Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) by Dennis Parry Page A
Authors: Dennis Parry
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Varvara and her uncle. And since he was extremely shrewd I should probably have got the correct answer: that the conflict was concerned with Mrs. Ellison’s will. Beyond that I am sure he could not have gone; even the most trusted servant could scarcely have learnt the facts, and if he had he would not have understood their legal implication.
At the present stage of our acquaintance the conversation had reached one of its natural boundaries. (Considering I was a guest and in the second day of my visit, I could hardly complain that it had lacked range and latitude.) We turned to less dramatic topics. They were also less exacting and this began to suit Turpin at a time of the evening when the decanter was running low. For the rest of the time we talked mostly about his pets. Just before I went to bed he did his strange, and somehow pathetic, act of ventriloquism.
3
The fortunes of the Ellisons were based on mining-machinery, particularly pumps. I believe Joseph Ellison liked in later life to pretend that he had set out as a bare-foot boy; in fact he was the son of a prosperous doctor who gave him a good education. But his ascent was still remarkable. In his twenties he went to Mexico where he obtained a position in the silver-mines and persuaded the management that it would pay them to expand with the help of certain machinery from England—on the sale of which he drew a large commission. When he returned to London he went to see the manufacturers who were so impressed by his astuteness that they made the mistake of inviting him to join them. Three years later he was at the head of a completely new Board.
For a long while he continued to travel widely, undeterred by the most frightful hardship. He was nearly frozen to death in the Bolivian Andes; a poisonous snake bit him on the West Coast of Africa. But all the time his empire grew and money, always responsive to personal attention, came pouring in.
Just after the last war I was in a small South Coast hotel. Its battered library of a dozen volumes included the reminiscences of an aristocratic old flâneur who had been About Town in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. I read with increasing boredom until I chanced on the name of Joseph Ellison, who seemed to have stung the author into his only gleam of wit.
‘Whenever I met this Napoleon of commerce,’ he said, ‘I was filled with a sense of guilt. Presently I found out why: it was because I had never bought anything from him.’
For me this rings true. Only a missionary sense of the sacredness of gain could reconcile the two sides of the picture; on this the grim old eagle with his fierce independence, on that the super-salesman who would sell a 1 , 000 horse-power pump to a sheik in the middle of the Sahara.
If Ellison had stuck strictly to his own business I suppose he would have ended merely as a very rich engineer. But he graduated into the realms of high finance by the usual means of moving more and more of his interests on to paper. He started, almost accidentally, to accept shares in and mortgages on mines in payment for the equipment which he supplied; and this led, in some instances, to his taking over and running his security. Soon he was going in for such arrangements as a matter of policy.
I have no idea how much he was worth at his peak, which probably occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century. Five or six millions perhaps. But already at that date a flaw in his empire was beginning to show itself. The bulk of his estate—that is, the investments other than his own business—was situated abroad, in the form of immovable property. From the time when Queen Victoria died foreigners were becoming, if not more dishonest, at least braver. They were no longer terrified by a couple of gunboats in the harbour and a few white shell-puffs over the Presidential palace. They pinched the property of the British pioneers, they legalized their thefts in rigged courts, and finally offered a derisory
At the present stage of our acquaintance the conversation had reached one of its natural boundaries. (Considering I was a guest and in the second day of my visit, I could hardly complain that it had lacked range and latitude.) We turned to less dramatic topics. They were also less exacting and this began to suit Turpin at a time of the evening when the decanter was running low. For the rest of the time we talked mostly about his pets. Just before I went to bed he did his strange, and somehow pathetic, act of ventriloquism.
3
The fortunes of the Ellisons were based on mining-machinery, particularly pumps. I believe Joseph Ellison liked in later life to pretend that he had set out as a bare-foot boy; in fact he was the son of a prosperous doctor who gave him a good education. But his ascent was still remarkable. In his twenties he went to Mexico where he obtained a position in the silver-mines and persuaded the management that it would pay them to expand with the help of certain machinery from England—on the sale of which he drew a large commission. When he returned to London he went to see the manufacturers who were so impressed by his astuteness that they made the mistake of inviting him to join them. Three years later he was at the head of a completely new Board.
For a long while he continued to travel widely, undeterred by the most frightful hardship. He was nearly frozen to death in the Bolivian Andes; a poisonous snake bit him on the West Coast of Africa. But all the time his empire grew and money, always responsive to personal attention, came pouring in.
Just after the last war I was in a small South Coast hotel. Its battered library of a dozen volumes included the reminiscences of an aristocratic old flâneur who had been About Town in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. I read with increasing boredom until I chanced on the name of Joseph Ellison, who seemed to have stung the author into his only gleam of wit.
‘Whenever I met this Napoleon of commerce,’ he said, ‘I was filled with a sense of guilt. Presently I found out why: it was because I had never bought anything from him.’
For me this rings true. Only a missionary sense of the sacredness of gain could reconcile the two sides of the picture; on this the grim old eagle with his fierce independence, on that the super-salesman who would sell a 1 , 000 horse-power pump to a sheik in the middle of the Sahara.
If Ellison had stuck strictly to his own business I suppose he would have ended merely as a very rich engineer. But he graduated into the realms of high finance by the usual means of moving more and more of his interests on to paper. He started, almost accidentally, to accept shares in and mortgages on mines in payment for the equipment which he supplied; and this led, in some instances, to his taking over and running his security. Soon he was going in for such arrangements as a matter of policy.
I have no idea how much he was worth at his peak, which probably occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century. Five or six millions perhaps. But already at that date a flaw in his empire was beginning to show itself. The bulk of his estate—that is, the investments other than his own business—was situated abroad, in the form of immovable property. From the time when Queen Victoria died foreigners were becoming, if not more dishonest, at least braver. They were no longer terrified by a couple of gunboats in the harbour and a few white shell-puffs over the Presidential palace. They pinched the property of the British pioneers, they legalized their thefts in rigged courts, and finally offered a derisory
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