Aaron Rodd, Diviner — Story, Setting & Ideas

There was a moment's silence. Mr. Harvey Grimm, with the beatific smile of opulence, was whistling softly to himself. His companion's thoughts had apparently travelled back into the past.

"Well," the latter said at last, "I will imitate your candour. The document I was examining with so much interest when you came in, is a seven-year-old lease, long since cancelled. The few black boxes you see around the room are, with one exception, bogus. I sit here from morning till night and nothing happens. I sit here and brood."

"Dear me! Dear me!" his visitor murmured sympathetically.

"By turning my chair around," Aaron Rodd continued, "I can just catch a glimpse of the river across the Gardens there. I sit and watch, wonder whether a tug will go past next or a lighter, watch the people in the gardens, wonder where they are going, why they are loitering, why hurrying. I speculate about the few passers-by down in the street there. Sometimes I close my eyes and I fancy myself in Lincoln's Inn, seated in a padded morocco chair, with a Turkey-carpet on the floor, and rows of boxes, black tin boxes, with wonderful names inscribed upon them in white lettering, reaching to the ceiling, and my secretary poring over my engagement book, wondering when it would be possible for me to squeeze in half an hour for an important client."

"Too much of the dreamer about you," Harvey Grimm pronounced. "Perhaps, after all, it is the fault of your work. It's a sedative profession, you know, Aaron. It wouldn't suit me to have to sit and wait for clients."

"It's the black bogey of my life," the other assented, with a thin note of passion in his tone. "If only one could get out and work, even if one didn't get a penny for it!"

"And financially?" Harvey Grimm enquired, with an apologetic cough.

"On the rocks," was the bitter reply. "You can understand," he went on, with a heedless sarcasm, "what a wonderful thing it is for me to welcome a capitalist in my shabby office."

"And an old friend," was the cheerful reminder. "Come, come, Aaron, we must look into this. I must place some of my affairs in your charge."

Aaron Rodd's lip curled with bitter incredulity.

"Some of your affairs! I had a taste of those in the old days, Ned--I mean Harvey. You brought me to the brink of Sing-Sing, you drove me over here to make a fresh start."

Harvey Grimm waved his hand. These reminiscences were indelicate.

"My dear fellow!" he protested. "Now come, answer me a few questions. Such affairs of business as have fallen to your lot have been conducted with--er--discretion?"

"If you mean have I preserved my reputation," the lawyer replied grimly, "I have. I have no temptation to do otherwise."

"That is capital," his friend declared. "That helps us at once. And now, I think," he went on, glancing at his neat little wristwatch, "lunch."

Aaron Rodd's first movement was almost eager. He checked himself, however. Then a glance at his visitor's immaculate toilet and distinctly opulent appearance reassured him.

"There will be no trouble, I presume," he said a little diffidently, "as to the settlement of our bill? I warn you before we start that a shilling and a few coppers----"

Harvey Grimm laid his hand almost affectionately upon the other's shoulder.

"My dear Aaron," he expostulated, "you are a little confused. You have not yet taken in the position. A capitalist is, of course, a relative term. I will not press that point. But let me assure you that I have a suite of rooms at the Milan, ample credit for any meals I choose to take there, even money to pay for them, if necessary."

"I am not fit to go to the Milan," Aaron Rodd muttered, brushing himself vigorously.

"That is entirely your mistake," his friend replied, rising to his feet and lighting another cigarette. "A judicious shabbiness is to-day an approved form of eccentricity. With your ascetic face, my dear Aaron, that little wisp of black tie, your clean but frayed collar, your sombre, well-worn clothes, you would be mistaken by the casual observer for either a Chancery lawyer with an indifferent housekeeper, or a writer of dramatic blank verse, which every one admires but no one buys. Reassure yourself, Aaron. I predict that as a companion you will do me every credit."

For the first time a grim, hard smile parted the lips of the man who was making out with rather weary fingers the accustomed card to affix to his door.

"The needy adventurer is what I feel like in these days," he observed.