CHAPTERII
Mrs. cyrilhad 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.”
ex-Lord-Chancellors agreed“... And the two ex-Lord-Chancellors agreed.”
“... 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 calledPowler’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 doyouthink 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,hertelephone was within five yards.
She begged the men to stay behind, and the banker would have been willing enough.Hewasn’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.
Mrs. CyrilMrs. Cyril leaping to the telephone.
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, theydo.
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.