn into twenty pieces by the angry Jimmy, who had also torn up the counterfoil and presented him with another cheque.
"I can't do it, gentlemen!" he said firmly—it was indeed too true—"I can't do it!"
Melba jumped up suddenly.
"I 'm not going to waste any more time with the old blighter!" he said shrilly. "Come on, Jimmy!" and Jimmy yielded.
They blew out the candle, left the room with a curse, turning the key in the lock from the outside, and the unfortunate Mr. Higginson was left bound tightly to his chair in complete darkness, and I am sorry to say upon the verge of tears.
Nature had done what virtue could not do and the Professor was stumped.
CHAPTER III.
In which the Green Overcoat appears as a point of religion by not being there.
In the smoking-room of Sir John Perkin's house upon the same evening of Monday, the 2nd of May, sat together in conversation a merchant and a friend of his, no younger, a man whose name was Charles Kirby, whose profession was that of a solicitor. The name of the merchant who had retired apart to enjoy with this friend a reasonable and useful conversation, was Mr. John Brassington. He was wealthy, he dealt in leather; he was a pillar of the town of Ormeston, he had been its mayor. He was an honest man, which is no less than to say the noblest work of God.
Mr. John Brassington was, in this month of May, sixty years of age. He was tall, but broad in shoulder though not stout. He carried the square grey whiskers of a forgotten period in social history. He had inherited from his father, also a mayor of Ormeston, that good business in the leather trade; it was a business he had vastly increased. He had not been guilty in the whole of his life of any act of meanness or of treachery where a competitor was concerned, nor of any act of harshness in the relations between himself and any of his subordinates. His expression was in one way determined, in another rather troubled and uncertain; by which I mean that there were strong lines round the mouth which displayed a habit of decision in business affairs, some power of self-control, and a well ordered life; but his lips were mobile and betrayed not a little experience of suffering, to which we must attribute certain extremes which his friends thought amiable, but which his critics (for he had no enemies) detested.
Mr. Brassington had married at thirty-one years of age a woman quiet in demeanour, and in no way remarkable for any special talent or charm. She was the daughter of a clergyman in the town. She brought him a complete happiness lasting for four years. She bore him one child, and shortly after the birth of that child, a son, she died.
Now Mr. Brassington, like most of his kind, was a man of strong and secret emotions. He loved his country, he was attached to the pictures which the public press afforded him of his political leader, and he adored his wife. Her death was so sudden, the habit of his married life, though short, had struck so deep a root in him, that from the moment of losing her he changed inwardly, and there began to appear in him those little exaggerations of which I have spoken. The best of these was too anxious an attachment to the son who must inherit his wealth. The next best a habit of giving rather too large and unexpected sums of money to objects which rather too suddenly struck him as worthy. To these habits of mind he had added excursions into particular fields of morals. In one phase he had been a teetotaller. He escaped from this only to fall into the Anti-Foreign-Atrocities fever. He read Tolstoy for one year, and then passed from that emotion into a curious fit of land nationalisation. Finally, he settled down for good into the Anti-Gambling groove.
By the time this last spiritual adventure had befallen Mr. Brassington he was nearer fifty than forty years of age, and the detestation of games of hazard was to provide him for the rest of his life with such moral occupation as his temperament demanded.
Certain insignificant but marked idiosyncrasies in his dress accompanied this violence of moral emotion. For some reason best known to himself, he never carried an umbrella or a walking-stick. He wore driving gloves upon every possible occasion, suitable and unsuitable, and he affected in particular, in all weathers not intolerably warm, a remarkable type of Green Overcoat with which the reader is already sufficiently acquainted. The irreverent youth of his acquaintance had given it a number of nicknames, and had established a series in the lineage of this garment, for as each overcoat grew old it was regularly replaced СКАЧАТЬ