XII.
Next morning Frank telephoned to Eva and arranged to take her out to lunch. He waited for her half-an-hour in the Victoria Arcade and suddenly caught sight of her mouse-grey cap and mouse-grey fur mounting the underground stairs (Eva looked down when she walked) and she was at his side, and she was in the taxi, and at once she was kissing....
“Why so late?”
“Shopping,” she said.
“Mummy has come back with John from Ireland,” she told him over lunch, “and absolutely wants me to bring you to tea.”
“Where?”
“At home. I mean at Pilling’s flat in Maida Vale.”
As they were half way through with their lunch and waiting for the sweets, she passed him, with a smile but without a word, an account, he perceived, for £203 10s.
“What’s this?”
“Furniture,” she said. “A dining room suite for Zita. It’s her birthday, you know.”
“You ordered her that?”
“I’ve had it sent this morning with a visiting card—‘With Miss Eva Kerr’s compliments.’”
“Oh. And who is to pay for it?”
“I thought it would be nothing to you, darling, now that you can draw on Lord Ottercove without limit. And it would take me years and years to pay it out of my secretarial funds.”
“God Almighty!” he said; and then again, after a pause: “God Almighty!”
“What’s the matter, darling?” she asked.
He grasped his head with both hands and shook it savagely. “God Almighty!” he said.
“You are an awful old miser,” she said.
“But why did you do such a thing?”
“I thought Pilling would look pleased.”
“But why couldn’t you ask?”
“But you haven’t seen the furniture! It isn’t at all expensive for what it is: it’s real lemon wood.”
“But whatever made you buy such a thing?”
“Because they already have a bedroom suite and are paying off for it; but not a dining room suite. They can’t afford a dining room suite.”
“But what is that to me?”
“But I’ve told you: it’s her birthday, darling, and it’s nothing to you.”
“But to run up to such a figure! Are you mad?”
“But you haven’t seen it!” she cried impatiently. “Wait till you’ve seen it. What’s the use of arguing before you’ve seen it!”
“I’ll stop it!” he said, rising.
“It’s been delivered this morning, darling.”
“I’ll get them to take it back.”
“You can’t do such a thing; it’s a birthday gift.”
“I shall apply for facilities of payment, and Pilling can pay it off within the next hundred years.”
“You can’t, darling. It would look so shabby. And Pilling wouldn’t think you were a gentleman. Besides, I said to them at the shop this morning: ‘There will be no trouble: Lord Ottercove, you know....’ And they looked like understanding.”
“This morning?”
“That’s why I was late, darling.”
He felt that he had nothing further to say.
They took a taxi-cab and went straight to the Pillings. They found the family, except for Raymond, in full strength. Pilling, a strong, wiry man with crisp, curly black hair, frivolous on the surface but really with ‘no nonsense about him,’ was almost fulsomely flattering and trying to speak French to Mrs. Kerr.
“He speaks it remarkably fluently for an Englishman,” was Mrs. Kerr’s comment as she turned to Frank. “I was just telling Mr. Pilling that my father, who had graduated at eight different faculties and universities, could speak twelve languages like a native.”
“I envy him,” said Pilling, with a little bow which he thought continental ideas of good breeding exacted. “If I had his abilities and, I understand, wealth, all the doors would be open to me. As it is I try to keep up my French whenever the opportunity presents itself.”
“In buses and trains,” added Zita. “Morty’s such a bore!”
“Well, French is an amiable language,” said Frank, “but I find it difficult to scintillate in it—even more difficult than in any other language!”
He expected the natural retort: “The difficulty would seem to lie in your scintillation rather than in any particular language.” But that also seemed to be their own difficulty. Pilling replied: “My own idea, though you may correct me, is that nothing so helps the study of foreign languages as travel, and as I hope, with the financing of my project, presently to come into some money, my beloved Zita and myself propose to undertake an extensive European trip to improve our linguistic equipment and to broaden our general outlook.”
“If you go to Abbazia,” cried Mrs. Kerr eagerly, “I can give you an introduction to the lady friend of the Spaniard Rodrigo. A very nice, quiet, well-read woman.”
“Yes, yes!” Eva cried.
“Or if you pass through Innsbruck, you must absolutely look up my friend Fräulein von Wiesendorf, and I am sure she would be very glad to give you German lessons.”
“I am very much indebted to you for this information,” Pilling bowed, “and if you allow me I will make a note of their addresses.” He produced out of his waistcoat pocket a neat leather-bound pocket-book and pencil, and their two heads mingled as he recorded: “Fräulein von Wiesendorf, in the care of Herr Oberst von Wiesendorf, Comptroller of Public Morals, Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria.”
“And what about Tamara Leonidovna?” said Eva.
“Frau König? No, no, she is too fiery; she will consume him.”
As they passed into the dining room, Frank perceived a striking suite of bright polished furniture. As he stood gaping at it, Eva slightly pinched his arm in the doorway, and her look seemed to say: “Now what did I tell you?”
“I congratulate you,” Mrs. Kerr turned to Frank, “on your very good taste.”
“It’s ‘Me-Too’s’ selection,” said Zita.
“But it’s Ferdinand Fyodorovich’s—how shall I say?—inspiration.”
“The Power-behind-the-Throne! Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Pilling—rather like a horse.
“I’ve heard of your prosperity. Very charming and touching.”
“Dam’ fine fibre in this wood,” said Pilling knowingly.
“What did I tell you, darling?” Eva said.
“And not at all expensive,” added Mrs. Kerr. “When I come to think what we paid for our Japanese suite in our Meran Schloss—”
“I told you it’s a bargain,” Eva said.
“Dirt cheap,” said Pilling, “considering,” he explained, “the finesse of the fibre.”
“I suppose it is,” said Frank, bewildered.
“Good value,” Eva said.
“Only the colour is wrong,” said Zita quietly.
They all turned to her enquiringly.
“The wall-paper,” she pointed by way of explanation. “Still, it’s very nice and sweet. And now let us all sit down to tea.”
“There is a Russian saying,” laughed Mrs. Kerr: “‘You don’t look into the mouth of a gift horse.’”
“I wish I knew Russian,” said Pilling.
“You must come and stay with us,” said Mrs. Kerr, “when things mend in Russia.”
The door opened and a lanky, awkward boy on the verge of youth walked timidly into the room.
“Hello, John!” said Zita.
“Is that John?” Frank cried. “To think it’s John, who fiddled with my razor blades way back in the Tyrol! How he’s pushed up!”
John giggled bashfully.
“Come up, John,” from Eva.
“John, say how do you do,” from Zita.
A tremulous leaf of a lad, at that awkward age which borders on adolescence, when one is neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring, came up lankily and shook hands with a shy grin. And that nervous youth had once been a dare-devil child!
“Hello, John,” from Pilling.
“John is so shy,” from Eva.
“Come and have tea, John,” from his mother.
Pilling looked him over, up and down. “Cheer up, John!”
John giggled bashfully.
“John is so shy,” Zita said.
“You’ll be all right on the farm, John,” from Eva.
“John is going on the farm when we go back to Ireland,” Mrs. Kerr explained.
“To our cousins in Ireland,” said Eva.
“With Daddy,” said Zita.
“Cheer up, John!” from Pilling.
“John is so shy,” from Zita.
“Don’t be shy, John,” from Eva.
“It’s a real family reunion to-day,” observed Mrs. Kerr. Very charming and touching. I am sorry Raymond couldn’t come, or we would have all been together.”
“I have a real feeling for family,” Pilling remarked, “and consider Zita’s people like my own.”
“It’s very delightful and homely. And I hope we will have a rattling good holiday together before Eva starts on her tour with Lord de Jones and John and I return to Ireland.”
“Lord de Jones asked me to come with him as his private secretary because he likes me very much and I remind him, he says, of Mummy. We start for Paris end of this month.”
“My husband can’t hear the name of de Jones,” Mrs. Kerr explained, “without a thirst for violence seizing him. I suppose it is because Lord de Jones came into my life almost immediately on our getting married. And, curiously enough, I loved him for the same sort of thing as I loved my husband. Both had wandered away from their families, seeking something remote and romantic, and both had alighted on me! I called them ‘my lost dogs.’ And Lord de Jones—he was then the Honourable Christopher Mosquito—was also called ‘Werther.’ Only, unlike Werther, he was not a poet, but a scientist, with queer, sombre ideas about the end of the world and his mission. Very romantic and charming. And my husband was Kestner, the fiancé, you know. Only they were not friends, as in Werther, but enemies. They used to go out with my father bear shooting on sleighs, but really trying to kill each other. I waited at home, wondering which of them would come back. Very exciting and thrilling.”
“Lord de Jones telephoned to me,” said Eva, “to come and see him on business, and as he was ill in bed he asked me to sit down beside him and hold his hand, as he said it did him good as I reminded him of Mummy.”
“When I was a young girl like Eva,” Mrs. Kerr pursued with a look of tender reminiscence, “I used to visit a young student, who lived in an attic and who was terribly in love with me, and sit on his bed, while he looked into my eyes and wept....”
“But Mr. Bumphill thinks it’s he who got me a secretarial post—but I said to him: ‘Confound your impudence!’” from Eva. “‘We want no introductions to anybody,’ I said, ‘We are well known. My fiancé—’”
“Who’s your fiancé?” asked Zita eagerly.
“Him,” said Eva, with a casual nod at Frank. “‘My fiancé,’ I said, ‘secured admission to Lord Ottercove by merely putting us into a story.’”
Pilling looked at Frank enquiringly.
“That’s true,” said Frank.
“I congratulate you,” Pilling said. And then, not without emotion: “I sincerely congratulate you. You are a made man.”
“‘And as for Lord de Jones,’ I said, ‘he’s Mummy’s friend,’ I said, ‘and no admirer of yours.’ So Mr. Bumphill looked very thoughtfully at the goldfishes and said at last: ‘Come, let us kiss and be friends.’”
“Now I was thinking,” said Pilling as he shifted his look from Eva to Frank, “of starting”—he looked for approval to his paramour—“with the expert assistance of my dear Zita, a West End dancing establishment of my own, if Lord Ottercove saw fit to finance the project.”
Eva sat facing Frank across the long tea table, staring at him with her large violet eyes, as if to take him in properly and now, as Pilling spoke, a faint look of irony came into them that made them ripple with light. As Frank passed her in a narrow passage she pinched his arm.
“What’s all this nonsense about your going away with de Jones?” he asked, and saw that she appreciated in the briskness of his tone the nervous jealousy that prompted it. “You’re not going, really, are you?”
“No.”
“Will you, darling, dine with me to-night? and we might go to the theatre afterwards.”
“If Zita lets me.”
“She surely will.”
“If Pilling lets her.”
“Oh, hang Pilling!”
“Hang Pilling!” she echoed.
“I do want you to come to the theatre with me to-night.”
“To something funny,” she said.
“We’ll go to the Opera. I want you to hear Die Walküre.”
“Is it a funny thing?”
“Oh, screamingly funny!”
But she missed his intonation. “We saw, Baby and I when she was here last month, The Constant Nymph. Rather good.”
“Who is Baby?”
“My little Irish cousin. She is back again in County Clare. And there was a man on my right who said I was like Tony. ‘Pardon me,’ he said, ‘but you are just like my conception of Antonia.’ ‘I have a nobler soul,’ I said: ‘I am more like Tessa.’ And he called me ‘The Nymph.’ Quite amusing.”
But she did not find it very amusing; she sat still, listening with an attentive but unreceiving look, like a good little girl in church.
In the taxi she sighed and said, “Another three weeks, and you won’t see me any more. Perhaps never again.”
“But what do you mean?”
“De Jones,” she said and nodded gravely.
“But you said No. I asked you this afternoon and you said No, you weren’t going.”
“I didn’t want to disappoint you,” she said.
On nearing home she asked the taxi-driver to make a noise—and the obliging man pressed the accelerator—“to make Zita jealous,” she explained. “Now that they live together, Pilling never takes her out, and if he does, once in a blue moon, they go by bus; never in a taxi.”
“I’ve noticed she has grown bitter.”
“Bitter. Bitter. That’s the right word for her. You have hit on the right word, darling. Bitter. I must tell her.—Louder!” she called to the taxi-driver.
The man was forcing his machine to convey the illusion of machine-gun fire.
“Still louder!” said Eva.
At last a window raised itself at the top and a head, dim and nebulous in the gloom, thrust out under it. “Oh, it’s you, Eva?” came Zita’s voice.
“Arrived,” answered Eva.
XIII.
THE SPIDER
In the vast cream-and-blue office all the lamps were discreetly shaded and cast a mild, steady light; the electric radiators exuded an even, purified warmth. Lord Ottercove seemed to go on with his work unencumbered, nay, stimulated by Frank’s presence. Frank would arrive at any time after six o’clock in the evening, and the braided commissionaire who confronted applicants with questionnaires would at once call out to the lift boy: “Mr. Dickin to see his lordship.” And Frank would be taken straight up, without relays on the way, and handed by the original lift boy to the topmost page, who, without a second’s hesitation, announced him to his master: “Mr. Dickin, m’lord,” immediately followed by a “Show him in.” He would saunter in noiselessly across the polished floor, Lord Ottercove taking no notice of him, and lounge luxuriously in one of the enormous blue chairs, and dream. Now visitors would be shown in, and Frank would listen, wonder and learn. Learn of the enormous net of activities controlled by Lord Ottercove. Now the page would announce that the editors of Lord Ottercove’s newspapers whom he had called for a conference were on the landing, and indeed one could already hear the shuffling of editorial feet. But Lord Ottercove might be settling a point with Frank as to the relative value of Buddha’s philosophy in the light of Einsteinian physics, or the historic veracity of the Immaculate Conception, and he would call out to the page: “Don’t let them in, unless it be over your dead body!” And the page, flattered by the momentous responsibility thrust on his slender shoulders, leaned zealously against the door behind which editorial feet were still shuffling, till the great chief, the historic or philosophic point settled, shouted: “Let ’em in!” They entered in a thin file, men of assorted girths, sizes and physiognomies, and Lord Ottercove as he beheld them would call out to Frank, with the leer of a Nero: “How do you like them, Dickin? eh? Aren’t they a gang of bloody ruffians, what?” while the editors with solemn mien and stately port settled round the octangular table, Lord Ottercove among them but eminently presiding. And now for matters of high policy! “Damn John Knox,” Lord Ottercove would say. “These interminable Sunday articles about him! I am sick to death of him. Let us have something new and fresh.” And gradually he would expand into a living message and tell them what it was he wanted his newspapers to say; his hands would rise, his fingers spread and come together, till they held the extracted substance, the salt, the Bovril-like quintessence of the meaning he wished to have conveyed to the waiting world outside. Fascinated, his editors watched him, fascinated and mesmerised, while he, like a conductor of orchestra, played on their heart strings, till even the sulky and backward ones melted.
They rose, the conference being over. Tired, he sat there, his hand on his brow.
“To get them to pull in a team. Not so easy,” he said.
“I don’t think your staff likes me very much,” said Dickin. “They think I have wormed myself into your heart and become an evil influence. A sort of Rasputin.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Ottercove. He rose, pressed the bell, ordered dinner.
The butler sprang out of the floor, the octangular table was cleared of papers and fittings. Chicken, caviare took their place. And champagne bottles.
They sat down to dinner. The host, who had had the telephone placed at his elbow, would every now and then take up the receiver and communicate with the editors of his newspapers, or the editors would themselves telephone to ask for instructions, when he would say: “I am supporting the Air Force against the Admiralty. All you need know.”
“But last Friday when I had tea with you at your house you were supporting the Admiralty against the Air Force,” Frank said.
“Getting too cocky,” Lord Ottercove explained.
“I suppose they are.”
“Besides, it doesn’t do for a newspaper proprietor to be one-sided. He must steer the middle course.”
“I suppose he must.”
To be alone with a man who has wrecked more than one Ministry, and register his sigh cumulative of a strenuous day’s work, to feel the contact of power! By no means a negligible experience. Frank felt he would like to incite Lord Ottercove to further action. But what action? Something big, something shattering, something gigantic. Wreck the Celestial Empire? Establish a Kingdom of Jewdom? a Negro Republic? Imbue the Fascisti with Socialist sense?
His heart swelled at the thought and he looked at his host tenderly. “I should like to write ... to describe ... all this....”
“Well,” said Lord Ottercove, “and why not?”
XIV.
And when Frank called on him again at his office, Lord Ottercove was lying on the sofa, covered by a luxurious Eastern rug, the telephone on the floor by his side and two electric radiators turned full on to him, dictating to a lady stenographer discreetly seated on the edge of a chair beside him. He looked enquiringly at Frank as if to ask: “Now isn’t that good enough copy for you?”
Frank looked hot and more than usually perplexed and embarrassed. He had experienced some difficulty in getting dressed for dinner. He had broken his collar stud, then torn his collar. He found the shirt studs would not go through the shirt front button holes, while the new collar stud would not keep open. He discovered that he had no clean tie and that the waistcoats, except for one which had no buckle at the back, were all in the wash, and the one without the buckle had, moreover, shrunk so much that he could not get the buttons through it. He lost his temper and his hat, and then, unable to secure a taxi, dashed off to the nearest Underground station and stepped into the wrong train. Emerging at the other end, he trod on to some slippery nastiness on the pavement and nearly broke his neck. He realised that he was over two hours late for dinner and he felt deeply distressed and unhappy. Lord Ottercove, on the other hand, looked harassed. Perhaps the news of the dining-room suite had reached him. Or perhaps he thought Frank wasn’t drawing nearly enough. But whenever now he met Lord Ottercove, Frank read a meaning into his look. Lord Ottercove looked sad, dubious, alarmed; or was trying not to look dubious, alarmed or sad. The uncertainty of Lord Ottercove’s reactions to the scale of Frank’s financial manipulations began to tell on the latter’s nerves. “As much as you need,” Lord Ottercove had said. But his needs had grown with his wants, and alarmed him. And he was as much pained by the thought of exceeding Lord Ottercove’s generosity (Lord Ottercove’s watchful generosity) as he was by the possibility of erring quite needlessly on the side of financial timidity and reluctance to use his good fortune. There was no kind of security in this arrangement, and suddenly he felt he couldn’t stand it. It was already in his throat. “I want to ask you to—”
“I’ve had a man in here just now playing”—Lord Ottercove pointed at the piano—“Rimsky-Korsakoff. That lovely bit from his opera.... Oh, what’s the name? It’s on my lips....”
“I want to ask you to turn off that financial arrangement,” Frank said. “It’s too upsetting. I—”
Lord Ottercove pressed the bell button.
“Stop that banking arrangement Mr. Dickin has with me,” he said as Mrs. Hannibal entered the room.
Frank gasped.
Mrs. Hannibal made a shorthand note of it and retired.
“It’s on my lips,” said Lord Ottercove. “I know the opera well. Lord! now what is the name?” He pulled out his watch and looked up at Frank.
“I know I am late. An evening of misadventures culminating” (he was going to say “in your stopping my principal source of income,” but pulled up in time) “in my nearly breaking my neck as I stepped on to some slippery nastiness on the pavement.” His sense of social injustice provoked by Lord Ottercove’s action, who, after depriving him of the principal means to a comfortable existence, remained lying on the sofa calmly stroking his pekingese, vented itself through a side outlet. “Confound these dogs and their owners! They should be made to respect the integrity of pavements. Pavements were made for men, not for dogs. But in this country it’s all topsy-turvy. If I were the Prime Minister of England I should exterminate the breed.”
Lord Ottercove suddenly jumped off the sofa and, without a word, went over to the octangular table in the middle of the room and made a note. Then, rising, “I will act on your suggestion,” he said.
“What? exterminate the breed of dogs?”
“Not I. The Prime Minister.”
“Hardly a popular task you are giving him?”
“Give him just enough rope to hang himself on,” said Lord Ottercove. He rang the bell, ordered a journalist to write an obituary article on a world-famous novelist about to be operated upon for appendicitis, and instructed a reporter to spend all night outside the house of a man remanded on bail on the chance of his committing suicide; then leaned back and said: “As you are too late for dinner I am taking you to-night to sup at the Kiss-Lick Club.”
“Are you really?”
Lord Ottercove began taking off his boots. Frank watched him, and was moved. There is something moving in seeing a great newspaper magnate and owner of several score million pounds removing his boots like any other citizen of the Western portion of the British Empire. One cannot assist at such a spectacle without an inward feeling that this should not be so. It should not be so, when a somebody-and-nobody in the Eastern part of the same empire has his sandals removed for him by servile wives or servants. And yet, resent it as you may, there was something fine, unquestionably right and noble, in seeing Lord Ottercove remove his boots, in a quick, breezy manner as though he thought this the most natural thing in the world.
And he did more than remove his boots. He disappeared into the bathroom and returned from there in his vest and pants—just as any other man might do—and yet still looking the part, still the unchallenged proprietor and director of the Daily Runner. He slipped into pumps and a boiled shirt prepared for him by his valet Gilbert, into the black braided trousers, tacked on the stiff white collar—so tortuous a task for most men—quite effortlessly, and presently was tying his white bow-tie. And now he emerged in an exquisite tailcoat, spruce and tight like a glove.
In the historic lift they descended to the ground and stepped into the great motor, Mimi, the decadent and undogly pekingese, with them. A crowd of Daily Runner hands had gathered at the corner of the building, and Lord Ottercove touched his hat with his forefinger on the chance of their having saluted him. “They’re awfully disappointed, I guess, that I am not emerging from that office with a woman.” The huge propellered car ran swiftly and imperiously down the deserted Fleet Street and, suddenly, spread out wings in front and behind and left the ground, clearing the roofs of Fleet-street houses, flying Piccadilly-ward. Frank gasped with surprise.
“You didn’t expect that, now did you?” said Lord Ottercove.
“I did not.”
“This is, in fact, the first model of a ‘Winged Chariot’ to reach this country. But I guess I won’t be long the only one to have a chariot.”
“Winged chariots!” mused Frank. “If, in addition, we could have winged love, a winged life, I would not refuse eternity at that.”
“If you had the refusal of it!” grunted Lord Ottercove, from the depth of the car, hatless as usual.
“You talk like a publisher,” Frank laughed; and presently asked: “Do you believe in immortality, Lord Ottercove?”
“Not a bit of it!”
“As Lord Balfour once said, ‘If there is no life after this, then life is a miserable joke. And whose joke?’”
“When did he say that and to whom?”
“He is reported by Lady Oxford to have said it to her.”
Lord Ottercove took out a pocket-book and pencil and made a note in it. For a while he looked pensive.
“You are thinking—?” Frank said.
“Of Rimsky-Korsakoff’s opera. What the hell is the name?”
“After love, music is the best thing in the world.”
“Love,” said Lord Ottercove, “is an inconvenience.”
“You mean sexual love?”
“No, love. Sexual love is a nuisance.”
Waiters were falling prostrate before Lord Ottercove at the Kiss-Lick Club and (in a manner of exaggeration) were committing hari-kari before him. But he gathered them round him and said: “Can any of you tell me the name of Rimsky-Korsakoff’s famous opera?”
They couldn’t.
He called the head waiter: who couldn’t. He called the manager; the director and his sleeping partner; they summoned the bandmaster, who returned to his band and conferred with the musicians and came back, shrugging his shoulders. Lord Ottercove looked sad and perplexed. “There is no solution,” he said at last, “but to get hold of Rimsky-Korsakoff in Leningrad or Moscow.”
“He is dead,” said Frank.
“Really!” Lord Ottercove shook his head. “ ... betrayed again ...” he muttered. He ate gloomily for a time, and watching him Frank wondered how even the rich in this world could not evade the anguish of thwarted longings! The two men ate in silence. When the meal was drawing to its close, Lord Ottercove looked up at Frank. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I will telegraph the name to you to-morrow morning.”
“You are very kind,” said Frank. “You cannot imagine how that relieves me.”
“Now this,” said Lord Ottercove more cheerily, “is instructive for you to see as a novelist. A real Michael Arlen atmosphere!”
“Ah!”
Frank did not tell Ottercove that he had already been to the Kiss-Lick with Eva a few nights before. He perceived that Ottercove liked to astonish him, and so he adopted the attitude of a newly-fledged chicken and to everything that was pointed out to him he said: “Ah!”
“Do you see that young man over there sitting at the side of my niece?” said the host. “Now it is my turn to continue your serial. That is Raymond Kerr.”
“Raymond Kerr!”
“Raymond Kerr.”
“Raymond Kerr! Her favourite boy? The one she used always to talk of. ‘Raymond has my eyes.’ Raymond this. Raymond that.”
“There is only one Raymond. And there is Chris de Jones.”
“I know him.”
“But you don’t know that the two are related.”
“How related?”
“Quite spontaneously. Chris is his dad—his ‘Papa.’”
“It never occurred to me! Yet, of course. There is a sort of resemblance.”
“A very marked resemblance.”
“Though Raymond is good-looking.”
“His mother’s boy.”
“And de Jones looks saintly but hideous.”
“He looks the part. A man with a mission. An ominous mission. Wait and he will tell you that he is the new Messiah. He came out with it once under chloroform; said his mission was to blow us all up.”
“I think,” said Frank, “that it is quite conceivable that the end of the world might come about in some such casual way. A fanatic like that.... Suppose he blows up the earth instead of increasing the crop?”
“I wish he did,” said Ottercove.
“Is he mad?”
“Mad as a hatter! But a genius.”
“Of the untried,” said Frank.
Lord Ottercove looked at him first circumspectly, then quizzically.
“Hullo, hullo, Mr. Kerr!”
“How do you do, Lord Ottercove.”
“This is Mr. Dickin, the novelist, you know him?”
Mr. Kerr, an extremely foolish-looking man, fixed a suspicious pair of eyes on Frank. “How do you do?”
“And you are happy on your farm in Ireland?”
Mr. Kerr took Lord Ottercove by the arm to where Lady de Jones and Raymond were sitting amorously together, and said in a significant undertone:
“This is my revenge.”
Then, as significantly, he walked away.
Lord Ottercove took Frank Dickin by the arm and led him towards Eleonor and Raymond Kerr. “This,” he observed, “is really getting to be more and more of a Michael Arlen atmosphere, of great help to you as a novelist, I daresay.—Well, Eleonor, how are you? Hullo, Raymond. Enjoying your fame as a prospective co-respondent, what? Some men win battles and get fame; others write lyrics; others, again, well—do as you do. This is Mr. Dickin, the novelist. You know my niece? Kerr, do you know Mr. Dickin? You don’t? But he knows all about you. You will see that he does as soon as you read his serial. Eleonor, how is your divorce getting on?”
“I expect it will be all right, Uncle Rex, but the difficulty is you never know just when it will be over, and with the baby coming....” She looked at Dickin fearlessly. She was a modern woman.
“Yes,” said her uncle, “you cannot time these things.”
“The divorce?”
“I mean the baby.”
“The baby is a deliberate protest on my part against Chris’s deserting me for Raymond’s mother.”
“Quite. I appreciate your motive. But you should have timed him for a little later. As it is, the baby will land between two stools. And as for Chris, he is at present more interested in Raymond’s sister than Raymond’s mother.”
“I cannot have the baby landing between two stools. Chris must acknowledge the baby as his son. It’s bad enough that Raymond has been tricked by him out of his heritage, and, as Raymond’s son, the baby is a de Jones by blood, and ought to have the name, too. Mr. Dickin, you are a psychologist. Don’t you think I am right?”
“You are quite right, Lady de Jones.”
“I see your point,” said her uncle. “Chris may deny the paternity of the baby: but he cannot deny its grandparentage. So he might as well not deny anything. And Raymond will not press his parental claims.”
“No. You see, he feels that thus he will be getting something of his own back, if not for himself, at least for his son.”
“If it is a son.”
“I hope it is.”
“Oh, here is Chris. We’ll speak to him about it. Hullo, Chris.”
“Hello, Rex.”
“Now look here, Chris. Eleonor wants to marry Raymond. I don’t mind. But—” (his lips moved silently) “she’s used to a great name; she’ll feel chilly, naked, don’t you know, as plain Mrs. Raymond Kerr.”
“I’m very sorry. But what can I do? I’d gladly sell him my name. But I know of no means to do so.”
“No—no, it’s all very simple. It’s all perfectly simple. You adopt Raymond as your son and heir. When you die he will be Viscount de Jones, and while you still potter about he’ll be—what will he be?”
“The Honourable Raymond Mosquito.”
“Well, that’s better than nothing. Here, Eleonor, I propose that”—his lips moved silently—“Chris adopts Raymond straightaway. Then the baby’ll be born a de Jones, and no need for Chris to adopt the baby. Kills two birds with one stone.”
Raymond seemed very pleased.
“But the baby’s nearly due.”
“Oh, well, in that case, Chris, you’ll have to acknowledge it as your own child, for, you know, it won’t fit into its proper time.”
“I don’t mind,” said Chris.
“What will he be?”
“Depends on what you call him.”
“What will you call him, Eleonor?”
“If it’s a boy, I’ll call him Robert.”
“The Honourable Robert Mosquito.”
“Now that’s all right. All perfectly in order. When can you do it?”
“What?”
“Adopt Raymond.”
“Not till after the divorce, of course.”
“Why, Chris?”
“I can’t adopt my co-respondent, can I?”
“But what nonsense, Chris!” cried Eleonor. “Raymond doesn’t come into the divorce at all. It’s his mother who is the co-respondent, or whatever the name happens to be.”
“I thought it was Raymond’s sister,” said Lord Ottercove.
“It was the mother at the time we started the proceedings, and let us stick to her or we shall never get divorced,” said Eleonor irritably. “You have no memory, Chris. You forget you are taking the blame on yourself.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Still,” Lord Ottercove observed, “I doubt the wisdom of adopting Raymond till after the divorce. It might prejudice the case. The difference, as I envisage the situation, is whether Raymond is to be Chris’s elder or younger son, and if the baby is to be born before Raymond is adopted, Raymond will be the younger brother of the baby.”
“What! the younger brother of his own son!” Eleonor exclaimed. “I understand nothing.”
“That’s right. The baby’ll be the elder brother of his own father. And why not?” said her uncle.
“I’d rather,” she said, “he was what he is: the son of his father and mother.”
“Well,” said Lord Ottercove, “it’s all very simple. It’s all perfectly simple. All you have to do is to adopt the baby. And he will be Raymond’s son again—The Honourable Robert Mosquito.”
“No, he won’t,” said de Jones.
“What will he be, Chris?”
“Master Robert Mosquito.”
“Well, all this will right itself,” said Lord Ottercove, “the moment Chris dies.”
They all looked at de Jones expectantly.
“But, of course, the baby may turn out to be a girl,” he said.
“Quite conceivably she may.”
On the way home, in the taxi, Frank once more reviewed the matrimonial situation revealed before him at the Kiss-Lick Club and found that he could not improve on the harmony of Ottercove’s solution.
At the club he found a telegram from Eva, despatched from Dublin: