Chance

"Come, Marlow," I said, "you exaggerate surely--if only by your way of

putting things. It's too startling."

"I exaggerate!" he defended himself. "My way of putting things! My dear

fellow I have merely stripped the rags of business verbiage and financial

jargon off my statements. And you are startled! I am giving you the

naked truth. It's true too that nothing lays itself open to the charge

of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth. What comes with a

shock is admitted with difficulty. But what will you say to the end of

his career?

It was of course sensational and tolerably sudden. It began with the Orb

Deposit Bank. Under the name of that institution de Barral with the

frantic obstinacy of an unimaginative man had been financing an Indian

prince who was prosecuting a claim for immense sums of money against the

government. It was an enormous number of scores of lakhs--a miserable

remnant of his ancestors' treasures--that sort of thing. And it was all

authentic enough. There was a real prince; and the claim too was

sufficiently real--only unfortunately it was not a valid claim. So the

prince lost his case on the last appeal and the beginning of de Barral's

end became manifest to the public in the shape of a half-sheet of note

paper wafered by the four corners on the closed door of The Orb offices

notifying that payment was stopped at that establishment.

Its consort The Sceptre collapsed within the week. I won't say in

American parlance that suddenly the bottom fell out of the whole of de

Barral concerns. There never had been any bottom to it. It was like the

cask of Danaides into which the public had been pleased to pour its

deposits. That they were gone was clear; and the bankruptcy proceedings

which followed were like a sinister farce, bursts of laughter in a

setting of mute anguish--that of the depositors; hundreds of thousands of

them. The laughter was irresistible; the accompaniment of the bankrupt's

public examination.

I don't know if it was from utter lack of all imagination or from the

possession in undue proportion of a particular kind of it, or from

both--and the three alternatives are possible--but it was discovered that

this man who had been raised to such a height by the credulity of the

public was himself more gullible than any of his depositors. He had been

the prey of all sorts of swindlers, adventurers, visionaries and even

lunatics. Wrapping himself up in deep and imbecile secrecy he had gone

in for the most fantastic schemes: a harbour and docks on the coast of

Patagonia, quarries in Labrador--such like speculations. Fisheries to

feed a canning Factory on the banks of the Amazon was one of them. A

principality to be bought in Madagascar was another. As the grotesque

details of these incredible transactions came out one by one ripples of

laughter ran over the closely packed court--each one a little louder than

the other. The audience ended by fairly roaring under the cumulative

effect of absurdity. The Registrar laughed, the barristers laughed, the

reporters laughed, the serried ranks of the miserable depositors watching

anxiously every word, laughed like one man. They laughed

hysterically--the poor wretches--on the verge of tears.