So began the firm of “P. Jameson & Company, Cigar Importers,”
which—aided by the financial support of John Gordon (who married
Dolores Bradley very shortly after that second shipment had been
disposed of) and the boom-crop of 1884—soon needed offices of its own,
two clerks, a country salesman, and all the paraphernalia of a regular
business. It was not, of course—never would be—a huge affair like
Gordon’s, who dealt the world over and in every conceivable commodity
from quinine to molasses—still it was a solid, money-making, not too
arduous concern; and, moreover, both Peter’s father and his salesman,
Tom Simpson, whom he subsequently took into junior partnership, needed
considerably less to live on than the profit which it earned.
§ 3
Peter the Third, _our_ Mr. Jameson, was not born until his parents had
been married nearly four years: John Gordon’s son, Francis, antedating
him by about a week. In both of them, you can trace the Miraflores
strain fairly clearly. They are both of them of medium height; stocky
rather than tall. Both have the same curious eyes which seem to change
colour—from gray to darkest black—with their thoughts. Both are
small-handed, small-footed, rather determined about the nose,
dark-haired, intelligent-headed. But life—and war, which is the same
thing—has dealt with them so differently that, nowadays, you would have
great difficulty in finding more than a fugitive likeness. You would
say, and perhaps rightly, that Peter is less, Francis more, the
Miraflores.
Dolores Gordon, despite her husband’s twelve thousand a year, presented
him with no more children; but Tessa Jameson had another son—Peter’s
brother Arthur—born in 1888.
Meanwhile, both businesses flourished: Gordon’s Limited, the larger;
Jameson & Co., the sounder—providing John Gordon with a rather
elaborate mansion in Curzon Street, West (to which he would return,
late, tired and neurotic from the new offices in London Wall), and the
Jamesons with a solid, rather tyrannous edifice in Lowndes Square,
Kensington, wherein Peter’s father found comfortable refuge from the
reflector-lit warehouse in Lime Street. By the late nineties, Peter the
First’s few thousand pounds had grown—thanks largely to the sole agency
for Beckmann cigars (of which more later)—into a fairly comfortable
fortune, so that when John Gordon suggested to Peter the Second that
both Peter the Third and Francis Gordon had better be sent to Eton
College, money did not stand in the way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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