H. Wells - You Can't Be Too Careful

Sir Rumbold reflected. “I never had your obsession with Dickens. Still—he got over a vast breadth of canvas, I admit. When did you read Bleak House last, Whittaker?”

“I read it and re-read it when I was at Cambridge. No!—at Winchester.”

“Don’t read it again—ever. There’s a time in a young man’s life for reading Dickens—and a time to stop reading Dickens.”

“I could read Pickwick now with the same enjoyment—”

“You don’t.”

“I tell you—”

“Don’t. It won’t be true, Whittaker. You’ll think it is true and you’ll get irritated if I throw doubts. Why cannot you be moderate, Whittaker? What a gift you have for unqualified enthusiasms! You over-do everything, unless you forget to do anything about it. Shakespeare isn’t all good. You’d die rather than confess it. If you had to choose two books for a desert island, you’d choose the Bible—and Shakespeare. You say that at once. I wouldn’t. I know them too well. If there was a third book allowed, you’d say Dickens....”

“This literary talk is all very well,” said Whittaker. “But where does it get us?”

“Who began it?”

“Have it your own way. But what concerns me now is this problem of Squeers-Chadband. What are we to do about him?”

“It’s poor ‘Jo’ out of Tom’s All Alone we have to consider,” said Sir Rumbold. “Do you remember poor Jo? He died very beautifully but rather incredibly repeating the Lord’s Prayer.”

“I remember Jo all right. But what I can do for him, I don’t know. His letter is a shriek for help, but Squeers-Chadband seems to have got him tied up body and soul, all ready to devour.”

“You think?”

“Should I consult you if I didn’t?”

“Another little port won’t do us any harm....”

“Well now, what standing have we? Whatever little pile of savings Ma Tewler left is completely in his hands until the kid is twenty-one, and, as the report points out, there is nothing to prevent him paying not only interest but principal into his own account as school and tuition fees, and transferring investments and so forth and so on. He seems to be launching out and enlarging his school. What’s to prevent him buying our little misery a partnership in his own school? He can break him down to a junior partner, and make a sort of unpaid assistant of him. Something that dropped from him, the report says, seems to suggest that. What right has anyone to intervene?”

“We’ll see about that later. Why is Chadband in a funk about it at all? Why doesn’t he face us out?”

“That puzzles me.”

“Conscience makes cowards of us all, Whittaker. Our investigator makes a suggestion. That youngster ought to be at Scotland Yard, by the way, instead of defiling himself with Keyhole and Sludge. But you see he suggests here that Chadband began by keeping accounts for a month or so until he felt safe about something, and that since then he has just been swiping money out of the trust whenever he felt like it. The appetite grows with what it feeds on. What was it he had to feel safe about? Well—let us consider. You?”

“How me?”

“As the boy’s next of kin or father perhaps?”

“But—!”

“When you didn’t follow up that evidently much too impressive wreath, he dropped the idea, and now this inquiry of yours has revived it.”

“My dear Hooper! Damnation! You don’t imagine!”

“No. But Chadband may. You can’t imagine the ideas he has about—our sort of people. I see no reason why he shouldn’t go on imagining it for a bit. I don’t think it would give you any standing in the case, but he may think it might.”

“Preposterous!”

“A time will come when you’ll have to drop that double port after lunch. It makes you gouty and testy. I can stand it but you can’t. It’s your hormones or something.... Anyhow Chadband’s not a well-informed man. You must always in this sort of affair consider the limitations of the particular individual you are dealing with. He may imagine there is some sort of legal supervision of trustees. There isn’t but there ought to be. There ought to be a sort of Public Trustee for these things. There will be one of these days. Let that pass. But evidently he can’t stand up to any sort of examination of his accounts, and that is what scares him. He’s just been drawing cheques out of the trust account, selling securities, and going ahead, building a new classroom, throwing out a wing for a third dormitory. And what we have to consider is just how we can go through his passbooks.”

“We can’t,”

“We can.”

“How can we?”

“And without any slur on your high moral character.”

“Well, just consider! The wife of a trusted employee! Damn it! I wish you wouldn’t keep harping on that idea. It’s disagreeable. Things like this without a word of truth in them get about. And when once they get about....”

“Forgive me. We’ll drop all that. When I tried that suggestion I hadn’t thought of the real way to do the job. Now I have.”

“Well?”

“You see,” said Sir Rumbold, “you owe the boy a considerable sum of money.”

“The devil I do!”

“Yes. You owe him well over a hundred pounds.”

“First I’ve heard about it. You get wilder and wilder.”

“You see you have a system of crediting commissions to your staff as a sort of bonus to the retiring allowance.”

“It’s news to me.”

“All done very quietly. Yes. You don’t know everything about your Firm, you know. By a long chalk. Listen to what I am telling you. Don’t keep interrupting. I’m doing this job for you, aren’t I? This bonus may have its imaginative element, but the fact is it gets us right into Chadband’s pass- book and that’s where we want to get.”

“He’ll just swipe that extra hundred pounds. What’s to prevent him?”

“That’s easy.”

“I don’t see it.”

“No. But listen! You have to see that it is invested to the best advantage. That is in the instrument or deeds or whatever they are—leave that to me—and that is where we poke our inquiring little fingers into the guardianship of the worthy Myame. We go and see him. We look at him hard. We ask for insignificant details. Somehow, and quite improperly and unjustly, the word embezzlement creeps into the discussion. Does your slow but solid intelligence begin to grasp the situation now?”

“Suppose he fights when he realises he is cornered?”

“Chadband isn’t going to fight. Trust me. We’ll have him whining in no time.”

“If the Lord had not been on my side,” said Mr Myame, “when men rose up against me, they had swallowed me up quick when their wrath was kindled against me. Then the waters had overwhelmed me, the stream had gone over my soul.

“Yes, but thou spared him, Lord. His weeping was turned to joy. Blessed be the Lord who hath not given us a prey to their teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken and we are escaped. Blessed words. Oh blessed words! So thou dealtest with thy servant David! So thou dealest with all sinners that repent. And now—do I cry in vain? Are not these blessed words for me? Are not these words for me? Out of the darkness I cry. Let my cry come unto thee.”

It was late at night and he was in his study in sore tribulation Wrestling with the Spirit. For some months he had been living in a state of great spiritual contentment. Now suddenly a terrible darkness had closed in upon him. His sense of Divine Guidance had departed from him. He delivered these long treasured words with profound emphasis and paused. But there came no answer to him in the stillness without or within.