Eva's apples

He had not understood the secret pleading of these words, till, following up the girl’s address to a dingy lodging-house off the Edgware Road, the landlady related to him how Eva, waiting for him, had held out three weeks, but that her sister Zita tracked her up through the police and took her home with her where, ever since, she was kept under surveillance but was allowed to take the terrier out for daily exercise in the adjoining Park. Eva, said the landlady, was a nice girl; owed rent, but all the time while waiting for him at the lodging-house sat piously at home, retired early to her bed to read a novel and eat chocolates.

She had waited, perilously, for him all these weeks, running up a debt, while he idled away in Paris on the pretext of sickness and postponed indefinitely his arrival! She had no money; but had not reproached him, had only written: “Come as soon as you are better. Perhaps it’s selfish of me to ask you to get better quickly. But I am waiting for you, Ferdinand,” etc. His name was Frank, but she did not like the plainness of it, and so called him Ferdinand. The landlady, who told him she had in her day eloped romantically and married secretly and very, very happily, exhorted him to be the knight-errant who should, like her own late husband, free his Eva from her intolerable captivity; while he rather wished she would mind her own business and let him do as he saw fit. And then, having pursued all the terriers in Hyde Park in vain, and equally so in Kensington Gardens, he had halted for a moment by Whiteley’s window in Queen’s Road and somebody sidled up to him, and before he turned to look he could feel the warmth of her delighted gaze. “Eva! And I had lost all hope of ever finding you!”

They lunched together hurriedly and then took a taxi to his appointed interview with Ottercove.

“‘Me-Too’ Darling! And how did Zita find you?”

“Through Scotland Yard.”

“And she came and took you away, did she?”

“Yes, she broke in and cried, ‘You’ve got a man here!’ and began opening all the cupboards and looking under the bed. But I was alone, in bed, reading a novel and eating chocolates and waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“For you, darling.”

“Oh, darling! And who paid?”

“She paid.”

“Rather generous of her.”

“But she took it all out of my saving’s bank at the post office.”

“Oh! how mean! how cruel!”

“And she took me home with her and locked me up, and got Mr. Pilling to lecture to me on morals.”

“But what is Mr. Pilling to you!”

“He is our guardian, while Mummy is away in Ireland.”

“He has guarded you well,” Frank said, not without bitterness. “What about Zita?”

“He’s taken a fancy to Zita long ago at the Arcadia Ball Rooms, where he’s a professional with her.”

“He has, has he? A fine guardian and no mistake! What is their relation?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know quite well what I mean.” He looked bluntly into her eyes. “Yes ...?”

“Yes,” she nodded.

“And so he’s taken you both under his wing?”

“Yes. And Mr. Pilling said I was not to go out except to take the terrier out for exercise. And I took him every morning out into the Park and wandered all over Kensington Gardens, hoping I might come across you suddenly.”

“And you did!”

“And I did!”

“Darling Eva!” He pressed her to his side.

The taxi-cab had reached the bottom of the Strand and was rounding Nelson’s Column into Pall Mall. “I must think of a hotel,” he said. “I daresay I will find a room at the Madrid Palace.”

“No, no,” she said, “that is not a smart hotel. Mr. Pilling will say it isn’t smart.”

“Hang Mr. Pilling! Besides, why can’t you tell him I am staying at the Ritz?”

She thought a while. “I didn’t think of it. Yes, I will tell him you are staying at the Ritz.”

He gave directions to the driver; ran up the steps into the hotel, ordered a room, and came back to her. “Darling, what do you want to do now?”

“Let us get out, darling, and walk and think. I am so tired of living in this taxi.”

He dismissed the man, after paying the full penalty of his caprice, and they walked on into Piccadilly and inadvertently turned into New Bond Street. “What do you want to do?” he asked again. “You are surely not going back to your sister’s to-night, are you?”

“No, no, I am not!”

Her reassurance weakened his resolve. “But if she searches for you; if she goes to Scotland Yard?” he asked uneasily.

“I don’t care, darling. I want to be with you.”

“We’ll dine.”

“Yes, and after dinner go to a dance.”

“All right,” he said, unenthusiastically. “What your mother used to call ‘making a night of it.’”

“Mummy writes that she is very dull in Ireland.”

“What is she doing there?”

“She’s gone to visit daddy’s people to see what they can do for us. I’d like,” she added, “to go to the Kiss-Lick Club.... It isn’t really expensive.”

“No. All right.”

“But I—”

“But you—?”

“But I haven’t a gown. The old Meran orange crêpe-de-Chine one is an old rag now.”

“We’ll get one.”

“But, darling, are you rich enough?”

“Just enough,” he said, not wishing to encourage her in her extravagance.

Now she was already standing at a shop window, trying to decide between two equally attractive gowns. But as they went in, the choice, and with it the difficulty of selection, and the perils of subsequent remorse, increased alarmingly. Seated, like a royal pair, in luxurious armchairs, the mannequins parading with studied step before them, they displayed, in return for the united efforts of the selling staff, an increasingly dispersed appreciation. From time to time, Eva disappeared behind a screen to emerge from it as an exhibit, to the venal praises of the saleswoman, who, anxious to bring matters to a head, gradually narrowed down the field of selection to two expensive gowns.

“I really can’t make up my mind which I should take.”

“Take both,” he said.

The saleswoman looked up at him as though she thought he was a fine young gentleman, and he felt pleased to have risen in her estimation.

“But are you sure—?”

“I think I can just do it.” Lucky to have cleared his entire bank balance that morning! To-morrow he would draw a cheque on Ottercove. It seemed scarcely credible. The affair smacked of the fairy godfather type of Christmas tale in an all-fiction magazine for juveniles. Yet Ottercove, his cheque book, and his bank balance were presumably realities. In the midst of life we’re in a dream, he mused, as they were bowed out into the street, when, a few paces off, Eva suddenly remembered that she had no shoes to match the gowns, and he took her to the nearest shop where she selected competently, while asking him, “Are you quite sure—?” the best the shop could offer.

“I think I’ll manage,” he replied, more by way of secret loyalty to Ottercove, who, he recalled, had said, “As much as you need,” not “as much as your women folk may feel they need,” which was not the same.

The shops were just closing; but, of his own accord, he suggested that she indulge in lingerie, and here, despite the closing hour, Eva’s fancy ran adrift, while his new-born tenderness for her prevented him from curbing her desires. So long as he had money enough to last out till the morning, what did it matter?

But he did not himself indulge in any purchases that evening, as an ascetic act of abstinence before the pure image of the kindly Ottercove which, like an ikon illumined by a candle, always shone before him. Nevertheless the devil tempted him from time to time. Suppose, he thought, Lord Ottercove had gone mad. It was not impossible. He could then gradually appropriate all his property. Till the executors stopped him. If so, was that not a cause for hurry? And Eva’s impulse was right? But it would never do to tell her. Not even if Lord Ottercove was mad.

He whispered in her ear as they pushed through the revolving door into the hall of the hotel, and she signed her name—with a, to unsuspecting eyes surely imperceptible, hesitation—“Nancy Dickin.” As they ascended in the lift, he was tendering excuses:

“It’s a poor room, you know.”

“Is,” she asked, “my room as poor as yours?”

“It’s the same,” he said.

Forgetting to kiss him, she immediately began to inspect her purchases, till he suggested it was time she put them on.

“It’s cold,” she twitched her shoulders.

“There’s a gas fire.”

“Yes, yes. Darling, ring the bell for me.”

And to the maid, in a commanding, knowing way:

“Put on the gas fire at eleven o’clock so it should be warm when we return. My husband likes it warm.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

At the Kiss-Lick she beamed all the time. While they danced she talked to him of himself. “Pilling said ... Zita said ... I said to Pilling: ‘Mr. Dickin doesn’t care a rap for your opinions! He wouldn’t look at you—’” Or, suddenly, without preliminary introduction, she would volunteer such isolated bits of information as: “He hurt me with my teeth. I cried.”

“Who? Pilling?”

“No, the dentist. And the man in the Tube thought I was a little Russian girl because I had a grey fur cap and was reading the translation of a Russian novel.”

Eva, he noticed, was very observant and ironic about Mr. Pilling. “He tries to speak French to Zita, because he thinks it’s grand. Pilling thinks she has influence.”

“With whom?”

“With Lord Ottercove. Through Lord de Jones, you know, who is Mummy’s friend. He is very funny.”

“Who? Pilling?”

“No, Lord de Jones. He goes about muttering funny things to me about wanting to blow up the earth. I think he is not quite all there. But Pilling would like Lord Ottercove to finance him.”

“Whom? Lord de Jones?”

“No, Pilling. He’d like to open out on his own. A dancing place, a night club like this one. Only he says he wants Lord Ottercove or somebody to finance him, because it will cost a lot of money. Pilling is very high class. He has bought a cottage at Marlow and called it ‘Villa Esperanza.’”

“Full of hope, evidently!”

“And he makes up to a man there because he is a member of the motor-boat club, and Pilling can’t be a member of the motor-boat club because he has no motor-boat. And he says he only needs Lord Ottercove to finance him to buy himself a motor-boat. That is why I wanted to meet Lord Ottercove this afternoon; and you wouldn’t let me.”

“You wanted to speak to Lord Ottercove to—to—” he stammered with incredulity.

“To ask him if he’d like to finance Pilling.”

“But why?”

“I thought it would please Pilling.”

While they supped, her legs touched his and he had but one thought and one desire: to return with her to the hotel, to grasp her, clutch her, smother and devour her just as she was now with her wistful violet eyes and her thoughts of Pilling. She sipped her champagne. She was silent, completely content. Her large eyes were bright dewy flowers.

Ensconced in a taxi, she at once fell over him and brought her mouth to his for kissing. But kissing, by this time, was nothing new to him. He wanted to explore new avenues, new vistas of experience.

Then they were back, alone. He clutched her in his arms. “Come, come, come,” he pleaded. She had quickly slipped into bed before he returned to the room and looked at him doubtfully.

“Ah!” he cried in the accents of the primitive man and leaping to her side.

But she had turned her back to him. “Darling....” she murmured.

“What?” he cried.

“Yes,” she said, “it isn’t always easy to be a woman, darling.”

He looked at her blankly. “Where is my revolver?”

“Your revolver?”

“Or I shall go out and hang myself—”

“What do you mean?”

“On the nearest lamp-post.”

After pacing the room up and down for a space, he lay down. But he could not sleep. At last he dressed and, to the astonishment of the night porter, went out and, incurring the suspicion of a lone policeman, loitered in empty Piccadilly Circus. He had calmed down and his thoughts turned back to his miraculous acquaintance with Lord Ottercove and his unlimited offer of money, so unusually generous that he could hardly force himself to take advantage of it. He would rather assassinate his old grandmother for the meagre contents of her purse than overdraw Lord Ottercove’s account. Wandering aimlessly about the quiet streets, tears dimmed his eyes as he reflected on the essential goodness of human nature. His look was moist, peculiarly naïve, and if a confidence-trickster had that moment come up to him, he would have been inclined to accept his offer, convinced that he would and could not harm him.

Eva was not asleep when he came back. Where had he seen it? Ah, she reminded him of that picture of a kitten tucked away in a big bed, with one paw over the quilt, one eye closed, the other open and looking at the world. In the dark they talked across the bedside table which separated their two beds, and she told him of all that had happened to her since he saw her last in Vienna. “Lord de Jones got Mummy to put me into a Secretarial College as he said he would need a secretary to go on his mission with him round the world to close all the craters and Mount Vesuvius and such for which Lord Ottercove is financing him for propaganda and such like purposes and that he could see from the colour of my eyes that he could trust me. Mummy wants to go with Lord de Jones on his mission all round the world because she says she hasn’t been round the world and would like to see it as his private secretary, but Lord de Jones says he’d rather I went with him, much rather than Mummy. And so he put me into this Secretarial College to learn shorthand and typewriting, and the Principal was making up to him, because he was Viscount de Jones, and used to write silly letters to him trying to flatter him because he thought Lord de Jones would appreciate deep thoughts. And so he wrote to Lord de Jones to congratulate him on the nobility of his scientific thoughts and researches and said: ‘Your philosophical mind, I am sure, will appreciate what a small fraction time is of eternity.’”

“And Lord de Jones?”

“He simply laughed, and I told the Principal what a fool Lord de Jones thought him. But he was making up to me.”

“Who? The Principal? Or Lord de Jones?”

“The Principal. And Lord de Jones, too. But I don’t mind Lord de Jones because he is an old friend of Mummy’s. But the Principal was a real rotter. He had a sort of conservatory behind his study where he used to receive visitors, and there was a palm tree there and an aquarium with goldfish, and he said to me when I said I was leaving him because he was a fool, ‘We had better kiss and be friends,’ and he tried to kiss me there among the goldfish.”

“No!”

“He did! And he used to pay his teaching staff at the end of the week in silver money. Three or four half-crowns, not more. They all stood huddled together at the end of the room and he’d recline in his chair at the desk and call out: ‘Jones!’ ‘Ferguson!’ ‘Gould!’ (Never ‘Mrs. Ferguson,’ or ‘Miss Gould!’) ‘Here!’ and give them three or four half-crowns each. And the typewriting mistress, Miss Gould, only got two half-crowns and a shilling.”

“And they seemed pleased?”

“No, not pleased, but kind of dumb, cowed, hungry looking. And when Mummy was behind with the payment because Lord de Jones had quarrelled with his wife and she wouldn’t let him have any more money, Mr. Bumphill got very ratty and said I had a bad character. I asked him what I had done; and he said: ‘You are lazy, and where is your loyalty to the College? Have you ever recommended it to a single human being?’

“‘I have,’ I said.

“He suddenly looked very interested. ‘And to whom, pray?’ said he.

“‘To Mr. Gorilla,’ said I, ‘a Spanish young gentleman.’

“‘Oh, indeed! I am interested to hear it,’ says he. ‘Take his name down, Miss Frazer.... H’m! And what is his address?’

“‘The Zoological Gardens,’ said I.”

“And then?”

“Then I left his Secretarial College. Mr. Pilling thought I should study to become a Nurse.”

“And why must you listen to Mr. Pilling.”

“I told you he is our guardian.”

“A fine guardian!” said Frank bitterly. “I’d like to bash his head for his treatment of Zita.”

“But what about yourself?” she asked, it seemed to him rather tactlessly.

“That was different. That was on a hill.”

“It was lovely. And Zita too thought it was lovely. But she said she could never tell Pilling about it. She doesn’t know what he’d do to you if he knew.”

“No need for him to know,” Frank said, gloomily. And then: “I say, is he ... Pilling a great reader of novels?”

“I don’t know, darling. I don’t remember having seen any of yours in their flat, though Pilling once said about you, ‘He is very clever. I wish I had his brains. I would not be a professional, nor Zita either.’”

“Why don’t they marry?”

“Pilling told her from the start that he couldn’t marry her as he was already married but separated from his wife, but Zita being always business-like and practically minded asked Pilling to guarantee to her on paper that he would remain true and loyal to her all his life. But Pilling said he couldn’t do such a thing as a man can never trust himself. Zita then met a doctor—an old consumptive fellow, full of gout and ischias and sciatica and heart disease—who fell in love with her and wanted her to be his own eternally and everlastingly, and as he also could not marry her he gave her the guarantee she asked in writing that he would be true to her during all his lifetime and even had it stamped at Somerset House; and then she became just like his wife. But he died in a week—from heart failure.”

“And what did Zita say?”

“She said: ‘I could have murdered him for it.’”

“Poor thing! And now?”

“Now she has gone back to Pilling unconditionally. She did ask him for a guarantee, but he only laughed at her. She still warns me about men. But I also laugh at her.”

“Yet she controls your movements?”

“Yes, she does. Once, when I got so tired of sitting at home with Zita and Pilling and went for a walk by myself, and a fat gentleman I met on the station platform at Victoria took me to a dance, Zita gave me an awful hiding and told Pilling to give me a dressing-down, and then slapped me.”

“Really slapped you hard?”

“Yes, darling, I haven’t had an easy kind of life, I can tell you.”

“And so Pilling sent you to the hospital to study to become a Nurse, did he?”

“He did. I had to cram my poor brains with so much anatomy. And the things they made us look at, the operations and things. Once I fainted; then I got used to it.”

“And do you really know something about it?”

“I know every little bone in your body.”

“Really?”

“There was a doctor there, an Irishman. He used to help me with my examinations and kiss me.”

“You let him?”

“He loved me, he said. And it was Spring like that time on the hill, and so stuffy at night, and the textbooks so difficult, and he so clever!”

“And then?”

“And then I ran away. I didn’t come back after my annual leave. I went to London to Mrs. White’s boarding house.”

“Why?”

“Because you wrote to me from Paris that you wanted me to meet you in London, and so I came to London from Colchester and waited for you—weeks and weeks, till my sister came—the matron at the hospital had started a hue and cry—and took me away.”

“And then?”

“Then Pilling said I must go back to the hospital, but I said I’d rather die than go back to the hospital, so I had a row with Pilling. He was furious, and I was furious, and so I went away to Mother Martha’s boarding house and took a room, but I had no money, so had to look for a situation.”

“You all alone in London looking for a situation! while I was lounging lazily in Paris!”

“Yes. I went to the shops asking for a job, and I didn’t know where I could get a reference. The managers were all the same. They said, ‘You have intriguing eyes.’ Or, ‘If you’ll be nice and friendly with me, I’ll give you a good cushy job.’ I had a good job in a draper’s shop in Holborn; I got twenty-five shillings a week. But as they began to reduce their staff and I was the lastcomer I was the first to go. Then I got a job as part cashier, part waitress in a tea-shop in the City. It was quite interesting. Business men would come up and talk to me and promise me a job. They said I had intriguing eyes. One man said, ‘You have eyes like violets.’ They would come up to the counter and we’d discuss together City topics. And one fat man asked me if I knew what Nero was doing while Rome was burning, and I said I didn’t know, and he said: ‘Fiddling.’ And we’d all burst laughing. It was quite intriguing.”

His heart ached for her. Poor child, all alone, men like vultures, ready to pounce on her: forgetting that men, old and young, common and cultivated, were to her a navigable ocean whereon indeed she was an A-1 skipper.

“Then I lost my job as part cashier because the manageress said I added up all wrong and she couldn’t make head or tail whether the shop was making profits or losses and I said she had better add up herself to make sure, and I went back to Mother Martha’s boarding house and waited, waited for you, while Mother Martha swilled whisky by herself upstairs. And when the Irish Doctor from the hospital came to see me Mother Martha, who was full of whisky, said I had a lover in my room and that she’d write and tell my father in Ireland. But I said: ‘I shall inform my Solicitor: False Accusation,’ and she got scared like a rabbit and crawled upstairs to swill down some more whisky.”

“And then?”

“Then I went to see what Zita and Pilling were doing and left Mother Martha severely alone.”

“Do you know what time it is? It’s four o’clock!”

“Good night, darling.”

“Good night, darling.”

IX.

Leaving the hotel next morning, they passed the gauntlet of waiting menials and tipped their way through to the door to the total price of their freedom, while the door porter waved his arms in the middle of the street in an ostentatious display to arrest a taxi for them, and a page boy craned his neck at the glass door to see if it was coming, to receive, for looking interested, another sixpence.

At the bank he cashed, without any trouble, a cheque for one hundred pounds, and indulged in some purchases for himself. Unlike Edith Wharton’s American heroes and heroines, he did not buy a grand piano, a motor-car, or a steam yacht, but invested in shirts, waistcoats, a new pair of pyjamas, a bathing-suit and an opera hat. At a bookstall he bought a booklet in a bright yellow jacket entitled Dictators of the Press and a recent volume of Who’s Who, and at lunch, having tired a little of Eva’s conversation, absorbed himself in the literature he had purchased.

Who’s Who, laconic but informative, recorded:

“OTTERCOVE, Rex Victor Alexander Green, P. C. 1st. Baron Ottercove of Ottercove. b. Ottercove, New Zealand; unmarried; heiress: niece, Eleonor Viscountess de Jones; recreation: controlling public opinion; address: Bourne Abbey, Kent; Stonedge House, S.W. 1.”

He read it out aloud to Eva, who said that Pilling would approve of the address.

The little yellow booklet related in a racy style the facts which were more or less common knowledge to the public, but re-dressed them with gay ribbons of fancy and let them scurry down the ebullient river of facile imagination. Frank learnt that Lord Ottercove was probably the greatest political and financial force operating in the England of the twentieth century—greater than Lord Northcliffe, greater than Lord Beaverbrook. Yes, greater! History records (said the little yellow book) that if the latter two had chosen to pull together there was nothing in the realm of the material universe that these two peers could not accomplish. Now what they could do if they pulled together Lord Ottercove, it seemed, could do alone. If you took the trouble to turn up in the Encyclopædia Britannica the rubric recording the development of journalism in the last half-century, you would learn that just as Lord Northcliffe’s advent opens a new page, and Lord Beaverbrook’s another, so the arrival of Lord Ottercove in Fleet Street definitely marks a third and, possibly, last, stage.

He was born (the booklet said) of English missionary stock in New Zealand, who, after working for the furtherance of what they regarded as the Christian Cause, in heathen lands, retired to that Commonwealth upon whose soil our hero first saw light. Human meteors had been known to exist before: but never quite so swift, so bright, so deft, so certain. By seventeen, Rex Green controlled the major part of the New Zealand industries. By the time he was nineteen he exhausted all Colonial possibilities and went to the United States and captured Wall Street. At twenty-four he accumulated such a fortune that, from sheer revulsion, he stopped making money (except for such as rolled in on its own momentum), came to England and plunged into home politics. He unmade two Prime Ministers, made a third, buried a fourth, and, tired of the game of politics, accepted a peerage, buying a controlling share in the Universal Press of the United Kingdom Syndicate. He bought fifty-one per cent. of the shares of a daily newspaper, arranging that this newspaper should purchase fifty-one per cent. of the shares of another newspaper, which second newspaper he instructed to buy fifty-one per cent. of the shares of a third newspaper, continuing the application of this principle, till, controlling the first newspaper, he automatically controlled all the worthwhile newspapers in the United Kingdom.

Yet despite his meteoric sweep, Rex Green was a man of strong attachments. So when, with the offer of a peerage, the time arrived for choosing a new name, and all the county, town, village, street and railway names in England lay before him, the great man remembered the little village in New Zealand that had been his landing-stage where he alighted we know not whence upon the Realm of Matter, and decided by adopting its name to distinguish the village. “In Ottercove I was born, and as Ottercove I will die,” he was reported to have said at the banquet given in his honour by the Ottercove inhabitants during his visit there soon after his creation, thereby drawing tears from their eyes; a banquet followed by a tour of inspection round the village, small, and with a railroad station so embryonic that you could not even buy a ticket there, but picturesque in its simple rustic way, quite a dear little place full of coves, creeks, and little brooks with beavers and otters, quite domesticated, it seemed, and almost eating out of your hand. The guest of honour, it is reported, beamed with pleasure as he beheld the place of his birth, and is said to have added to his foregoing remark at the banquet: “And in Ottercove I wish to be buried,” thereby drawing renewed tears from the onlookers’ eyes.

“Well,” said Frank, closing the book and leaning back luxuriously, “it seems we’ve struck oil this time!”

“But why don’t you get Lord Ottercove to give you some money, darling?”

“I have,” he said.

“How much?”

“Well, I don’t know. He said ‘without limit.’” It was out before he had meant it to be.

“Without limit,” she said. “But that means that you can buy yourself everything, darling; horses and houses with grounds all over England and Scotland and—”

“No, no—”

“But yes, darling. ‘Without limit’ means everything.”

“But no—”

“But it does, darling. Everything, everything without limit.”

He was sorry he had said it.

“We must tell Mummy,” she said.

“Great heavens, no! Why tell her?”

“She will be pleased.”

“Now then,” he said, rising and helping her with her coat and then taking Who’s Who under his arm. “No. I shall make the restaurant a gift of it.”

“No, darling, don’t. Pilling would love to have it.”

“What does he want with a copy of Who’s Who?”

“He’d read and read it days and nights.”

“Whatever for?”

“To find out who is who.”

“But how will you get it over to him?”

“In a taxi.”

“Well, look here, you had better take a taxi and go straight to Pilling with it.” There were moments, after prolonged social intercourse with people, when his soul positively shrieked to be left alone.

“I shall ring you up at your club,” she said as she drove away with the book.

X.

At the club he found a message from Mrs. Hannibal that Lord Ottercove expected him to tea at five o’clock at his house. Frank, who was late, having failed by sheer strength of will to accelerate the movement of the train in the Inner Circle, jumped into a taxi at Dover-street, imploring the driver to make a dash for Stonedge House. But the vehicle, freighted with his dismay and anxiety, got jammed in a mesh of other vehicles. A march through London by the Unemployed, the taxi-driver put him wise: a call to Direct Action. Not for the first time. Frank jumped out, paid the fare, and made a dash through the crowd. A cordon of policemen barred his way into the square. Gaping suspiciously at him, they none the less let him pass through to Stonedge House.

The butler informed him that his lordship was expecting him, but had not yet come in from his walk, and conducted him into a great bare lounge with windows overlooking the Park, a huge marble chimney-piece, as in a club room, with an oil portrait of a member of the Royal family hung over it, and a lady sitting by the log fire. She smiled to him and said Lord Ottercove had asked her to meet him so that she might write an article about him for one of Lord Ottercove’s newspapers, probably the Evening Ensign. They had barely exchanged a few words when Lord Ottercove strolled in somberly across the soft carpet with a cloud on his face.

Frank wondered whether the cause of it was not his cashing forthwith one hundred pounds of Lord Ottercove’s money. “Why aren’t you having any tea?” asked the host, and rang for the butler. “Well, have you talked it over?” he asked rather wearily.

“Mr. Dickin has only just come,” said the lady, thus giving her partner away, Frank felt, rather cruelly.

Lord Ottercove gave his visitor a searching look, as though he thought this was a bad beginning. “They wouldn’t let me pass through the crowd,” Frank proffered his excuses.

“Nor would they let me,” said Lord Ottercove.

“A bewildering procession of the Unemployed,” the lady journalist remarked. “More ominous than the last one.”

“Yes. I don’t know what is going to happen. Processions are indelicate manifestations and are best discouraged by indifference. But an idle curiosity sends everyone out into the streets to see what is happening and swells the ranks of the dissatisfied. It is the same with revolutions. Mankind is periodically beset by mass dissatisfaction when, at some obscure, unmeaning signal, men suddenly begin to air their private grievances in a mass—as though that could possibly help them; and then, growing hearty, and with that corporate look in their eyes, they are ready to track down the Evil in their life to any handy bogey—the capitalist, the Jew, the profiteer, the Bolshevik, or any foreigner. It used to be religion—the Jesuit, the Pope, the Turk, or the Free-Mason—but that is now out of fashion. I do not see that anything is likely to side-track their present agitation saving some big stunt which would appeal to their imagination—such as the increased crop-growing scheme which Lord de Jones and myself have in mind. Miss Henderson, will you make a note of that for your Sunday article. Lord de Jones, who is a scientist by training, and myself, under the auspices of the re-dressed and re-bandaged Liberal Party (with Joe pleased as Punch at last to have a party policy) are travelling round the world to agitate public opinion in the countries concerned in favour of the closing of craters, wherever such are known to exist, to increase the crop-growing capacity of weary Mother Earth, for the general benefit of the human race, irrespective of class or nationality. The policy is to be launched in the broadest Liberal terms, and I want my newspapers to give it the widest possible publicity.”

“When do you hope to start on your journey, Lord Ottercove?”

“I cannot tell you. We have to time it with the General Election. It wouldn’t do to have it all behind us before the General Election begins. A policy is only a policy if it is a promise. A difficulty is only a difficulty if it needs overcoming. A difficulty overcome is like your last year’s birthday present. You cannot talk of it with any credit to yourself. And in politics you must boast in order to get credit, and though you cannot boast of what you have done, you can boast of what you will do, if they let you do it for them.”

“Do you expect any difficulties ahead of you?”

“Our difficulty is that there will not be any to enable us to overcome them with glory. But I expect we will be able to overcome that difficulty by creating a few difficulties of the spectacular order we require to swing old Joe back into the saddle at the next General Election, which cannot now be long delayed.”

“Is it an established scientific fact,” Frank ventured, “that the closing of the craters would increase the crop?”

Lord Ottercove frowned. “You’ve asked me that before. I cannot tell you. It’s a journalistic fact, anyhow.” He paused. “But I have no reason to doubt it. It stands to reason if you reflect. More heat, more pressure from the bowels of the earth, and the quicker the blades pushed to the surface. That’s how I read the scientific aspect of it. But de Jones ought to know; he is a scientist.”

“Rather a genius by the looks of him,” said Frank, in order to hear Lord Ottercove reply with deliberation:

“A Genius of the Untried.”

“I see,” said Frank, “you will leave nothing untried, not even questionable science, if you may thereby alleviate the lot of the people.”

“I am a man of the people,” said Lord Ottercove, “and my sympathies are with the people. But here it is not a case of alleviating the lot of the people. Increased crops will cheapen bread, undoubtedly, but only to lower wages. I know my capitalists!”

“But there are socialist weapons for that.”

“Strikes,” said Lord Ottercove. “Direct action. Revolutions.”

Frank was not so much disarmed as submerged by the intensity of Lord Ottercove’s self-assurance.

“No,” said Lord Ottercove. “My aim is somewhat different. In ancient Rome the people were given bread and shows. They will have their bread and plenty of it, the Lord and Lord de Jones willing; but I am out to give them shows, grip their attention, side-track the vicious trend of idle minds—or I am not a journalist.”

He paused to give both listeners an opportunity to survey the boldness and originality of his vision.

“I am a journalist, and I love my newspapers. You, Miss Henderson, and you, Mr. Dickin, must have known love in the course of your lives; my love is akin to yours, but rather than being wasted on a mistress” (he looked at Dickin), “or on a lover” (he looked at Miss Henderson enquiringly), “my love is lavished on my newspapers. I love my newspapers.” Tears stood in his eyes as he spoke, and Miss Henderson and Frank lowered their heads as though they were in church. “I am amazed, with a sweet amazement, when I suddenly look into my heart and discover the depth of my love for these journals of mine.” Miss Henderson and Frank suspended their breath and continued suspending it so far as this is possible. “They were nothing. I witnessed and sponsored their birth; guarded their adolescence; tended their youth; exulted in their maturity....” He paused as if having revealed too much of his heart.

“There is also an intellectual side to it,” he said at last, as if to prove that such things were not foreign to him. “I have slowly come to the realisation that things, the ordinary common things we see and grip, are not: they only seem.... They are phantoms, dreams of some one great Dreamer who has dreamt us and presently awakes to congratulate himself.”

“And are we the dream or the dreamer?”

“Well,” said Lord Ottercove, pensively, “I haven’t so far rounded off my philosophy, though now that you have put this question it is already clear to me that two courses of enquiry are feasible.”

“I mean, are we included in the congratulation?”

“Well,” said Lord Ottercove, “my original thesis was in the negative. But now I have come to think that for a series of Sunday articles in which I want to incorporate my philosophy the notion that we are the Dreamer and everything unpleasant in life the Dream about to be dissolved in the reality of our awakening is rather more cheerful and more suitable from a journalistic point of view and I will pursue the Dreamer as against the Dream course.”

“But is that a ground?”

“Certainly. A journalistic ground.”

“But I thought you were going to write philosophy.”

“Journalism, as I was going to explain, is philosophy. Life is a dream, according to my philosophy, a dream of illusions. And this faculty of creating illusions in a world of appearances is, I claim, the function of the journalist.”

“Make-belief?”

“If you like to—to put it so crudely,” said Lord Ottercove, evidently hurt. It seemed strange to see this rich, successful, powerful, middle-aged newspaper magnate, once Cabinet Minister, hurt. So it seemed he was vulnerable?

Miss Henderson rose, and her host and employer, in his double capacity, saw her out into the hall, murmuring, “So you have grasped the trend of the Wheat-Growing Story?”—completing his instructions in an undertone. “And will you do a story on Mr. Dickin? Dwell on the strange similarity of his name to another famous novelist?”

“Which one, Lord Ottercove?”

“Dickens, my girl. Author of David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Tale of Two Cities. You might work Mr. Dickin into these tales. Perhaps suggest a common ancestry. Here’s a title for you: ‘Is Genius Hereditary?: The Unpublished Story of the Dickens Issue.’ You might add that modesty, a fastidious dislike to shine in the blinding light of his grandparent caused this shy, blinking, unassuming-looking youth who, nevertheless, in the course of years is groping after the crown of his illustrious forbear, to drop the ‘s’ in his name—and substitute ‘i’ for ‘e’.”

“I see.”

“Well, I’ve given you two stories. Write them to-night and send them in to me before breakfast to-morrow. I will read them in bed directly on waking. Good-bye to you.”

Frank was about to follow Miss Henderson, and rose; but “Don’t go,” said the host, and each sank back into an enormous leather chair, Lord Ottercove opening his mouth to pose a question—perhaps why had Frank cashed so much money—when the butler strode in, announcing:

“Mr. Atkinson, my lord.”

“Come in! Come in, Atkinson!” roared Lord Ottercove. “You bloody ruffian ... come right in. Well, how’s New Zealand? Gone to hell, I suppose, since I left it, what? This is Mr. Dickin. You’ve read his books, of course. The Tale of Two Cities. David Copperfield.”

“Of course, of course.”

“Bloody liar, you’ve read nothing!”

“Too busy, too busy ...” murmured Mr. Atkinson.

“How would you like turning out twenty motor-cars a day Mr. Dickin? This man here earns more money in an hour of his sleep by growing fat than you with all your artistry and intelligence and talent can earn in a year!”

“I assure you,” Mr. Atkinson protested, “there is great artistry in designing a new model ... and the machinery, too, trickish ... devilishly trickish.... At least Archie thinks so. But then Archie—”

“Is a liar,” supplied Lord Ottercove, looking humorously at Frank, who, not knowing Archie, smiled at them both noncommittally.

“Did I tell you Archie’s latest?” asked the guest.

“No.”

“He’d gone out hunting lions in East Africa. ‘I advance,’ he says, ‘under cover, and straight before me sits a lion. I aim—and bang! down goes the lion. But there, a few paces off, if you please, sits a second lion. Bang! And down he goes. I shoulder my gun and advance under cover, and there, just in front, sits the third lion—’”

The telephone at Lord Ottercove’s feet rang discreetly, and taking it up, “Of course,” he said. “Use your judgment. What’s the use of my having a great editor like you if I am to do all the work? Quite. In the question of National Defence I am supporting the Admiralty against the Air Force. All you need know. Good-bye to you.”

The motor-car manufacturer was evidently only waiting for the host to put down the receiver, for:

“‘And there to the side of me was the fourth lion,’” he said, smiling all over.

Lord Ottercove looked pensive. “Excuse me,” he said, and taking up the telephone from the floor spoke, “Give me Lady de Jones. How are you, Eleonor? Look here, you’d better have Admiral Battersea to your right and the Emir to your left to-morrow night. I want to mark my support of the Admiralty. What? You would rather I gave you the £30,000 necklace for your birthday? You’re welcome to it, of course. But I advise you against it. Why? I don’t think it will do you any good having it. Why? It would not make you happy. Why not? The remorse at imposing on your uncle. Not a bit, you are welcome to it, my dear; it is only advice. Good day, to you.”

“‘And there,’” said Mr. Atkinson, watching his friend put down the telephone, “‘was the fifth lion.’”

“Excuse me,” said the host, and uttered forth a strange wood-note like a bird (which he must have learnt when as a boy he tended to spend his school hours in the wood behind Ottercove); in answer to which vocal sign Mrs. Hannibal came into his presence. “Tell Franklin,” said Lord Ottercove, completing his instructions in an undertone with an almost silent movement of his robust lips. The instructions were so long and explicit that the car manufacturer, despairing of securing Lord Ottercove’s attention, buttonholed Frank Dickin and was saying to him in a tone hushed to a level likely not to interfere with their host’s business conversation but adequately forceful and dramatic:

“‘And there,’ says he, ‘to either side of me were the sixth and seventh lion. Bang! Bang! Down they went.’”

“What’s that?” Lord Ottercove questioned, Mrs. Hannibal having gone to execute his instructions.

“‘Down they went....’”

“Who?”

“The sixth and the seventh lions.”

“H’m.”

“‘And there,’ he says, ‘to the front of me ... was ... the eighth lion!’”

Here the car manufacturer paused for appreciation, a little tardy in coming; and then, not waiting for it and holding his curved sides to prevent them from splitting, burst out into a Homeric roar.

“Well,” he said, cheerily, linking this his leave-taking to the humorous anecdote, but his face growing serious, “thank you for your hospitality. What message have you for me to take back with me to New Zealand? Is the Old Country all right? Will keep the flag flying? Eh? What?”

“Sure!” from Lord Ottercove, more forced than spontaneous.

“If,” said the car manufacturer, “you can keep Labour down and their wages you’ll be all right in this old country yet.”

“This is a point,” Lord Ottercove said coldly, “on which I differ from you,” looking to Frank for recognition of this sympathetic attitude to the workers.

“But ain’t we both of us Conservatives?”

“In New Zealand, yes, but not in this country, Atkinson.”

“How so?” the dull, blood-shot look of an uncomprehending bull coming into the manufacturer’s face.

“In so far as I wish to conserve the liberties won by the Liberals in the past, I am a Conservative; but in as much as I would gain new liberties worth the conservation, I am a Liberal.”

He paused, and added:

“I stand for tolerance—for the complete toleration of everything short of the intolerable.”

The car manufacturer, shaking his head at the brainy madcapness that overtakes some successful business men, made for the door, followed cheerily by Ottercove, proffering, with subversive gusto, advice to a man he knew incapable of following it. “Atkinson, you should stop making money and go in for Thought.”

“Why should I, if it keeps me occupied?”

“It’s a vice. A man should stop when he has made enough. I’ve stopped.”

Frank made a mental picture of Lord Ottercove stopping. “You don’t make any more money, Lord Ottercove?” he asked.

“No. Except for such as makes itself. Of course, every year I am called upon to invest fresh capital. But that is not for want of any facility of imagination in the art of spending it.”

Lord Ottercove followed Mr. Atkinson into the hall, and as he waited for his host’s return Frank Dickin’s mind sang and tingled at the thought of money. Money! Money! Money! How did Lord Ottercove make so much money? “Business ability,” was the saying. But what was it? Frank’s ideas were vague and nebulous. Lord Ottercove, he thought, bought consols, sold them at valuation, at contango, and depreciation; bought debentures at quotation; accumulated stock, multiplied it by going into liquidation ... and made a fortune. Frank believed High Finance to be closely allied with Mysticism. It was ineffable and inutterable: it could be revealed, but not explained; its priests were inspired. As Lord Ottercove returned to him, with a smile, he blessed Lord Ottercove’s entire organisation for the kindly light that emanated from him. Lord Ottercove’s bias, he was pleased to note, was artistic. He turned his turnovers like a virtuoso, delighting in what he could do with so little effort. His friendships, his natural disposition, were all for artists. His collar and negligent tie bore witness to it. Whenever Frank was about to rise Lord Ottercove would say, “Don’t go.” And when at last the guest, feeling the indecency of lingering any longer, rose convincingly, Lord Ottercove reminded him that he was dining with him to-morrow night.

“I am afraid for my own sake,” said the visitor, “that the more you see of me, the sooner will the reaction in you, to borrow the language of critics, make itself felt.”

“My dear fellow,” said Lord Ottercove, “you don’t know how all this delights me. Are you,” he asked in the hushed tones of a doctor who enquires if your stomach is in order, “drawing all the money you want?”

“Yes. Thanks awfully.”

“Good-bye to you!”

XI.

When at half-past eight next evening Frank arrived at Stonedge House and the footman, divesting him with critical thoughtfulness of his street clothes, ushered him into the inner rooms, a lady, regally resplendent, came out to meet him and, greeting him with spontaneous affability, took him upstairs to the drawing-room, saying, “I can’t drag Uncle Rex from the roasting fire in his room. He is always miserably cold.” But already Lord Ottercove, festal in his immaculate tailcoat and pumps, was slowly coming up the steps behind them, and—“How are you?” he asked.

A question to which it is difficult to say anything but, “Oh, very well.”

They had not been in the blue, mirrored drawing-room many moments when the butler flung open the doors and announced:

“His Majesty the Emir of Turkestania.”

A tall ample man, with a protruding shirt front, blew in like a whirlwind and immediately began to register a vocal admiration of the hostess’s sparkling sea-green gown. “The result of your Paris season I can see, Lady de Jones?” he boomed in tones of teasing gallantry.

“As I know to my cost,” said her uncle. “This is Mr. Frank Dickin, your Majesty. You’ve read his novels, of course.”

“Who hasn’t read them!” exclaimed the Emir and, turning to the hostess: “A most artistic, subversively provocative gown!” when the butler again appeared at the door on the landing and announced:

“Admiral Lord Battersea.”

Up the red carpeted steps came a corpulent figure with a visage, familiar to readers of the picture press in a large-rimmed naval cap tilted at a rakish angle over a wind-beaten sea-dog face, now projecting out of a prosaic but discreetly confident tailcoat.

From time to time the butler appeared on the threshold, announcing the guests as they came up the steps; and presently he ceased announcing, and at a sign they all trooped down again to dinner. As the footman pushed up the chair behind him, Frank began to take his dispositions. In a moment of periodical unemployment when both his partners were engaged in conversation, he would prick his ears—for he was curious about his fellow men—and listen. Admiral Battersea was saying in his hoarse, sea-grunting way to the pretty, dark-eyed woman at his side: “The Prince of Wales, I hear, kept very fit during the trip by taking a great deal of exercise....”

He found Lord de Jones at his side peculiarly congenial. Did he know the Kerrs? Didn’t he! Eva? “The darling!” said de Jones. And Mrs. Kerr?

Lord de Jones’s silence seemed to hold a lot.

“She craved for impossible things,” Dickin suggested.

“And she got them,” said de Jones.

“What she wanted.”

“Exactly what she wanted. They were Impossible.”

They covered many a familiar field—Russia, Vienna, the Tyrol. “Did you know her father?” asked de Jones. “I went out to Russia as a young man. I was taken to their country place by him. She had just got married. Lovely. She was lovely then; really lovely. Just like Eva now. If I’d known her three days earlier she wouldn’t have married Kerr.” He was pensive. “Eva might have been my daughter.” He stopped, as if realising the superfluity of his reflections. “It doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters now. A journey with her round the world. And then ... the coup de grâce! It is finished....” The butler was removing his plate. He looked ironically at Frank. “It is finished,” he said, a strange light in his greenish eyes.

“Would you mind it awfully?” he asked Frank.

“What?”

“If I were to end it all.”

“How do you mean?”

“At a stroke. The world and its suffering.”

“Which world?” Frank asked, he felt, rather stupidly, but he had mixed wine and his head was happily singing.

“The suffering world.”

“But I thought you were concerned to grow more wheat.” He thought Lord de Jones could not be quite right in the head.

“Wheat!” said de Jones, drinking lugubriously, “Wheat!”

When the ladies had left them to their smoke and smirky wit Frank found himself side by side with Admiral Battersea, who, he reflected, was surely the extreme opposite of his own type, so much so that if Lord Battersea had read his books, he would, given the chance, have gladly got him hanged and considered it as a service to the community. Lord Ottercove must have read his thoughts, for, “Admiral,” he said, “come and sit by my side.” The conversation turned upon whisky, which was described as a good thing; at which the Emir protested. “Wine,” he said, “is a good thing; but whisky—?!”

“Good whisky, your Majesty.”

Good whisky, it was urged, was a good thing.

From whisky they switched on to politicians who drank whisky and from politicians to politics. “Ah, Joe,” said Lord Ottercove. “There’s nobody like him. Just you wait till he is again in the saddle.”

“He is a long way off it,” grunted a guest.

“But he wants it, he wants it with all his heart. When a man day and night thinks of the one thing he wants, he gets it.”

“He has oratory, inspiration, energy; he only lacks one thing: a goal, an objective,” said another guest.

“What can you do?” said the host. “Liberals have no policy, since the war. But now we have something. I am off myself with Chris”—he nodded towards Lord de Jones—“on this stunt of ours and I hope”—he dropped his voice to a whisper and his lips moved inaudibly—“to identify the party with it.”

Upstairs in the ball-room, where chairs had been spread in rows, a dark, passionate man was already singing and some guests had seated themselves and were listening, while Lord Ottercove walked about, with a long fat cigar in his mouth, looking pleased. Frank found the pretty girl on his left, now looking beautiful, with melodious eyes. She closed her eyes at him in bliss and said that passionate music stirred people’s passions. To his right, leaning back leisurely, was Lord Battersea, puffing away at his cigar, while the baritone squeezed juice and tears out of the “Lotusblume.” And when the song was done, the British Admiral, who had measured his strength on the high seas with von Scheer, each, on his own admission, emerging the victor, now with eyes dim with beatitude murmured ecstatically:

“Die Lotusblume ... Die Lotusblume....”