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Title: Mr. Petre
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Illustrator: G. K. Chesterton
Release date: January 3, 2025 [eBook #75030]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1925
Credits: Carol Brown, Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. PETRE ***
MR. PETRE
[Illustration: _Mr. Petre wondering who or what he may have been._]
MR. PETRE
_A novel by_
HILAIRE BELLOC
_Illustrated by_
G. K. CHESTERTON
[Illustration]
Robert M. McBride & Company
NEW YORK MCMXXV
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
PUBLISHED
AUGUST
1925
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
=Dedication=
To All Poor Gentlemen
ILLUSTRATIONS
Mr. Petre wondering who or what he may have
been _Frontispiece_
PAGE
“... As though he were a Unicorn” 11
“... And the two ex-Lord-Chancellors agreed” 27
Mrs. Cyril leaping to the telephone 37
His Grace the Proprietor of the “Messenger”
conferring the Order of the Boot on Mr. Batterby,
of Golder’s Green in the County of Middlesex 52
Sir Jeremiah Walton, God’s servant 57
Minatory but Patient Admonishment of the Ignoble
Algernon by Breeches of Bolter’s Club,
St. James’ (S.W.1) 62
“... Spectacles adorning a face like the full
moon” 69
“His forehead witnessed to a lifetime of profound
thought, his white beard to careful grooming” 72
The Partners 89
“Exactly. I quite understand” 99
Dada Beeston (Dorothea Madua, second and younger
daughter of Henry, 10th Baron Beeston, of Beeston
Abbey, Beeston, Rutlandshire; and of Desirée
Waldschwein, his wife) 131
“One had chosen Public Service, the other--Affairs” 138
“He used to think in three figures; he was now
thinking in five” 144
Young Mr. Cassleton, growing acquainted with
the World of Affairs 150
The Public discovering no small appetite for the
Debentures at 8% 173
“He had decided” 189
The Great Specialist wrote:--“Special circumstances:
A Bastard” 199
The second and more jovial Great Specialist, Sir
William Bland 208
Joyous recognition of Buffy Thomas 218
John Kosciusko protesting against the interference
of Peers in Judicial Procedure 267
Ermyntrude, First (and Last) Viscountess Boole:
Lord Chancellor of England 272
MR. PETRE
MR. PETRE
CHAPTER I
It was the 3rd of April, 1953. As the big rotor came up through the
Sound at the end of her ten days’ passage from New York, a passenger
standing alone forward upon her decks looked at the very shores of
Devon close at hand on either side, and delighted in the Spring.
It was nearly two years since he had seen his own country, and he
felt the eagerness of his return almost as though he were a boy
again. He was a short, rather stout man in later middle age, with
gray curling hair, clean shaven, and in his gesture and expression
most unmistakably English. His clothes and his boots were American,
and his hat; and what was more, when he spoke there was just that
trace of American accent and that habitual use of American locutions
which so often mark the man who has lived, though for no more than a
few months, in wholly American surroundings.
Everything was ready for his landing. He would not be troubled with
so much as a handbag. The blessed abolition of passports in 1933 as
for Englishmen landing in England saved him the trouble of even that
small encumbrance; and as he hated his pockets bulging with papers,
he had locked all, down to the least important notes, in a little
dispatch box and handed it to his steward. He had nothing on him
but one of the tickets under the new system, the ordinary railway
ticket for London which they exchange on board against the steamship
receipt; and a good wad of £63 in English notes, with a handful of
change; he had not even kept a nickel for remembrance. He could
recover what he required by the time he had taken his seat in the
train; and all this disembarrassment, coupled with the long vacuity
of the sea voyage, gave him an odd sense of freedom.
Odd ... and he knew that it was odd. It was a little too complete.
His mind seemed to be holding nothing but the scene before him: the
vigorous sky, the leaping water and the green above the gray of the
rocks with their white fringe of foam.
He felt unnaturally careless. And when his thoughts turned to his
luggage and its arrangement, to the petty incidents of that same
morning, they were blurred and faded. Nor did he concern himself with
their increasing faintness ... he enjoyed relief in it. But he knew
that the relief was strange.
His daily life in America had been too much preoccupied, and that
for a long time past. He had gone over to judge and help direct an
investment in land, which had not turned out too brilliantly. He
had not even been able to sell out as he wished; he was still held
to it and its mortgage. He had not put things right. He had found it
of no purpose to remain. He had turned back homewards--and yet he
suffered an uneasy fear that in his absence things might go worse.
Too much of his small fortune had been locked up in that venture, and
the prospect before him, when he should reach his rooms in London,
was not over bright. He was not sure that he could keep up the modest
scale of living on which he had arranged his life for the last ten
years before this voyage to the States. The place he had inherited in
Dorsetshire, and which had been at his disposal since his mother’s
death fifteen years earlier, he had let; but there were heavy charges
upon it, and he could see little income in what remained of its
revenue.
Nevertheless, he did now feel that curious sense of lightness and of
carelessness. It was not connected with the returning home: it seemed
a new mood of a kind by itself. It came in deep successive waves,
each washing out, while it lasted, all responsibility and care; and
twice, as they neared the breakwater, he went through an abnormal
moment or two of complete freedom, like that of a man who has just
wakened from a profound sleep, and has not yet remembered the burdens
and details of life.
* * * * *
When he had landed with the other passengers that unknown mood
returned upon him with greatly increased force and with more
permanence. It enveloped him like a mist. It made him neglectful of
all appointment and watch. He forgot his steward altogether; and
his luggage, as though it had never been. He found himself doing
only that which he could do without any effort of recollection. His
empty-handedness, his neglect, made him the first to walk up the
platform along the train for London. He took no heed of the reserved
places. He chose out an empty seat in a first-class carriage at the
head of the train and took a corner looking forward. There he sat in
the same continued mood of content and vacuity.
The train filled, and the crush of porters hurrying and crossing
each other upon the platform made confusion all along its line. One
in particular, badly chivied by an anxious steward, who had implored
leave to land in search of a missing client, was asking what he
should do. That porter had put a dispatch box, a rug and a small
strapped packet upon a reserved place. He had noted the name. But no
one had come to claim them. The porter and the steward, looking back
to where a couple of belated men were running, saw no sign of the
expected figure. The glorious official to whom a clamorous appeal
was made refused to delay the train. The whistle sounded, the rotor
buzzed, the train drew out. The porter and the steward felt each in
his own degree that agony of loss which greater men know when they
open their paper of a morning and read of a slump. The one was
widowed of a sovereign. The other of half a crown.
Meanwhile the author of their misfortunes sat all alone in his
comfortable carriage, looking at the houses slipping by and the
beginning of the countryside. Then he grew drowsy and sank into his
corner and fell asleep. He half awoke at a hand tapping upon his
shoulder and a voice asking him for his ticket. He had it upon him;
he felt for it, found it in an inside pocket and handed it over, and
in a moment was asleep again.
When he woke it was but slowly, for evidently he had been more
fatigued than he knew, and the strain of a rough voyage had weighed
upon him. The express was already roaring past Newbury Race-course.
He recognized the place and suddenly connected it in his mind with a
name ... the name of some one living thereabouts.... Yes, ... it was
certainly some one connected with those trees and heaths beyond ...
but what was the name? He sought and sought, and nothing would come.
It was very aggravating, this little lapse. He remembered how often
of late he had had slight trouble of that kind. Then he set out to
try and recover the name by a chain. He had passed a race-course. He
knew it of old. He would connect things up link by link. First he
looked at his watch. It was just at 12.30. He had started from....
Where had he started from?
That really _was_ exasperating ... that was even serious.
He shook his head with the sharp gesture a man makes when he is
trying to be rid of some passing nervous affection, and he did what
the efficiency men call “concentrating.” But his concentration was
poor. Not a word would come.
Then overwhelmingly, in a flash, the truth broke upon him. He
had lost all conception of his past: every image of it. He knew
where he was. All about him, the landscape, the type of railway
carriage--everything was familiar, but of any name or place or action
or movement _in connection with himself_ prior to that sleep nothing
whatsoever remained.
He passed his hand across his forehead, and stared at the empty
cushions opposite him, waiting for this very unpleasant mental gap to
close up, and for his normal self to return. It did not return. What
was worse, he felt a sort of certitude within him that it had gone
for ever--that it was no good looking for it. It was as though he had
died.
Through all the remaining hour of the run into Paddington he was
seeking, seeking, seeking. The Thames, distant Windsor, Slough went
past, the first houses of London: he knew them all as well as he knew
his own voice; but of any link between these and himself, of any
action or emotion of his past identity, there was no trace at all. It
was not even blank. It was nothingness.
The train drew up, the herd of passengers bundled out, and he,
at the head of the train, among the first. He went uncertainly
sauntering down the platform. He was half inclined to ask some one
where the train had come from. He even found himself listening to one
or two groups of people in the hope that he should hear its name; but
he was ashamed to listen too long, and still more ashamed to put the
question which had at first occurred to him. It was a pity. If he
had acted there and then he would have saved himself a great deal of
coming trouble. But he had already begun to feel a mixture of shame
and fear lest his humiliation should be discovered. That dangerous
mood was to grow.
Mechanically he hailed one of the new rotor taxis--he recognized
them, though he could not tell where or how (they had just been
coming in the year before he left England; but of that year there was
nothing now in his mind). It suddenly broke upon him that he could
not tell the taxi where to drive.
Now the man who drove the taxi judged tips by wealth and wealth by
external signs. So he said, with simple judgment, “The Splendide?”
His fare nodded hastily and got in. Anywhere would do. Here again the
name was perfectly familiar to him. The picture of the big hotel in
his mind was quite clear. He could have told you exactly where it was
in London. But for the soul of him he couldn’t have told you _how_ he
knew. He nodded, and the rotor cab jerked and plunged and pulled up
sharp and jerked forward again for its half-hour to the Splendide,
with the stricken man inside concentrating away for dear life and
getting nowhere.
During the Berkeley Street block, and to the whirring of the mighty
little engine and the shaking of the cab, he suddenly shouted PETRE
at the top of his voice. The driver opened the door sharply and
barked at him, “What say?”
“Nothing,” said the greatly relieved man, sighing deeply. “I was
talking to myself.”
The taxi driver slammed the door, looked at the policeman whose hand
still barred the traffic, jerked his thumb towards the inside of his
cab, touched his forehead and smiled. The policeman also deigned to
smile. Then the flood was released and they jerked off again.
Petre, that was it ... Petre.... That was his name! But what
Petre? He could not tell. The sound was perfectly clear and
perfectly familiar.... Petre. Petre it was: he was quite certain of
that.--Thank God, he was certain of that!... And during the next
three blocks in the traffic his certitude grew firmer and firmer. He
clung to the protection of that word Petre as does a drowning man to
a deck chair. That was something to go on, anyhow.... He could not
see it as P-e-t-e-r or P-e-t-r-e. It was only the sound he was sure
of. But when he came to think of it, it must be Petre, for he had
not in his mind any savor, not even the slightest, of a grotesque
connotation, and if it had been “Peter,” however familiar to him,
it would have sounded a little silly in his ears.... No, it must
certainly be Petre. It was a good name.... There was--he had a vague
idea--a Lord Petre. He did not think he was--or had been--a lord. He
would have remembered that at least, though all the rest had gone.
No, it was Mr. Petre all right.... Mr. something Petre, as Mr. J.
Petre.... But what was that Christian name, or those Christian names?
He had reached the Splendide. Mr. Petre (for he could now securely
call himself by his right name, an anchor-hold in such an awful tide)
got out and vastly overpaid the cab. The new rotor cabs had the fare
marked up in large red ticking figures inside. It was a rule brought
in by Jessie Anderson when she was at the Home Office in the last
Administration. It had always annoyed her to peer through the glass,
and she was no longer young. Mr. Petre quite understood the meaning
of those figures; shillings and pence were familiar to him and the
connection of their symbols with the coins in his hand was part of
himself, though he could not have told you where or when he had last
handled such coins.
Now and then he would hesitate over a detail. He had puzzled a minute
before getting the name of Oxford Street as they crossed it. But the
run of London life was as common to him as to any of the myriads
around. It was only the bond between them and his past self that had
snapped.
He knew the Splendide. He knew the ritual of registration. He even
knew the liveries with their absurd gold crowns. He knew it was
strange to take a room without luggage. He feared resentment. Yet he
rightly judged such eccentricity stood a better chance at the more
expensive hotels than the less.
He was full of the ordeal before him, and he approached it rather
nervously. But he put on as bold a front as he could, and gave the
name “Petre” in rather a loud voice, and with that slight American
intonation which was his though he knew it not.
He was surprised at a certain note in the clerk’s reply, something
between the tone in which a man addresses a great lady advanced in
years and that in which he would address (were addresses paid to such
things) a unicorn or any other apparition; and the voice using these
tones said quite low, so that no one around should hear, and with a
certain thrill of reverence displayed and of astonishment controlled:
“Mr. John K. Petre?”
Mr. Petre nodded rapidly. It was no good seeking for the real
Christian names: these would do as well as any other for the time
being.
He was relieved to see the right spelling coming out from the tip
of the clerk’s pen in the register: “John K. Petre.” No place of
residence followed. The clerk knew too much for that. He made an
inclination that was nearly a bow as he sent for the boy in buttons,
and begged Mr. Petre in a still lower voice to let him know if the
suite he had chosen would do: it had only three rooms, he said,
but it was the best unoccupied and over the garden. Two hundred
dollars--forty pounds.
[Illustration: “_... As though he were a Unicorn._”]
Mr. Petre recollected the £63 he had upon him and the very strange
condition under which he was attacking this stronghold. He firmly
refused anything but a plain bedroom and bathroom. He would not even
have a sitting-room, and the clerk this time really did bow, as a
worshiper might incline to a saint who was beyond the pale of mortal
kind. He whispered rather than spoke the number “44,” and Mr. Petre,
before going to the lift, said:
“One moment, I have no luggage.” He said it in the over-emphatic tone
which men use to say anything startling that has to be forced down;
he repeated it in that same firm voice in which the slight American
accent was emphasised: “I have no luggage.”
The clerk showed no surprise at all. If Mr. John K. Petre chose to
travel without luggage, it seemed to be in the clerk’s eyes but one
more evidence of more than human greatness.
“I shall go out and buy what I need,” continued Mr. Petre, still
firmly, “when I have washed, in a few minutes.”
“Can we----” insinuated the clerk.
“No,” said Mr. Petre yet more firmly, and almost readily. “I always
do these things myself.”
But when and where he had done these things himself he could not
possibly have told, for Mr. Petre had no idea what things he did and
what things he did not do. His new life had begun less than a couple
of hours before, and the old one was lost.
He followed the boy to the lift, and as he went he was reassured.
For he said to himself, “I am some one of consequence. I am known.”
But on that thought followed its terrifying successors--The more
imperative his need for caution (the lift was taking him up to No.
44); the worse the ridicule if his secret were discovered before he
had found himself (the lift had reached the landing); the deeper his
humiliation and (the door of 44 was opened for him--no, he needed
nothing; it shut upon him and he was seated alone in despair) the
more intolerable his lot. What if that unknown life of his had been
passed in some great household, a grandeur of spouse and children and
domestics; lived for years with intimates who should know what had
befallen him? He would be marked. A diminished man. One who had “had
an accident.” Pitied, despised, his relapse awaited. He recoiled at
the thought!...
No! There must be no discovery by others. With infinite caution,
catching and comparing every word, he would pick up piece by
piece the truth about himself. He would secretly effect his own
restoration. But what of questions? How should he answer _them_?
* * * * *
While Mr. Petre was moving towards the lift, magnificently waved
forward by dazzling liveries and piloted in procession by the boy
in buttons, a young fellow who had been sitting in the lounge of
the hotel talking to an older man got up and sauntered towards the
registration counter.
He had heard a name--and that name was gold. For though the clerk had
whispered Mr. Petre had spoken loudly and without discretion.
The young man dug his hands into his trousers pockets, looked for a
moment through the windows toward the street, and then turned sharply
beyond the register book to the office where inquiries were made.
As he did so he kept his head well to the left, outwards from the
counter; but his eyes shot furtively to the right, and he spotted
the name upon the open page. It was John K. Petre all right. He had
thought as much.
At the Inquiry he asked whether there was a telegram for Gadget, and
was not surprised to hear that there was none; indeed, he had only
that moment made up the name. But such is the spell of association
over even the sharpest crook that he could not help saying, “John K.
Gadget”; so much was the famous name of John K. Petre now branded
upon his brain.
He sauntered back again to his chair, sank down, and took up speech
again with his companion.
The young man himself was tall, just an inch or two overdressed, with
black hair, greased, brushed back over a high narrow forehead and
thin face, of the bony sort, which is also called “distinguished,”
the long narrow chin and the high narrow forehead were each a long
way from the advanced cape of the squeezed nose. He made delicate
gestures with his right hand. He spoke leisurely and high.
His companion was of no such exalted station. He was squat,
round-headed, double-chinned, with a thick, frowsy, gray mustache;
short, ill-combed hair; and dressed in clothes so loose and creased
that they disgraced that cavern of the rich. His boots were shameful,
and even his collar was dubious.
“Well, Arthur?” said he to the young man.
“Well, Batterby, he’s come here.”
“Oh, he has, has he? I told you so!” said Batterby, not without pride.
“Yep,” answered the more elegant Arthur. “There’s the name right
enough. John K. Petre. But you know what I told you. He makes it a
point to keep low and dark. I’d use it--but I wouldn’t print it. I’ve
heard what he does when he’s given away. Oh! He’s savage! The clerks
are paid in all these places to keep it quiet whenever he _does_
come over. Once they did get hold of him in the _Howl_, when he came
over four years ago, and they printed a story about him. Then they
found he controlled half the poison ads.: Rodney’s Cure, and the
Pain-killer and Voler’s Pills--and he made ’em print a denial too,
displayed. And then he broke ’em! Oh! he’s savage.”
“It was I tracked him to that boat on my own risk,” said Batterby
doggedly. “I paid the clerk at this end out of my own pocket, and
he said John K. would be on it, as sure as one can be of him. He’d
booked as Carroll, so’s not to be pestered on board. If I liked to
take the trouble I could find out that he’d landed and what train he
took. It’s a cruel shame if I can’t make a story for the _Messenger_
out of it! His Grace’ll want it too,” he added plaintively. “It’s for
him to print or not as he likes. He knows his way about, does the
Duke.”
Arthur shrugged his shoulders. “You can tell your gang if you like,
Batterby, but it’s at your own risk. He’ll ferret you out and he’ll
never let go of you. He bites to the bone: specially newspaper men.
That’s what he hates most. You know what he is. If they print they’ll
get hell, and even if they only talk _you’ll_ get hell. I’ve told you
all I know about him. He comes to London, Paris, Naples, anywhere.
Nobody to know when he passed, except his men. And what’s more, he’ll
get plenty of people to swear to his being somewhere else. If he
makes a row, it isn’t my fault. At any rate, he’s here.... I’ve got
to be off. Will you wait while I get my hat and coat?”
Batterby, who had his hat in his hand and his coat on his back,
looked uneasy and said, “Yes, if you like.” Arthur sauntered off
at his slow pace, and the older, heavier, less consequent man
watched him slyly well round the corner, and then lumbered up to the
Registration Desk. The book was shut. He leaned with a foolish grin
of cunning over the desk, winked, and said to the clerk: “Any one o’
the name o’ Petre registered to-day?”
The clerk said curtly, “No.”
“Nothing like it?” said Batterby, taking out a case with cigarettes
upon the one side and notes prominently showing upon the other.
“Nothing,” said the clerk icily.
Batterby tapped the thick red leather binding with a square, short
forefinger, and winked again. For answer the clerk put the big book
on one side and turned away. His questioner waddled back again to
the easy chair and wished _he_ could earn money so easily. He
looked at his watch, and wondered that Arthur was so long. Yet there
was nothing wonderful in the delay. Arthur was telephoning. He was
telephoning to Mrs. Cyril.
Before he had returned to the lounge and to the impatient Batterby
a stout, rather bewildered man, middle-aged and gray, but active in
his step, had passed by him, and had gone rapidly through the great
turning doors into the street. It was Mr. Petre, seeking a Gladstone
bag and linen and hair brushes, and all that might be necessary to
restore him to citizenship. Had Batterby known what presence it was
that thus passed he would have been a changed man. But Batterby did
not know. Arthur rejoined him, the two went out into the street in
their turn.
The Strand is not a good place for conversation in these days, but
Batterby was anxious and eager. It was a scoop, if he could bring
it off; and poor Batterby lived and kept an unhappy household in
Golder’s Green upon scoops; and Arthur was his informant on the
great world, in return for services rendered before Arthur had
climbed--through a knowledge of Arthur’s earlier days. Arthur knew
every one now, and yet could still be squeezed. The shorter and older
man looked up at his young companion as they jostled eastward towards
Fleet Street.
“Don’t you think I could risk it, Arthur?”
“Oh! I’ve told you,” said Arthur impatiently. “It’s at your risk.
But mind you, if he is here he’ll have it denied, and if he isn’t,
it comes to the same thing. You’ll get hell. You can’t fight fifty
million pound.”
Batterby sighed. It would mean a great scoop.... And he might have
had the interview given him. His Grace had given him just that job
when he had spotted the secret visit of the French Prime Minister six
months before. But French Prime Ministers are small game compared
with Americans on the scale of John K. Petre.... Then again, if
things went wrong, and he could not make the news good, that meant
the sack. His Lordship could be terribly firm; and Batterby thought
of the little house in Golder’s Green and the nagging, dissatisfied
wife, and inwardly trembled.... No, he couldn’t risk it.... At least,
not unless Arthur would guarantee him, and Arthur wouldn’t. Arthur
had sworn he would know nothing about it.... So there was an end of
it. But it was astonishing how full Batterby’s mind was of John K.
Petre; almost as though he had him there by his side, arm in arm.
It is said that very great men thus permeate the air of the cities
through which they pass. It may be so. Arthur and Batterby melted
into the crowd.
* * * * *
Mr. Petre was a full two hours in making his purchases. One very good
reason for such delay was that he had no idea of his measurements.
Another, that his recent, his overwhelming misfortune had made him
mistrustful of himself. He kept on wondering whether he had filled
up a sufficient list. At last he had fully packed his newly-purchased
bag; he had brought it back to the hotel; he had followed it up to
No. 44. He sat down beside it, counted out what remained of his
capital and found fifty-two pounds and a few shillings left. He
plunged again into that depth of thought wherein he groped like a
diver in dim water to find some recollection or some clew--and he
found none. The enormous loneliness of the position was upon him: it
appalled him even more than the approaching end of his resources. He
felt all the millions of London round about him, aloof and hostile:
dumb ... when the telephone on the table in his room rang suddenly,
and he took it up.
A woman’s voice, very clearly articulate, rather too high, asked if
that were Mr. Petre, and announced itself as Celia Cyril. It then
cleared its throat, but in a very ladylike manner, and Mr. Petre
boldly answered “Yes” and waited; concluding, as he waited, that he
ought certainly to have answered “No.” The voice told him it knew he
_hated_ being fussed, but he had always made an exception of dear
Leonard, hadn’t he? So the voice had taken the liberty to send a
note which would explain; but the voice had thought (it said) that
it seemed better first to ring up before the note would get to him;
because the voice knew that he _hated_ being fussed. And then thought
that perhaps it ought not perhaps to have rung up after all. But it
did hope he didn’t mind. All of which clear-headed and decisive
stuff Mr. Petre received in a complete confusion.
“My only excuse,” the voice went on, “is that you were _so_ good to
dear Leonard, to my dear husband when he was in the States two years
ago. You know all that has happened since. You don’t mind my asking?
_Do_ you? You remember my Leonard?”
Now at this moment--I write it down without comment, for all that
follows is a commentary upon it, but I think it excusable in a man
so hungry to know and so dazed as was Mr. Petre--at this moment, I
say, Mr. Petre again answered “Yes.” The clearly articulate voice
continued in a tone of relief.
“Ah, I _am_ so glad. I knew it was a liberty. I know you _hate_ to be
fussed. But I do hope you will be able to come, and you will get my
note. It ought to be with you any time now. I sent the car with it.”
Then the voice said “_Good_-by” in a fashion which oddly reminded
Mr. Petre of pink sugar--but after his great catastrophe he dared
not guess whether it were because the late Mr. Cyril or Sir Leonard
Cyril, or Lord Leonard Cyril or Leonard Lord Cyril had been connected
with sugar, or whether it was only the tone of the voice.
But the recitation of such names suggested to him rather suddenly a
book the name of which he perfectly remembered, and he telephoned
down at once for the year’s _Who’s Who_. Now he would make a serious
search. He was on a clew.
The first thing he did was to look out Cyril. He found nobody,
and in good time it was to be made very clear why he had found
nobody of that name. Leonard Cyril was dead. Then he looked out
Petre--brilliant thought, and he found many Petres, and read all
that was to be read of them closely; but not one suggested anything
to his knowledge. He was certainly John K. The clerk had made that
clear. There was no John K. in _Who’s Who_. He sighed. It was a
heart-breaking business. Then, the processes of his mind working
more fully, but his sense of personality as blank as ever, he tried
the telephone book of London. There was a Mrs. Cyril right enough,
and she seemed to be well-to-do, for what she had said about her
car corresponded with her address. But when he turned to the Petres
he was baulked again: there were too many, and not a John K. in the
bunch ... and after all, why hadn’t he thought of it? The States!...
Was he not an American?... There was evidence that he had been in
America. That would make it less incomprehensible--but more difficult
to trace through London.... And he didn’t _feel_ American somehow....
What a business!
Then came the note. A young child, dressed in yet another uniform
and with bright, active eyes brought it in. It was but an expansion
of the telephone message he had had before. Mrs. Cyril had only just
heard of him from a friend who had caught sight of him (he trembled!)
in the hotel. She was taking a great liberty, but her late husband
had spoken so warmly of him and of the kindness Mr. Petre had shown
him when he visited the United States, that she presumed upon that
acquaintance and asked him whether he could not lunch with her next
Wednesday?
Mr. Petre delved down again into the depths of his mind. Whatever
he may have been in that past life of his, he had evidently been
courteous, for he felt the necessity of answering by writing and by
messenger, and not by telephone. The more he thought of the affair,
the more he discovered at once its possibilities and its dangers.
In the last few hours the shrinking from humiliation had become an
obsession. He was now fixed in a mood such that he would rather have
died than admit his hidden trouble. All around him, perhaps, would be
people who would know who he was; some perhaps would have met him;
his hostess at least would have heard much of him. He would have to
play up to all that he could hear, to glean everything that he could,
and yet not give away his secret.
For some little time he hesitated. Then he considered that if he
never took the plunge he might be lost. Either he must recover his
past by clews or by inferences, and these could only be had from
witnesses; or else live on a few weeks to the end of his money, and
then--what?
Evidently he had been--whatever he was--not only a courteous man, but
a man of decision. He took up his pen and wrote a rapid note to Mrs.
Cyril, saying how pleased he would be to lunch. He rang at once and
sent it off by the messenger. He was a little alarmed to learn that
her car had been waiting all the time to take that answer back. Mr.
Petre might be a man of decision, but he could not compare with Mrs.
Cyril. Whoever he (Mr. Petre) might be, and whoever she (Mrs. Cyril)
might be, she (Mrs. Cyril) gave points to him (Mr. Petre). And Mr.
Petre drew another deep sigh as he considered the peculiar misfortune
of his life, and wondered why he had been pitched upon to suffer so
extraordinary a fate.
He could not tell. But I know and I will tell the reader. It was
holiday in heaven and a Dæmon, genial, ironic, had been given Mr.
Petre for a toy to play with a little while.
He glanced again at the letter, turned over the sheet and found a
postscript. “You know how discreet I shall be and how familiar I am
with your rules. The Press shall not hear a word of it. It was by the
merest _accident_ that I heard of your presence in London myself, and
even if you send an answer that you are not there at all, I shall
_quite_ understand.--C.C.”
Mr. Petre held those words before him and stared. Then he began to
put everything together in a sort of summary. He had been in the
States; perhaps he was a native of the States. He didn’t think so;
he felt it in his bones that he was not an American. Yet ... at any
rate, he had been in the States.
There was another point. The man he had been had some reason or other
for keeping very secret; the clerk’s manner had proved that. It made
him feel anxious. Had he committed a crime?... No! On reflection, no.
If he had Mrs. Cyril would not be so keen to have him to lunch with
her. He must have had the power to do some good to the late Cyril; he
must have had some great position out there in America.... What?
For a moment he was on the point of drafting an advertisement to
sundry American papers, and then that shame came upon him and he
put down his pen. He gave it up; he trusted to chance; he awaited
Wednesday; and having been apparently in that past of his a naturally
hopeful man, he took it for granted that at Mrs. Cyril’s table some
light might break. Then he went down to dinner.
He sat there at his lonely table, perfectly clear upon the roof
under which he was (it was familiar to him), upon the date, upon
the meaning of all that he read in the paper (he was consecutive
upon this, not only for the news of the last twenty-four hours, but
also, after a gap of about a fortnight, with many older allusions).
Oddly enough, certain dull fragments of American news, meaningless
to an Englishman, struck him with particular familiarity; and the
name of one town in which a bishop in the middle west had denied his
Saviour struck him with a feeling of home; but of himself and of who
he was--nothing. It was like standing in a well-lit room and looking
through the window at a dense fog outside pressing against the panes.
Then he went upstairs again to No. 44 and took off all his clothes
and looked on every edge of shirt and collar and vest and drawers and
socks for initials. He found a New York price ticket on his shirt,
the word “Paramount” on his collar and “Zenith” woven into his socks,
but of initials not a sign, and as for his night-shirt, he had just
bought it--not pajamas; was that instinct a clew? He was tired out.
He put it on and went to bed.
CHAPTER II
Mrs. Cyril had received her guests.
It was a vast room in a house on the south side of Grosvenor Square.
There was a kind old Cabinet Minister, who was rather deaf and kept
on putting his hand to his left ear with a beatified look; a rich
young woman who had just married a still richer lord in the North
of England, and who wrote small, carefully-sculptured pieces of bad
verse; two ex-Lord Chancellors; a banker, and his wife too; Lady
Batton (Henry Batton’s wife, not the old lady); and Marjorie Kayle,
who had only one leg and was very witty. But great as these people
were, they were nothing like as great as the room. It was perfectly
enormous, and Mrs. Leonard Cyril, relict of the late Leonard Cyril,
who had no particular business but had certainly thriven wonderfully
by it, and who was herself the daughter of Pallins, the old artist,
gloried in the dimensions thereof. She murmured that Mr. Petre was
late; she lied, for she had deliberately given him an hour twenty
minutes later than the others. They fell to talking of him, of his
vast wealth, of his eccentricities, of his mania for avoiding the
world and his refusal of his name and movements.
“Oh, I can understand that,” sighed Marjorie Kayle, who was
perpetually in the papers; and the two ex-Lord Chancellors agreed.
But the kind old Cabinet Minister, putting up his left hand to his
ear, only said “What?” and beamed. “Petre,” bellowed Mrs. Cyril into
his better ear. “Petre. The American man. John K. Petre.”
[Illustration: “_... And the two ex-Lord-Chancellors agreed._”]
“Oh, the American man,” said the kind old Cabinet Minister, his
face suddenly changing, and assuming the expression proper to a
revelation. “Not J. K. Petre, the rotor man?”
“Yes,” roared Mrs. Cyril again. “The rotor man. J. K. Petre.”
“I can’t conceive,” said the noble poetess, “what possible good it
can do a man to have so much money.”
“I don’t see what possible harm it can do him,” said Marjorie Kayle
with asperity, for she herself, poor darling, felt strongly on that
point; she resented the great wealth of the woman who had just
spoken. “He does plenty of good with it. He gave £200,000 to Peggy’s
show last year, and it just got them round the corner.”
“Who got him to do that?” asked the hostess quickly.
“No one,” said Marjorie Kayle--who, indeed, knew nothing but the bare
fact, and had got that out of a newspaper. “He does those things
suddenly out of his head.”
The banker said “Humph!” and for a moment a solid little smile
appeared upon his face.
“It’s quite true,” said Marjorie Kayle, nodding her head, and now
launched in her new character as John K. Petre expert. “He simply
won’t answer a letter, even on business, and he’s mad against giving
anything--’cept when he feels inclined, like this, suddenly; an’ then
he does the most extraordinary things! He gave a quarter of a million
to the famine fund in Sicily, and it came long after the famine
because he only heard of it late, through a magazine called _Powler’s
Humanitarian Weekly_, and then they asked him what they ought to do
with it, and he cabled back a text out of the Bible, and they thought
he was mad and they divided it up.”
“Who?” said Mrs. Cyril severely.
“Oh, they,” answered Marjorie Kayle vaguely. “The Sicilians.” Then
she added simply, “He’s like that.”
“Is it true that he wears elastic-sided boots?” said the banker’s
wife in a weary, over-refined voice. She was a woman full of frills
and with a cameo face. Marjorie Kayle took the plunge.
“Not now,” she said, greatly daring; and being inwardly a believer in
the Higher Powers, she shot up a little prayer that when the great
man should come into that room he might not be wearing elastic-sided
boots. It was a fair risk, for they had not been seen in any great
number since the Boer War. On the other hand, she thought that his
boots would probably be very pointed, and might well be of patent
leather; but these surmises she kept hidden within her own heart. She
had gambled on him enough as it was.
While this enlightened conversation was proceeding one last guest
had said nothing. It was a Mr. Terrard; Mr. Charles Terrard, Charlie
Terrard, by courtesy the Honorable Charles Merriton Terrard, a
stockbroker and without guile. He had frank blue eyes and frank
yellow hair which curled; and he was very pleasant. He listened to
his elders and betters, to whom also he could often be of service.
There was a future before that man.
Mrs. Cyril had just begun, “They say that whenever he washes he----”
when the big yellow door was thrown open and a servant in archaic
clothes said mournfully, “Mr. Petre!”, introduced a gray, sturdy, but
lively figure, and shut the door very gently again behind him. There
was a silence as at the entry of God.
Mrs. Cyril came forward and seized him by the hand. She overwhelmed
him with apologies. Nothing would have persuaded her to take such a
liberty except her gratitude for all he had done for Leonard; and as
she murmured the word “Leonard” a touching moisture suffused her eyes.
The guests all stood around awkwardly, like provincial notables
awaiting an introduction to royalty. Mrs. Cyril went through them one
by one in their exact order of greatness, and shouted at the kind old
Cabinet Minister again, to give Mr. Petre some impression of the way
in which one had to talk to him.
Never was a man more deeply impressed than was Mr. Petre by the
solemn deference he received. One after another each of those men
and each of those women spiritually knelt before him, and there
was manifest in their eyes and in their gestures all the spirit
of religion. He who showed it least was young Terrard; yet even he
showed it plentifully, and Marjorie Kayle exceeded.
“Evidently,” thought Mr. Petre, remembering the hotel, “I was right.
I am somebody--or I was somebody.”
They sat at table, sneered at by six enormous portraits, in another
room as large as the first, and having a view through its windows of
a mews; and as they so sat the wine loosened their tongues and they
talked of things and people, of which Mr. Petre knew some by repute,
others not at all. He answered gently such questions as his hostess
put to him (he sat upon her right); he assured her that he had had an
excellent crossing (for she asked him what kind of crossing it had
been); but he was careful not to risk any details, as he had not the
slightest idea that he had crossed anything from anywhere. He assured
her that he was familiar with London; he told her that he had not yet
been to any other house--and all this while he was in terror lest
some question more searching than the rest might challenge him and
make him flounder past recovery.
The meal dragged on. They had come to coffee. The banker had looked
at his watch, and found it was already twenty past two. At each
succeeding phrase his hostess put to him Mr. Petre came nearer and
nearer to breaking-point under the strain.
He was saved by a magic word. Some one at the end of the table had
pronounced three syllables: “Touaregs.” At that sound the whole
conversation was in a blaze. Here was something in which all held
communion! Here was a subject which struck right at the heart of
every man and woman in the room--except poor Mr. Petre, to whom every
allusion and phrase and term was Greek and nonsense; of not one could
he make anything; yet he was relieved to think that they were off on
matters which imperiled him no more.
As the fowls of a farmyard strut aimlessly back and forth picking
aimlessly at the ground after the convention of fowls, but very empty
of interest in their lives, so had the people round Mrs. Cyril’s
table spoken first of a play, then of a novel, then of a politician,
then of a criminal; and then, still more languidly, of a coming
eclipse. Their words were the more vapid and without stuff, the
more like sawdust, because each man and woman had in his heart one
object only dominating all, and that object was John K. Petre, high
above the few lords of the free modern world: fifty million pounds
incarnate, and come to dwell amongst us. There, before them, in the
flesh.
As the fowls of a farmyard will change their whole beings, clucking
and chattering prodigiously and scrambling together in a swarm, and
the whole flock alive with appetite when a handful of grain is thrown
down; so did the people round Mrs. Cyril’s table change inwardly and
outwardly at once upon the appearance of Touaregs. Their souls and
bodies became alive, their wings were flustered, their minds clashed
and struggled.
Touaregs would go farther. No, they had touched top mark. They were
steady. No, they were rocketing. It was astonishing how mulish the
French Government was about the concession. Not so mulish as all
that: they knew which side their bread was buttered. Marjorie Kayle
said that Billy Wootton had squared the French Commissioner. The
banker then told the company in general that they knew nothing about
it, and Mrs. Cyril eagerly quoted what Charlie Byrne had told her,
only that morning, of the new deposits; whereupon one of the ex-Lord
Chancellors who had not yet given tongue said with great good sense
that when a market ran away like that it didn’t matter what news
came or didn’t come. And the other Lord Chancellor agreed with him.
At which the kind old Cabinet Minister smiled, nodded, and said,
“Just so!” because he had usually found it safe to use these words on
things he couldn’t hear.
But if the kind old Cabinet Minister had no notion what it was all
about, he was an expert compared with Mr. Petre. Mr. Petre, though
his hearing was quite sound, might as well have been listening to a
babel of rooks. What were Touaregs? Where were the deposits? What
of? How did the French Government come in? How do you square a
Government? What was a Commissioner? Who was Billy Wootton and with
what instrument did he perform his rite? And up what did Touaregs go,
or down what, and in what were they steady? What was it all about?
The eager judgment and counter-judgment, argument, affirmation,
bluff, falsehoods, tips, went back and forth in an amazing game:
for it is a game where every one plays his own hand, and where the
number of relations is the square of all those present. But it is a
game which works to a climax and then halts or languishes; it is a
fire of thorns, burning very quickly to ash; and Mr. Petre, dazed in
the babel and thanking his stars that it prevented questions which
might have destroyed his peace, was alarmed to find that the subject
drooped and that gaps of silence appeared.
At any moment the whole talk might turn; it might be a point-blank
question on his home, or some other matter in which he would be
agonized to reply. He was desperately concluding that he must take
the first step and say something to lead Mrs. Cyril on till some word
of hers should tell him what he did not know, when, just in time,
at the end of a silence longer than the rest, the decisive thing
happened.
The young broker, Charlie Terrard, deliberately said, looking at Mr.
Petre with a slightly quizzical look:
“Well, sir, what do _you_ think of them?” To which he bluntly added,
“You know more about it than most of us.”
One or two of the less controlled faces took on an awkward look, the
others went suddenly blank. The two ex-Lord Chancellors exchanged
glances covertly and both half smiled:--certainly Terrard had done
a monstrous thing! But then, great men like John K. are often
straightforward, and sometimes eccentricity of that sort pleases
them. They all waited for the answer, not breathing.
Mr. Petre was in torture. If he admitted complete ignorance,
what would follow? If he pretended knowledge, he would blunder
irretrievably. They were not helping him as he had hoped; they were
putting him into a fearful crux.
He made one last desperate effort to fence. He leaned forward with a
poised and equal look, like a man who has something to say, and put
such a question as he hoped must draw information and help. He said:
“What exactly do you mean?”
Young Terrard, having gone so far, went farther, and said with awful
simplicity, “Why, Mr. Petre, I mean, would you buy or sell Touaregs?
Now, this afternoon?”
The silence turned to ebony; the daring seemed too great, and in her
heart of hearts Mrs. Cyril feared a scene. Then Mr. Petre spoke, and
decided his fate.
“I shall buy,” he said, firmly and distinctly; and then, not having
the fear of God before his eyes, and determined only on plunging
through and saving himself alive from further perils, he pronounced
these memorable words, “I shall buy largely.” He looked round at the
stupefied assembly and smiled a genial smile.
Mrs. Cyril pulled the team together. She said with a little laugh,
“That’s all right.” One of the ex-Lord Chancellors said, “Oh, curse
it, look at that!” It was a passing shower on the pane. The poetess
asked Marjorie Kayle whether she could give her a lift. Mrs. Cyril
protested that it was early, but her protest was hollow. They were
all, for some reason or other, suddenly filled with an itch for
movement; they would be off, and Mr. Petre wondered why.
Dear friends, it was because the earlier you get into a market, if it
is a rising market, the better for you, and every man and woman of
them knew it, except Mr. Petre himself.
Perfect love casteth out fear; and in their intense love for what
each of them was bent on doing, and on doing now, and on doing at
once, convention was hard pressed, and fear was routed. What was red
and burning in them all--except the banker, the broker, and the kind
old Cabinet Minister--was an intense desire for the telephone.
First come, first served. Mrs. Cyril made a move. Lucky woman, _her_
telephone was within five yards.
She begged the men to stay behind, and the banker would have been
willing enough. _He_ wasn’t going to bother; and the kind old Cabinet
Minister (who, with Mr. Petre himself, was alone innocent of motive
in that roomful) wanted a glass of port. Charlie Terrard said
without haste that he must go, so with more haste did the two ex-Lord
Chancellors, looking at their watches in unison, like twins.
[Illustration: _Mrs. Cyril leaping to the telephone._]
As for Mr. Petre, he snatched at this general movement as a relief,
and was one of the first to excuse himself hastily. To whom, indeed,
young Terrard as the party broke up, and when all had said good-by to
their hostess (herself as hungry for the telephone as is the saintly
heart for heaven), with continued boldness (he was so frank and so
charming) said as they went through the door together:
“Mr. Petre, are you going my way?”
“I am going to the Splendide,” said Mr. Petre, caught.
“I am going past there,” said young Terrard; it was true enough, for
he had determined to be going wherever Mr. Petre might deign to be
bound.
The short shower had been over some few minutes. They strolled
southward, and in a leisurely conversation full of simplicity and
good humor and good sense Charlie Terrard with his frank blue eyes
and frank yellow hair (that curled) had discovered before they
reached Piccadilly that Mr. Petre had fixed on no broker in town:
not one more than another; it was just like his eccentricities to
buy at random and refuse to be bound; it was another millionaire
eccentricity to buy through Charlie, and Charlie was only too happy
to oblige. It was like yet another of his eccentricities not to
appreciate, or to affect to ignore, the danger of delay and the
necessity for early action. It was again so like the man, with his
reputation for indifference to wealth, oddly coupled with a passion
for accumulation, to leave it almost at a hazard how much he would
buy and to affect indifference to the hour at which he bought. He
seemed (really it was monstrous) not to know the price that day, and
to have no idea of what they would open at on the morrow. It was
Charlie Terrard who spoke tentatively of fifty thousand shares, “I
think I shall make it fifty thousand,” he said. Did he say “shall”
or “should”? Mr. Petre passed the figure almost with boredom. He
heard also that they were wobbling round 2½. Were they? It was very
interesting, no doubt. But he didn’t follow it up.
“All right!” said Mr. Petre. “Fifty thousand.” He wasn’t clear
whether Charlie Terrard was going to buy from him, or on his own.
He wasn’t clear upon anything, except his mortal dread that any
argument or discussion might bring forth a Monster Question which
would give him away.
“All right. Fifty thousand.”
An astonishing passage; but things happen like that in this world.
No, they don’t? Yes, they _do_.
The conversation continued leisured down the comparative freedom
from jostle of St. James’ Street and Pall Mall. Those fools who had
broken away from Mrs. Cyril’s like fragments from an exploding shell
might think these two would feel as they did the need for hurry.
Charlie Terrard knew perfectly well there was none, so far as he
and the great John K. were concerned. Touaregs were stagnant, and
it wasn’t half a dozen wretched punters from among the smart that
would reinstate them. Mrs. Cyril was not poor, but women don’t do
such things on a large scale, and the largest of her scale would
be insignificant compared with what he had in mind. As for the two
ex-Lord Chancellors, they might potter about with their few pounds
and be damned. Marjorie Kayle was a matter of shillings, and she
would have to borrow those. They might make their little profits.
He didn’t grudge them. It wasn’t things of that sort that affected
a market. It was something very different; it was a mighty rumor,
and the confirmation of that rumor: that was what moved a stock. And
Charlie Terrard now had the lever of that solidly between his hands.
Charlie Terrard was wrong; not in his judgment of the non-effect of
Mrs. Cyril’s purchase and the rest in such a big market--that any
fool could have judged. He was wrong in his judgment of the relative
scales of their purchases. For of all those who were buying their
little packets at that very moment over the wire while he sauntered
at his ease southward and eastward with his millionaire, it was
Marjorie Kayle who had plunged most deeply. She had stopped to
telephone from the Tube station. But she had not telephoned to any
broker. She had telephoned to something better than that; she had
telephoned to Lord Ashington, and he would act for him and for her.
But even his purchase was nothing at all to what was coming.
Charlie Terrard and his Catch were at the door of the Splendide. He
looked over his shoulder as he went off and nodded gayly to Mr. Petre.
“I’ll get you fifty thousand. Round about 2½ one ought to”; and was
gone.
Charlie Terrard hastened; he was in the City just at a quarter past
three, and he had said behind closed doors, and to his partner alone,
what he had to say. Only after hours was the thing released.
With the next morning every one--that is, all the fifty or sixty who
count--was full of it. John K. Petre was buying Touaregs.
* * * * *
When Mr. Petre reached his room he realized that panic is a bad
adviser.
In his terror and shame lest that roomful should guess his
misfortune, he had not only put himself in peril--he did not know
the law on these things, but he thought that he might very well have
committed a crime--but he had also brought in, with that peril,
the peril of a complete discovery. For if things went badly, and
that mad order to buy left him under a heavy obligation--whenever a
settlement should come (and he know nothing about the times and the
seasons--evidently in that mysterious former life of his, whatever
else he had been, he had not been a stockbroker, and yet he had
evidently been very rich, and must have made investments: it was
all exceedingly bewildering)--and if his inability to meet the same
losses (and he was unable to meet anything more than a few pounds)
led to a prosecution, everything would come out in Court. Could the
law act, he wondered? He didn’t know. If it could and did, the law
would charge itself with finding out who he was, and all the misery
he had desired to avoid would be upon him with tenfold force. Not a
mere roomful of rich people would merely suspect him; he would be a
laughing stock for the whole of England. And heaven only knew what
friends or nearer ones would be involved in the affair. It was too
late to undo it. The thing had gone through.
For a moment he had a wild idea of flight. Then he remembered the
diminishing sum that stood between him and disaster. He would do
better than that. He would hide himself. With infinite precaution he
would hide himself, until there was news one way or the other of what
had happened to that dreadful order for Touaregs.
And again, what were Touaregs? He was quite clear upon what shares
were; he was quite clear upon the buying and selling of the same;
perhaps he had cautiously speculated in a few hundreds once or twice.
No incident of the sort had any place whatever in his mind to-day,
and yet the terms seemed familiar enough to him. But fifty thousand!
And at what price? Two and one-half pounds, shillings, francs? What
had he let himself in for?... It maddened him.
A Bradshaw was part of the furniture of his room. He spread out the
map, noted affectionately one of those little curling lines which
leave a main railway and stop abruptly in the Wolds. He took the name
of the village; he packed his bag, looked up a train; he had half
an hour. He went down to leave his orders. He would keep the room;
nothing was to be forwarded to him; to any enquiry they were to say
that he had gone out of town, and were not to know when he would
return.
It gave Mr. Petre a moment’s relief in his suffering to notice with
what deference his old friend the clerk noted so strange a plan,
without deposit, without explanation. He was more convinced than ever
that this unknown Self was of vast consequence. Then, after all this
trouble, a new thought struck him. Would it not be better to wait an
hour or two? Could he not discover Terrard’s address and see whether
it had really gone through? Such a man must be in the reference
books. The miserable man hesitated, irresolute, when a shock hurled
him into a decision. He saw, standing between himself and the light,
a most extraordinary figure, tall, aquiline, with intense dark eyes,
a waxed and forbidding mustache, black (for it was dyed), and an odd
snarling way of speech, of which its owner was profoundly innocent,
and which, indeed, he took for the common tone of a man about town.
In that blotted-out mystery of the past he must--this sinister
apparition must--have known Mr. Petre abominably well. A light of
recognition shone in his eye. He strode up, a menacing smile upon his
lips; he addressed Mr. Petre with a dreadful familiarity; he even did
what your distant acquaintance commonly forbears to do, he darted out
a forefinger, thrust it out against Mr. Petre’s side, and winked.
“Not stopping here, eh? Not quite your style? Where’ve you been all
this time, eh? Hiding?”
Mr. Petre’s heart stopped beating.
“No,” he said, in a strained voice which he could hardly bring out.
“No ... I’m not stopping here.” Then he dashed out through the door,
leapt into a cab and was gone.
But in that little space to Waterloo, and in the train for two hours,
his terror grew and grew. What had he done? What had he been? What
thieves’ kitchen had he known? Who was that damnable stranger? How
many men possessed what secrets of his life--and he possessing not
the simplest, not the most innocuous detail of it?
Yes; he must, he must, he must discover; but he must discover before
any fatal guess, any frightened random answer of his to some chance
question, should destroy him.
* * * * *
One thing consoled him; the valiant loyalty of that Registration
Clerk at the Splendide, whom now he felt to be his own brother in a
world of misery and fear. For as Mr. Petre had leaped into that cab
he had shot a glance at the dreadful Mephistopheles, and had seen him
asking a question at the desk, and had seen the noble official, who
had all power in his hands, shake his read resolutely and turn away.
* * * * *
But the whole thing was getting worse and worse; those brief hours,
not forty-eight hours, only the second night after the blow had
fallen--and already he was in the net, caught.
But the inn at the little place, when he reached it, comforted him.
Surely in that past he had been of the English country and not of the
town, still less of any foreign outlandish place, America or another.
The simplicity and the goodness of the people wrapped him round like
a blanket against the cold of the abominable world. Here, he thought,
he could rest. And rest he did, sleeping deeply, exhausted, and woke
to the new day less troubled, and, to the next, reposed.
CHAPTER III
John K. Petre was buying Touaregs.
The news had penetrated to a little room, paneled in the dark oak of
Shakespeare’s day; for the paneling had come from Arden out of old
Kirlby Hall when they pulled it down. It was half lit by four soft
candles standing on a glorious table of two hundred years. They shone
on silver as old; on quills ranged in order by a royal inkstand. Over
the door hung a deep curtain of tapestry which clothed the place with
silence. All the air of that room was an air of lineage and endurance
and repose.
Yet it was but a backwater in the noisy, the sordid, the very modern
iron and concrete offices of the _Messenger_, the offices of that
great newspaper which was the Duke’s instrument of power.
The Duke himself sat there at that table, which in his heart he
felt to be a desk. A very large cigar was cocked up at an angle
in the far corner of his considerable mouth, his flabby-fleshed,
artificially determined face was bent over the proofs of an article
which a secretary had written but himself had signed--for he could
read better than he could write--and he was puzzling as to what he
could print above his name and what he could not. He puzzled long;
for he had got the problem wrong before now and had paid dear for the
blunder.
People said that the Duke deserved his position; and when for the
first time in so many years Mrs. Fossilton (whom he had made Prime
Minister) had advised the King to give him that supreme title,
and to honor Commerce with it, men, though they thought the thing
revolutionary--in our time every new step looks revolutionary--at
least admitted that the man had made himself, and rightly revered his
ruthless expression, his flair for any weakness in others, and his
rapid clutch at money.
He had begun life at what is called “the bottom of the ladder”--selling
matches as a lad in Melbourne, and an orphan at that, under the plain
name of Higgs.
Between those early years and his appearance as an agent, humble
enough, put on to bully the smaller fry and to watch the larger fry
at Marogavatcho’s place in Cairo, there is a gap. It is presumed
that even as a boy his strength of will, his grasp of opportunity,
had served him. He had perhaps made a beginning by some rapid piece
of minor acquisition--we have no particulars--that had set him upon
the status of possible clothes and possible grooming; from that,
no doubt, he had gone on. At any rate, he had got somehow to know
William Carter when William Carter meant so much in Australia, and
yet William Carter wished him away. It was William Carter who had
casually dropped his name as a pushing, energetic young fellow for
whom some little job might be found, and from the Australian Branch
they had sent him to Cairo; again because William Carter said he
would do as well as another. It was in Cairo that he worked what is
still known there as “Higgs’ Great Double Cross,” the details of
which he never himself explained. I have had them given me by those
who understood them (and they were usually given with a good deal
of chuckling admiration not unmixed with fear) but they were quite
beyond my comprehension.
At any rate, it was a quick rise, and he was in London with a fortune
before three more years were out--in 1936; he was then thirty-five
years old. This idea of buying the _Messenger_ came to him late.
He had gone through the usual mill, first in Parliament, then a
baronetcy, keeping himself to himself, never speaking, but doing many
a generous deed of which the public heard nothing, especially among
the politicians of his own group. He had even (it was said) paid a
regular subsidy to one of the most worthy and the most needy of them.
His first peerage was startling; but it would not have been if his
private activities had been more publicly known. He had preferred to
avoid publicity.
He enjoyed no increase of rank until, his fortieth year long passed,
he had purchased the great daily, and there, as in everything he did,
he succeeded. It was after the negotiations which established Mrs.
Fossilton in office that the last step was taken and that a new
ducal title, an honor which had been for so long unknown--longer than
men could remember--was suddenly given him.
It did not mean what it would have meant in the old days before the
War, days which those of us who are now not so far on in middle
age can still remember, but of which the younger generation knows
nothing. But he wanted it, and therefore it was right that he should
have it. There was no great harm done. It is true he had an heir, but
the boy had been born late in his life, and had never known anything
but the atmosphere of a Public School, so it was safe enough; and
though he had built his own place in the country, instead of buying
it, it did not swear with his rank.
He finished reading the proof, ticked it off, and rang. He asked for
his secretary, and when the secretary came he said:
“Say, see here, boy, how’s all this shout ’bout John K. Petre and
Touaregs?”
“It’s quite true,” said the secretary, who was where he was because
he knew everything and knew it rightly, and who had become so
necessary that he had promotion and now said “Duke” instead of “Your
Grace.”
“How d’yer know it?” said his Grace, mumbling, with the big cigar
jerked to the other corner of his mouth, but by a feat of dexterity,
learned in a distant clime, kept admirably at its exalted angle.
“Oh, it’s everywhere, Duke,” said the younger man quietly, lighting
a cigarette without leave, and sitting down.
“Quite sure, now, boy?”
“Quite.”
There was a pause during which the Duke frowned thoughtfully. Then he
took the cigar out of his mouth between the first and middle finger
of his right hand--a gesture which he only used in great moments--and
said:
“Well, let ’em rip. I’m not touching the blamed things, anyway,” and
having said that, he stopped frowning.
“He’s here in London,” went on the secretary, smiling slightly and
watching his master.
“Here!” shouted the Duke suddenly. “Here? In London? Have they got
it?” He jumped up in his excitement. “Have they got it upstairs?” He
had his hand out for the bell.
The secretary began: “If I were you, Duke ...” but the Duke cut him
short and snapped back, “Y’re not me, so that’s that.” Then as though
he were ordering the least of his servants, “Send me Batterby, and
keep yer mouth shut.”
The secretary rose quietly and without offense--he was used to it;
and Batterby was shown in. Batterby wondered what it could be. He
stood humbly turning his greasy soft hat round and round in his hands
with nervousness, looking up humbly once or twice into his master’s
face. The Duke leaned back with his legs crossed and the big cigar
still going.
“Batterby,” said the chief, “did yer know about John K.?”
“Yes, y’r Grace,” said Batterby, almost inaudibly.
“And yer didn’t tell me, nor no one in this shop?”
“No, y’r Grace.”
“Well, it’s the boot, Batterby,” said the Duke genially, “De Order of
de Boot. D’yer hear?” He uncrossed his legs and turned to the table
again.
The unfortunate Batterby tried to stammer out, “Oh, your Grace, I
understood....”
His master turned round like a barking dog: “Git out!” he said.
“D’yer hear? Git out!” And Batterby got out, still humbly, and
went through the luxurious little corridor, past the outer office,
stumbled down the broad dirty stone stairs of the place; he was as
near tears as a man of his age can be. He wondered how he would dare
to face the little house in Golder’s Green. It was ten o’clock.
He elbowed his way into the “Dragon” under the arch; there were
always some of the fellows there, and he began to take something for
his despair, and to talk shop with the others of that sad, drifting,
lost crowd of the newspaper men, the publicists, the slaves.
Meanwhile in that luxurious little room a hundred yards away the Duke
had sent for his secretary again.
“Whose to worry John K.?” he said.
The secretary’s quiet reply surprised him.
“Don’t send any one, Duke; don’t have a word of it in the paper.”
[Illustration: _His Grace the Proprietor of the “Messenger”
conferring the Order of the Boot on Mr. Batterby, of Golder’s Green
in the County of Middlesex._]
The master of so many lives had become used to such comment. Time and
again it had saved him from pitfalls and from crashes. Though he made
up for it by occasional violence, advice from that quarter, when he
got it in a certain tone, he never dared neglect; but he growled and
he wanted to know the reasons.
Then did his Grace’s secretary gently, evenly and without embroidery
tell him the story of what John K. Petre had done to his competitor,
the _Chicago Judge_, when the _Chicago Judge_ had opened its mouth
too wide. After that he told another story of what John K. Petre had
done to the man on the Riviera who had let the newspapers know the
name of his guest. And the Duke in his heart, though he knew very
well that the _Messenger_ was something bigger than the _Chicago
Judge_, and that he counted more in what the modern world reveres,
and had more power over it than any host upon the Riviera, yet felt a
certain chill in his breast, and there tolled in it the knell of that
sentence which everybody used when John K. was on the carpet, “You
can’t fight fifty million pounds.”
“It’s a scoop,” he said bitterly.
The secretary shook his head: “It’s ruin and damnation!” Then he
explained himself. “Where’s the scoop? He wouldn’t give an interview;
and just to say he’s in London--what’s the good of that?”
“Lord, man!” shouted the Duke suddenly, “doesn’t he ever want a write
up?”
“I think he manages to do without them,” said the secretary drily.
The cigar was finished and the Duke threw it away. He handed his coat
to the secretary without true courtesy, and the secretary, who knew
exactly how far to go, held it for him while he put it on.
“The man’s mad,” said the Duke, as he struggled into the coat.
“They all say that,” said the secretary, pulling the coat collar down
and valeting his master as in duty bound.
“They’re ruddy well right,” said the Duke, and he stamped out to his
private lift.
* * * * *
In the “Dragon” Batterby told his tale. There was nothing to be lost
by telling it: there was everything to gain. He had his value. Some
one might yet take him on.
“You’ve got a contract?” said a friend sympathetically.
“Yes,” said poor Batterby over his second. “What’s the good of that?”
“Why, it’s always something,” said a third. “The _Messenger’s_ always
on the nail. You’ll get your check to-morrow morning.”
“What’s the good of that?” said Batterby again gloomily, as a distant
member of the group ordered another round.
“Room to turn round,” said the first friend.
Then up spoke a little man whom they all knew but whom they none
of them knew enough; he was kind, he was reticent, and he had a
reputation for getting things done.
“I’ll go round to Jerry now,” said the little man.
“What’s the good of that?” said Batterby for the third time.
“You’re an ungrateful beast,” said the little man. “The good is he’ll
see you.”
“And nothing’ll come of that,” said Batterby again into his glass.
But the little man never minded ingratitude or folly or human grief;
he enjoyed doing things.
“I bet you I’m back here in twenty minutes, and that Jerry is seeing
you in half an hour,” he said.
“Jerry’s not there this time of night,” said Batterby, still
determined upon woe.
“Jerry’s always there,” said the little man, and he disappeared.
He was back as he had said, and in less than twenty minutes. Batterby
had got no farther than his fifth; but in the extravagance of penury
he ordered another round for them all.
“You’re to see Jerry now, at once,” he said. “Up you go.”
Batterby would have discussed, but the other pushed him good-naturedly
forward; and it was as his benefactor had said. Within half an hour
of the first suggestion Batterby was sitting comfortably in a chair
which Sir Jeremiah Walton had courteously pushed toward him with his
own hands. Sir Jeremiah was a great editor. He knew the House of
Commons above and Fleet Street below. He had wanted Batterby for
years. Batterby had the reputation for finding out things, and the
right things, better and quicker than any newspaper man in the
“Street.”
“Well now, Mr. Batterby, this is what one may call sudden like,”
said Sir Jeremiah genially. “Ef I had known as you were free, why,
man”--then he gave a cunning glance at the simple face before him,
and said, “Ye’ve not been trying on any games, ’ave yer?”
“I was told you wanted me, sir,” said Batterby. “I don’t know what
you mean by games.” He was still sore.
“No offense, Mr. Batterby,” said Sir Jeremiah. “No offense,” and he
handed his cigarette case to him to emphasize the good feeling. Mr.
Batterby took a cigarette. “So you’ve left the _Messenger_, ’ave you?
That’s what they tell me. Well, I don’t suppose you’d mind our crowd.”
“No, sir,” said Batterby, taking care not to grasp the lifebuoy with
too much enthusiasm.
Sir Jeremiah laughed pleasantly.
“Thought they could make a story about John K., did they?” he said.
“Funny how child-like people do stop! I wouldn’t have thought it of
’em. Of the Duke, I mean. ’Owever, you can’t ever tell. Now, if I
_’ad_ been asked,” went on Sir Jeremiah with the happiness of his
very considerable fortune spread all over his face, “if I _’ad_ been
asked what risky thing I _wouldn’t_ do, just now this minute, I
should ’a said, touching Touaregs; and if I had been asked what was
suicide, _I_ should ’a said, touching John K. D’yer get me?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Batterby, thawing a little. “That’s what I
thought, sir. I told his Grace that.”
“Ah? And what did ’e say?”
[Illustration: _Sir Jeremiah Walton, God’s Servant._]
“Well, sir,” said Batterby slowly, recalling the exact terms of the
conversation in the inner room of the _Messenger_, “his Grace gave
me to understand that he greatly needed this piece of news, and he
told me that he could not conceal his regret that I had not imparted
it to him. I told him that I thought I had acted for the best, and
he answered: ‘I am sure, Batterby, you did what you thought best.
But don’t let it occur again.’ Well, sir, I may have been wrong, but
that’s a tone I am not used to; so what I answered was this. I said:
‘Well, your Grace, I am afraid if I don’t give satisfaction here I am
not where I should be.’ ‘Oh, don’t say that,’ he said; but I was firm
and I said: ‘Yes, your Grace, I don’t say which is to blame, but I do
say that I must regard my connection with the _Messenger_ as being
at an end,’ and then, sir, I went out. You mustn’t blame me, Sir
Jeremiah, I think I was acting as one gentleman should to another.”
During this long speech Sir Jeremiah Walton had put his head more and
more on one side and watched with greater and greater interest the
features and the delivery of Batterby. But all he said was: “You were
right about John K., Batterby. And s’posing we wanted a story from
yer to-night, Batterby, what could yer give us?”
“Well, Sir Jeremiah,” answered Batterby, thinking slowly, “there have
been no letters or anything between us.”
“That’s all right,” said Sir Jeremiah, waving his hand. “We’ll ’ave
that settled before you leave,” and he named a figure.
“I have got what they’re saying of the Duke’s own last little
affair,” said Batterby at last. “The Hotel in Rome. Him being kicked
down the main staircase,” he explained with a beautiful candor.
“Don’t want that,” said Sir Jeremiah, shaking his head, but this
time laughing openly. “Dog don’t eat dog.”
“I’ve got the story they’re sending to Paris to-night, which was to
have come out first in Paris and then in London next day. They’ve
squared the _Messenger_, Sir Jeremiah. If you like it you can have
it.”
“Eh?” snapped that politician eagerly. “Not the Foreign Office
Note?” Batterby nodded. “By Go--Gum! That’s the style!” The knight
was radiant. He was so moved that he opened a bottle of ginger ale,
filled a glass and offered it to his guest. “That’s the style! Ye’re
a trump, Batterby! Ye’re a trump!”
“Best respects,” said Batterby, lifting the ginger ale and falling
into the manner of his youth.
“Granted, I am sure,” said Sir Jeremiah courteously. “We don’t allow
anything stronger than that, yer know, Batterby.” And he winked, “Not
’ere, any’ow.” And he winked again.
“I know, sir, I know,” answered the other, conscious that the
“Dragon” was within call.
Thus did Mr. Batterby recover what he had lost and rise from where
he had fallen; and thus were the fortunes of one man unmade and made
in one night, and the Duke’s reputation put in peril and just saved,
and the secrets of Great Britain prematurely disclosed; and all this
through the unconscious action of poor Mr. Petre, who would not have
hurt a fly, and who at that hour of the night was already sleeping
his good sleep down in the peace of the Hampshire country-side.
* * * * *
There is among the many departments of our well-ordered State a
department which would be known if we were Chinese as “The Board
of Things to be Known and Not to be Known.” Its seeming simple and
deceptive name wild horses shall not tear from my sealed lips; and
the reader must content himself with surmise.
Over this small but exceedingly important and admirably efficient
cell of the executive presides a man of good birth, education and
manners (for it is a permanent). He is elderly and a little jaded,
but astonishingly on the spot.
Some hours before those much greater men, the Duke and the Knight,
had been exchanging civil nothings with the ingenuous Batterby,
this permanent official (K.C.B., Porter Mansions, £3,500, Eton and
Trinity. Recreation, Golfing. Clubs, Travelers’, Blue Posts) was
saying not more than half a dozen phrases to an equal in social rank,
an inferior in years and office.
“You know that damned Yankee’s in town?”
“Yes.”
“They’ve told you it’s the usual note?”
“Oh! Yes--and Jessie Malvers said she particularly hoped....”
“That’s all right. She’s not the only one. You sent round to the
Press Department?”
“Yes. Nothing’ll come out--as usual. But I don’t think we need worry
much. He’s put the fear of God into everybody.”
“He was at Celia Cyril’s, all the same--at lunch to-day,” said the
older man, getting up and mechanically settling a sheaf of paper on
his table, as he prepared to go out. “His name’s not to get about,
in spite of that. I don’t think he’ll go out much. You’ve had the
division warned?”
“Johnson saw to that. They’ve got a plain clothes man both sides and
another following.”
“That’s all right,” said the superior. “Going my way?”
“Yes.”
They took down their hats and coats from the lobby and sauntered off
side by side till they came to the Horse Guards’ Parade, and so up
the Duke of York’s Steps to the Club.
* * * * *
That same night a young and guileless constable of Division Phi, his
head relieved of its preposterous helmet and his hands swinging at
ease between his knees as he sat on a bench with betters, enjoying a
brief and well-earned leisure, said: “That foreign millionaire at the
Splendide, him as they call....”
“Never mind what they call him, me lad,” broke in a voice of
authority, years and stripes, “the less _you_ call him anything the
better for you. Them’s orders.” And a deep silence reigned.
* * * * *
In Bolters, oldest and noblest of clubs, the young ignoble Algernon
piped out, “I say, Breeches, is it true this millionaire fellah....”
But him also Breeches, irreverently so called, a man of much
acquaintance and worldly sense, rapidly led aside, and, far out of
earshot of all others, said in a low grumble: “You have the sense to
keep quiet about that, about him, and you won’t regret it. Don’t you
remember what happened to poor Harry?” At which Algernon marched off
dazed but obedient.
[Illustration: _Minatory but Patient Admonishment of the Ignoble
Algernon by Breeches of Bolter’s Club, St. James’ (S.W.1)._]
CHAPTER IV
Mr. Petre, settled in that country inn, felt for the first time in
those days a relief from tension. He began to realize how intolerable
that tension had been, and a plan vaguely formed itself in his mind
to bury himself altogether; perhaps even to go off abroad, take
another name, and be free of worries which were growing intolerable,
and of a problem that could not be solved. It was even a comfort
to him to believe, as he had come to believe, that he could never
recover himself, his name, or his past. Some deeply-rooted but no
longer conscious habit of mind made him take for granted that his
livelihood would necessarily be provided. It was well for him that he
had not to put that illusion to the test!
He enjoyed a deep night’s rest, and by the next morning had already
determined to look up a train for Southampton and the hours of the
boats, when the morning paper, which waited upon his table, turned
his mind suddenly into another channel. For on the last page, where
he had casually opened it, he saw a violent headline: “BLAZING
TOUAREGS,” and read the astonishing series of prices soaring up,
in the course of the day before, the morrow of his leaving town:
2⅝-⅞, 3, 3½, 3, 3⅛, 3, 3¼, 3¾, 3½. He read the comment of the City
Editor--the comment of a man ignorant, puzzled, and pretending in
his style omniscience. Some one had got early news of a new French
surrender; a new pocket of the deposits had been found--it was said.
It was better to await confirmation. The sudden rise seemed hardly
justified--and so on. The City Editor was groping. Yet what had
happened was simple enough. First had come a few little heaves. Every
one in that luncheon-room--except the banker--had given their orders.
Even the kind old Cabinet Minister, who, driving away with his niece,
the banker’s wife, had with difficulty grasped what was toward,
was dragged in. For that excellent woman had bawled at him as they
spun away from Mrs. Cyril’s door, “Uncle Tom, buy Touaregs!”--and
Uncle Tom, with his gentle, futile smile had said, “Eh, what?” The
lady had repeated in a scream, “Buy Touaregs!” and the word “buy”
had penetrated the passage of that senile ear. A younger gleam had
illumined the statesman’s eye; he had said almost briskly, “Eh,
what? Buy what?” His niece sinking back pettishly on the cushion
had muttered, “Silly old ass!” Then, remembering a common interest,
she had braced herself to a supreme effort and roared, “TOUAREGS!”
and seeing ineptitude spreading once more over her uncle’s finely
inherited features, had taken a little gold pencil and a diary from
her bag, had scribbled in shaky letters to the bumping of the
machine, “TOUAREGS”--torn off the page, and thrust it into his hand.
He nodded. At last he understood. And she dropped him at his door
just in time to get the order through.
Charlie Terrard had done better. Better than the banker’s wife,
better than the kindly old Cabinet Minister, better than the two
ex-Lord Chancellors, better than Mrs. Cyril herself; better even than
Marjorie Kayle; better, far better, than the solid banker himself,
who as he trudged manfully back to his office had turned the thing
over in his mind and had determined with sound business sense that
when a man like John K. Petre said publicly that he was buying it
meant quite certainly that he was unloading. Therefore had that
banker shrewdly refrained from touching the affair and thereby missed
a pile.
The stock, still sticking, had taken its first lift in that last hour
of Wednesday, and next morning the public came tumbling in. Touaregs
went soaring up at once like a happy soul released from the bonds of
flesh. They grew strong and winged, they stormed heaven. The week-end
passed in a fever. With the first bids of Monday they were shooting
out of sight. Four and one-eighth to one-fourth at the opening, four
and one-half, four and three-fourths--my word, _Five_! Five and a
_quarter_? Six ... could they have touched Six? Yes,--and passed it.
Charlie Terrard before that Monday’s business closed was alarmed.
They got quite out of hand; at any moment there might be trouble.
He blamed himself for not selling; but the fever had touched even
him, and he waited another night. With Tuesday the curve was still
slightly on the rise, though now and then wobbly. Rather late, on a
falling market, Charlie Terrard sold. What he himself made I have
never discovered; it was very pretty. But for Mr. John K. Petre’s
account there was a clear profit of £73,729, 16s. 3d. Then came the
very full reaction, with which these pages have nothing to do; and
in many a lonely parsonage, in many a quiet country cottage of the
purest Drury Lane, gentlemen and ladies who had bought at anything
between 5 and 6¼ were hastening to cut losses in time--and by their
eagerness and multitude hastening those losses--as Touaregs dropped
down again to something near their true, their original, their
humbler level.
Away down in Hampshire Mr. Petre watched those figures with a vague,
imperfect comprehension of their meaning; but he had at least a
general impression that he was safe. Of when settling day might be,
of what settling day might mean, he knew nothing; but he saw that
something had happened which--unless Terrard was hopeless--made him
secure. His first wild thought of flight left him altogether. He
determined to return; and only when he had made that determination
did it occur to him that if he had fled he would have come in a very
few weeks to the end of his tether.
He made no haste to get back to London, though the hotel was again
his goal. The freedom from haunting terrors of publicity and pursuit
was grateful. He stopped at one place and another, drinking in the
spring. And when he got back to the Splendide he was refreshed and
strengthened to meet whatever might be awaiting him, though his
nervousness returned as he got back into his room and looked for his
correspondence.
There was only one letter, in the business envelope of Blake and
Blake, upon his table; and within it a very few formal lines, and a
check for £73,729, 16s. 3d.
* * * * *
The importance of any sum of money differs with the habits of the
recipient. It is possible that Mr. Petre in the full knowledge of
what and who he was would have found that sum sufficient, but nothing
overwhelming. It is possible that it might have seemed to him an
incredible fortune. If he were what all indications made him out to
be, it was but one fairly successful minor transaction. If he were
what a very vague, very confused, but permanent profound sense warned
him that he was, it was a miracle, changing all his prospects.
But neither the one attitude nor the other was that of Mr. Petre as
he spread out the check before him and stared rather stupidly at the
figures. His preoccupation was not with the magnitude of the sum,
nor with its comparative insignificance. His preoccupation was with
a much simpler question--of what he should do with that little bit
of pink paper. He knew, just as he knew the Strand, and the map of
England, and Bradshaw and the rest of it--though he did not know
himself--that there were such things as banks and banking accounts,
and that pieces of paper of this kind went through that machine. But
he stood like a child in the matter of how to begin.
Here again the simplest course would have been to have looked up
Terrard in the book, met him and consulted him. But that would have
been to give himself away, and to open that series of questions the
starting of which he had come to dread as a man dreads an operation.
He did what all men do when they are quite at a loss. He plunged.
He put that check into an hotel envelope, put the envelope in his
pocket, walked aimlessly through half a dozen turnings, and entered
the doors of the first bank he saw. It was a branch, neither small
nor great, doing business briskly in a quarter of large shops; one of
a score of such branches in central London, nothing more.
The furniture was familiar to him, for banks are all upon a pattern;
and the brass railings and the mahogany desks and the glass
swing doors and the little army of clerks all scribbling in huge
leather-bound books, gave him, he knew not why, an odd association
of discomfort and dread: of irritation and humiliation: of worries.
But the feeling was slight, a long and far-off thing stirring in the
depths of his mind. He went straight up to a worthy young gentleman
in round spectacles adorning a face like the full moon, who was
rapidly counting slips with a dampened finger behind the railings. He
simply pushed over the check.
[Illustration: “_... Spectacles adorning a face like the full moon._”]
The worthy young gentleman in round spectacles, mild, moonlike, but
precise, turned it over, shot a glance at the back, pushed it back
to the newcomer and said:
“Isn’t endorsed.”
Mr. Petre looked at him with a vacant look of perplexed inquiry.
“Are you the payee?” said the humble associate of international
finance, with just as much impatience as he ever allowed himself. But
Mr. Petre boggled at the word “payee.”
“Are you the person to whom the check is made out?”
He understood that! “Yes,” said Mr. Petre.
“Do you want to pay it in?”
“I--I suppose so,” said Mr. Petre.
How great is England! The young man went off with no more concern
than if he were carrying a postage stamp. He was absent about five
minutes, during which time Mr. Petre stood gently drumming his
fingers upon the counter and wondering what would happen next.
No one had overheard the conversation except a porter in gorgeous
uniform, and he saw nothing extraordinary in it. He was used to
eccentrics of all kinds, to millionaires in tatters and to frauds and
to plain fools; they passed before him in an unceasing stream.
The moonlike youth returned.
“Do you wish to open an account?” he said.
“Open?” said Mr. Petre.
“Do you wish this check,” said the selenian patiently, “to be put
to your credit? Do you wish to draw against it ... when it has been
cleared?”
“Credit” was clear enough. “Draw” was ambiguous. “Cleared” was quite
meaningless.
“I want it to go in here,” said Mr. Petre simply.
His friend (or opponent) on the other side of the counter sighed
and once more disappeared. He was not absent so long this time, and
when he returned there was clearly apparent, in spite of his immense
reserve, something of awe in his manner, and a great deal of new
courtesy.
“Mr. Petre,” he said, in a respectful, very low voice, “the manager
would like to see you.”
A wild dread pierced like a lance through Mr. Petre’s inmost soul.
He had an impulse to dash through the doors--but he was no longer
young, and he feared pursuit; so he said “Yes,” in a voice which he
prevented from trembling by an assumption of boldness, and just at
that moment a very charming, quietly dressed, ironical, smiling man
in the thirties, spare, and with a high voice, came up welcoming him
and saying:
“Oh, Mr. Petre? Mr. Petre, I presume? I wonder whether you could be
so kind--whether you could spare a moment! The manager would really
be very much honored....”
Mr. Petre followed him mechanically through a door, down a deeply
carpeted passage on the walls of which were three engravings of the
Mother Bank in the City of London; one dated 1815, one 1852, and the
last 1930; they displayed a progressive decay in the architectural
sense of bankers. The charming man pushed open a further door with
grace, with decision, with reverence, and Mr. Petre found himself in
the presence of a very fine old English gentleman, solid, rubicund,
who stood up solemnly at his entry and welcomed him with a sensible
apology for taking up his time. His high forehead witnessed to a
lifetime of profound thought, his white beard to careful grooming.
[Illustration: “_His forehead witnessed to a lifetime of profound
thought, his white beard to careful grooming._”]
“It is very good of you indeed, Mr. Petre; very good of you, I am
sure. Pray take this chair.” And he put a piece of sacred furniture,
preserved from the beginnings of the Mother House, in front of the
excellent coal fire which burned in an Adams fireplace, preserved
from the beginnings of the Mother Bank. It was of marble; a
sacrificial frieze supported upon Doric columns. Above it stood a
clock, preserved from the beginnings of the Mother Bank, gilt, and
supported by a figure of Time with a scythe and an hour-glass, signed
“Letellier, de Paris; au Palais Royal,” in thin, careful script; the
whole under a glass case.
The two men sat down, and the manager opened genially.
“Well, Mr. Petre, we had no idea you were in London.”
“No,” answered Mr. Petre, after a pause; then quite idiotically. “I
mean yes.” He was on the point of adding the day of his arrival, when
the terror of inquisition leaped up before him, and he was silent.
“We are greatly honored, Mr. Petre,” said the manager, thrusting
the tips of his fingers together and separating them once or twice
in habitual fashion. “Ah, by the way....” he rang a bell. “Have you
given your signature, Mr. Petre?”
What responsibility was this? But Mr. Petre did as he was bid;
he rose, wrote on a slip of paper which the attendant put before
him, “John K. Petre” in a bold hand. It was the second time he had
inscribed that fatal name. It was his now and on record. He was in
for it. But anyhow, what did it matter? There was no harm done. He
was sure of the Petre, and John K. was what they had recognized
at the hotel. It was as John K. that he was known there. An odd
combination “John K.” He must remember to avoid the mere initials, J.
K. He must keep to the “John.” Mentally he performed the operation
half a dozen times, and the signature “John K. Petre” rose before his
inward eye, certain and fixed.
So did it rise, you may well believe, before the inward eye of that
happy manager. It rose before his inward eye surrounded by an aureole
of heavenly light: letters to be counted among the stars. There was a
pause.
“They are preparing your book, Mr. Petre,” said his host, at length.
“K ... is?”
By a happy providence Mr. Petre, on the point of answering, pulled
up. He might--such is the particularity of men when they begin to use
their imagination--have made a conversation by surmise. He might have
guessed Kenneth or Kaspar, and Lord knows what would have happened
then! for there was no John Kenneth or John Kaspar in the empyrean
of high finance. But the playful Dæmon who had been given his
destinies for a pastime shielded him from such a blunder. He remained
obstinately dumb. The manager respected his reticence. He sent out
a brief note, and in the depths of that vast mansion of gold a serf
engrossed in fine black letters upon a parchment cover, bold and
triumphant, “JOHN K. PETRE.” Nothing more. And what bank, let alone
what obscure branch bank, could want more?
“And what kind of check book shall I send for, Mr. Petre?” said the
manager kindly, as though he were offering a choice of viands.
Once more the playful immortal shielded his favorite son.
For Mr. Petre had not the least idea what he should reply, nor
whether he was being asked to make a choice between various colors,
or various shapes, or sundry magic names. And he would have stumbled
and blundered in his reply, had not the other immediately continued:
“Shall we say fifty crossed to order? It is much the more convenient
form for us, is it not?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre, with dignity and emphasis. “Fifty crossed to
order.” Then he fell silent again.
“Of course, Mr. Petre,” continued the great man, with a touch of
nervousness strange in such a voice and so well poised a mouth, “we
shall be happy to do anything you may require during your stay in
London. Any transaction or--ah--I won’t say _advice_,”--and here he
smiled with dignity--“but any--well--anything you may require.”
“Yes, certainly,” said Mr. Petre. “Certainly. By all means.” He could
hardly say less.
The pause lengthened. Mr. Petre rose. His host rose with him. “A
thousand thanks,” he said, “Mr. Petre. We shall only be too pleased.
Too pleased.” He nodded, made the slightest possible inclination of
his head, and Mr. Petre bowed and was gone. He was conducted back
with great ceremony through the deeply-carpeted corridor, past the
three engravings of the Mother Bank in 1815, 1852 and Present Day;
and as he would have gone hurriedly out past the counter, was gently
detained while his courteous, his even obsequious, guardian handed
him an oblong check book, which he thrust hurriedly into his pocket
as he disappeared.
So ended the first episode in a great career.
* * * * *
When Mr. Petre got back to his room in the hotel he first of all
bolted the door--he could hardly have told you why; it was through
an odd feeling that he was about to do something that would make him
ridiculous if he were caught at it. Then he pulled out the check
book from his pocket and looked at it closely and curiously inside
and out. He sat down at the table and opened the check book, holding
it down flat with either hand and gazing at the first form and its
counterfoil.
As he did so a perfect familiarity returned, though no personal
memory whatsoever: only that same odd feeling of ill ease which had
suddenly struck him when he came into the bank, and which was renewed
in him at the aspect of this banking thing. Whatever he had been,
banks or banking had in some way bothered him. He sighed, and then
more cheerfully considered that after all even this dim sensation was
a kind of clew. He mused. Perhaps he had been--perhaps he was--a
very great banker somewhere or other, but a banker who had got into
trouble: what kind of trouble? The question cast him down again. Then
his spirits rose as he recalled the way he had been treated. Whoever
he was, the trouble either was not very great or had not yet come
out. It suddenly struck him as he thus pondered over the simplicity
of the affair that he had been a fool not to cast out feelers. A
few very discreet allusions, a few apparently innocent questions
cautiously framed, might have led him to know more. He would rather,
far rather, have died (such was the odd effect of his misfortune)
than let a human being guess it even in the most distant fashion. But
if he led them on...? He would think about it.... He would frame a
few phrases and be ready to bring them out at the right moment. Then
he turned to the open check book again.
Yes, it was perfectly familiar. That was where you signed, and
those little blank spaces beyond the perforations on the left were
the counterfoils where you marked how much you had signed for, and
there was the place for a date; but he was worried for a moment as
to whether the figures came above the writing or below it; then the
image of the check he had just paid in came to his mind. Of course,
that was what had brought it all back to him. He felt confident. He
could go ahead, so far as that little detail of his new life was
concerned, and there was an ample balance. He wrote down the main
sum, £73,729 16s. 3d. on the inside of the cover. Then he turned to
his desk and considered the questions he should frame, the leading
questions which might gradually get men without their knowing it to
tell him who he was.
He put down a little list of what he already knew. He had been in
the States, he had been there some little time at least, and perhaps
for a lifetime. If he was an American citizen, at any rate he knew
London well. Perhaps if he went back to the States he would discover
there what he was; it might all return to him in the familiar sounds
and sights and smells. But it was a big effort to make for finding
out something that might be discovered much more easily or that
might return to him at any moment. He had in the States befriended a
certain Mr. Cyril, now dead. A Mr. Leonard Cyril. Plenty of people
must have known this Mr. Cyril, for by his widow the man was rich
and her acquaintance nobby. If he went about it quite carefully, in
some company where his name was not known, he might hear what kind
of man this Mr. Petre was who had thus befriended Mr. Leonard Cyril,
a man so wealthy that his very widow rolled in it--to judge by her
house and guests. Then there was the other main clew, he had been in
a train arriving at a certain hour at Paddington. Now that he had
collected his wits it would be a simple matter to find out where that
train had started from. Yes, there were quite a number of clews. It
ought not to take long. He turned to the Bradshaw. A train from
Cardiff came into Paddington at one. He did not know that his own
train, the boat train from Plymouth, had been half an hour late. He
noted that Cardiff train and its stops. He had come from Cardiff or
beyond, or joined at Swindon. It wasn’t much of a help but it limited
the field.
Then his mind passed again to those questions he had to frame. But it
must be done with tact. He saw himself again in Mrs. Cyril’s house
trying to shepherd her words into his fold. He might begin in a tone
of gentle and respectful condolence: “When I met Mr. Cyril....” and
then hope that she would interrupt with, “Ah, yes! How good you were
to him in New York”--or Topeka, or wherever the damned place was. But
then again, she might meet him with a counter question, and say, “Oh,
do tell me, please, how Miriam is?” Then he would get it between wind
and water, and if he had shuddered a moment ago, now he trembled. It
was not so easy as it looked.
A brilliant thought leaped into his brain. And as it leaped his
guardian Dæmon laughed.
He rang the bell, he unbolted the door. He asked if they had in the
hotel any American books of reference. They had a New York telephone
book, and a very strange, short, fat volume in which were the names
of the American great who still survived in this sad world to the end
of November, 1952. For there was a brutal note on the title-page,
“The Editor cannot guarantee that none of the names mentioned in
this annual, which went through the press at the end of November
last, may not since have died.” There was no John K. Petre. He was
ashamed to ask for more books of this library. He went down to the
ground floor and consulted the London Directory. There was no John
K. Petre. He made a note that he would look, as a last and desperate
chance, at the New York Directory, and would guarantee it to say if
he had ever lived in New York. They had one--of two years before.
There was no John K. Petre.
Then another ruse suggested itself to him. He would with infinite
pains secure the services of a man--perhaps there were those who did
it for a living--of some man who would find out for him all about Mr.
John K. Petre.
He went down by the great stairs turning over in his mind the strange
dearth of John K. Petres in the printed lists. Clearly an enormous
John K. Petre did, somewhere, dominate the world; but where? He
formed the plan of consulting his one friend at the Registration
counter.
He made his effort. He went to the clerk standing at the great book
of registry, and asked him in a low voice (after looking about to
make sure that no one could hear) whether he might be told the name
of some agency or person who could look up a small obscure private
point for him while he was in London. It was confidential. The clerk,
who made an honest penny, among many dozen other honest pennies, by
recommending the right people, wrote out at once upon his own card a
name and an address: “Jos. Daniels, 27 Birkham Street, Soho.”
“Mr. Petre,” he said, with his usual respect, which seemed so
exaggerated to the unfortunate man to whom it was addressed, “if you
will just go and give that personally, I think you will get all you
want. There is no proper office, and no name put up. Mr. Daniels is
too careful for that. He has worked wonders, to my knowledge. Never
mind the look of the house. Don’t write. He has no telephone, either.
Just go there; and when you find him in, give him this card of mine.”
And thus was the clerk assured of his commission.
Mr. Petre was not quite sure that he had done right. Even one human
being knowing but one step of his research was a peril; but he had
no other choice, or rather, it was safer than addressing himself to
some public firm. He set off at once for Birkham Street. He found the
house, or rather, the door; a grimy door next to a little foreign
restaurant. He rang. He was let in by a slatternly woman who seemed
to have caught something of her master’s air, for she certainly
looked as if she knew too much.
He asked for Mr. Daniels, and was overjoyed to find that Mr. Daniels
was in.
He found a little, dark-haired man, with keen eyes and a full mouth,
and an expression as though the world amused him--which indeed it
did; but as if also he were sparing in his words, which indeed he
was.
There were, as Mr. Petre had been warned, no marks of an office,
nothing to betray Mr. Daniels’ trade. It was a dingy room, stuffily
furnished with a few old horsehair chairs, and Mr. Daniels as his
visitor came in laid down a paper which he had been reading, rose and
asked him, when he had looked at the card, and offered one of the
horsehair chairs, of what service he might be.
“My dear sir,” said Mr. Petre earnestly, feeling that unless he began
the matter at once he would never have the courage to begin it at
all, “it is very simple. I am desired--I have been asked--at any rate
I have occasion to find out ... what I can about a Mr. John K. Petre.
You know the name?”
Mr. Daniels smiled sweetly.
“Oddly enough,” he said, “I _do_ know the name. If you had asked me
to find a man who did not know the name, you might have given me more
difficulty.” His smile remained upon his full lips, and he held his
head back somewhat, examining Mr. Petre in the fashion a humorous
diplomat might use if he were asked by a casual stranger to talk upon
secrets of State.
“You have never seen him?” said Mr. Petre.
It was a foolish question; for after all, if Mr. Daniels had already
recognized his guest, Mr. Daniels would have greeted him, and perhaps
he might even have remembered Mr. Daniels. But perhaps Mr. Daniels
_had_ seen him; perhaps Mr. Daniels _did_ know him. Mr. Daniels had a
mysterious smile upon him. The whole thing was very perplexing.
“No,” said Mr. Daniels slowly. “No. I have never seen Mr. Petre.
Nor has any one that I know of,” he added, gazing up blankly at the
ceiling. “Nor,” he continued emphatically, after a pause, and looking
Mr. Petre full in the eyes, “nor are you likely to come across any
one who has; not easily!”
“Exactly,” said Mr. Petre. “Precisely.... Could you ... my dear Mr.
Daniels”--and here he leaned forward--“I am prepared to pay well; to
pay largely. You have but to name your figure. Now, do we understand
each other? Can you not discover for me any of the leading facts with
regard to....”
But Mr. Daniels interrupted him, putting his hand firmly down upon
the table and still looking Mr. Petre in the face, only rather more
sternly.
“I do not know who you are, sir,” he said. “You have not given me
your name, and no doubt you have your own good reasons for not doing
so. But I can tell you this--and it will save you a good deal of
trouble. It is not worth _my_ while--it is not worth _anybody’s_
while--to hunt that particular game. Do you understand?”
Mr. Petre understood about as much as if it had been Choctaw, but he
looked wise, nodded, and said:
“Yes! yes! I understand.”
“It’s mere waste of time,” said Mr. Daniels, a little more kindly,
and getting up as he spoke to show that there was nothing more
doing. “If I cannot talk to you about it nobody can--and you may be
certain that nobody will.”
There was a long silence between the two men. Mr. Petre broke it with
a lie.
“Yes--I understand,” he said.
His guardian angel wept and his guardian Dæmon shook with laughter.
Then Mr. Petre went out in a mist of moral fog so thick that his
moral hands were groping all round. He had feared something like
madness in himself when his misfortune fell upon him. Now it looked
as if the rest of the world were mad as well.
* * * * *
Meanwhile in the parlor of the bank the manager was speaking to the
spare and courteous man who had introduced the great client.
“He’s an extraordinary fellow, Tommy; we’ve all heard of him. Now
we’ve seen him at it--in the flesh.”
Tommy nodded and was amused. “It’s much stranger than a book,” he
said.
“Yes,” answered the manager ponderously enough; and added the
original words, “Life is stranger than fiction.”
“What astonishes me,” said Tommy, “is the way he comes up to sample.
He went on exactly like a film; it was better than that, it was the
exact echo of himself, wasn’t it? Or like a photograph?”
“He’s always done it,” said the manager, with the pompous assumption
of knowledge drawn at fourth hand, and accurate enough. “I don’t know
whether it is that he likes the mystery of it, or that he has got
some mania for keeping everything to himself; but he did exactly the
same thing in Paris, two years ago. He blew into Rogers’s, started
an account, behaved like a lunatic--but quite gently--asked the most
ridiculous questions, made a sudden haul in what nobody was thinking
about, the Bordeaux Loan--he had heard something--left the whole
pile on current account for three months, and then transferred it by
cable. Without a word of writing or anything. They had had the use
of the money all that time, and they’ve been living ever since with
their mouths open praying he’ll blow in again.”
Tommy nodded, holding his chin in his hand.
“We shall not keep him,” he said; “but it will be useful while it
lasts,” and the manager nodded in agreement. Then they both smiled
and returned each to his task.
It has been said by a Great Victorian Bore that if you could take
samples of the conversation going on in our great cities at any
one moment you would think you were listening to parrots repeating
themselves. He was right.
Not indeed at that exact moment, but less than three hours later, the
clerk of the register of the Splendide, having gone off duty, met
Mr. Daniels (as was his custom) in the bar of the “Beaver.” And Mr.
Daniels’ first question was:
“Who was that old fellow you sent me to-day?”
The clerk drew a little closer, put his mouth close to Mr. Daniels’
ear, and murmured the name.
For once in his life Mr. Daniels showed real, honest, innocent
surprise. His eyes opened widely, and then his expression changed to
a mixture of vast amusement and vast admiration combined.
“By God!” he said, “he’s a genius!”
“We all know that,” answered Harrison drily.
“A genius!” shouted Mr. Daniels, ordering a second round on the
strength of it. “A genius! He comes into my room like a lamb and asks
me to find out about himself!”
“Testing you, he was,” said the clerk Harrison with profound
psychology.
“That’s it,” answered Mr. Daniels wisely, wagging his head from side
to side. “Testing me! And didn’t find me wanting! Ah! He knows Jos.
Daniels by now! He’ll know who he came to.” And the clerk ordered a
third round on the strength of that little triumph, which both of
them had won. The mighty man now knew the accuracy of Harrison’s
choice in private detectives, and would trust him now for ever: there
ought to be something in it. The mighty man knew the fidelity of
Daniels: and surely something would come Daniels’ way also. He would
know that his privacy was safe in such hands.
That same evening, innocent of so much power, the original author
of these movements slept, and forgot his troubles till the morning
light.
CHAPTER V
Deep in the heart of Surrey, on the edge of Walton Heath, and at the
gate of that wild loneliness which is the joy of the millions who
defile it, stands a house of no great age. It is called “Marengo.”
Round about it lie grounds, some twenty acres in extent (of which
two at least are gardens and shrubberies) wherein the speckled
laurel luxuriantly grows, and from the depths of which the copper
beech and other ornamental trees not infrequently protrude. To the
doors of “Marengo” (which is set back some yards from the road, but
not so far as to shut off the cheerful prospect of modern traffic
and the enlivening sound of horns) sweeps an avenue or approach of
gravel large enough to admit two motor-cars abreast; and there are
two gates, but no lodges. The house itself, to be perfectly honest,
is of red-brick tile-healed on the upper story; the roof, however,
has been tamed and verges upon brown. Moreover, that roof has dormer
windows--but the woodwork is of Norwegian pine.
Now this mansion was (and is) the residence of John Charlbury,
Esquire, J.P., the partner of the Honorable Charles Terrard in the
firm of Blake and Blake, Brokers, on the London Stock Exchange. He
was unmarried, just on fifty years of age, and bald. He was short, he
was square, he was stout; he was decided, and somewhat lethargic. He
was not ill-natured; he had cunning little pig’s eyes, which would
have warned off the most innocent of men at fifty yards, but which
were evidence of a very useful talent when they could work behind the
screen of correspondence, so that the victim could be caught unawares.
It is related by travelers that the great tawny lion of the Atlas,
though the vainest and therefore the stupidest of beasts, has at
least the sense to associate with creatures very different from
himself. The jackal discovers his prey, and a small bird hunts the
parasites on those parts of his integument which he cannot easily
reach with his muzzle or paws; the sword-fish is accompanied by a
very different friend, small and bearing a lamp wherewith to guide
him through the dark depths of the sea; and the very rich, themselves
innocent of letters, will furnish their households with poets,
dramatists and even philosophers of whatever caliber they can retain
in bondage.
Now so it is with the best of businesses, with the most successful
houses of affairs.
[Illustration: _The Partners._]
He does not advance the farthest who attempts to advance alone.
Rather do they go farthest who associate with some other, utterly
different from themselves, so that each may bring into play
activities of which the other is incapable. Of such a sort was the
alliance between John Charlbury, Justice of the Peace, and the Hon.
Charles Terrard, nothing--not even B.A. The latter might be compared
to the delicate rod line and fly; the former to the gaff and net.
Terrard could go where Charlbury could never go; Charlbury could
discover in the market opportunities which Terrard would not have
dreamed of. The supplemental character of their faces and their
friends was paralleled in their souls. For just as Charlbury was
short, bald, fat, square, elderly, and pig-eyed, while Terrard was
tall, lithe, young, and marrying such innocent blue eyes to such
an innocent mass of happy curls; so Charlbury knew most approaches
to the soul by avarice or fear, while Terrard was familiar only
with those attached to vanity, debauchery, and the customs of the
rich. Charlbury conducted from the base in the City, while Terrard
skirmished in the West--and between them they were doing very well:
were the firm of Blake and Blake, known to the gods as Charlie
Terrard but to men as Old Charlbury.
Deep in the heart of London on the edge of that Square Mile of the
Very Rich who are the delight of the millions they defile, stands a
wild patch of loneliness known as “The Paddenham Site.” It is some
acres of abandoned ground worth--it should be--sums untold: but none
will buy.
A Hospital had stood there once. It had gone to the country. Its
former site should have been snapped up. It was not. For a year, and
another year, and another its weeds grew, and grasses covered its
uneven hollows.
It had been bought at last, to re-sell; mortgaged; foreclosed on;
sold at a loss to resell; sold again at a loss. Thus twenty years had
passed and now the last mortgage holders in their Broad Street Office
were grown desperate. Who would hold the Baby? There was a fine
commission for whomever should introduce a purchaser; and Charlbury
had bethought him of John K. Petre.
It was not long after settling day, upon an evening late, when
Charlbury sat in the drawing-room of “Marengo,” surrounded by all
things consonant to himself, and awaited his partner. He heard
the coming of the car, he welcomed Terrard and furnished him with
a drink. He asked him whether anything more had been done about
getting John K. on to the Paddenham Site purchase: and he reminded
his blue-eyed partner of the healthy little commission; of the eager
anxiety of Williams on the edge of disaster after such extreme delay,
of the people in Broad Street panting to accept the bare necessity.
Now, here, to hand, in John K. Petre, was the chance; the heaven-sent
eccentric chance.
“You’ve spoken of it to John K.?” asked Charlbury.
“Not yet,” said Terrard. “I thought I’d wait until I’d seen you.”
“Have you seen _him_ since?” said Charlbury.
“No,” answered Terrard. “I thought it best to let it stew a
little--eh?” He looked sideways at his partner, a little nervously.
That partner was staring at the fire. “You see,” added Terrard, “he’s
one of that funny kind. Quite empty to look at.... Nothing behind
his eyes.... Might be grandpapa.” Charlbury nodded slowly at the
description--he had met that kind before, and he knew how their vast
wealth had been garnered.
“I was right not to rush him?” Terrard concluded anxiously. Charlbury
continued to nod slowly at the fire. Then he gave a guffaw, roaring
out:
“So you don’t call that ‘rushing,’ eh?” and he chuckled hugely,
putting a familiar hand on Terrard’s knee to emphasize his enjoyment.
“Two days after ’e landed, rushed him for Touaregs,” and he chuckled
again, “and it’s ’ardly a week yet!”
“Well, but ...” went on Terrard, still more nervously, “I told you
I hadn’t seen him again. I thought I’d see.... But you know I’m for
acting all the same.... I don’t think he minds. It is certainly ‘yes’
or ‘no’ with him, and we have all heard what he is, though we haven’t
seen him.”
“You’ve seen ’im,” sighed Charlbury--he was faintly jealous of his
young partner’s opportunities; for in his heart he nourished secret
ambition, and he saw, far off, a day--distant but bound to come
before he died--when he should himself emerge, laden with gold, into
the great world.
“Yes,” answered Terrard snappishly, “I’ve not seen him till just now,
and then only once. We’ve all _heard_ of him and his lunacies. He’s
capable of vanishing at a moment’s notice, without telling any one.”
Charlbury nodded again, and said more softly and musingly:
“You’ve told ’em in Broad Street that you’ve some one in your eye?”
“Yes ... but I gave no name, 600,000 is what’ll fetch ’em.”
Once more Charlbury nodded. He had heard that figure.
“Make it eight,” he said briefly.
Then there was a slight pause.
Charlbury spoke again: “What’s the way to tackle him--about the
Paddenham Site, I mean?”
“I should put it straight out,” said Charlie. “When we’ve got
it clear, between ourselves, I should ring him up--this very
evening--and make an appointment for to-morrow.”
“There’s nothing to get clear,” said Charlbury. “It’s a straightforward
proposition. He will bite, or he won’t bite.”
“No,” said Terrard slowly. “But what I was thinking of was, how it
ought to be put.”
Charlbury was all decision.
“I tell you it’s straightforward. Put it that it’s a lock-up: that
it’s a lock-up for one that can afford it, but precious few can. Tell
him it’s not a lock-up for a lot of them together, because it’s got
to be kept close and tight, and that one man’s got to bide his time
and take his opportunity. Don’t ’ide anything from ’im. Tell him
it’s been empty the best part o’ twenty years--right in the ’eart o’
London--and tell ’im plain it may be five more--that there’s Gawd
knows ’ow much in it--at least, that’s my judgment, honest. I’d do
it myself if I could ...” and he sighed. “I did try to persuade old
Vere,” he shook his head sadly. “But he died--the old fool died.”
“Shall we say we’re in it?” asked Terrard.
“Better not. No good telling lies. Besides which, commission’s
enough. And we can’t wait years, and ye can never be _quite_ sure. If
any one’s got to bear the racket, let ’im. ’E’ll be quit of us long
before then; though, honest, mind you, I don’t believe there’ll be a
racket to bear, any’ow.”
“Very well,” said Terrard simply. He looked at his watch. It was only
a quarter past ten. “I’ll ring up now,” he said.
“Is that sife?” said Charlbury, showing anxiety for the first time
that evening.
“Quite, I think,” said Terrard, who was on his own ground. “If he’s
not out anywhere alone--for he’s keeping to himself, I’m told. He
would think it ordinary to be rung up at this hour,” and he picked up
the telephone and called up 8309 Embankment.
There was nothing heard but the slight sound of the good fire in the
room, and in that silence both men had but one thought, or rather had
before their mental eyes but one picture. Each of them saw a figure.
It was the figure of a commission. And it was a sound one.
At last came the tiny squeaking of the instrument upon Mr.
Charlbury’s ears, and he looked round and watched Terrard. That young
gentleman was saying in an easy, happy voice:
“Oh, Mr. Petre, I’m sorry to ring you up at such an hour, but I want
you to have the news as soon as I could possibly get it to you.
I am sure you won’t mind when you hear.”... “No, not at all.”...
“Thank you very much. It would be easier to put it by word of mouth.
It’s a thing called the Paddenham Site. I have just heard of the
chance. I could tell you all the details if you like. Can I see you
to-morrow?...” “Yes, certainly. That will do perfectly. Can you
lunch?”... “Very well, then, just before one, and I can tell you all
about it before we go down. It won’t take long. Then after lunch I
could show it to you. Not that that means much, but later we might go
round to their lawyers and see the papers.”... “Thanks. All right.
12.45. Go-o-o-o-o-d night.” Charlie Terrard said the last words in
the exact inflection given to them by the more refined of the wealthy
women, and hung up the receiver. And Charlbury thought in his heart
how useful a thing it was to have a partner with such an air of the
great world--and yet how bitter.
There was one thing more to be done: to write a note to Broad Street
telling them that they might expect a client introduced to them by
Blake and Blake. It wasn’t sure: but they might.
Terrard would ring them up, if it matured, at short notice, and he
would let them know when to expect him.
The note was written. Charlie took it up to town that night and got
it into the post just on the stroke of twelve.
* * * * *
At about twelve o’clock in the morning of the next day Mr. Petre was
walking slowly along the Embankment, looking at the tide that rushed
past and communing with his own soul. It was a breezy, sunny, spring
day. The water was alive, and London had half forgotten its native
misery.
It was an air in which new thoughts and clear ones should naturally
come to a man; but none came to Mr. Petre. He was pondering upon that
interview which he had to face, and went round it in his thoughts,
coming no nearer to a center, but still remaining as he had been
since the blow fell upon him, attendant upon Fate. It was to be about
some horrid business called the Paddenham Site. It might be--he dared
to hope!--that some words would be used which he should understand.
It might be that those inimitable talents of his, which all seemed
to accept, would return to him--but at the bottom of his heart he
doubted it. It was in no very happy mood that he returned to his
rooms and awaited his guest.
But men in those moods are compelled to abrupt decisions. It is the
only escape from their torture, and to such a second decision was Mr.
Petre led upon this enormous occasion.
Charlie Terrard came in all breeze and happiness, with a dancing
light in his honest blue eyes--I had almost added, in his honest
curling hair. He seemed ready to talk of anything but business, and
he came to business only as a little tedious frill, necessary, and
soon to be dismissed. But when he got it out he was clear enough, and
he explained the matter with a fair concentration, leaning forward to
Mr. Petre across the table and making his points distinctly with just
that touch and gesture which helps such a catalogue.
“It’s about a bit of land called ‘The Paddenham Site.’”
Mr. Petre sat beside him, leaning back a little in his chair, and
wearing that look which he himself felt to be a betrayal of complete
incapacity, and which all who met him and knew his name (but none
more than Charlie Terrard) revered as the mask of financial genius.
Indeed, a sudden terror seized the young broker at the thought of his
own audacity, but he conquered it and went ahead.
“The Paddenham Site: yes, the Paddenham Site. That’s the official
name for it; or rather, the official name for it is Turner’s Estates
and Paggles’ Addition, subject to the order of the Court--but I won’t
trouble you with all that,” he said, as Mr. Petre, hearing these
terms, very slightly moved his head as one experienced in all such
things. “You won’t hear it called that,” went on Charlie rapidly.
“What people _call_ it, you know, is ‘That waste space where the
Hospital used to be.’ Quite young people nowadays mostly just call it
‘that funny big waste space in Paddenham Street,’ because they can’t
remember the Hospital. I can’t remember it myself. At least, I was a
child when they pulled it down. And look here,” he said, putting a
greater intensity into his voice, “I have got first of all to tell
you the drawback.”
What drawback, or why, or what it was all about Mr. Petre could not
have told you under threat of torture. Therefore he looked still
more solemn, and slightly emphasized the movement of his head, as
one who was taking it all in and glancing with eagle eye over every
opportunity and every disadvantage.
“You know it’s been standing like that for more than twenty years?”
Here, as in a special effort of heroic falsehood, Mr. Petre quite
distinctly nodded, and Terrard was relieved.
“I’m glad you know that,” he said, “because it’s the very first
thing to get hold of. _Why_ a site like that should stand empty in
the heart of London all the time it would take a very long time to
explain to you. It began with a quarrel between the two estates, or
rather between the Trustees of the Paddenham Estate and a claimant
who had bought up an option on the addition; or rather, we won’t
say a quarrel, but what each called obstinacy. And then there was
the bankruptcy, you know: old Elmer’s bankruptcy--the Elmers are
Paddenhams. A lot of small people were rather badly hit, because
there was a syndicate.”
Mr. Petre was in up to his middle, and as the meaningless words
flowed on he began to nod more vigorously than ever.
“Exactly,” he said. “Exactly. I quite understand.”
[Illustration: “_Exactly. I quite understand._”]
“Then, when the second syndicate took it over, they got the option of
a price which seemed nothing at the time--but that was just before
the London Traffic Bill. The fight over that held it up, of course,
and then after the compromise....”
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre, “of course,” as though that explained it all.
(What compromise? his dear heart asked of him--and an inward voice
replied, “God knows!”)
“If the Government hadn’t been nibbling at it,” went on Mr. Terrard
rapidly, “they wouldn’t have hung on, perhaps. But they did, and
there was the second bankruptcy. Then Williams came in. You know what
_that_ means?”
“Ah!” said Mr. Petre, with a knowing smile.
“Williams thought he had got it for nothing. But still it was all he
could do to meet it, and he certainly covered it; but he could not
meet it alone.”
“No,” said Mr. Petre in judicial tones. “No! Naturally!” and Terrard
marveled at the man’s familiarity with the details of a distant land.
“In a sense Williams has got it still, but he can’t hold. It’s
cracking--you can hear it cracking.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” laughed Mr. Petre joyously--it was astonishing
how quickly these things were coming to him now when once he warmed
to them. “I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Now, the question is this. When people are desperate like that, and
have to let things go, they’re watched, aren’t they?”
Mr. Petre said nothing. He smiled another knowing smile.
“Well,” continued Terrard, “they’ve watched a little too long. And
_if_ some one came in _now_--I don’t think it would be less than
£800,000--it might be a little more ... but if some one comes in
_now_, while Williams’ tongue is hanging out....” Mr. Petre saw
that tongue and oddly visualized the unknown Williams in the shape
of a large dog panting and athirst--“he gets it!” concluded Terrard
triumphantly, striking the table gently but sufficiently with his
open palm. “He gets it. And then it’s whatever you like. Doubling it
might be too much, but it can’t be less than a fair margin of 60 per
cent, when it does go.”
“I see,” said Mr. Petre, getting up and pacing slowly down the little
hotel sitting-room and back again. “I see.” For, like the blind man
in the story, he didn’t see at all.
“That’s the trouble,” said his guest, leaning back in his chair as
though he were relieved by the conclusion of the tale. “It must be
one man, and one big man, for they’re all shy of it, are the little
ones. And it must be one man because it will have to be handled
briskly at both ends.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre rapidly, “at both ends.”
“Buying and selling,” said Terrard.
“Obviously,” said Mr. Petre.
There, at least, he was on firm ground. So much was clear. If
somebody bought a thing some one else must sell it. It was a relief
to understand one thing, anyhow, in the rigmarole. He halted with his
back to the light.
“Besides which,” said Terrard, “you don’t want to be bothered with
other people. I know you’ll take it or leave it, and I wanted to put
it before you now and at once. I don’t know if you’re following our
London site-values, Mr. Petre? No doubt you’ve handled such things in
your time?”
“It is very good of you,” said Mr. Petre. He was miserable within;
he felt himself being led on, but what he dreaded most was an agony
of doubt and delay; for he saw himself arguing and re-approached
and his other ventures quoted. If once he allowed the series to
accumulate upon him one pressure and question after another,
suggestion following suggestion, in the end he would be corralled
and find himself right up against that fatal day when his awful
riddle should be published to others before he had solved it himself.
A man’s judgment in such suffering is that of a thing hunted,
unbased, perhaps instinctive, at any rate precipitate; and Charlie
was astonished to hear the words solemnly and simply pronounced by
the standing figure at the window, who looked at him with a sort of
forensic severity.
“Well, Mr. Terrard, you have convinced me.”
“Mr. Petre, Mr. Petre,” said Charlie Terrard in the agony of his
relief and the whirlwind of such expectations suddenly realized. “I
am undertaking a great responsibility! Do not be rushed on account of
what I have just said! I do not pretend for a moment that there is an
immediate market. I do not believe there is.”
“No,” said Mr. Petre, sitting down again. “No. Quite so,” as if it
were the smallest matter in the world.
“But the mere fact that your name--if you will allow it to be known,
_after_ the transaction.... Well, you see, it would mean a great
deal. They would take it for granted that you were going to build, or
at any rate they would know that you hadn’t done it without knowing
what you were at.”
“Nor should I,” said Mr. Petre coolly.
“Of course not,” and Terrard laughed nervously. “No. Naturally. Well,
your name, you see....” He looked at his watch. “Shall we go and see
the place now, or after lunch?”
“Come down and lunch with me,” said Mr. Petre--he felt it was the
least he could do under circumstances so grand. “And we could go and
look at it afterwards.”
Terrard excused himself a moment, to buy a paper he said. And so he
did buy a paper; but he also telephoned to Broad Street. Then he
returned to his millionaire in the Louis Quinze grill room of the
Splendide.
They lunched. They proceeded. And Mr. Petre gazed for a good ten
minutes on sodden grasses waving in the wind, tall and dirty stalks
and broken palings; the poor abandoned acres of bare land lying there
doing nothing, with the enormous wealth of London all around. It was
like seeing a hole in the middle of the sea, and wondering why the
water did not pour in and flood it; wondering why the huge appetite
of London did not snap up such a morsel, why the jostle of London
didn’t crowd that vacancy with London once again.
It was an odd ritual, this looking at the nothingness of the
Paddenham Site. It might just as well have been foregone. But Terrard
was not wrong in his psychology. Looking at a purchase discussed is
the beginning of possession, and as they walked away and Terrard
explained, amid the dodging of the traffic and the crowds, the
importance of a rapid decision, Mr. Petre was prepared for the next
step. They picked up a rotor taxi and were crawling towards the City.
As they went Charlie explained their goal. In the office they were
bound for they would meet the man who could treat for Williams--for
the Vendor: and he had full powers.
Charlie knew what they would take. He repeated to Mr. Petre frankly
that less than 700,000 was no use, but that 800,000 would fetch them.
They wouldn’t dare stand out for more. All that was needed was plain
speech and no haggling: take it or leave it.
In a large, very dirty room that looked out through dirty windows
upon a court off Broad Street Mr. Petre was solemnly introduced
to maps, to abstracts, to memoranda, to as many papers as would
have taxed in so brief a time the brain of the most practiced at
conveyance. But he took the onset solidly, and Terrard, standing at
his elbow, a little hard spectacled man who was doing the honors of
the treat, and a busy clerk who came in and out with new papers as
they were needed, and withdrew those done with--all secretly agreed,
each in his own heart, that they were dealing here with such a brain
as they had never met before.
Mr. Petre had such a way of spreading a parchment and holding it
down firmly with both hands while he mastered its contents, of
peering at the smaller details of a plan, of smiling sardonically at
illegible pencilings in the corners, of copying into a pocket book
chance details such as “not 5½--8½” and “This must be corrected by
comparison with No. 10”; he had such a rapid fashion of putting aside
what he chose to regard as insignificant (though they might have
thought it essential) and of delaying upon little things which they
had disregarded, but which he for some deep reason of his own would
closely examine, that they were impressed as they had never yet been
impressed; and the hard little man in spectacles, silent upon nearly
every other experience in his career of purchase and option and
foreclosure, would recount in his later years over and over again to
whomever would hear, the strange happenings of these two hours. For
two hours only were taken up in the great decision.
A line of memorandum was written, initialed, and signed; and Mr.
Petre went out into the fresh air hooked, securely hooked, on to the
Paddenham Site, and liable, morally liable, for rather more than
£800,000 and frills. The man Williams, all witless of his happy
fate, was saved.
Terrard took leave at his office door, and Mr. Petre, crawling back
westward again in a taxi to his hotel, suffered what is known as the
reaction.
He sat for the best part of an hour in his room, turning over in
his mind the madness, the enormity of the thing he had just done.
It rushed in upon him suddenly, like a fierce animal springing from
the brake upon a traveler, that he had not realized--it had been too
sudden--the affair of the £73,729 16s. 3d. He was living in a whirl
of dreams. The reality of that solid sum now loomed upon him. It was
jeopardized. It might go like smoke. Then with infinitely greater
force, with a thud like a battering ram, came the consideration that
he was by way of meeting a sum the like of which was fantastic beyond
the powers of any but one man in millions. Under the deadening blow
of that fairly obvious discovery he reeled back into the consolation
which he had already found on that day, not so long past, when he
had ordered with perfect simplicity in the corner of Berkeley Square
the purchase of fifty-thousand barbarous things called Touaregs of
which he knew not anything at all. He remembered the fate of that
blind action of a moment. He trusted to the same good fortune. And
there returned to him that odd consolation which he had felt on that
first day. What if the whole thing crashed? He was only where he
was before. Would a man standing as he was be held responsible? His
conscience told him yes, but the Law?--He knew nothing of the law in
the matter.
And then ... if he were really all they thought he was (and they
seemed to know) he might be able to raise even so vast a sum.... But
how without discovery of his dreadful secret?
It meant the revelation which he dreaded, at the worst; but that at
the worst would come anyhow. At the best (and, after all, it was one
chance in two), his fate would be postponed.
His disturbed and blinded heart was the lighter for this confusion of
thought so ending, and he exercised what power he had over his own
thoughts to drive from them all anxiety. He knew one way in which it
could be done. He had tried it already. He left an abrupt message, as
he had left one those few days before; he noted the date when he was
pledged to return to the city, and he departed by the very next train
he could catch for his retreat in Hampshire.
The playful Dæmon attached to Mr. Petre’s fortunes grinned to himself
and acted. He it was that thrust a spear into the heart of a certain
minor official of the Education Department.
He was a poet in the truest sense of the word; a creator, was that
minor official. They only paid him £750 a year--from which income
tax was brutally deducted ere ever he touched the checks--he lived
a bachelor and alone in Clapham. But the Spirit bloweth where it
listeth, it does, and it had inspired this isolated man.
Long ago this minor official of the Education Department had been
inspired to save England.
It was a vision; a revelation; it had struck him in one blinding
flash that what Elementary Education lacked in all our great towns
and especially in London was a Central Physical and Civic Training
Ground and Development Premises; what was soon briefly known under
his energetic propaganda as a C.P.C.T.G.D.P.
That was three years ago; all that time the great idea had grown.
Lady Gwryth had taken it up with all her might and so had her sister.
What an ideal to realize! Miniature ranges, swimming baths, large
airy gymnasiums, acoustic theaters, Greek plays and, above all,
Dromes!
A new life open (in relays) to the children of the poor, and that in
the very core of London!
Only the Treasury blocked the way. It did not definitely oppose, but
it looked askance at the proposed expenditure. For the County Council
could not add more than 2d.
The Dæmon suddenly stirred that minor official with the sharp
decisive conviction that his moment had come. And, indeed, it was
Primrose Day.
Therefore, much at the same time that Mr. Petre was sitting there in
his room, wrestling with gloom and consolation, before his flight
to the isolation and refreshment of Southern England, that minor
official had jogged the memory of a superior; that superior had
determined to approach the Permanent Secretary once more with his
mighty scheme; and the Permanent Secretary, before the office closed
for the evening, had determined in his turn that the thing must be
done now or never, and had gone himself (for all his glory) to the
House of Commons, and had bearded the Secretary of State in his room.
Therefore it was that when, the next day, Mr. Petre was relaxing in
the happy vacuity of his beloved Hampshire a brief note came by hand
to the hard little man in spectacles in the dirty court off Broad
Street, and that individual found himself summoned to the big palace
in Whitehall; the Education Department had at last made up its mind
to buy.
It had been told (as perhaps three hundred other possible purchasers
had been told) that the site could be got for a song, the song being
perhaps 2d., perhaps 2½., upon the insignificant rates; or, if the
worst came to the worst, a mere pimple upon the Budget. And after
all, they had delayed too long. They had heard it, as all those other
possible gulls had heard it, in every form of approach--at dinner, in
the street, by letter, by write-ups in the Press, even through the
personal eloquence of Mr. Williams himself. No one can say as a rule
what it is that moves a public department at last to act, or what
power fixes the moment; but in this case we know the agent: it was
the Playful Dæmon.
The hard little man in spectacles heard with impassible face the
demand and the project of his Sovereign--for, as we all know,
Ministers are but advisers to the Crown. And as the scheme unrolled
before him, his accurate, well-trained mind, immeasurably experienced
in such things, was running up figures and attaching to the sum upon
which at last it settled, that happy margin which would fall to the
office in Broad Street when all the rest of the pack had torn off
their share.
Provisionally, very provisionally, protesting that he had no powers
to act; protesting that he could not speak for his principals;
protesting that it must be put before others; he stated--oh, so
provisionally--a bedrock sum (in round figures, of course, only
round figures); and the Department, which had been well salted, was
astonished to hear that what it hardly expected much under three
millions was obtainable--provisionally of course, it was a mere
estimate, there was no authority--for not so very much more than two.
CHAPTER VI
Any one who has engaged in the sale and purchase of land knows what
a long business it is; but no one was in any hurry in the matter of
the Paddenham Site. On the selling side there was a happy conviction
that delay increases appetite and a fine faith in the staying powers
of John K. Petre. As to the buyer, if indeed His Majesty (through and
with the advice of that Secretary of his who happened for the moment
to preside over the Board of Education) should have the good fortune
to acquire the Paddenham Site, there was no need to betray violent
hurry whatever eagerness the Department might be repressing in its
gizzard. After all, it was other people’s money, and not a salary in
the Department would be increased by a farthing, however advantageous
the deal.
What did push things forward a little was the appearance in the
market of an Anonymous Benefactor.
This excellent man proposed in a letter to the Public Press to
purchase the Paddenham Site as an Open Space for the People, a new
Lung for London. And he would stand the racket.
It was astonishing--considering he was anonymous--what a lot the
papers had to say about him, and how loudly they praised his truly
British generosity. From my own insufficient experience in these
matters I should say that, counting one thing with another, the
noise need not have cost more than £500; but it had the effect of
thousands. There was opposition too. There were angry letters of
protest against the object of the proposed benefaction, a sheer waste
of land; but there were warm letters of approval from the public
also, and there was even one very solemn communication, in which the
Anonymous Benefactor gave it to be understood that the sum asked by
the Paddenham Estate (for under that guise did Mr. Petre move, or
rather Mr. Petre’s kindly friends) was satisfactory; and though it
came to far more than another site which had been suggested, the
central position was essential to it.
The Great Unknown remained a complete mystery. Those fantastic
fools--happily few in our sane English world--who are for ever
imagining vast conspiracies and deep-hidden plots, whispered that
Messrs. Blake and Blake knew too much about it. They suspected even
such absurdly innocent and obvious encounters as Charlie Terrard’s
dining twice with one Editor and three times with another--as though
in that world people did not constantly meet. They remarked that
when Charlbury went off to France for a short holiday the excitement
waned. In a word, they indulged in the maddest surmises and even
affirmations. It was well for them that they did not print their
libels. For our Courts of Justice are never more severe than in the
due punishment of such monstrous defamations of well-established
people.
The Department was not slow in discovering the sum which the
Anonymous Benefactor was prepared to pay, and indeed were told all
about it by many mutual friends of the Minister and the Anonymous
Benefactor. It is the pride of our civil servants that they will do
a job as thoroughly, without the incentive of private advantage, as
any man of affairs would do for profit. And though they were not so
basely impertinent as to seek who the Anonymous Benefactor might be
(and after all, that was immaterial), they did find that he would be
prepared to go to the neighborhood of three millions.
Now another adviser of His Majesty--no less a person than the
Secretary of State who looks after expenditure, the Chancellor of
the Exchequer (or to be strictly accurate, the young man who did
all the hard work for the third of the Permanent Officials in the
Treasury)--had marked one and a half millions as the very limit.
There was a difference of one hundred per cent., and it did look for
a moment as though the Anonymous Benefactor would have a walk-over.
For he was evidently a man determined on his object, and apparently
one of those sudden modern apparitions with visions in their heads
and quite incredible sums in their pockets.
That £750 poet in the Education Department, who was keenest on the
whole affair, the man who years before had started the idea of the
C.P.C.T.G.D.P., the man who had already erected in his imagination
all that mass of acoustic theaters, baths, miniature ranges, and
above all, Dromes, through which the children of London should be
passed in myriad relays (there also on great screens the ravages
of alcohol upon the human body should be depicted in novel and
more striking form), the man whom Providence had raised up to save
our little ones and do Mr. Petre that exceedingly good turn, was
distracted at the sudden peril of losing the Paddenham Site. It would
be a cruel thing if his great dream were never to be realized!
Now this same humble individual had come, through Lady Gwryth,
to know everybody--an excellent form of knowledge even in an
educationalist. In the serious drawing-rooms a counter-offensive
developed against the Anonymous Benefactor.
It was as well; for had the Anonymous Benefactor had it all his
own way, it is terrible to think what would have happened to Mr.
Charlbury, to Charlie Terrard, to the hard-faced man, and to all
the host of little people who were ready for their pickings. As for
what would have happened to Mr. Petre I dare not think of it. But
at any rate, the Anonymous Benefactor, that mysterious, gigantic
figure, lost the throw. After a good many questions in Parliament,
two speeches and the threat of a Commission; after a joke or two in
the Revues and on the Bench, a passionate protest from the _Morning
Post_, a bleat from the Anti-Communist League and a fierce howl
from the absurd Taxpayers’ Union, all the general routine of such
affairs--the Paddenham Site issued an august communication in its
turn and announced that it preferred the good of Education to its
miserable pocket.
There was a very fine leader indeed in the _Messenger_, which I have
myself cut out and keep framed before me upon the wall of my study,
to cheer me when I come near to despairing of my fellow-men. His
Grace (for it was His Grace who inspired that leader, though he did
not actually write it, because he could not write consecutively),
pointed out that such things only happened here and in America, and
that they were characteristic of the Nordic Race and of the modern
man of affairs; that the sacrifice was Idealist ... a peak.... But,
indeed, I have no space for it all; at any rate, that leader in the
_Messenger_ was calculated to lead to some later friendly relation
between the Duke and Mr. John K. Petre; and would inevitably have
done so, as the Duke intended it to do, had it not been for the fact
that Mr. Petre suffered from so uneasy, so insane a panic, which grew
upon him with every passing day.
He would meet no one. He refused to go out into the great world of
Dukes and Gwryths and their sisters. He hid.
While these negotiations were toward he had, as may be believed,
fled from the Splendide; for once more, less than a week after his
return, he had seen Mephistopheles--only the back of him--striding
towards the bar. He had taken refuge in the omniscience of Charles
Terrard, and Charlie Terrard had found him rooms in the Temple under
the convenient name of Patten. Henry Patten was painted on the door
and Mr. Petre was at great pains to remember it. There for the moment
he could feel a little more secure. Charlie Terrard had suggested,
indeed, how pleasant it would be if they could share a flat, but
Mr. Petre already appreciated the world in which Charlie Terrard
moved, and he was about as inclined for that arrangement as a devout
spinster in a country village is inclined for appearance upon the
stage with song and dance.
He lay low. He visited his Hampshire lair continually. He prayed for
peace--but how could peace come to a man who had lied so freely in
pursuit of it?
The weeks went by without incident. He had signed what papers were
put before him; he dreaded abominably the day when he would have
to sign something else: when he would have to sign for money which
was not there and to pay sums more than tenfold the capital at his
command. But that day never came.
Incredible as it may seem to you, my chance reader, and to all those
million sisters of yours who with so much difficulty earn real
money which they pay in real form, across real counters, for food
and permission to live, incredible as it may seem to professors of
political economy, there is such an operation as selling without
buying, and that blessed paradox was put in operation by Mr. Petre’s
Guardian Dæmon with the greatest ease.
It was, to be accurate, upon the 17th of May that at last a letter
was signed which bound the Education Department in bonds of
iron--nothing as yet negotiable, but a sure and certain pledge of
completion; and that bunch of honest fellows, Terrard and Charlbury
and the hard-faced man, and I know not how many of their merry
hangers-on entered into the fullness of their joy. Some even borrowed
on the strength of it, for they were pressed; therefore did the
Banks come to hear of it, and among others the Branch Bank where Mr.
Petre’s huge current account, still well over £73,000, lay idle or
rather earning money at usury for others.
The only man who had not heard the final news was the obstinately
secluded Petre. He was in Hampshire again, lost; and none dared seek
him. Anxiously did Terrard await his return; but when he did come up
to the Temple, a few days later, it was too late in the evening for
business.
Next day Mr. Petre sought the Bank early in the morning to draw a
casual check for his trifling personal expenses (he was still a
little nervous, but he was getting accustomed to the place), the
young man in horn-rimmed spectacles with a face like the moon asked
whether he could possibly see the Manager. Again a hairy terror
passed through Mr. Petre’s being. But he nerved himself, and once
more did he tread the carpet of that corridor, once more conducted by
the leader of souls who had conducted him those weeks before; once
more did he pass the three engravings; once more did he find the
presiding godlet of the place, and there was still a fire, for May’s
a bitter month and the Managers of Banks are sedentary men.
For a few moments he did not speak. He looked on that extraordinary
man to whom seventy odd thousands were as small change, and who left
such a sum on current account as your common lord leaves a rickety
overdraft of seventy.
What doom was to fall upon him Mr. Petre knew not; but the face
of his host reassured him, for though it was full of grandeur, as
befitted his station, it was not malignant. It was even kindly,
though its owner took care that it should not betray the too great
respect which he felt for such a client’s presence.
“We have all heard the news, Mr. Petre,” he said, when they were
alone.
Mr. Petre gulped. _He_ hadn’t heard any news!
“I congratulate you, Mr. Petre. It was a bold move.”
Mr. Petre inwardly agreed that it was--not to say temerarious--and
the word “congratulate” relieved him, but he said nothing. He only
smiled profoundly.
“I need not say that we are entirely at your disposal for any
operation in connection with all that will follow?”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Petre in tones the firmness of which surprised
him. “Certainly.” Though what it was that might follow left him
bewildered.
“I should imagine everything will be settled before the end of the
Session, eh?” continued the Master of Credit, or rather the high
servant of those who are the ultimate masters of Credit.
“No doubt,” said Mr. Petre. “Yes, probably. In fact, obviously.” Then
there was a silence.
“Well, Mr. Petre, I only asked you to be good enough to give me a few
moments in order to put that before you. Ah! It is for you to judge.”
It was indeed! The Manager knew, as did all his world, the exceeding
eccentricity of the millionaire, and dreaded to the last extremes of
dread lest one chance word should lead to the sudden withdrawal of
his favors.
“It is not for me to suggest it, Mr. Petre,” the voice went on, “but
there is a large sum standing idle, Mr. Petre, a very large sum. And
of course when this purchase goes through it will really be a very
large sum indeed.... A much larger sum,” he added with a futility
worthy of a better cause.
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre, catching a vague impression that there would
undoubtedly be a very large sum indeed doing nothing, and in his
name. His manner confirmed the impression that however large the sum
it would pass through the same hands: and the Branch Bank was very
pleased. It spoke and said:
“Government departments aren’t given to hurrying themselves, are
they? Ha! Ha! But you must be glad they’ve made up their minds at
last!”
Then Mr. Petre began to understand, though none too clearly. It
seemed he had been saved again.
He saw the white beard wagging, he heard the voice continuing, in a
new, persuasive tone:
“Ah, I don’t know, Mr. Petre, whether you have considered ...” and
here the Manager pulled towards him a large publication with an
elaborate cover, “whether you have considered the Magna Development
Scheme? We think highly of it here, Mr. Petre. To tell you the full
truth, the issue was made through us, and to be perfectly frank,
we are ourselves engaged in the matter. I am not free to give you
other names, but some of them are public property, Mr. Petre, public
property. You will know them as well as I do. They are names to
conjure with, Mr. Petre.”
He put on his spectacles, opened the elaborate cover, and looked over
sundry pictures and curves, printed on that fine hand-made paper.
He held the document so that Mr. Petre had a glimpse of photographs
showing a beastly foreign land parched under a hellish sun, with
blackamoors about. There was a map with rivers in blue, mostly
dotted, and interrogation marks upon the everlasting hills. There
was a portrait of a bounder in a pith helmet. It was revolting. The
Manager was about to urge further arguments when there happened in
Mr. Petre’s soul a surge of emotion for which he could not himself
have accounted; perhaps it was his weariness and disgust with this
successive business of blind actions. He might on a closer analysis
have discovered that it had something to do with a new confidence
born of the turn that this last blind action had taken. But I think
it was more the effect of those photographs and of the pith helmet
man. At any rate, that Ironic Spirit at work, to whom for a brief
span the life of this distracted man had been given as a plaything,
moved Mr. Petre’s mind to a pronouncement. He said with the same
decision he had used a month before at Mrs. Cyril’s luncheon party,
when first he had engaged upon that path which had led him so far:
“I won’t have anything to do with it.” He was surprised at his own
abruptness.
The Manager looked up sharply. Mr. Petre was gazing into the fire,
his face averted, and for half a second that face was inspected as
closely as a face can be. The Manager decided that Mr. Petre was
beyond him--and there the Manager was right.
“I must wait,” Mr. Petre had almost added, when he checked himself.
Why should he tell any of these people anything? He hated these
Magnas. He hated the sunburned wastes and the blackamoors. He wanted
to get away. One thing he was determined on: he wouldn’t give
reasons. That way catechism lay and in catechism exposure, and the
end of all. He repeated doggedly: “I have made up my mind not to
touch them! I won’t touch them! I won’t have anything to do with
them!”
“Certainly, Mr. Petre, certainly,” said the Manager. “I quite
understand. But you will let us know if anything....”
“Of course, of course,” said Mr. Petre, whatever the devil “anything”
might be.
“Well then, my dear sir, it is quite understood, is it not? I need
hardly say that you may draw upon us with perfect freedom,” and he
laughed, a conventional laugh, as though the thing were too absurdly
obvious to need saying.
“Yes, oh yes,” said Mr. Petre. His host made the slightest movement
to rise; Mr. Petre took advantage of it, and rose himself to go.
Indeed, he was in such haste to go that he left his hat behind him,
and the Manager with a human gesture followed him almost quickly,
and handed it to him before he got to the door. Mr. Petre thanked
him, shook hands quite warmly and was gone. He went so fast that the
conductor who acted as usher or dog for so great a man only just
caught him up at the end of the corridor and bowed him out. And as he
went out at top speed through the main building to the great swing
doors of the Bank he was followed by fifty pairs of eyes from behind
the grille which divides the Priests and Acolytes of Finance from the
profane, and one man and another by pairs exchanged short sentences
upon the judgment and the power and the glory of so many millions.
Mr. Petre could not escape, what no man can escape, the influence of
his activities, even though these activities had been thrust upon
him. He had fallen, alas! to looking at the financial columns of
his paper. It had become a daily habit, though he was doing nothing
with those regiments of names and figures; therefore on the day
after his visit to the bank parlor his eyes caught the words “Magna
Development,” and he read what they had to say. It seemed that
Magnas were moving. It did not read like a puff, it read like sober
chronicle.
There was the new report, and as he read it a faint breath--oh, a
mere zephyr--of the Holy Spirit of Business, which he so gravely
lacked, ruffled the surface of Mr. Petre’s soul. But the scent of
that fetid air nauseated him. He read the prices as a decent man
reads, from a kind of itch and against his better instincts, the
exploitation of the gallows by our great modern Lords in their
newspapers. He reads: but hates it the more as he reads. Till at last
he burns the rag.
So felt Mr. Petre as he watched Magnas moving.
When a big thing moves it does not move like Touaregs, that flighty
Gallic-African stock; it moves as moves the mighty Pachyderm, in a
solemn ascentional surge like a herd of elephants breasting a hill;
it moves as a great volume of water might move, as a tide flooding
into harbor. So moved Magnas all that day, and I cannot conceal it
from you that Mr. Petre went so far as to buy an evening paper at
what I might call the close of play; he had not looked at a tape as
yet--and, indeed, he never came to that. The interest was momentary;
the disgust permanent. He soon relapsed into his fixed mood of
anxious inward searching, and when buying and selling obtruded
themselves they were soon swallowed up in that repeated torturing
riddle the Sphinx had set him. Who am I? Who are mine?
That same evening he was to meet Terrard in order to hear the last
details of the Paddenham Site scheme, and they were to dine together.
It was all very well to defend himself with isolation, but he had
been too lonely, and so long as they dined where no one could see
them he was glad of companionship. The dinner was in his own rooms;
small, simple and bad. After the meal Terrard said to him casually,
“What do you think of Magnas?”
“Don’t mention them!” Mr. Petre answered angrily. Terrard looked up
astonished. He had never heard that emotion in Mr. Petre’s voice
before. But, indeed, that excellent man was overtaxed. He had a
feeling of being driven, a feeling that if he was to do anything more
he would do it on his own. He had had enough.
Charlie Terrard obeyed the implication and was silent; then talked of
other things. He gave him the date when the whole of the Paddenham
Site affair would be wound up, and the Government money paid over.
He asked him whether he would care to look at the figures. Mr.
Petre sighed, said he would, meaning that it had to be done; but
how willingly he would have foregone the task! He said it vacantly
enough, for indeed he was weary of the thing, now that it had come to
fruition, and not even yet had he grasped the full meaning of that
enormous affair. Rather did his mind continue to dwell on Magnas,
like an ache; and while Charlie Terrard was putting scattered sheets
out upon the table with sundry jottings upon them in pencil the older
man was wondering whether he could not be rid of all, now that his
future was more than assured. With the end of the session--when the
end of the Paddenham Site purchase had gone through--he would bolt
and be at peace. Till then the less doing the more his chafed soul
was eased. This and nothing but this occupied that poor afflicted
mind, even while Terrard was trying to call his attention to the vast
sums before him.
Mr. Petre made an effort, looked wearily at the penciled marks, and
grasped the figures they conveyed, but not their social meaning.
“There is the net,” said Charlie Terrard, and he pointed to the
scribbled, but legible seven figures. “That of course is after
deducting your purchase price, plus the commissions and stamps and
all the rest of it; only from the balance, apart from the frills you
have got to take, of course, what Bannister’s bill will come to, and
then there are the 1932 duties, as we call them.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre blankly.
“So with what the completion will have come to, and what this
Government purchase comes to, and the stamps and the rest, the total
is here. That is where you stand on it,” and Mr. Petre read with
weary eyes the penciled marks which meant £1,032,405 8s. 10d. He did
not add to it mentally the lump that remained out of the original
£73,000 odd. He did not contrast that original lump with the very
much larger lump that would be through by August when Parliament had
risen and the deal had gone through to its last detail; he simply saw
the figures, and he was tired of them.
“It’s just possible,” said Terrard, “that you may be questioning
some of these items,” and he pointed to another litany of figures
and frowned intelligently. “Now this little separate batch of
deductions....”
Mr. Petre waved him off; he was not questioning those deductions, or
anything else. They were the pickings that the crowd had made--out
of his money; and they were welcome. He nodded solemnly as one item
after another was ticked off for him--commission this, commission
that; expense this, expense that; and traveling and printing and
advertising. He heard Terrard’s voice concluding after the litany:
“It might have been simpler to put the whole thing down in a lump and
then give you the details for inspection; but I thought you would
like to see all the items.” And poor Mr. Petre said, “Yes,” though he
would willingly have given ten shillings or even a pound to be free
of the bother and know simply that it was--what was it? He looked
again, £1,032,405 8s. 10d. He continued to nod mechanically as the
pencil went on ticking off. Terrard had expected no opposition; he
knew by this time the strange mentality with which he had to deal;
yet even he was surprised. I am sorry to say that in his heart of
hearts he wondered whether that litany might not have been swelled
and the pickings increased. Indeed, they might have been for all Mr.
Petre would have cared.
Terrard, dealing with the mere record of such wealth was not fully
in control of himself. The pencil trembled; but as for Mr. Petre, I
readily believe that if the conversation had concluded by Terrard’s
telling him that some hitch had prevented realization after all,
and that this vast sum had vanished, his mind would have remained
unchanged.
“Would you like to keep the notes,” said Terrard, “or shall I have a
copy made of them?”
“Oh, have a copy made of them,” answered Mr. Petre carelessly, as he
said good-night, “and send it along when you like.”
Terrard, as he went slowly down the stone stairs, his hand upon
the ancient iron railing of that ancient Row, was absorbed in this
further question: What was Petre up to in the matter of Magnas? Why
such a prompt rejection? Why so violent? He stopped twice on his way
down to try and think it out. He decided that probably the old fox
was buying under some other name. He came to a determination that,
high as the stock had gone that day, he would be the first on the
market to-morrow.
In the rather somber Bloomsbury house which the Manager of the Branch
Bank honored with his habitation that same question was proposing
itself for submission, and the brain that dealt with it had come to a
conclusion not very different. So emphatic a declaration could only
mean that Mr. Petre had not yet bought Magnas, or why crab them? But
certainly he was about to buy--or why crab them? He smiled as he
thought of the different tale Mr. Petre would be telling people about
Magnas on the morrow. Therefore, said the Manager to himself, he had
been wise to buy more Magnas himself, as he had done, the very moment
Mr. Petre had left his parlor. He was justified; we know that Magnas
moved all that morrow. Their rise confirmed two men--and more--in
their admiration of a genius who could marry the commonest tricks to
unheard-of rapidity and daring.
The following morning Charlie Terrard bought. Magnas were still
moving; not blazing, not soaring, but comfortably going up and up
with dignity and precision. And so they ought; for the report was
true and the position sound; and for five days the thing went on, and
after that, though the pace slackened, the rise slowly continued.
Then a halt. Distant in space, each knowing nothing of the other, two
men had one thought: Terrard and the Manager each grasped with subtle
perception that the old goat Petre was cautiously beginning to sell.
They also sold. That moment was followed by a slight fall, and then
another halt. But Terrard had not touched them again. He had made a
nice little packet. Charlbury, I fear, had neither bought nor sold,
for Terrard had had no occasion to speak to him. As for the Bank
Manager, he also wisely abstained. Each man as he took his profits
wished ardently, but with a useless curiosity, that some one could
tell him how, and in what amount, and through whom, the eccentric
millionaire had acted, and what _his_ profit had been. But the
eccentric millionaire, the old goat, the fox, was otherwise engaged.
He had fled for silence to the chalk uplands, worshiping the spring
and drinking in the morning.
* * * * *
When a little later one of his innumerable hostesses had taken
Charlie Terrard aside, and had implored him to tell her what Petre
was doing (“You are the only man who knows,” she had said, archly,
damn her!) Terrard with a look of too much wisdom had protested that
he didn’t know. When the private deal in Magnas was over and the
general appreciation of the stock and the benefit it had produced to
the house he served was discussed in the Bank parlor, the Master of
that place smiled meaningly at his subordinate and said that Petre
was a curious man. And the subordinate had smiled back, and both of
them in their hearts very firmly believed that they had laid bare the
secrets of that mighty heart.
* * * * *
The summer and its London season rose to their climax through June
and into July. The end of the session approached. Mr. Petre was less
and less to be seen. Three splendid attacks by Mrs. Cyril failed;
the third with heavy loss. A forlorn hope led by a First Secretary’s
wife, issuing from the American Embassy, was cut off and wiped out to
the last woman.
Mr. Petre grew a shell. He was the despair of Terrard.
That young gentleman was happy enough all the same, and so he ought
to be! The dogs also get the crumbs that fall from the table, and
considering the scale of his intelligence, he was a lucky dog. He
rode in the magnificent car which the Hooter people had forced on
Mr. Petre with two chauffeurs and garage complete--to the huge
discomfiture of the Paramount people, who spread the perfectly true
rumor that it was a gift for advertisement. He moved into a very
sumptuous flat. He got engaged to Dada Beeston, who had refused him
fifteen times. She had thought better of it; he even promised to
introduce her to the Midas and to turn her own dross into gold, which
was beyond his power. He floated on a sea of Petre. But Petre himself
had grown invisible. Terrard saw him frequently enough, putting
all his business through and winding up the Paddenham Site affair.
But that was not enough. Terrard wanted to display the animal; he
boasted of him. All the smart women regarded Charlie as the keeper.
They pestered him with their invitations. They put down the silence
and absence of the millionaire to some scheme of poor Charlie’s own,
whereas poor Charlie was dying to trot him out. But whether it was
that so incredible an access of fortune had in some way strengthened
him, or whether it was that long strain had turned him inward upon
himself, Mr. Petre was adamant; he would not move. He took the air
solemnly when he was in town in the Temple Gardens an hour a day; and
even so, passed back and forth in short stretches to keep his eyes
on the dangerous human species and be ready for immediate flight.
And Charlie Terrard knew that it was as much as his place was worth
to disturb him then. Long intervals he spent in his country retreat,
where his old false name still held and where he was secure. Yet even
here his accursed fate pursued him. He had now taken the rooms at the
inn by the year, and the landlady, treating him as a god, could not
but gossip and wonder; for why should a man to whom money seemed to
be nothing bring his splendor beneath her roof? When he found that
she had gossiped he did an odd thing; he paid her an astonishing
percentage and told her it would cease on the day when he heard that
the gossip had been renewed.
[Illustration: _Dada Beeston (Dorothea Madua, second and younger
daughter of Henry, 10th Baron Beeston, of Beeston Abbey, Beeston,
Rutlandshire; and of Desirée Waldschwein, his wife)._]
So even in that tiny Hampshire village all tittle-tattle about the
man was stopped dead.
Terrard did not dare reveal Mr. Petre’s Temple address and name to
the hunters. Mr. Petre had succeeded in making himself of his own
volition in his new life what apparently he had made of himself in
his old life: a man entirely remote from mankind, inaccessible,
unknown.
For all his researches--and he had tried desperately and well--told
him no more of John K. Petre than all the world knew. And at times he
caught himself wondering whether indeed he were he.
Go back and inquire in the States themselves he dared not. If here in
England questions were to be fled--what would it be there? Come, he
would wait. Some day in a flash his soul would return to him.
CHAPTER VII
The Session was drawing to its end. The Paddenham deal--which Gowle,
in that fanatical sheet of his, called “The Paddenham Scandal”--had
gone through. Many had thought of putting up some opposition against
it in the Commons, and all had given way at last--for the sake of the
children, Mrs. Fossilton assures me.
At the Branch Bank more than a million pounds sat looking foolish,
still on current account, and its guardians were living in a perilous
Paradise.
July had not long to live (nor the Home Secretary either for that
matter, though he was in crude health, for he was destined to fall
off the Matterhorn that very coming August--but I digress), when the
Dæmon played a trump and presented to Mr. Charlbury’s patient but
ingenious fancy one more good, great and thumping Petre deal. For
John K. Petre was the master of American Rotors--and the opportunity
lay patent. Mr. Charlbury long wondered why he hadn’t thought of it
before. But the Dæmon knew why.
* * * * *
The Rotor has come to enter into nearly everything that a man sees,
and does, to-day. The last generation, that of the Great War, never
dreamt of it. Ours will remember how it came, first in the modest
form of a toy with an outlandish name, and put upon the market in
London and Paris by the Japanese. Then there were two or three
years of experiment, with occasional newspaper paragraphs, and Lord
Winnipeg’s unfortunate venture in which Saillant and his crowd were
mixed up--I am afraid the Frenchman got the better of it. But,
anyhow, it was wound up within eighteen months. Then there were two
years in which the only advertisement the new thing got was a crop of
popular jeers.
The Rotor was already driving our heavy vehicles and pretty well
all our large merchant vessels. The Navy had taken it up before
anybody else. It was beginning to do part of the domestic work,
especially in the new underground flats, where it could be fitted in
the first digging without the change over that is necessary in the
old-fashioned over-ground houses. It was beginning to be used for
private cars, though no one had yet started a fleet of taxis with it
in those days. I am speaking of 1948.
Somehow or other none of the many companies connected with the new
discovery could make good. The work was there all right; it was the
profit that seemed to misfire.
For one thing the theorists and the busybodies had tinkered with
it. Those people (prominent everywhere in local government) who
have read too many books and have not seen enough of life, talked
of “reserving for the community” the “future possibilities of the
Rotor.” That frightened off investors. Then the London County Council
made most absurd regulations, hampering the commercial development of
what already ought to have been a universal form of power.
The provincial towns were hopeless. Birmingham coolly went into the
Rotor business on the rates, and even hall-marked a particular type
of Rotor which it thrust upon all domestic users and manufacturers
in the town. It did worse. It let out the smaller machines at a
price which barely earned 4 per cent. on the cost and quite killed
commercial competition. Manchester was nearly as bad. Glasgow and
Liverpool were not far behind in their half-socialist absurdities.
The only northern community of any size which acted with common sense
in the matter was Pudsey, which had the distinction of being the
first English town to leave private enterprise completely free in
this matter. But the southern residential towns, and especially the
watering-places, are, as every one knows, in a much better tradition;
and the Rotor companies paid fair dividends in these sections:
especially Brighton, where Sir Charles Waldschwein was the presiding
genius of the enterprise.
But every one surveying the figures for the whole group of connected
ventures would have shared the gloom of that great scientist, in his
way an eminent business man, Lavino (an Englishman, in spite of his
name, or rather a Welshman) who prophesied openly at the Cardiff
inaugural that the Rotor would never pay, and yet had the patriotism
to join the board of the youngest of the linked companies.
It seemed as though some odd fate prevented the chief new instrument
of our new time from reaping its due commercial reward.
What changed all this was the taking of the whole thing in hand by
two men of genius, Henry Trefusis and his brother, both of them sons
of a Hamburg merchant who had come to this country in early youth,
married here and established the great firm which is known under
his name. The brothers had chosen different paths in life, the one
had preferred Public Service, the other, affairs. But when Henry
first began to set in order the finance of Rotors Charles, though
not neglecting his political duties, could not but take a certain
interest in the boundless opportunities offered.
It was but three years before Mr. Petre’s unfortunate and
inexplicable accident that the first amalgamation took place.
Everything had been straightened out by the amazing organizing power
of the younger Trefusis, and though the new enterprise, taking in
the whole British field, had not yet turned the corner by the end of
1952, there were already being prepared the last two necessary steps
without which no great modern public service can function properly: a
public charter and a concealed, but effective, monopoly.
The small and hopelessly mismanaged competing interest which the
Saillant French group still controlled in this country were bought
out on very favorable terms about ten days before the shocking
suicide of Saillant himself, which, as the Frenchman had chosen to
commit it in the middle of St. Paul’s Cathedral at the most solemn
moment of the Memorial Service for Lord Winnipeg, could not be kept
out of the papers, and is fresh in the minds of the public.
[Illustration: “_One had chosen Public Service, the other--Affairs._”]
What still hindered the final successful establishment of Rotors
under a National system was the network of local companies and
conflicting sectional contracts, of which nothing but an Act of
Parliament could compel the purchase and settlement.
The elder Trefusis had felt a very honorable scruple in directly
promoting such a measure; he left it in the hands of his two most
intimate associates in the Cabinet. But there was no doubt about
the Bills going through, especially as it could not, of course, be
submitted to public debate; it was quite unfitted for treatment of
that kind, dealing as it did with a mass of scientific particulars
and equally technical and difficult financial details, which a large
assembly is quite unfitted to discuss.
It is true that Lord William Mawson, who had been a director of the
old Saillant wreck, put down something on the paper which might have
led to a discussion at some impossible hour of the night towards the
last days of the session. But luckily so futile an intervention was
rendered impossible by his Lordship’s appointment to the little-known
post of Sub-Controller of the Chains and Liveries: a coincidence
worthy of the good fortunes that have latterly attended the Trefusis
scheme in all its activities.
Briefly what was proposed was this. (1) The moribund existing
companies--or such as could not see their way to amalgamation--were
to be compulsorily bought out at a price to be fixed by judicial
award. (2) The whole mass of obsolete local contracts now hampering
Rotors should be codified under rules imposed by the Government; not
only the efficient working of what is now a public interest, but the
simplification of its management, made such a new policy necessary.
Maximum charges for the use of power and for the lease of machines
and meters were set down in the same instrument. The Trefusis
brothers were pleased that Mr. Justice Honeybubble should preside
over the award. The drafting of the rules was in the hands of a loyal
committee whose chairman was Arthur Cannon. In such hands business
men could be certain that all the reasonable claims of Henry Trefusis
and his company would be safe.
All this was plain sailing: the real difficulty lay in the point of
arranging a virtual monopoly.
Old prejudices die hard; and there lingers quite a respectable body
of opinion, especially among our older public men who can remember
the last days of King Edward VII. and were born in those of Queen
Victoria, which has an unreasonable horror of monopoly unconnected
with public ownership. Of public ownership there could, of course, be
no question; that fad had, thank Heaven, been destroyed at the polls
by an overwhelming majority of votes when Mrs. Fossilton’s party had
gained its majority of thirty-six in a full House over that of her
brother-in-law, Mr. Cowl. It was as certain as anything could be that
the English people would never revive the old dead socialist formula
of nationalization. Indeed, the last stronghold of that nonsense, the
road system, was already in private hands, and the various branches
of the postal service had followed the telephones, and had been given
out to private contract half a dozen years ago. Only the northern
municipalities still played with the moribund fetish of public
control.
On the other hand, it was difficult to see how any effective
competition could be established in the particular case of the
Rotor; the nature of its transmission of power, the necessary
standardization of the instruments, the existing strength of the
Trefusis interests, all seemed to forbid it.
There were not a few upon the Board (and it included the best brain
of them all after Trefusis--I mean Mary Gallop) were for letting
things stand, with the codified B. O. T. rules as a sufficient sop to
the constitutional Puritans.
The Company was in such a strong position that no competition, they
said, was to be feared. To establish anything like a serious rival
would have meant millions, not only in the comparatively unimportant
point of buildings and plant, but on the political (and social) side
as well.
And who was likely to enter such a field with Charles Trefusis in the
Cabinet and a close group of his political friends associated with
him in the high patriotic interest of Rotor development?
But the majority of the Board, and even Henry Trefusis himself,
inclined to make things somewhat more secure. The difficulty was
turned by the suggestion that, after the present Bill had gone
through, and British Amalgamated Rotors could feel themselves
reasonably safe for the future, The Admiralty, War Office, and I.A.F.
should enter into contracts to purchase their material from the
English Company to the exclusion of all others for at least thirty
years; and as this would establish the standardized machines and
their power in the ports, in the Imperial air transport system, and
in all functions under the control of the Government, especially the
Harbor Entries and new Public Wharfage, a virtual monopoly would
follow. For it would be difficult for any hypothetical rival--and
it seemed impossible at this time of day that such a rival should
appear--to establish any permanent service; acting as he would be
under an inability to link up with the public uses of what would
soon come to be known as the official Rotor system. For instance,
how could a boat make harbor in a difficult channel at night under
a different and competing system controlling the rival patents? It
could only pick up the guiding-ray with a Rotor attuned to the shore
Rotor. Or how could the elevators (to take but one small detail, but
a detail which applied to hundreds of ports throughout the British
Empire) link up with termini in the holds unless both were on the
same system?
Certain fields, notably the recently launched Tidal Power areas and
their supply, Henry Trefusis decided not to touch. He doubted his
power to capitalize so vast a new extension. On the other hand, he
would not leave them in being as dangerous competitors. He would use
his political connection to kill them, as railways had killed canals.
Then indeed his monopoly, the monopoly of the British Amalgamated
Rotors, of “B.A.R.” would be secure.
Such were the prospects of B.A.R.’s in this month of July, 1953, when
Mr. Petre, rather perhaps by good fortune than by the talent which
his contemporaries so freely ascribed to him, had just banked (and
left on current account) the ready moneys of the Paddenham purchase.
* * * * *
In “Marengo,” at breakfast, all alone, sat Mr. Charlbury. Opportunity
breeds opportunity, and discovery, discovery; and the Dæmon found a
fruitful soil.
If any one had told Mr. Charlbury three or four weeks before that he
would pull off an amazing scoop in Touaregs and then, on the top of
that, walk off with an enormous commission (come, to be accurate, two
enormous commissions) on the Paddenham Site, he would have thought
himself in fairyland.
But by this time he had already come to take such things for granted.
He used to think in three figures; he was now thinking in five: and
of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
[Illustration: “_He used to think in three figures; he was now
thinking in five._”]
If no brilliant scheme had illumined his life before Mr. Petre had
so strangely blown into it by the really unexpected door of his
partnership with Terrard, it was not because Mr. Charlbury lacked
initiative, but because habit had put him upon a certain road
whereon to exercise his initiative, and he had never been led to
consider larger things. He had shown plenty of initiative quite early
in life in the matter of a row of cottages near his father’s shop,
and he prided himself--out of a hundred other successful ventures--in
the purchase of Mrs. Railton’s interests after the divorce, and the
subsequent sale of them to Mr. Railton. But to-day he had risen
into another sphere, and what had moved him at this moment was a
paragraph of half a dozen lines in small print coming at the end of a
column in his daily paper.
The column had dealt with the enormities of the Polish People,
and had threatened them with the vengeance of the journal if they
continued to trample upon the rights of an oppressed German-speaking
minority. Mr. Charlbury had as much patriotism as any man, and was
free to indulge in hatred of all Poles, but the little paragraph at
the foot of the column interested him in another fashion.
At a public indignation meeting of the ratepayers of Loosham a
resolution had been unanimously passed condemning the new provisional
licenses issued by the British Amalgamated Rotor Company, and
a committee had been appointed to draft an alternative, which
upon completion was to be submitted to the Board of Trade. This
resolution, he remembered, followed upon a somewhat similar
resolution passed by a considerable majority at a meeting at Paxton
the week before.
Moreover, at Loosham, as at Paxton, there had been passed a
_unanimous_ resolution against the compulsory purchase of Locals.
It was a paragraph that meant nothing to the millions that had
seen it that morning. It appeared in several papers as a piece of
unimportant general news. It meant little more than nothing to the
Directors of Amalgamated Rotors themselves, they had expected a few
such meetings--but it inspired Mr. Charlbury with a Great Thought.
He pushed his chair back from the lonely breakfast table, screwed
his little pig’s eyes closely together and gave this Great Thought
elbow-room within his mind.
A few more such meetings? Eh? A number of them? Eh? Then virtuous
indignation in the Press. And if the Press were too frightened of the
Trefusis brothers, why then the purchase of a great Daily, eh?
It would cost money. But there was a man available with limitless
money. He was called John K. Petre.
He looked at his watch. He would soon be taking the train to his
office.
Mr. Petre stood in the consciousness of Mr. Charlbury as does
revelation in the consciousness of the new convert; as does the
beloved in the consciousness of the new lover; as does the sunlight
in the consciousness of a man cured suddenly of blindness; as does
life in the consciousness of a man reprieved from immediate death. He
was flooded with one supreme conviction: that in and by and through
Mr. Petre all things were possible. Mr. Charlbury grunted to himself
and took the train to town. During all the forty-seven minutes which
it took the powerful new Rotor engines to cover the fifteen miles
between Epsom and Victoria, his Great Thought threw branches and
leaves and burgeoned amazingly.
When he reached his office he was annoyed to find that Charlie
Terrard hadn’t yet turned up. He never did turn up before the middle
of the morning; but to-day Mr. Charlbury, who was at business on
the stroke of ten o’clock every day of his life (except Sundays and
a month’s holiday at the seaside) felt an unusual irritation at so
usual an absence. For the Great Thought needed Charlie Terrard, and
it needed him at once.
When that young gentleman did come in he was not happy; he was even
less happy than he usually was in the middle of the morning, for
his night had been happier far; and Mr. Charlbury, watching him
with some inward contempt, but remembering his mundane connections
with some inward awe, wondered whether he were fit to receive the
instructions--or let us say the proposals--which were to be his task.
But he did not wait long.
“Charlie,” he said, “you know that man Petre?” It was rather a
redundant question, but Charlie nodded wearily.
“Yes,” he said.
“Well,” went on Charlbury slowly, “if he takes up Rotors....”
“How do you mean, ‘takes up Rotors’?” said young Terrard irritably.
“It’s not worth our while to make him lose a little packet over what
all the world knows. Rotors have seen their best. Bailey tells me he
believes Trefusis is selling privately.”
“What I mean,” began Mr. Charlbury.
“What you mean,” broke in Terrard pettishly, “is that when the Bill
is through and the damn-fool public come to hear of the Public
Services Contract Rotors will go to 5½.... Well, they won’t. They’re
over-priced now. All that’s discounted. They were 4¾-⅞, offered by
whoever it was that was selling them the last thing yesterday, and
they won’t fetch that again, so there. After all,” he added, a little
ashamed of himself for showing any heat over so small a matter,
“that’s good enough in all conscience! They were 2s. 6d. before
Trefusis and his gang came in. Thirty-five pounds odd for your quid
isn’t bad, even for Trefusis, these days: Harry Holt’s wife made
forty odd thousand, and Holt left the Government, took a directorship
in it.”
Mr. Charlbury heard him out, his contempt increasing, but his awe at
the mundane connections remaining fixed. “Nothing to do with that,
Charlie,” he snapped. “Listen to me. _If the Trefusis crowd think
they’ve got Petre up against them_ ... eh?”
Charlie Terrard opened his mouth foolishly, like a man recovering
from gas. “Up against ’em?” he repeated mechanically.
“Yes,” said Mr. Charlbury, beginning to show a little temper this
time, “up against them.”
“But he isn’t,” said Charlie Terrard simply. “Petre isn’t up against
them.”
“Of course he isn’t, idiot!” answered his partner with fine equality.
“Not yet. But you can make him, can’t you?”
“Make him what?” said Charlie, who was really too stupid this
morning: but then it wasn’t fair to tackle him before twelve; he
always thought so much better after twelve.
“Look here,” said Charlbury, folding his arms on the table, squaring
his jaws and planting two gimlets of eyes into Terrard’s own. “Don’t
you know that Petre means Rotors in the States?” Charlie nodded. He
saw light. “Well, what you’ve got to do is to put Petre up to doing
something on this side. Put him up to a _British_ scheme in Rotors
on his own. Put him up to having his name in it anyhow, and _then_
you’ll hear Trefusis sing! That’s when the Anthem will rise! They’ll
have to make it a combine; they couldn’t stand against him! He can
carry us all on his back. He can swallow us and not know he’s had
breakfast! _Now_, have you got it?”
Yes, Charlie Terrard had got it now. “They would have to get new
capital or reconstruct or something,” he began slowly.
“Oh, leave that to them,” shouted Charlbury, “leave that to them,
for God’s sake! They know their way about! All they want to know is
that Petre’s up against ’em, and they won’t be up against Petre long.
They’ll be arm in arm with the enemy before he fires.”
“It wants thinking about,” said Charlie Terrard.
“It does,” said Charlbury grimly, “I’ll do the thinking.”
And he proceeded to do so. And as he unwound the tale his young
partner stared and marveled and at last grew wise in one more chapter
of the wisdom of this world.
First came a few words on Trefusis’s false security, his certitude
that nothing could come in to touch his monopoly.
Then came suggestions for a few more meetings--they, Blake and Blake,
would find the few hundreds for that--no need to worry Petre. He
might kick at details.
Then came talk of letters in the Press, write-ups; indignation
growing--only, not overdone. Enough to frighten Trefusis; not enough
to queer B.A.R.’s.
After that Petre could strike home.
Mr. Charlbury described the John K. Petre position in American
Rotors. He described the plant and the huge works at Theocritus,
Mich. He described the ignorance of these magnates on our venerable
constitution, with its connection between public service and private
enterprise. He described with holy glee the faces of Trefusis and
his brother and young Cassleton, their skirmisher, hearing that the
vast concern had thought of crossing the Atlantic; if necessary of
starting a paper to take advantage of the growing grumble against
the new licenses. He described the effect of fifty millions acting
in opposition to the proposal for permanent Government contracts
in the coming autumn. He described the salting of the smart women
and the private secretaries and the News Agencies. He described
the necessary haste of the Trefusis crowd to come down off the
shelf, to take the robber to their arms, to arrange, to settle, to
go fifty-fifty, to save their souls alive. He described how he and
Charlie would come romping in for a touch on both deals--from the
victor in his triumph, from the vanquished whom Charlie could save.
More commissions. All good!
[Illustration: _Young Mr. Cassleton, growing acquainted with the
World of Affairs._]
Oh! It was all good!
And Charlie Terrard saw a great light and was filled with the true
doctrine and confirmed and primed for his mighty work. He set out.
* * * * *
As Charlie Terrard climbed up the old stone stairs to Mr. Petre’s
rooms in the Temple his heart misgave him. He remembered the rebuff
over Magnas, and though he didn’t understand the motive or the mood,
he had noted that curious indifference which had spread over Mr.
Petre’s mind like a veil as they went together over the figures of
the Government purchase of the Paddenham Site. It’s all very well
to be a millionaire, and an American millionaire at that, and a
fantastic American millionaire into the bargain; but you weren’t
going to tell Charlie Terrard that any living man was indifferent to
something well over a million pounds.
No. It was some deep game! Something in the man which made him
great, but which, to Terrard as to every one else, also made him
inexplicable. He had to propose to-day a deal upon a scale quite out
of the common--far above the humdrum of the Paddenham Site--and he
dreaded a scene. Besides which, Mr. Petre seemed to him to have got
odder and odder in all these last few months, imprisoning himself
absurdly. It made the young man nervous to think of it. But he had to
face that interview, and he faced it. After all, the worst that could
happen would be a refusal--even if it were abrupt they could leave
the matter and talk of other things.
So mused he on those stairs till he came to the old dark oaken door
and rang.
He came in. Mr. Petre greeted him rather wearily, and they sank
opposite each other into two deep chairs looking out into the gardens
under the summer light--and upon his soul Charlie Terrard didn’t know
how to begin.
At last he said:
“Mr. Petre, I have never talked to you about your own interests in
your own country.” (Mr. Petre’s blood already ran cold.) “Honestly,
I thought it would be impertinent.” (Mr. Petre was far beyond any
effective impertinence. Panic was the emotion which those few words
had stirred in him. Good God! What was coming next? And how should he
meet it?) “But I ought to tell you what people are saying. I mean,”
concluded Charlie firmly, “about your position in Rotor affairs.”
It was an odd, hoarse voice that answered him.
“What people are saying--eh, what?” Mr. Petre still kept his face too
much turned away as he gasped out the words, and Terrard noted his
hands grasping the arms of the chair.
“Mr. Petre,” said Charlie quietly, “you are Jevons; he’s only the
original man; you’re Jevons now and you’re the American Rotor
Combine.”
“Yes,” gasped the unfortunate man almost inaudibly ... at any moment
a direct question would sink him. He prayed as no man yet prayed
that Charlie would keep to affirmations which he had but to admit.
“Of course, the people who count know that you really control....
Anyhow, they make certain you control--_I_ should say you control,”
he continued, plunging boldly, “‘The American Rotor Trust.’ It’s
a sort of commonplace with those who know, Mr. Petre, and I only
mention it because it’s common knowledge, and to explain what I want
to say next.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre desperately--it was the first he had heard of
it. Then he added still more desperately, “I do....” He added those
words in his terror of the alternative, “I don’t,” which would lead
to heaven knows what cataract of revealing blunders. Follow the lead,
he thought, follow the lead; it’s the only chance. Therefore it was
that he had confessed himself to be the man behind Jevons, whoever
the devil Jevons might be, or whatever the devil Jevons was. Yes. All
right. He, the victim of this torture, controlled the American Rotor.
“Yes, I do,” he added again, and looked down at the Temple greensward
so tragically that he might have been confessing forgery and high
treason and making a clean breast of it.
“Now you know, Mr. Petre,” said Terrard, a trifle emboldened by
the absence so far of a check, “it’s inevitable--I don’t say it’s
justified--but it’s inevitable under the circumstances--that they
should think you’ve come over on that business. I mean for or against
the Trefusis crowd.”
“Yes,” murmured Mr. Petre inanely, like a parrot, “for or against
the Trefusis crowd.” Then with sudden intelligence and anxiety,
“Who’s they?” he jerked out irritably. “Who’s talking about me and my
affairs?” Terrard soothed him with a lifted hand.
“Oh, Mr. Petre, Mr. Petre, don’t imagine for a moment that your
privacy has not been respected!... I do assure you it has been. I
only meant those who cannot but know your splendid boldness in the
Paddenham business. After all, you know, there’s me, and there’s
Charlbury, and the office--oh, there’s been nothing in print, but you
couldn’t expect the people who follow these things not to have heard
a name, a mere name, Mr. Petre.”
“Yes,” groaned Mr. Petre dully. “Go on.”
“Well,” said Terrard, “as I say, they can’t help thinking you’re here
either with or against Trefusis and his lot. Certainly that’s what I
thought--to put it plainly.”
“Well,” said Mr. Petre, “what then?”
Terrard pondered a moment, recalling the instructions of Mr.
Charlbury, J.P. for the County of Surrey. Then he started off:
“Well,” slowly, “the fact is,” more slowly, “Trefusis is going about
saying he must act, one way or the other.” Mr. Petre’s blood ran
cold again. “You know the kind of man he is?” Mr. Petre nodded; he
didn’t, so he nodded--quite emphatically. “He’s like a rat. If he’s
cornered, he bites.” Mr. Petre nodded again, as though the habits
of the mysterious Trefusis had been the study of his life. “But
he’s frightened, Mr. Petre; devilish frightened. To put it plainly,
I’ve no doubt of this; that if he thinks you’ll meet him, and that
you really mean business, he’ll come down. He’ll combine. He won’t
do anything--he’ll just take your terms--in reason. He won’t take
action.”
“Take action!” gulped the distracted man. “Take action!” And in
his heart he cried aloud to heaven for salvation. A certain malign
Trefusis was--might--would take _action_!--oh! merciful God!--and all
would be before the world!
“I said he _wouldn’t_ take action if you approached him,” said
Charlie, “and that I advise you to do. I advise you most strongly.”
“You mean,” said Mr. Petre slowly, as he gathered some wandering,
foggy idea that there was an avenue of escape somewhere, “that ...
Mr. Trefusis....” he was glad that the “Mr.” went down; it might have
been Sir Ezekiel or Lord Trefusis for all he knew, “won’t take action
if he thinks that I...?”
“Yes, exactly,” said Charlie, impatient at such play-acting, but
restraining his impatience. “If he knows that you’re bringing your
thing over here against him, he’ll take it for granted you’ve marked
him and he’ll die game. He’ll attack first. If you approach _him_,
that’s another matter. I tell you, he’d come right down and feed out
of your hand.”
“Ah!” echoed Mr. Petre, “if I approach him, yes; if I approach him,
he’ll feed out of my hand.”
“He knows you might even start a paper--and that would sink him with
the grumbling that’s going on. He knows of your campaign in the
States, Mr. Petre, and your--I mean Jevons’--purchase of the ... the
... what _was_ the name of that paper...?”
Charlie’s inquiry was honest enough, he knew the name of that great
American organ, but he couldn’t recall it for the moment, “You know,
Mr. Petre, the...? ... the...?”
“Oh, Lord!” thought Mr. Petre, “oh, _Lord_!” He would say anything,
do anything to prevent another such extreme of danger.
To his unspeakable relief Terrard babbled on. “Oh I never mind!” he
said. “Anyhow, the paper did the trick. Yes,” he continued, with a
little half laugh, “the Trefusis brothers--they’ve only got to know
that you’re coming in and they’ll make their proposals all right.
They know their way about.” It was not an echo of Charlbury; it was
a phrase that every one had used of the brothers Trefusis, even in
the old obscure days when the one had been hammered and the other had
wriggled out of the police court proceedings over the check business.
Men said “They knew their way about” in the tone of admiration due
to such master minds. “All you’ve got to say is that you’re quite
agreeable to an arrangement with the Company as it stands, and that
if they don’t like it you’re out for an independent proposition. It
binds you to nothing.”
“No,” said Mr. Petre (he understood _that_ phrase at any rate,
and a blessed one it was!), “it binds me to nothing. What were
your exact words, by the way, Mr. Terrard? I mean that about the
present Company, and an arrangement, and the proposition? It was
‘proposition’ you said, I think, wasn’t it?”
Terrard was used to pretty well anything by this time, but he did
marvel a little at the affectation of simplicity in manner that was
so admirably done. But the matter of it was surely extravagant.
However, millionaires must be humored, and he fell in with the great
man’s affectation of not knowing the A.B.C. of blackmail.
“Yes,” he answered, “that’s what I said.”
Mr. Petre pulled out a note-book and a pencil. “Yes,” he said.
“Please give me the exact words.” Terrard was getting a little
frightened. This was really out of nature.
“Well, what I said was, ‘All you’ve got to say is that you’re
agreeable to an arrangement with the Company as it stands.’”
“Wait a moment,” said Mr. Petre, “not quite so fast, please. Yes, ‘as
it stands.’ I’ve got that down.”
“And if they don’t like it,” Terrard went on, “you’re out for an
independent proposition. It binds you to nothing.”
“I’ve got that down now,” said Mr. Petre at last, reading it over to
himself, “... proposition. It binds me to nothing.”
“Yes, but don’t put that last down,” said Charlie Terrard. “It’s
separate. The words ‘it binds you to nothing’ were only my comment.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Petre, shutting the pocketbook up and putting
it back. “That’s a weight off my mind. And you said if I do that ...
I mean, if you let Mr. Trefusis know that I’m ready to see him ... he
won’t,” he shuddered inwardly, “take action.”
“That’s so,” said Terrard. “That’s what I said.” But he was almost as
much bewildered as Mr. Petre himself. That such a man should act thus!
“Very well,” concluded Mr. Petre with a vast sigh of relief. “Go and
see them, Mr. Terrard, go and see them by all means. That’s what I
want.”
It was an astonishing way to deal with a huge commercial affair
covering two continents; but Terrard knew his man too well by this
time to spin out the interview. He was content to take his leave.
A few days later there was a large public indignation meeting against
the B.A.R. Bill in Leeds. That same week half a dozen in the north
and Midlands, and one, not very successful, in London.
Two papers timidly admitted letters. Gowle’s wretched fanatical sheet
(what a Godsend!) began a regular attack.
A few days later again a careless conversation between Terrard and
young Cassleton at the Benezra’s ball had drifted, somehow, on to
B.A.R.’s. Charlie had said casually that Mr. Petre had been talking
about the future in front of Rotors over here, in England.
Cassleton saw Henry Trefusis on the morrow, and put up danger
signals. Henry Trefusis refused to budge. Cassleton had grown
eloquent. Trefusis had said it was talk--Terrard’s talk, no proof.
Cassleton was the more convinced of danger.
Next day he met Terrard hurrying west: going to see Petre, he said.
He’d look into Bolter’s at five. Terrard was telling the truth. He
was indeed on his way to see Mr. Petre--and he saw him, to some
purpose.
A little after five he was in Bolter’s lounging by the side of the
lounging Cassleton. They had talked for half an hour and more.
Terrard had summoned the young genius, the Hermes of the Trefusis
Jove, and had plainly put the thing before him. Mr. Petre, _his_ Mr.
Petre, wasn’t over here for his health: He--the Rotor man. However,
he was willing to come to terms. Terrard could assure Cassleton of
that. Couldn’t the principals meet?
But Cassleton had bluffed. The surrender was not going to be as easy
as Terrard had hoped. He told Terrard plainly that Mr. Petre was not
in any one’s pocket, and that talking was only talking. He sneered
that there wasn’t a word in Mr. Petre’s writing; not even a penciled
scrawl; there wasn’t even a telephone message; there wasn’t----
“Oh, if that’s all,” said Charlie Terrard with sudden vigor, “that’s
easily settled.” He sent for a messenger, sat down, and wrote at top
speed:
“DEAR MR. PETRE,
“You will remember our recent conversations. I am putting
it before them now. I wonder, could you let me have a line
simply to say ‘An arrangement with the present Company
if they will, after an appointment with Mr. Trefusis;
if he will discuss the matter with me. Failing this, an
independent proposition.’ It would be quite enough.
“Yours,
“C. T.”
The messenger was told to wait for an answer.
Mr. Petre was still one of those who on receiving a letter answered
it, such was his simplicity, such was his happy ignorance of the
world. When he had read that innocent note, of which the hand was the
hand of Terrard, but the spirit was the spirit of Charlbury, he wrote
his reply at once, straight-forwardly as a man should:
“DEAR MR. TERRARD,
“Yes, that was exactly the way we put it, an arrangement
with the present Company, if they will, after an
appointment with Mr. Trefusis, if he will discuss the
matter with me. Failing this, an independent proposition.
“Very sincerely yours,
“JOHN K. PETRE.”
The messenger bore back to Bolter’s that invaluable envelope. Charlie
Terrard had spent the half hour in drinking with his prey as amicably
as a brother. Mr. Petre’s answer was given him by a Club servant.
He just put it into his pocket, and for a few minutes more the two
men, still settled down side by side, talked first of a cousin’s
accident in the hunting field, from that to new Rotor roads, from
that to Rotors, and they had not been upon that dangerous ground for
the space of three replies before Cassleton said, “You know, Charlie,
Trefusis won’t take any stock of this yarn of yours.”
“I can’t help that,” said Terrard simply. “I did the right thing. I
told you at once. You know what you’d have thought of me if I hadn’t;
and if you won’t meet Petre in time, believe me, so much the worse
for you.”
Cassleton put on an air of distress.
“It isn’t exactly that, Charlie,” he said. “You know as well as I do
what I mean. Trefusis wouldn’t say it isn’t true. What he does say is
that he takes no stock of it.”
“Well, he’ll be selling stock pretty soon,” said Charlie, as grimly
as his easy voice could manage such a tone. Then he added: “Surely
Trefusis knows what kind of a man Petre is?”
Cassleton nodded. “Oh, yes,” he said, “everybody knows that.”
“Perhaps everybody does _not_ know it as I know it,” said Charlie.
“It is the amazing everyday sort of way that he does these things. He
moves the price of a City like a man taking off his hat; he decides
in five minutes.”
“They’re all supposed to do that,” said Cassleton wearily.
“Well, he _does_ it,” said Charlie with unusual emphasis, even
sitting up slightly in the effort and then sinking back again. “Now
you said just now there was no writing, and you saw me write and you
saw me get the answer. Perhaps you thought I’d nothing to show you.
Well, I don’t know whether this means anything to you,” he went on,
pulling out the envelope. “It’s only a chance note, but you must be
blind if you can’t see the man through the few words,” and he tossed
Mr. Petre’s innocuous, candid five lines over to Trefusis’ lieutenant.
Cassleton looked with a languid eye over these five lines and
restrained himself. It was getting hotter than he thought.
He handed them back with no comment at first: then--“Well, I don’t
see that makes any difference,” he said, and broke off the subject.
Terrard had no reason for remaining much longer, nor had Cassleton.
They parted with as little ceremony as they had met. Cassleton moved
off without haste, hailed a taxi and was with Trefusis within half an
hour. Terrard saw him well off, and then went to the box to talk to
his office. Even as Terrard was telling his partner over the ’phone
that there was nothing doing Trefusis was hearing from Cassleton that
the thing was real and urgent, that his fears were realized, and that
at any moment the mine might be sprung under his feet.
“How shall I get him, here? Now?” Trefusis had asked sharply.
“You can’t,” Cassleton had drawled out. “I can get Terrard if you
like.”
“Get Terrard,” said Trefusis.
But by the time Cassleton had got the Club he was told that Terrard
had gone, and when he got on to Blake and Blake he was told that
Terrard had not yet come, but that Charlbury could speak to him.
“How long will Mr. Terrard be?”
“We don’t know,” said the voice.
“Tell him to ring up 4398 St. Martin’s the moment he comes.... Tell
him that it’s urgent,” he ended, in the voice of a man who doesn’t
believe anything to be ever urgent at all. Then he put up the
receiver and waited, saying nothing, while his master sat at the
table looking through the walls and thinking furiously. The deep
lines about Trefusis’ mouth were heavily drawn and he was breathing
a little more rapidly than was his wont. He turned to the table
and made a pretense of writing. But if any one had looked over his
shoulder they would have seen that he was writing nothing, only
scribbling the pen forward feverishly line after line to avoid the
lifting of his head and the indiscretion of speech.
At long last the bell of the telephone rang. Cassleton was taking
it up when Trefusis rushed to his side, took it from his hand and,
even as he spoke into it, his eyes became so vivid and of such an
intensity that the younger man, who knew him too thoroughly, was
afraid.
“Yes,” he said.... “No”.... “Mr. Terrard?”... “My name is
Trefusis.”... “Very well, I will see you first if you will. My
arrangements are almost complete.”... “No, Mr. Terrard, I’m afraid
it must be now. To-morrow will be too late.”... “Very well, Mr.
Terrard,” and he put the receiver up again.
Of the two alone in that room Cassleton was the one who suffered
the feeling of defeat. Through the brain of Trefusis was running
the rapid chain of a new scheme for changing front ... at all costs
a combine, new capital, the public would take the racket; bound
to.... Did he stand to lose? to get less than what he had made sure
of, even that morning?... Possibly. One must take the rough with
the smooth.... There might have to be heavy sacrifice.... He would
see.... But at any rate B.A.R.’s would be saved and the bulk of
what he had securely grasped after that long effort of building up
British Amalgamated would remain in his hands.
“Cassleton,” he said after a pause, “where would you like to be when
Terrard comes?”
“You don’t want me to hear?” said Cassleton.
“On the contrary,” said Trefusis, “I do want you to hear.”
The eyes of the younger man wandered about the corners of the room.
He smiled oddly at the cupboard which had played so famous a rôle in
the Burton transaction, then he shook his head.
“No, my dear fellow,” he said, with an odd and new familiarity
towards such a master, “there are limits. Besides which, I hate
stuffy cupboards.”
“I wasn’t suggesting you should hide and eavesdrop,” said Trefusis
angrily.
“I am glad of that,” answered Cassleton. “One never knows! Witnesses
are useful.”
Trefusis nearly found himself saying “Take care,” but he caught back
the words in time.
“You needn’t worry,” said Cassleton, continuing in that familiar tone
which surprised himself, “Terrard’ll talk to you before me, just as
he would if I wasn’t there.”
“Well, there must be some record,” said Trefusis, “and we leave it at
that.”
They had nothing more to say one to the other; each feared a breach,
for each knew too much about the other. Perhaps the more powerful
of the two feared it most. For now there were special reasons for
hanging together, and those reasons became stronger than ever when
Terrard was shown in, greeted Cassleton, and took his place for
discussion.
That discussion was of no great length, the two sole motives which
urge men in the world to which these men belonged, the motives
of avarice and fear combined, were at work and acting with their
accustomed command and power.
There was the less ground for delay when Terrard protested that
he had no power to negotiate. He told them that he was but the
mouthpiece of the principal. He could only repeat the message he had
himself been given, that Mr. Petre was willing to transact; that Mr.
Petre thought it common sense to transact; that if Mr. Trefusis would
not transact, then Mr. Petre would not transact; but that if Mr.
Trefusis would transact, then he, Mr. Petre, was free to meet him at
any time or place he would, Mr. Petre being a free man.
Trefusis elaborately drew a five-pointed star with a pencil upon a
piece of paper, tracing odd curves about it, as he heard this simple
statement of the position.
“Would Mr. Petre come here at eleven o’clock to-morrow morning, Mr.
Terrard?” he said.
“I have no doubt he would,” said Terrard easily. “I will ring you up
just beforehand, but I’m pretty sure he’ll come round; he’s one of
those men who never seem to have much to do.” Here he rose to go.
“Yet he seems to get a lot done somehow, doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Trefusis....
Next morning at eleven Mr. Petre and Charlie Terrard were shown with
some pomp into the room where they found Trefusis and Cassleton
awaiting them. And one of those exchanges which determine the lives
of millions in our modern democracy began between those four men,
within those four walls.
There sat Henry Trefusis and Cassleton on one side of the table in
the bare, vulgar office, and there sat Mr. Petre and Terrard on the
other; Mr. Petre strained and ill at ease.
Mr. Petre said very little and said it oddly, as though by rote.
Cassleton and Trefusis noted that manner, and agreed silently that
our greatest men are the hardest to comprehend. Charlie Terrard did
most of the explanation and all the firmness in the intervals of his
principal’s silence. Terrard it was who laid down detail and clause,
negotiated, insisted, yielded when he chose to yield. All Mr. Petre
did was to nod and, now and then, in monosyllables, to agree. But
Trefusis, fighting a losing battle, could see well enough which was
master and which was man. He divined the reality behind the mask.
Petre was the soul, Terrard the mere mouthpiece. Petre was the
Captain of that day.... How marvelously did that great man affect
tedium! How admirably assumed was the recurrent spasm of disgust when
his eyes met Henry Trefusis’ eyes!
It took less than two hours. And at the end of it there existed in
duplicate a document not fifty lines long which left Charlie Terrard
assured that Mr. Petre would stand as an equal God and twin master of
B.A.R.
* * * * *
The victors went out. Henry Trefusis sat silent. Cassleton spoke to
him, and could hardly get replies. At last the young man left in his
turn, and the financier sat alone, not writing, not moving, pondering
hour by hour.
He rang for wine and food; dismissed it; told the porter he should
remain to work and that he was in to no one.
The long summer evening, benign, beneficent, went by. From the narrow
court below came the shouts of children playing. The light drooped.
It was almost dark before this man had concluded what is of import to
such men.
A fool would have said that he and his politician brother had lost
half their prospect of loot in the decision of the morning. But the
Trefusis sort in our declining state are not fools in that sense.
One scheme was wrecked? He would build a vaster one--with the rumor
of John K. Petre behind him. He had designed to leave apart the Tide
Power Basins and to ruin them. Now, with this name behind him, he
would change his plan. He would buy up and Rotorize them. He would
catch the fool public with debentures: they should buy the tides for
him and yet leave him master, and at the same time provide a wide
support for his raid upon the wealth of England. He would rotorize
Central Lighting in the towns. He would more than double the haul
in which he had sacrificed half his share. He had lost a battle. He
would win the campaign.
It was dark when his long thought was concluded. He went out into the
warm night.
CHAPTER VIII
The public came after those debentures very kindly, very willingly;
as kindly and willingly as cows galloping into a new pasture. The
Government Contracts were enough to make certain of that. The
House had left them alone as a matter of course, and the Service
Departments were thoroughly reassured; now that--as their controllers
knew--the two great names of the Rotor world were working together.
The critics were voluble, as they always are; diverse, as they always
are; variously ill-informed--and, in the issue, proved quite wrong.
Those who had said that there would be opposition in the House were
obviously wrong; they didn’t know what they were talking about; they
were thinking in terms of an imaginary House of Commons long ago:
old-fashioned academic fools like the editor (and owner) of _The
City_, who had run in their groove for forty years and still talked
of the “Constitution,” “the Watchdog at the Treasury,” “the great
spending departments,” “the power of the Purse.”
Those who said the new purchase would be voted down at the General
Meeting were ridiculously wrong. They hadn’t even analyzed the
nominal holdings, let alone the real ones. The Locals got one hundred
of the new fully-paid-up shilling shares for their old 4¾-⅞ sagging
pound shares (with a 2s. 6d. call on them), and the new stuff was
quoted at 112 within a fortnight. But after all, who were the Locals?
When you dug out realities from under such names as the Imperial
Adjustment Corporation, and Percival and Co., and Benezra Bros., who
were they? Trefusis. There were a few hundred investors with tufts of
fifty to five hundred, a few dozen larger insignificants, a handful
of real investors (every one of them come in through the Trefusis
crowd), a dust of little gamblers; all the rest were Trefusis--with
Cassleton for his little necessary tail.
The new ordinaries, five million of them, were half and half: Petre
(with Blake and Blake and certain appendages) stood for fifty
per cent. of the lot, and Trefusis and his crowd for more than
seven-eighths of the other half. And there you had it.
They could shake out the small fry and tie up the bundle to
themselves any day they chose. General meeting indeed! It was a
walk-over--and enthusiastic at that.
Those who said the Public wouldn’t take up the Debentures (and who
pitied such underwriters as Honest Tim Hulker of The Needle-Filers,
the working-man member for Parrett) were utterly wrong. They said
it was the wrong time of year, with so many out of town; that no
one would be such a fool as to make Trefusis a present of his own
property at their expense. That debenture sum for buying out the
Locals was too large altogether; that the eight per cent. offered was
of itself a danger signal and would warn off even the worst fools:
that for once Trefusis had overreached himself.
[Illustration: _The Public discovering no small appetite for the
Debentures at 8%._]
They didn’t know Trefusis; they didn’t know the dear old Public; they
didn’t even know the time of year.
Profits are always in season. The Public is quite fond of eight per
cent. Trefusis--to repeat the classic phrase--knew his way about.
But the people who were most hopelessly wrong were those who
prophesied after the event. When the obscure army of placers had
rushed to oversubscribe nearly three times over, these prophets shook
their heads knowingly and said, “Wait for the slump!” It never came.
It is too early to be certain yet, perhaps, and nothing lasts for
ever: but that debenture interest was paid at the end of the first
quarter as easily as a bus fare; and the next, and the next; and any
of the first-comers could sell if they liked, any time in the end of
the second year, for a very nice little premium indeed.
* * * * *
On a day of that late summer, with autumn already in the air, the
new Session and the Opening of the Courts not so distant, Trefusis
reviewed his position.
He had thought on that blazing July morning that he was cornered. He
had cursed inwardly and set out to save what could be saved. In the
two hours of wrestling with Terrard (the silent, impenetrable John
K. Petre looking on) he had envisaged some necessary loss. On the
contrary, he had gained.
His hours of lonely scheming had borne fruit. On a much larger
capitalization his holding was less in proportion but it was worth
more. So was his brother’s. And he was fond of his brother.
His interest was worth more to-day than his holding in its original
form--a good tenth more; even allowing for that stiff present to
Charlie--which gratitude for tolerable terms had rendered necessary,
and on which, indeed, Charlie had insisted. Not only was he richer:
he was in a rapidly growing thing--and the Public had paid. Nor were
the Public wrong. For apart from the big Service uses and Tidal and
Lighting and all the new Colonial and Indian contracts, the private
use of the Rotor was suddenly expanding. The dealings in ordinaries
didn’t cover a fiftieth of the bulk, yet the price already stood
close on one hundred and twenty shillings. And now--the inexplicable
Petre left him wholly free! Never interfered, hardly appeared. Yes.
He had done well, had Trefusis. It was worth being thrashed at such
a price. He would be delighted to take a second thrashing on such
terms. There was little of the _Pun-d’Onor_ about Trefusis, in spite
of the stage-villain face.
* * * * *
Mr. Petre had grown more sealed up than ever. There were days when
he never showed his face out of doors. He would spend whole weeks in
the country, buried, lost, unattainable. Charlie Terrard began to
wonder whether that stupendous brain were sound, and whether so large
and such sudden operations had not begun to undermine the Imperial
Intelligence which had fascinated him during all those months.
He had looked up Mr. Petre once or twice as the summer dragged
on, first before he had gone away to Switzerland--and then he had
thought him somewhat changed; again on his return, when the change
was notable, and for the worse. He had tried gently to suggest a
little going out into the world, a little relief from such strange
isolation; but he had met with so fierce and unaccustomed a refusal
to discuss the thing at all, that he had shrunk back--and he let some
weeks go by without troubling that inhuman loneliness.
Mr. Petre was suffering after a fashion which Terrard could not
understand. The original gnawing tooth of self-ignorance, the now
maddening, now despairing and numbing presence of an impotent self
that was not a self, had been reënforced as an agent of decay by a
new and surely morbid mood; active, intense, destructive. Mr. Petre
had grown frenzied against that base, bewildering world of money.
His own comet-like path through it had no effect upon him as a
good fortune, or even as a mere adventure. It had the effect of an
increasing evil at the very core of his being.
Of old friends, of the ties which alone make human life endurable
after forty--let alone at his age--he had none. He was wrecked and
spiritually ruined; imprisoned, starved, exiled, damned. In the place
of such good, human, necessary things as support a man with the savor
of his youth and manhood--his old books and friends, and loves and
worship, and air and powers of home--he was associating with what
every nerve in him, every nerve inherited from the lost youth and
middle-age of a better world, was exasperated against, and rejected
as vile.
He called in a routine way at the office--as briefly as he could.
He signed. He excused himself. The air of the place, the face of
Trefusis, the talk of lesser men ruined and of the innocent caught
unaware, of guttersnipes suddenly enriched, poisoned him out of all
measure. It was, perhaps, the heat. We all remember that summer of
’53.
The man fell ill. He had long ago cut off his telephone. His bouts of
country air failed to cure him. He would return restlessly to town,
and yet walked the few steps from the gate of the Temple to the Row
(by night if he could) in terror of being accosted. The few notes
sent to him remained unanswered. He refused to go near the office. He
saw Trefusis only twice. A third suggested meeting he escaped by a
pretended absence. The new shares lay in the Bank. He tried to forget
them. Later, the face of Trefusis began to haunt him unpleasantly,
and a thirst which was becoming a wild longing for freedom and a
clean riddance of all that abominable circumstance.
Then came dreams to torture him. Every night some new terror of sly
inhuman creeping acquaintance poisoned his soul in dreadful sleep and
the savor of it during the day, a savor of what was vampire-like and
snake-like in the vices of the modern market fastened on him within.
His soul was in hell.
He refused all service save that of a woman who came in late of a
morning and left at night. What we have read of misers became true of
this man, for whom the curse of gold was active in a very different
way from what any miser has ever felt.
There came a point where the servant grew alarmed. She had heard
Terrard’s name and knew his direction. She told him, and he had
written asking to call again, fearing to come without warning. He had
received a shaky line in reply, saying that the millionaire would
rather be alone.
The message troubled Charlie Terrard.
But it troubled him less than it might have done. The biggest and the
best was over. The Master would hardly stay in Europe much longer.
The climate of home would soon call him, as it called so many of his
compatriots, back to the hale New England winter.
Doubtless he had reserved his berth already on a late October boat:
his suite rather.... No.... Seeing his queer ways, rather a berth.
But a single cabin. Oh, yes. Charlie was sure of that!
Meanwhile he, Charlie, had done extremely well, and that was the main
thing. So had the other half of Blake and Blake.
He did not disturb the great man. He thought it would be time to call
on him later in the holidays: he looked forward to a long respite
from these awkward puzzling interviews, each of which had opened a
new mine of gold, but each of which had increasingly strained poor
Charlie. He was well rid of that strain.
In such a mood he got a sudden summons. Not over the ’phone; it was a
brief note brought by hand to his office just as he was going off for
the day. It was headed from the rooms in the Temple, and it ran:
“DEAR MR. TERRARD,
“Will you not come round to me here _as soon as you can_.
I am sorry to disturb you so late in office hours, but I
shall think myself fortunate if this finds you. For your
presence is, believe me, most urgent to my peace of mind.
“JOHN K. PETRE.”
Terrard was on the point of telephoning to the Temple to assure
Mr. Petre that he was hastening westward to such a summons, when
he remembered that this miserable hermit had cut off his wire. He
would not lose a moment, even to see his partner. He left a scrawl
for Charlbury telling him to be in that evening _without fail_: that
Petre had suddenly woken up and was moving. Then he went off eastward
at a trot to the Mansion House, rotored to Blackfriars, crossed on
foot, rotored again to the Temple. No man could have done it in
less, since the new regulations. From the Temple Gate, off Carmelite
Street, he ran across to the Row, ran up the stairs, and stood
puffing in front of Mr. Petre’s oak.
What was it? Heart? Rotor slump? Blackmail? He decided for blackmail,
and was making a rapid calculation on the best business lines when
the door opened--its own master opened it--and there stood Mr. Petre
before him, haggard, tired out, stooping.
“Come in,” he said, in a voice so changed that Terrard was shocked.
“Come in! It’s good of you to have come so quickly! I needed you!
You’re a good friend,” and he pressed the young man’s hand. “Sit down
... Terrard.... I--I’ve been sleeping badly. I hardly slept all the
night before last. Last night I couldn’t sleep at all. I’m done!” He
looked it.
Terrard began to murmur something. Mr. Petre put up his hand. “No,
Terrard. Hear me a little. It won’t take long. But I can’t wait. I
couldn’t trust any one else, but you ... I ... I ... didn’t really
know any one else ... and all this filthy chopping and watching and
overreaching ... oh!”
Terrard, used as he was to marvels from that mouth, felt, even after
all these months of incalculability, an appreciable astonishment.
“Hear me!” Mr. Petre went on. “You can help me.... No one else can.”
Then he halted.
“What is it, Mr. Petre?” said Terrard in his best bedside manner.
“It’s the shares!” said Mr. Petre hoarsely. “I can’t bear them ...
and Trefusis ... and all that.... It’s intolerable!” and he sank back.
“You’re ill!” said the other, still more sympathetically. “Give
yourself time, Mr. Petre.”
Mr. Petre shook his head with some remaining energy.
“No,” he answered. “No! I shall be right when I am rid of this
burden.... You can do it.... But do it at once!”
“Do what?” said Terrard.
“Get rid of those shares,” said Petre.
“What shares?” came the startled answer.
“Those. I don’t know what you call them. Those damned Amalgamated, I
mean Rotor, no British----Oh, curse it, Terrard,” the voice sinking
again, “it’s beyond me! Get rid of them for me, I can’t bear it!”
Terrard could not believe his ears.
“I get rid of ... Mr. Petre, what do you mean?”
“What I say,” with a burst of new energy. “Turn them into money.
I must go free.... Ever since----” He checked himself. “Well, no
matter, but ever since a certain moment in a certain day it’s been
cozening and evil beyond a harassed man’s enduring; and nightmares,
Terrard. I’ve come to the end of my tether.... Terrard, what’s my
holding worth? Now? To-night?”
Terrard had seen the last tape--luckily: 121. He remembered the
original allotment--the balance after the frills (especially his own
substantial frill), and he took for granted that none had been sold.
He made a rapid calculation. Then--as though in a religious awe of
such a man--instead of speaking, he pulled out his pencil, and jotted
figures down on a half sheet from the table and handed it to Mr.
Petre.... There was written, “roughly £2,634,300.”
Mr. Petre looked at the row of digits with a dull, unhappy eye.
“Turn ’em into money,” he said, “clean money--and put it in the Bank
for me--to-night: no ... what am I saying.... I’m ill, as you say,
Terrard; I haven’t slept for three days hardly ... I’m in for another
night of it,” and he groaned.
“My dear sir,” gasped Charlie, “you can’t go into the market and
sell a lump of that sort like ... like eggs. It wants any amount of
handling--and even then what a crash!”
“Oh?” said the suffering man sullenly. “I didn’t know. I don’t
understand these things. What’s to be done? I can’t wait. I won’t.”
Terrard grasped at the only way out.
“If you really mean it, Mr. Petre,” he said, solemnly and slowly,
separating every word, “there is one rapid way, and only one.” Mr.
Petre made no sign: he only waited. “Trefusis might take over--but at
a sacrifice--Mr. Petre--a very heavy sacrifice, I’m afraid.”
“He would, would he?” caught up Mr. Petre with a gleam of eagerness.
“Would he pay over--now, any time, at once?”
“Well,” said the other, “it’s not a matter of a moment, a great
operation like that ... it would want financing, he’d have to work it
delicately.”
It was odd to find himself telling such a man such things--as though
to a child. But he dared not question. He humored and followed the
lead given him.
Mr. Petre menaced disaster, and Terrard rapidly added, “But _if_
he’ll meet you--and at a price, Mr. Petre, he would, I suppose--you
could have a line that would bind him: and you could have it soon;
_if_ he’ll meet you,” and he looked at the strange Thing before him,
wondering.
“Any price,” said Mr. Petre, groaning, “any price. _That_ doesn’t
touch me.”
“He’d try to get all the difference of the rise, I’m afraid,” said
Charlie.
“What’s the difference of the rise?”
“Why, the rise since ... since the deal. He’d want the twenty per
cent. premium back, Mr. Petre.”
“It’s all Greek to me,” said Mr. Petre, with a wearied bow of the
head. “As he likes, what he likes.... Look here--give me the paper
again. No--what’s the twenty per cent. premium, what’s it all about?
Let him have it! What does it bring this down to?” and he tapped the
paper with its penciled millions.
Terrard jotted, amazed. “It doesn’t leave more than two and a
quarter,” he answered.
“Two and a quarter what?”
“Millions,” said Terrard in an awed voice.
“Tell him I’ll take two.”
“Mr. Petre, Mr. Petre!” Terrard cried aloud in genuine concern. “Oh,
Mr. Petre! it’s impossible.... Do for heaven’s sake....”
“Do as I tell you,” said the elderly marvel in sudden and astonishing
rage. “If he’ll do it now, to-night--he can have it.... If he won’t,
I’m done with him.”
“Mr. Petre,” began the now terror-stricken Terrard--but Mr. Petre was
silent. His effort had exhausted him.
Terrard cursed the absence of a telephone. He must see Charlbury. He
didn’t trust himself. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t yet six.
“If you’ll give me an hour,” he said, “I’ll come back.”
“If it must be, it must,” said Mr. Petre, in the low tense tone of
a man who bears the pangs of his tumor until the morphia comes.
“But--as quick as you can ... as quick as you can,” and he closed his
eyes.
Terrard was watching him. Was it madness or acting? And if it was
affected (a miracle!), what object in it all?
But he could not delay. He left the eccentric--or genius--with his
eyes still closed and dashed out. He ran to the nearest telephone, in
a pub, and caught Charlbury, who was fuming at the other end of the
wire: “No, don’t argue. Meet me half-way--at the New Tavern; that’s
half-way; it’s urgent.” And at the New Tavern, to the sound of an
intolerable band, and steadying his nerves with old brandy, Terrard
told his quite incredible tale.
“Does he mean it?” said Charlbury when he had done.
Terrard arched his eyebrows. “Looks like it!” he said. “Anyhow, it’s
orders. And you know what he is. It’s mortal to cross him.”
Charlbury nodded. “What’s his game?” he half mused, screwing his
little eyes together in a downward investigation of the floor.
“Beyond me!”
“There must be something,” said Charlbury. Then a light broke on him,
he slapped his thigh. “By God! The old weasel! He’s going to freeze
Trefusis out!”
Terrard shook his head. “It can’t be that. He’s offering them to
Trefusis,” he said.
Mr. Charlbury smiled pitifully. “That’s the bait,” he remarked.
“He’ll buy in later, after the slump.”
Terrard respected his partner’s judgment in High Finance now, as he
had for so long in lesser things of the sort. But he had seen Petre’s
face with his own eyes that evening; Petre’s bewildering appeal was
still in his ears. He was confident there was something much deeper
than so obvious a maneuver. Perhaps a man like Petre, one of the
masters of the world, had heard of coming war; of plague. After all,
it wasn’t the motive that counted, it was the incredible proposal
itself. Mr. Petre was certainly determined to get rid of those shares.
His thoughts were interrupted by Charlbury’s strong, short phrase:
“What’s the Commission?”
“There isn’t any,” answered Charlie as shortly.
Charlbury watched him narrowly. Then he spoke.
“Go to Trefusis,” he said. “Get him as soon as ever he can be
got. Tell him it goes through now or never. Get his name to it
to-night--and make him understand it’ll cost him £40,000 to Blake
and Blake--eight per cent. is moderate, damn it, for throwing half a
million at a man’s head without his having to move a finger for it.
He’ll be 400,000 up ... till it leaks out,” and at that thought he
grinned. “He knows you’ve got John K. in your pocket.” (Charlie had
his doubts of that now.) “If you tell him it’s now or never he’ll
believe you--but by God, he’s a fool if he bites!”
“And what about our shares?” said the other half of Blake and Blake.
“As you say--when it leaks out--when any one ... knows that John
K.’s crawled out, the mercury’ll go down. It’ll be a cold day for
B.A.R.--Bars.”
“If the fool bites, we sell to-morrow morning. He’ll have his men out
to buy. You may go to sleep on that. Ring me up at Walton Heath the
moment you know.”
And the New Tavern Conference broke up.
* * * * *
Charlie Terrard had the Dæmon’s luck that evening. By half-past
seven he had got to Trefusis, just back in his flat to dress. He had
managed by something in his tone over the instrument to arrest him,
and to make him put off the people he was going to. Before eight
the two men were together, both standing; Charlie dreadfully moved
and hoping that his face quite covered the throbbing of his blood;
Trefusis looking him full and rather hardly in the face, with his
brilliant dark eyes and raven beak, in the half light of the falling
summer evening.
Charlie Terrard approached the enormous obstacle with a fevered
determination; it rendered him quite unnaturally abrupt.
“As I told you, I’ve come from John K. It’s a big thing. Too big. No
matter. It’s simple, anyhow. You heard me say that; too simple. But
you know what he is?”
“Yes.” Nor did Trefusis move a finger as he said it.
“He wants writing, to-night, now. I’m dead sure of it, Trefusis.
Don’t disbelieve me. You’ll see what hangs on it. If he doesn’t get
your name to it to-night--there’s nothing doing in the morning.”
“What is it?” said the other in tones as fixed as his face.
Then Terrard delivered the mighty thing.
“Sit down,” said Trefusis immovably, in a tone and with a gesture
which were an invitation, but with an indefinable air of command
which sat him ill. Terrard pulled a chair to the table and sat there
with his head in his hands. The Dark Spirit of B.A.R.’s sank into his
arm-chair, sitting in profile to Terrard, his arms slightly moving,
gazing through the wall before him as he had gazed when first he
awaited Petre weeks before.
A twenty minutes passed. There was no sound except the tiny ticking
of a traveling clock upon the bracket below the Degas. The light
failed. It was almost dusk.
At last Trefusis rose. Terrard rose with him and Trefusis spoke, in
the gloaming. “Very well,” he said.
His voice sounded a little weary. It was from the effort of such a
survey of every peril, every trap, every consequence as not many men
could have flashed through in such a space without a breakdown of
attention. He had decided. Let ’em slump. He’d buy himself--and hold.
Let ’em attack. He had it all now--his own thing--and no one could
undo it.
He, Henry Trefusis, would take on that offer, trap or no trap, and
become sole Master again of the thing he had made.
He did not turn to switch on the light. He wrote rapidly in the half
darkness ten lines on a sheet of his paper, signed it, and held it
out to Terrard. Something which corresponds to honor in that world
forbade Terrard even to glance at it. He folded it rapidly and thrust
it into his wallet.
[Illustration: “_He had decided._”]
“And what’s _your_ price?” the deep voice sneered in the dark.
Terrard gave him Charlbury’s figures.
“I suppose you want that in writing too?” said the voice again.
“No,” said Charlie, “I trust you.” With better light he would have
seen the very slight mounting smile upon the other’s face.
“Good-night.”
“Good-night.”
* * * * *
It was nine by the time Terrard was in the Temple doorway again
and ringing at Mr. Petre’s door. Quiet outside, and only a little
radiance shining up from a bulb in the well of the stone staircase
below. There was no reply. He rang again, and still no reply. He
began to be afraid. He knew Mr. Petre’s mania for isolation. He
would be alone. Terrard had been away three hours--more. He had
said one hour. He rang again; still no reply. He knocked loudly and
repeatedly, in dread; then came a step, slow but not uncertain, and
Mr. Petre, refreshed, himself stood in the doorway.
“I was asleep,” he said. “Lord, what a blessing! I thought I’d never
sleep again.... I’m....” Then he remembered the cause of the young
man’s visit. “Come in,” he said. “Have you done it? Have you seen
them?”
“I’ve got it here,” said Terrard, and he handed it over. Mr., Petre
read the brief document and breathed a deep breath of content. He
heard Terrard repeat the original, the obvious words, that it would
take a few days.
“That’s all right,” said Mr. Petre, in a new, sane voice. “I shall
sleep now--only, as soon as it can be done, get it done.”
Then Terrard for the first time found that he was ravenous. He
hastened to be gone; but before he tasted a crumb he had rung up
“Marengo.” “It’s through,” he said, and all the answer he got was,
“Ah! See you to-morrow morning.”
* * * * *
At the opening of the morrow’s market Blake and Blake began their
careful selling; it had to be delicately handled; and the next day,
either some one knew or guessed things about the B.A.R.S. and 119 was
marked down, 118, 117, 118 again--116 at the close. But the operation
was piloted through, and what was skimmed off was nothing to that
lump coming in from Trefusis. They thought themselves well out of it.
Before a week was out Bars were steady at 112. Then a very slow rise
began--and it hasn’t stopped to this day.[A]
[A] Nominally 135--but you’re lucky to get them.
* * * * *
The instruments had been delivered in due form. Mr. Petre didn’t
understand instruments--he said. He had signed, as he always did,
where he was told to sign. He did not regard himself as well into
port till he had verified the figures in the book at his own
bank--cash--only cash, clean cash, and the shares forgotten and done
for.
And there it lay piled on its original foundation--the most original
Current Account that ever stood in any man’s name since the first
Banker, before the beginning of years, had it revealed to him by an
angel that you can always borrow from a thrifty fool at 4 per cent.
to lend to a wise one at 6.
* * * * *
Mr. Petre--well over three million in cash--went down to Hampshire
already half restored. He took a long and complete repose. He
returned to London reluctantly, lest there should be some message
waiting for him there, found none, and determined once and for all
that he must get loose and free.
The one good thing about his amazing adventure was that he could go
whither he willed and had full command of his own life.
But before he would get him away--somewhere far away--to end his life
in his own peace--he would make one last effort to recover what he
had lost, and to raise again within himself a living soul.
He knew not whom to trust. It quaintly occurred to him (and quite
rightly) that he would trust the good and humble woman who served
him, and who cooked for over three million pounds after the most
atrocious fashion known to man.
“Mrs. Malton,” he said, “I want you to do something for me.” He
eccentrically pulled out a five-pound note, and Mrs. Malton grew
faint at the sight thereof. It gave her a turn.
“Mrs. Malton, I trust you.”
“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Malton, with an old-fashioned bob.
“I do,” said Mr. Petre, interrupting her. “But remember that I do.
Mrs. Malton, what is my name?”
“Mr. Patten, sir,” said Mrs. Malton.
“Well,” said Mr. Petre, “I’ve got a secret to confide to you. My
name’s not Patten. It’s Jasper.”
“Indeed, sir,” said Mrs. Malton dutifully. She had no doubt at all
what was the matter with her employer, but her loyalty stood firm.
“Now, Mrs. Malton, I depend upon you not to tell a soul of what I am
going to ask you to do.”
“Oh, you may depend and depend, sir,” said Mrs. Malton, “always
allowing that it’s right and proper.”
“Mrs. Malton, I want you to go to the Public Library, and ask them
for a book, any book, on Loss of Memory.” Mrs. Malton bobbed again.
She thought it was an extraordinary fuss to make about nothing,
and five pounds left her under some strain of conscience. The good
gentleman would never mean it if he were in his right mind. “Now,
Mrs. Malton, go out and ask for the latest, and bring it back to me.
I mean, find out where it’s sold, and buy a copy, and bring it back
to me. Take a cab, be quick, and keep the change.”
Mrs. Malton was disappointed. She was looking forward to taking home
that piece of paper unbroken; but her virtue was proof, and her
loyalty. She brought back Wittrington--a book not twelve months old,
and apparently, to judge by the Publishers’ Press Notices at the end,
the last edition of the final authority upon such things. Mr. Petre
turned to a telephone book remaining from the old days when he had
possessed that instrument. He looked up Wittrington, and found an
untitled person of that name with the right initials.
“Mrs. Malton, can you use the telephone?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said Mrs. Malton with another bob, “in my last place I
did it frequent.”
“Mrs. Malton, I want you to go to the nearest telephone, and say that
you are speaking for a man who will give any fee that may be asked
to visit the greatest specialist upon this,” and he wrote down upon
a piece of paper--“‘severe nervous trouble involving confusion and
loss of continuity of thought.’ Say that the conditions are,” here he
wrote down again--“‘The name will not be given. Any appointment will
be kept.’ Use those very words, Mrs. Malton, and use no other. And as
you value your salvation, breathe not a word of this to any one.”
Mrs. Malton was away longer than he liked; but when she got back she
was clear enough, and very sensible.
Dr. Wittrington was dead. A name had been given her. It was the name
of Sir Henry Brail, with an address in Harley Street. She had written
it down in her large, irregular, childish letters, and off she was
sent again to give that exact message to Sir Henry Brail. She came
back more quickly this time, and with a very business-like message to
convey. Four o’clock the next day. A hundred guineas. And of course
complete privacy. No question of asking a name.
So far so good. Mr. Petre had what he wanted, and he would try it as
a last poor chance before cutting himself off and getting clean away.
What he had learned of the name he bore--if it were his name--was no
more than the bare facts which recalled in him nothing. Maybe his
soul would be healed. He might return (would it be to the States?
More than one had seemed to recognize him, and John K. Petre he
certainly was for all the world) to a home that knew him and that he
knew; but if the worst came to the worst, and that brazen wall proved
impassable, why, then there was nothing for it but to get him clean
away.
CHAPTER IX
Mr. Petre approached the door in Harley Street with some little fear
in his heart.
It was the first time he had broken the wall of his isolation with
any human being. It had been a human being, humble, poor and loyal;
to be trusted, if any one could be. But the doctor was another
matter. Mr. Petre--he knew not why, some impression perhaps received
in the old days of which he knew nothing and which yet remained with
him--Mr. Petre distrusted all professions, all corporations; for he
feared that their members would always be more loyal to their Guild
than to the private citizen with whom they dealt. He stopped in the
street a moment to count the twenty-one fivers in their envelope (a
risk, but he had not learnt the precautions of the rich), and found
them accurate. He went up to the door, rang, and was admitted by an
impressive mute.
He was shown into a room where he had to wait for some time, after
the ritual of medicine, and in which his spirits sank lower and
lower as he turned over the pages of a dead weekly. When he was at
last admitted into the Presence what he saw did nothing to raise his
spirits.
Not that there were any instruments of torture furnishing the Great
Specialist’s inner room, not even one of those chairs with strange
joints which threaten abominable things; no, it was the spirit of the
room, consonant to the figure which inhabited it and had made it.
For the walls were covered with a dark brown composition embossed
to imitate leather, and too thickly covered with some varnish. In
the fire-place was an imitation fire of imitation logs, through
which no gas flames murmured now. On the walls were four large steel
engravings, all after Landseer; upon the mantelpiece one large clock,
of stone, funereal black and with the ghastly white face of operated
men.
At the table, whereon were ranged four or five books of reference
and, exactly ordered, blank paper, a pen, ink and a blotter, sat the
Great Specialist himself. He did not rise at Mr. Petre’s entrance,
but very courteously motioned him to a chair, on which that financier
sat down uncertainly, awaiting inquisition. The Great Specialist
looked at him for a moment, and he at the Great Specialist. He felt
sure that the Great Specialist was searching the very inwards of his
soul, while as for himself, he could not even search, but only very
generally receive the most external, the most superficial impression
of that eminent man before him. Yet of the two names--had the
Scientist but known it--that of John K. Petre was more renowned than
that of Henry Brail; for it meant more money.
It was a very long face, which would have been weak about the mouth
had not many years of posing to many clients, most of them wealthy,
given it a sort of lugubrious restraint. The eyes were fatigued, the
scanty hair was gray, and when the voice spoke it was sepulchral.
“Mr. ...?” began the voice, and then checked itself, remembering the
special conditions of that consultation. The face smiled inwardly
and strangely at the recollection thereof. The hand attached to its
owner’s arm scratched down headings on the corner of the foolscap
with a rasping pen.
“I must ask you,” continued the Master of Hidden Things, “a few
questions, if you please.” Mr. Petre bowed his head. “In the first
place....”
“The reason I have come,” interrupted the Unknown nervously....
The Great Specialist put up a dried, open hand, like a policeman
stopping traffic, and said, rather more loudly than before:
“I must beg you, my dear sir! I must beg you! Pray, leave yourself in
my hands. I must ask you these preliminary questions before we go any
further.” The hand dropped, and the voice continued: “Your father’s
age, or age at death?” The pen was prepared to scratch, and the tired
eyes looked inquisitively upwards into Mr. Petre’s face.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Mr. Petre, with more boldness
than he thought himself possessed of.
“Did you--do you--not know your father?” asked the more startled
voice.
“Not from Adam,” said Mr. Petre composedly.
So nearly as such beings can express surprise the Great Specialist
expressed surprise in a sudden movement of the brows. His pen was
scratching. It scratched “Special circumstances affecting case.
Bastardy.” Its driver then superfluously inquired:
[Illustration: _The Great Specialist wrote:--“Special circumstances:
A Bastard.”_]
“May I take down that, that particular aspect of the case?”
“Yes, certainly,” said the patient, almost cheerfully.
“Then I take it,” continued the scientist slowly, “if you do not
even know your father’s name, it is no good my asking the date of
his death, nor the cause of it? Nor, I suppose, whether he had any
nervous trouble, to your knowledge?”
“Not the least use,” said Mr. Petre with increasing firmness.
“In fact, you have no idea of your ancestry--your hereditary
history--upon that side?”
“None,” said Mr. Petre.
The Great Specialist coughed gently but firmly to himself, sighed,
took up the pen again, and began again with the same upward
inquisitive look.
“Mother’s name?”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Petre.
This time the Great Specialist betrayed real emotion. He was not
quite sure that he was being respectfully treated; besides which, his
Method was drifting into danger. He put down the pen, leaned back
in his chair, joined his finger tips, and gazed at Mr. Petre for a
minute or two in the fashion of a schoolmaster who has sympathy with
an erring boy, but fears he may be too young to understand the full
gravity of his fault.
“Am I to understand,” said the Inquisitor, still keeping his hands
together and not yet reaching out for his pen, “that you know
_nothing_ of _either_ of your parents?”
“Nothing whatsoever,” said Mr. Petre, looking up at the ceiling. He
was a little piqued at the first interruption he had suffered, and he
was determined to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth--and even
the whole truth when he should be allowed to volunteer it.
The Inquisitor leaned forward.
“Now, my dear sir, be good enough to fix your attention upon me.”
Mr. Petre looked at his enemy in mild, benevolent fashion.
“You know nothing whatever of your ancestry upon either side?”
“Nothing,” said Mr. Petre.
“Were you a foundling, sir?” said the Specialist sharply.
“Not that I know of,” replied his guest. “The fact is that I have
come to see you because....”
The large, dried hand went up again.
“One moment. We must get things clear to begin with. In these cases
of nervous trouble--I am speaking frankly--it is essential to put
things in the right order to the patient, or the whole consultation
fails of its purpose.”
Mr. Petre nodded, and accepted. He saw that he was not believed.
“Now, sir,” continued the Specialist, “since I must accept what you
say” (it was pretty clear that he did not), “I can only ask you
questions which are within your own knowledge. Have you (you will
excuse my direct question?) have you, to your knowledge, any taint?”
“Any what?” said Mr. Petre anxiously.
“Taint--alcoholic, for instance?”
Mr. Petre thought for a moment, and answered, “No. At any rate, I
should doubt it.”
“What are your habits in the matter of--ah!--wine?”
“Claret for lunch, usually, or beer. Beer or claret at my dinner.
Liqueur with my coffee....”
“Not so fast, please, not so fast! Yes, coffee.... How much?”
“Oh! A cup.”
“I mean” (more severely), “how much claret, how much liqueur?”
Mr. Petre considered.
“Say a bottle. Liqueur, oh, well a glass.”
The pen scribbled away furiously.
“For how long?” asked the writer.
“Since April 3rd, just after noon.”
“And before that...?”
“The reason I can’t tell you,” began the victim, “is....”
“I _must_ beg you to let me act in my own way, sir,” broke in Sir
Henry almost angrily. “If you refuse me essential information, the
consequences will not be on my head....” He paused. “Since you refuse
to inform me on this point--and I must tell you I am used to such
difficulties--I will leave it,” and he wrote down, “Probable case of
chronic alcoholism. Consumption daily in last five months at least
one liter at 12%, one deciliter at 35%; probably more.”
“Can you tell me,” said the Specialist, breaking new ground and
preparing again to write, “whether at any stage you have used
drugs--even as long ago as five or ten years?”
“I am afraid I can’t,” said Mr. Petre.
The Medical Genius restrained his temper, determined--he was a
conscientious man--to do his best by the impossible fellow, and
started anew.
“I must now,” he continued, putting on a look of much greater
importance than he had yet assumed, and settling himself up in his
chair, “I must now, my dear sir, put to you a very intimate question
indeed; it is one which we always have to ask at this stage of our
inquiries.” (Mr. Petre marveled what that stage exactly was. But he
was wise enough to remain silent.) “_Do you dream?_”
“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Petre cheerfully. He was all right now; this was
plain sailing. The pen began writing busily.
“For instance,” murmured the Sepulchral voice, the face still bent
over the paper, “last night?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Petre. “Most nights. Last night certainly. Yes,
most nights.”
The pen was now working furiously.
“Now, if you please,” said the Specialist, his mind working with
such energy that his face looked almost bright for a moment, “now, if
you please, the details, if you remember them.”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Petre. “I dreamed I went to Liverpool Street
and took a ticket for New York; the man who gave me the ticket
through the little hole turned out to be a peacock, but I didn’t
think it at all odd. After that I found myself trying to read a book,
but I didn’t understand the letters, so I put it down and found
myself dropping into a sort of confusion. That was my dream, as far
as I can remember it.”
The pace at which Sir Henry’s pen had raced was worthy of an expert
in shorthand. He had the whole thing down, and was aglow with
excitement and interest.
“Ah!--Now--” he said, “this is really important! Here we have a clew.
Such illusions as you may be suffering from....”
“But,” interrupted Mr. Petre, “I am not....” Up went the hand again.
“I say, as you may be suffering from,” went on Sir Henry, “we shall,
I think, be able to explain. But we cannot resolve the complex
until you shall tell me quite frankly to what vivid experience of
childhood--no doubt of a _very_ private nature; but you must tell me
all--you most naturally return in your innermost thoughts.”
“To none,” said Mr. Petre, in a voice that was almost a shout, for
the delay was exasperating him, and he refused to be put off any
further though the hand was up again at “Line blocked.” “I remember
_nothing_ of my childhood. I remember _nothing_ of my manhood. I
remember nothing _before_ last Easter--to be accurate, last Easter
Monday. That’s why I came to see you!”
The Great Specialist turned upon him a face of stone.
“Why did you not say that before, sir? It would have saved us both a
great deal of trouble.”
“Because you wouldn’t let me.”
“Come, come,” said the doctor, “we must have no discussion.” The pen
came down upon the paper again and wrote a line. “I take it, then,
that you require my aid in a case of Amnemonesis.”
“No doubt,” said Mr. Petre. “No doubt. Well, yes, if that’s the name.
My memory failed completely and suddenly about noon on April 3rd,
1953--this year. I remember nothing of myself before that moment.” He
had got it all in by rapid speaking.
“Pray don’t interrupt me,” said the Great Specialist, in the tone
of a governess, only a little more pettishly. “It is a case of loss
of memory, or rather, let us call it loss of identity.” He twisted
his head sideways and murmured to himself: “What Pfungst has named
‘loss of the time-space continuum in its subjective aspect.’” Then
he got his head into the normal position again and murmured in a
still lower tone, which Mr. Petre could only just catch: “_Paranoia
penipsissimisma_, some people call it.” He added a little louder,
looking up at Mr. Petre and presenting the title with a touch of
affection, “Also called Bantam’s Complex, from Bantam, Sir George
Bantam.”
“Indeed,” said Mr. Petre, slightly interested, but with too much
gnawing at his heart to be really gripped by the thing.
“It is more generally known as the Seventh Sub-Complex, after
Boileau’s category. It is universally so known upon the Continent--ah,
yes,” then he began scribbling again. “This is the address you
want,” said the Master of Modern Science, jumping up suddenly from
his chair. He handed it as a superior officer might hand an order
to a subordinate.
“Could I.... Can I see him now?”
“Now? At once?” answered the Specialist, frowning.
“Well,” said Mr. Petre, “I have reasons.”
“Yes, I know,” replied the other courteously. “You are all like that.
I will see.” He pressed a buzzer with his foot, and told the man who
came in to ring up Sir William Bland, and ask him whether he could
see an urgent case on the part of Sir Henry Brail, a case of M.3.
The man bowed as to Royalty, and reappeared saying that Sir William
Bland happened to have just one half hour free, at that moment, from
four-forty-five to five-fifteen. Mr. Petre looked at his watch. He
had five minutes. He asked where it was. Strangely enough, this new
address was also in Harley Street, and some odd connection beneath
the level of the waking mind gave the new millionaire a mood of
happiness at the thought that he had time to walk and save a taxi
fare.
Then followed an awkward moment. Mr. Petre shyly pulled out the
envelope. Sir Henry was far too precise and honorable for that.
“No! No! My dear sir,” he said. “I won’t dream of it. A misapprehension.
My own fault indeed, but still, a misapprehension. I had the idea
that you suffered from, I mean that we were to deal with--ah!--
_Illusions_. Yes, Illusions. I don’t pretend to go out of my
province. Indeed, I prefer not to deal with any cases not covered
by Purall’s formula.... One moment.” He came rapidly up to his
visitor and pushed back the lid of the right eye. “No,” he said, “not
a case for me in any way.”
“No illusions!” he muttered to himself as he turned back. “No
illusions under the Bergheim test.”
Mr. Petre rubbed the replaced eyelid and made one more protest in
favor of due payment; but his advisor was determined. Mr. Petre
thanked him warmly, though confused, and was off. The impressive mute
showed him out, and in a couple of minutes he was ringing at another
door half a dozen houses down the street.
Sir William Bland received him in a room extremely different from
that in which he had just suffered. It was the room in which a man
might live rather than work. There was a very large photograph of a
Royalty in a sloping silver frame upon the table, autographed. There
was a novel lying half-open. There was a bad portrait upon one wall,
and a good, very small, Corot on the wall opposite; no other pictures
at all. A small room, cozy, domestic; just the thing for the nerves.
[Illustration: _The second and more jovial Great Specialist, Sir
William Bland._]
Sir William Bland greeted Mr. Petre as a lifelong friend, and this
the reader will find the more remarkable if he remembers that nothing
had been said of who Mr. Petre was or what Mr. Petre was worth. Sir
William Bland was well suited to such a rôle. He had a round, kind
face, in which only the eyes were insincere; hardly any eyebrows;
simple steel spectacles, and a fine bald dome, with a fringe of hair.
He took his colleague’s note and read it, smiling as cheerfully over
it as though it were a packet of mild fun. Then he gave tongue,
surveying the newcomer with ease and happiness.
“Loss of memory? My dear sir? Loss of memory? That is what you say it
is. Eh? Ah, yes; loss of memory. I have” (he glanced at the note), “I
have the date here. Oh! Yes! April 3rd.... H’m.... Yes. _Easier_, my
dear sir, easier if I could know something of--well” (resignedly), “I
understand that the conditions are absolute.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre.
“I would respect any confidence religiously--you know that?”
“Indeed, yes,” said Mr. Petre, touched, “but ... sincerely ... I must
keep my rule. It was not lightly made.”
“Very well, sir, very well!” sighed Sir William Bland.
He asked a few common questions on diet and habit, all easily
answered and all normally.
Then the great business was seriously approached.
“I must ask you,” said the Magician, “to do one or two things if you
please. In the first place” (he opened a drawer in a little table
and pulled out a little book), “would you mind looking through this,
page by page, and telling me if anything in it strikes even the
slightest echo within you?”
Mr. Petre took the book. It was a polyglot New Testament. There was
the French, which seemed to him pretty dull. He glanced at a few
words in Italian which he recognized, and one or two German words
with which he was familiar. The rest meant nothing to him, except
that he could distinguish the Spanish as Spanish and no more, and he
noted the odd script of the eastern versions. He laid it down again.
“No, Sir William, it recalls nothing,” he said.
“The sacred words,” said Sir William Bland earnestly (Mr. Petre had
been dealing with the Genealogy in St. Matthew), “recall nothing of
childhood? No tender associations?” There was infinite pathos in
his voice, and he went so far as to lay a sympathetic hand upon his
patient’s arm.
“No, sir, no,” said Mr. Petre, a little abruptly for him. “The fact
is, I must tell you plainly. Loss of Memory is a weak term. At a
certain recent date” (here he remembered that he had divulged it,
and his terror returned), “I lost all sense of what I had been,
where I had been, who I was. I retained my habit of mind, and
all my knowledge of general things in life, but not one personal
association.... It is very distressing,” he added.
“Yes, indeed, my dear sir,” said Sir William, drawing the nose-end of
his eyebrows up in an agony of kindness. “But it will comfort you to
hear that nowadays we nearly _always_--I may say _always_--manage,
sooner or later”--he was spinning out his words as he fumbled again
in the drawer of the little table, and brought out yet another
book--it was in German, of course, but its peculiarity was an
appendix in which were brightly-colored pictures after the German
fashion, all of them attaching to childish tales; and the colors
especially were German.
“Now, my dear sir,” said Sir William, pulling his chair a little
nearer to his victim, “pray glance at this--the more casually the
better--and see whether a stab of memory....”
Mr. Petre saw on the front page some words in German script and then,
in our type, the word “Perrault.” He made nothing of that. He opened
the book.
Mr. Petre rapidly turned over the score of pages. There was
a huntsman in a red hat with a feather in it, a very large
muzzle-loading gun under his arm, holding a dead fox up by the
tail, while his companion blew a horn; there was a lion with a
human-looking face holding up his paw to a young man with gooseberry
eyes who was pulling a thorn out; there was an old gentleman in a
gray tunic pointing towards a star, his gaze followed by a young
gentleman in a blue tunic whose face was fatuous beyond the dreams of
avarice; there was a fairy with a star-tipped wand touching a grand
coach and six for the benefit of a pasty-faced wench, over-dressed
and with flaxen, plaited hair; there was another Gretchen asleep on
a bed, cobwebbed, and with sleeping guards around her, and a Junker
not much her senior, prepared to press a Junker’s salute upon her
lips, and so on. It meant nothing to Mr. Petre--nothing at all.
“None of these simple nursery tales,” said the Specialist, wagging
his head slightly from side to side with an infinite compassion, and
gazing steadily upon the sufferer. Mr. Petre shut the ridiculous book
smartly.
“It’s no good answering questions. What am I to do?”
To his surprise, he was begged very courteously to take off his coat
and waistcoat, tie, shirt and vest; which done, instruments were used
upon him, of measurements and of percussion, and he was touched by
wires, which his host had drawn like thin serpents from a corner,
and which oddly registered mysteries upon dials. He was struck four
or five times: harder than he liked. An ugly piece of machinery was
clamped upon his arm below the elbow; he was made to sit down and
cross his legs, and he was unpleasantly cut with the edge of the hand
below the knee, with the result that his foot kicked upwards. In
fact, all manner of things were done to him, which, in an ignorant
age, would have made him suspect a charlatan. But we live in better
times.
When he was allowed to dress himself and become human again (for
it is human to be clothed) he was aware that the Master was pacing
his little round body up and down the room, with his hands crossed
behind his back, and was reciting to himself cabalistic sounds; words
of no meaning to the profane. Then he stopped suddenly, looked Mr.
Petre in the face, and said:
“My dear sir, yours is a very curious case. A very strange case! You
have told me nothing of yourself--because as my colleague has warned
me, you will not give any details of yourself since ... since ...
since the sad....”
“No,” interrupted Mr. Petre doggedly, “that is the strict condition
of my presence here to-day. Upon terms,” he added, though it hurt him
to allude so coarsely to the fee, “which I think you know.”
“Precisely,” answered Sir William, “precisely ... yes ... quite.
Ah.... You remember everything, well, since that unfortunate ...
since the date on which....”
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre shortly.
“_Quite_ normally, my dear sir? _Quite_ normally?”
“I suppose normally,” said Mr. Petre. “I seem to remember as well as
anybody else.”
The Specialist looked at his watch; a sudden light broke over that
face which masked so well the profound intelligence within. “It is
clearly a case,” he chirruped, “for Sir Christopher Cayley.”
But Mr. Petre had had enough. Whether his new-found wealth had bred
in him a new-found assurance, or whether he had reached the limit of
what humanity can bear, he kept his own counsel and said: “Well, Sir
William, I am sorry you can do nothing for me.”
“It is not that; it is not that,” said the little man eagerly. “It
is that really, my dear sir, Sir Christopher is the _one_ man in all
England--I think I may say in all _Europe_....”
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre, “yes.” He had already taken up his hat and his
stick.
“Now shall I advise Sir Christopher? Shall I advise him now? Shall I
write a note?”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Petre. “I will consider it. If you will allow
me, I will communicate with you again.” But alas! for the integrity
of a good man; he had firmly determined never to touch the Faculty
again till agony should drive him. He was fed up--to the back teeth.
Slowly he produced the envelope with his eyes nervously diverted from
the round face before him. There was no awkwardness. But there was on
Mr. Petre’s side a pleased surprise at the simplicity of the passage.
“Thank you a thousand times,” he said.... “You have already done me a
world of good, believe me ... but the truth is, if I were to give you
my name....”
A suppressed smile upon the lips of the expert barely betrayed his
emotions. He had known that kind of thing before, and he never
irritated that mood. He would have lost money by irritating that
mood. But in the other cases he had always known in time, and before
the event, who the Mysterious Stranger (though he might call himself
the Grand Mogul) really was. In the other cases an agonized relative
had informed him before the visit, had poured the true tale into his
ear, warning him of a brother or a father’s sensitiveness and shame.
To-day he was nonplussed.
Everything about this last patient betrayed precision; but who he was
he could not for the life of him have told you. Even the very slight
American accent had worn away.... Sir William did regret one thing.
He _would_ have asked to know who the funny fellow thought he was.
He kept a book with screaming things of the sort. But it couldn’t be
helped. Perhaps he’d find out later. As Mr. Petre walked off, filled
with despair, down the street towards Oxford Street, Sir William
at a little discreet distance from the light watched him from the
bow-window; then he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, rang the
bell, and sent for the next case: the Dowager who was the head of
the list in that great room without, where already two or three were
attempting to beguile the time with _Life_ and even _Punch_. She had
come with her keeper, but he saw her alone. She was quite harmless.
Mr. Petre, bearing that inward burden of his, despairing, hopeless
of rediscovering a knowledge without which life was not life, still
paced southward, choosing the squares and the less occupied streets,
until he found himself upon the top of St. James’s Hill. There he
halted a moment at the corner of Piccadilly gazing down towards the
Palace; the Clubs, the old brick towers, the Guardsmen on sentry-go
at the door, the crowd of cars, even the London sky under a fresh
autumnal breeze--all was as familiar to him as familiar could be. All
was part of some home furniture in his mind; but of the home itself,
nothing. A complete blank. The soul had lost its habitation.
* * * * *
Mr. Petre went out from this last of his ordeals profoundly
depressed. By all our standards he was greatly to be envied. He was
untroubled by any great responsibility. He had drunk the water of
Lethe; he was in health, he was rich.
Yet that intimate thing within us which demands immortality, and
which we call Ourselves, was incomplete, and he was a maimed man.
Not all the high respect with which he could now be surrounded at
will was other than a nightmare to him. He was gnawed by the loss of
that mysterious past; by the lack in him of that momentum of things
lived under one mind, coördinating all that human, continuous, soul
whereby indeed we suffer, but also are. He passionately desired--more
than ever he now desired--now that he must face exile--to know
himself.
His hands were clasped behind his back, his gold-headed cane within
them; his eyes were bent upon the pavement in a reverie; he wondered
and wondered, and he was tragically ill at ease. He had lost his
bearings. He was more wretched in his loneliness than the poorest of
the millions in the vast surge of life about him.
As he thus slowly paced St. James’s Street, down towards the Palace,
under the long evening light, half forgetting the roar of the traffic
around him, he suddenly heard, just as he passed White’s Club, a
voice very familiar; and looking up with a start, he saw a face more
familiar still. It was a hearty face, the face of a man of his own
age, but bronzed and gay, the face of a man who had advanced up the
hill at a vigorous stride, and had now suddenly halted with his arms
extended and had cried:
“Peter Blagden!”
“That’s my name!” said Mr. Petre, as suddenly. To which he added,
“Buffy Thompson!” Within his mind what had been a dead wall of mist
began to roll and form into clouds; and now dim shapes appeared,
which were already almost memories.
“Peter Blagden!” shouted the new-comer; and slapped him on the
shoulder and put an arm in his and led him sharply round the corner
into St. James’s Place.
“When did you get back?”
As naturally as if his misfortune had never happened, Mr. Petre said:
“She was due at Portsmouth on April the 3rd, I think. My memory is
not very good, Buffy. But I’m pretty sure she made good time. I am
pretty sure it was the 3rd that I landed.”
“April the _third_! Good Lord, man! That’s half a year ago. Why
didn’t you let me know?” said Buffy.
They crossed St. James’s Street together.
“I was ill,” said Mr. Petre, looking oddly askance and a little
ashamed.
[Illustration: _Joyous recognition of Buffy Thomas._]
“Well,” said the honest friend, “that’s all over, anyhow. Come along
in with me. You’ll want your rooms again.”
He stopped in front of a door in the little side street and put in
the key.
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre, hesitating more oddly still, “these are my
rooms all right.”
The rolling mists in his mind had formed now definitely into clouds
with shapes to them, and gaps in between through which appeared
things more and more definite. He had a sudden sharp vision of a
red-brick cloister and of the same voice shouting to him from a
window, and it was mixed up in his mind with the name of a place,
but he could not catch that name. Cayridge? Clayridge? He had
simultaneously a little picture presented to his mind of green Downs
beyond a valley, and he was thinking of horses; and again the wreaths
of the mist blotted all that out, and he was side by side with this
same man on a public platform listening to his friend orating badly.
He mechanically pulled out his watch as he had done on that distant
day on that platform. Political speeches bored him.
Mr. Petre put his watch back and looked pathetically into Buffy’s
face.
“Thompson,” he said slowly, “Thompson, you’re a good fellow.”
“Are you ill?” said Thompson, holding him as if he were afraid he
would fall.
“No, not exactly,” said Mr. Petre. “I _have_ been ill. Take me in.”
Mr. Petre had forgotten all about the Temple, all about Trefusis, all
about Charlie Terrard.
South England came flooding into his mind, and an irresistible desire
for sleep.
The key clicked in the lock, the door pushed open, and showed a
narrow hall of rooms he knew. There was the funny old engraving--a
hundred years old at least--of Mostyn Steeplechase, and there,
projecting on its bracket so that the narrow hall was made too narrow
by it, stuck out at a place that made it positively dangerous, was
the bust of Lord Brougham. It was all part of the furniture of his
mind. So was the used carpet upon the stair. So was the curtain
upon the landing. So was the very smell of the musty house and the
outline of the dreary gas bracket which had been fitted with electric
light. So was the dusty yellow fringe of stuff which hid the glare
of the light from the eye. It was Home. It was his surroundings, the
clothing of his soul. He would sleep.
“You want your rooms again?” said Thompson again, heartily.
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre, stopping on the landing and leaning his hand
upon the banister and bending his face downward again.
“Good Lord, man!” said his friend, “you’re not puffed by half a dozen
stairs!”
“No,” said Mr. Petre. “No.” He groped with his hands as a man does in
darkness, but it was a gesture of the mind, not of the body.
Thompson, looking at him queerly for a moment, (but most concernedly,
for he loved the man), threw open the door of the room and they both
went in. Mr. Petre gave a cry.
Here, came in a flood, all that had supported his being. Here were
books, each one he knew; here was the familiar dull aspect of the
house opposite, here was the faded looking-glass, and, thrust into
it, cards, every one of the names on which he could tell. Here was
the chair; and in a rack opposite the looking-glass half a dozen
pipes, to one of which he stretched out his hand mechanically. He
took it and blew into its stem and was delighted to find it clear. He
felt in his pocket for a pouch, and found none. There was no doubt
at all that he was at home. He sat down in his own chair, and sighed
like a man who has come in full of a good weariness from riding
outside upon the Downs. His mind was inhabiting an island, already
clear, well lit, the boundaries of which were expanding upon every
side.
Yes, these were his rooms. These were his books, his pictures, new
and choice, or ugly, old, familiar and inherited; there was the door
of the little frowsty bedroom; but he missed something, and then
suddenly said to Buffy:
“What about Billy--what about the dog?”
“Your man took him out,” said Buffy.
Mr. Petre added, as though it were a most solemn thing: “I bought
that dog as a puppy at Henley. You remember? You were with me. When
was that?” he said sharply.
“Three years ago last June,” said Thompson, looking at him curiously
again. “You ought to remember that better than I do.”
“I ought,” said Mr. Petre humbly. “I ought, Buffy,” he added, “I
think I ought to sleep.”
“You look as though you’d been up; but, damn it! it isn’t seven yet,”
said Thompson, “and I’ve any amount of things to ask you. Are you
tired?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Petre, “I think I ought to sleep.”
“Get a nap,” said Buffy, stretching himself, “and I’ll wait here for
you and read. Go in and get a nap and then we can go out and dine
together somewhere. I’m dying to hear all about it.”
“About what?” said Mr. Petre, his mind troubled again, and a
drowsiness falling upon him.
“Why, your travels, of course,” said Thompson.
“Buffy,” said poor Mr. Petre again, “let me sleep. I must sleep. I
won’t dine. Let me sleep. Only,” here he clasped Thompson’s hand
suddenly at the wrist with a gesture so absurdly exaggerated that
his friend grew afraid, “only promise me you will come back at eight
to-morrow morning, and no matter how soundly I am sleeping, promise
to wake me and be with me and befriend me, Thompson. Tell my man that
I am sleeping, and tell him--yes, tell him that I know where the bell
is and that I may ring, and that if I ring he is to come at once,
no matter what the hour is. It rings in his room, you know. I may
need him. I may need him, Thompson,” he said, his voice falling to a
dangerous whisper. “I remember him perfectly well. My man. Wait here
till he comes in. Tell him I must sleep on.”
“That’s all right,” said Thompson heartily. “I’ll see to everything.
Go in and sleep.”
He was intrigued and bewildered, but he had plenty of sense, and he
saw what was needed.
“You never had the telephone. It’s one of my grievances. I’ll send a
messenger round to Chesterfield Gardens and tell them I can’t come.”
“Chesterfield Gardens,” said Mr. Petre suddenly; and then his
troubled soul walled up again and he said, “Yes, Chesterfield
Gardens. What houses?” Thus he mumbled to himself. There was some
connection in his mind with these words, “Chesterfield Gardens,”
which he could carry on no longer. He stumbled into the little
bedroom as though he were drunk. Thompson helped him off with his
clothes and into his night-shirt, saw him into bed, turned out the
light, and sat anxiously in the next room until a steady snoring from
within told him that the man slept as he needed to sleep.
Buffy Thompson knocked out the ashes of his pipe very gently, so as
not to awaken that strange invalid--if invalid he were--filled it
again, lit it, and smoked, staring at the floor with his head upon
his hands.
It could not be drugs. There was nothing of that sort about Blagden
at all. It certainly was not drink--drink never took a man that way.
There was the sound of a door opening and shutting downstairs, and
a man came in with a little dog upon a leash. Thompson went out and
hushed.
“Mr. Blagden’s come back,” he said. “But he’s exceedingly tired, and
he must sleep. He’s sleeping now in his room. He wants you to take
the dog upstairs with you, and he’ll ring if he wants you at all
during the night. Don’t go out, Martin. Stay in and be ready for him
if he wants you--at any hour. I don’t know what has happened. I am a
little frightened about him.”
“I had no warning, sir,” said Martin.
“No, neither had I,” answered Thompson. “I tell you I don’t know
what’s happened. Anyhow, he must sleep. If you want me, go round next
door and ring up the Bolton. I shall take a room there to-night.”
“It’s all very sudden, sir,” said Martin.
“It is,” said Thompson. “But we can do nothing till the morning.”
Buffy went back, pushed the door gently open. The sleeper was still
sleeping with that light snoring; his slumber was deep. He could
dimly see, by the reflected light from the room without, that he had
not moved. It seemed he would so sleep for hours.
Thompson went out on tiptoe down the stairs and into the street,
marveling at the things that happen in this world.
* * * * *
Mr. Petre--I mean Mr. Blagden--slept and slept. He slept fourteen
hours; and when he woke the revolution within him was accomplished.
Mr. Blagden, no longer Mr. Petre, had returned to this world.
But he had paid a price. That blow he had received was not without
its effects and sequel. He suffered some torpor of the spirit as
does the body after long maintenance of an unnatural attitude. His
brain was fatigued and for the moment indifferent.
He had slept all those hours profoundly. Upon waking and seeing
those accustomed walls he was back, for a few seconds, in the days,
two years gone and more, before he had left for America. He looked
mechanically for clothes in the old mahogany tall-boys and found
another man’s. As he did so his situation came back to him at once.
Buffy Thompson had his rooms. He rang for Martin.
“Martin, have you any clothes of mine or did you store them?”
“I’ve got the gray suit, sir, and some ties and linen. The rest’s in
the cottage at Harrington.”
“All right, Martin; bring me that.”
He dressed slowly, laying aside the garments of Mr. Petre and glad
to find that two years had made him neither more nor less unwieldy.
He approved the tie; he always wore the same kind. He approved the
collar. He put watch and chain and keys and change and papers into
the old regular pockets. It was a resurrection of the flesh.
Then he went into the sitting-room--they were but two, these modest
ancient rooms of his on the second floor, with Martin and a boxroom
up above. He sat at his desk by the window and pondered. It was
half-past nine o’clock.
He sat at his desk recovering rapidly, moment by rising moment, from
such weakness as a man feels after a long illness; but his mind was
clear. All his boyhood, all his manhood, were before him as they are
with you and me; the normal memory, here vivid, there imperfect,
with the full personality and past of the man. He saw it all in its
perspective and in its frame, and with his restoration came decision
and will.
That life he had now before him had not been very eventful, it was
nowhere tragic; it had its disturbances and its troubles; it had its
few moments of petty glories and one short episode of passion.
The shock which had brought it back to him when he had come suddenly
upon that friend of his youth did not exaggerate anything. It only
restored. It shook him back into himself and their long acquaintance:
the life of school together, and of college; the rooms above the
Cloisters in Cambridge, the winter days in which he had gone down to
Devizes to stay with them, and their hunting together.
He remembered his father’s death and how he had left his mother
the use of Harrington, living himself between it and town. His
determination, which had so grieved her, not to marry after his
disappointment. He remembered those regular journeys up and down;
the station in the country town of Patcham near at hand; the beloved
accent of his own people on the platform, the beloved West-country
talk of the Patchamites. The four miles’ drive home. He remembered
his mother’s stroke, her decline, her death, and his own grief. He
remembered (an odd detail which brought a tired smile to his lips)
that bad investment in Mexicans, or to be perfectly frank with
himself, that bad speculation.
He remembered how Charlie Cable had unloaded upon him, and how he
had trusted him because Charlie had just got into the Cabinet and
was somewhat of a hero in his eyes. He remembered the letting of
Harrington and his furnishing for himself the cottage outside the
North Lodge and how he regretted leaving the place. He remembered the
conversation with Wilkins, the family lawyer: he remembered their
office, the long talks on affairs: all futile. He was himself again.
He remembered the taking of these very rooms twenty years ago and
more--not so long after the Great War. He remembered his habitation
of them during the two weeks of the Levantine Crisis in ’39, when
they were threatened with air raids, and had an oddly vivid memory
of walking back from the office in which he had volunteered to
work, half a mile away in Whitehall, during the first warning.
He remembered how strange he had thought it was that he was not
frightened--at his age. He was frightened enough a little later.
He remembered the occasion of his journey to the States twenty-eight
months ago, the strange climate of New York, his days in Chicago, his
disappointment at the condition of that land-venture of his; his
renewed anxieties. He even remembered his amusement at the difference
between what he had thought the land would be like and what it really
was. The astonishing American landscape. He vividly remembered the
return, the abomination of the crossing on the great liner, the
bad company, the bad food. Then came, like the shutter of a camera
coming sharp down on his mind, the darkness that followed: the dead
blank--the gap, in a train.
And yet he could oddly contrast his present knowledge of what he
had been and was with those few months in which every surrounding
experience was so strange, ugly, tortured, and the whole of his
life before the accident cut away as though it had never been:
his associates share-shufflers, and for society a glimpse of the
abominable smart.
There was a duality in his vision of these last few months that made
him shudder as though his present memory, revived and sane, was
living side by side with that vile period in which he was himself and
yet not himself. But the mood did not last long. There was too much
comedy to relieve it.
He traveled along each episode. He saw step by step the prodigious
increase of fortune, and in spite of his weakness he could have
laughed aloud. He, the permanently embarrassed, had had a dream of
millions, evil millions. He could sit still no longer at the desk.
He stood up and steadied himself by the mantelpiece, and did laugh
slightly at last. As he did so, the recent reality of stocks and
deals and sales which had stood apart in his mind as an ended,
exceptional episode returned as an enormity: he was _now_, he was
_still_, an immensely wealthy man.
He began to realize it. He, standing there in that cozy, shabby room
which was part of himself; he, Peter Blagden of Harrington, a poor
gentleman, insufficiently provided, embarrassed--had an immense lump
of money; over three million pounds.
What it would mean to him; what he would do with his opportunities;
whether indeed he desired to do anything with them (he did not
think he did, unless it were to travel--anywhere except across the
Atlantic) troubled him little. What he chuckled over was the high
comedy of this immense fortune in his hands. He looked round the
little dusty room, the dear little familiar room of twenty years, all
telling of his modest (and declining, encumbered) country gentleman’s
income, of his lineage, of his affections, most of them now with the
dead; he remembered the Bank Parlor and he laughed again, aloud.
He had for a moment the boyish impulse to do something really
amusing--to go out there and then, that morning, pick up a telephone
and give some critical order which should shake a wobbling market. He
might sell half a million Moulters, and wreck them; Lord! What fun!
He held his head back to laugh once more, but his weakness came upon
him again and he sank down into his chair.
Martin knocked at the door; his visage recalled to Mr. Blagden an
imperative precaution.
“Martin,” he said, “my name is Blagden--Peter Blagden. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir--of course, sir.” Nor did Martin flinch. He was of country
training and had feudal knowledge that gentlemen were free to be
quite unaccountable if they chose.
“Does our landlord know that I’m back?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, then, Martin, don’t tell him. I’ll slip out when he’s away
and, Martin, _don’t tell any one_: not for a day or two. I’ll tell
you when you may, quite soon.”
“Yes, sir. Very good. Will you have your breakfast now, sir,” he
said, “or will you wait till Mr. Thompson comes?”
“Is Thompson coming?” asked Mr. Petre, gratefully.
“Yes, sir,” said Martin. “He told me he would be here at ten, and
it’s striking now.”
“Then I will wait for Mr. Thompson,” said Mr. Blagden--who was also
Mr. Petre when the thought of the Bank came back to him and brought
up that smile again--“I will wait for Mr. Thompson, and we will
breakfast together, Martin. What is there for breakfast?” he added
sharply.
“I got kippers,” said Martin, in a voice which years had rendered
part of his master’s life. “I had to use my judgment, sir, and you
were always fond of kippers.”
“I was,” said Mr. Blagden, in deeper and more religious tones than
he had yet used; and he added, “I was and am again. Indeed, I was
fond of them in between, and I ought to have remembered why. But I
didn’t, Martin, I didn’t.”
“No, sir,” said that excellent man, amenable to the absurdities of
his lord.
“I should have known it all the time, Martin,” said Mr. Blagden.
“It’s curious I didn’t know anything all the time.”
“Yes, sir,” said Martin.
* * * * *
Buffy Thompson came in; tall, bustling, his hair in all its native
fuzz and his eyes dancing. He began a torrent of questions. But
Blagden stopped him with a question that made him gape.
“You haven’t told any one that I’m back?”
“No.... No one--but why the Hell you....”
“Well: _don’t tell any one_. Martin’s got those orders. I’ve the very
best reasons. It won’t last long. But it’s _absolutely essential_.
Have you got that?”
Buffy Thompson was unused to the American phrase.
“Got what?” he asked.
“I mean, will you promise?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then we’ll talk.”
Over the breakfast-table Peter Blagden told the hardly believable
tale, and Buffy Thompson believed.
“I’m going to put it boldly into the one stock that won’t turn a
hair,” he ended; “I’m going to buy New Bearer Loan.” He turned up the
last page of the morning paper Martin had brought--the accustomed
one, the _Messenger_. “99--8½ ... about 3 months to mature. There’ll
be an odd 40,000 pounds or so.” Buffy Thompson was awed at such
nonchalance--it was uncanny. “I’ll transfer it to current account in
the bank at Patcham--in my own name.” He suddenly got up. “I can’t
wait, Buffy, I’m on wires. You won’t mind helping me in a little
business matter?”
“No,” said Buffy, “all in reason.”
“Oh! It’ll be all in reason, never fear. Now take your hat and stick
and come with me.”
They drove to that Branch Bank which should be famous in the annals
of Banking. Together they passed the swing doors. Together they stood
as Mr. Blagden--Mr. Petre, I mean--addressed Moonface with a firm
courtesy. Together they were conducted through the carpeted corridor,
past the three engravings, together they entered the Sacred Cell.
Mr. Petre introduced, “My dear sir, this is my friend Mr. Palling
Thompson.” They all bowed. No flies were on Mr. Petre that morning.
He knew his own mind at last.
“By all means, Mr. Petre, by all means. Ah! And for the purpose...?”
“One moment.” Mr. Petre pulled out a small vellum-bound book from his
pocket. “Yes ... £3,273,764 6s. 2d. There are no checks outstanding.
I am about to draw £264 6s. 2d. That leaves £3,273,500.”
The obvious truth needed no reply.
“Now, my dear sir,” Mr. Petre went on with calm decision, “the
New National Bearer Bonds are at 98½ this morning? They were that
yesterday.”
The Manager rang and asked for the sheet. It came flimsy and large;
he put on his spectacles too slowly and confirmed. Yes. 98⅜, ½.
“In what denominations can they be bought?”
The Manager smiled.
“Well, my dear sir--surely it is immaterial?--Some are high--for
convenience of transport or what not--it’s a great innovation.
Really! If you’d told any one even twenty years ago....”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted Mr. Petre, “what’s the highest denomination?”
“Well, really, £10,000, I think.”
“I should like to see one,” said Mr. Petre, “if you have one in the
place.”
The Manager rang and the glorious thing appeared--presented in a
Morrison folder.
Mr. Petre took it out and handled it with curiosity and interest.
It was printed on one of those new metal sheets which they make the
notes of nowadays, and which, they tell us, will replace all paper in
the long run; thin, stronger, even lighter; 500 to the inch--almost
like the India paper of the old late nineteenth-century books, only
not quite so flimsy.
It wasn’t ugly--for an official thing; about eighteen inches by
twenty-four and all the little coupons very neat.
Mr. Petre held it up to the light and got absorbed in the grain and
the Royal Arms. Then he remembered his business and put it down again.
Mr. Petre asked for a sheet of note-paper and murmured as he wrote
thereon: “Please buy me 320 £10,000 nominal National Bearer Bonds at
current price, this date. The balance of my account pay in to the
account of Mr. Peter Blagden, of Harrington, in the Empire Bank,
Patcham Branch,” and he signed boldly “John K. Petre.”
He looked up and spoke: “I want those bills put....” he began. “No!
I’ll add it in writing.”
He murmured again: “P.S.--Please put the securities so purchased into
a secure receptacle and keep them against my coming”--“What’s to-day?
Tuesday. I’ll come on Friday”--“against my coming on Friday next, the
22nd, at 11 a.m., when I shall take them with me.--J. K. P.” “There!”
he added in the tone of a man who has paid a small bill promptly, and
with a pleasant smile he handed it to the Man of Affairs.
That Manager was dumb. The blow had fallen. The golden dream was
over. But it had to come. It might have come at any moment in all
those weeks. The Formidable Eccentric ever acted in some such
lightning fashion. Doubtless (or, at any rate, pray Heaven) he would
return. He had been most courteously treated. He should retain a
good memory of their continued courtesy.
“By all means, Mr. Petre, by all means.” The Manager swallowed twice.
“At eleven on Friday.”
There was no more to be said. There was nothing more to be done.
* * * * *
“Buffy,” said Mr. Blagden, when they were in the street, and the odd
£264 6s. 2d. safe in pocket, “Don’t you want to come on with me? I’ve
only got two things more to do--one in the Temple. Then we’ll lunch.”
“All right,” said Buffy.
Mrs. Malton was scrubbing when they entered. She staggered up to her
weary feet, bobbed and apologized.
“Mrs. Malton,” said her employer abruptly, “you are a good woman. Now
listen to me,” as she would have protested, “I’m leaving. I’m paying
my rent now. At the office. This morning.” Mrs. Malton’s eyes filled
with tears. “The van will come for this furniture to-morrow. Be
here to see that it is loaded. It’s going down to Dorset. No, don’t
interrupt. Here is five pounds. Are you married?”
Mrs. Malton said that she was a widow. He asked her if she had
children. There were two living: one in the Army, and the other
married down Hackney way.
“Mrs. Malton, if you are well advised you will arrange your affairs
at home, and take the train from Waterloo Station to a place called
Patcham. If you are well advised you will take the train to-day week
at ten in the morning, and at Patcham you shall be met; and there you
shall be shown my house and certain duties attached to it. And if it
suits you, you can stay.”
Mrs. Malton made no terms. Nor did it occur to her that virtue could
be rewarded in this world. For in her station of life reward is
unknown, as is in higher stations virtue. She simply thought that
God, in Whom she believed (for she had been brought up in a very
old-fashioned way on the lonely edge of an Essex march) had sent Mr.
Petre with a gift, and in her philosophy that was not reward but good
luck.
Her employer turned to go, and then suddenly remembered.
“Mrs. Malton, when you get to Patcham, you must not ask for me as
Mr. Petre. You must ask for me as Mr. Blagden. I am Mr. Blagden now.
Good-by.”
Mrs. Malton, returning to her task, mused on the common madness of
the wealthy, and humbly thanked Heaven for her good fortune.
Peter Blagden took Thompson with him as he settled for the rent, gave
the order for the moving of the furniture, and the address, went back
to his rooms; sent Martin down to meet the furniture at Harrington,
bade him be back on Thursday without fail, and then disappeared into
that happy inn of his, with Thompson attendant. By ten of the Friday
he was back in London; by eleven precisely, after a heavy struggle
with his nerves, he was at the door of the Bank, in a good roomy
motor, hired from Rimington’s over the river.
A box of steel, burnished, about two feet and a half by two, lined
with some dull bronze metal, and having a curious set of three
fastenings of a sort he had never seen before, was awaiting him.
There was a swing handle at either end. A man could lift it easily
enough. The printed securities it contained, each batch just like the
last, were handed out with the reverent care which a superstitious
age might have shown to the body of a saint; they were in three thin
flat bundles of 100 each, tied and docketed; and twenty over.
The solemn process of verifying the printed numbers by tens was
to begin when Mr. Petre--in a last eccentricity at which, for all
his thought of the future, the Banker could hardly refrain from
protesting--had them all put back.
“I’ll take it as read,” he said. “All I want to understand is these
locks.”
The simple, the ingenious mechanism was explained, and when cordial
farewells had somewhat raised the hearts of the mourners who were
to remain thus widowed, a menial bore the box away in train of the
millionaire, the last poor corpse of an immortal episode, and put it
into the roomy motor at its master’s feet. So went a little more--a
trifle of one or two odd one hundred thousands more--than three
million pounds through Guildford to Alton, where they lunched late
and took the air.
At Alton Mr. Petre bought a good strong sack and corded it about
the box. At Winchester he stopped for the night, paid off the car,
and dined well with Thompson. As for the sacking parcel, it went
up to his room with his luggage. Next morning Mr. Petre hired a
standing rotor cab himself in the street, standing by it to see that
none should speak to its chauffeur. His luggage was put within and
without, and he and Buffy, whom he had asked to pay the bill, drove
to Lymington. The taxi was paid off with its return fare, and Mr.
Petre had the satisfaction of seeing it go off without comment or
converse.
He and his companion lunched. After lunch Thompson went out, saying
that all might hear, “I’m sure I can get something,” and sure enough,
in an hour he was back with a little old-fashioned trap, still
surviving, and a venerable horse, his purchases, for they designed
to tour the forest. They put their few things aboard and the small
sacking case which held some camping kit and off they went; so slowly
that the children jeered at them as the old horse wheezed along.
The Forest was divine with Autumn; they drove on alone, exploring
its views. One night Mr. Petre took out those bonds and made a nice
brown-paper parcel of them, leaving the metal box empty. But he took
it carefully along. They turned the old horse’s head westward toward
the Dorset border.
They took it easy. They made their twelve or fourteen miles in a
day, all leisurely, nor in a direct line. On the fifth day, from
a hill-top, they saw before them in its vale the happy roofs of
Harrington, its belfry, the sober gray of Blagden’s House beyond the
trees, and slowly their voyage ended at the cottage by the North
Lodge.
The heavy camping kit was lifted in. Then the rest. The ramshackle
old trap put away in a barn behind a farm cart. They would not need
it for some time. It had only been for the forest, said Mr. Blagden.
The old horse found a good stable and the much-enduring man his home.
He was released. He had given the slip to that incredible world of
shuffling and of falsehood and of cozening, of vain gambling and
snatching and open robbery which pretends, in our toppling moment, to
govern mankind. So long as the State was secure he was secure; he had
his money out at usury, but to one debtor only, the Government of his
country; better investment he could not find. He was washed of all
the slime of evil acquaintance as he was rid of all that terror and
perplexity and agony of nothingness which had poisoned the spring and
summer of ’53.
But the gigantic sum in the locked cupboard of his bedroom above less
affected him than the doubling of his insufficient revenue two years
before would have done. He desired nothing but his old friends, his
home and the peaceful passage of age, and these were now secure.
It did not take him ten days to put the simple trials of his earlier
life to rights. The small sums--to him now small--very large to the
recipients, which were needed to give him an immediate occupation of
the old place, to give the mortgagees compensation for his haste, he
had sacrificed, as he would have sacrificed a sixpence. And only the
clerks in the Patcham Branch of the Empire Bank knew about it. Mr.
Blagden, of Harrington Hall, had done famously in America. He had
made a deal with the great John K. Petre, and netted close on £50,000.
As for the American land, Mr. Blagden had cabled to London that power
was following by mail to let it go. His agent there could sell or let
’em foreclose, just as he willed. He was indifferent; he only desired
to hear no more of it. He had visited the old place and strolled
round its gardens, pleased with everything, except to note this or
that slight disorder, this or that slight mark of an alien presence
now vanished. He had recalled in a flood the years of his childhood
and of his early manhood. He had made friends of every chair and
table and picture and book. He was bathed in content.
He retained his rooms in St. James’s Place. He was used to them, they
suited him, he wanted no more. Here was a good end to life. What
would he do with the inordinate excess? He should put it somewhere
apart from him so that he should not be troubled by the violence of
men, or even by their needs beyond reason.
He was bathed in content; and mighty peace had spread her wings again
over a world new blessed.
CHAPTER X
And mighty Peace had spread her wings again over a world new blessed?
Not at all. Far from it!
When they have a holiday in Heaven they suck it out to the last
half-minute, and beyond if they can; for Heaven has been hard-worked
since the Fall, and play is precious to it.
That merry Dæmon to whom Mr. Petre had been handed over for a
plaything still had a few days to disport himself--a few minutes,
as they call them in Heaven--and he was not going to waste them. He
wasn’t going to drop his toy till Higher Powers should come and take
it from him. Not he! Mr. Petre was still in for it.
* * * * *
In that same great Rotor boat which had brought the new millionaire
and his fortune to Plymouth upon that April day, these five months
agone, was borne to the shores of Europe a real old millionaire, a
matured one.
Mr. Batterby had been perfectly right. That real old millionaire,
that matured one, had indeed taken the same boat; and his name
_was_ quite certainly and without ambiguity, and without problem,
and without mystery or miracle, John Kosciusko Petre. But with
a charming modesty he had taken his ticket and registered under
the name of Carroll. It secured him isolation; a thing he prized.
For John Kosciusko Petre (who never wasted a moment of his waking
hours--they were eighteen, for he only slept six) knew himself to
be the target of innumerable arrows, the desired prey of a million
ravenous appetites, the flesh at which a host of claws throughout
the world were clutching, and he built round himself a wall of
secrecy. It had been his rule for years. When he was off and away no
man should know where he might be; save when, at rare intervals, he
cabled a code word during his travels, awaited the reply, and then
moved off again. In these annual bouts of leisure John Kosciusko
Petre improved his mind, and he read, and read, and read, and read,
and read. He had already read in this vacation all George Eliot, all
Dickens, all Hardy, all Meredith, and a literal translation of the
_Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ by Homer, and he was now halfway through
the works of William Shakespeare. He had begun with the poems, and
he was rapidly nearing the end of _Henry V_. Tennyson was yet to
come--oddly enough.
John Kosciusko Petre was a man nearly seventy years of age, and
looked fifty or ninety as you felt inclined. His skin was of fine
vellum, drawn strongly over strong bones, with not much in between.
And he had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes, which was an economy.
His eyes gave nothing away, and in this they were unlike his hands,
which, for thirty years past, had been giving away wholesale and in
the oddest fashion--public baths, and food in famine areas, and funds
for the observation of seismological phenomena--earthquakes, that
was--and splendid collections to museums, and one model University,
complete in every detail, and even including a Papist among its
professors: the professor of Mismatices. It was the first University
of that Mountain State, and large enough to train all its youth of
all its sexes, in all the higher departments of learning. He was
tall, bald, as strong and energetic as any man twenty years his
junior. He was silent, and prided himself on being silent; and he
prided himself also on this, that he never had a suit of clothes
built for him in his life, but had always bought what was necessary
from the hook.
As for his blood, it was very good. He knew his ancestry right away
back a good deal longer than most people do who boast of blood in
Europe. And it was good blood, for those who prefer the blood of
New England. Nor was there poverty in his lineage, nor, until his
own opportunities had come, great wealth; but whether he was of the
English Petres or not he could not have told you, for he did not
pretend to go back beyond the mid-seventeenth century. But he was as
old as that.
As for his names, he had been called John after his grandfather,
who had farmed in New Hampshire, and was a very honest man; and
Kosciusko from a hero of that grandfather, of whom that grandfather
had read in a book of excerpts (called _A Thousand Gems of Poetry_)
that Freedom had shrieked when Kosciusko had had the misfortune to
fall. Nor was his grandfather aware what horrid superstitions that
hero had followed in religion, or he perhaps would have been less
devoted. At any rate, Kosciusko had the baby been called, nearly
seventy years ago, for his middle name. Hence the K.
Mr. John Kosciusko Petre--John K. as he was affectionately
known--traveled with no valet; and therein he was wise. Where he was
wiser still was that he traveled with a man who did his work for
him, and whom he paid a very high salary indeed. You may call him
a Private Secretary, or a Confidential Secretary if you will, but
John Kosciusko did not give him these titles, he called him simply
“My Clurk,” and this attendant was devoted and efficient in such a
degree, that you would not believe it if you saw it in a book.
It was his business never to approach John Kosciusko until he was
summoned; he traveled second in boat and train in Europe when John
Kosciusko traveled first; in the States he went Pullman as his
master did, but not in the same drawing-room reservation. He kept
all letters, papers, figures--everything--orderly in his mind;
with a free hand to organize what sized office he willed, and what
bureaucracy he chose for the maintenance of all this; and to spend
at large for keeping in touch, and having everything in order.
So did John Kosciusko arrange his life. And the Dæmon had even
arranged that John Kosciusko should come on deck well muffled up,
and gaze without too much interest upon the town of Plymouth while
that other gentleman stepped ashore towards his fate. For John
Kosciusko was bound for Cherbourg and would land among the French,
whose civilization he affected more than he did that of the English,
though blaming the Gauls in certain points, and particularly in their
plumbing, their religion, and their lack of their religion; all which
three things he disapproved. Of all the Gauls he chiefly relaxed in
the district of Touraine, and on the Coast of Azure. Upon this last,
indeed, he had a set of rooms kept for him permanently, though he
visited them but once in two years at the oftenest.
So in that happy springtime John Kosciusko wandered. A contract motor
of sufficient size met him at Cherbourg. Once more did he survey the
castles of the Loire, once more the conservatories of the Riviera.
It was his glory that in these vacations (though he lost not a moment
and continued to read; Shakespeare was finished long before he had
gutted Chinon and Tennyson was polished off and Thackeray was passing
along the belt to the Receiver) he put business on one side. The
clurk saw to that. But my Dæmon, having need of him, quite instantly
jerked him out of his repose.
The weather was torrid, as September in France can be, the same
weather in which, half a lifetime before, and more, the German armies
had marched upon Paris; and John Kosciusko, reading yesterday’s
_Matin_ in the town of Angers (where he found himself in his progress
north to the coast), read a paragraph which he would certainly not
have read in any English paper; and, reading it, wondered whether he
were alive or dead.
It was plain French, and he could read plain French well enough.
There would have seemed, to any one else, nothing very startling
in the news. It was a commonplace story of modern speculation, and
described in the light French manner how a big Rotor merger had
taken place in London that summer and how its monopoly was virtually
established by the Government decision to adopt the Combine system
in the ports and on board the King’s ships as well as in the Postal
System; and how the Dominions had followed suit.
But it was not these first few lines which had knocked John Kosciusko
sideways; it was the last three. They ran:
“It is the secret of Punchinello that the soul of this affair, of one
so large _envergure_, is but that John K. Petre, the man of fantastic
millions, who is of passage at London, seems it, and of whom one
talks currently in the best clubs of the Bond Street and of the
Strand....”
John Kosciusko Petre put the paper down on the little marble table
in the café where he sat, spread it out with two large bony hands,
and fixed upon the ill-conditioned print of the French journal those
steel spectacles, that firm and concentrated gaze, which were his
marks.
He registered every word. He felt a duty to take some immediate
decision, but he could not decide what the decision was to be. He
could not decide decisively, as decisions should be decided. For once
in his life he was flummoxed. Then--for our millionaires are men
of rapid conclusions, that is why they now and then die poor--the
corners of his mouth drew down; he had solved the problem. During
that long vacuity of his in France he had been impersonated in
London. His clurk should have known of this!
He pulled forth a little knife, rather blunt, and slowly cut out the
offending paragraph. He unscrewed his big black Waterman pen and
wrote on it in the bold American hand “7/10/53.” He blotted it with
the vile French blotting paper, frowned to see it blurred, folded
it carefully, and put it into a cheap leather wallet which he had
carried for over forty years. He was still angry against the clurk.
But he was a just man, and reflected under what difficulties of a
foreign language and of slow communication that very efficient young
man had kept up communications during all these months of travel; and
he acquitted him. But he must consult with him, and he went back to
the hotel.
There was not a day to be lost. They could not make the night boat at
Havre, but they could catch the morning Air Mail from Paris if they
motored through the night; and motor through the night that old man
of iron did; sleeping with arms crossed as he tore through the warm
air. He took the earliest of the three air services, and by the time
that he and his companion were at the Splendide it was the younger
man who was tired out, not the elder. As he registered the clerk
hesitated. John Kosciusko pulled him up sharply and said: “What’s the
matter now?” in tones which were of metal and startled the lounge.
“Well, sir ...” said the clerk.
“That’s my name, ain’t it?” said John Kosciusko, showing an envelope.
And the clerk succumbed. But his head was going round. How many John
K. Petre’s were there in this wicked world?
Then with no deliberation, at once, the wires were set to work. The
agencies which the clerk held in the hollow of his hand, the points
on the map of Central London where he could press a button, the
centers from which money could work anything, whatever it willed, all
buzzed; all the wheels went round.
And upon the morning of the third day John Kosciusko, who had kept
strictly to himself all the time, never so much as leaving his rooms,
receiving the reports, coördinating them, mastering the thing like
a man of thirty-five, and a genius in staff work at that--on the
morning of the third day, I say, the whole thing was before him,
shaken into shape, and presented as lucidly as a good diagram. He had
got it all.
Five months ago, on the 3rd of April (the very day, by gosh! that he
himself had looked on Plymouth before he had landed at Cherbourg!) a
man of such and such appearance, perhaps twenty years younger than
himself, utterly different from himself, stout, gray, in the early
fifties (some said he might be American, and some said he might be
English) had impersonated him in that very hotel, the Splendide. He
had crossed the tracks of those very agencies, apparently to find out
what the real John K. was doing and where he might be. He had moved
to rooms in the Temple. He had lunched and dined at such and such a
house; he had been the constant associate of one Terrard, of Blake
and Blake, Brokers on ’Change in the City of London, and he had had
the gall to make good!
It was said that he had begun with a deal in some stock. One line of
inquiries made sure it was French African stock, but another that it
was a Bear account in the External Loan. Anyhow, immediately after,
he had bought the Paddenham Site and then sold it to the Government
for some ten million dollars. Then he had gone in with the Trefusis
crowd at fifty-fifty; but about three weeks after the Contract had
gone through with the Commons he had sold out. What he had done after
this it was too soon to know, as it was only a few days before; but
he had gone out with half the capital. He had not been frozen out, or
anything of that kind. He had it good and tight, mayhap in National
Bonds.
John Kosciusko was in such a cold anger that the parchment of his
skin showed white. For men of that energy can be very angry indeed,
at and beyond their seventieth year.
The next thing--and it was all done the same morning--was an
interview with the lawyer--the only lawyer whom he trusted on this
side, and whom he had good reason to trust, for John Kosciusko had a
method of his own, not only with his lawyers, but with his doctors;
not only with his doctors but with the humble watchers, who saw to
it that his rest was not disturbed by undue sounds. He paid them all
regularly and largely; but the payments stopped dead when the service
failed in the least point, and during his slightest indisposition
the steady and satisfactory income of three excellent practitioners
ceased suddenly; to resume as suddenly when John K. could honestly
say he felt himself again.
The lawyer asked for a little time to turn the matter over. He was
not given that time. He was told to decide, and he decided, naturally
enough, that there was matter for fees--I mean for an Action. The
dreadful Kosciusko forbade the ordinary courtesies, of warning, of
acceptance.
Therefore it was that on the morning of the 15th of September a
chirping young man in a rather dirty collar popped his head into St.
James’s Place, put a not too clean envelope into Mr. Peter Blagden’s
hand, uttered a few cabalistic words, and went out sideways. Mr.
Blagden (of Harrington), opening the missive, was agreeably surprised
to find a document partly in print, and partly in writing, and all in
an English of its own which ran, or rather hobbled, as opposite.
=In the High Court of Justice.= 1953.--No. 42.
KING’S BENCH DIVISION.
=Between=
_John Kosciusko Petre_
PLAINTIFF
AND
_Peter Charles Tamporley Blagden_
DEFENDANT
=George the fifth=, by the Grace of God, of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of the British
Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith, To
_Peter Charles Tamporley Blagden_
of _Harrington Hall, Harrington_
in the _County_ of _Dorset_
WE COMMAND YOU, That within Eight Days after the Service of
this Writ on you, inclusive of the day of such Service, you
do cause an Appearance to be entered for you in an Action
at the Suit of
_John Kosciusko Petre_
And take Notice, that in default of your so doing, the
Plaintiff may proceed therein, and Judgment may be given in
your absence.
Witness, ERMYNTRUDE VISCOUNTESS BOOLE, Lord High Chancellor
of Great Britain, the _fifteenth_ day of _September_, in the
year of Our Lord One thousand nine hundred and _fifty-three_.
* * * * *
N.B.--This Writ is to be served within TWELVE Calendar Months
from the date thereof, or, if renewed, within SIX Calendar
Months from the last date of the last renewal, including
the day of such date, and not afterwards.
The Defendant may appear hereto by entering Appearance,
either personally or by Solicitor, at the Central Office,
Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London.
If the Defendant fail to deliver a defence within TEN Days
after the last day of the time limited for Appearance,
he may have Judgment entered against h_im_ without notice,
unless he has in the meantime been served with a Summons for
Judgment or for Directions.
Mr. Blagden stared hopelessly at this rigmarole. Why this solicitude
of his Sovereign for his old false self? Why this peremptory, this
tyrannical summons from a Monarch whom he had loyally served on the
Commission of the Peace during so prolonged and prosperous a reign?
He happened to turn the sheet over. On the other side was a line of
print followed by writing:
THE PLAINTIFF’S CLAIM IS
_For damages for impersonation of the Plaintiff in
connection with financial and commercial transactions
conducted in his name without his consent._
This Writ was issued by _Jacob King_
of _16 Flag Buildings, Inner Temple_
whose Address for Service is _16 Flag Buildings, Inner Temple_
Solicitor for the said Plaintiff, who reside_s_ at _The
Hotel Splendide_.
Mr. Blagden read this document three times over: first mechanically,
noting only the larger printed words; then still more mechanically,
noting nothing at all; lastly, with a concentrated attention, closely
following every syllable of the Royal harshness to his Liege and
puzzled at the reappearance of that address “The Hotel Splendide.”
Could there be some mistake? Could he be claiming damages against
himself?
He had not yet the habits of his new rank in our plutocracy. He did
not summon his secretary, for he had none. He did not even send for a
messenger, for it was not in his habits to afford such luxuries. He
simply sat and wondered what men did under worries of this kind.
Then he bethought him of the dear old family lawyer, Mr. Wilkins.
Everything belonging to that real life of his--better, for all its
troubles than the mad episode of fortune--was to Mr. Blagden now at
once very distinct and very small, like a picture looked at through
one of these diminishing glasses which the block makers use to decide
on the effect of a wash drawing when it shall be reduced to scale.
The image of Mr. Wilkins stood out thus exceedingly sharp and yet
still remote. It was Mr. Wilkins who had presided over the steady
decline of his mother’s income and his own. It was Mr. Wilkins who
had drawn a substantial income from loyal work performed for a dozen
such families of the declining gentry--clients inherited from his
worthy father and grandfather; for it was a fine old firm. It was
Mr. Wilkins who had given him every possible piece of advice--on
legal technicalities always accurate, on policy always bad--since
he had come of age. To Mr. Wilkins he now turned. He remembered the
telephone number well enough, and considered curiously within himself
what a strange thing this faculty of memory must be, that not only
faded, but could be wholly exiled, and then could present the past
again with all the violent reality of immediate things.
As he waited for the answer on the machine it struck him that Mr.
Wilkins might be dead. He was twelve years older than Mr. Blagden,
and an absence of twenty-eight months is a gap. To his joy he heard
the same clerk’s familiar voice answering with the same irritability
it had invariably answered with in the old days, he heard the
familiar formula when he had given his name, that he would be put
through to Mr. Wilkins; and at last he heard once more the familiar
tones of the principal, still clear in his sober age. They wasted
very little time in greetings. Mr. Wilkins was free? Mr. Blagden
would go round now, at once.
An old association of more than thirty years endeared the two men to
each other; money lost upon the one side and gained upon the other
was a further bond.
Mr. Wilkins heard patiently the details; of the sudden loss of
memory, the name Petre, the financial dealings, the writ. He showed
not the faintest surprise at any part of the extraordinary story of
lost identity (which he entirely disbelieved), he jotted down dates
and then gave tongue.
He used the customary string of technicalities, to each of which was
attached a customary payment. He took for granted, in that clear-cut
professional manner which was part of his job, that his client had
done something quite amazingly astute; that he had been running very
close to the wind. He felt a strong professional admiration for so
much daring and skill. Who would have expected it of Peter Blagden?
He changed his tone to one of conversation and said:
“My dear Mr. Peter” (Mr. Blagden heard that formal familiarity of
Harrington with a double recognition--of old days, and of the past
fevered months), “my dear Mr. Peter, if the interests involved were
not so very large, I should advise an arrangement. But seeing what
those interests are” (and, he added to himself, the considerable fees
that can be milked out of them), “it is worth your while to fight.
There can be no question about the profit on Touaregs. No hurt was
suffered there. Nor of the purchase and sale of land; you were free
to transact it under any trade name. The only doubtful ground is the
Rotor affair.”
“I have no anxiety to go on with that,” said Mr. Blagden wearily.
“None at all.”
“My dear sir,” said Mr. Wilkins, shocked, “do consider what you are
saying! Two millions! More than two millions!”
“I assure you I mean it,” said Mr. Blagden sincerely and simply.
“What on earth does a man want with more than sixty thousand a year?
I’ve got that now, apart from all this last detestable nonsense.”
The image of Mr. Trefusis rose in his mind and nauseated him; for
the morbid mood of those last days remained as a strong impression,
although he was now back again in his right mind. Doubtless had he
met the Great Organizer again in his new condition he would have
respected him as highly as did, and still does, all our business
world. But he had met him in days of mental torture and warping, and
the picture was distorted.
“Why, bless you, Mr. Wilkins,” went on Mr. Blagden, with more
assurance than he would have shown before the older man in his former
days of poverty, “all I want is peace. And if a man can’t have
leisure on £60,000 a year....”
“Less taxes,” broke in Mr. Wilkins anxiously. “Less taxes, my dear
Mr. Peter!”
“Yes, I know,” said Mr. Blagden wearily. “But if a man cannot have
leisure on, say, £30,000 pounds a year, he’s not likely to get it.
What do I want with another quarter million or so of income?”
Mr. Wilkins’ age did not impair his rapidity of decision and his
power for an immediate change of front; for here habit was strong.
He at once went off upon a new tack.
“Have you considered, Mr. Peter,” he said solemnly, and Mr. Blagden
was back again in his twenty-first year, listening to the solemn
admonitions of the Family Lawyer in the old study at home, “have
you considered what the effect will be upon your whole position?
What people will say of your motives, Mr. Peter?” And here he leaned
forward and tapped Mr. Blagden on the knee. “The Paddenham Site
purchase was made under that other name also. Remember that! No doubt
they won’t go into it, but remember what it means! If you let them
take it into court it will make you talked about, that’s true; but it
may clear you.”
Peter Blagden was struck with the full force of that argument, and he
felt the blood going to his face.
The lawyer continued: “No, Mr. Peter, the more I think of it, the
more I see that you must fight it.”
“But if I fight it with the truth,” said Blagden, “all the miserable
humiliating business comes out. I shall be known as a man who has
lapses of memory; a deficient; an absurdity.”
Mr. Wilkins did not understand the objection.
“Why not?” said he. “The only objection is that it’s a poor defense.”
“I won’t have it,” said Mr. Blagden, with sudden fierceness. “I won’t
have it. D’you understand?”
For the whole of thirty-two years Mr. Wilkins had had no experience
of such a mood, either in this client or in any other. At first
he was prepared to wrestle with it; then he thought of the vast
interests involved, and he gave way; instead of replying, he pondered
within himself for a moment.
“It can’t help coming out, Mr. Peter,” he said at last. “Supposing
you say that you used the name at random, and had never heard of
John K. Petre; do you suppose anybody will believe you? And even if
they did believe you, do you suppose you could convince a Court of
Justice that you were having all these opportunities given to you for
love? The first quarter of an hour’s examination of any one of your
witnesses, the first five minutes of an arbitrator ... and whether
you won or lost, you would be branded.”
Mr. Blagden suffered. He was in a cleft stick; he suffered more when
he heard a further remark from the lawyer--not very original, a piece
of human wisdom as old as any fossil monkey’s skull; but ancient
wisdom has an amazing force when it falls pat.
“Every decision in life,” said the older man, “is a choice between
two evils, and there is no doubt which is the worst evil here. You
want peace. You can get it if you tell them this--” (he had almost
slipped out the words “Cock-and-bull story” but he had caught himself
in time)--“this misfortune of yours. You will have an unfortunate
and strange incident remembered of you, but nothing affecting your
honor. If you take the other line, at the very best you will be shown
up as a swindler in every newspaper in the world; and at the worst
... well, I don’t like to go on.”
But Mr. Blagden had recovered his fierce determination.
“No!” he said, “I _won’t_. I’ll make an arrangement.”
“And if they won’t take it?” said the lawyer.
There was a silence--luckily for Peter Blagden’s future happiness
he was the first to break it; the Dæmon had suggested with his
supernatural vision just what was needed, and had slid it into Mr.
Blagden’s heart: “I never said I was John K. Petre. I never alluded
to one act of John K. Petre’s life,” he said slowly; “it was thrust
upon me. I’ll give reasons--good reasons, I’ll find ’em--for not
wishing to have my own name come out. I’ll swear--and it’s the
truth--it was a chance name; I’ll swear I knew nothing of John K.
Petre the millionaire; and I’ll let ’em believe what they like. I
_won’t_ have my humiliation published. I _won’t_. If the lawyers
insist, my own evidence will break them. Go to this man’s lawyers and
tell him I’ll compromise. I’ll take any terms they offer.”
Poor Mr. Wilkins saw vast receipts from a most juicy Action fade
away. He sighed and accepted his fate.
* * * * *
As I draw near to the conclusion of this simple story I review in my
mind the little army of those who had done well out of Mr. John K.
Petre’s--I mean Mr. Peter Blagden’s--little adventure, and I conclude
that Providence orders all things together for good.
An economist, perhaps, might tell you who had provided these various
windfalls. I cannot. But I mark that Charlie Terrard was now
established for life and precariously married to his Dada; that Mr.
Charlbury would in the next honors list be Sir Marmaduke Charlbury
(he had dropped his original Christian name), and had already bought
that fine old Jacobean country house which I have not had the leisure
to describe for you; that the hard-faced man in the Court off Broad
Street had retired upon a small, but for him, excellent competence;
that at least fifteen of the hangers-on round the Paddenham Site had
collared from one or two hundred up to five hundred; that Williams,
intermediary grasper of the Paddenham Site, had been saved--certainly
from bankruptcy, possibly from prison, and was now sunning himself
in Madeira planning a new coup (for you cannot teach wisdom to such
men); that the innumerable new Debenture holders in the Trefusis
reconstruction of B.A.R.’s were not disappointed in their steady
eight per cent.; that the ordinary shares still crept upwards; that
even the little people of that distant luncheon table had pocketed
their little packets safely; that Mrs. Cyril had been able to cover
the silly old Victorian walls of her house with brand-new pictures
which looked as if they had been painted by a lunatic in hell, and
to stuff it with chairs and tables like the inside of a German
philosopher’s mind; that the kind old Cabinet Minister had a little
more to leave to his nephews, and even the two ex-Lord Chancellors
had for a brief moment enjoyed a few extra hundreds, which they had
lost (and a little more) through a combined speculation in Virtue
Deeps, to which they had been emphatically recommended by a friend of
prominent South African type.
I said just now that I could not tell you who had provided all these
sums; but upon consideration it seems to me that they can only have
been provided by the British taxpayer at large. The burden was
therefore distributed over the widest possible field and nothing more
equitable could be imagined.
* * * * *
An arrangement had been proposed--even to the sacrifice of the
proceeds of Mr. Blagden’s sale of B.A.R.’s ordinary; it was refused.
John K. Petre wasn’t out to add to his fifty millions a paltry two.
He was out for blood.
Counsel’s opinion had been taken, experts called in, documents of
every kind drawn up, written, engrossed, typed, filed, stamped,
endorsed, docketed, and in general treated to the excellently
elaborate and lucrative ritual which documents in such cases
uncomplainingly suffer; pleadings had been entered, several
consultations enjoyed, briefs marked, tremendous leaders chosen.
Everything had been done upon Mr. Blagden’s side to swell the costs
to the largest possible figure; and that is the test of sincere and
conscientious work on the part of a man’s legal advisers. Upon John
K. Petre’s side the same process had been even more thoroughly and
conscientiously performed. In his own country the Rotor King--I mean
Baron--would have known how to check these figures; here under the
immemorial traditions of the English Courts, he was helpless. But his
relentless humor tolerated any extravagance, so only that he might
drink deep of vengeance.
The case was set down for October the 20th. It came before Mr.
Justice Honeybubble. Its importance as a precedent, and the fees--a
record, as the American Press was careful to call them--were checks
upon undue haste.
Nine times the space that measures day and night to mortal man did
those lawyers on the floor grind guineas out of the great John K.
Petre mill. Then the lawyer perched up above them talked for half
a day more, and after that the judgment. The decision fell for
the Defendants. Mr. John K. Petre, of Summit, Merryvale, in New
Hampshire, one of the United States of North America, failed to
recover.
Nor was the Defendant subjected to the necessity of disproving
impersonation though he was prepared in evidence clearly and firmly
to swear that he had no such intention, but had had thrust upon
him a chance name at a moment when he did not desire to do business
under his own. _That_ point--which had loomed so large before the
case came on, was forgotten by public and professionals in the really
interesting development which the great action took.
For behold, the Defendant’s counsel had advanced on a most unexpected
line, coming in flank upon John K.’s attack and disturbing it
horribly. They granted--while they vigorously denied--the technical
plea of impersonation--it was nothing of the sort, but no matter.
They based the defense on the Statute cited as _Fraudeurs et
Tireurs_, vulgarly and humorously known as “Frauds and Terrors,”
of the 13th of Ed. III., Cap. 2, where it is laid down that if a
merchant use the name of another, even by error, and under such
obtain a delivery of cheptal, he is at the mercy of the King, _saving
in Market of Free Cloison_ (that is the point) and (of course)
“excepting precincts.”
Mr. Justice Honeybubble’s judgment will long be quoted as a model. It
was lengthy--that was inevitable under the circumstances--but it was
conclusive.
Free Cloison being proved, the exception of Precincts (a technical
term) did not lie.
The Press vigorously applauded the common sense and justice of the
decision.
A writer hired to write in the _Howl_ said it was bluff English
stuff. Another writer, hired to write on the _Times_, said it bore
witness to that sense of reality and impatience with technicalities,
peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon race.
Anyhow, judgment for the Defendants, and John Kosciusko beaten on
points.
Against this judgment the Plaintiff appealed, and _Petre v. Blagden_
was taken to the Court of Appeal upon the two points, (_a_) that the
original _negoce_ was not that of _Merchaunts Libres_ nor of _New
Livery_, (_b_) that the transit was not of Goods in Marque but of
Instrument sole.
The Lords Justices of the Court of Appeal reversed the judgment
of the lower Court (Mr. Justice Cubber dissenting). They pointed
out that the acts complained of were obviously not done in _Free
Cloison_, and admitted “_Merchaunts Libres_.” But they left _Livery_
open, as being free to either party regardant.
The Press vigorously applauded the common sense and justice of this
judgment.
The most ignorant layman can grasp the effect of this last point upon
the issues involved. It meant, in practice, that Mr. John K. Petre
had Record of Relief _Non Obstante_; that is, he had the technical
decision in his favor. But he could not recover what the old Law
called (before the Consolidating Act of 22 Vic. 15) “Damnification
Personal”; in plain English, he could not proceed to enforce Seizin
Virtual and in Plein; or, as Mr. John K. Petre’s solicitor explained
to him in the simplest possible terms, he could not get any money
out of Mr. Blagden, and he was left, of course, to bear the costs of
the action.
The anger of John Kosciusko on hearing this upshot of the affair was
terrible to witness.
He used the most extravagant language against the Majestic Fabric
of British Jurisprudence, and passed all bounds in his abuse of our
Courts and Magistrates. He seemed quite to forget that he was our
guest, and sorely tried the patience of his legal adviser, Mr. Jacob
King, devoted though he was to the financier’s service.
“See here,” the Rotor King--I mean Baron--began, when the first
paroxysm of his indignation had subsided, “hev I got to gi’ back home
to Summit with nothing out of that skunk, and all this fall wasted?
Is that what you call progress? How d’ye _do_ it? If it wasn’t for
the principle of the thing, I’d never want to hear the name of your
town again! I’d get quit of this place for good. Why! sir! There’s
not a coon court on our continent that couldn’t give a plain verdict
on a thing like that! Why ain’t the fellow jailed? But I’m coming
back! Don’t you think you’re rid of me; no! There’s some way round
it, and I’ll take it till I burst him! I’ll send a man here and start
a paper. I’ll track his holdings and wreck ’em. I’ll....”
Mr. Jacob King dammed the torrent with the remark that there was
still the House of Lords.
“Still the what?” said the angry man of millions.
“The House of Lords,” said Mr. Jacob King again, “appeal to the House
of Lords.”
[Illustration: _John Kosciusko protesting against the interference of
Peers in Judicial Procedure._]
That excellent and straightforward millionaire wondered if he had
heard aright.
“What in Hell hez any durn Lord to do with it?”
Mr. Jacob King explained the technicality. How the words “House
of Lords” in this connection meant no more than the supreme and
last Court of Appeal composed of Judges and presided over by the
Lord Chancellor of the day. He was free to add that it was a great
monument to the political genius of the English people that they had
preserved ... etc., etc. But his employer cut him short.
“Well, then, that’s more time and more money?”
“More time, certainly, yes,” said Mr. Jacob King thoughtfully. “You
may say a year, or the best part of a year.”
“What!” shouted John K. Petre. “’Fore they _begin_? ’Fore those
wind-artists _begin_?”
“Yes; usually. You see, it’s the rule that everything has to be
printed, and then....”
“Well, I’m not going to wait a year,” exploded the old gentleman.
“I’ll do something desperate! I’ll start one of these campaigns
that’ll make the whole darn herd feel like an old Caroliny note, kep’
for a curio, ’en framed.”
“There are ways,” mused Mr. Jacob King aloud, “by which even this can
be expedited; only, of course, when urgent public necessity demands
it.”
“Well, you’ve got to find that urgent public necessity,” said his
paymaster, without urbanity, indeed roughly. “That’s what you’ve got
to do. Else I won’t go down that road anyway. I’ll raise the Hell I
was telling you of.”
Mr. Jacob King hinted that this would be an extra expense. John
Kosciusko grumbled. If only they’d told him, he complained. And a man
never knew. They just tied him up tight round the eyes and emptied
his pockets. Hadn’t he been told in the first hearing, when he
allowed that 8,000 dollars to go out for the briefs, that there would
be things called consultations? And then there was the tomfoolery of
the Five Full Hours and a piece of smarty work called “refreshers,”
and the good Lord knew what and all. And then there was the Appeal,
and all that monkey business over again. And no end to it. And what
was the use, anyway?
But he made this proposition. If they could get it through in the
next term--Session, was it?--he was sick of these fool words--he’d
stay on and they could just bleed him; but--his word!--if they were
going to dawdle he’d be off and make Hell smoke! Mr. King pleaded for
a lump sum to turn round with and do the necessary work. After a good
deal of protest he got it; and having got it, he set to work to pull
all possible strings--and he did the trick.
There was precedent; there was the Art O’Brien case. It wasn’t on all
fours, to be sure; but the Authorities were given to understand that
it would please what are called “Our Cousins,” and the Authorities
are always eager where “Our Cousins” are concerned.
And who are the Authorities, you ask? It is a secret of State. None
may see those awful Beings in the flesh. Let it suffice the humble
reader to be told that we can only know them, like God, by their
effects, and that it is our duty to trust them with the faith of a
little child--as they used to sing at the Follies in better days than
these. So the Authorities worked the machinery, and the Appeal came
on in the House of Lords.
Never was the Political direction of a great action more delicate to
adjust. On the one hand everything should always be done (as every
Patriot agrees) to soothe, not to say dandle, our powerful American
Cousins and Hands across the Sea. Yes. On the other hand what on
earth would happen to the Majestic Fabric of Public Life if any one
even remotely connected with such a world as the Trefusis world were
to get a knock from the Lawyers? Upon the whole, upon balance, it lay
slightly in favor of the Majestic Fabric of Public Life and a shade
of odds against Hands across the Sea. But it was a close thing.
It was an open-mouthed marvel to John K. Petre. The Counsel in
full-bottomed wigs; the five old gentlemen, one of them bald; Lady
Boole sitting on the Woolsack, a squat alert little woman with
grinning eyes, and queer little fin-like movements of the hands which
she finally clasped and held still; the awful majesty of that Chamber
with its leather, its commercial oak, and its metal fittings, all
giving the alien Plaintiff an impression of incalculable age. He
tried to size it up, and failed.
He was moved to reverence for a moment; but very soon to
exasperation, as the heads hidden from him by the full-bottomed
wigs drawled on hour after hour, and one or another of the five old
gentlemen, but particularly the bald one, would jerk in a fusillade
of questions, using words of another world. Then (what was really
intolerable!) they would laugh at some jest of theirs, and the Bar
would discreetly join. It was interminable.
In the midst of it a tall, sad young man lounged in and sat far away
in a dark corner. John K. Petre wondered what secret ritual that
might mean; but the tall sad young man found it boring, and lounged
out again. He had but exercised one of those privileges for which
his father, the glue manufacturer, had paid half a million after the
fiber scandal; and he had never yet got his father’s money’s worth
out of the place.
The hours, the days, went by, and judgment was delivered.
Lady Boole went to the Woolsack and in a beautifully distinct,
silvery articulation spoke, for some hours, words meaningless to
mortal man. But it was one of the great judgments of our time, and
has been the basis of the law ever since. There was a rustle, and a
movement, and the beginnings of a departure.
Mr. John K. Petre, his gaunt powerful figure striding vigorously, for
all its age, by the side of Jacob King, was thundering down to the
central hall. He didn’t understand what had happened.
“Well,” sighed the solicitor, in an unpleasant tone of content, “so
that’s that.”
[Illustration: _Ermyntrude, First (and Last) Viscountess Boole: Lord
Chancellor of England._]
“Which way did it go?” said John K. Petre.
“Oh,” answered Jacob King, shaking his head very slightly and slowly,
“the original judgment was sustained.”
“What d’ye mean?” snapped John K. Petre, stopping short.
“Why, we’ve lost,” said Jacob King simply.
Then it was that John Kosciusko gave tongue to the eternal heavens,
and the central hall rang with such imprecations as startled the
crowd of boobies waiting for their M.P.’s and moved three stalwarts
of Division A to approach with leisured but determined majesty.
The protestor was hustled out, under the stony reproaches of dead
Statesmen, of the Thistle, the Rose, and even the Shamrock. Down past
Pitt and the rest of them, off through the end of Westminster Hall,
and into his motor and through the winter dark throughout, still
shouting vengeance.
But it was all over, and there was nothing left to do but the paying.
* * * * *
_The Times_ had a leader next day upon the interest, the
significance, and the indubitable soundness of the decision. John K.
Petre was already in Paris, and on his way to the warmer ports of
the South, and so by an Italian boat to his home. All thought of our
Island was doubly abhorrent to him now and for ever.
As for Mr. Blagden, he had paid and paid and paid, without the least
regret, delay or protest; and now that all was over, he sat with
Buffy Thompson in the dear library at Harrington settling his plans.
“I’ve made up my mind, Buffy,” he said. “I thought I could have
stayed here till the end of my life. But it needs a poorer man to do
that.”
“What’re you going to do?” said his friend.
“The first thing I’m going to do,” said Peter Blagden, “is to run
down to Southampton and buy a boat well found. I won’t wait. I’ve had
enough. Then I’m going off cruising. Will you come with me?”
“Yes, if you like,” said Buffy.
“We’ll pick up a house somewhere. I favor the Sicilian Coast. We
were there reading, you remember, in our fourth year with Turtle of
Kings’. And I’ll consider where to bank those cursed bonds abroad.”
“You must divide them,” said Buffy.
“I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so. I’ll wait. There’ll have to be some
one to collect. I’m going to work out the easiest way of doing it. I
want it automatic. I want peace.”
“But you’ll come back here,” said Buffy, “won’t you?”
“Yes,” said Peter Blagden, with a terrible regret in his eyes. “I
couldn’t live without that. Yes, I shall come without warning and
go without warning. You see what money does to a man, Buffy,” he
went on bitterly. “I used to wonder why they all seemed to carry on
like secretive, suspicious madmen. But I know now, I shall have to
organize peace. You’ll help me, won’t you?”
“Certainly,” said Buffy. “I’ve nothing else to do.”
Buffy Thompson had done nothing all his life, and was therefore a
very happy man.
“I shall have to do something with that money, Buffy. I shall tie up
something for that miserable young idiot, my cousin Albert’s son.
Thank God, he’s a minor; but it’s his right to come into the place
when I’m dead; and after all, he has the name. But it shall only be
enough to keep it up properly and give him a decent income. A few
thousands too much, and they’d be pulling the old walls about, and
playing the goat with the village. Good God! Buffy, they might put
up new lodges, like the horrors at Ballingham, the other side of
Patcham, since the whisky man bought it: the things we called ‘Little
Versailles,’” and he shuddered. “I shall endow you, Buffy.”
“I shall be very pleased,” said Buffy.
“It’d be only fair; and you’re not only my oldest friend, you’re
my only one, nowadays. And, you know, I’ll keep those rooms in St.
James’s Place. They feel part of me; and I’ll buy the house, if
they’ll sell it. You’d take the rooms below mine, wouldn’t you?”
“There’s nothing against it,” said Buffy.
“Now,” said Peter Blagden, suddenly rising and walking up and down
the room with his hands clasped behind his back and his head bent,
“what’s to be done with the bulk of it? I’ve never yet heard of
anything being done with a lump like that that didn’t bring disaster
to all concerned. How can one give big money and not give a curse
with it? I must think it out.”
* * * * *
And next day in Southampton, looking over one advertised boat and
another, he would suddenly break in with that sentence which became a
refrain of his: “I must think it out.”
And during the weeks of their cruise, on into the Mediterranean
spring, in one passage of talk after another, the phrase would crop
up. It had become his habit; if he had had a larger circle would have
become a jest: “I must think it out ... I must think it out.”
But he is still thinking.
THE END
Transcriber’s Note:
Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent
hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged. Dialect,
obsolete and alternative spellings were not changed. The caption
for the illustration on page 218 and related entry in the list
of illustrations may have a typographical error of “Thomas” for
“Thompson.”
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Those in blackletter font are surrounded by equal signs,
=like this=. Final stops and quotation marks missing at the end of
sentences were added. One footnote was moved to follow the paragraph
in which its related anchor occurs.
The following item was changed:
Changed “be” to “he” ... he kept his own counsel ...
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