"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.