Payment Deferred by C.S. Forester — Read

At the Bank, as was only to be expected, they had noticed a slight change in Mr. Marble's manner of late. He always looked worried, and clearly often he had been drinking. The head of the department to whom Mr. Marble acted as second-in-command noticed it frequently, but he took no drastic action. For one thing, he was glad to have an inefficient second, as that enabled him to keep the work more closely under his own hand, thereby making his retention of his job more probable, and for another he had a queer sort of liking for "poor old Marble," with his worried expression, and his worried eyes, and his worried moustache. In fact, Mr. Henderson was heartily glad that Marble had apparently struggled out of the financial difficulties which had for many months before made him come to Henderson borrowing a fortnight before payday. What Henderson did not realize was that for all Marble's looseness of fibre, and seeming incompetence to grapple with anything worth while, somewhere in Marble there was a keen mind -- razor keen still, despite too much whisky of late -- and a fount of potential fierce energy which might contrive wonderful things if only something were to rouse him sufficiently. Mr. Henderson, of course, knew nothing of a piece of work that Marble had performed marvellously efficiently some months ago.

So far Mr. Marble had found no opportunity of making the money that he hankered after so pathetically. Yet money was in the air all the time that he was working, more so even than is usually the case in a bank department. For the department of the County National Bank, of which Mr. Henderson was executive chief, with Mr. Marble as his chief assistant, dealt solely with foreign exchange, buying and selling money all day, dollars for cotton spinners, francs for costumiers, pesetas for wine merchants, and dollars, francs, pesetas, and, above all, marks, for speculators of every trade or none. Gambling in foreign exchange was becoming a national habit by which the National County Bank profited largely. Here, if anywhere, would Mr. Marble win the money for which he thirsted. But Mr. Marble knew too much about foreign exchange operations, and he was afraid. There had been times when he had made a pound or two by well-timed buying and selling, but not many. He had the example before him of those who had bought marks at prices seemingly lower than they could ever be again, only to see them change from the absurd thousands to the still more absurd hundred thousands which meant the loss of nine-tenths of their investment. The wise man who speculated in foreign exchange would do well to sell, not buy, in most cases. And one could not sell without first buying unless one could arrange a "forward operation" with a bank. One can only profit by a falling market if one sells what one has not got. And no bank would allow anyone to arrange a forward operation unless he could show some sort of reason for wanting to do so. Not much reason, of course, but a good deal more than a mere bank clerk with sixty pounds only in his account could possibly show. There was another advantage about the forward operation, too. It was only necessary in this case to put up a margin of ten percent of one's investment. In that case an increase of five percent in the value of the sum controlled meant an actual profit on the sum invested of fifty percent -- if one were lucky enough to have bought; if one had sold instead it meant a loss of fifty percent. If a man were to buy on a ten percent margin, and the money bought were to double in value, he would multiply the money invested not by two, but by twenty. Mr. Marble thought of the sixty pounds he had to invest, and his mouth watered.