and in a low voice he retailed the facts.
“As I expected,” he ended, “the young man came to me again this morning. He is naturally upset. I want to keep my hand on him. Without knowing more, I can’t make up my mind whether to go further or not. Besides”–Soames hesitated; to claim a good motive was repulsive to him: “I–it seems hard on him. He’s been getting three hundred and fifty.”
“Dashed hard!” said Michael. “I say, Elderson’s a member here.”
Soames looked with renewed suspicion at the door–it still seemed opaque, and he said: “The deuce he is! Do you know him?”
“I’ve played bridge with him,” said Michael; “he’s taken some of the best off me–snorting good player.”
“Ah!” said Soames–he never played cards himself. “I can’t take this young man into my own firm for obvious reasons; but I can trust you.”
Michael touched his forelock.
“Frightfully bucked, sir. Protection of the poor–some sleuth, too. I’ll see him to-night, and let you know what I can wangle.”
Soames nodded. ‘Good Gad!’ he thought; ‘what jargon!…’
The interview served Michael the good turn of taking his thoughts off himself. Temperamentally he sided already with the young man Butterfield; and, lighting a cigarette, he went into the card-room. Sitting on the high fender, he was impressed–the room was square, and within it were three square card tables, set askew to the walls, with three triangles of card players.
‘If only,’ thought Michael, ‘the fourth player sat under the table, the pattern would be complete. It’s having the odd player loose that spoils the cubes.’ And with something of a thrill he saw that Elderson was a fourth player! Sharp and impassive, he was engaged in applying a knife to the end of a cigar. Gosh! what sealed books faces were! Each with pages and pages of private thoughts, interests, schemes, fancies, passions, hopes and fears; and down came death–splosh! – and a creature wiped out, like a fly on a wall, and nobody any more could see its little close mechanism working away for its own ends, in its own privacy and its own importance; nobody any more could speculate on whether it was a clean or a dirty little bit of work. Hard to tell! They ran in all shapes! Elderson, for instance–was he a nasty mess, or just a lamb of God who didn’t look it? ‘Somehow,’ thought Michael, ‘I feel he’s a womaniser. Now why?’ He spread his hands out behind him to the fire, rubbing them together like a fly that has been in treacle. If one couldn’t tell what was passing in the mind of one’s own wife in one’s own house, how on earth could one tell anything from the face of a stranger, and he one of the closest bits of mechanism in the world–an English gentleman of business! If only life were like ‘The Idiot’ or ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ and everybody went about turning out their inmost hearts at the tops of their voices! If only club card rooms had a dash of epilepsy in their composition! But–nothing! Nothing! The world was full of wonderful secrets which everybody kept to themselves without captions or close-ups to give them away!
A footman came in, looked at the fire, stood a moment expressionless as a stork, waiting for an order to ping out, staccato, through the hum, turned and went away.
Mechanism! Everywhere–mechanism! Devices for getting away from life so complete that there seemed no life to get away from.
‘It’s all,’ he thought, ‘awfully like a man sending a registered letter to himself. And perhaps it’s just as well. Is ‘life’ a good thing–is it? Do I want to see ‘life’ raw again?’
Elderson was seated now, and Michael had a perfect view of the back of his head. It disclosed nothing.
‘I’m no sleuth,’ he thought; ‘there ought to be something in the way he doesn’t part his hair behind.’ And, getting off the fender, he went home.
At dinner he caught one of his own looks at Fleur and didn’t like it. Sleuth! And yet how not try to know what were the real thoughts and feelings of one who held his heart, like an accordion, and made it squeak and groan at pleasure!
“I saw the model you sent Aubrey yesterday,” she said. “She didn’t say anything about the clothes, but she looked ever so! What a face, Michael! Where did you come across her?”
Through Michael sped the thought: ‘Could I make her jealous?’ And he was shocked at it. A low-down thought–mean and ornery! “She blew in,” he said. “Wife of a little packer we had who took to snooping–er–books. He sells balloons now; they want money badly.”
“I see. Did you know that Aubrey’s going to paint her in the nude?”
“Phew! No! I thought she’d look good on a wrapper. I say! Ought I to stop that?”
Fleur smiled. “It’s more money and her look-out. It doesn’t matter to you, does it?”
Again that thought; again the recoil from it!
“Only,” he said, “that her husband is a decent little snipe for a snooper, and I don’t want to be more sorry for him.”
“She won’t tell him, of course.”
She said it so naturally, so simply, that the words disclosed a whole attitude of mind. One didn’t tell one’s mate what would tease the poor brute! He saw by the flutter of her white eyelids that she also realised the give-away. Should he follow it up, tell her what June Forsyte had told him–have it all out–all out? But with what purpose–to what end? Would it change things, make her love him? Would it do anything but harass her a little more; and give him the sense that he had lost his wicket trying to drive her to the pavilion? No! Better adopt the principle of secrecy she had unwittingly declared her own, bite on it, and grin. He muttered:
“I’m afraid he’ll find her rather thin.”
Her eyes were bright and steady; and again he was worried by that low-down thought: ‘Could he make her–?’
“I’ve only seen her once,” he added, “and then she was dressed.”
“I’m not jealous, Michael.”
‘No,’ he thought, ‘I wish to heaven you were!’
The words: “A young man called Butterfill to see you, sir,” were like the turning of a key in a cell door.
In the hall the young man “called Butterfill” was engaged in staring at Ting-a-ling.
‘Judging by his eyes,’ thought Michael, ‘he’s more of a dog than that little Djinn!’
“Come up to my study,” he said, “it’s cold down here. My father-inlaw tells me you want a job.”
“Yes, sir,” said the young man, following up the stairs.
“Take a pew,” said Michael; “and a cigarette. Now then! I know all about the turmoil. From your moustache, you were in the war, I suppose, like me? As between fellow-sufferers: Is your story O. K.?”
“God’s truth, sir; I only wish it wasn’t. I’d nothing to gain and everything to lose. I’d have done better to hold my tongue. It’s his word against mine, and here I am in the street. That was my first job since the war, so I can whistle for a reference.”
“Wife and two children, I think?”
“Yes, and I’ve put them in the cart for the sake of my conscience! It’s the last time I’ll do that, I know. What did it matter to me, whether the Society was cheated? My wife’s quite right, I was a fool, sir.”
“Probably,” said Michael. “Do you know anything about books?”
“Yes, sir; I’m a good book-keeper.”
“Holy Moses! OUR job is getting rid of them. My firm are publishers. We were thinking of putting on an extra traveller. Is your tongue persuasive?”
The young man smiled wanly.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Well, look here,” said Michael, carried away by the look in his eyes, “it’s all a question of a certain patter. But, of course, that’s got to be learned. I gather that you’re not a reader.”
“Well, sir, not a great reader.”
“That, perhaps, is fortunate. What you would have to do is to impress on the poor brutes who sell books that every one of the books on your list–say about thirty-five–is necessary in large numbers to his business. It’s lucky you’ve just chucked your conscience, because, as a matter of fact most of them won’t be. I’m afraid there’s nowhere you could go to to get lessons in persuasion, but you can imagine the sort of thing, and if you like to come here for an hour or two this week, I’ll put you wise about our authors, and ready you up to go before Peter.”
“Before Peter, sir?”
“The Johnny with the keys; luckily it’s Mr. Winter, not Mr. Danby; I believe I could get him to let you in for a month’s trial.”
“Sir, I’ll try my very best. My wife knows about books, she could help me a lot. I can’t tell you what I think of your kindness. The fact is, being out of a job has put the wind up me properly. I’ve not been able to save with two children; it’s like the end of the world.”
“Right-o, then! Come here tomorrow evening at nine, and I’ll stuff you. I believe you’ve got the face for the job, if you can get the patter. Only one book in twenty is a necessity really, the rest are luxuries. Your stunt will be to make them believe the nineteen are necessaries, and the twentieth a luxury that they need. It’s like food or clothes, or anything else in civilisation.”
“Yes, sir, I quite understand.”
“All right, then. Good-night, and good luck!”
Michael stood up and held out his hand. The young man took it with a queer reverential little bow. A minute later he was out in the street; and Michael in the hall was thinking: ‘Pity is tripe! Clean forgot I was a sleuth!’
Chapter X.
FACE
When Michael rose from the refectory table, Fleur had risen, too. Two days and more since she left Wilfrid’s rooms, and she had not recovered zest. The rifling of the oyster Life, the garlanding of London’s rarer flowers which kept colour in her cheeks, seemed stale, unprofitable. Those three hours, when from shock off Cork Street she came straight to shocks in her own drawing-room, had dislocated her so that she had settled to nothing since. The wound re-opened by Holly had nearly healed again. Dead lion beside live donkey cuts but dim figure. But she could not get hold again of–what? That was the trouble: What? For two whole days she had been trying. Michael was still strange, Wilfrid still lost, Jon still buried alive, and nothing seemed novel under the sun. The only object that gave her satisfaction during those two dreary, disillusioned days was the new white monkey. The more she looked at it, the more Chinese it seemed. It summed up the satirical truth of which she was perhaps subconscious, that all her little modern veerings and flutterings and rushings after the future showed that she believed in nothing but the past. The age had overdone it and must go back to ancestry for faith. Like a little bright fish out of a warm bay, making a splash in chill, strange waters, Fleur felt a subtle nostalgia.
In her Spanish room, alone with her own feelings, she stared at the porcelain fruits. They glowed, cold, uneatable! She took one up. Meant for a passion fruit? Alas! Poor passion! She dropped it with a dull clink on to the pyramid, and shuddered a little. Had she blinded Michael with her kisses? Blinded him to–what? To her incapacity for passion?
‘But I’m not incapable,’ she thought; ‘I’m not. Some day I’ll show him; I’ll show them all.’ She looked up at ‘the Goya’ hanging opposite. What gripping determination in the painting–what intensity of life in the black eyes of a rather raddled dame! SHE would know what she wanted, and get it, too! No compromise and uncertainty there–no capering round life, wondering what it meant, and whether it was worth while, nothing but hard living for the sake of living!
Fleur put her hands where her flesh ended, and her dress began. Wasn’t she as warm and firm–yes, and ten times as pretty, as that fine and evil-looking Spanish dame, with the black eyes and the wonderful lace? And, turning her back on the picture, she went into the hall. Michael’s voice and another’s! They were coming down! She slipped across into the drawing-room and took up the manuscript of a book of poems, on which she was to give Michael her opinion. She sat, not reading, wondering if he were coming in. She heard the front door close. No! He had gone out! A relief, yet chilling! Michael not warm and cheerful in the house–if it were to go on, it would be wearing. She curled herself up and tried to read. Dreary poems–free verse, blank, introspective, all about the author’s inside! No lift, no lilt! Duds! She seemed to have read them a dozen times before. She lay quite still–listening to the click and flutter of the burning logs! If the light were out she might go to sleep. She turned it off, and came back to the settee. She could see herself sitting there, a picture in the firelight; see how lonely she looked, pretty, pathetic, with everything she wished for, and–nothing! Her lip curled. She could even see her own spoiled-child ingratitude. And what was worse, she could see herself seeing it–a triple-distilled modern, so subtly arranged in life-tight compartments that she could not be submerged. If only something would blow in out of the unkempt cold, out of the waste and wilderness of a London whose flowers she plucked. The firelight–soft, uncertain–searched out spots and corners of her Chinese room, as on a stage in one of those scenes, seductive and mysterious, where one waited, to the sound of tambourines, for the next moment of the plot. She reached out and took a cigarette. She could see herself lighting it, blowing out the smoke–her own half-curled fingers, her parted lips, her white rounded arm. She was decorative! Well, and wasn’t that all that mattered? To be decorative, and make little decorations; to be pretty in a world that wasn’t pretty! In ‘Copper Coin’ there was a poem of a flicker-lit room, and a spoiled Columbine before the fire, and a Harlequin hovering without, like ‘the spectre of the rose.’ And suddenly, without warning, Fleur’s heart ached. It ached definitely, rather horribly, and, slipping down on to the floor before the fire, she snuggled her face against Ting-a-ling. The Chinese dog raised his head–his black eyes lurid in the glow.
He licked her cheek, and turned his nose away. Huf! Powder! But Fleur lay like the dead. And she saw herself lying–the curve of her hip, the chestnut glow in her short hair; she heard the steady beat of her heart. Get up! Go out! Do something! But what–what was worth doing? What had any meaning in it? She saw herself doing–extravagant things; nursing sick women; tending pale babies; making a speech in Parliament; riding a steeplechase; hoeing turnips in knickerbockers–decorative. And she lay perfectly still, bound by the filaments of her self-vision. So long as she saw herself she would do nothing–she knew it–for nothing would be worth doing! And it seemed to her, lying there so still, that not to see herself would be worse than anything. And she felt that to feel this was to acknowledge herself caged for ever.
Ting-a-ling growled, turning his nose towards the windows. “In here,” he seemed to say, “we are cosy; we think of the past. We have no use for anything outside. Kindly go away–whoever it is out there!” And again he growled–a low, continuous sound.
“What is it, Ting?”
Ting-a-ling rose on his fore-legs, with muzzle pointed at the window.
“Do you want your walk?”
“No,” said the growl.
Fleur picked him up. “Don’t be so silly!” And she went to the window. The curtains were closely drawn; rich, Chinese, lined, they excluded the night. Fleur made a chink with one hand, and started back. Against the pane was a face, the forehead pressed against the glass, the eyes closed, as if it had been there a long time. In the dark it seemed featureless, vaguely pale. She felt the dog’s body stiffen under her arm–she felt his silence. Her heart pumped. It was ghastly–face without body.
Suddenly the forehead was withdrawn, the eyes opened. She saw–the face of Wilfrid. Could he see in-see her peering out from the darkened room? Quivering all over, she let the curtains fall to. Beckon? Let him in? Go out to him? Wave him away? Her heart beat furiously. How long had he been out there–like a ghost? What did he want of her? She dropped Ting-a-ling with a flump, and pressed her hands to her forehead, trying to clear confusion from her brain. And suddenly she stepped forward and flung the curtains apart. No face! Nothing! He was gone! The dark, draughty square–not a soul in it! Had he ever been–or was the face her fancy? But Ting-a-ling! Dogs had no fancies. He had gone back to the fire and settled down again.
‘It’s not my fault,’ she thought passionately. ‘It’s not! I didn’t want him to love me. I only wanted his–his–!’ Again she sank down before the fire. “Oh! Ting, have a feeling heart!” But the Chinese dog, mindful of the flump, made no response…
Chapter XI.
COCKED HAT
After missing his vocation with the young man Butterfield, Michael had hesitated in the hall. At last he had not gone upstairs again, but quietly out. He walked past the Houses of Parliament and up Whitehall. In Trafalgar Square, it occurred to him that he had a father. Bart might be at ‘Snooks’, The Coffee House, The Aeroplane; and, with the thought, ‘He’d be restful,’ he sought the most modern of the three.
“Yes, Sir Lawrence Mont is in the lounge, sir.”
He was sitting with knees crossed, and a cigar between his finger-tips, waiting for some one to talk to.
“Ah! Michael! Can you tell me why I come here?”
“To wait for the end of the world, sir?”
Sir Lawrence sniggered. “An idea,” he said. “When the skies are wrecking civilisation, this will be the best-informed tape in London. The wish to be in at the death is perhaps the strongest of our passions, Michael. I should very much dislike being blown up, especially after dinner; but I should still more dislike missing the next show if it’s to be a really good one. The air raids were great fun, after all.”
Michael sighed.
“Yes,” he said, “the war got us used to thinking of the millennium, and then it went and stopped, and left the millennium hanging over us. Now we shall never be happy till we get it. Can I take one of your cigars, sir?”
“My dear fellow! I’ve been reading Frazer again. Extraordinary how remote all superstition seems, now that we’ve reached the ultimate truth: That enlightenment never can prevail.”
Michael stopped the lighting of his cigar.
“Do you really think that, sir?”
“What else can one think? Who can have any reasonable doubt now that with the aid of mechanics the headstrong part of man must do him in? It’s an unavoidable conclusion from all recent facts. ‘Per ardua ad astra,’ ‘Through hard knocks we shall see stars.’”
“But it’s always been like that, sir, and here we are alive?”
“They say so, but I doubt it. I fancy we’re really dead, Michael. I fancy we’re only living in the past. I don’t think–no, I don’t think we can be said to expect a future. We talk of it, but I hardly think we hope for one. Underneath our protestations we subconsciously deduce. From the mess we’ve made of it these last ten years, we can feel the far greater mess we shall make of it in the next thirty. Human nature can argue the hind leg off a donkey, but the donkey will be four-legged at the end of the discussion.”
Michael sat down suddenly and said:
“You’re a bad, bold Bart!”
Sir Lawrence smiled.
“I should be glad to think that men really believed in humanity, and all that, but you know they don’t–they believe in novelty and getting their own way. With rare exceptions they’re still monkeys, especially the scientific variety; and when you put gunpowder and a lighted match into the paws of monkeys, they blow themselves up to see the fun. Monkeys are only safe when deprived of means to be otherwise.”
“Lively, that!” said Michael.
“Not livelier than the occasion warrants, my dear boy. I’ve been thinking. We’ve got a member here who knows a trick worth twenty of any played in the war–an extraordinarily valuable fellow. The Government have got their eye on him. He’ll help the other valuable fellows in France and Germany and America and Russia to make history. Between them, they’ll do something really proud–something that’ll knock all the other achievements of man into a cocked hat. By the way, Michael, new device of ‘homo sapiens’–the cocked hat.”
“Well,” said Michael, “what are you going to do about it?”
Sir Lawrence’s eyebrow sought his hair.
“Do, my dear fellow? What should I do? Can I go out and grab him and the Government by the slack of their breeches; yes, and all the valuable fellows and Governments of the other countries? No! All I can do is to smoke my cigar and say: ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay!’ By hook or crook, they will come into their own, Michael; but in the normal course of things I shall be dead before they do.”
“I shan’t,” said Michael.
“No, my dear; but think of the explosions, the sights, the smells. By Jove, you’ve got something to live for, yet. Sometimes I wish I were your age. And sometimes,” Sir Lawrence relighted his cigar, “I don’t. Sometimes I think I’ve had enough of our pretences, and that there’s nothing left but to die like gentlemen.”
“Some Jeremiad, Dad!”
“Well,” said Sir Lawrence, with a twirl of his little grizzled moustache, “I hope I’m wrong. But we’re driving fast to a condition of things when millions can be killed by the pressing of a few buttons. What reason is there to suppose that our bumps of benevolence will increase in time to stop our using these great new toys of destruction, Michael!”
“‘Where you know little, place terrors.’”
“Very nice; where did you get that?”
“Out of a life of Christopher Columbus.”
“Old C. C.! I could bring myself to wish sometimes that he hadn’t been so deucedly inquisitive. We were snugger in the dark ages. There was something to be said for not discovering the Yanks.”
“Well,” said Michael, “I think we shall pedal through, yet. By the way, about this Elderson stunt: I’ve just seen the clerk–he doesn’t look to me the sort that would have made that up.”
“Ah! That! But if Elderson could do such a thing, well–really, anything might happen. It’s a complete stumper. He was such a pretty bat, always went in first wicket down. He and I put on fifty-four against Eton. I suppose old Forsyte told you?”
“Yes, he wanted me to find the chap a job.”
“Butterfield. Ask him if he’s related to old Butterfield the gardener? It would be something to go on. D’you find old Forsyte rather trying?”
Loyal to Fleur, Michael concealed his lips. “No, I get on very well with him.”
“He’s straight, I admit that.”
“Yes,” said Michael, “very straight.”
“But somewhat reticent.”
“Yes,” said Michael.
On this conclusion they were silent, as though terrors had been placed beyond it. And soon Michael rose. “Past ten, I’d better go home.”
Returning the way he came, he could think of nothing but Wilfrid. What wouldn’t he give to hear him say: “It’s all right, old man; I’ve got over it!”–to wring him by the hand again. Why should one catch this fatal disease called love? Why should one be driven half crazy by it? They said love was Nature’s provision against Bart’s terrors, against the valuable fellows. An insistent urge–lest the race die out. Prosaic, if true! Not that he cared whether Fleur had children. Queer how Nature camouflaged her schemes–leery old bird! But overreaching herself a bit, wasn’t she? Children might yet go clean out of fashion if Bart was right. A very little more would do it; who would have children for the mere pleasure of seeing them blown up, poisoned, starved to death? A few fanatics would hold on, the rest of the world go barren. The cocked hat! Instinctively Michael straightened his own, ready for crossing under Big Ben. He had reached the centre of Parliament Square, when a figure coming towards him swerved suddenly to its left and made in the direction of Victoria. Tall, with a swing in its walk. Wilfrid! Michael stood still. Coming from–South Square! And suddenly he gave chase. He did not run, but he walked his hardest. The blood beat in his temples, and he felt confused to a pitch past bearing. Wilfrid must have seen him, or he wouldn’t have swerved, wouldn’t be legging it away like a demon.
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