Here I am again. The fact is that I have become so used to setting down my private thoughts that yesterday, during the time I usually devote to these jottings, I felt quite at a loose end. I felt the same way this morning, until it occurred to me that it was the height of stupidity to stop doing anything that helped me to while away my time pleasantly, merely because the occupation in itself had ceased to have any serious purpose. Moreover, having got that far I realised that I have something of considerable interest to record.
Helmuth did not get back from his trip to London until just before dinner last night; soon afterwards he came in to see me. He is usually rather restless when making casual conversation, but on this occasion he settled himself down in a way that showed he had something serious to say; then, after a bit, he started off more or less as follows:
‘Now that we are friends again, Toby, we can talk freely together, just as we used to in the past. I have been wanting to have a heart-to-heart with you ever since you arrived here; but at first I didn’t want to rush matters, and later I was afraid you might not feel like discussing your future plans with me. I am naturally deeply interested to know what they are. When you come into your inheritance, do you intend to assume control of the Companies, as far as your health permits, or will you continue to let other people handle matters for you?’
‘I shall assume control,’ I replied with a smile. ‘At least, I hope so. After all the time and trouble you have given to educating me for the job I’d be a pretty poor specimen if I let you down to the extent of not even attempting to tackle it.’
He nodded. ‘I’m glad you feel like that. I was afraid that your time in the Air Force might have altered your outlook. Since you are still prepared to take on this enormous responsibility it is doubly tragic that your health is likely to prove such a heavy handicap.’
‘This new trouble may,’ I agreed. ‘But before that started I saw no reason why the injury to my spine should prevent me using my brain; so I had been toying with the idea of having a special motor-ambulance-caravan fitted out, in which to tour the factories. It would probably take me the best part of a year to get a real grip of things, and I had no intention of throwing my weight about to start with; but after a tour like that I should have picked up enough of the practical side to argue the pros and cons of the broader issues with my co-directors.’
Helmuth nodded his white head again. ‘That sounds an admirable scheme. You will have to continue to observe your rest hours, and be careful not to overdo it until your back is a bit stronger; but if all goes well in the other matter, I see no reason why you should not start on a tour of that kind in the autumn. It would certainly prove a most popular move with all your employees, and, as you say, give much more weight to your opinions when you do decide to give vent to them at Board Meetings. Yes, I congratulate you on that idea, Toby.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and after a moment he went on:
‘All the same, I wonder if you fully realise what you will be up against. However tactfully you set to work, most of these middle-aged and elderly industrialists who are running your Companies at the present time are not going to take at all kindly to a young man of twenty-one walking in and insisting on changes in old-established policies.’
‘I hope that in most cases that will not be necessary.’
‘My dear Toby; if it is not you will have put yourself to a great deal of trouble for nothing. The whole object of a new broom is to sweep clean. With your intelligence you are bound to spot all sorts of effort-wasting, obsolete practices, incompetent executives and unnecessary wastages to which the others have become blind through seeing them go on for years. If you do not initiate reforms to abolish these weaknesses you will be letting yourself down as well as your shareholders, and never become a great leader of industry.’
‘I suppose you are right,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘If that does prove the case, I shall certainly introduce reforms and endeavour to overcome any opposition that I may meet with.’
‘It will take a lot of overcoming. Most of these men have had to fight hard to attain their present positions, and they will have an instinctive prejudice against your youth and inexperience. Those who are uncertain of themselves will combine against you from fear that you may think them not up to their jobs and get rid of them; while others, who are of stronger mettle, will do their utmost to dominate you and climb on your back to greater power.’
‘You paint a gloomy picture,’ I remarked. ‘It looks as if instead of being able to devote most of my time to making my Companies more prosperous I shall have to spend it defending myself from the jealousy and intrigues of my co-directors.’
‘I think you will—anyhow, to start with,’ he said frankly. ‘But, if you will let me, I can help you to overcome a great deal of such opposition.’
Naturally, I thought he was suggesting that I should make him my private adviser; and evidently he guessed what I was thinking, as he waved aside my murmur of thanks, and said quietly:
‘If, later on, you find any use for my personal services I will give them gladly; but that was not what I had in mind. I expect you remember hearing about the Brotherhood when you were at Weylands?’
At that my ears pricked with interest. ‘Rather! It was the great mystery of the place, and we all used to speculate on what went on at those meetings in the crypt of the old Abbey. It was a Masonic Lodge of the Grand Orient, wasn’t it?’
‘No. A number of its members are also Freemasons who had been initiated on the Continent; so we use that Grand Orient story as cover; ours is a much older fellowship. The main reason why I tried to prevent you joining the R.A.F. was because I did not want you to miss initiation; but by running away you stymied me over that. However, it is not too late, and membership of the Brotherhood could be of immense value to you in your business life; so if you are agreeable, I propose to start preparing you for initiation now.’
‘How thrilling!’ I exclaimed. ‘Do tell me about it. What is the object of the association, and what should I have to do?’
‘It is a Brotherhood, based on the old principle that Union is Strength. Each member contributes to it according to his means and receives from it according to his needs.’
I laughed. ‘That sounds rather like Socialism to me. As I am exceptionally rich it looks as if I should be expected to make a contribution out of all proportion to anything I was likely to get back.’
‘It is Socialism, but on the highest plane. You need have no fears that your millions will be scattered to the masses.’
‘My millions!’ I echoed, raising an eyebrow at his joke.
He shrugged. ‘Even if it cost you your whole fortune you would still be the gainer on balance. That may sound a tall statement, Toby; but in due course I believe you’ll agree with me.’
‘I’ll be better able to form an opinion when I know more about it,’ I said, with a grin. ‘If the rumours which used to circulate at Weylands had any truth in them, the Brotherhood consists of a considerable number of people all of whom possess wealth, influence or brains; and are pledged to help one another. Is that a fact?’
As he nodded assent, I went on: ‘I can fully appreciate that membership of such a fraternity must be extremely valuable; and I see now why you think it would prove a big asset to me in dealing with my fellow industrialists; but obviously there is a limit to what such secret assistance in one’s dealings would be worth.’
‘Why should there be?’ he asked quite seriously. ‘You are an immensely rich man. Your grandfather left in trust for you assets to the value of over fourteen million sterling. If that had happened half-a-century ago, by the reinvestment of the bulk of the income at cumulative interest during your minority, by now you would be worth something like thirty million.
‘But time marches on; owing to your grandfather’s death not having occurred till nineteen-twenty-nine, income- and supertax had already risen to such heights that in the past thirteen years the Trustees have been able to add only a beggarly million-and-three-quarters to your original capital. Since the war the situation of people in the top income groups has deteriorated still further. By the time it ends you will be lucky if you are allowed to keep sixpence in the pound of what your money earns. So what will your fortune be worth to you then?’
I did a quick calculation. ‘In Government stocks it would bring me in only about ten thousand a year, but in my own companies it should produce at least double that. And you forget the Directors’ Fees that I should draw; they would easily amount to a further twenty thousand.’
It was Helmuth’s turn to grin. ‘My dear Toby, Directors’ Fees are taxable, and twenty thousand sixpences comes to only five hundred pounds. On your own showing your net income would barely exceed twenty thousand a year, all told. You already allow your uncle that figure to keep up Queensclere and the London house, and I gather you have now promised that he shall lose nothing by your assuming control of your own money. Actually, of course, your tax-free allowances for business expenses will save you from having to give up cocktails and cigarettes; but the sooner you disabuse yourself of the idea that the possession of millions still endows their owner with almost limitless spending power, the better.’
‘You have shaken me quite a bit,’ I confessed. ‘I have been out of touch with all this sort of thing for so long that I had no idea that the picture had become so black for the working rich. Still, however high they raise income- and super-tax, a fortune is always a fortune; and, although Grandpapa Jugg might turn in his grave, I could sell out capital to ante-up my income. Even if I live to be a hundred and spent twenty thousand a year from capital for the next eighty years, that would consume less than the million-and-three-quarters that has piled up during my minority. So I should still be able to leave my heirs the original fourteen million.’
Helmuth threw back his massive head and roared with laughter: ‘Toby, Toby; did you think of nothing but Hurricanes and Heinkels while you were in the R.A.F. and in hospital? Time marches on, I tell you. If you do live to be a hundred, it is most unlikely that you will have fourteen thousand—let alone million—left to leave anybody; and if you have your heirs will be lucky if the Government of the day permits them to keep more than one thousand of it.’
I smiled a little ruefully. ‘Of course I know that death duties have been going up for years; and that even now they would cut the Jugg millions in half. But do you really think that in another fifty years or so there will be practically nothing left of them?’
‘Indeed I do. By that time all public services and every form of industry will be State-owned: and it is highly probable that private ownership of land, houses and investments will have been abolished. But you won’t have to wait that long before the bulk of your fortune is taken from you.’
I said that I thought, myself, all the odds were on the Socialists coming to power soon after the war; but that most of their leaders were sensible enough to realise the danger of throwing the nation’s economy out of gear by doing anything too drastic. Helmuth shrugged and replied:
‘They will be moderate to start with, but as is always the case when the Left gets into the saddle, the masses expect a Silver Age—if not a Golden one—to dawn before very long. That gives the extremists a rod with which to beat the moderates. They will never be able to raise enough money by ordinary means to propitiate the Labour electorate, by carrying out all the Socialist conceptions; but it can be taken from those who have it.
‘The wiser men will realise that it is suicidal to seize a large part of the wealth, which for generations has financed the nation’s commerce and industry, and fritter it away in unproductive channels; but they will be forced to it. They will introduce some form of Capital Levy. And then, my dear Toby, what of your fine fortune?’
‘That would be killing the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs,’ I said, ‘because if they do, it is inevitable that they will skim the top off the cream. Say they introduce legislation to collect a hundred million, the great bulk of that would come from people like myself who might be paying anything up to nineteen-and-sixpence in the pound in taxes already. That means that the following year there would be the equivalent number of nineteen-and-six-pences less to go into the exchequer. And not for one year only, but for good. It is far worse than anticipating taxes; it is destroying the source from which they come. We couldn’t continue to pay on what we no longer had; so they would have to introduce new taxation affecting the lower-income groups to make up the deficit. It would be a crazy policy, even from their own point of view, because sooner or later the masses themselves would be left holding the baby.’
‘Of course,’ Helmuth agreed. ‘But political extremists are never statesmen, otherwise they would not be extremist. Such people allow their hatred of the rich to dominate every other consideration. And it would be done in gradual stages. That is the insidious part about it. As you say, they will go for the big fish first; and if you are forced to realise only half your holdings to pay up, very few people are going to think that you have been hardly done by.
‘No one will squeal until some of their own savings are seized to pay the dole. You are right too about the drop in income and surtax receipts having to be made up from somewhere, but there is a limit to what can be got by normal means; so with each successive Budget the level at which the thrifty will be robbed of their savings will go down and down, until even the little man with his few hundreds tucked away in the Post Office will find himself caught.’
He paused for a moment, then went on: ‘As for yourself, having paid the first time will not exonerate you from having to pay up the second, third and fourth. So, my poor friend, I fear you will find your rosy dream of being able to spend twenty thousand a year of your capital turning out to be moonshine, long before you are my age. It won’t be there any longer for you to realise.’
It was a black future that he conjured up, but I had to admit to myself that his grim prognostications were based on a perfectly possible and logical sequence of events. For a bit we remained silent, then I said:
‘Well, if you are right, I’ll be in a pretty mess. But I suppose the State will take care of cripples?’
‘Oh yes,’ he smiled cynically. ‘You’ll get your keep in an institution and a pound a week. You might do quite a lot better, though, if you are prepared to follow my advice. All I have been endeavouring to show you is, that if you decide to play a lone hand your millions may be reduced to hundreds by the time you are forty.’
‘Do you think, then, that by becoming one of the Brotherhood I could save them?’
‘No, Toby; I don’t think that. But I am confident that whatever loss of fortune may overtake anyone else—and even themselves, individually, as far as the possession of shares, property and bank-balances go—the member of the Brotherhood will continue to enjoy comparative affluence, and even luxury to such a degree as it is obtainable, in a world where all but a very few will live on a miserable pittance as little cogs in the machinery of a vast slave State.’
‘How would they manage to do that?’ I enquired.
‘There must always be rulers,’ he said quietly; ‘and we shall be the rulers of the Britain of tomorrow. The bulk of the upper classes are bound to be submerged, because they have no unity. But we shall survive, because we are bound together by an indissoluble bond, pledged to help one another to the limit, and holding all our assets in common. We already have men in all sorts of key positions, both here and abroad. Our level of intelligence is far higher than that of any ordinary group of professional politicians, and we have resources that such people do not possess. The attainment of power in all its forms is the object of our association, and that having been our special study ever since our foundation you may rest assured that you will be shown how to attain it too—if you decide to join us.’
‘I don’t quite understand,’ I said. ‘One can study all sorts of subjects, a knowledge of which is valuable for attaining one’s ends; but I shouldn’t have thought that there could be any royal road to attaining power, as such.’
‘Oh yes, there is,’ he smiled, as he stood up, ‘and at our next chat I will tell you something about it. But I must go now, as I have some letters to write. In the meantime, you might think over what I have said.’
I did think it over, and the whole thing’s extremely intriguing; but I am far from certain that I would care to become involved in this Secret Society of his.
Of course, when he said that about my whole fortune not being too big a price to pay for membership, he could not have been speaking seriously. All the same it sounds as if from anyone as rich as myself they would expect the hell of a big cheque.
If Helmuth is right in his contention that when the Socialists do get in, after a time, the extremists will dominate the moderates, and introduce a series of Capital Levies which will eventually swallow up all private investments, great and small, it would certainly be worth my while to go into this thing as a form of insurance—even if they did stick me for a hundred thousand pounds. Plenty of people used to pay that much in my grandfather’s day for a title, and I shouldn’t miss it.
But the thing that I don’t like about it is this pooling of interests business. That is all very well in its way, but they might want me to do all sorts of things that I should not care about. Helmuth more or less inferred that in exchange for their help one became subject to some form of control by them. If that is the case, I would rather stand on my own feet and keep my freedom.
As I have decided to continue this journal, I may as well record a rather revealing conversation that I had with Sally this morning.
Some reference had been made to my weekend visitors, and I asked her if she did not think Julia one of the loveliest people she had ever seen.
‘I didn’t think her all that,’ she replied. ‘I suppose when she was young she must have been rather a poppet. But that’s the worst of these Mediterranean types; they always age early.’
‘Oh, come!’ I protested. ‘You talk as though she was middle-aged already.’
She shrugged. ‘Well, it all depends on what you call middle-aged. I bet she’ll never see thirty again.’
‘She won’t,’ I agreed. ‘But that’s just the point, she doesn’t look it.’
‘Not to a man perhaps. Any woman who has enough money to dress a shade eccentrically, and go to a first-class beauty specialist for regular treatments, can pull the wool over a man’s eyes about her age; but she can’t deceive her own sex.’
I resisted the temptation to tell Sally that, however much money she had, no beauty specialist would ever succeed in turning her into a real lovely, and that I very much doubted if she would ever acquire the clothes sense to become even tolerably smart. But as I was thinking on those lines, she added with a laugh:
‘Anyone could see that you think your aunt is tops. I suppose she sold you the idea that she is in the Mona Lisa class when you were in your cradle, and you have never got over it.’
I feel sure that normally Sally is not given to making catty remarks; so it was easy to guess which way the wind is blowing. Julia and Helmuth are such very old friends, that the gallantry with which he always treats her is accepted as a habit by all who know them. But Sally would not realise that, and seeing them together has made her jealous.
I knew she admired Helmuth, but evidently the handsome doctor has made a deeper impression on her than I realised. She was probably hoping that he would ask her to dine with him again over the weekend; and Julia being here put her nose completely out of joint.
Actually it is over a week now since the only occasion on which Helmuth asked her to dine. As he has not repeated the invitation it looks as if he found her too unsophisticated for his taste, and is not going to bother with her further.
On the other hand, his having turned the battery of his charm on her just for one evening and since treated her only with friendly politeness is well calculated to keep her guessing, and so predispose her to go half-way to meet him should he choose to make another move. He is up to all those tricks, and that may be the game he is playing.
I hope not, for if he does make a real set at her it is a sure thing that she will get the raw end of the deal. Of course, now that Helmuth and I are good friends again, I have nothing to lose if they do have an affair and she falls completely under his spell; but I can’t help having a sort of protective feeling about her. God knows, I couldn’t protect anyone from anything, as things are, but Helmuth has never made any secret to me of his attitude towards women, and I would hate to think of Sally becoming the plaything of a cynical roué.