The Embezzler Read Online Free PDF Page B

had
not
borrowed from his rich brothers in all the long hard years of his married life. Never once, even when mother was at her most ailing, did he take a single penny for her doctors or for her pleasures. On the contrary, he poured out sums that he could ill afford in presents for his wealthy sisters-in-law and nephews and nieces, on birthdays and on Christmases, and nearly bankrupted himself paying tips to their servants and buying outfits for their sporty weekends. It was bitter tea, keeping up with his rich relations, but he did it all with a view in mind of the day when he would be able to go to his brothers and say: "Never have I dunned you before. What will you do now for my only son?" And when that day came, the money was forthcoming as readily and as willingly as he had foreseen. My uncles were not imaginative, but even they could appreciate so perfect a father's love.
    In all the wreckage of my career there remains one thing for which I continue to be grateful to the dark deities who presided over my collapse: that Father never lived to see it. He died, at ninety, in his room at the Glenville Club, which I always reserved for his spring visit, after attending a great dinner that I had given in honor of the visiting King of Siam. He had seen me reach a social altitude never attained by his brothers, and he expired with his own particular
Nunc Dimittis
on his lips. It is perhaps of some significance that the only person I never let down was the only person whose faith in me was complete.

4.
    I WAS ALWAYS very proud of my office, which was unique for Wall Street. Prime King Dawson & King occupied the top floor of No. 65, but the banal, if splendid, view of the harbor and the Statue of Liberty I had abandoned to my partners and employees. For myself I had kept the noble chamber in the center of the floor, forty feet by twenty, possessed of no window but entirely covered by a great skylight. On the walls, painted a glistening white, I had hung my Grandfather Fearing's collection of Hudson River canvases: "Source of the Amazon" by Church, "Storm in the Catskills" by Cole, "Indian Bivouac" by Durand. The effect of these, with their rolling mountains, broad prairies and tumbling rivers, was to make one feel as if one were rushing across the American continent in a low-flying, open plane.
    The first of my callers, on that spring Monday morning of 1936, after the Sunday revelations at the Glenville Club, was my junior partner, Bert King. He brought the sorry news of another terrible slide in Georgia Phosphates. His long handsome face, still boyish at forty, had become pinched and dry with eight years of anxiety.
    "You make me wonder if the ancients didn't have a point," I complained. "They used to put the bearers of evil tidings to death. If I'd tossed you out the window years ago, do you think my luck might have turned?"
    "I'll save you the trouble, Guy. I'm ready to jump now."
    I tried to picture how he would look if he knew what I knew. Decidedly these younger men, depression weary, lacked the bounce of my generation.
    "Buck up," I told him. "It can only get worse."
    My grandsons will learn from their elders and betters that foolish investors always blame their failure on bad luck. But I wonder if even the wisest watcher of the market could have foreseen the hurricane that wrecked my Caribbean resort island, the patent suit that delayed the production of my Vita-Glass houses, the title flaw that paralyzed my phosphate mines, the federal investigation that slandered my tranquilizer pills. If only one of these projects had been realized in 1936, my troubles would have been over. All were realized ultimately—that is the killing part. If I owned today the stock in those four companies that I owned twenty-three years ago, I would be richer than any partner in de Grasse.
    When Bert left, my secretary rang to say that she had Jo Beal, treasurer of the Glenville Club, waiting on the line to talk. Jo was one of those