management the principle of
Thrift for which they were founded. The fact is that de Barral simply
didn't think of it. Of course he had soon moved from Vauxhall Bridge
Road. He knew enough for that. What he got hold of next was an old,
enormous, rat-infested brick house in a small street off the Strand.
Strangers were taken in front of the meanest possible, begrimed, yellowy,
flat brick wall, with two rows of unadorned window-holes one above the
other, and were exhorted with bated breath to behold and admire the
simplicity of the head-quarters of the great financial force of the day.
The word THRIFT perched right up on the roof in giant gilt letters, and
two enormous shield-like brass-plates curved round the corners on each
side of the doorway were the only shining spots in de Barral's business
outfit. Nobody knew what operations were carried on inside except
this--that if you walked in and tendered your money over the counter it
would be calmly taken from you by somebody who would give you a printed
receipt. That and no more. It appears that such knowledge is
irresistible. People went in and tendered; and once it was taken from
their hands their money was more irretrievably gone from them than if
they had thrown it into the sea. This then, and nothing else was being
carried on in there . . . "

"Come, Marlow," I said, "you exaggerate surely--if only by your way of
putting things. It's too startling."

"I exaggerate!" he defended himself. "My way of putting things! My dear
fellow I have merely stripped the rags of business verbiage and financial
jargon off my statements. And you are startled! I am giving you the
naked truth. It's true too that nothing lays itself open to the charge
of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth. What comes with a
shock is admitted with difficulty. But what will you say to the end of
his career?

It was of course sensational and tolerably sudden. It began with the Orb
Deposit Bank. Under the name of that institution de Barral with the
frantic obstinacy of an unimaginative man had been financing an Indian
prince who was prosecuting a claim for immense sums of money against the
government. It was an enormous number of scores of lakhs--a miserable
remnant of his ancestors' treasures--that sort of thing. And it was all
authentic enough. There was a real prince; and the claim too was
sufficiently real--only unfortunately it was not a valid claim. So the
prince