Free The Power of the Dead by Henry Williamson Page B

you intend to issue further cheques?”
    Phillip said he had no securities. The manager then suggested that a balance sheet be drawn up, to find out if the Firm was solvent. Phillip replied that this was being done; Mr. Timothy Copleston was working on them in the coffee shop.
    “Ah, reminiscent of the eighteenth-century merchant venturers ,” smiled the manager, showing him out.
    He joined Tim at a scrubbed wooden table. Figures were pencilled all round the borders of a newspaper, most of them crossed out. Phillip took over and started again. The lists were short.
    “Is this all?”
    “So far as I can see, it is.”
    They returned together to the bank with the figures. The manager suggested that the phrase ‘Cannot pay’ be avoided.
    “If you say to a creditor, ‘I cannot pay,’ that constitutes an Act of Bankruptcy, which would further complicate what at present appears to be a not very involved situation.”
    “I take it that you won’t allow an overdraft?”
    “On these figures, I’m afraid not.”
    They thanked him and went out. While Tim went to the wine-merchant —he had removed the last coins from the till—Phillip called at the bookshop to ask about the Encyclopædia. He found Mr. Roper in a small office at the back of the shop. Phillip had had several talks there in the past, and been shown Mr. Roper’s collection of first editions.
    The bookseller was a man with a twin passion for music and literature. He did his best to recommend good books in a district which was largely composed of farmers, with a sprinkling of retired soldiers, sailors, Indian officials and their wives and daughters; and had long ago found out that the literary-minded among them were very few indeed.
    “I’ve called about the Encyclopædia for Mr. Copleston, Mr. Roper. Has it come?”
    To his surprise the other’s face hardened.
    “It’s a somewhat expensive item, I suppose you know, Mr. Maddison? We booksellers cannot afford to give long credit, and by long I mean anything up to three or four years.”
    “I understand that. I’d like to pay for it myself. How much is it? Twenty-eight pounds? I suppose you wouldn’t allow me a little time to pay? I could give you a post-dated cheque——”
    “But why should you have to spend your hard-earned money on——”
    “I know what you mean, but I assure you that the Coplestons are solvent. They are an extremely kind and unworldly family, really.”
    Mr. Roper offered him a chair. “Part of my life of drudgery is made worth while when I can talk to a genuine literary person like yourself,” he said. “Will you give me permission to speak frankly?”
    “Certainly. Truth never killed anyone yet.”
    “Not your kind of truth, I agree. But I see such things from another angle, from the wrong side of the counter, perhaps, but that is my side as a tradesman, I suppose. Only this morning I had the manager of the Empire Stores in here, sitting where you are sitting now. He is a genuine poetic character, and like all such, suffers at times from association with average insensitive humanity. Do you know, he has been owed a bill for groceries delivered to the Coplestons during more than two years! Where is he, if he cannot get his account paid? Either he risks being dismissed as an incompetent manager by his regional inspector, or else he has to make up the bad debt himself. Thirty-nine pounds for two years’ groceries. And yet they can afford, apparently , to order expensive encyclopædias for cross-word puzzles—those refuges of idle intellects—and also to go otter-hunting.”
    Mr. Roper began to look almost angry. “Why, my dear sir, I find an incompatability in the two view-points, and would give another name for what you call ‘unworldly’.”
    His words shocked Phillip. The bookseller saw this, and continued in his normal soft voice, “This is entirely between ourselves, of course. Only I felt I must tell you what I thought, since you have done me the honour of