The Rynox Mystery

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‘Your father, Peter,’ said F. X., ‘said nothing to me about squinting Palazzo’s. Nothing at all. He wouldn’t. He might think I’d take a fancy to them. I’m worried about your father’—his smile was gone now—‘because your father is getting worried about RYNOX.’

‘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.

SEQUENCE THE THIRD (#ulink_e2b466bb-a7ab-559a-8d4b-69c5da34f8f4)

Friday, 29th March 193— 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.

F.X. sat at breakfast. Through the big French windows of his dining-room in William Pitt Street, the spring sun blazed, turning the comfortable but rather sombre room into a chamber of temporary glory. F.X., so to speak, read The Morning Mercury with one hand and with the other conversed with his man, Prout.

Prout was a short, stiff little man. There was a legend about Prout—started probably by F. X. himself—to the effect that he had nineteen hairs and that twelve of these were upon the right side of his parting and seven upon the other. He was clean-shaven—very shaven and very, very clean. He was also very quiet. There was another legend—this one having its birth with Tony—to the effect that Prout really was a ‘foreigner,’ only knowing three words of English: ‘Very good, sir.’ Prout, who had been with F. X. now for seven years—ever since RYNOX had been founded—adored F. X. In a lesser, quieter way he was fond of Tony. For Peter, he would have gone through nearly as much, if not quite, as for F. X. himself.

‘If you, Prout,’ said F. X., ‘were Lord Otterburn and owned the daily paper with the largest net sale (don’t forget net, Prout, there’s always a lot of holes in a net) what would you do?’

Prout put a cover upon the dish of kidneys. ‘Nothing, sir,’ said Prout.

F. X. looked at him. ‘And a very good answer too. Don’t know what it is about you, Prout, but you always say the right thing with the most delightfully innocent air of not knowing you’ve said it.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Prout. ‘Excuse me, sir, but Mrs Fairburn wanted me to ask you whether you could see her for a moment before you leave for the office.’

F. X. nodded. ‘Certainly, certainly.’ He looked at his watch. ‘You’d better tell her to come in now, hadn’t you? I shall be off in a few minutes.’

‘Very good, sir,’ said Prout, and left the room so silently, so unobtrusively that the moment he was gone F. X. wondered, as he always wondered on these occasions, whether Prout had really ever been with him at all.

The door opened again. Mrs Fairburn came in. Mrs Fairburn was F. X.’s housekeeper. She, too, had been with F. X. for seven years. She, too, strictly within her very strict notions of right and wrong, would have done anything for F. X. She was, as Tony frequently said, almost too good to be true. Her hair, quite black despite her fifty-four years, was scraped from her forehead and piled high upon the back of her head. She wore black satin always. Sometimes there were bugles upon the black satin, but at other times the black satin was plain. Always when she walked the black satin rustled. About her severely corsetted waist was a belt and inevitably there dangled from this belt a bunch of keys. No one in the house had ever discovered—since nothing in this house ever was locked—what these keys were for. But always they were there, swinging and dangling and jangling. They told you, in fact, where Mrs Fairburn, moving about her duties in the tall, narrow house, could be found. You had only to stand still and listen. Presently you would hear them and then you could track Mrs Fairburn.

‘Good-morning!’ said F. X. ‘Lovely morning, Mrs Fairburn.’

‘Gord-mooning, Mr Baynedik. Truly a delaiteful day. It makes one feel really as if spring were drawing on.’

F. X. nodded. ‘Yes, doesn’t it? Well, what’s the trouble, Mrs Fairburn?’

The thin lips of Mrs Fairburn writhed themselves into one of their sudden smiles. ‘No trouble, Mr Baynedik. Nothing of the sort. Only rather an extraordinary thing has happened.’ She produced, from some recess in the black-clad angularity of her presence, an envelope; advanced, bearing this rather like a lictor his symbolic bundle, towards the table. ‘Mr Baynedik,’ she said, ‘this letter came by a district maysenger boy last night when you were out. It is, as you see, addressed to the housekeeper and staff. Seeing this address, Mr Baynedik, Ay opened the letter and inside Ay found three orchestra fauteuils for the Royal Theatre for tonight’s performance. It is a piece which is apparently entitled The Sixth Wife of Monsieur Paradoux … rather, I must say, an astonishing title, Mr Baynedik.’

F. X. struggled with a smile. ‘Certainly. Certainly. Damn silly names some of these people call their damn silly plays. Well, what about it, Mrs Fairburn? Do you want to go?’

‘Ay did think, Mr Baynedik, that perhaps we would like to go as these seats have been presented to us so kindly, albeit so mysteriously.’

F. X. frowned. ‘We’d like to go … Oh, I see. You want to take the rest of the staff, Mrs Fairburn? Yes, take them by all means. Do you all good, I’m sure. And you can keep an eye on them and see that they don’t get into mischief. Wonder who’s sending you theatre tickets …’

‘Ay cannot,’ said Mrs Fairburn, ‘understand the gift mayself, Mr Baynedik, but Ay believe there is a saying to the effect that one should not look at the mouth of a horse that has been given to one. Ay must confess that Ay could never see the meaning of this saying, but Ay have no doubt it is an apposite one.’

F. X. buried himself behind his paper. ‘Yes. Go, by all means. It’s very good of you, I’m sure, to chaperone the other two.’