Philip MacDonald - The Rynox Mystery

‘And a fat sauce,’ said Peter, ‘he’s got. Worried about RYNOX. I’ll scald his fat little ears! What d’you mean, F. X.—worried about RYNOX?’

She leant her elbow on the table and looked steadily, with a seriousness belying her words, into the eyes of F. X.

‘Have a cigar, Tony?’ said F. X. ‘All right, Peter, I’m going to shoot in a minute. There’s a maitre d’hotel with long pitchers just behind. Have a cigar, Tony, go on? … Look here, Peter, I don’t know whether Tony’s told you. Being Tony he probably has, but RYNOX is on about the stickiest patch of country we’ve ever struck. The position exactly is this—that if we can keep going for another six months, we shall be rolling along on top of the world, and right on top of the world. If we can’t keep going for six months, we shall be rolling along somewhere in Lambeth gutter. Now, I’m not joking, Peter. I’m talking dead straight. RYNOX is mine. I mean, I started it, and I don’t believe, for business purposes, in limited companies. A limited company means limited credit, and I like my credit hot, strong and unbounded. Hence the unlimited condition of RYNOX. But, Peter, do you know what an unlimited company means? It means that if the company fails, all the creditors can come down upon not only the company, but upon all the individual partners in the company. That is, upon me first, then Tony, and then your father. They can take not only the chairs and desks and pictures and carpets out of the office, but the tables and pianos and bath-taps out of your house .’

‘All right, sir! All right!’ Peter was smiling again now. A very different smile, a smile which made Tony gasp at his luck, and F. X. mentally raise a hat.

‘All right, sir,’ said Peter again. ‘Yes, I knew that.’

A good lie; she hadn’t known that. Both men knew that she hadn’t known that. Both men if possible loved Peter more than they had five minutes ago.

‘Your father,’ said F. X., ‘being, if I may say so, Peter, a very shrewd but rather timid Leadenhall Street business man, has frankly got the wind up. I keep soothing him down but I’d like you to help. I’d like you really to soothe him right down.’ He turned to his son. ‘Tony, has Sam said anything to you lately?’

‘Sam,’ said Tony. ‘Sorry, Peter, Daddy thinks that if a man is under fifty he ought still to be playing with rattles. Sam doesn’t understand me, I don’t understand Sam. How on earth Peter ever managed to be—sorry, old thing! Anyway, in answer to your question, F. X. Benedik, Sam has not said anything to me. I think he has to Woolrich, though.’

F. X. laughed. ‘If he said anything against RYNOX to Woolrich, I know what he’d get! That boy’s keener on his job than anybody so fond of trips into the country’s any right to be. RYNOX is graven on his liver.’

Tony moved the glasses from before him; leaned across the table; said in a different tone:

‘Look here, Dad, we’re going to pull this off, aren’t we? Because if you think it’s too much for you … but of course you don’t!’

‘I don’t think anything,’ said F. X. ‘I know, boy, I know. By the way, did you see that friend of yours? Young Scott-Bushington?’

Tony’s lip curled. ‘I saw him all right. Cold feet though. Nothing doing, F. X.’

F. X. grinned. ‘Don’t look so solemn! That’s all right. Look here, Peter’—he turned to the woman who was going to be his son’s wife—‘I don’t know how much Tony tells you, but I’d tell you everything and then some. What RYNOX wants, Peter, is a hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds.’

‘That all ?’ said Peter.

F. X. smiled. ‘It sounds a lot of money, my dear, but in this sort of business it’s, well, just nothing. You know what RYNOX are doing, don’t you, Peter? RYNOX have practically chucked all their other interests into the fire to back the Paramata Synthetic Rubber Company.’

Peter nodded. ‘Oh, yes, I know that. Tony does tell me things.’

‘I expect,’ said F. X., ‘he does, and if I may say so, quite right, too. Well, the Paramata Synthetic Rubber Company’s going—not west, but big. We’ve got the plant, we’ve got the stock, we’ve got the orders—some of them. We’ve got four big orders, Peter, hanging fire. They’re coming along all right; they’re German, three of them. But we’ve got to last out until they do come and then a bit, see? And that’s what your father’s worried about. He thinks we can’t hang on, and I tell him we can. I tell him we’ve damn well got to! So you get at him, Peter, and tell him so, too.’ He turned to his son. ‘Tony!’

‘Sergeant?’

‘Paris for you, my lad. I want you to go and see Menier. If we don’t recall that Valenciennes loan within the next six months we ought to be shot. I’d like it within a month. Just see what you can do, will you?’

Tony drew patterns upon the cloth with the haft of his fork. ‘Right! Yes, I know Menier pretty well. We’re rather pally, as a matter of fact. When do you want me to go?’

‘Better take the five o’clock air mail. That gets you there in time for a full day tomorrow and Saturday and as much of Sunday as you’d like. Come back Monday morning …’ F. X. looked at his son for a long moment. ‘Stick at it, Tony. And by the way …’

Tony cocked an unobtrusive ear. He knew F. X.’s ‘by-the-ways.’ They generally concealed a major point.

‘By the way,’ said F. X., ‘while you’re with Menier, you might sound him. That Caporal group of his might put up fifty thousand. You could tell him six months and ten per cent, if you like. Anyway, try.’

Tony nodded. And at that moment the faces of father and son were so alike in every line that they might have been, not elder and younger brothers, but twins.

Peter looked at the watch upon her wrist. ‘My dears,’ she said, ‘I must go. What about you? Or don’t RYNOX do any work in the afternoon?’

F. X. stood up. ‘They do. We’ve been chewing the rag here a bit too long as it is. Come on.’

They went on. Outside, father and son put Peter into a taxi; watched while the taxi purred out of Alsace Court and into the Strand.

F. X. turned to his son. ‘Going back to the office, boy?’

Tony nodded. ‘And you?’

F. X. shook his head. ‘Not this afternoon. I’m going away to think.’

Tony waved a stick—they were half-way up the court by this time—at a taxi with its flag up. ‘You have this?’ he said. ‘Or me?’

‘You,’ said F. X. ‘I’m walking.’

The taxi came to a standstill abreast of them. Tony put a foot upon its running board and fingers to the handle of its door. ‘RYNOX House,’ he said to the driver.

His father looked at him.

Tony opened the taxi door. He said over his shoulder:

‘See you on Monday then.’ He made to enter the cab.

‘Tony!’ said his father.

‘Hullo!’ Tony turned round; saw his father’s outstretched hand; raised his eyebrows. ‘Good Lord!’ he said, but he took the hand. They shook; a firm grip, each as strong as the other.

‘Do your best,’ said his father, ‘with Menier.’

Tony nodded and leapt into the cab and slammed the door. The engine churned. Tony looked out of the window. ‘So long, F. X.,’ he said.

‘Good-bye!’ said F. X., and raised his hand in salute.

COMMENT THE SECOND

ALL is not well with RYNOX. F. X. is probably not so confident even as his most pessimistic words to his son.

RYNOX is at that point where one injudicious move; one failure of judgment; one coincidental piece of bad luck, will wreck it. And it ought not—thinks F. X.—to be wrecked. For if it can struggle on for another six or seven months all his speculation, all his endeavour, will meet with incalculable success.