The Eye of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

of film-stars. “Why not?” thought Mr Gibson. They couldn’t discuss the customers, because there weren’t any; indeed it was only the endemic slackness of trade that made such pals of them at all. They broke off politely to bid their employer good morning, and Miss Molyneux had a message as well.
    â€œMrs Whittingtall phoned, Mr Gibson. The lady who looked at the nutria.”
    â€œThe one we offered to re-model at cost,” supplied Miss Harris.
    â€œWell?” said Mr Gibson.
    â€œShe’s decided against it, Mr Gibson.”
    â€œThank you,” said Mr Gibson. “Come up to my office, both of you, in half an hour.”
    â€œ Both of us?” repeated Miss Molyneux, raising her plucked eyebrows. “Suppose there’s a customer?”
    â€œThere won’t be,” said Miss Harris. But she was a good sort. “Not at nine-thirty, dear,” she added tactfully. “Luxury goods, I’ve often noticed, ladies rarely shop for much before lunch …”
    Mr Gibson went on upstairs. He didn’t go into the work-room, because there was no one there. (In his father’s rash hey-day it housed three girls and a cutter. Old Mr Gibson’s downfall had been a passion for auctions; he bought up any quantity of second-hand goods, expecting to re-model and sell them at a handsome profit. Harry Gibson was presently overloaded with such eccentric items as monkey-fur evening-capes.) Now there was no one at all, in the work-room, and Mr Gibson was momentarily glad of it.
    There was naturally no one in the office. This also suited him: he needed the strictest privacy for his next act, which was to open the safe and place therein a Spanish comb. Recognising even as he performed it, its futility: how much longer would that safe remain inviolate? Joyce’s accountants had been through the books a month before, and almost cynically returned them to Gibson custody; they could still at any moment re-enter. In a week, in two weeks, he’d have to find another monstrance. But so brittle a treasure couldn’t be carried in the pocket, and he was perfectly aware that at home his mother went through his drawers.
    The tortoiseshell was still warm. Mr Gibson’s heart, if not his mind, refused to recognise that warmth as deriving from his own person. He shut Dolores’ comb into the safe, first making a sort of nest for it with his handkerchief, as tenderly as if it had been a tress of her hair, newly-shorn.
    There wasn’t anything much to take out, beyond the ledgers. Mr Gibson studied them for some time—trying as so often before to spot where things had definitely begun to go wrong. Essentially it all boiled down to the auctions: a chinchilla coat, for instance, property of a Russian princess, his father had paid six hundred pounds for; it was still knocking about in store, no yellower than when bought, and now definitely unsaleable. A couple of bearskin rugs—“My God, who wants bearskins?” thought Mr Gibson bitterly. “Are we in the stuffed-animal line?”—had cost the firm two-fifty. “They sent their equerries to bid against him,” thought Mr Gibson, full of hate for the entire Muscovite aristocracy, “and he fell for it every time. But it’s I who am left holding the cub—and now in the Depression!”
    It was the Depression that had finished him off. 1932 was the year of the Depression, the year when even people who could afford new furs wouldn’t buy them, because it was the thing to go shabby. “All right, kill all trade together!” thought Mr Gibson violently. “Where will taxes come from then?” But in his heart he knew the Depression only a final blow, that even if women started buying like mad again, Gibson’s would never be able to unload a yellowing chinchilla coat …
    The half-hour he’d allowed himself passed all too soon. All too soon—on the tick, in