The Embezzler Read Online Free

I have always known what people thought of me. My son Percy, who shrilly took his mother's side in everything, long regarded me as the monarch of Philistia. How many times at table, when I had expressed my fondness for the novels of Galsworthy or the art of Rodin or the music of Mascagni, had I caught the exchange of visual sneers between him and Angelica! Really, they seemed to be asking each other, how Babbitt could Babbitt be? No doubt they still feel that way.
    But they have never been to jail. They have never learned the fundamental secret that one man is very like the next, that our poor old shoddy human material is pretty much the same beneath its surface manifestations. Consider how little flesh you have to cut off two faces to make them look alike. Guy Prime was a mask; we all wear masks. Thank heaven for them: they are what give us our individuality. Behind the mask my love of Galsworthy was the same palpitation as Percy's preference for Henry James. I cared as much as he for high thoughts and passions. As a young man I was even rather an aesthete, as he today, no doubt, is already rather a Philistine. But to my story.
    My first hint of disaster, as ominous as the first dull throb of a fatal growth, came on a brilliant spring Sunday in 1936. As I proceeded, after my golf, from the locker room to the bar down the Audubon corridor, noisy with its prints, I saw Mr. Elkins, the club cashier, waiting to intercept me at the door of his office. He was a small, dry, tousled graying creature, a symbol of fidelity to duty in minor posts, with dandruff on the worn shoulders of his blue suit and eyes that looked like beetles behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. I nodded, a bit impatiently, for he was always waylaying me about trifles.
    "Please, Mr. Prime, could I have a word with you?"
    "What is it, Elkins? Don't you even take Sunday off?"
    "I just came in to clear off my desk, sir. It makes Monday less rushed. Could I ask you about those America City bonds? The ones that were sent to your office to be sold and that the board then decided not to sell? They're still there, of course?"
    "Where else would they be?"
    "Oh, nowhere else, sir, of course. But it's been six months now, and Mr. Beal says it's most irregular for securities to be left that long in a broker's office."
    "Even when the 'broker' happens to be president of the club?"
    "It's not that anyone's worried, sir..."
    "I should hope not, Elkins!"
    Poor Elkins at this seemed about to weep. "It's the merger with Dellwood Beach, sir. The auditor has to see those bonds."
    "Merger? Auditor?" I had arranged for Glenville to take over a small near-bankrupt beach club on the Sound so that our members could have the benefit of salt-water swimming. The operation was only technically a merger. "Do you mean to tell me, Elkins, that Dellwood has the presumption to look into our books?"
    "It's the agreement, sir, that the lawyers drew up. It calls for each club to submit a statement. The auditor has to check our securities. Mr. Beal wants me to make an appointment for him to come to your office."
    "You may tell Mr. Beal, Elkins," I retorted, "that when the treasurer of the Club wants something of the president he can come to me himself. It is not your function to discuss with him my duties as bailee of club property. May I remind you again that it's the Lord's Day?"
    And I proceeded ineluctably on my way to the bar.
    The America City bonds with which Mr. Elkins was so unhappily obsessed that morning represented the bulk of a million dollar fund that I had raised from the membership for the construction of a stately pleasure dome that was to contain, among other amenities, a vast swimming pool and two indoor tennis courts. Remember that we were still in 1936 when the dollar could buy something. The reason that the bonds had not been returned was that a portion of them (a small one, as I then believed) was sitting in the vault of de Grasse Brothers as security for one of my