



Produced by David Widger from page images generously
provided by the Internet Archive









TERESA OF WATLING STREET

A Fantasia On Modern Themes

By Arnold Bennett

With Eight Illustrations By Frank Gillett

London: Chatto & Windum

1904


[Illustration: 0013]


[Illustration: 0016]




TERESA OF WATLING STREET




CHAPTER I--THE BANK

Since money is the fount of all modern romantic adventure, the City of
London, which holds more money to the square yard than any other place
in the world, is the most romantic of cities. This is a profound truth,
but people will not recognise it. There is no more prosaic person than
your bank clerk, who ladles out romance from nine to four with a copper
trowel without knowing it. There is no more prosaic building than your
stone-faced banking office, which hums with romance all day, and never
guesses what a palace of wonders it is. The truth, however, remains;
and some time in the future it will be universally admitted. And if the
City, as a whole, is romantic, its banks are doubly and trebly romantic.
Nothing is more marvellous than the rapid growth of our banking system,
which is twice as great now as it was twenty years ago--and it was great
enough then.

Such were the reflections of a young man who, on a June morning, stood
motionless on the busy pavement opposite the headquarters of the British
and Scottish Banking Company, Limited, in King William Street, City.
He was a man of medium size, fair, thick-set, well-dressed, and wearing
gold-rimmed spectacles. The casual observer might have taken him for a
superior sort of clerk, but the perfect style of his boots, his gloves,
and his hat precluded such a possibility; it is in the second-rate
finish of his extremities that the superior clerk, often gorgeous in a
new frock-coat, betrays himself. This particular young man, the tenor of
whose thoughts showed that he possessed imagination--the rarest of all
qualities except honesty--had once been a clerk, but he was a clerk no
longer.

He looked at his watch; it showed three minutes to twelve o’clock. He
waited another minute, and then crossed through the traffic and entered
the sober and forbidding portals of the bank. He had never before
been inside a City bank, and the animated scene, to which many glass
partitions gave an air of mystery, would have bewildered him had he not
long since formed the immutable habit of never allowing himself to be
bewildered. Ignoring all the bustle which centred round the various cash
desks lettered A to F, G to M, and so on, he turned unhesitatingly to an
official who stood behind a little solitary counter.

‘Sir?’ said the official blandly; it was his sole duty to be bland (and
firm) to customers and possible customers of an inquiring turn of mind.

‘I have an appointment with Mr. Simon Lock,’ said the young man.

The official intensified his blandness at the mention of the august name
of the chairman of the British and Scottish Banking Company, Limited.

‘Mr. Lock is engaged with the Board,’ he said.

‘I have an appointment with the Board,’ said the young man. ‘My card;’
and he produced the pasteboard of civilization.

The official read:

Mr. Richard Redgrave, M.A.,

Specialist.

‘In that case,’ said the official, now a miracle of blandness, ‘be good
enough to step this way.’ Mr. Richard Redgrave stepped that way, and
presently found himself in front of a mahogany door, on which was
painted the legend, ‘Directors’ Parlour’--not ‘Board Room,’ but
‘Directors’ Parlour.’ The British and Scottish was not an ancient
corporation with a century or two of traditions; it was merely a
joint-stock company some thirty years of age. But it had prospered
exceedingly, and the directors, especially Mr. Simon Lock, liked to seem
quaint and old-fashioned in trifles. Such harmless affectations helped
to impress customers and to increase business. The official knocked,
and entered the parlour with as much solemnity as though he had been
entering a mosque or the tomb of Napoleon. Fifty millions of deposits
were manoeuvred from day to day in that parlour, and the careers of
eight hundred clerks depended on words spoken therein. Then Mr. Richard
Redgrave was invited to enter. His foot sank into the deep pile of a
Persian carpet. The official closed the door. The specialist was alone
with three of the directors of the British and Scottish Bank.

‘Please take a seat, Redgrave,’ said Lord Dolmer, the only one of the
trio with whom Richard was personally acquainted, and to whom he owed
this introduction. ‘We shall not keep you waiting