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Page 22
He considered the others in the office. Most of them, he decided, would,
like Bulger, have been keeping their ends up. Of course, there was
Breede. But Napoleon at his best would never have tried to borrow money
of Breede, not even on the day of his coronation. Tully, the chief
clerk, was equally impossible. Tully's thick glasses magnified his eyes
so that they were terrible to look at. Tully would reach out a nerveless
hand and draw forth the quivering heart of his secret. Tully would know
right off that a man could have no respectable reason for borrowing five
dollars on Thursday.
There remained old Metzeger who worked silently all day over a set of
giant ledgers, interminably beautifying their pages with his meticulous
figures. True, Bean had once heard Bulger fail interestingly to borrow
five dollars of Metzeger until Saturday noon, but a flash of true
Napoleonic genius now enabled him to see precisely why Bulger had not
succeeded. Metzeger lived for numerals, for columned digits alone. He
carried thousands of them in his head and apparently little else. He
could tell to the fraction of a cent what Union Pacific had opened at on
any day you chose to name. He had a passion for odd amounts. A flat
million as a sum interested him far less than one like $107.69-3/4. He
could remember it longer. It was necessary then to appeal to the poetry
in the man.
A long time from across his typewriter he studied old Metzeger, tall,
angular, his shoulders lovingly rounded above one of the ledgers, a
green shade pulled well over his eyes, perhaps to conceal the
too-flagrant love-light that shone there for his figures. Napoleon had
won most of his battles in his tent.
Bean arose, moved toward the other and spoke in clear, cool tones.
"Mr. Metzeger, I want to borrow five dollars--"
The old man perceptibly stiffened and bent his head lower.
"--five dollars and eighty-seven cents until Saturday at ten minutes
past twelve."
Metzeger looked up, surveying him keenly from under the green shade.
"_How_ much?'
"Five eighty-seven."
There was a curious relenting in the sharpened old face. The man had
been struck in a vital spot. With his fine-pointed pen he affectionately
wrote the figures on a pad: "$5.87--12:10." They were ideal; they
vanquished him. Slowly he counted out money from various pockets, but
the sum was $5.90.
"Bring me the change," he said.
Bean brought it from the clerk who kept the stamp-box. Metzeger replaced
three pennies in a pocket, and Bean moved off with the sum he had
demanded, feeling almost as once he might have felt after Marengo.
It must be true! He couldn't have done the thing yesterday.
He omitted his visit to the dog that day and loitered for an hour in a
second-hand bookshop he had often passed. He remembered it because of a
coloured print that hung in the window, "The Retreat from Moscow." He
had glanced carelessly enough at this, hardly noting who it was that
headed the gloomy procession. Now he felt the biting cold, and shivered,
though the day was warm. There were pleasanter prints inside. In one,
Napoleon with sternly folded arms gazed down at a sleeping sentry. In
another he reviewed troops at Fontainebleau, and again, from an
eminence, he overlooked a spirited battle, directing it with a masterly
wave of his sabre. These things were a little disconcerting to one in
whom the blood-lust had diminished. He was better pleased with a steel
engraving of the coronation, and this he secured for a trifle. It was a
thing to nourish an ailing ego, a scene to draw sustenance from when
people overwhelmed you in street cars and took your gold watch.
Then there were books about Napoleon, a whole shelf of them. A lot of
authors had thought him worth writing about. He examined several
volumes. One was full of dreadful caricatures that the English had
delighted in. He found this most offensive and closed it quickly.
Probably that explained why he had always felt an instinctive antipathy
for the English.
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