The Garden at № 19 by Edgar Jepson - first published 1910 (2003).pdf

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The Garden at 19
The Garden at 19
By Edgar Jepson
Originally published by Mills & Boon
1910
This eBook was created by:
HKA
November, 2003
This text is in the public domain.
Chapter I
I Came to Live at No. 20
IT HAD long been plain to me that I should live my life in London,
that I could not hope to save enough money to buy or start, a
practice in a country town till I was too old to begin life afresh
with any hope of success. Since therefore I was destined to life in
London, I had always desired to live in Hertford Park, for it is the
prettiest and greenest of the inner suburbs, and for me an outer
suburb is too far from the office. But it seemed impossible that I
should compass even that desire for years; I was saving money far
too slowly to hope to rent, much less to buy, a house in Hertford
Park for a very long while. Then came my flutter in Tegean
Corporations.
I have never understood how I came to take that flutter. I was no
gambler. Very seldom I played bridge for tenpence a hundred at
my boarding-house, Paragon House, in the Goldhawk Road;
always I had half-a-crown on a Derby loser. My father, a country
doctor with a large practice, had always had a flyer on a Derby
loser; it seemed only dutiful to maintain the family tradition. But
to buy a thousand Tegean Corporation shares on a margin was a
very different matter.
Yet walking through Richmond Park one moonlit night I made up
my mind that I would buy them. Perhaps it was that the moon
was full. It is no confession for a young lawyer to make; but
sometimes at the full moon I am a little mad. Several of my
acquaintances have admitted to me that they are. It is an odd fact;
but that it is a fact I am sure. Yet I ought to have awakened next
morning in a more sober and less speculative spirit, my head clear
of moonshine. I awoke with the resolve to buy them stronger
than ever. It was something in the nature of a revolt against the
tedium of my life so cramped by want of money. After all it was
not a bad gamble. The syndicate proposed to acquire a large tract
of land near Tegea, a village in Greece, for the purpose of growing
on a large scale the little grapes which are dried into currants; and
all the chief currant-merchants of Athens and London were
interested in the venture and shareholders.
As soon as I reached the city, I went to the offices of the stock
brokers who had acted for my father when he had run through all
his money and property in a persevering effort to fill the pockets
of Alfred Beit and Whitaker Wright. He died ten years earlier than
he would have done, had those benefactors of the British Empire
never emerged from the ghettos in which they were born. I had
with me my Birkbeck bank-book which showed that I had £211 on
deposit; and in five minutes I had arranged that my broker should
buy me a thousand Tegean Corporations at nineteen shillings.
There was the less difficulty about it since he knew me from the
days when I had straightened out my paralyzed father's affairs
and saved enough from the wreck to keep him in decent comfort
for the two years he survived his losses.
Having completed this transaction, I went to my cousin's offices
where I work. I got none of the gambler's excitement out of my
flutter. It was a little odd, but I found myself almost indifferent
whether Tegean Corporations went up or down. I dreamt none of
Alnaschar's dreams. I went steadily through my work. When I
went out to my lunch I did not trouble to buy an evening paper to
learn whether Tegean Corporations were going up or down; I met
a fellow member of the New Bohemians, and we talked about the
latest book of G.K. Chesterton.
I did not even bother to buy a paper as I went home. But I found a
late edition of the Pall Mall in the drawing-room of Paragon
House, and read that Tegean Corporations had fallen to eighteen
shillings. Fifty pounds out of my £211 had gone.
I was not depressed, though I sighed when I saw their price. After
dinner I set out for Richmond Park and spent a delightful evening
in it. At some moment during it I filled with the sense that Tegean
Corporations were on the knees of the gods, and I was very well
content to leave them there. If the gods wanted my two hundred
and eleven pounds, they would certainly take them, and that was
all there was to it. Still I could have wished that I was enjoying
more of the sense of adventure in my flutter.
The shares remained at eighteen shillings for two days – the gods
seemed to have lost all interest in my two hundred and eleven
pounds. Then when I came out to lunch on the third day, the
words Tegean Corporations, large on a poster, caught my eye,
and I bought the paper.
It was one of those share-pushing penny rags which minister to
the simple intellectual needs of the hardy clerk and at the same
time strive to allure him to unburden himself in bucket-shops of
any savings he may chance to have. But it was obliging me deeply
by setting forth that Tegean Corporations were the noblest
speculative venture presented to the British public since the
palmy days of the Rand. That night Tegean Corporations stood at

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