PART TWONIRVANA, LIMITED
“Pretty” Bramson—black well-oiled hair, curled moustaches, blue eyes and general dapperness had earned the nickname when, as East County salesman for his cousin Marcus Bramson, owner of Bramson’s “Pulman” Virginias, he had first gone “on the road”—sat pensive in the sales-manager’s office of Nirvana Ltd., Manufacturers of High Grade Cigarettes. The room was large, well carpeted, glinting with mahogany. On the walls hung sales-charts, specimen advertisements for the Press, show cards—gaudy but efficient—for tobacconists’ windows. Through the thin partition, he heard the whirr of fly-wheels, subdued chatter of work-girls, Turkovitch’s voice raised in sharp expostulation, occasionally the thump which told him that the new “U.K.” machine—their fourth—was being swiftly erected. But “Pretty” Bramson thought only indirectly of Nirvana.
He had dined, the night before, with his cousin Marcus; and Marcus had asked, quite casually, about the factory. “Were they earning dividends yet? Why didn’t one see the stuff about more? How about the export trade?” Marcus had hinted too, barely hinted, that if at any time. . . .
“Pretty” Bramson put the temptation resolutely behind him. Jamesons had plenty of capital; could always find more if they wanted it. Besides, he had a little money put by himself. Probably, if things continued to go well, “young Peter” would let him in as a minority shareholder. Afterwards, they would float it on the public. Meanwhile, £500 a year plus a sliding-scale commission on the constantly increasing output was not to be sneezed at by a man of thirty-two.
Peter Jameson paid his taxi; threw away the stump of his after-breakfast cigar; and walked straight through the open doors of the goods entrance into his factory.
He was neither an over-imaginative nor a romantic person, this quiet gray-eyed young man in the bowler hat and the well-cut tweed overcoat: but he never could look at that big glass-roofed building, at the work-girls in their clean smocks, at the vague forms of machinery whirling away behind their frosted-glass partitions, at the men pricking and soldering the vacuum export-tins (plunged base-deep in hot sand to expel the corrupting air), at the great bins of sweet-smelling tobacco,—at the whole paraphernalia of this living entity he was creating—without a certain thrill of satisfaction. He had given up a good deal for this same Nirvana—leisure, money, his gun in the little Norfolkshire shoot, trout fishing, the possibility of a car. But Nirvana, almost home! was worth it.
Ivan Turkovitch bustled out from behind one of the partitions; trotted over.
“Vell, Petere. And how are you? Come overe and see de new machine. Ve are just getting him put up. Peautiful!”
The small hands gesticulated satisfaction; the tawny beard waggled accompaniment. Like the rest of his “vork-peoples,” Turkovitch wore a smock. It made him a rather grotesque little figure.
But Turkovitch’s satisfaction, as an artist, with the growth of the factory, was only superficial. As a man, a man of small ideas, he could not grasp the ultimate scheme, the big conception which inspired Peter. Frankly, it frightened him. More orders and more orders! More expenses and more expenses! What would be the end? He—Ivan Turkovitch—had never wanted a vast business; felt himself incapable of controlling it.
“Peautiful,” he said again, as they stood in the machine-room. Overhead, fly-wheels whirled, driving-belts clacked. On the clean hardwood floor, the three machines stamped and clicked at their endless tasks. Perched on high seats, girls fed the hoppers with flocky golden armfuls of tobacco. The machines swallowed it; spewed it forward, forcing it through steel tubes into a rod: drew up paper from the slow-moving reels; wrapped it about the tobacco; printed it; chopped the paper-covered rod into cigarettes; delivered them to the waiting hands of the girls who patted them into wooden trays. A shirt-sleeved mechanic tended each machine, now this part, now that. Sparks spurted as deft grindstone met swift-revolving knife. The fourth and newest “U.K.” was not yet working: by it, adjusting, measuring, screwing up a bolt here and there, stood a German workman.
For the “United Kingdom” Cigarette-machine was not made in this England, where craftsmen starved while Free Traders preached to them!
Turkovitch spoke to the German; queried something.
“Dass ist mir verboten,” said the man. “Es muss genau so gemacht werden.”
“What does he say?” asked Peter.
“He says he cannot do what I ask him. It is forbidden. Never mind, when he goes back to Hamburg, we do it ourselves. They do not know everything, these Germans.”
They passed on; through the drying-rooms; and the cutting-rooms where girls picked-over the dried leaves and “blenders” fed them into presses that forced the thick mass forward to the dropping knife; through the label-printing room; into the main factory again; past the box-making tables where more girls laboured with paste-brush and zinc-board; and the packing tables, piled high with filled boxes waiting their seals; into the stock-room.
“Rather low, aren’t we?” queried Peter, looking at the half-empty shelves.
“Very low, Sir?” said the dispatch-forewoman, busy making up the day’s orders.
“You go on with your vork, Mary,” snapped Turkovitch. The woman went out of the room, leaving them alone.
“Look here, Turkovitch”—Peter’s gray eyes had grown just a shade darker—“you know I won’t stand that sort of thing. I spoke to the girl; and she answered me. You’ve no right to be rude to her.”
The little man became apologetic. . . . “But you do not understand the vork-peoples, Petere. You have never been one of the vork-peoples. I have. De vork-peoples they do not respect you ven you talk nicely to them.”
“Don’t you believe it, Turkovitch”—the quarrel between them was an old one—“the ‘vork-peoples,’ as you call them, respect a man who respects them; who knows what he wants, and tells them how he wants it done—decently.”
Ivan, inventing an excuse, went back to the machine-room. “How on earth I shall ever be able to introduce the copartnership system into this place with that Hungarian obstructionist in charge,” thought Peter, “the Lord knows.” He stood there with his hands in his pockets for a minute or two: then, lighting a cigar, strode off to Bramson’s room.
“Bramson,” said Peter—greetings over—“how much do you know about the manufacturing part of this business?”
“Well, Sir. . . .”
“Oh, never mind about the ‘Sir.’ You’re not a clerk.”
“Well, when I was with my cousin, I used to spend a good deal of time in the various departments.” The Jew looked up shrewdly, intimately. “Why? Is anything wrong with T.?”
“No. I was asking—for information. One-man shows are never safe. Supposing Turkovitch were taken ill, could you run the place for—say three months?”
“I ran it while he was on his holidays.”
“H’m. That’s rather different. Know anything about blending?”
“Not much.”
“We could get a foreman to do that,” remarked Peter reflectively. “And I’m not entirely ignorant on the subject myself. How about the rest of it—printing, box-making, looking after the girls? . . . That new master-printer seems a pretty efficient kind of fellow.” He broke off; said, “Don’t let this conversation go any further”; and took up the routine of the day.
Bramson, in addition to his principal duty of sales-manager, acted as Peter’s right-hand man in the not-always-smooth financing of the concern: so that their discussion lasted—uninterrupted save for occasional telephone calls—till the whistle blew, and a shuffle of moved stools on the hard-wood floor presaged the midday break. Nirvana provided free cooking for its employés; and the three principals shared the facility.
“Vell,” said Turkovitch, peeling off his smock as he entered, “now ve have some lunch. You join us, eh, Petere?”
One of the girls brought in a table; laid it; produced three chops, potatoes, beer. The Hungarian had apparently got over his huff. “Orders is plentiful, especially de export,” he said.
“Bramson and I have just been discussing that. Something’s got to be done about the home trade. We must have two more travellers. The press-advertising wants gingering up. I’ve telephoned for Higham to come and see me this afternoon. And I think we ought to have one or two electric signs. Big ones. Flashing, if we can afford them.”
“But the money? . . .” remonstrated Turkovitch.
“Oh, damn the money. Don’t you worry about that. I’ll find the money all right, if you’ll only get the orders out quickly. That last big lot for the Argentine took nearly six weeks.”
Turkovitch protested; and a wrangle ensued. Bramson sat very quiet. He was not a shareholder in the concern—yet. But, if he knew anything about anything, “young Peter” would get his own way; even if he had to buy Turkovitch out. Then that thousand pounds of savings would go into “ordinary” shares of Nirvana Ltd. . . .
“We’d better have all this out at the board-meeting next Monday,” said Peter finally. “Reid will have the year’s figures ready by then.”
Reid, Chatterton and Reid, Chartered Accountants, inhabited a cold gloomy office on the fourth floor of Great Winchester House—an office by no means in keeping with their status as one of the premier auditing firms in the City. George Reid himself—a deliberate-looking middle-aged man of University education, square-chinned, clean-shaven, lined of face but twinkling of eye—welcomed Peter; led him into the “board-room”—a shabby apartment furnished with twelve wood-seated chairs, an enormous table and a rather gimcrack sofa.
“The others haven’t arrived yet. Have some tea?”
“Thanks,” said Peter. “Tell me,” he went on, after the two cups had been brought, “has Turkovitch been to see you?”
“Unofficially,” grinned Reid. “Yes. What have you been doing to the little man? He’s in a rare stew. Says he wishes he could get his money out.”
“He can,” said Peter laconically. “I’m about through with friend Ivan. It isn’t that I grudge him the eventual profits. But the chap’s no good for a show like this. He hasn’t got the spunk.”
“Well, don’t lose your temper with him this afternoon,” warned Reid, who knew Peter of old. “By the way, how’s Jameson’s getting on these days? You really ought to have their accounts audited, you know.”
“Simpson won’t. He’s very old-fashioned; says he can’t stand outsiders prying into his affairs.”
Bramson and Turkovitch came in, shook hands, sat down. Reid opened the “minute-book,” gabbled off the minutes of the last meeting which Peter signed perfunctorily. (Nirvana was a private company, the requisite number of shareholders being made up by clerks.)
“And now,” began Reid, “for the accounts. As far as I can see—there are one or two adjustments still to be made—we have managed, for the first time, to pay all our expenses and earn a small dividend.”
“Do ve pay out de dividend?” asked Turkovitch.
“Of course we don’t,” snapped Peter, “the money’s wanted for expansion.”
“Den vot’s the good of making it?” growled Turkovitch.
“One moment, gentlemen,” went on Reid. “I find, on careful analysis of the figures, that—had it not been for the high profits earned on the export trade—we should have made, not a profit, but a loss.” He gave details, and concluded, “I don’t think that’s a sound position.”
“Nor I,” commented Peter.
But here Turkovitch—tact thrown to the winds—boiled over. It washisbusiness;hisname was on all the brands; he knew quite well what “Petere” wanted; “Petere” wanted to be a millionaire; “Petere” wished to spend all the profit in some crazy scheme of advertising; why should they advertise? the cigarettes were the finest cigarettes in the world; he, Turkovitch, guaranteed them. . . .
“Oh, shut up,” muttered Peter, exasperated.
“I vill not shut up. You are always interfering. You interfere with me and de vork-peoples. You interfere vith my tobacco merchants. And now you vant to interfere vith de dividends.”
“Damn it,youdraw a salary of seven hundred a year; and I haven’t had a penny piece out of the concern yet.”
Turkovitch became plaintive, even less intelligible than usual. “But vy not pay out de dividend? A leetle dividend. Drei per cent on de cabital.”
“Because, there’s no money to do it with: because we’re trading on bank-credit: because. . . . Oh, you try and explain things to him, Reid,” said our Mr. Jameson hopelessly.
Reid plunged into an exhaustive bath of facts and figures. There was big money to be made out of Nirvana. Reid knew it; Peter knew it; Bramson knew it. The hopeless period of an advertising business, the pay-pay-pay-and-not-a-jitney-of-it-back stage had been passed. Now, all they needed was work, a little more capital, and—supremely—confidence. But the Hungarian didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t see it.
“Dis is not business, eet is gambling,” he kept on saying. “You spend and you spend. And dere are no deevidends. I vish I had my cabital out of de gompany. . . .”
Reid glanced at Peter, who took the cue, screwed the butt of his cigar into the corner of his mouth, and said, very slowly:
“Look here, Turkovitch. You’re being a frightful ass. I don’t like to see any man who has worked with me throwing away a fortune. . . .”
“Fortune?” sniffed Turkovitch. “Vith no deevidends.”
“Dolet me speak for a minute. As I was saying, you’re being very foolish. But if you really mean what you say, you shall have your capital out.I’llbuy your shares off you. At a fair price.”
“Vot price?”
Peter, who had devoted the week-end (Poor Patricia!) to a careful study of the anticipated problem, drew a piece of paper from his pocket.
“When I first consented to join you in this show,” he began, “you were worth, at an outside estimate, two thousand pounds. For six years, you’ve been drawing £700 a year.”
“Dat,” said Turkovitch, slightly mollified already, “vos for my vork, for my experience.”
“Quite right. I wasn’t asking you to give it me back, was I? Then there’s six years’ compound interest at, say, five per cent. Call it two thousand eight hundred. I’ll give you”—Peter hesitated for a moment, went up two hundred in his mind—“Three thousand pounds for your shares in Nirvana. The lot, of course.”
And so—after about a fortnight of negotiation—they got rid of the obstructionist. He went, in the end, quietly; delighted with his cheque; saying: “Now, I and my wife, ve take a little trip to Salonica. Perhaps, ven I come back, ve do some business in de leaf-tobacco, eh, Petere?”
“Right you are,” said our Mr. Jameson, who had no patience with fools but never bore malice.
PART THREETHE CREST OF THE WAVE
“Limousine-Landaulette body would be best,” said Peter. “We want something that will do either for town work or touring.”
“How about a cabriolet?” asked Patricia.
“If it’s not too heavy for you to drive.”
It was a Saturday afternoon, the first in July; and they were lunching in the low-roofed, cabin-like grill-room of the Carlton Hotel. The brass clock on the white mantelpiece pointed a quarter to three; most of the tables had emptied; but Peter and his wife sat on. The choice—that of their first automobile—needed careful discussion.
It pleased her to see him sitting there, boy-like for the moment, liqueur-glass poised steadily in his firm hand, inevitable cigar between his lips. The six months since his return from Hamburg had not been over-happy ones for Patricia. Always, she had felt the City pulling against her, taking him from her. Always, he grew more absorbed, more reticent. But now it seemed as though, just for a flash, the pal she had married was hers again.
“Aren’t I getting a little old to drive a car?” she asked.
He looked at her carefully before he spoke; took in at one glance smooth complexion, perfect teeth, the clear eyes and the glossy hair under the gray toque. Then he said, “Don’t talk rot, old thing.”
“And either way,” she went on, “it’s an extravagance.”
“An extravagance we can afford.”
For, really, it looked as though dreams would come true. Turkovitch’s defection—owing to Bramson’s application for shares—had only meant two thousand pounds instead of the anticipated three. Nirvana’s bank, approached with a profit-earning balance-sheet and guaranteed by Peter, had loaned the five thousand for their new advertising campaign. Jamesons, in sole control of the Beckmann brand, were making more money than ever before. Only that morning, Hagenburg had placed an order on which the profit made even Peter a little dizzy.
Of course there had been difficulties. Elkins and Beresford did not surrender their customers without a struggle. The re-organization of the manufacturing staff proved a shade less simple, Bramson a shade less capable, than anticipated. Home-trade climbed a trifle too slowly. Still, it climbed; and Peter was winning, winning all along the line. Now, only the finest of hairs divided gamble from certainty.
“An extravagance we can afford,” he repeated.
“I’m so glad,” she said, “not for the sake of having a car but because. . . .” For the first time in their married life, she almost felt shy with him.
“Because of what?”
“Because I know you can’t bear failure.”
“Failure,” he laughed; then, growing serious, “No. I’ve no use for failures. The man who ‘goes under’ doesn’t strike me as pathetic—only as idiotic.”
“You mean the man who fails to make money.”
“Good Lord, no. Money’s nothing. At best, only the counters with which we are paid for winning certain games. Mine, for instance. By failure, I mean not getting what you go for. Never mind what it is—fame, money, tranquillity, distinction. A girl or a seat in the House of Lords. As long as you know what you want,and get it, you’re a success.”
“But some people don’t want anything in particular.”
“I’ve no use for that kind.”
Her trained mind told her that the man had voiced his whole creed. Her woman’s instinct resented it. “He didn’t wantherlike that. She was only a side-issue. ‘Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his’—cigarette-factory.”
“Idiot” said her reason. “Idiot! You’ve been married eight years. . . .”
“If we want to be with Francis in time for tea,” said her voice, “you’d better ask for your bill.”
Peter paid; and they passed out, picking up his hat and stick from the cloak-room; climbed the carpeted stairs into the Haymarket.
It was the zenith of London’s last, maddest “season”; but her pleasure crowd—the dancers in her night-clubs; the befeathered scantily-draped women of her Opera House; the placemen, the panderers and the nincompoops who made pretence of governing her—had departed; were “week-ending” in pseudo-rusticity, twenty, thirty, a hundred miles away. And real London, heart of Empire, rested quietly in the soft sunshine—glad to be free of such parasites—as Peter and Patricia made way through her empty streets to Bloomsbury.
When a young man, who has never done a day’s work except “to amuse himself,” comes down with a crash from ten thousand pounds a-year to about five hundred, it seems to him at first as though Life (with a capital L) were finished. Later on, the adaptability of the human animal begins to assert itself; a new standard of values replaces the old one; and theman—as apart from his chattels—emerges. Bruised, broken or strengthened according to his nature.
Peter’s cousin, Francis Gordon, had come down with just such a crash: but in Francis’ case the human animal had more than altered conditions to which it needed adapt itself. For Francis Gordon at the very moment when Life (with a capital L) had looked its blackest, met a girl,thegirl, the ideal to whom his soul had been, was, and would always be, faithful.
He looked up now—from the papers on the table where he sat working—at her photograph, the only one in the room.
Beatrice Cochrane! A very ordinary, very human, very idealistic American girl. The sort of girl a man may meet in her hundreds from Los Angeles to Atlantic City; from New Orleans to Flushing, Long Island; from Dubuque, Iowa to Dallas, Texas. A girl still in her ’teens; slender-handed; with pale-gold hair and pale-gray thoughtful eyes.
A very ordinary American girl, of the old Anglo-Saxon stock—but tempered and refined by struggle: child of very ordinary American parents, educated rather to beauty of thought than to “beauty roses.” But, in the mind of Francis Gordon, she stood for all the flowers; for poetry and romance, for self-sacrifice and achievement, for every decent impulse which had helped him through the black hours of crisis.
He had not married her, not even asked her to marry him. He had not—in that brief fortnight of a shipboard friendship—deemed himself worthy. It had seemed to him as though God—a visible speaking God—forbade their union; commanding His creature, Francis Gordon, abandon that dream; take up, in its stead, the burden of vocation, the Work of writing for which He had endowed him with a tiny spark of His own genius.
And so Francis—who imagined himself to have seen, for a moment, behind that Veil of God which does not lift until the time appointed—returned to London; sold his house in Curzon Street, his cars and his pictures, his gold plate and his Aubusson carpets; and retired, taking with him only Prout, his old manservant, to this high apartment at the top of the eighteenth-century Georgian building in Mecklenburgh Square.
All “literary” London knewaFrancis Gordon, a versifier whose technique they admired, whose pose they applauded. ButtheFrancis, they did not know. Nor, had they known him, would they have, at that time, admired.
FortheFrancis—the man who, for all his fine aspirations, was still utterly incapable of formulating clean thought into simple words—had conceived another dream. And this was the shape of it.
He had learned from Beatrice, and from her parents, something—though very little—of the real America. He had taught her something—though very little—of the real England. He realized, as few Englishmen of his time, how the two nations had drifted apart; misunderstood one another. And it seemed to him, in his presumption, that a few words, a trumpery poem, could set this misunderstanding right.
Of course—(he was too much in love with the phantom of Beatrice for any except a prejudiced judgment)—he blamed his own countrymen exclusively. Equally of course, the great poem of his projecting, became—the moment pen touched paper—an artificial web of phrases through which the man’s real belief in a Spiritual Federation of the English-speaking Peoples oozed to nothingness. Still, it says something for the influence of a girl who only wrote in calm friendship, confident of his ultimate success as a writer, but by no manner of means—consciously at any rate—in love with him, that Francis Gordon should have held to this belief, unflinchingly, through all those weary months when other Englishmen—better informed on material points though utterly ignorant of the spiritual reluctance to realize that a world-crime was being committed (which reluctance alone kept America so long out of the War)—were saying to themselves, “Can’t they see things? Won’t they see things? Must we fight this greatest of all battles without them?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Jameson, Sir,” announced the elderly manservant.
Nothing in the outward appearance of the Francis Gordon who rose at the entrance of his cousin’s wife, suggested the conventional (or unconventional) poet. Short dark hair parted at the side, clipped moustache, well-cared-for hands, creaseless gold-pinned soft collar, well-tailored blue suit—all proclaimed the ordinary idle young man of the period. And as such, to tell the truth, his cousin Peter—to whom, except for a certain lack of dourness about the expression, he bore an amazing resemblance—regarded him.
His surroundings, too, helped this illusion of the idle commonplace. The room was large, white-walled and green-carpeted; crowded mahogany book-shelves completely lined one wall; a spacious writing-table—scrupulously tidy—set square in the centre of two big windows—the other. Chippendale chairs, a tea-table already laid, and a revolving bookcase filled with foreign dictionaries, Roget’s Thesaurus, and other reference-works, completed the furniture. Two mahogany doors—one, through which Patricia and Peter had just entered, leading to the narrow hall—the other to the bedroom and bathroom—glowed darkly against the rough white of the wall-paper.
“This doesn’t look much like poverty,” commented Peter. (Francis had only just taken the flat. This was their first visit to him.)
“I don’t think you’d make much of a welfare inspector, old man,” replied Francis. “Fourth floor. No lift. No telephone. Geyser-bath. Shilling-in-the-slot electric-light meter. A complacent landlord. And the relics of the Curzon Street furniture. Guess again about my poverty.”
“Anda manservant,” commented Patricia, taking off hat and gloves, sitting down—as by right—at the tea-table.
“Oh, Prout! Prout wouldpayto stay on, I believe. Francis Gordon and his faithful valet; or the loyalty of an old retainer. . . .”
But Patricia knew that the supercilious remark hid real affection for that “old bounder Prout.” She had seen a good deal of Francis since his return to England; revised many of her early unfavourable opinions about him. The good-will was mutual: though Francis, who still thought “Pat.” rather a commonplace young woman, would have been more than surprised to know how near she had come to divining the change in his mentality—and the real reason for that change.
“Who’s this?” commented Peter, his inspection of the new quarters having brought him to Beatrice’s photograph.
“Friend of mine,” said Francis curtly. “Don’t touch those papers.”
“I won’t touch your precious papers.”
At which little passage of arms, Patricia’s last doubts settled into a comfortable certainty.
Prout, bringing tea, restored harmony. They sat long over it, smoking and talking—mostly, as is the habit of near relations, about themselves.
“By Jove,” said Peter—interrupting himself in the middle of a long monologue about advertising—“I almost forgot. We’ve taken a house at Wargrave for a month. Lodden Lodge. It’s rather a decent place. Tennis lawn; river-frontage; bath, h. and c.; usual domestic offices; et cetera et cetera. You are expected to stay with us.”
“Hukkum hai?(Is it an order?),” asked Francis.
“Oh, we all know you spent three months in India,” chaffed Peter. “Question is: are you coming?”
“Of course I’m coming,” said Francis, “and so is Prout—if Patricia doesn’t object.”
“Some car!” thought Peter as he stepped into the front seat; slammed the door home; said “You take her for a bit, Murray,” to the uniformed chauffeur; and acknowledged “Pretty” Bramson’s rather overdone salute with a wave of his hand. They purred out from the factory-gates into Brixton Road; swung first right, then left; headed for Hounslow.
Certainly, “some car”—a long, low stream-lined cabriolet, royal-blue in colour, the Crossley cross on her radiator. Peter had discovered her through the advertisement columns of theMorning Post; clinched the deal a week before. But his thought did not centre long on the new purchase.
It was the Thursday before August Bank Holiday 1914. To get away so early, had meant cramming the week’s work into three and a half days. Still, he could afford to take a restnow. For a few minutes, he allowed himself the rare luxury of a dream. Nirvana had arrived! July sales proved it. Nothing could stop their automatic increase. Already, the capital he had sunk was in sight again. Then—what a business he would make it! All over the world, too. . . . India, China, New Zealand, South Africa. He must have his own factory in the States, in Canada; defeat their confounded protective tariffs. . . .
“Will you take her now, sir?” asked Murray, as they wriggled out through Hounslow High Street.
“Not for another mile or so.”
Peter’s mind came back to details; wandered off them again. Nothing could stop that automatic increase. Nothing. The political situation? Blow the political situation! Nobody with any sense cared for political situations. Except retail tobacconists, to whom they furnished a good excuse for curtailing orders.
“I’ll take her now, Murray.”
The chauffeur slowed down sufficiently to allow a change of places. Peter took the wheel; opened the throttle; slammed her into “top”; and whisked off down the Bath Road.
For the first time in six years, our Mr. Jameson felt a little above himself!
Lodden Lodge, Wargrave, is a square, comfortable, late Victorian house, ivy-covered, backing on a quiet side-road and fronting the Thames mainstream with sloping close-clipped lawns.
Peter arrived towards tea-time; found his wife and Francis (over-immaculate in creased white trousers and buckskin shoes), just sitting down to the silver-laid sun-dappled table under the willow-trees.
“Where’s your brother, Jack?” asked Peter.
“He’s not coming after all,” said Patricia. “I had a wire this morning. Manœuvres, I expect.”
“Don’t you believe it, Pat,” put in Francis. “He’s off to fight the good fight in Ulster. What a lark! Fancy Teddy Carson, mounted on a ‘sable destrier,’ charging the guns.”
“Idiot!” commented Peter; and added, “Confound the fellow. That spoils our four for tennis.”
“We shall be all right for tennis.” Patricia filled the cups; passed them. “Violet and her husband have invited themselves for the week-end.”
“Oh Lord,” began Peter; but—catching his wife’s eye—desisted. After all, Rawlings didn’t play such a bad game of tennis; and Violet’s bridge, though not pleasant, was perfect. Tea over, Peter changed into flannels; came down to find Evelyn and Primula, barelegged, muslin-frocked and sun-bonneted, waiting for him.
“We want to go on the river,” they chorused, “we want to go on the river.”
“It’s too late for the river,” said Patricia.
“It isn’t too late. It isn’t too late. Is it Daddy? . . .”
“They do like him, don’t they?” Francis said to their mother. Peter, over-ruling her objections, had picked up the two laughing bundles; packed them into the cushioned punt; and was now poling slowly out into main stream.
“Why shouldn’t they?” laughed Patricia. But, all the same, she felt a little twinge of jealousy. The children meant so much to her, so little to Peter. Yet, at a lift of the finger, they would desert her for him. . . . Perhaps it was because that finger so seldom lifted. . . . If only one of them had been a boy!
She watched her husband’s strong figure, black now against the glow of the water, bending to the pole as he met the current. The punt glided under the railway bridge, out of sight.
“Of course they ought to have been boys.” Francis Gordon’s voice interrupted her reverie. He seemed—as often when they were quite alone,—to have dropped the mask of superciliousness. She looked at him; wondered how much he realized. A disturbing person, this new cousin of hers. Almost uncanny at times, this way in which his mind seemed to penetrate her thoughts. . . . And again that night, at table in the long low dining-room, she speculated about this man.
He sat, facing the sunset, immaculate as ever but unusually silent. Every now and then, it seemed to her as though his eyes saw—beyond the rose glow of the horizon—into vision-land. “He’s thinking about that girl,” she reasoned, “the girl whose photograph we saw at the flat.” And then, remembering the eyes of a man she had once seen at a revivalist meeting, she began to doubt her theory of a love-affair.
Sunset darkled to twilight, twilight to blackness, as they finished dinner.
Patricia, pleading tiredness, went upstairs early; heard, as she undressed in the cool fragrance of the river-night, the sound of canvas-chairs, dragging first across the gravel, then over grass; saw the points of two cigars burning redly under the willow-trees.
“Beckmann,Coronas,” announced Peter. “Good, aren’t they?”
“Very,” admitted Francis.
For nearly ten minutes, neither spoke. It was a night for confidences. Silent save for the river-chuckle; star-dusted;peaceful. But the two Englishmen smoked on; reticent, each busy with his own dreaming: the one seeing a great business, world-wide, endless in opportunity: the other, vignetted in silver radiance against the sable background of his thought, the features of a girl—of a girl five thousand miles removed from England—a girl for whose sake and without hope of reward he had vowed himself to the dissatisfying god of Work.
“Why don’t you get married again?” asked Peter suddenly.
“Only because I can’t afford it,” lied Francis Gordon.
Violet Rawlings, sprightly as ever, even more fluffily dressed than usual; and her husband Hubert, determined that ninety-six hours of personal suggestion should at last secure him some part of the Nirvana advertising account, arrived in time for lunch next day. The foxy-faced publicity agent lost no time in opening his campaign.
“We went to the Palace last night,” he began, almost before they had sat down to their meal. “On our way home I noticed that your new sign in Piccadilly wasn’t burning properly.”
“Really,” said Peter stiffly.
“Lobster mayonnaise, or some of these cold eggs?” asked Patricia, hoping to turn their conversation.
But her brother-in-law took no notice. “I’m somewhat of an expert on signs,” he continued. “And, frankly, I don’t think they have much selling value on a high-grade article like yours.Ipin my faith to full pages in the six-penny weeklies. And of course,Punch. AlthoughPunchis a humorous paper. . . .”
“I beg your pardon,” interrupted Francis.
“I said—althoughPunchis a humorous paper.”
Francis, feeling satire useless with a creature of this type, gave up the struggle. Hubert accepted an egg, as less liable than lobster to impede talk; and continued his harangue.
Peter, who knew that Rawlings, despite his personal unpleasantness, possessed knowledge, listened interestedly—asking a question every now and then. The others started a conversation on their own.
Said Violet, monopolizing it, “Oh but weneverleave London while the ‘House’ is sitting. I think politics so interesting, Mr. Gordon. Don’t you? Though I suppose as an author—soclever, that last poem of yours—you take more interest in the affairs of the heart.”
She ruffled herself; rattled on.
“But of course, politics arethe thingnowadays. I’m afraid”—her voice dropped to the confidential whisper of the person who has no news to impart—“we’re going to havetrouble. Not with Servia, of course: but in Ireland.Peopleare saying. . . .”
“Amazing,” thought Francis, “how a nice woman like Pat. can have such a sister.”
Smith, bringing the joint, interrupted the Rawlings duo in their monologues.
“I always wonder,” went on Hubert a few minutes later, “why you didn’t take your brother into partnership. He seemed an awfully nice fellow, the only time I met him.”
“Arthur?” queried Peter. “Why, Arthur wouldn’t take a partnership in Rothschilds! He ran away from school when he was fifteen; and he’s been running from somewhere or other ever since. The last time I heard from him, he was in the Dutch Indies—planting. Wrote to ask my opinion about tobacco prospects in Java. Beastly stuff, Javanese tobacco; though they use a lot of it for making so-called Borneo cigars.”
Luncheon over, Peter and Patricia challenged the two men at tennis: Violet, languid in a long chair, alternately watched the match; and picked her way expertly throughThe Tatler. To see her own photograph in that periodical, not once but regularly, was a small part of Violet’s many unrealized ambitions: which included a knighthood and a seat in the House of Commons for her husband, a Rolls-Royce limousine (painted black and white for preference) for herself, and all the usual appurtenances of the politico-parisitical set which both of them alternatively aped and envied. Neither she nor her husband belonged to the class who “didn’t want anything in particular”!
Peter, playing brilliantly at the net, and Patricia, backing him up accurately from the base-line, defeated their opponents in three straight setts. Followed tea, a languid paddle towards Shiplake, the dressing-gong, stiff shirts and low frocks, auction bridge. . . .
July the Thirty-first, Nineteen Hundred and Fourteen! And yet, not one of those fairly well-informed five dreamed the False Peace actually at an end. Already, the Beasts in Gray,—murder, rape and plunder in their swinish eyes,—were abroad. Already the Crime, so long premeditated, had been committed. Even as these four sat at their game, less than fifty miles away from them, up in London, the womanizers and the wine-bibbers of Westminster were scuttling hither and thither, incredulous, anxious to compromise, fearful. The scum which had floated to the surface! They trembled now, those false guardians. For they and they alone in all England feared the Beast. But more than the Beast, they feared their own People;—knowing them not, neither their strength, nor their courage, nor their infinite forgiveness.
But already (one man’s work!), silent, forethoughted, utterly equipped, the People of the Sea were wheeling to their battle-stations. Already, Anglo-Saxondom had flung its first bulwark across the world.
It was the commencement of the Great Cleansing!