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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Man Who Bought London', Edgar Wallace intricately weaves a thrilling narrative that explores the intersection of wealth, power, and ambition within the backdrop of early 20th-century London. The novel is characterized by its sharp dialogue and fast-paced prose, typical of Wallace's style, which blends crime fiction with social commentary. As the protagonist navigates the intricacies of a city rife with corruption and intrigue, Wallace examines the implications of materialism and the moral dilemmas faced by those who wield financial influence over society. Edgar Wallace, a prolific British author and journalist, wrote extensively during the early 1900s, often drawing inspiration from his own experiences in London's underbelly. His diverse background'—from his time as a war correspondent to his insights into the criminal justice system'—shaped his understanding of human nature and societal structures. These influences are palpable in 'The Man Who Bought London', as Wallace deftly critiques the burgeoning capitalist ethos that defined his era, imbuing the narrative with a sense of urgency and relevance. This novel is a must-read for fans of crime fiction and social critique alike, as it invites readers to reflect on the moral complexities that arise when ambition knows no bounds. Wallace's captivating prose and incisive observations offer an engaging exploration of the darker sides of urban life, making 'The Man Who Bought London' both a thrilling and thought-provoking experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Man Who Bought London
Table of Contents
Introduction
A city can be remade with ledgers as surely as with bulldozers, and The Man Who Bought London contemplates how the concentrated will of money presses upon streets, institutions, and conscience until the map itself becomes a balance sheet and the lives within it a test of what, in the end, a metropolis is for.
Edgar Wallace’s novel belongs to the tradition of British crime and thriller fiction, unfolding in London during the early twentieth century, when finance, transport, and municipal power were visibly reshaping urban life. Wallace, a prolific author of popular fiction, sets his story amid boardrooms, newspaper offices, and the city’s densely layered neighborhoods. The result is a narrative that stitches together the procedural feel of business dealings with the urgency of criminal threat. Without leaning on exotic locales or espionage, it draws suspense from the familiar rhythms of the capital and the competing authorities that claim to govern it.
The premise is disarmingly simple: an audacious financier sets out to acquire, coordinate, and modernize key tracts of London, promising efficiency, improvement, and handsome returns. The scale of the plan invites allies from commerce and public life, but it also provokes resistance—from rivals who fear displacement, from guardians of civic autonomy, and from opportunists who see leverage in disruption. Wallace uses this setup to stage negotiations, legal maneuvers, and shadowy countermoves, letting the pressure accumulate as reputations, fortunes, and public order hinge on whether the city can, or should, be brought under one controlling vision.
Readers encounter a brisk, highly legible style marked by short scenes, shifting vantage points, and the steady tightening of complications. Wallace’s pacing favors momentum: boardroom discussions pivot quickly to backstreet surveillance, formal agreements meet informal coercion, and conversations are charged with the possibility that the speaker is angling for advantage. The mood alternates between cool calculation and sudden peril, yet the prose remains economical, attentive to action and consequence rather than ornament. It is a story built from gambits and replies, where every apparent solution opens a new seam of risk and where public announcements conceal private stakes.
Beneath the intrigue lies a study of power—how capital recruits legitimacy, how law grapples with ingenuity, and how civic ideals are tested when efficiency becomes its own justification. The book probes the boundary between improvement and control, asking whether prosperity delivered from above can honor the plurality of urban life. It also touches class and access: who benefits when property is rationalized, who pays when speculation becomes policy, and who can afford patience while grand designs unfold. Wallace keeps these questions embedded in suspense, allowing ethical tension to emerge from choices made in pursuit of apparently practical ends.
For contemporary readers, the novel’s concerns feel immediate: real estate as an instrument of influence, the privatization of public functions, the rhetoric of modernization, and the speed with which a city’s character can change under coordinated investment. It resonates with debates about accountability and transparency when private vision intersects public need. The story does not lecture; instead, it dramatizes how tactics that promise order can generate fresh vulnerabilities, and how opposition coalesces from unlikely quarters when place, identity, and livelihood are at stake. In watching deals unfold, we also witness the struggle to define what counts as progress.
Approached as entertainment, The Man Who Bought London delivers sleek plotting, calibrated tension, and a satisfying interplay of intellect and nerve; approached as a document of its moment, it captures anxieties about modern urban governance in the decades when London’s growth felt both exhilarating and precarious. Wallace offers no easy heroes, only competing claims to necessity and advantage, which keeps the narrative alive without requiring grand revelations to astonish. Readers who appreciate crime fiction grounded in civic reality will find a vivid panorama here—an invitation to consider how cities are organized, who commands their future, and what such command inevitably costs.
Synopsis
In early twentieth-century London, an American millionaire known as King Kerry arrives with an audacious objective: to purchase pivotal tracts of the city and reorganize them according to a comprehensive plan. Far from a mere grab for profit, his scheme blends commercial calculation with civic improvement, promising cleaner streets, better housing, and streamlined traffic. Kerry brings immense capital, a small circle of trusted aides, and a reputation for swift, decisive action. His presence unsettles established interests and excites the public imagination. The novel opens by setting out his vision and the scale of the enterprise, establishing London itself as both arena and prize.
Kerry operates through discretion. He dispatches confidential agents to secure options on properties from scattered owners, knitting together a mosaic of deeds that will enable sweeping redevelopment. Transactions unfold in dingy offices and well appointed chambers, each one a small step toward a larger design. Though he avoids publicity, rumours ripple through the markets. Newspapers speculate about a mysterious buyer. Politicians and municipal officials debate whether concentrated control will hasten improvement or endanger public oversight. Speculators circle, hoping to anticipate the next purchase. The tempo of City life quickens as subtle shifts in ownership threaten to redraw familiar maps.
The pressure draws out opposition. A loose syndicate of adventurers and professional swindlers recognizes in the upheaval a chance to strike. Using a plausible financier as their public face and relying on shadowy confederates in lesser offices, they set about exploiting gaps in title, floating fictitious securities, and sowing confusion around Kerry’s agreements. Their strategy is to entangle the project in legal thickets and then extract advantage from the delays. The group recruits a vulnerable intermediary with access to sensitive documents, and quietly tests defenses with minor frauds. Beneath polite conversation, a concealed struggle begins for leverage and time.
Personal threads enter the narrative alongside commercial maneuvers. A young woman, connected by family or duty to one of the opposing figures, encounters Kerry in settings that reveal his motives beyond profit. Charitable committees, drawing rooms, and crowded streets frame their meetings, underscoring contrasts of class and opportunity. She becomes an unwitting link between circles that seldom mix, relaying impressions that humanize the forces at work. The novel dwells on London’s social surfaces and hidden rooms, using her perspective to show the stakes for ordinary lives. Ambivalence about loyalty and trust complicates her position as tensions amplify.
The syndicate escalates from rumor to action. Spurious liens and forged claims appear against key parcels, sellers receive threats, and a calculated burglary targets blueprints and lists of pending purchases. Kerry tightens his procedures and brings in official assistance. An able investigator from Scotland Yard begins tracing peculiar transfers and following quiet men across bridges and alleys. The story moves between counting houses, law offices, West End hotels, and the docks, emphasizing the breadth of the campaign. Financial language and police method intermingle as each side seeks to predict the other’s next step without exposing its own vulnerabilities.
A turning point arrives when a signature transaction, expected to anchor the entire scheme, suddenly collapses under unexpected pressure. The setback coincides with a dangerous encounter that demonstrates the syndicate’s willingness to move beyond paper intrigues. Public attention sharpens and inquiries are raised at official meetings. Kerry is pressed to explain his larger intentions while preserving the confidences that make them possible. In this atmosphere, the connection with the young woman acquires new weight, revealing what he will risk to continue. The plan narrows to its essentials, and the conflict shifts from dispersed feints to open confrontation.
Countermeasures follow. Kerry alters his financial tactics, buying time in one quarter to provoke mistakes in another, while the investigator arranges watchful traps around suspected rendezvous. False trails and decoy documents test loyalties inside both camps. Night journeys along the river, tense interviews in rented rooms, and hurried conferences in chambers mark the intensified pursuit of proof. The technicalities of law become instruments of strategy, as affidavits and warrants intersect with stakeouts and discreet arrests. Each success reveals a deeper layer of orchestration, implying a controlling mind not yet exposed but increasingly constrained by changing circumstances.
The climax draws together the financial, legal, and personal strands. Critical evidence surfaces at a moment when the city’s leaders demand clarity, and the antagonists race to turn revelation to advantage. A staged confrontation forces admissions about the methods used to undermine the project, while certain figures seek compromise to protect themselves. The outcome depends on a decisive negotiation in which the value of London’s future is weighed against immediate gain. Kerry’s larger purpose, long hinted, becomes explicit as he sets terms that reach beyond a single deal. The resolution turns on responsibility more than spectacle or force.
In the aftermath, markets settle and the outline of redevelopment emerges with measured confidence. The narrative closes by tracing the practical impact on streets and tenants, and by marking where ambition has been tempered by oversight. Relationships reach measured conclusions, with gratitude and reserve rather than grand declarations. The book’s broader message emphasizes how concentrated power can serve the public when checked by accountability, and how private greed invites its own defeat. London remains the constant theme, resilient and adaptable. The final pages suggest future undertakings while letting the immediate contest subside into the rhythm of civic life.
Historical Context
Set in London in the early 1910s and published in 1915, The Man Who Bought London unfolds against the twilight of the Edwardian era and the first year of the Great War. Its geography spans the City’s financial district, the developing West End thoroughfares, and the densely populated East End. The narrative revolves around large-scale property acquisition and the consolidation of urban power, echoing a metropolis remade by engineers, speculators, and municipal reformers. The presence of a wealthy American magnate intent on reorganizing London’s real estate market reflects the period’s transatlantic flows of capital and influence, and the city’s tensions between private profit and public purpose.
The most immediate historical frame is the wave of urban redevelopment and slum clearance led by the London County Council (LCC) from the 1890s to the eve of World War I. Enabled by the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890 and expanded by subsequent measures, notably the 1909 Housing and Town Planning, etc. Act, authorities gained powers of compulsory purchase, layout control, and minimum housing standards. Model estates such as the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green (opened in 1900 on the cleared Old Nichol rookery) and the Millbank Estate (1897–1902) reconfigured inner London. Simultaneously, philanthropic bodies including the Peabody Trust and the Guinness Trust multiplied working-class dwellings, while reformers like Octavia Hill advanced rent-collection and management schemes. Urban macro-projects—Kingsway and Aldwych (constructed 1902–1905) with their tram subway (opened 1906)—required huge land assembly, injecting volatility into land values and displacing thousands. Bolstered by new transit, speculative office blocks and improved arterials linked the City to the West End, redefining commercial geography. The novel mirrors this exact milieu: its central scheme of block-by-block acquisition to reshape districts reflects the legal tools of compulsory purchase, the rhetoric of social improvement, and the hard arithmetic of rents, mortgages, and ground leases. The friction between idealistic redevelopment aims and entrenched interests—including slumlords, rent-farmers, and unscrupulous intermediaries—maps onto the book’s conflicts. Its American-led financial syndicate evokes how large, coordinated capital pools could outmaneuver piecemeal owners and even pressure municipal authorities, dramatizing the period’s contest between public planning and private empire-building.
London before 1914 was the world’s premier capital market, with British overseas investments nearing about £4 billion by 1913, roughly two-fifths of global foreign investment. The London Stock Exchange, the discount market, and trust companies funneled international money into railways, mines, utilities, and municipal projects. Companies Acts of 1900 and 1907 tightened disclosure and governance but did not temper the dynamism of mergers and syndicates. The novel channels this financial reality: its protagonist’s transatlantic consortium and boardroom maneuvers echo London’s capacity to mobilize vast funds quickly, and the City’s culture of underwriting ambitious, quasi-public schemes for private gain.
Two headline episodes shaped public suspicion of finance: the transatlantic Panic of 1907 and the Marconi scandal of 1912–1913. In October–November 1907 the Bank of England raised its rate to a crisis-level 7% to defend gold reserves as New York banks convulsed, stressing London’s money market and curbing property deals. The Marconi affair—implicating senior ministers through purchases of American Marconi shares during a British contract—produced parliamentary inquiries and excoriating press campaigns. The book reflects this climate of anxiety about insider dealing and political capture; its portrayal of information asymmetries, leaks, and speculative raids mirrors the era’s fear that markets could be bent by the well-connected.
London policing underwent rapid modernization with the establishment of the Metropolitan Police Fingerprint Bureau (1901) and reforms under Commissioner Sir Edward Henry (1903–1918). High-profile episodes such as the Siege of Sidney Street (Stepney, January 1911), involving armed anarchists and a dramatic intervention by Home Secretary Winston Churchill, signaled a city grappling with organized, often transnational criminals. Special Branch expanded its remit amid fears of espionage and political violence. The novel’s collision of respectable finance with a clandestine underworld reflects this juncture: it stages a capital city where corporate offices, backstreet fixers, and criminal rings intersect, and where modern investigative methods chase white-collar and street-level conspiracies alike.
Transport-finance ventures transformed land values and corporate power, most conspicuously under American entrepreneur Charles Tyson Yerkes. Through the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL, formed 1902), Yerkes financed and built the Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines (opened 1906) and the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead line (1907), while electrifying the District Railway. These projects required immense land acquisition, air-rights deals, and complex securities, creating booms around stations from Hammersmith to Finsbury Park. The novel’s premise of “buying London” resonates with this precedent: an American-led syndicate reconfiguring mobility and property from below ground up, demonstrating how infrastructure capitalism could redraw the city’s economic map.
World War I altered the calculus of property and finance. The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA, 1914) imposed controls on lighting, land use, and communications; labor and materials were diverted to the war effort; and Londoners faced Zeppelin raids, including the first major attack on 31 May 1915. Simultaneously, Britain’s dependence on U.S. credit deepened, culminating in the $500 million Anglo-French loan arranged by J. P. Morgan & Co. in late 1915. Although the novel’s action is set on the cusp of war, its publication year and atmosphere reflect wartime constraints and the growing prominence of American capital, intensifying its portrait of foreign-led financial power in London.
As social and political critique, the book interrogates the ethics of large-scale redevelopment and finance. It exposes the ambiguity of “improvement” schemes that promise housing reform while displacing communities, dramatizing the tension between public benefit and private monopoly. By juxtaposing elite financiers with slum landlords and urban fixers, it critiques a system where legality and legitimacy diverge, and where information and access, not merit, govern outcomes. The prominence of an American consortium underscores anxieties about sovereignty and the outsourcing of civic priorities to capital. In tracing how money can purchase influence as easily as land, the work indicts class privilege, municipal complicity, and the thin line between enterprise and exploitation.
The Man Who Bought London
CHAPTER I
NIGHT had come to the West End, but though the hour was late, though all Suburbia might at this moment be wrapped in gloom—a veritable desert of deadness relieved only by the brightness and animation of the busy public-houses—the Strand was thronged with a languid crowd all agape for the shady mysteries of the night world, which writers describe so convincingly, but the evidence of which is so often disappointing.
Deserted Suburbia had sent its quota to stare at the evil night-life of the Metropolis. That it was evil none doubted. These pallid shop girls clinging to the arms of their protecting swains, these sedate, married ladies, arm in arm with their husbands, these gay young bloods from a thousand homes beyond the radius—they all knew the significance of those two words: "West End."
They stood for an extravagant aristocracy—you could see the shimmer and sheen of them as they bowled noiselessly along the Strand from theatre to supper table, in their brilliantly illuminated cars, all lacquer and silver work. They stood for all the dazzle of light, for all the joyous ripple of laughter, for the faint strains of music which came from the restaurants.
Suburbia saw, disapproved, but was intensely interested. For here was hourly proof of unthinkable sums that to the strolling pedestrians were only reminiscent of the impossible exercises in arithmetic which they had been set in their earlier youth. It all reeked of money—the Strand—Pall Mall (all ponderous and pompous clubs), but most of all, Piccadilly Circus, a great glittering diamond of light set in the golden heart of London.
Money—money—money![1q] The contents bills[1] reflected the spirit of the West. "Well-known actress loses 20,000 pounds worth of jewellery," said one; "Five million shipping deal," said another, but that which attracted most attention was the naming bill which The Monitor had issued—
KING KERRY TO BUY LONDON (Special)
It drew reluctant coppers from pockets which seldom knew any other variety of coinage than copper. It brought rapidly-walking men, hardened to the beguilement of the contents-bill author, to a sudden standstill.
It even lured the rich to satisfy their curiosity. "King Kerry is going to buy London," said one man.
"I wish he'd buy this restaurant and burn it," grumbled the other, rapping on the table with the handle of a fork. "Waiter, how long are you going to keep me before you take my order?"
"In a moment, sir."
A tall, good-looking man sitting at the next table, and occupying at the moment the waiter's full attention, smiled as he heard the conversation. His grey hair made him look much older than he was, a fact which afforded him very little distress, for he had passed the stage when his personal appearance excited much interest in his own mind. There were many eyes turned toward him, as, having paid his bill, he rose from his chair.
He seemed unaware of the attention he drew to himself, or, if aware, to be uncaring, and with a thin cigar between his even white teeth he made his way through the crowded room to the vestibule of the restaurant.
"By Jove," said the man who had complained about the waiter's inattention, "there goes the chap himself!" and he twisted round in his chair to view the departing figure.
"Who?" asked his friend, laying down the paper he had been reading.
"King Kerry," said the other, "the American millionaire."
King Kerry strolled out through the revolving doors and was swallowed up with the crowd.
Following King Kerry, at a distance, was another well-dressed man, younger than the millionaire, with a handsome face and a subtle air of refinement.
He scowled at the figure ahead as though he bore him no good will, but made no attempt to overtake or pass the man in front, seeming content to keep his distance. King Kerry crossed to the Haymarket and walked down that sloping thoroughfare to Cockspur Street.
The man who followed was slimmer of build, yet well made. He walked with a curious restricted motion that was almost mincing. He lacked the swing of shoulder which one usually associated with the well-built man, and there was a certain stiffness in his walk which suggested a military training. Reflected by the light of a lamp under which he stopped when the figure in front slowed down, the face was a perfect one, small featured and delicate.
Herman Zeberlieff had many of the characteristics of his Polish-Hungarian ancestry and if he had combined with these the hauteur of his aristocratic forbears, it was not unnatural, remembering that the Zeberlieffs had played no small part in the making of history.
King Kerry was taking a mild constitutional before returning to his Chelsea house to sleep. His shadower guessed this, and when King Kerry turned on to the Thames Embankment, the other kept on the opposite side of the broad avenue, for he had no wish to meet his quarry face to face.
The Embankment was deserted save for the few poor souls who gravitated hither in the hope of meeting a charitable miracle.
King Kerry stopped now and again to speak to one or another of the wrecks who ambled along the broad pavement, and his hand went from pocket to outstretched palm not once but many times.
There were some who, slinking towards him with open palms, whined their needs, but he was too experienced a man not to be able to distinguish between misfortune and mendicancy.
One such a beggar approached him near Cleopatra's Needle, but as King Kerry passed on without taking any notice of him, the outcast commenced to hurl a curse at him. Suddenly King Kerry turned back and the beggar shrunk towards the parapet as if expecting a blow, but the pedestrian was not hostile.
He stood straining his eyes in the darkness, which was made the more baffling because of the gleams of distant lights, and his cigar glowed red and grey.
"What did you say?" he asked gently. "I'm afraid I was thinking of something else when you spoke."
"Give a poor feller creature a copper to get a night's lodgin'!" whined the man. He was a bundle of rags, and his long hair and bushy beard were repulsive even in the light which the remote electric standards afforded.
"Give a copper to get a night's lodging?" repeated the other.
"An' the price of a dri—of a cup of coffee," added the man eagerly.
"Why?"
The question staggered the night wanderer, and he was silent for a moment.
"Why should I give you the price of a night's lodging—or give you anything at all which you have not earned?"
There was nothing harsh in the tone: it was gentle and friendly, and the man took heart.
"Because you've got it an' I ain't," he said—to him a convincing and unanswerable argument.
The gentleman shook his head.
"That is no reason," he said. "How long is it since you did any work?"
The man hesitated. There was authority in the voice, despite its mildness. He might be a "split"—and it would not pay to lie to one of those busy fellows.
"I've worked orf an' on," he said sullenly. "I can't get work what with foreyners takin' the bread out of me mouth an' undersellin' us."
It was an old argument, and one which he had found profitable, particularly with a certain type of philanthropist.
"Have you ever done a week's work in your life, my brother?" asked the gentleman.
One of the "my brother" sort, thought the tramp, and drew from his armoury the necessary weapons for the attack.
"Well, sir," he said meekly, "the Lord has laid a grievous affliction on me head—"
The gentleman shook his head again.
"There is no use in the world for you, my friend," he said softly. "You occupy the place and breathe the air which might be better employed. You're the sort that absorbs everything and grows nothing: you live on the charity of working people who cannot afford to give you the hard-earned pence your misery evokes."
"Are you goin' to allow a feller creature to walk about all night?" demanded the tramp aggressively.
"I have nothing to do with it, my brother," said the other coolly. "If I had the ordering of things I should not let you walk about."
"Very well, then," began the beggar, a little appeased.
"I should treat you in exactly the same way as I should treat any other stray dog—I should put you out of the world."
And he turned to walk on.
The tramp hesitated for a moment, black rage in his heart. The Embankment was deserted—there was no sign of a policeman.
"Here!" he said roughly, and gripped King Kerry's arm.
Only for a second, then a hand like teak struck him under the jaw, and he went blundering into the roadway, striving to regain his balance.
Dazed and shaken he stood on the kerb watching the leisurely disappearance of his assailant. Perhaps if he followed and made a row the stranger would give him a shilling to avoid the publicity of the courts; but then the tramp was as anxious as the stranger, probably more anxious, to avoid publicity. To do him justice, he had not allowed his beard to grow or refrained from cutting his hair because he wished to resemble an anchorite, there was another reason. He would like to get even with the man who had struck him—but there were risks.
"You made a mistake, didn't you?"
The beggar turned with a snarl.
At his elbow stood Hermann Zeberlieff, King Kerry's shadower, who had been an interested spectator of all that had happened.
"You mind your own business!" growled the beggar, and would have slouched on his way.
"Wait a moment!" The young man stepped in his path. His hand went into his pocket, and when he withdrew it he had a little handful of gold and silver. He shook it; it jingled musically.
"What would you do for a tenner?" he asked.
The man's wolf eyes were glued to the money.
"Anything," he whispered, "anything, bar murder."
"What would you do for fifty?" asked the young man.
"I'd—I'd do most anything," croaked the tramp hoarsely.
"For five hundred and a free passage to Australia?" suggested the young man, and his piercing eyes were fixed on the beggar.
"Anything—anything!" almost howled the man.
The young man nodded.
"Follow me," he said, "on the other side of the road."
They had not been gone more than ten minutes when two men came briskly from the direction of Westminster. They stopped every now and again to flash the light of an electric lamp upon the human wreckage which lolled in every conceivable attitude of slumber upon the seats of the Embankment. Nor were they content with this, for they scrutinized every passer-by—very few at this hour in the morning.
They met a leisurely gentleman strolling toward them, and put a question to him.
"Yes," said he, "curiously enough I have just spoken with him—a man of medium height, who spoke with a queer accent. I guess you think I speak with a queer accent too," he smiled, "but this was a provincial, I reckon."
"That's the man, inspector," said one of the two turning to the other. "Did he have a trick when speaking of putting his head on one side?"
The gentleman nodded.
"Might I ask if he is wanted—I gather that you are police officers?"
The man addressed hesitated and looked to his superior.
"Yes, sir," said the inspector. "There's no harm in telling you that his name is Horace Baggin, and he's wanted for murder—killed a warder of Devizes Gaol and escaped whilst serving the first portion of a lifer for manslaughter. We had word that he's been seen about here."
They passed on with a salute, and King Kerry, for it was he, continued his stroll thoughtfully.
"What a man for Hermann Zeberlieff to find?" he thought, and it was a coincidence that at that precise moment the effeminate-looking Zeberlieff was entertaining an unsavoury tramp in his Park Lane study, plying him with a particularly villainous kind of vodka; and the tramp, with his bearded head on one side as he listened, was learning more about the pernicious ways of American millionaires than he had ever dreamt.
"Off the earth fellers like that ought to be," he said thickly. "Give me a chance—hit me on the jaw, he did, the swine—I'll millionaire him!"
"Have another drink," said Zeberlieff.
CHAPTER II
THE "tube" lift[2] was crowded, and Elsie Marion, with an apprehensive glance at the clock, rapidly weighed in her mind whether it would be best to wait for the next lift and risk the censure of Mr. Tack or whether she should squeeze in before the great sliding doors clanged together. She hated lifts, and most of all she hated crowded lifts[2q]. Whilst she hesitated the doors rolled together with a "Next lift, please!"
She stared at the door blankly, annoyed at her own folly. This was the morning of all mornings when she wished to be punctual.
Tack had been mildly grieved by her innumerable failings, and had nagged her persistently for the greater part of the week. She was unpunctual, she was untidy, she was slack to a criminal extent for a lady cashier whose efficiency is reckoned by the qualities which, as Tack insisted, she did not possess.
The night before he had assembled the cash girls and had solemnly warned them that he wished to see them in their places at nine o'clock sharp. Not, he was at trouble to explain, at nine-ten, or at nine-five, not even at nine-one—but as the clock in the tower above Tack and Brighton's magnificent establishment chimed the preliminary quarters before booming out the precise information that nine o'clock had indeed arrived, he wished every lady to be in her place.
