Why Gelden Made a Million

by Edgar Wallace

WHY GELDEN MADE A MILLION

By EDGAR WALLACE

IN the days when Carfew was living on the verge of poverty, he knew a man named Gelden. Not a pleasant man, by any means, because he had habits which are not pleasant to nice men. He associated with people who did not move in the best of circles, and he drank more than was good for an ambitions junior reporter. For ambitious he was, this lantern-jawed lank youth, with his crudities of speech and his scarcely hidden brutality.

Gelden lived with his invalid sister and his widowed mother in the days when he and Carfew had been reporters on The Dallington Times and Herald, and Carfew had boarded with them. Mrs. Gelden had an income derived from an investment in Consolidated Funds, and it is probable that she accepted Carfew as a boarder at a ridiculous tariff because she stood in some fear of this wild scapegoat of a son. How far her fears were justified, Carfew learnt later.

Gelden lived in the faith that the future held a fortune for him, and he lived up to his expectations. One day he came to Carfew—newly established in London—-and borrowed twenty-five pounds. A month later Carfew learnt that his former landlady was taking the boarding-house business seriously, for with Carfew's twenty-five had disappeared almost all the unfortunate woman's capital. Gelden had had a scheme—one of many—for getting rich quick, and had cashed his mother's Consols and vanished with the money.

That was years before this story opened. At the period of which I write, things were not going as well with Carfew as he wished them to go. His investments had proved speculations, and his speculations were, of necessity, investments.

"Of necessity" because he found that the stocks he had bought at six, to sell at seven, were quite unsaleable at four. There was nothing for it but to lock away these jumpers that would not jump until the great miracle day when all stocks reach for the sky, and the only thing which is flat and unprofitable is the "bear" who has sold short.

If there was one person in this bright and lovely world whom Carfew did not wish to meet at this moment of adversity, it was Gelden, and since Carfew's luck was freezing, the mercury, you may not need telling that Gelden was the very man who came hideously on the skyline and refused to harmonise with the landscape.

Carfew was in his office one day, totting up his losses on 'Change. He had the arithmetic of the optimist, which is the science of counting nine as ten on the profit side, and omitting to count it at all when it lay under the "Dr." symbol. He was ever the apostle of the "round figure" system. A gain of nine thousand six hundred was in round figures ten thousand. A loss of nine thousand eight hundred was by simple adjustment a loss of nine thousand.

His banker, who was a born Jonah, had worked out Carfew's position into four places of decimals, and Carfew hated the bank manager for his cruelty.

The young financier threw his pass-book into a drawer, banged the drawer into its place, and hunched back into his chair with a scowl which expressed his entire disapproval of existence as he found it.

It was at that solemn moment, when disaster was written so plainly, and when the only physical effort he seemed capable of making was the drawing of impossible old men upon his blotting-pad, that the vision of Gelden obtruded itself.

There was a confident knock at the door.

"Come in!" said Carfew sternly.

A man stood in the doorway—a self-confident young man, who was, perhaps, twenty-eight and who certainly looked forty. He was dressed a little extravagantly. The pearl pin in his cravat was just a shade too large. The spats which covered his glossy shoes should, by the strictest canons of fashion, have been of some other design than shepherd's plaid; and his entrance coincided with the arrival of a delicate and subtle odour of violets.

Carfew frowned up at him. This was not the Gelden he knew. The man's face was lined and seamed and sallow. There were little pouches under his tired eyes, his cheeks were hollow, and the hand that removed the amber-and-gold cigar-holder from his teeth shook a little.

His manner was buoyant enough as he stepped forward with a little grin and extended a lemon-glove-covered hand.

"My dear boy!" he said. And Carfew, annoyed by the patronage in the tone, and impressed by the evident prosperity in the other's appearance, indicated a chair.

It was five years since Theodore Gelden had borrowed twenty-five pounds, at a moment when twenty-five pounds was a lot of money. Theodore was buying Siberian oil-fields with Carfew's good gold, and incidentally with his mother's pitiably small capital. I forget whether he was on the verge of clearing two millions profit or four. It was something fabulous, and all that was required to complete the impending negotiations were those twenty-five pounds. And Carfew lent them. And Carfew never saw Theodore again, or saw a prospectus, or smelt the faint, musty smell of oil, or heard one word in the Siberian language which might convey to him a sense of part proprietorship in that wonderful country. The oil-fields of Tomskovski faded away like a quivering mirage.

"Here we are," said Theodore, comfortably stretching his impressive feet.

"Here you are," retorted Carfew, in a non-committal tone.

Suddenly Gelden straightened himself.

"By the way," he said.

He had a trick of employing inconsequent phrases, and his conversation was a very patchwork of speech. His gloved hand sought an inside pocket. From this he withdrew a large, flat pocket-book of green Russia,n leather, bordered and bound and initialled in gold. This he opened, and from a pocket therein extracted a flat pad of notes.

"Have you change for a hundred?" he asked, and peeled a thin, crinkly sheet from the mass.

Carfew took the note. There was no doubt as to its genuineness. That admirable institution, the Bank of England, through its chosen official, promised to pay on demand to the man who earned or stole this wonder-working slip of paper one hundred golden sovereigns.

"I owe you something," said Gelden carelessly. "Fifty?"

"Twenty-five," said Carfew. "I can give you a cheque for the balance."

Gelden replaced his pocket-book.

"Send it round to my hotel," he said, and relapsed into his attitude of ease.

Carfew was interested. He was always interested in people who had large sums of money.

Gelden watched him lazily.

"Things a-booming?" he asked.

Carfew nodded gravely.

"I've several things on hand," he said. "I'm interested in a new hotel, I've a concession in Bulgaria, timber and that sort of thing."

Gelden chuckled.

"Small," he said, and snapped his long, unshapely fingers. "Tiny—petty. Look at me!"

Carfew was looking.

"I've told you I'd be a millionaire," said Gelden. "A million or nothing, eh? How often have I said that?"

Carfew said nothing. He was thinking that the change from the hundred-pound note might with advantage go to the wronged mother, unless this son of hers indicated restitution.

Gelden had an uncanny knack of reading the thoughts of people.

"You're thinking of the mater," he said easily. "I suppose you know I ruined her? But, my boy, I've been cruel to be kind—she's a rich woman."

His smile of triumph, the sense of information suppressed which his attitude conveyed, were all imposing. Carfew was impressed.

"Getting along," said Gelden, and rose abruptly.

He scanned the face of a gold chronometer which he extracted from his left-hand waistcoat pocket, pursed his lips as if dissatisfied with the inspection, and produced another gold chronometer from his right-hand pocket.

"One moment," said Carfew softly, when the other's hand was on the door-knob. "You haven't told me anything about yourself."

Gelden frowned a little.

"I made a million out of tin," he said simply. "I am now making another million out of rubber."

Carfew was speechless. The man spoke with such conviction, was so evidently speaking the truth. Moreover, he referred to a million with such insolent familiarity that there was no wonder Carfew found himself a little breathless.

For he himself had secret ambitions concerning millions, vaporous nebulas of hopes and doubts which might, by the alchemy of time, solidify into a material something expressible in seven figures.

Gelden was watching him.

"I could make you a millionaire in a week," he said, and, returning to the chair, he had vacated, he sat down and began to talk.

II.

A taxi-cab carried Carfew to his broker, and Mr. Parker forgot to be facetious as he entered. To a question Carfew put he replied readily.

"If one may judge by his style of living," he said, "there's no doubt about his having made a fortune, though I doubt very much if it is a million. Gelden has been bulling tin. He does a little business through Transom e and Cole, but the bulk of his buying has been through some other firm."

"Am I to follow him in his oil speculations?"

Parker shook his head.

"I say 'No,' but I am aware that I may be advising you against your best interests. There is pretty sure to be an oil boom, but whether it is coming now or in ten years' time it is impossible to say."

Carfew bought a few oil shares cautiously, and that night dined with Gelden at the Celvoy.

"It's dead easy," said Mr. Gelden over coffee. "You've only to ask yourself sane questions. I ask myself questions. One: What will the traffic of the world be carried upon? Answer—Rubber. I bought rubber. Now I say: What is the motor power of the future? Answer—Oil. I buy oil. Everybody's nibbling at it. The big men who know most are hesitating because they're risking more; the little men wait for the big men. I know,"

Gelden spoke with some reason. In a week from that evening London was in the delirium of an oil boom. On 'Change they call it the Gelden boom to this day. It was Gelden who amalgamated the Banker Fields with the Southern Odessa concern; Gelden who put Steam Oil up to 6; Gelden who smashed the corner in West African Wells.

Carfew saw little of him. Now and again the young man would drop into his office, throw out disjointed comments on the condition of the market, and as abruptly as he had arrived he would go, without a word of farewell, save a slurred "S'long! " as he vanished through the swing doors of Carfew's suite.

Carfew was making money in little sums. He cleared three hundred pounds out of Bankers, and one thousand one hundred pounds from the phenomenal rise in Steam Oils.

What Gelden was making was conjectural. Packer shook his head when Carfew put the question.

"It isn't what he's making," he said gravely; "it is what he has behind him that is puzzling me. Do you realise that he should be in a position to produce two millions in liquid assets?"

"Can he?"

"His broker says he can find four," said Parker.

There was a long silence, the two men looking at one another across the table.

"He arrived in May from nowhere," said Parker, consulting a little table which he had compiled. "Beyond the fact that he seemed to have plenty of money, and made no secret of his having made a million in oil, I cannot discover anybody who had dealings with him before that date. And here is a curious circumstance: Gelden says he made a fortune in oil prior to May, but there has been no big market in oil before May."

Parker might have his doubts, and Carfew his misgivings, but the very apparent fact was that Gelden went from big to bigger things. His photograph was a daily occurrence in the papers. His house in Grosvenor Square was purchased on a Monday; on the Tuesday it was in the hands of three hundred decorators; on the Thursday it was furnished by eight of the greatest furnishing houses, each supplying the articles which the others had not in stock.

He bought seven motor-cars in one week, and purchased, at a cost of eighty-three thousand pounds, the steam yacht Terra Incognita from the Earl of Dambert.

London was oil mad. However important might be the news which monopolised the contents bills, be sure there was a subsidiary line, "Oil Boom: Latest," to supply the needs of the frenzied investors.

And Gelden had done this, Gelden the Magnificent, who had appeared over the horizon as violently as a tropic sun; Gelden the unknown, who had fallen into the City an unknown millionaire from nowhere, and, as he prospered, so prospered his friends.

Carfew was returning home late at night from the theatre, in an agreeable frame of mind. He was making money, he had discovered flaws in the play he had witnessed, he was smoking a rare and peculiarly fragrant cigar, and the people he had met at dinner had made a fuss of him. As to this last event, it may be said that his popularity was due less to his own qualities than to his known friendship with Gelden.

If there was an uneasy note in the harmony of his self-satisfaction, it lay in the fact that there was a something about Gelden which worried him. He had tried to trace this discomfort to its first cause, without any great success. References to the genius and wisdom and goodness of Gelden—he had to-day presented a new wing to a children's hospital—jarred him slightly.

It may have been, he told himself, because of his acquaintance with a Gelden that the public did not know—the earlier Gelden, a little vicious, a little unscrupulous, and something of a liar.

As he walked along the Strand, threading a way through the homeward-bound theatre-goers, the sense of distrust, which was ever present, was for the moment overlaid by the material comforts which a pleasant evening had brought.

He turned into the covered courtyard of the Celvoy at peace with the world.

He hoped to find Gelden, but the inquiry clerk informed him that the millionaire had gone out a few minutes before. Gelden, in his splendour, maintained a suite at the hotel in addition to his new town house.

"Do you know where he has gone?"

The clerk shook his head.

"He has been here all the evening," he said, "looking at his six new motor-cars."

The man smiled proudly as one accepting the reflection of Gelden's glory.

"Six?" gasped Carfew.

"Yes, sir; he bought 'em all to-day. You're Mr. Carfew, aren't you, sir? Well, one of the cars is for you. Mr. Gelden happened to be at the motor show this afternoon and bought 'em."

Carfew went out of the hotel a little dazed. He was living at Buckingham Gate Gardens in a flat which was neither modest nor magnificent. It was just expensive, and London is full of such unsatisfactory homes. His man-servant met him in the little hall.

"There is a lady to see you, sir," he said.

Carfew was not in the habit of receiving lady visitors in the neighbourhood of mid night, and the elderly woman who turned to him, when he entered his cramped drawing-room, was certainly not any friend that he recognised.

"Mr. Carfew," she said, with a sad little smile. "you don't remember me?"

Only for a moment was he puzzled, then—

"Mrs. Gelden, of course," he said heartily. It was his sometime landlady, a faded woman whose richness of apparel went incongruously with the drawn pale face and restless, nervous hands.

"I've come to see you about my son," she said.

His first inquiries satisfied Carfew that Gelden had made handsome amends for his earlier fault.

"But it is the money he has given me which worries me," she said. "Mr. Carfew, a week before my son arrived in London I had to wire him money for his fare."

She said this quietly, and Carfew looked at her in amazement.

"But he came to London with a million," he said incredulously.

She shook her head.

"A paper said that the other day, but all that I know is this: one week he was so poor he was obliged to telegraph to me for money, the next week he was in London spending money lavishly. I have seen the broker who transacted his earlier business."

"And——"

"He says that my son gave a hundred thousand pound order at a time when I knew Gregory could not have possessed a hundred pounds."

Carfew was troubled. He had accepted the meteoric rise of his friend without question. He accepted meteoric rises as part of the natural order of things.

"But he has plenty of money now," he said.

Mrs. Gelden shook her head.

"I don't know—I can't understand," she said. "He has put two hundred thousand pounds to my credit in the bank; but though he is rich, I am worried, and I want you to see him to-morrow and find out the secret of his sudden wealth. I feel I cannot rest until I know."

Carfew looked dubious.

"I doubt whether he will tell me," he began.

"You are the only friend he ever mentions in his letters," said the woman, "and—and I was hoping, perhaps, that it had been you who gave him this start."

To any other person in the world Carfew would have admitted his responsibility, but here was one to whom he could not so much as boast.

He saw her to a cab and returned to review the situation. The next day he sought Gelden, and found him just as he was leaving his house.

Carfew thought the man was looking older. There were lines about his eyes, and the corners of his mouth drooped pathetically. None the less, he was cheerful, almost boisterously so.

"How's things?" he jerked. "Bought you a car—a fine car—sen'in' it along."

He would have passed out with that, but Carfew had a mission to perform. He induced the other, albeit reluctantly, to go with him to the library. Without any preliminary, and with the desperate sense of his own impertinence, Carfew dashed out the subject.

"Want to know where I got my money from, eh?"

There was an amused glint in Gelden's eye.

"Got it out of gold—Siberian gold-mine."

"But you told me tin!" protested Carfew.

"Gold—gold!" insisted the other. As he warmed to the subject, he spoke rapidly, dropping his lazy habit of clipping his short periods. " A whole mine given to me by—you'll never guess—a Grand Duke! No, I won't lie to you—given to me by the Czar!"

He leant back and looked at Carfew triumphantly.

"There is royal blood in my veins! Yes, yes, yes!" He laid his hand on Carfew's knee. "Carfew, I always had money—I can make you a rich man—I've twenty million pounds invested in Russia!"

He leant forward and dropped his voice.

"I've got enemies who hate me," he whispered; "they follow me wherever I go—but I am prepared for you!"

He glared at Carfew, and his face was set and horrible.

"You—you—you!" he yelled.

In a flash his hand went to his hip-pocket. Carfew saw the revolver and realised his danger.

With one spring he leapt at the man as he fired.

•••••

Three days later Carfew interviewed Sir Algernon Sinsy, M.D., and Sir Algernon is the most famous of alienists.

"My theory is that your friend was mad when he arrived in London, and that, like most madmen, he was most convincing. I think also that he came to London without a penny, and the enormous fortune which will now be administered on his behalf was made whilst under the influence of the mania."

"Will he never recover?"

Sir Algernon looked at him gravely.

"He died this morning," he said.