In the event, this long-awaited culmination proved to be disappointingly flat and commonplace. It was over before Thorpe had said any considerable proportion of the things he saw afterward that he had intended to say. The two men came as he had expected they would--and they bought their way out of the tragic “corner” at precisely the price he had nominated in his mind. But hardly anything else went as he had dimly prefigured it.
Mr. Rostocker was a yellow-haired man, and Mr. Aronson was as dark as a Moor, and no physical resemblance of features or form suggested itself to the comparing eye, yet Thorpe even now, when they stood brusquely silent before him, with their carefully-brushed hats pulled down over their eyes, stuck to it in his own mind that it was hard to tell them apart. To the end, there was something impersonal in his feeling toward them. They, for their part, coldly abstained from exhibiting a sign of feeling about him, good, bad, or indifferent.
It was the man with the fair hair and little curly flaxen beard who spoke: “How do you do! I understand that we can buy eight thousand five hundred Rubber Consols from you at 'twenty-three.'”
The dark man spoke: “The jobbers' price is twenty-three.”
“To carry over--yes,” Thorpe answered. “But to buy it is twenty-five.”
The two sons of the race which invented mental arithmetic exchanged an alert glance, and looked at the floor for an engrossed instant.
“I don't mind telling you,” Thorpe interposed upon their silence, “I put on that extra two pounds because you got up that story about applying to the Stock Exchange Committee on a charge of fraud.”
“We didn't get up any story,” said Rostocker, curtly.
“You tried to plant it on us,” Aronson declared.
“One of your own Directors put it about. I thought it was a fake at the time.”
This view of the episode took Thorpe by surprise. As it seemed, in passing, to involve a compliment to his own strategic powers, he accepted it without comment. “Well--it is twenty-five, anyway,” he told them, with firmness.
“Twenty-four,” suggested Aronson, after another momentary pause.
“Not a shilling less than twenty-five,” Thorpe insisted, with quiet doggedness.
“We can always pay our creditors and let you whistle,” Rostocker reminded him, laconically.