The Inheritors /

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Title: The Inheritors

Author: Joseph Conrad
        Ford M. Hueffer

Release Date: February 3, 2005 [EBook #14888]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE INHERITORS

_An Extravagant Story_

By

JOSEPH CONRAD & FORD M. HUEFFER

   _"Sardanapalus builded seven cities in a day.
   Let us eat, drink and sleep, for to-morrow we die."_

MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

_New York_

MCMI

   _London,
   William Heinemann._
   _1901, by_
   MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

   _The Trow Printing Company
   New York_


To BORYS & CHRISTINA




THE INHERITORS




CHAPTER ONE

"Ideas," she said. "Oh, as for ideas--"

"Well?" I hazarded, "as for ideas--?"

We went through the old gateway and I cast a glance over my shoulder.
The noon sun was shining over the masonry, over the little saints'
effigies, over the little fretted canopies, the grime and the white
streaks of bird-dropping.

"There," I said, pointing toward it, "doesn't that suggest something to
you?"

She made a motion with her head--half negative, half contemptuous.

"But," I stuttered, "the associations--the ideas--the historical
ideas--"

She said nothing.

"You Americans," I began, but her smile stopped me. It was as if she
were amused at the utterances of an old lady shocked by the habits of
the daughters of the day. It was the smile of a person who is confident
of superseding one fatally.

In conversations of any length one of the parties assumes the
superiority--superiority of rank, intellectual or social. In this
conversation she, if she did not attain to tacitly acknowledged
temperamental superiority, seemed at least to claim it, to have no doubt
as to its ultimate according. I was unused to this. I was a talker,
proud of my conversational powers.

I had looked at her before; now I cast a sideways, critical glance at
her. I came out of my moodiness to wonder what type this was. She had
good hair, good eyes, and some charm. Yes. And something besides--a
something--a something that was not an attribute of her beauty. The
modelling of her face was so perfect and so delicate as to produce an
effect of transparency, yet there was no suggestion of frailness; her
glance had an extraordinary strength of life. Her hair was fair and
gleaming, her cheeks coloured as if a warm light had fallen on them from
somewhere. She was familiar till it occurred to you that she was
strange.

"Which way are you going?" she asked.

"I am going to walk to Dover," I answered.

"And I may come with you?"

I looked at her--intent on divining her in that one glance. It was of
course impossible. "There will be time for analysis," I thought.

"The roads are free to all," I said. "You are not an American?"

She shook her head. No. She was not an Australian either, she came from
none of the British colonies.

"You are not English," I affirmed. "You speak too well." I was piqued.
She did not answer. She smiled again and I grew angry. In the cathedral
she had smiled at the verger's commendation of particularly abominable
restorations, and that smile had drawn me toward her, had emboldened me
to offer deferential and condemnatory remarks as to the plaster-of-Paris
mouldings. You know how one addresses a young lady who is obviously
capable of taking care of herself. That was how I had come across her.
She had smiled at the gabble of the cathedral guide as he showed the
obsessed troop, of which we had formed units, the place of martyrdom of
Blessed Thomas, and her smile had had just that quality of superseder's
contempt. It had pleased me then; but, now that she smiled thus past
me--it was not quite at me--in the crooked highways of the town, I was
irritated. After all, I was somebody; I was not a cathedral verger. I
had a fancy for myself in those days--a fancy that solitude and brooding
had crystallised into a habit of mind. I was a writer with high--with
the highest--ideals. I had withdrawn myself from the world, lived
isolated, hidden in the countryside, lived as hermits do, on the hope of
one day doing something--of putting greatness on paper. She suddenly
fathomed my thoughts: "You write," she affirmed. I asked how she knew,
wondered what she had read of mine--there was so little.

"Are you a popular author?" she asked.

"Alas, no!" I answered. "You must know that."

"You would like to be?"

"We should all of us like," I answered; "though it is true some of us
protest that we aim for higher things."

"I see," she said, musingly. As far as I could tell she was coming to
some decision. With an instinctive dislike to any such proceeding as
regarded myself, I tried to cut across her unknown thoughts.

"But, really--" I said, "I am quite a commonplace topic. Let us talk
about yourself. Where do you come from?"

It occurred to me again that I was intensely unacquainted with her type.
Here was the same smile--as far as I could see, exactly the same smile.
There are fine shades in smiles as in laughs, as in tones of voice. I
seemed unable to hold my tongue.

"Where do you come from?" I asked. "You must belong to one of the new
nations. You are a foreigner, I'll swear, because you have such a fine
contempt for us. You irritate me so that you might almost be a Prussian.
But it is obvious that you are of a new nation that is beginning to find
itself."

"Oh, we are to inherit the earth, if that is what you mean," she said.

"The phrase is comprehensive," I said. I was determined not to give
myself away. "Where in the world do you come from?" I repeated. The
question, I was quite conscious, would have sufficed, but in the hope,
I suppose, of establishing my intellectual superiority, I continued:

"You know, fair play's a jewel. Now I'm quite willing to give you
information as to myself. I have already told you the essentials--you
ought to tell me something. It would only be fair play."

"Why should there be any fair play?" she asked.

"What have you to say against that?" I said. "Do you not number it among
your national characteristics?"

"You really wish to know where I come from?"

I expressed light-hearted acquiescence.

"Listen," she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholy
emotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of
wind through a breathless day. "What--what!" I cried.

"I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension."

I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had been visited by
some stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind.

"I think we must have been climbing the hill too fast for me," I said,
"I have not been very well. I missed what you said." I was certainly
out of breath.

"I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension," she repeated with admirable
gravity.

"Oh, come," I expostulated, "this is playing it rather low down. You
walk a convalescent out of breath and then propound riddles to him."

I was recovering my breath, and, with it, my inclination to expand.
Instead, I looked at her. I was beginning to understand. It was obvious
enough that she was a foreigner in a strange land, in a land that
brought out her national characteristics. She must be of some race,
perhaps Semitic, perhaps Sclav--of some incomprehensible race. I had
never seen a Circassian, and there used to be a tradition that
Circassian women were beautiful, were fair-skinned, and so on. What was
repelling in her was accounted for by this difference in national point
of view. One is, after all, not so very remote from the horse. What one
does not understand one shies at--finds sinister, in fact. And she
struck me as sinister.

"You won't tell me who you are?" I said.

"I have done so," she answered.

"If you expect me to believe that you inhabit a mathematical
monstrosity, you are mistaken. You are, really."

She turned round and pointed at the city.

"Look!" she said.

We had climbed the western hill. Below our feet, beneath a sky that the
wind had swept clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl, shallow,
filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths. And above the mass of red roofs
there soared the golden stonework of the cathedral tower. It was a
vision, the last word of a great art. I looked at her. I was moved, and
I knew that the glory of it must have moved her.

She was smiling. "Look!" she repeated. I looked.

There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower, the vision, the
last word. She said something--uttered some sound.

What had happened? I don't know. It all looked contemptible. One seemed
to see something beyond, something vaster--vaster than cathedrals,
vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised.
The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not
roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, an unrealisable infinity
of space.

It was merely momentary. The tower filled its place again and I looked
at her.

"What the devil," I said, hysterically--"what the devil do you play
these tricks upon me for?"

"You see," she answered, "the rudiments of the sense are there."

"You must excuse me if I fail to understand," I said, grasping after
fragments of dropped dignity. "I am subject to fits of giddiness." I
felt a need for covering a species of nakedness. "Pardon my swearing," I
added; a proof of recovered equanimity.

We resumed the road in silence. I was physically and mentally shaken;
and I tried to deceive myself as to the cause. After some time I said:

"You insist then in preserving your--your incognito."

"Oh, I make no mystery of myself," she answered.

"You have told me that you come from the Fourth Dimension," I remarked,
ironically.

"I come from the Fourth Dimension," she said, patiently. She had the
air of one in a position of difficulty; of one aware of it and ready to
brave it. She had the listlessness of an enlightened person who has to
explain, over and over again, to stupid children some rudimentary point
of the multiplication table.

She seemed to divine my thoughts, to be aware of their very wording. She
even said "yes" at the opening of her next speech.

"Yes," she said. "It is as if I were to try to explain the new ideas of
any age to a person of the age that has gone before." She paused,
seeking a concrete illustration that would touch me. "As if I were
explaining to Dr. Johnson the methods and the ultimate vogue of the
cockney school of poetry."

"I understand," I said, "that you wish me to consider myself as
relatively a Choctaw. But what I do not understand is; what bearing that
has upon--upon the Fourth Dimension, I think you said?"

"I will explain," she replied.

"But you must explain as if you were explaining to a Choctaw," I said,
pleasantly, "you must be concise and convincing."

She answered: "I will."

She made a long speech of it; I condense. I can't remember her exact
words--there were so many; but she spoke like a book. There was
something exquisitely piquant in her choice of words, in her
expressionless voice. I seemed to be listening to a phonograph reciting
a technical work. There was a touch of the incongruous, of the mad, that
appealed to me--the commonplace rolling-down landscape, the straight,
white, undulating road that, from the tops of rises, one saw running for
miles and miles, straight, straight, and so white. Filtering down
through the great blue of the sky came the thrilling of innumerable
skylarks. And I was listening to a parody of a scientific work recited
by a phonograph.

I heard the nature of the Fourth Dimension--heard that it was an
inhabited plane--invisible to our eyes, but omnipresent; heard that I
had seen it when Bell Harry had reeled before my eyes. I heard the
Dimensionists described: a race clear-sighted, eminently practical,
incredible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling for
art and no reverence for life; free from any ethical tradition; callous
to pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerable
and immortal. She did not say that they were immortal, however. "You
would--you will--hate us," she concluded. And I seemed only then to come
to myself. The power of her imagination was so great that I fancied
myself face to face with the truth. I supposed she had been amusing
herself; that she should have tried to frighten me was inadmissible. I
don't pretend that I was completely at my ease, but I said, amiably:
"You certainly have succeeded in making these beings hateful."

"I have made nothing," she said with a faint smile, and went on amusing
herself. She would explain origins, now.

"Your"--she used the word as signifying, I suppose, the inhabitants of
the country, or the populations of the earth--"your ancestors were mine,
but long ago you were crowded out of the Dimension as we are to-day, you
overran the earth as we shall do to-morrow. But you contracted diseases,
as we shall contract them,--beliefs, traditions; fears; ideas of pity
... of love. You grew luxurious in the worship of your ideals, and
sorrowful; you solaced yourselves with creeds, with arts--you have
forgotten!"

She spoke with calm conviction; with an overwhelming and dispassionate
assurance. She was stating facts; not professing a faith. We approached
a little roadside inn. On a bench before the door a dun-clad country
fellow was asleep, his head on the table.

"Put your fingers in your ears," my companion commanded.

I humoured her.

I saw her lips move. The countryman started, shuddered, and by a clumsy,
convulsive motion of his arms, upset his quart. He rubbed his eyes.
Before he had voiced his emotions we had passed on.

"I have seen a horse-coper do as much for a stallion," I commented. "I
know there are words that have certain effects. But you shouldn't play
pranks like the low-comedy devil in Faustus."

"It isn't good form, I suppose?" she sneered.

"It's a matter of feeling," I said, hotly, "the poor fellow has lost his
beer."

"What's that to me?" she commented, with the air of one affording a
concrete illustration.

"It's a good deal to him," I answered.

"But what to me?"

I said nothing. She ceased her exposition immediately afterward, growing
silent as suddenly as she had become discoursive. It was rather as if
she had learnt a speech by heart and had come to the end of it. I was
quite at a loss as to what she was driving at. There was a newness, a
strangeness about her; sometimes she struck me as mad, sometimes as
frightfully sane. We had a meal somewhere--a meal that broke the current
of her speech--and then, in the late afternoon, took a by-road and
wandered in secluded valleys. I had been ill; trouble of the nerves,
brooding, the monotony of life in the shadow of unsuccess. I had an
errand in this part of the world and had been approaching it deviously,
seeking the normal in its quiet hollows, trying to get back to my old
self. I did not wish to think of how I should get through the year--of
the thousand little things that matter. So I talked and she--she
listened very well.

But topics exhaust themselves and, at the last, I myself brought the
talk round to the Fourth Dimension. We were sauntering along the
forgotten valley that lies between Hardves and Stelling Minnis; we had
been silent for several minutes. For me, at least, the silence was
pregnant with the undefinable emotions that, at times, run in currents
between man and woman. The sun was getting low and it was shadowy in
those shrouded hollows. I laughed at some thought, I forget what, and
then began to badger her with questions. I tried to exhaust the
possibilities of the Dimensionist idea, made grotesque suggestions. I
said: "And when a great many of you have been crowded out of the
Dimension and invaded the earth you will do so and so--" something
preposterous and ironical. She coldly dissented, and at once the irony
appeared as gross as the jocularity of a commercial traveller. Sometimes
she signified: "Yes, that is what we shall do;" signified it without
speaking--by some gesture perhaps, I hardly know what. There was
something impressive--something almost regal--in this manner of hers; it
was rather frightening in those lonely places, which were so forgotten,
so gray, so closed in. There was something of the past world about the
hanging woods, the little veils of unmoving mist--as if time did not
exist in those furrows of the great world; and one was so absolutely
alone; anything might have happened. I grew weary of the sound of my
tongue. But when I wanted to cease, I found she had on me the effect of
some incredible stimulant.

We came to the end of the valley where the road begins to climb the
southern hill, out into the open air. I managed to maintain an uneasy
silence. From her grimly dispassionate reiterations I had attained to a
clear idea, even to a visualisation, of her fantastic conception--allegory,
madness, or whatever it was. She certainly forced it home. The
Dimensionists were to come in swarms, to materialise, to devour like
locusts, to be all the more irresistible because indistinguishable. They
were to come like snow in the night: in the morning one would look out and
find the world white; they were to come as the gray hairs come, to sap the
strength of us as the years sap the strength of the muscles. As to methods,
we should be treated as we ourselves treat the inferior races. There would
be no fighting, no killing; we--our whole social system--would break as a
beam snaps, because we were worm-eaten with altruism and ethics. We, at our
worst, had a certain limit, a certain stage where we exclaimed: "No, this
is playing it too low down," because we had scruples that acted like
handicapping weights. She uttered, I think, only two sentences of
connected words: "We shall race with you and we shall not be weighted,"
and, "We shall merely sink you lower by our weight." All the rest went
like this:

"But then," I would say ... "we shall not be able to trust anyone.
Anyone may be one of you...." She would answer: "Anyone." She prophesied
a reign of terror for us. As one passed one's neighbour in the street
one would cast sudden, piercing glances at him.

I was silent. The birds were singing the sun down. It was very dark
among the branches, and from minute to minute the colours of the world
deepened and grew sombre.

"But--" I said. A feeling of unrest was creeping over me. "But why do
you tell me all this?" I asked. "Do you think I will enlist with you?"

"You will have to in the end," she said, "and I do not wish to waste my
strength. If you had to work unwittingly you would resist and resist and
resist. I should have to waste my power on you. As it is, you will
resist only at first, then you will begin to understand. You will see
how we will bring a man down--a man, you understand, with a great name,
standing for probity and honour. You will see the nets drawing closer
and closer, and you will begin to understand. Then you will cease
resisting, that is all."

I was silent. A June nightingale began to sing, a trifle hoarsely. We
seemed to be waiting for some signal. The things of the night came and
went, rustled through the grass, rustled through the leafage. At last I
could not even see the white gleam of her face....

I stretched out my hand and it touched hers. I seized it without an
instant of hesitation. "How could I resist you?" I said, and heard my
own whisper with a kind of amazement at its emotion. I raised her hand.
It was very cold and she seemed to have no thought of resistance; but
before it touched my lips something like a panic of prudence had
overcome me. I did not know what it would lead to--and I remembered that
I did not even know who she was. From the beginning she had struck me
as sinister and now, in the obscurity, her silence and her coldness
seemed to be a passive threatening of unknown entanglement. I let her
hand fall.

"We must be getting on," I said.

The road was shrouded and overhung by branches. There was a kind of
translucent light, enough to see her face, but I kept my eyes on the
ground. I was vexed. Now that it was past the episode appeared to be a
lost opportunity. We were to part in a moment, and her rare mental gifts
and her unfamiliar, but very vivid, beauty made the idea of parting
intensely disagreeable. She had filled me with a curiosity that she had
done nothing whatever to satisfy, and with a fascination that was very
nearly a fear. We mounted the hill and came out on a stretch of soft
common sward. Then the sound of our footsteps ceased and the world grew
more silent than ever. There were little enclosed fields all round us.
The moon threw a wan light, and gleaming mist hung in the ragged hedges.
Broad, soft roads ran away into space on every side.

"And now ..." I asked, at last, "shall we ever meet again?" My voice
came huskily, as if I had not spoken for years and years.

"Oh, very often," she answered.

"Very often?" I repeated. I hardly knew whether I was pleased or
dismayed. Through the gate-gap in a hedge, I caught a glimmer of a white
house front. It seemed to belong to another world; to another order of
things.

"Ah ... here is Callan's," I said. "This is where I was going...."

"I know," she answered; "we part here."

"To meet again?" I asked.

"Oh ... to meet again; why, yes, to meet again."




CHAPTER TWO


Her figure faded into the darkness, as pale things waver down into deep
water, and as soon as she disappeared my sense of humour returned. The
episode appeared more clearly, as a flirtation with an enigmatic, but
decidedly charming, chance travelling companion. The girl was a riddle,
and a riddle once guessed is a very trivial thing. She, too, would be a
very trivial thing when I had found a solution. It occurred to me that
she wished me to regard her as a symbol, perhaps, of the future--as a
type of those who are to inherit the earth, in fact. She had been
playing the fool with me, in her insolent modernity. She had wished me
to understand that I was old-fashioned; that the frame of mind of which
I and my fellows were the inheritors was over and done with. We were to
be compulsorily retired; to stand aside superannuated. It was obvious
that she was better equipped for the swiftness of life. She had a
something--not only quickness of wit, not only ruthless determination,
but a something quite different and quite indefinably more impressive.
Perhaps it was only the confidence of the superseder, the essential
quality that makes for the empire of the Occidental. But I was not a
negro--not even relatively a Hindoo. I was somebody, confound it, I was
somebody.

As an author, I had been so uniformly unsuccessful, so absolutely
unrecognised, that I had got into the way of regarding myself as ahead
of my time, as a worker for posterity. It was a habit of mind--the only
revenge that I could take upon despiteful Fate. This girl came to
confound me with the common herd--she declared herself to be that very
posterity for which I worked.

She was probably a member of some clique that called themselves Fourth
Dimensionists--just as there had been pre-Raphaelites. It was a matter
of cant allegory. I began to wonder how it was that I had never heard of
them. And how on earth had they come to hear of me!

"She must have read something of mine," I found myself musing: "the
Jenkins story perhaps. It must have been the Jenkins story; they gave
it a good place in their rotten magazine. She must have seen that it was
the real thing, and...." When one is an author one looks at things in
that way, you know.

By that time I was ready to knock at the door of the great Callan. I
seemed to be jerked into the commonplace medium of a great, great--oh,
an infinitely great--novelist's home life. I was led into a well-lit
drawing-room, welcomed by the great man's wife, gently propelled into a
bedroom, made myself tidy, descended and was introduced into the
sanctum, before my eyes had grown accustomed to the lamp-light. Callan
was seated upon his sofa surrounded by an admiring crowd of very local
personages. I forget what they looked like. I think there was a man
whose reddish beard did not become him and another whose face might have
been improved by the addition of a reddish beard; there was also an
extremely moody dark man and I vaguely recollect a person who lisped.

They did not talk much; indeed there was very little conversation. What
there was Callan supplied. He--spoke--very--slowly--and--very
--authoritatively, like a great actor whose aim is to hold the stage as
long as possible. The raising of his heavy eyelids at the opening door
conveyed the impression of a dark, mental weariness; and seemed somehow
to give additional length to his white nose. His short, brown beard was
getting very grey, I thought. With his lofty forehead and with his
superior, yet propitiatory smile, I was of course familiar. Indeed one
saw them on posters in the street. The notables did not want to talk.
They wanted to be spell-bound--and they were. Callan sat there in an
appropriate attitude--the one in which he was always photographed. One
hand supported his head, the other toyed with his watch-chain. His face
was uniformly solemn, but his eyes were disconcertingly furtive. He
cross-questioned me as to my walk from Canterbury; remarked that the
cathedral was a--magnificent--Gothic--Monument and set me right as to
the lie of the roads. He seemed pleased to find that I remembered very
little of what I ought to have noticed on the way. It gave him an
opportunity for the display of his local erudition.

"A--remarkable
woman--used--to--live--in--the--cottage--next--the--mill--at--Stelling,"
he said; "she was the original of Kate Wingfield."

"In your 'Boldero?'" the chorus chorussed.

Remembrance of the common at Stelling--of the glimmering white faces of
the shadowy cottages--was like a cold waft of mist to me. I forgot to
say "Indeed!"

"She was--a very--remarkable--woman--She----"

I found myself wondering which was real; the common with its misty
hedges and the blurred moon; or this room with its ranks of uniformly
bound books and its bust of the great man that threw a portentous shadow
upward from its pedestal behind the lamp.

Before I had entirely recovered myself, the notables were departing to
catch the last train. I was left alone with Callan.

He did not trouble to resume his attitude for me, and when he did speak,
spoke faster.

"Interesting man, Mr. Jinks?" he said; "you recognised him?"

"No," I said; "I don't think I ever met him."

Callan looked annoyed.

"I thought I'd got him pretty well. He's Hector Steele. In my
'Blanfield,'" he added.

"Indeed!" I said. I had never been able to read "Blanfield." "Indeed,
ah, yes--of course."

There was an awkward pause.

"The whiskey will be here in a minute," he said, suddenly. "I don't have
it in when Whatnot's here. He's the Rector, you know; a great temperance
man. When we've had a--a modest quencher--we'll get to business."

"Oh," I said, "your letters really meant--"

"Of course," he answered. "Oh, here's the whiskey. Well now, Fox was
down here the other night. You know Fox, of course?"

"Didn't he start the rag called--?"

"Yes, yes," Callan answered, hastily, "he's been very successful in
launching papers. Now he's trying his hand with a new one. He's any
amount of backers--big names, you know. He's to run my next as a
_feuilleton_. This--this venture is to be rather more serious in tone
than any that he's done hitherto. You understand?"

"Why, yes," I said; "but I don't see where I come in."

Callan took a meditative sip of whiskey, added a little more water, a
little more whiskey, and then found the mixture to his liking.

"You see," he said, "Fox got a letter here to say that Wilkinson had
died suddenly--some affection of the heart. Wilkinson was to have
written a series of personal articles on prominent people. Well, Fox was
nonplussed and I put in a word for you."

"I'm sure I'm much--" I began.

"Not at all, not at all," Callan interrupted, blandly. "I've known you
and you've known me for a number of years."

A sudden picture danced before my eyes--the portrait of the Callan of
the old days--the fawning, shady individual, with the seedy clothes, the
furtive eyes and the obliging manners.

"Why, yes," I said; "but I don't see that that gives me any claim."

Callan cleared his throat.

"The lapse of time," he said in his grand manner, "rivets what we may
call the bands of association."

He paused to inscribe this sentence on the tablets of his memory. It
would be dragged in--to form a purple patch--in his new serial.

"You see," he went on, "I've written a good deal of autobiographical
matter and it would verge upon self-advertisement to do more. You know
how much I dislike _that_. So I showed Fox your sketch in the
_Kensington_."

"The Jenkins story?" I said. "How did you come to see it?"

"Then send me the _Kensington_," he answered. There was a touch of
sourness in his tone, and I remembered that the _Kensington_ I had seen
had been ballasted with seven goodly pages by Callan himself--seven
unreadable packed pages of a serial.

"As I was saying," Callan began again, "you ought to know me very well,
and I suppose you are acquainted with my books. As for the rest, I will
give you what material you want."

"But, my dear Callan," I said, "I've never tried my hand at that sort of
thing."

Callan silenced me with a wave of his hand.

"It struck both Fox and myself that your--your 'Jenkins' was just what
was wanted," he said; "of course, that was a study of a kind of
broken-down painter. But it was well done."

I bowed my head. Praise from Callan was best acknowledged in silence.

"You see, what we want, or rather what Fox wants," he explained, "is a
kind of series of studies of celebrities _chez eux_. Of course,
they are not broken down. But if you can treat them as you treated Jenkins
--get them in their studies, surrounded by what in their case stands for
the broken lay figures and the faded serge curtains--it will be exactly the
thing. It will be a new line, or rather--what is a great deal better,
mind you--an old line treated in a slightly, very slightly different
way. That's what the public wants."

"Ah, yes," I said, "that's what the public wants. But all the same, it's
been done time out of mind before. Why, I've seen photographs of you and
your arm-chair and your pen-wiper and so on, half a score of times in the
sixpenny magazines."

Callan again indicated bland superiority with a wave of his hand.

"You undervalue yourself," he said.

I murmured--"Thanks."

"This is to be--not a mere pandering to curiosity--but an attempt to get
at the inside of things--to get the atmosphere, so to speak; not merely
to catalogue furniture."

He was quoting from the prospectus of the new paper, and then cleared
his throat for the utterance of a tremendous truth.

"Photography--is not--Art," he remarked.

The fantastic side of our colloquy began to strike me.

"After all," I thought to myself, "why shouldn't that girl have played
at being a denizen of another sphere? She did it ever so much better
than Callan. She did it too well, I suppose."

"The price is very decent," Callan chimed in. "I don't know how much per
thousand, ...but...."

I found myself reckoning, against my will as it were.

"You'll do it, I suppose?" he said.

I thought of my debts ... "Why, yes, I suppose so," I answered. "But who
are the others that I am to provide with atmospheres?"

Callan shrugged his shoulders.

"Oh, all sorts of prominent people--soldiers, statesmen, Mr. Churchill,
the Foreign Minister, artists, preachers--all sorts of people."

"All sorts of glory," occurred to me.

"The paper will stand expenses up to a reasonable figure," Callan
reassured me.

"It'll be a good joke for a time," I said. "I'm infinitely obliged to
you."

He warded off my thanks with both hands.

"I'll just send a wire to Fox to say that you accept," he said, rising.
He seated himself at his desk in the appropriate attitude. He had an
appropriate attitude for every vicissitude of his life. These he had
struck before so many people that even in the small hours of the morning
he was ready for the kodak wielder. Beside him he had every form of
labour-saver; every kind of literary knick-knack. There were
book-holders that swung into positions suitable to appropriate
attitudes; there were piles of little green boxes with red capital
letters of the alphabet upon them, and big red boxes with black small
letters. There was a writing-lamp that cast an aesthetic glow upon
another appropriate attitude--and there was one typewriter with
note-paper upon it, and another with MS. paper already in position.

"My God!" I thought--"to these heights the Muse soars."

As I looked at the gleaming pillars of the typewriters, the image of my
own desk appeared to me; chipped, ink-stained, gloriously dusty. I
thought that when again I lit my battered old tin lamp I should see
ashes and match-ends; a tobacco-jar, an old gnawed penny penholder, bits
of pink blotting-paper, match-boxes, old letters, and dust everywhere.
And I knew that my attitude--when I sat at it--would be inappropriate.

Callan was ticking off the telegram upon his machine. "It will go in the
morning at eight," he said.




CHAPTER THREE


To encourage me, I suppose, Callan gave me the proof-sheets of his next
to read in bed. The thing was so bad that it nearly sickened me of him
and his jobs. I tried to read the stuff; to read it conscientiously, to
read myself to sleep with it. I was under obligations to old Cal and I
wanted to do him justice, but the thing was impossible. I fathomed a
sort of a plot. It dealt in fratricide with a touch of adultery; a Great
Moral Purpose loomed in the background. It would have been a dully
readable novel but for that; as it was, it was intolerable. It was
amazing that Cal himself could put out such stuff; that he should have
the impudence. He was not a fool, not by any means a fool. It revolted
me more than a little.

I came to it out of a different plane of thought. I may not have been
able to write then--or I may; but I did know enough to recognise the
flagrantly, the indecently bad, and, upon my soul, the idea that I, too,
must cynically offer this sort of stuff if I was ever to sell my tens
of thousands very nearly sent me back to my solitude. Callan had begun
very much as I was beginning now; he had even, I believe, had ideals in
his youth and had starved a little. It was rather trying to think that
perhaps I was really no more than another Callan, that, when at last I
came to review my life, I should have much such a record to look back
upon. It disgusted me a little, and when I put out the light the horrors
settled down upon me.

I woke in a shivering frame of mind, ashamed to meet Callan's eye. It
was as if he must be aware of my over-night thoughts, as if he must
think me a fool who quarrelled with my victuals. He gave no signs of any
such knowledge--was dignified, cordial; discussed his breakfast with
gusto, opened his letters, and so on. An anaemic amanuensis was taking
notes for appropriate replies. How could I tell him that I would not do
the work, that I was too proud and all the rest of it? He would have
thought me a fool, would have stiffened into hostility, I should have
lost my last chance. And, in the broad light of day, I was loath to do
that.

He began to talk about indifferent things; we glided out on to a
current of mediocre conversation. The psychical moment, if there were
any such, disappeared.

Someone bearing my name had written to express an intention of offering
personal worship that afternoon. The prospect seemed to please the great
Cal. He was used to such things; he found them pay, I suppose. We began
desultorily to discuss the possibility of the writer's being a relation
of mine; I doubted. I had no relations that I knew of; there was a
phenomenal old aunt who had inherited the acres and respectability of
the Etchingham Grangers, but she was not the kind of person to worship a
novelist. I, the poor last of the family, was without the pale, simply
because I, too, was a novelist. I explained these things to Callan and
he commented on them, found it strange how small or how large, I forget
which, the world was. Since his own apotheosis shoals of Callans had
claimed relationship.

I ate my breakfast. Afterward, we set about the hatching of that
article--the thought of it sickens me even now. You will find it in the
volume along with the others; you may see how I lugged in Callan's
surroundings, his writing-room, his dining-room, the romantic arbour in
which he found it easy to write love-scenes, the clipped trees like
peacocks and the trees clipped like bears, and all the rest of the
background for appropriate attitudes. He was satisfied with any
arrangements of words that suggested a gentle awe on the part of the
writer.

"Yes, yes," he said once or twice, "that's just the touch, just the
touch--very nice. But don't you think...." We lunched after some time.

I was so happy. Quite pathetically happy. It had come so easy to me. I
had doubted my ability to do the sort of thing; but it had written
itself, as money spends itself, and I was going to earn money like that.
The whole of my past seemed a mistake--a childishness. I had kept out of
this sort of thing because I had thought it below me; I had kept out of
it and had starved my body and warped my mind. Perhaps I had even
damaged my work by this isolation. To understand life one must live--and
I had only brooded. But, by Jove, I would try to live now.

Callan had retired for his accustomed siesta and I was smoking pipe
after pipe over a confoundedly bad French novel that I had found in the
book-shelves. I must have been dozing. A voice from behind my back
announced:

"Miss Etchingham Granger!" and added--"Mr. Callan will be down
directly." I laid down my pipe, wondered whether I ought to have been
smoking when Cal expected visitors, and rose to my feet.

"You!" I said, sharply. She answered, "You see." She was smiling. She
had been so much in my thoughts that I was hardly surprised--the thing
had even an air of pleasant inevitability about it.

"You must be a cousin of mine," I said, "the name--"

"Oh, call it sister," she answered.

I was feeling inclined for farce, if blessed chance would throw it in my
way. You see, I was going to live at last, and life for me meant
irresponsibility.

"Ah!" I said, ironically, "you are going to be a sister to me, as they
say." She might have come the bogy over me last night in the moonlight,
but now ... There was a spice of danger about it, too, just a touch
lurking somewhere. Besides, she was good-looking and well set up, and I
couldn't see what could touch me. Even if it did, even if I got into a
mess, I had no relatives, not even a friend, to be worried about me. I
stood quite alone, and I half relished the idea of getting into a
mess--it would be part of life, too. I was going to have a little money,
and she excited my curiosity. I was tingling to know what she was really
at.

"And one might ask," I said, "what you are doing in this--in this...." I
was at a loss for a word to describe the room--the smugness parading as
professional Bohemianism.

"Oh, I am about my own business," she said, "I told you last night--have
you forgotten?"

"Last night you were to inherit the earth," I reminded her, "and one
doesn't start in a place like this. Now I should have gone--well--I
should have gone to some politician's house--a cabinet minister's--say
to Gurnard's. He's the coming man, isn't he?"

"Why, yes," she answered, "he's the coming man."

You will remember that, in those days, Gurnard was only the dark horse
of the ministry. I knew little enough of these things, despised politics
generally; they simply didn't interest me. Gurnard I disliked
platonically; perhaps because his face was a little enigmatic--a little
repulsive. The country, then, was in the position of having no
Opposition and a Cabinet with two distinct strains in it--the Churchill
and the Gurnard--and Gurnard was the dark horse.

"Oh, you should join your flats," I said, pleasantly. "If he's the
coming man, where do you come in?... Unless he, too, is a Dimensionist."

"Oh, both--both," she answered. I admired the tranquillity with which
she converted my points into her own. And I was very happy--it struck me
as a pleasant sort of fooling....

"I suppose you will let me know some day who you are?" I said.

"I have told you several times," she answered.

"Oh, you won't frighten me to-day," I asserted, "not here, you know, and
anyhow, why should you want to?"

"I have told you," she said again.

"You've told me you were my sister," I said; "but my sister died years
and years ago. Still, if it suits you, if you want to be somebody's
sister ..."

"It suits me," she answered--"I want to be placed, you see."

I knew that my name was good enough to place anyone. We had been the
Grangers of Etchingham since--oh, since the flood. And if the girl
wanted to be my sister and a Granger, why the devil shouldn't she, so
long as she would let me continue on this footing? I hadn't talked to a
woman--not to a well set-up one--for ages and ages. It was as if I had
come back from one of the places to which younger sons exile themselves,
and for all I knew it might be the correct thing for girls to elect
brothers nowadays in one set or another.

"Oh, tell me some more," I said, "one likes to know about one's sister.
You and the Right Honourable Charles Gurnard are Dimensionists, and who
are the others of your set?"

"There is only one," she answered. And would you believe it!--it seems
he was Fox, the editor of my new paper.

"You select your characters with charming indiscriminateness," I said.
"Fox is only a sort of toad, you know--he won't get far."

"Oh, he'll go far," she answered, "but he won't get there. Fox is
fighting against us."

"Oh, so you don't dwell in amity?" I said. "You fight for your own
hands."

"We fight for our own hands," she answered, "I shall throw Gurnard over
when he's pulled the chestnuts out of the fire."

I was beginning to get a little tired of this. You see, for me, the
scene was a veiled flirtation and I wanted to get on. But I had to
listen to her fantastic scheme of things. It was really a duel between
Fox, the Journal-founder, and Gurnard, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Fox, with Churchill, the Foreign Minister, and his supporters, for
pieces, played what he called "the Old Morality business" against
Gurnard, who passed for a cynically immoral politician.

I grew more impatient. I wanted to get out of this stage into something
more personal. I thought she invented this sort of stuff to keep me from
getting at her errand at Callan's. But I didn't want to know her errand;
I wanted to make love to her. As for Fox and Gurnard and Churchill, the
Foreign Minister, who really was a sympathetic character and did stand
for political probity, she might be uttering allegorical truths, but I
was not interested in them. I wanted to start some topic that would lead
away from this Dimensionist farce.

"My dear sister," I began.... Callan always moved about like a
confounded eavesdropper, wore carpet slippers, and stepped round the
corners of screens. I expect he got copy like that.

"So, she's your sister?" he said suddenly, from behind me. "Strange that
you shouldn't recognise the handwriting...."

"Oh, we don't correspond," I said light-heartedly, "we are _so_
different." I wanted to take a rise out of the creeping animal that he
was. He confronted her blandly.

"You must be the little girl that I remember," he said. He had known my
parents ages ago. That, indeed, was how I came to know him; I wouldn't
have chosen him for a friend. "I thought Granger said you were dead ...
but one gets confused...."

"Oh, we see very little of each other," she answered. "Arthur might
have said I was dead--he's capable of anything, you know." She spoke
with an assumption of sisterly indifference that was absolutely
striking. I began to think she must be an actress of genius, she did it
so well. She _was_ the sister who had remained within the pale; I, the
rapscallion of a brother whose vagaries were trying to his relations.
That was the note she struck, and she maintained it. I didn't know what
the deuce she was driving at, and I didn't care. These scenes with a
touch of madness appealed to me. I was going to live, and here,
apparently, was a woman ready to my hand. Besides, she was making a fool
of Callan, and that pleased me. His patronising manners had irritated
me.

I assisted rather silently. They began to talk of mutual
acquaintances--as one talks. They both seemed to know everyone in this
world. She gave herself the airs of being quite in the inner ring;
alleged familiarity with quite impossible persons, with my portentous
aunt, with Cabinet Ministers--that sort of people. They talked about
them--she, as if she lived among them; he, as if he tried very hard to
live up to them.

She affected reverence for his person, plied him with compliments that
he swallowed raw--horribly raw. It made me shudder a little; it was
tragic to see the little great man confronted with that woman. It
shocked me to think that, really, I must appear much like him--must have
looked like that yesterday. He was a little uneasy, I thought, made
little confidences as if in spite of himself; little confidences about
the _Hour_, the new paper for which I was engaged. It seemed to be run
by a small gang with quite a number of assorted axes to grind. There was
some foreign financier--a person of position whom she knew (a noble man
in the _best_ sense, Callan said); there was some politician (she knew
him too, and he was equally excellent, so Callan said), Mr. Churchill
himself, an artist or so, an actor or so--and Callan. They all wanted a
little backing, so it seemed. Callan, of course, put it in another way.
The Great--Moral--Purpose turned up, I don't know why. He could not
think he was taking me in and she obviously knew more about the people
concerned than he did. But there it was, looming large, and quite as
farcical as all the rest of it. The foreign financier--they called him
the Duc de Mersch--was by way of being a philanthropist on megalomaniac
lines. For some international reason he had been allowed to possess
himself of the pleasant land of Greenland. There was gold in it and
train-oil in it and other things that paid--but the Duc de Mersch was
not thinking of that. He was first and foremost a State Founder, or at
least he was that after being titular ruler of some little spot of a
Teutonic grand-duchy. No one of the great powers would let any other of
the great powers possess the country, so it had been handed over to the
Duc de Mersch, who had at heart, said Cal, the glorious vision of
founding a model state--_the_ model state, in which washed and
broadclothed Esquimaux would live, side by side, regenerated lives,
enfranchised equals of choicely selected younger sons of whatever
occidental race. It was that sort of thing. I was even a little
overpowered, in spite of the fact that Callan was its trumpeter; there
was something fine about the conception and Churchill's acquiescence
seemed to guarantee an honesty in its execution.

The Duc de Mersch wanted money, and he wanted to run a railway across
Greenland. His idea was that the British public should supply the money
and the British Government back the railway, as they did in the case of
a less philanthropic Suez Canal. In return he offered an eligible
harbour and a strip of coast at one end of the line; the British public
was to be repaid in casks of train-oil and gold and with the
consciousness of having aided in letting the light in upon a dark spot
of the earth. So the Duc de Mersch started the _Hour_. The _Hour_ was to
extol the Duc de Mersch's moral purpose; to pat the Government's back;
influence public opinion; and generally advance the cause of the System
for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions.

I tell the story rather flippantly, because I heard it from Callan, and
because it was impossible to take him seriously. Besides, I was not very
much interested in the thing itself. But it did interest me to see how
deftly she pumped him--squeezed him dry.

I was even a little alarmed for poor old Cal. After all, the man had
done me a service; had got me a job. As for her, she struck me as a
potentially dangerous person. One couldn't tell, she might be some
adventuress, or if not that, a speculator who would damage Cal's little
schemes. I put it to her plainly afterward; and quarrelled with her as
well as I could. I drove her down to the station. Callan must have been
distinctly impressed or he would never have had out his trap for her.

"You know," I said to her, "I won't have you play tricks with
Callan--not while you're using my name. It's very much at your service
as far as I'm concerned--but, confound it, if you're going to injure him
I shall have to show you up--to tell him."

"You couldn't, you know," she said, perfectly calmly, "you've let
yourself in for it. He wouldn't feel pleased with you for letting it go
as far as it has. You'd lose your job, and you're going to live, you
know--you're going to live...."

I was taken aback by this veiled threat in the midst of the pleasantry.
It wasn't fair play--not at all fair play. I recovered some of my old
alarm, remembered that she really was a dangerous person; that ...

"But I sha'n't hurt Callan," she said, suddenly, "you may make your mind
easy."

"You really won't?" I asked.

"Really not," she answered. It relieved me to believe her. I did not
want to quarrel with her. You see, she fascinated me, she seemed to act
as a stimulant, to set me tingling somehow--and to baffle me.... And
there was truth in what she said. I had let myself in for it, and I
didn't want to lose Callan's job by telling him I had made a fool of
him.

"I don't care about anything else," I said. She smiled.




CHAPTER FOUR


I went up to town bearing the Callan article, and a letter of warm
commendation from Callan to Fox. I had been very docile; had accepted
emendations; had lavished praise, had been unctuous and yet had
contrived to retain the dignified savour of the editorial "we." Callan
himself asked no more.

I was directed to seek Fox out--to find him immediately. The matter was
growing urgent. Fox was not at the office--the brand new office that I
afterward saw pass through the succeeding stages of business-like
comfort and dusty neglect. I was directed to ask for him at the stage
door of the Buckingham.

I waited in the doorkeeper's glass box at the Buckingham. I was eyed by
the suspicious commissionaire with the contempt reserved for resting
actors. Resting actors are hungry suppliants as a rule. Call-boys sought
Mr. Fox. "Anybody seen Mr. Fox? He's gone to lunch."

"Mr. Fox is out," said the commissionaire.

I explained that the matter was urgent. More call-boys disappeared
through the folding doors. Unenticing personages passed the glass box,
casting hostile glances askance at me on my high stool. A message came
back.

"If it's Mr. Etchingham Granger, he's to follow Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly's
at once."

I followed Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly's--to a little flat in a neighbourhood
that I need not specify. The eminent journalist was lunching with the
eminent actress. A husband was in attendance--a nonentity with a heavy
yellow moustache, who hummed and hawed over his watch.

Mr. Fox was full-faced, with a persuasive, peremptory manner. Mrs.
Hartly was--well, she was just Mrs. Hartly. You remember how we all fell
in love with her figure and her manner, and her voice, and the way she
used her hands. She broke her bread with those very hands; spoke to her
husband with that very voice, and rose from table with that same
graceful management of her limp skirts. She made eyes at me; at her
husband; at little Fox, at the man who handed the asparagus--great
round grey eyes. She was just the same. The curtain never fell on that
eternal dress rehearsal. I don't wonder the husband was forever looking
at his watch.

Mr. Fox was a friend of the house. He dispensed with ceremony, read my
manuscript over his Roquefort, and seemed to find it add to the savour.

"You are going to do me for Mr. Fox," Mrs. Hartly said, turning her
large grey eyes upon me. They were very soft. They seemed to send out
waves of intense sympatheticism. I thought of those others that had shot
out a razor-edged ray.

"Why," I answered, "there was some talk of my doing somebody for the
_Hour_."

Fox put my manuscript under his empty tumbler.

"Yes," he said, sharply. "He will do, I think. H'm, yes. Why, yes."

"You're a friend of Mr. Callan's, aren't you?" Mrs. Hartly asked, "What
a dear, nice man he is! You should see him at rehearsals. You know I'm
doing his 'Boldero'; he's given me a perfectly lovely part--perfectly
lovely. And the trouble he takes. He tries every chair on the stage."

"H'm; yes," Fox interjected, "he likes to have his own way."

"We _all_ like that," the great actress said. She was quoting from her
first great part. I thought--but, perhaps, I was mistaken--that all her
utterances were quotations from her first great part. Her husband looked
at his watch.

"Are you coming to this confounded flower show?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, turning her mysterious eyes upon him, "I'll go and get
ready."

She disappeared through an inner door. I expected to hear the
pistol-shot and the heavy fall from the next room. I forgot that it was
not the end of the fifth act.

Fox put my manuscript into his breast pocket.

"Come along, Granger," he said to me, "I want to speak to you. You'll
have plenty of opportunity for seeing Mrs. Hartly, I expect. She's tenth
on your list. Good-day, Hartly."

Hartly's hand was wavering between his moustache and his watch pocket.

"Good-day," he said sulkily.

"You must come and see me again, Mr. Granger," Mrs. Hartly said from
the door. "Come to the Buckingham and see how we're getting on with your
friend's play. We must have a good long talk if you're to get my local
colour, as Mr. Fox calls it."

   "To gild refined gold; to paint the lily,
   To throw a perfume on the violet--"

I quoted banally.

"That's it," she said, with a tender smile. She was fastening a button
in her glove. I doubt her recognition of the quotation.

When we were in our hansom, Fox began:

"I'm relieved by what I've seen of your copy. One didn't expect this
sort of thing from you. You think it a bit below you, don't you? Oh, I
know, I know. You literary people are usually so impracticable; you know
what I mean. Callan said you were the man. Callan has his uses; but one
has something else to do with one's paper. I've got interests of my own.
But you'll do; it's all _right_. You don't mind my being candid, do you,
now?" I muttered that I rather liked it.

"Well then," he went on, "now I see my way."

"I'm glad you do," I murmured. "I wish I did."

"Oh, that will be all right," Fox comforted. "I dare say Callan has
rather sickened you of the job; particularly if you ain't used to it.
But you won't find the others as trying. There's Churchill now, he's
your next. You'll have to mind him. You'll find him a decent chap. Not a
bit of side on him."

"What Churchill?" I asked.

"The Foreign Minister."

"The devil," I said.

"Oh, you'll find him all right," Fox reassured; "you're to go down to
his place to-morrow. It's all arranged. Here we are. Hop out." He suited
his own action to his words and ran nimbly up the new terra-cotta steps
of the _Hour's_ home. He left me to pay the cabman.

When I rejoined him he was giving directions to an invisible somebody
through folding doors.

"Come along," he said, breathlessly. "Can't see him," he added to a
little boy, who held a card in his hands. "Tell him to go to Mr. Evans.
One's life isn't one's own here," he went on, when he had reached his
own room.

It was a palatial apartment furnished in white and gold--Louis Quinze,
or something of the sort--with very new decorations after Watteau
covering the walls. The process of disfiguration, however, had already
begun. A roll desk of the least possible Louis Quinze order stood in one
of the tall windows; the carpet was marked by muddy footprints, and a
matchboard screen had been run across one end of the room.

"Hullo, Evans," Fox shouted across it, "just see that man from Grant's,
will you? Heard from the Central News yet?"

He was looking through the papers on the desk.

"Not yet, I've just rung them up for the fifth time," the answer came.

"Keep on at it," Fox exhorted.

"Here's Churchill's letter," he said to me. "Have an arm-chair; those
blasted things are too uncomfortable for anything. Make yourself
comfortable. I'll be back in a minute."

I took an arm-chair and addressed myself to the Foreign Minister's
letter. It expressed bored tolerance of a potential interviewer, but it
seemed to please Fox. He ran into the room, snatched up a paper from his
desk, and ran out again.

"Read Churchill's letter?" he asked, in passing. "I'll tell you all
about it in a minute." I don't know what he expected me to do with
it--kiss the postage stamp, perhaps.

At the same time, it was pleasant to sit there idle in the midst of the
hurry, the breathlessness. I seemed to be at last in contact with real
life, with the life that matters. I was somebody, too. Fox treated me
with a kind of deference--as if I were a great unknown. His "you
literary men" was pleasing. It was the homage that the pretender pays to
the legitimate prince; the recognition due to the real thing from the
machine-made imitation; the homage of the builder to the architect.

"Ah, yes," it seemed to say, "we jobbing men run up our rows and rows of
houses; build whole towns and fill the papers for years. But when we
want something special--something monumental--we have to come to you."

Fox came in again.

"Very sorry, my dear fellow, find I can't possibly get a moment for a
chat with you. Look here, come and dine with me at the Paragraph round
the corner--to-night at six sharp. You'll go to Churchill's to-morrow."

The Paragraph Club, where I was to meet Fox, was one of those sporadic
establishments that spring up in the neighbourhood of the Strand. It is
one of their qualities that they are always just round the corner;
another, that their stewards are too familiar; another, that they--in
the opinion of the other members--are run too much for the convenience
of one in particular.

In this case it was Fox who kept the dinner waiting. I sat in the little
smoking-room and, from behind a belated morning paper, listened to the
conversation of the three or four journalists who represented the
members. I felt as a new boy in a new school feels on his first
introduction to his fellows.

There was a fossil dramatic critic sleeping in an arm-chair before the
fire. At dinner-time he woke up, remarked:

"You should have seen Fanny Ellsler," and went to sleep again.

Sprawling on a red velvet couch was a _beau jeune homme_, with the
necktie of a Parisian-American student. On a chair beside him sat a
personage whom, perhaps because of his plentiful lack of h's, I took for
a distinguished foreigner.

They were talking about a splendid subject for a music-hall dramatic
sketch of some sort--afforded by a bus driver, I fancy.

I heard afterward that my Frenchman had been a costermonger and was now
half journalist, half financier, and that my art student was an employee
of one of the older magazines.

"Dinner's on the table, gents," the steward said from the door. He went
toward the sleeper by the fire. "I expect Mr. Cunningham will wear that
arm-chair out before he's done," he said over his shoulder.

"Poor old chap; he's got nowhere else to go to," the magazine employee
said.

"Why doesn't he go to the work'ouse," the journalist financier retorted.
"Make a good sketch that, eh?" he continued, reverting to his
bus-driver.

"Jolly!" the magazine employee said, indifferently.

"Now, then, Mr. Cunningham," the steward said, touching the sleeper on
the shoulder, "dinner's on the table."

"God bless my soul," the dramatic critic said, with a start. The steward
left the room. The dramatic critic furtively took a set of false teeth
out of his waistcoat pocket; wiped them with a bandanna handkerchief,
and inserted them in his mouth.

He tottered out of the room.

I got up and began to inspect the pen-and-ink sketches on the walls.

The faded paltry caricatures of faded paltry lesser lights that
confronted me from fly-blown frames on the purple walls almost made me
shiver.

"There you are, Granger," said a cheerful voice behind me. "Come and
have some dinner."

I went and had some dinner. It was seasoned by small jokes and little
personalities. A Teutonic journalist, a musical critic, I suppose,
inquired as to the origin of the meagre pheasant. Fox replied that it
had been preserved in the back-yard. The dramatic critic mumbled unheard
that some piece or other was off the bills of the Adelphi. I grinned
vacantly. Afterward, under his breath, Fox put me up to a thing or two
regarding the inner meaning of the new daily. Put by him, without any
glamour of a moral purpose, the case seemed rather mean. The dingy
smoking-room depressed me and the whole thing was, what I had, for so
many years, striven to keep out of. Fox hung over my ear, whispering.
There were shades of intonation in his sibillating. Some of those "in
it," the voice implied, were not above-board; others were, and the tone
became deferential, implied that I was to take my tone from itself.

"Of course, a man like the Right Honourable C. does it on the straight,
... quite on the straight, ... has to have some sort of semi-official
backer.... In this case, it's me, ... the _Hour_. They're a bit splitty,
the Ministry, I mean.... They say Gurnard isn't playing square ... they
_say_ so." His broad, red face glowed as he bent down to my ear, his
little sea-blue eyes twinkled with moisture. He enlightened me
cautiously, circumspectly. There was something unpleasant in the
business--not exactly in Fox himself, but the kind of thing. I wish he
would cease his explanations--I didn't want to hear them. I have never
wanted to know how things are worked; preferring to take the world at
its face value. Callan's revelations had been bearable, because of the
farcical pompousness of his manner. But this was different, it had the
stamp of truth, perhaps because it was a little dirty. I didn't want to
hear that the Foreign Minister was ever so remotely mixed up in this
business. He was only a symbol to me, but he stood for the stability of
statesmanship and for the decencies that it is troublesome to have
touched.

"Of course," he was proceeding, "the Churchill gang would like to go on
playing the stand-off to us. But it won't do, they've got to come in or
see themselves left. Gurnard has pretty well nobbled their old party
press, so they've got to begin all over again."

That was it--that was precisely it. Churchill ought to have played the
stand-off to people like us--to have gone on playing it at whatever
cost. That was what I demanded of the world as I conceived it. It was so
much less troublesome in that way. On the other hand, this was life--I
was living now and the cost of living is disillusionment; it was the
price I had to pay. Obviously, a Foreign Minister had to have a
semi-official organ, or I supposed so.... "Mind you," Fox whispered on,
"I think myself, that it's a pity he is supporting the Greenland
business. The thing's not _altogether_ straight. But it's going to be
made to pay like hell, and there's the national interest to be
considered. If this Government didn't take it up, some other would--and
that would give Gurnard and a lot of others a peg against Churchill and
his. We can't afford to lose any more coaling stations in Greenland or
anywhere else. And, mind you, Mr. C. can look after the interests of the
niggers a good deal better if he's a hand in the pie. You see the
position, eh?"

I wasn't actually listening to him, but I nodded at proper intervals. I
knew that he wanted me to take that line in confidential conversations
with fellows seeking copy. I was quite resigned to that. Incidentally, I
was overcome by the conviction--perhaps it was no more than a
sensation--that that girl was mixed up in this thing, that her shadow
was somewhere among the others flickering upon the sheet. I wanted to
ask Fox if he knew her. But, then, in that absurd business, I did not
even know her name, and the whole story would have sounded a little mad.
Just now, it suited me that Fox should have a moderate idea of my
sanity. Besides, the thing was out of tone, I idealised her then. One
wouldn't talk about her in a smoking-room full of men telling stories,
and one wouldn't talk about her at all to Fox.

The musical critic had been prowling about the room with Fox's eyes upon
him. He edged suddenly nearer, pushed a chair aside, and came toward us.

"Hullo," he said, in an ostentatiously genial, after-dinner voice, "what
are you two chaps a-talking about?"

"Private matters," Fox answered, without moving a hair.

"Then I suppose I'm in the way?" the other muttered. Fox did not answer.

"Wants a job," he said, watching the discomfited Teuton's retreat, "but,
as I was saying--oh, it pays both ways." He paused and fixed his eyes on
me. He had been explaining the financial details of the matter, in which
the Duc de Mersch and Callan and Mrs. Hartly and all these people
clubbed together and started a paper which they hired Fox to run, which
was to bring their money back again, which was to scratch their backs,
which.... It was like the house that Jack built; I wondered who Jack
was. That was it, who was Jack? It all hinged upon that.

"Why, yes," I said. "It seems rather neat."

"Of course," Fox wandered on, "you are wondering why the deuce I tell
you all this. Fact is, you'd hear it all if I didn't, and a good deal
more that isn't true besides. But I believe you're the sort of chap to
respect a confidence."

I didn't rise to the sentiment. I knew as well as he did that he was
bamboozling me, that he was, as he said, only telling me--not the truth,
but just what I should hear everywhere. I did not bear him any ill-will;
it was part of the game, that. But the question was, who was Jack? It
might be Fox himself.... There might, after all, be some meaning in the
farrago of nonsense that that fantastic girl had let off upon me. Fox
really and in a figure of speech such as she allowed herself, might be
running a team consisting of the Duc de Mersch and Mr. Churchill.




CHAPTER FOUR


He might really be backing a foreign, philanthropic ruler and
State-founder, and a British Foreign Minister, against the rather
sinister Chancellor of the Exchequer that Mr. Gurnard undoubtedly was.
It might suit him; perhaps he had shares in something or other that
depended on the success of the Duc de Mersch's Greenland Protectorate. I
knew well enough, you must remember, that Fox was a big man--one of
those big men that remain permanently behind the curtain, perhaps
because they have a certain lack of comeliness of one sort or another
and don't look well on the stage itself. And I understood now that if he
had abandoned--as he had done--half a dozen enterprises of his own for
the sake of the _Hour_, it must be because it was very well worth his
while. It was not merely a question of the editorship of a paper; there
was something very much bigger in the background. My Dimensionist young
lady, again, might have other shares that depended on the Chancellor of
the Exchequer's blocking the way. In that way she might very well talk
allegorically of herself as in alliance with Gurnard against Fox and
Churchill. I was at sea in that sort of thing--but I understood
vaguely that something of the sort was remotely possible.

I didn't feel called upon to back out of it on that account, yet I very
decidedly wished that the thing could have been otherwise. For myself, I
came into the matter with clean hands--and I was going to keep my hands
clean; otherwise, I was at Fox's disposal.

"I understand," I said, the speech marking my decision, "I shall have
dealings with a good many of the proprietors--I am the scratcher, in
fact, and you don't want me to make a fool of myself."

"Well," he answered, gauging me with his blue, gimlet eyes, "it's just
as well to know."

"It's just as well to know," I echoed. It _was_ just as well to know.




CHAPTER FIVE


I had gone out into the blackness of the night with a firmer step, with
a new assurance. I had had my interview, the thing was definitely
settled; the first thing in my life that had ever been definitely
settled; and I felt I must tell Lea before I slept. Lea had helped me a
good deal in the old days--he had helped everybody, for that matter. You
would probably find traces of Lea's influence in the beginnings of every
writer of about my decade; of everybody who ever did anything decent,
and of some who never got beyond the stage of burgeoning decently. He
had given me the material help that a publisher's reader could give,
until his professional reputation was endangered, and he had given me
the more valuable help that so few can give. I had grown ashamed of this
one-sided friendship. It was, indeed, partly because of that that I had
taken to the wilds--to a hut near a wood, and all the rest of what now
seemed youthful foolishness. I had desired to live alone, not to be
helped any more, until I could make _some_ return. As a natural result I
had lost nearly all my friends and found myself standing there as naked
as on the day I was born.

All around me stretched an immense town--an immense blackness.
People--thousands of people hurried past me, had errands, had aims, had
others to talk to, to trifle with. But I had nobody. This immense city,
this immense blackness, had no interiors for me. There were house
fronts, staring windows, closed doors, but nothing within; no rooms, no
hollow places. The houses meant nothing to me, nothing more than the
solid earth. Lea remained the only one the thought of whom was not like
the reconsideration of an ancient, a musty pair of gloves.

He lived just anywhere. Being a publisher's reader, he had to report
upon the probable commercial value of the manuscripts that unknown
authors sent to his employer, and I suppose he had a settled plan of
life, of the sort that brought him within the radius of a given spot at
apparently irregular, but probably ordered, intervals. It seemed to be
no more than a piece of good luck that let me find him that night in a
little room in one of the by-ways of Bloomsbury. He was sprawling
angularly on a cane lounge, surrounded by whole rubbish heaps of
manuscript, a grey scrawl in a foam of soiled paper. He peered up at me
as I stood in the doorway.

"Hullo!" he said, "what's brought you here? Have a manuscript?" He waved
an abstracted hand round him. "You'll find a chair somewhere." A claret
bottle stood on the floor beside him. He took it by the neck and passed
it to me.

He bent his head again and continued his reading. I displaced three
bulky folio sheaves of typewritten matter from a chair and seated myself
behind him. He continued to read.

"I hadn't seen these rooms before," I said, for want of something to
say.

The room was not so much scantily as arbitrarily furnished. It contained
a big mahogany sideboard; a common deal table, an extraordinary kind of
folding wash-hand-stand; a deal bookshelf, the cane lounge, and three
unrelated chairs. There were three framed Dutch prints on the marble
mantel-shelf; striped curtains before the windows. A square, cheap
looking-glass, with a razor above it, hung between them. And on the
floor, on the chairs, on the sideboard, on the unmade bed, the profusion
of manuscripts.

He scribbled something on a blue paper and began to roll a cigarette. He
took off his glasses, rubbed them, and closed his eyes tightly.

"Well, and how's Sussex?" he asked.

I felt a sudden attack of what, essentially, was nostalgia. The fact
that I was really leaving an old course of life, was actually and
finally breaking with it, became vividly apparent. Lea, you see, stood
for what was best in the mode of thought that I was casting aside. He
stood for the aspiration. The brooding, the moodiness; all the childish
qualities, were my own importations. I was a little ashamed to tell him,
that--that I was going to live, in fact. Some of the glory of it had
gone, as if one of two candles I had been reading by had flickered out.
But I told him, after a fashion, that I had got a job at last.

"Oh, I congratulate you," he said.

"You see," I began to combat the objections he had not had time to
utter, "even for my work it will be a good thing--I wasn't seeing
enough of life to be able to...."

"Oh, of course not," he answered--"it'll be a good thing. You must have
been having a pretty bad time."

It struck me as abominably unfair. I hadn't taken up with the _Hour_
because I was tired of having a bad time, but for other reasons: because
I had felt my soul being crushed within me.

"You're mistaken," I said. And I explained. He answered, "Yes, yes," but
I fancied that he was adding to himself--"They all say that." I grew
more angry. Lea's opinion formed, to some extent, the background of my
life. For many years I had been writing quite as much to satisfy him as
to satisfy myself, and his coldness chilled me. He thought that my heart
was not in my work, and I did not want Lea to think that of me. I tried
to explain as much to him--but it was difficult, and he gave me no help.

I knew there had been others that he had fostered, only to see them, in
the end, drift into the back-wash. And now he thought I was going
too....

"Here," he said, suddenly breaking away from the subject, "look at
that."

He threw a heavy, ribbon-bound mass of matter into my lap, and
recommenced writing his report upon its saleability as a book. He was of
opinion that it was too delicately good to attract his employer's class
of readers. I began to read it to get rid of my thoughts. The heavy
black handwriting of the manuscript sticks in my mind's eye. It must
have been good, but probably not so good as I then thought it--I have
entirely forgotten all about it; otherwise, I remember that we argued
afterward: I for its publication; he against. I was thinking of the
wretched author whose fate hung in the balance. He became a pathetic
possibility, hidden in the heart of the white paper that bore
pen-markings of a kind too good to be marketable. There was something
appalling in Lea's careless--"Oh, it's too good!" He was used to it, but
as for me, in arguing that man's case I suddenly became aware that I was
pleading my own--pleading the case of my better work. Everything that
Lea said of this work, of this man, applied to my work; and to myself.
"There's no market for that sort of thing, no public; this book's been
all round the trade. I've had it before. The man will never come to the
front. He'll take to inn-keeping, and that will finish him off." That's
what he said, and he seemed to be speaking of me. Some one was knocking
at the door of the room--tentative knocks of rather flabby knuckles. It
was one of those sounds that one does not notice immediately. The man
might have been knocking for ten minutes. It happened to be Lea's
employer, the publisher of my first book. He opened the door at last,
and came in rather peremptorily. He had the air of having worked himself
into a temper--of being intellectually rather afraid of Lea, but of
being, for this occasion, determined to assert himself.

The introduction to myself--I had never met him--which took place after
he had hastily brought out half a sentence or so, had the effect of
putting him out of his stride, but, after having remotely acknowledged
the possibility of my existence, he began again.

The matter was one of some delicacy. I myself should have hesitated to
broach it before a third party, even one so negligible as myself. But
Mr. Polehampton apparently did not. He had to catch the last post.

Lea, it appeared, had advised him to publish a manuscript by a man
called Howden--a moderately known writer....

"But I am disturbed to find, Mr. Lea, that is, my daughter tells me that
the manuscript is not ... is not at all the thing.... In fact, it's
quite--and--eh ... I suppose it's too late to draw back?"

"Oh, it's altogether too late for _that_" Lea said, nonchalantly.
"Besides, Howden's theories always sell."

"Oh, yes, of course, of course," Mr. Polehampton interjected, hastily,
"but don't you think now ... I mean, taking into consideration the
damage it may do our reputation ... that we ought to ask Mr. Howden to
accept, say fifty pounds less than...."

"I should think it's an excellent idea," Lea said. Mr. Polehampton
glanced at him suspiciously, then turned to me.

"You see," he began to explain, "one has to be _so_ careful about these
things."

"Oh, I can quite understand," I answered. There was something so naive
in the man's point of view that I had felt my heart go out to him. And
he had taught me at last how it is that the godly grow fat at the
expense of the unrighteous. Mr. Polehampton, however, was not fat. He
was even rather thin, and his peaked grey hair, though it was actually
well brushed, looked as if it ought not to have been. He had even an
anxious expression. People said he speculated in some stock or other,
and I should say they were right.

"I ... eh ... believe I published your first book ... I lost money by
it, but I can assure you that I bear no grudge--almost a hundred pounds.
I bear no grudge...."

The man was an original. He had no idea that I might feel insulted;
indeed, he really wanted to be pleasant, and condescending, and
forgiving. I didn't feel insulted. He was too big for his clothes, gave
that impression at least, and he wore black kid gloves. Moreover, his
eyes never left the cornice of the room. I saw him rather often after
that night, but never without his gloves and never with his eyes
lowered.

"And ... eh ..." he asked, "what are you doing now, Mr. Granger?"

Lea told him Fox had taken me up; that I was going to go. I suddenly
remembered it was said of Fox that everyone he took up did "go." The
fact was obviously patent to Mr. Polehampton. He unbent with remarkable
suddenness; it reminded me of the abrupt closing of a stiff umbrella. He
became distinctly and crudely cordial--hoped that we should work
together again; once more reminded me that he had published my first
book (the words had a different savour now), and was enchanted to
discover that we were neighbours in Sussex. My cottage was within four
miles of his villa, and we were members of the same golf club.

"We must have a game--several games," he said. He struck me as the sort
of man to find a difficulty in getting anyone to play with him.

After that he went away. As I had said, I did not dislike him--he was
pathetic; but his tone of mind, his sudden change of front, unnerved me.
It proved so absolutely that I was "going to go," and I did not want to
go--in that sense. The thing is a little difficult to explain, I wanted
to take the job because I wanted to have money--for a little time, for a
year or so, but if I once began to go, the temptation would be strong to
keep on going, and I was by no means sure that I should be able to
resist the temptation. So many others had failed. What if I wrote to
Fox, and resigned?... Lea was deep in a manuscript once more.

"Shall I throw it up?" I asked suddenly. I wanted the thing settled.

"Oh, go on with it, by all means go on with it," Lea answered.

"And ...?" I postulated.

"Take your chance of the rest," he supplied; "you've had a pretty bad
time."

"I suppose," I reflected, "if I haven't got the strength of mind to get
out of it in time, I'm not up to much."

"There's that, too," he commented, "the game may not be worth the
candle." I was silent. "You must take your chance when you get it," he
added.

He had resumed his reading, but he looked up again when I gave way, as I
did after a moment's thought.

"Of course," he said, "it will probably be all right. You do your best.
It's a good thing ... might even do you good."

In that way the thing went through. As I was leaving the room, the idea
occurred to me, "By the way, you don't know anything of a clique: the
Dimensionists--_Fourth_ Dimensionists?"

"Never heard of them," he negatived. "What's their specialty?"

"They're going to inherit the earth," I answered.

"Oh, I wish them joy," he closed.

"You don't happen to be one yourself? I believe it's a sort of secret
society." He wasn't listening. I went out quietly.

The night effects of that particular neighbourhood have always affected
me dismally. That night they upset me, upset me in much the same way,
acting on much the same nerves as the valley in which I had walked with
that puzzling girl. I remembered that she had said she stood for the
future, that she was a symbol of my own decay--the whole silly farrago,
in fact. I reasoned with myself--that I was tired, out of trim, and so
on, that I was in a fit state to be at the mercy of any nightmare. I
plunged into Southampton Row. There was safety in the contact with the
crowd, in jostling, in being jostled.




CHAPTER SIX


It was Saturday and, as was his custom during the session, the Foreign
Secretary had gone for privacy and rest till Monday to a small country
house he had within easy reach of town. I went down with a letter from
Fox in my pocket, and early in the afternoon found myself talking
without any kind of inward disturbance to the Minister's aunt, a lean,
elderly lady, with a keen eye, and credited with a profound knowledge of
European politics. She had a rather abrupt manner and a business-like,
brown scheme of coloration. She looked people very straight in the face,
bringing to bear all the penetration which, as rumour said, enabled her
to take a hidden, but very real part in the shaping of our foreign
policy. She seemed to catalogue me, label me, and lay me on the shelf,
before I had given my first answer to her first question.

"You ought to know this part of the country well," she said. I think she
was considering me as a possible canvasser--an infinitesimal thing, but
of a kind possibly worth remembrance at the next General Election.

"No," I said, "I've never been here before."

"Etchingham is only three miles away."

It was new to me to be looked upon as worth consideration for my
place-name. I realised that Miss Churchill accorded me toleration on its
account, that I was regarded as one of the Grangers of Etchingham, who
had taken to literature.

"I met your aunt yesterday," Miss Churchill continued. She had met
everybody yesterday.

"Yes," I said, non-committally. I wondered what had happened at that
meeting. My aunt and I had never been upon terms. She was a great
personage in her part of the world, a great dowager land-owner, as poor
as a mouse, and as respectable as a hen. She was, moreover, a keen
politician on the side of Miss Churchill. I, who am neither land-owner,
nor respectable, nor politician, had never been acknowledged--but I knew
that, for the sake of the race, she would have refrained from enlarging
on my shortcomings.

"Has she found a companion to suit her yet?" I said, absent-mindedly. I
was thinking of an old legend of my mother's. Miss Churchill looked me
in between the eyes again. She was preparing to relabel me, I think. I
had become a spiteful humourist. Possibly I might be useful for platform
malice.

"Why, yes," she said, the faintest of twinkles in her eyes, "she has
adopted a niece."

The legend went that, at a hotly contested election in which my aunt had
played a prominent part, a rainbow poster had beset the walls. "Who
starved her governess?" it had inquired.

My accidental reference to such electioneering details placed me upon an
excellent footing with Miss Churchill. I seemed quite unawares to have
asserted myself a social equal, a person not to be treated as a casual
journalist. I became, in fact, not the representative of the _Hour_--but
an Etchingham Granger that competitive forces had compelled to accept a
journalistic plum. I began to see the line I was to take throughout my
interviewing campaign. On the one hand, I was "one of us," who had
temporarily strayed beyond the pale; on the other, I was to be a sort of
great author's bottle-holder.

A side door, behind Miss Churchill, opened gently. There was something
very characteristic in the tentative manner of its coming ajar. It
seemed to say: "Why any noisy vigour?" It seemed to be propelled by a
contemplative person with many things on his mind. A tall, grey man in
the doorway leaned the greater part of his weight on the arm that was
stretched down to the handle. He was looking thoughtfully at a letter
that he held in his other hand. A face familiar enough in caricatures
suddenly grew real to me--more real than the face of one's nearest
friends, yet older than one had any wish to expect. It was as if I had
gazed more intently than usual at the face of a man I saw daily, and had
found him older and greyer than he had ever seemed before--as if I had
begun to realise that the world had moved on.

He said, languidly--almost protestingly, "What am I to do about the Duc
de Mersch?"

Miss Churchill turned swiftly, almost apprehensively, toward him. She
uttered my name and he gave the slightest of starts of annoyance--a
start that meant, "Why wasn't I warned before?" This irritated me; I
knew well enough what were his relations with de Mersch, and the man
took me for a little eavesdropper, I suppose. His attitudes were rather
grotesque, of the sort that would pass in a person of his eminence. He
stuck his eye-glasses on the end of his nose, looked at me
short-sightedly, took them off and looked again. He had the air of
looking down from an immense height--of needing a telescope.

"Oh, ah ... Mrs. Granger's son, I presume.... I wasn't aware...." The
hesitation of his manner made me feel as if we never should get
anywhere--not for years and years.

"No," I said, rather brusquely, "I'm only from the _Hour_."

He thought me one of Fox's messengers then, said that Fox might have
written: "Have saved you the trouble, I mean ... or...."

He had the air of wishing to be amiable, of wishing, even, to please me
by proving that he was aware of my identity.

"Oh," I said, a little loftily, "I haven't any message, I've only come
to interview you." An expression of dismay sharpened the lines of his
face.

"To...." he began, "but I've never allowed--" He recovered himself
sharply, and set the glasses vigorously on his nose; at last he had
found the right track. "Oh, I remember now," he said, "I hadn't looked
at it in that way."

The whole thing grated on my self-love and I became, in a contained way,
furiously angry. I was impressed with the idea that the man was only a
puppet in the hands of Fox and de Mersch, and that lot. And he gave
himself these airs of enormous distance. I, at any rate, was
clean-handed in the matter; I hadn't any axe to grind.

"Ah, yes," he said, hastily, "you are to draw my portrait--as Fox put
it. He sent me your Jenkins sketch. I read it--it struck a very nice
note. And so--." He sat himself down on a preposterously low chair, his
knees on a level with his chin. I muttered that I feared he would find
the process a bore.

"Not more for me than for you," he answered, seriously--"one has to do
these things."

"Why, yes," I echoed, "one has to do these things." It struck me that he
regretted it--regretted it intensely; that he attached a bitter meaning
to the words.

"And ... what is the procedure?" he asked, after a pause. "I am new to
the sort of thing." He had the air, I thought, of talking to some
respectable tradesman that one calls in only when one is _in
extremis_--to a distinguished pawnbroker, a man quite at the top of a
tree of inferior timber.

"Oh, for the matter of that, so am I," I answered. "I'm supposed to get
your atmosphere, as Callan put it."

"Indeed," he answered, absently, and then, after a pause, "You know
Callan?" I was afraid I should fall in his estimation.

"One has to do these things," I said; "I've just been getting his
atmosphere."

He looked again at the letter in his hand, smoothed his necktie and was
silent. I realised that I was in the way, but I was still so disturbed
that I forgot how to phrase an excuse for a momentary absence.

"Perhaps, ..." I began.

He looked at me attentively.

"I mean, I think I'm in the way," I blurted out.

"Well," he answered, "it's quite a small matter. But, if you are to get
my atmosphere, we may as well begin out of doors." He hesitated, pleased
with his witticism; "Unless you're tired," he added.

"I will go and get ready," I said, as if I were a lady with
bonnet-strings to tie. I was conducted to my room, where I kicked my
heels for a decent interval. When I descended, Mr. Churchill was
lounging about the room with his hands in his trouser-pockets and his
head hanging limply over his chest. He said, "Ah!" on seeing me, as if
he had forgotten my existence. He paused for a long moment, looked
meditatively at himself in the glass over the fireplace, and then grew
brisk. "Come along," he said.

We took a longish walk through a lush home-country meadow land. We
talked about a number of things, he opening the ball with that infernal
Jenkins sketch. I was in the stage at which one is sick of the thing,
tired of the bare idea of it--and Mr. Churchill's laboriously kind
phrases made the matter no better.

"You know who Jenkins stands for?" I asked. I wanted to get away on the
side issues.

"Oh, I guessed it was----" he answered. They said that Mr. Churchill
was an enthusiast for the school of painting of which Jenkins was the
last exponent. He began to ask questions about him. Did he still paint?
Was he even alive?

"I once saw several of his pictures," he reflected. "His work certainly
appealed to me ... yes, it appealed to me. I meant at the time ... but
one forgets; there are so many things." It seemed to me that the man
wished by these detached sentences to convey that he had the weight of a
kingdom--of several kingdoms--on his mind; that he could spare no more
than a fragment of his thoughts for everyday use.

"You must take me to see him," he said, suddenly. "I ought to have
something." I thought of poor white-haired Jenkins, and of his long
struggle with adversity. It seemed a little cruel that Churchill should
talk in that way without meaning a word of it--as if the words were a
polite formality.

"Nothing would delight me more," I answered, and added, "nothing in the
world."

He asked me if I had seen such and such a picture, talked of artists,
and praised this and that man very fittingly, but with a certain
timidity--a timidity that lured me back to my normally overbearing frame
of mind. In such matters I was used to hearing my own voice. I could
talk a man down, and, with a feeling of the unfitness of things, I
talked Churchill down. The position, even then, struck me as gently
humorous. It was as if some infinitely small animal were bullying some
colossus among the beasts. I was of no account in the world, he had his
say among the Olympians. And I talked recklessly, like any little
school-master, and he swallowed it.

We reached the broad market-place of a little, red and grey, home county
town; a place of but one street dominated by a great inn-signboard a-top
of an enormous white post. The effigy of So-and-So of gracious memory
swung lazily, creaking, overhead.

"This is Etchingham," Churchill said.

It was a pleasant commentary on the course of time, this entry into the
home of my ancestors. I had been without the pale for so long, that I
had never seen the haunt of ancient peace. They had done very little,
the Grangers of Etchingham--never anything but live at Etchingham and
quarrel at Etchingham and die at Etchingham and be the monstrous
important Grangers of Etchingham. My father had had the undesirable
touch, not of the genius, but of the Bohemian. The Grangers of
Etchingham had cut him adrift and he had swum to sink in other seas. Now
I was the last of the Grangers and, as things went, was quite the best
known of all of them. They had grown poor in their generation; they bade
fair to sink, even as, it seemed, I bade fair to rise, and I had come
back to the old places on the arm of one of the great ones of the earth.
I wondered what the portentous old woman who ruled alone in Etchingham
thought of these times--the portentous old woman who ruled, so they
said, the place with a rod of iron; who made herself unbearable to her
companions and had to fall back upon an unfortunate niece. I wondered
idly who the niece could be; certainly not a Granger of Etchingham, for
I was the only one of the breed. One of her own nieces, most probably.
Churchill had gone into the post-office, leaving me standing at the foot
of the sign-post. It was a pleasant summer day, the air very clear, the
place very slumbrous. I looked up the street at a pair of great stone
gate-posts, august, in their way, standing distinctly aloof from the
common houses, a little weather-stained, staidly lichened. At the top of
each column sat a sculptured wolf--as far as I knew, my own crest. It
struck me pleasantly that this must be the entrance of the Manor house.

The tall iron gates swung inward, and I saw a girl on a bicycle curve
out, at the top of the sunny street. She glided, very clear, small, and
defined, against the glowing wall, leaned aslant for the turn, and came
shining down toward me. My heart leapt; she brought the whole thing into
composition--the whole of that slumbrous, sunny street. The bright sky
fell back into place, the red roofs, the blue shadows, the red and blue
of the sign-board, the blue of the pigeons walking round my feet, the
bright red of a postman's cart. She was gliding toward me, growing and
growing into the central figure. She descended and stood close to me.

"You?" I said. "What blessed chance brought you here?"

"Oh, I am your aunt's companion," she answered, "her niece, you know."

"Then you _must_ be a cousin," I said.

"No; sister," she corrected, "I assure you it's sister. Ask anyone--ask
your aunt." I was braced into a state of puzzled buoyancy.

"But really, you know," I said. She was smiling, standing up squarely to
me, leaning a little back, swaying her machine with the motion of her
body.

"It's a little ridiculous, isn't it?" she said.

"Very," I answered, "but even at that, I don't see--. And I'm not
phenomenally dense."

"Not phenomenally," she answered.

"Considering that I'm not a--not a Dimensionist," I bantered. "But you
have really palmed yourself off on my aunt?"

"Really," she answered, "she doesn't know any better. She believes in me
immensely. I am such a real Granger, there never was a more typical one.
And we shake our heads together over you." My bewilderment was infinite,
but it stopped short of being unpleasant.

"Might I call on my aunt?" I asked. "It wouldn't interfere--"

"Oh, it wouldn't _interfere_," she said, "but we leave for Paris
to-morrow. We are very busy. We--that is, my aunt; I am too young and
too, too discreet--have a little salon where we hatch plots against half
the regimes in Europe. You have no idea how Legitimate we are."

"I don't understand in the least," I said; "not in the least."

"Oh, you must take me literally if you want to understand," she
answered, "and you won't do that. I tell you plainly that I find my
account in unsettled states, and that I am unsettling them. Everywhere.
You will see."

She spoke with her monstrous dispassionateness, and I felt a shiver pass
down my spine, very distinctly. I was thinking what she might do if ever
she became in earnest, and if ever I chanced to stand in her way--as her
husband, for example.

"I wish you would talk sense--for one blessed minute," I said; "I want
to get things a little settled in my mind."

"Oh, I'll talk sense," she said, "by the hour, but you won't listen.
Take your friend, Churchill, now. He's the man that we're going to bring
down. I mentioned it to you, and so...."

"But this is sheer madness," I answered.

"Oh, no, it's a bald statement of fact," she went on.

"I don't see how," I said, involuntarily.

"Your article in the _Hour_ will help. Every trifle will help," she
said. "Things that you understand and others that you cannot.... He is
identifying himself with the Duc de Mersch. That looks nothing, but it's
fatal. There will be friendships ... and desertions."

"Ah!" I said. I had had an inkling of this, and it made me respect her
insight into home politics. She must have been alluding to Gurnard, whom
everybody--perhaps from fear--pretended to trust. She looked at me and
smiled again. It was still the same smile; she was not radiant to-day
and pensive to-morrow. "Do you know I don't like to hear that?" I began.

"Oh, there's irony in it, and pathos, and that sort of thing," she said,
with the remotest chill of mockery in her intonation. "He goes into it
clean-handed enough and he only half likes it. But he sees that it's his
last chance. It's not that he's worn out--but he feels that his time has
come--unless he does something. And so he's going to do something. You
understand?"

"Not in the least," I said, light-heartedly.

"Oh, it's the System for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions--the
Greenland affair of my friend de Mersch. Churchill is going to make a
grand coup with that--to keep himself from slipping down hill, and, of
course, it would add immensely to your national prestige. And he only
half sees what de Mersch is or _isn't_."

"This is all Greek to me," I muttered rebelliously.

"Oh, I know, I know," she said. "But one has to do these things, and I
want you to understand. So Churchill doesn't like the whole business.
But he's under the shadow. He's been thinking a good deal lately that
his day is over--I'll prove it to you in a minute--and so--oh, he's
going to make a desperate effort to get in touch with the spirit of the
times that he doesn't like and doesn't understand. So he lets you get
his atmosphere. That's all."

"Oh, that's _all_," I said, ironically.

"Of course he'd have liked to go on playing the stand-off to chaps like
you and me," she mimicked the tone and words of Fox himself.

"This is witchcraft," I said. "How in the world do you know what Fox
said to me?"

"Oh, I know," she said. It seemed to me that she was playing me with all
this nonsense--as if she must have known that I had a tenderness for her
and were fooling me to the top of her bent. I tried to get my hook in.

"Now look here," I said, "we must get things settled. You ..."

She carried the speech off from under my nose.

"Oh, you won't denounce me," she said, "not any more than you did
before; there are so many reasons. There would be a scene, and you're
afraid of scenes--and our aunt would back _me_ up. She'd have to. My
money has been reviving the glories of the Grangers. You can see,
they've been regilding the gate."

I looked almost involuntarily at the tall iron gates through which she
had passed into my view. It was true enough--some of the scroll work was
radiant with new gold.

"Well," I said, "I will give you credit for not wishing to--to prey upon
my aunt. But still ..." I was trying to make the thing out. It struck
me that she was an American of the kind that subsidizes households like
that of Etchingham Manor. Perhaps my aunt had even forced her to take
the family name, to save appearances. The old woman was capable of
anything, even of providing an obscure nephew with a brilliant sister.
And I should not be thanked if I interfered. This skeleton of swift
reasoning passed between word and word ... "You are no sister of mine!"
I was continuing my sentence quite amiably.

Her face brightened to greet someone approaching behind me.

"Did you hear him?" she said. "_Did_ you hear him, Mr. Churchill. He
casts off--he disowns me. Isn't he a stern brother? And the quarrel is
about nothing." The impudence--or the presence of mind of
it--overwhelmed me.

Churchill smiled pleasantly.

"Oh--one always quarrels about nothing," Churchill answered. He spoke a
few words to her; about my aunt; about the way her machine ran--that
sort of thing. He behaved toward her as if she were an indulged child,
impertinent with licence and welcome enough. He himself looked rather
like the short-sighted, but indulgent and very meagre lion that peers at
the unicorn across a plum-cake.

"So you are going back to Paris," he said. "Miss Churchill will be
sorry. And you are going to continue to--to break up the universe?"

"Oh, yes," she answered, "we are going on with that, my aunt would never
give it up. She couldn't, you know."

"You'll get into trouble," Churchill said, as if he were talking to a
child intent on stealing apples. "And when is our turn coming? You're
going to restore the Stuarts, aren't you?" It was his idea of badinage,
amiable without consequence.

"Oh, not quite that," she answered, "not _quite_ that." It was curious
to watch her talking to another man--to a man, not a bagman like Callan.
She put aside the face she always showed me and became at once what
Churchill took her for--a spoiled child. At times she suggested a
certain kind of American, and had that indefinable air of glib
acquaintance with the names, and none of the spirit of tradition. One
half expected her to utter rhapsodies about donjon-keeps.

"Oh, you know," she said, with a fine affectation of aloofness, "we
shall have to be rather hard upon you; we shall crumple you up like--"
Churchill had been moving his stick absent-mindedly in the dust of the
road, he had produced a big "C H U." She had erased it with the point of
her foot--"like that," she concluded.

He laid his head back and laughed almost heartily.

"Dear me," he said, "I had no idea that I was so much in the way of--of
yourself and Mrs. Granger."

"Oh, it's not only that," she said, with a little smile and a cast of
the eye to me. "But you've got to make way for the future."

Churchill's face changed suddenly. He looked rather old, and grey, and
wintry, even a little frail. I understood what she was proving to me,
and I rather disliked her for it. It seemed wantonly cruel to remind a
man of what he was trying to forget.

"Ah, yes," he said, with the gentle sadness of quite an old man, "I dare
say there is more in that than you think. Even you will have to learn."

"But not for a long time," she interrupted audaciously.

"I hope not," he answered, "I hope not." She nodded and glided away.

We resumed the road in silence. Mr. Churchill smiled at his own thoughts
once or twice.

"A most amusing ..." he said at last. "She does me a great deal of good,
a great deal."

I think he meant that she distracted his thoughts.

"Does she always talk like that?" I asked. He had hardly spoken to me,
and I felt as if I were interrupting a reverie--but I wanted to know.

"I should say she did," he answered; "I should _say_ so. But Miss
Churchill says that she has a real genius for organization. She used to
see a good deal of them, before they went to Paris, you know."

"What are they doing there?" It was as if I were extracting secrets from
a sleep-walker.

"Oh, they have a kind of a meeting place, for all kinds of Legitimist
pretenders--French and Spanish, and that sort of thing. I believe Mrs.
Granger takes it very seriously." He looked at me suddenly. "But you
ought to know more about it than I do," he said.

"Oh, we see very little of each other," I answered, "you could hardly
call us brother and sister."

"Oh, I see," he answered. I don't know what he saw. For myself, I saw
nothing.




CHAPTER SEVEN


I succeeded in giving Fox what his journal wanted; I got the atmosphere
of Churchill and his house, in a way that satisfied the people for whom
it was meant. His house was a pleasant enough place, of the sort where
they do you well, but not nauseously well. It stood in a tranquil
countryside, and stood there modestly. Architecturally speaking, it was
gently commonplace; one got used to it and liked it. And Churchill
himself, when one had become accustomed to his manner, one liked very
well--very well indeed. He had a dainty, dilettante mind, delicately
balanced, with strong limitations, a fantastic temperament for a person
in his walk of life--but sane, mind you, persistent. After a time, I
amused myself with a theory that his heart was not in his work, that
circumstance had driven him into the career of politics and ironical
fate set him at its head. For myself, I had an intense contempt for the
political mind, and it struck me that he had some of the same feeling.
He had little personal quaintnesses, too, a deference, a modesty, an
open-mindedness.

I was with him for the greater part of his weekend holiday; hung,
perforce, about him whenever he had any leisure. I suppose he found me
tiresome--but one has to do these things. He talked, and I talked;
heavens, how we talked! He was almost always deferential, I almost
always dogmatic; perhaps because the conversation kept on my own ground.
Politics we never touched. I seemed to feel that if I broached them, I
should be checked--politely, but very definitely. Perhaps he actually
contrived to convey as much to me; perhaps I evolved the idea that if I
were to say:

"What do you think about the 'Greenland System'"--he would answer:

"I try not to think about it," or whatever gently closuring phrase his
mind conceived. But I never did so; there were so many other topics.

He was then writing his _Life of Cromwell_ and his mind was very full of
his subject. Once he opened his heart, after delicately sounding me for
signs of boredom. It happened, by the merest chance--one of those blind
chances that inevitably lead in the future--that I, too, was obsessed at
that moment by the Lord Oliver. A great many years before, when I was a
yearling of tremendous plans, I had set about one of those glorious
novels that one plans--a splendid thing with Old Noll as the hero or the
heavy father. I had haunted the bookstalls in search of local colour and
had wonderfully well invested my half-crowns. Thus a company of
seventeenth century tracts, dog-eared, coverless, but very glorious
under their dust, accompany me through life. One parts last with those
relics of a golden age, and during my late convalescence I had reread
many of them, the arbitrary half-remembered phrases suggesting all sorts
of scenes--lamplight in squalid streets, trays full of weather-beaten
books. So, even then, my mind was full of Mercurius Rusticus. Mr.
Churchill on Cromwell amused me immensely and even excited me. It was
life, this attending at a self-revelation of an impossible temperament.
It did me good, as he had said of my pseudo-sister. It was fantastic--as
fantastic as herself--and it came out more in his conversation than in
the book itself. I had something to do with that, of course. But imagine
the treatment accorded to Cromwell by this delicate, negative,
obstinately judicial personality. It was the sort of thing one wants to
get into a novel. It was a lesson to me--in temperament, in point of
view; I went with his mood, tried even to outdo him, in the hope of
spurring him to outdo himself. I only mention it because I did it so
well that it led to extraordinary consequences.

We were walking up and down his lawn, in the twilight, after his Sunday
supper. The pale light shone along the gleaming laurels and dwelt upon
the soft clouds of orchard blossoms that shimmered above them. It dwelt,
too, upon the silver streaks in his dark hair and made his face seem
more pallid, and more old. It affected me like some intense piece of
irony. It was like hearing a dying man talk of the year after next. I
had the sense of the unreality of things strong upon me. Why should
nightingale upon nightingale pour out volley upon volley of song for the
delight of a politician whose heart was not in his task of keeping back
the waters of the deluge, but who grew animated at the idea of damning
one of the titans who had let loose the deluge?

About a week after--or it may have been a fortnight--Churchill wrote to
me and asked me to take him to see the Jenkins of my Jenkins story. It
was one of those ordeals that one goes through when one has tried to
advance one's friends. Jenkins took the matter amiss, thought it was a
display of insulting patronage on the part of officialism. He was
reluctant to show his best work, the forgotten masterpieces, the things
that had never sold, that hung about on the faded walls and rotted in
cellars. He would not be his genial self; he would not talk. Churchill
behaved very well--I think he understood.

Jenkins thawed before his gentle appreciations. I could see the change
operating within him. He began to realise that this incredible visit
from a man who ought to be hand and glove with Academicians was
something other than a spy's encroachment. He was old, you must
remember, and entirely unsuccessful. He had fought a hard fight and had
been worsted. He took his revenge in these suspicions.

We younger men adored him. He had the ruddy face and the archaic silver
hair of the King of Hearts; and a wonderful elaborate politeness that he
had inherited from his youth--from the days of Brummell. And, whilst all
his belongings were rotting into dust, he retained an extraordinarily
youthful and ingenuous habit of mind. It was that, or a little of it,
that gave the charm to my Jenkins story.

It was a disagreeable experience. I wished so much that the perennial
hopefulness of the man should at last escape deferring and I was afraid
that Churchill would chill before Jenkins had time to thaw. But, as I
have said, I think Churchill understood. He smiled his kindly,
short-sighted smile over canvas after canvas, praised the right thing in
each, remembered having seen this and that in such and such a year, and
Jenkins thawed.

He happened to leave the room--to fetch some studies, to hurry up the
tea or for some such reason. Bereft of his presence the place suddenly
grew ghostly. It was as if the sun had died in the sky and left us in
that nether world where dead, buried pasts live in a grey, shadowless
light. Jenkins' palette glowed from above a medley of stained rags on
his open colour table. The rush-bottom of his chair resembled a
wind-torn thatch.

"One can draw morals from a life like that," I said suddenly. I was
thinking rather of Jenkins than of the man I was talking to.

"Why, yes," he said, absently, "I suppose there are men who haven't the
knack of getting on."

"It's more than a knack," I said, with unnecessary bitterness. "It's a
temperament."

"I think it's a habit, too. It may be acquired, mayn't it?"

"No, no," I fulminated, "it's precisely because it can't be acquired
that the best men--the men like ..." I stopped suddenly, impressed by
the idea that the thing was out of tone. I had to assert myself more
than I liked in talking to Churchill. Otherwise I should have
disappeared. A word from him had the weight of three kingdoms and
several colonies behind it, and I was forced to get that out of my head
by making conversation a mere matter of temperament. In that I was the
stronger. If I wanted to say a thing, I said it; but he was hampered by
a judicial mind. It seemed, too, that he liked a dictatorial
interlocutor, else he would hardly have brought himself into contact
with me again. Perhaps it was new to him. My eye fell upon a couple of
masks, hanging one on each side of the fireplace. The room was full of a
profusion of little casts, thick with dust upon the shoulders, the hair,
the eyelids, on every part that projected outward.

"By-the-bye," I said, "that's a death-mask of Cromwell."

"Ah!" he answered, "I knew there _was_...."

He moved very slowly toward it, rather as if he did not wish to bring it
within his field of view. He stopped before reaching it and pivotted
slowly to face me.

"About my book," he opened suddenly, "I have so little time." His
briskness dropped into a half complaint, like a faintly suggested avowal
of impotence. "I have been at it four years now. It struck me--you
seemed to coincide so singularly with my ideas."

His speech came wavering to a close, but he recommenced it
apologetically--as if he wished me to help him out.

"I went to see Smithson the publisher about it, and he said he had no
objection...."

He looked appealingly at me. I kept silence.

"Of course, it's not your sort of work. But you might try.... You
see...." He came to a sustained halt.

"I don't understand," I said, rather coldly, when the silence became
embarrassing. "You want me to 'ghost' for you?"

"'Ghost,' good gracious no," he said, energetically; "dear me, no!"

"Then I really don't understand," I said.

"I thought you might see your ... I wanted you to collaborate with me.
Quite publicly, of course, as far as the epithet applies."

"To collaborate," I said slowly. "You...."

I was looking at a miniature of the Farnese Hercules--I wondered what it
meant, what club had struck the wheel of my fortune and whirled it into
this astounding attitude.

"Of course you must think about it," he said.

"I don't know," I muttered; "the idea is so new. It's so little in my
line. I don't know what I should make of it."

I talked at random. There were so many thoughts jostling in my head. It
seemed to carry me so much farther from the kind of work I wanted to do.
I did not really doubt my ability--one does not. I rather regarded it as
work upon a lower plane. And it was a tremendous--an incredibly
tremendous--opportunity.

"You know pretty well how much I've done," he continued. "I've got a
good deal of material together and a good deal of the actual writing is
done. But there is ever so much still to do. It's getting beyond me, as
I said just now."

I looked at him again, rather incredulously. He stood before me, a thin
parallelogram of black with a mosaic of white about the throat. The
slight grotesqueness of the man made him almost impossibly real in his
abstracted earnestness. He so much meant what he said that he ignored
what his hands were doing, or his body or his head. He had taken a very
small, very dusty book out of a little shelf beside him, and was
absently turning over the rusty leaves, while he talked with his head
bent over it. What was I to him, or he to me?

"I could give my Saturday afternoons to it," he was saying, "whenever
you could come down."

"It's immensely kind of you," I began.

"Not at all, not at all," he waived. "I've set my heart on doing it and,
unless you help me, I don't suppose I ever shall get it done."

"But there are hundreds of others," I said.

"There may be," he said, "there may be. But I have not come across
them."

I was beset by a sudden emotion of blind candour.

"Oh, nonsense, nonsense," I said. "Don't you see that you are offering
me the chance of a lifetime?"

Churchill laughed.

"After all, one cannot refuse to take what offers," he said. "Besides,
your right man to do the work might not suit me as a collaborator."

"It's very tempting," I said.

"Why, then, succumb," he smiled.

I could not find arguments against him, and I succumbed as Jenkins
re-entered the room.




CHAPTER EIGHT


After that I began to live, as one lives; and for forty-nine weeks. I
know it was forty-nine, because I got fifty-two atmospheres in all;
Callan's and Churchill's, and those forty-nine and the last one that
finished the job and the year of it. It was amusing work in its way;
people mostly preferred to have their atmospheres taken at their country
houses--it showed that they had them, I suppose. Thus I spent a couple
of days out of every week in agreeable resorts, and people were very
nice to me--it was part of the game.

So I had a pretty good time for a year and enjoyed it, probably because
I had had a pretty bad one for several years. I filled in the rest of my
weeks by helping Fox and collaborating with Mr. Churchill and adoring
Mrs. Hartly at odd moments. I used to hang about the office of the
_Hour_ on the chance of snapping up a blank three lines fit for a
subtle puff of her. Sometimes they were too hurried to be subtle, and
then Mrs. Hartly was really pleased.

I never understood her in the least, and I very much doubt whether she
ever understood a word I said. I imagine that I must have talked to her
about her art or her mission--things obviously as strange to her as to
the excellent Hartly himself. I suppose she hadn't any art; I am certain
she hadn't any mission, except to be adored. She walked about the stage
and one adored her, just as she sat about her flat and was adored, and
there the matter ended.

As for Fox, I seemed to suit him--I don't in the least know why. No
doubt he knew me better than I knew myself. He used to get hold of me
whilst I was hanging about the office on the chance of engaging space
for Mrs. Hartly, and he used to utilise me for the ignoblest things. I
saw men for him, scribbled notes for him, abused people through the
telephone, and wrote articles. Of course, there were the pickings.

I never understood Fox--not in the least, not more than I understood
Mrs. Hartly. He had the mannerisms of the most incredible vulgarian and
had, apparently, the point of view of a pig. But there was something
else that obscured all that, that forced one to call him a _wonderful_
man. Everyone called him that. He used to say that he knew what he
wanted and that he got it, and that was true, too. I didn't in the least
want to do his odd jobs, even for the ensuing pickings, and I didn't
want to be hail-fellow with him. But I did them and I was, without even
realising that it was distasteful to me. It was probably the same with
everybody else.

I used to have an idea that I was going to reform him; that one day I
should make him convert the _Hour_ into an asylum for writers of merit.
He used to let me have my own way sometimes--just often enough to keep
my conscience from inconveniencing me. He let me present Lea with an
occasional column and a half; and once he promised me that one day he
would allow me to get the atmosphere of Arthur Edwards, the novelist.

Then there was Churchill and the _Life of Cromwell_ that progressed
slowly. The experiment succeeded well enough, as I grew less domineering
and he less embarrassed. Toward the end I seemed to have become a
familiar inmate of his house. I used to go down with him on Saturday
afternoons and we talked things over in the train. It was, to an idler
like myself, wonderful the way that essential idler's days were cut out
and fitted in like the squares of a child's puzzle; little passages of
work of one kind fitting into quite unrelated passages of something
else. He did it well, too, without the remotest semblance of hurry.

I suppose that actually the motive power was his aunt. People used to
say so, but it did not appear on the surface to anyone in close contact
with the man; or it appeared only in very small things. We used to work
in a tall, dark, pleasant room, book-lined, and giving on to a lawn that
was always an asylum for furtive thrushes. Miss Churchill, as a rule,
sat half forgotten near the window, with the light falling over her
shoulder. She was always very absorbed in papers; seemed to be spending
laborious days in answering letters, in evolving reports. Occasionally
she addressed a question to her nephew, occasionally received guests
that came informally but could not be refused admittance. Once it was a
semi-royal personage, once the Duc de Mersch, my reputed employer.

The latter, I remember, was announced when Churchill and I were finally
finishing our account of the tremendous passing of the Protector. In
that silent room I had a vivid sense of the vast noise of the storm in
that twilight of the crowning mercy. I seemed to see the candles
a-flicker in the eddies of air forced into the gloomy room; the great
bed and the portentous uncouth form that struggled in the shadows of the
hangings. Miss Churchill looked up from the card that had been placed in
her hands.

"Edward," she said, "the Duc de Mersch."

Churchill rose irritably from his low seat. "Confound him," he said, "I
won't see him."

"You can't help it, I think," his aunt said, reflectively; "you will
have to settle it sooner or later."

I know pretty well what it was they had to settle--the Greenland affair
that had hung in the air so long. I knew it from hearsay, from Fox,
vaguely enough. Mr. Gurnard was said to recommend it for financial
reasons, the Duc to be eager, Churchill to hang back unaccountably. I
never had much head for details of this sort, but people used to explain
them to me--to explain the reasons for de Mersch's eagerness. They were
rather shabby, rather incredible reasons, that sounded too reasonable to
be true. He wanted the money for his railways--wanted it very badly. He
was vastly in want of money, he was this, that, and the other in certain
international-philanthropic concerns, and had a finger in this, that,
and the other pie. There was an "All Round the World Cable Company" that
united hearts and hands, and a "Pan-European Railway, Exploration, and
Civilisation Company" that let in light in dark places, and an
"International Housing of the Poor Company," as well as a number of
others. Somewhere at the bottom of these seemingly bottomless concerns,
the Duc de Mersch was said to be moving, and the _Hour_ certainly
contained periodically complimentary allusions to their higher
philanthropy and dividend-earning prospects. But that was as much as I
knew. The same people--people one met in smoking-rooms--said that the
Trans-Greenland Railway was the last card of de Mersch. British
investors wouldn't trust the Duc without some sort of guarantee from
the British Government, and no other investor would trust him on any
terms. England was to guarantee something or other--the interest for a
number of years, I suppose. I didn't believe them, of course--one makes
it a practice to believe nothing of the sort. But I recognised that the
evening was momentous to somebody--that Mr. Gurnard and the Duc de
Mersch and Churchill were to discuss something and that I was remotely
interested because the _Hour_ employed me.

Churchill continued to pace up and down.

"Gurnard dines here to-night," his aunt said.

"Oh, I see." His hands played with some coins in his trouser-pockets. "I
see," he said again, "they've ..."

The occasion impressed me. I remember very well the manner of both
nephew and aunt. They seemed to be suddenly called to come to a decision
that was no easy one, that they had wished to relegate to an indefinite
future.

She left Churchill pacing nervously up and down.

"I could go on with something else, if you like," I said.

"But I don't like," he said, energetically; "I'd much rather not see
the man. You know the sort of person he is."

"Why, no," I answered, "I never studied the Almanac de Gotha."

"Oh, I forgot," he said. He seemed vexed with himself.

Churchill's dinners were frequently rather trying to me. Personages of
enormous importance used to drop in--and reveal themselves as rather
asinine. At the best of times they sat dimly opposite to me, discomposed
me, and disappeared. Sometimes they stared me down. That night there
were two of them.

Gurnard I had heard of. One can't help hearing of a Chancellor of the
Exchequer. The books of reference said that he was the son of one
William Gurnard, Esq., of Grimsby; but I remember that once in my club a
man who professed to know everything, assured me that W. Gurnard, Esq.
(whom he had described as a fish salesman), was only an adoptive father.
His rapid rise seemed to me inexplicable till the same man accounted for
it with a shrug: "When a man of such ability believes in nothing, and
sticks at nothing, there's no saying how far he may go. He has kicked
away every ladder. He doesn't mean to come down."

This, no doubt, explained much; but not everything in his fabulous
career. His adherents called him an inspired statesman; his enemies set
him down a mere politician. He was a man of forty-five, thin, slightly
bald, and with an icy assurance of manner. He was indifferent to attacks
upon his character, but crushed mercilessly every one who menaced his
position. He stood alone, and a little mysterious; his own party was
afraid of him.

Gurnard was quite hidden from me by table ornaments; the Duc de Mersch
glowed with light and talked voluminously, as if he had for years and
years been starved of human society. He glowed all over, it seemed to
me. He had a glorious beard, that let one see very little of his florid
face and took the edge away from an almost non-existent forehead and
depressingly wrinkled eyelids. He spoke excellent English, rather
slowly, as if he were forever replying to toasts to his health. It
struck me that he seemed to treat Churchill in nuances as an inferior,
whilst for the invisible Gurnard, he reserved an attitude of nervous
self-assertion. He had apparently come to dilate on the _Systeme
Groenlandais_, and he dilated. Some mistaken persons had insinuated that
the _Systeme_ was neither more nor less than a corporate exploitation of
unhappy Esquimaux. De Mersch emphatically declared that those _mistaken_
people were _mistaken_, declared it with official finality. The
Esquimaux were not unhappy. I paid attention to my dinner, and let the
discourse on the affairs of the Hyperborean Protectorate lapse into an
unheeded murmur. I tried to be the simple amanuensis at the feast.

Suddenly, however, it struck me that de Mersch was talking at me; that
he had by the merest shade raised his intonation. He was dilating upon
the immense international value of the proposed Trans-Greenland Railway.
Its importance to British trade was indisputable; even the opposition
had no serious arguments to offer. It was the obvious duty of the
British Government to give the financial guarantee. He would not insist
upon the moral aspect