flat, hard lumps of gold, then it begins to assume the proportions of a bite from a hippopotamus. I can't raise it, dear Moon-of-my-Desire, and that's all about it. So there we are; or, to put it more accurately, here we shall very shortly not be. The Old Guard, Josephine, have failed to rally round their beloved Emperor; so—St. Helena for Napoleon."
Although Dermot Windleband described himself as a Napoleon of Finance, a Cinquevalli of Finance would, perhaps, have been the more accurate description. As a juggler with other people's money Dermot was emphatically the Great and Only. And yet his method—like the methods of all Great and Onlies—was, when one came to examine it, simple in the extreme. Say, for instance, that the Home-Grown Tobacco Trust—founded by Dermot in a moment of ennui—failed, for some inexplicable reason, to yield those profits which the glowing prospectus had led all and sundry to expect; Dermot would appease the angry shareholders by giving them preference shares (interest guaranteed) in the Sea-Gold Extraction Company, hastily floated to meet the emergency. When the interest became due it would, as likely as not, be paid out of the capital just subscribed for the King Solomon's Mines Exploitation Company, the little deficiency in the latter being replaced in its turn, when absolutely necessary and not before—by the transfer of some portion of the capital just raised for yet another company. And so on, ad infinitum. It was more like the Mad Hatter's tea-party than anything else.
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The only flaw in Dermot's otherwise excellent method was that he could never stop and take a rest. He had to keep on all the time floating new companies to keep the existing ones afloat. Sometimes, in his more optimistic moments, he cherished a wild hope that he would succeed one day in floating a company that would, by some fluke, pay its way, and so give him a chance to catch up with himself; but the day, somehow, never seemed to arrive. He had solved the problem of Perpetual Promotion, and had to suffer the consequences of his own ingenuity.
