Eva's apples

That doesn’t seem to make sense.”

“No. How could a man walk and talk half an hour after his head was cut off?”

“Precisely. Even King Charles couldn’t do it. But put a full stop after ‘talked’ and it makes perfect sense. You may have heard of treaties being wrecked through a comma out of place. And what punctuation is for the written speech, intonation is for the spoken language. You should have listened for it.”

“I have heard of treaties wrecked by faulty punctuation,” Frank said bitterly; “but this is my first experience of two human lives ruined by an ambiguous intonation.”

“Obviously you married under a misapprehension. But she! I am surprised she didn’t know any better. I am rather concerned about the matter. I knew her mother well. What was she thinking? Marrying a man like you without a farthing to bless himself with!”

“I told her you would give me The Evening Ensign as a wedding present.”

Lord Ottercove frowned.

“You said so.”

“I cannot,” said Lord Ottercove, “give you The Evening Ensign as a wedding present. It is my principal evening paper. It has the best tone of all the evening papers; it is read by the élite, the cream of the nation. But look here, I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you.”

Frank looked up at him hopefully.

“I’ll take an article from you. I’ll pay you”—he blew hard while considering the sum—“£20 for it. You know, when I like a fellow there’s nothing that I wouldn’t do for him! I am like that—can’t help myself. My staff consider me wildly extravagant.”

“Is there any valid objection to paying me more?”

“Well, look here,” said Lord Ottercove, “you must make a name for yourself, and I will pay you more.”

“All very well, but how? How?”

“Well, we must bring your personality before the public. I am sure that if your personality is brought before the public the public will begin to get curious about your personality and begin to want to buy your books.”

Frank meditated for a minute. “There is nothing in my life of any interest to anybody, except perhaps that I was born at the time my father was First Secretary at our Embassy in St. Petersburg and—”

“Well, that’s interesting enough. Couldn’t you develop the situation?”

“How? Perhaps suggest that the Tsar eloped with my mother?”

“Of course. That would immediately reflect on your paternity and bring into question your legitimacy.”

“A marked resemblance to the late Emperor—what?”

“Certainly. It will make them talk.” He took up the receiver. “Send up Miss Sherwood to me, will you. I want her to write up a story about Mr. Dickin, who is in my office.”

Frank learnt that “stories” was the journalistic term for articles; whereas real stories—he suggested writing a short story for Lord Ottercove for £100—were called “articles.”

“All right,” said Lord Ottercove. “Write it to-night and let me have your article by six o’clock to-morrow morning. I will read it in bed before breakfast.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms to the ceiling. “Oh God, I’m bored to hell,” he said, and yawned voluptuously.

“Now, Miss Sherwood, you know Mr. Dickin, the famous novelist. Don’t say you haven’t read his books. That would sound uneducated. Now I want you to write a story about him that would reach the wider public which lives in ignorance of him only because they haven’t heard of him. I am convinced that he has a great future before him, a future of fame and felicity. He has already taken the first step towards it: he has gone and got married to-day. But I feel that the public wants to know personal details about him. There is, in the first place, his birth, under mysterious circumstances, in Russia. His mother was an intimate of the Imperial family. It is delicate ground we are treading upon here, but I know you are a clever woman and I have every confidence in your address and discretion. Your treatment of my niece’s divorce case confirms my opinion. You could begin by giving a pen-portrait of the late Tsar by projecting, so to speak, onto the screen of your story salient points of the amorous life of the late Emperor. Go to the British Museum and see if you find something, or look through the works of William Le Queux. I remember reading something about spies in Russia or somewhere—sure to be something about Rasputin or somebody. Well, here is Dickin’s mother....” Lord Ottercove’s tone grew inaudible; he took her across to the blue sofa. His robust lips moved silently. “You understand ...” Dickin heard, “ ... more than the lad cares to admit....”

“It’s a fine story,” nodded Miss Sherwood.

Lord Ottercove looked radiant. “Creating illusions,” he murmured, “in a world of appearances. The essential function of the journalist. Mrs. Hannibal,” he said in a loud, clear voice, “have that hung up as my motto all over the building.”

Mrs. Hannibal, making a shorthand note of it, retired to execute his instructions.

“Well,” said Lord Ottercove, stretching his hands to heaven, but restraining a yawn.

Miss Sherwood and Frank understood that the séance was at an end.

After the door had closed on them, Lord Ottercove vented his yawn, looked at his watch, and jumped up.

XXI.

“On the banks of the river Neva stands the city of St. Petersburg, in the Empire of Russia.”

Thus, illustrated by a picture of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, The Sunday Runner started off Miss Sherwood’s article. Frank read it out aloud in bed to his wife as they woke up on Sunday in her (now their) attic flat in Half-Moon-street. “It is not perhaps generally known that Mr. Frank Septimus Dickin, the novelist, was born in Petrograd—or as he prefers to call it, St. Petersburg—at the time his father was Naval Attaché to our Embassy. This austerely beautiful city has changed its name twice since its inception by Peter the Great, who christened it in the Swedish idiom after himself. The late war changed the idiom, while maintaining the name, and the revolution changed the name to that of Lenin, while preserving the Russian idiom. In truth, a romantic city. (A corner picture showed the Winter Palace and the Quay.) Here Peter once walked. Here the last tragic emperor dwelt in fear and misgiving, while Lenin stormed the citadel by word of mouth and word of print—the capital which was to bear his name! Mr. Dickin, who loves this granite city of private palaces, built by Peter and sung by the great poet Pushkin and haunted by the spirit of Rasputin, claims to be connected with it by ties of blood of the Romanov strain. It is a romantic story which, perhaps, some day he will give us in full; the love of the last and most tragic of Romanovs for the novelist’s beautiful mother. There are things in life that are hurt by indelicate scrutiny, things which shrink before the too-eager curiosity of the sensational mind, when the biographer must withdraw or stand aside and linger in reverence.”

Ensconced in a single bed with his wife, Frank felt more like an adjunct than a husband, and the reading of the article he thought might rehabilitate his dwindling prestige with Cynthia. If he had no money, he had at least, it seemed, imperial blood. When, on discovering his financial infecundity, she had said: “What are we to do?” he had replied: “Don’t you bother. Live on as you’ve been doing and take no notice of me.” Hence the single bed. She was just to go on sleeping in it as before and take no notice of his presence in it.

Their married life was enriched by a stream of press-cuttings which trickled in with every post. Miss Sherwood’s article was reprinted by some of the provincial newspapers, and Frank’s Press-Cutting Agency had no difficulty in supplying him with paragraphs of a biographical interest.

Another cutting, headed, “Descendant of the Tsars,” read:

A new cutting read:

As time went on, the press-notices became more involved and informative. “Mr. Dickin’s mother,” read a notice, “which may not be generally known, was a governess at the Imperial Russian Court who became the Czar’s mistress and later that of Lenin, and his fame reposes on these two tragic pillars of Czardom and Communism.”

A further cutting, from a Liverpool paper, read:

A Dundee paper reprinted this identically, up to the words “Woman’s Battalion,” after which it had added: “of which she was the leader.”

“Well,” said Frank. “We seem to have had a good run for our money!”

“If it helps to sell the book,” said Cynthia.

“Bound to do! And now that we are comfortably settled in our own abode, don’t you think, darling, that we ought to give a party?”

“Whom could we ask?”

“I mean return hospitality to Ottercove before he goes abroad.”

“But he is so difficult about food.”

“I know. Always gets poisoned. It’s uncanny the way some people have a gift for getting poisoned in the most innocuous circumstances. I can’t conceive of getting poisoned short of going to an apothecary’s and asking for a bottle of poison. But Ottercove can’t swallow an egg without dropping his napkin on the floor and groaning: ‘Poisoned!’”

“But what does he eat?”

“We might write to his butler and find out.”

“Well, if you like write to the butler,” she said warily.

“I don’t remember his name.”

“What does that matter?”

“It doesn’t, of course.” He sat down to Cynthia’s (now his) writing-table and began to write to the butler, reading aloud to his wife as he did so, feeling that, in matrimony, a man cedes one half of his thoughts to his mate:

“‘My Dear Friend—’”

“You don’t address a butler as My Dear Friend. Frank! Really!”

“It does rather sound like addressing a Salvation Army meeting.”

“You simply write: to Mr. So-and-So.”

“Every day of my life with you, Cynthia, I am learning something!”

And he wrote: “To Mr.——, Butler to Lord Ottercove: Conceiving the idea of entertaining your lord at dinner, I appeal to you in all sincerity and friendship to supply me with a list of his lordship’s favourite dishes.”

“Leave out ‘appeal in all sincerity and friendship.’”

“All right. ‘Request in all earnestness.’”

“No, leave that out, too.”

Her intellect was not, Frank perceived, penetrating. She always meant what she said and thought that others did so too.

“Then we might ask ... whom?”

“Whom?”

“The Foreign Secretary. The difficulty is how begin my letter to him.—‘Signor, I would esteem it a privilege—’”

“Frank! Really! Don’t you know that only foreigners, I mean Italians, are addressed ‘Signor?’”

“I thought the Foreign Secretary was a foreigner.”

“Frank! Really! Don’t you know any better?”

“But why then is he called the Foreign Secretary?”

“Because he has to deal with foreigners—with other foreign secretaries!”

“Ah—!—that’s why!... But are they too called foreign because they deal with foreigners?”

“Of course.”

“A world, I see, populated by foreigners.”

“Foreign to us. We foreign to them.”

“Every day of my life with you I learn something!”

A reply came next day from the butler of Lord Ottercove.

“Sir,” he wrote, “My lord is fond of cold chicken, ham, plaice, salmon, a mutton chop (well done) with mashed potatoes, curry and rice, roast beef (hot), and strawberries. His lordship’s favourite drink is whisky.—Your obedient servant, T. Wilkins.

“P.S.—Taking the liberty to show your kind letter to his lordship, my lord desires me to say that he would prefer a hard boiled egg.”

At half past seven Lord Ottercove’s winged chariot came to a halt, grandly yet sensitively, at their door in Half-Moon-street and, not bothering to wipe his feet, Lord Ottercove climbed up the expensive carpet and the remaining seven flights to their comfortable attic flat, panting dreadfully.

Frank took him at once into the dining room. “Since there is no cook on the premises, Cynthia is attending to the egg. And a great big fine egg it is too; you will see for yourself.”

“Fine,” said Lord Ottercove.

“Cynthia, bring forth the golden egg!”

Cynthia came in, with a plate in her hands.

“There,” cried Frank, “there you have it. There it is! A real egg....”

“Great ... grand ...” said Lord Ottercove.

“Sit down. There’s no one else to wait for. We invited the Foreign Secretary. But he couldn’t come. Either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Anyway, didn’t. Tuck in, Lord Ottercove.”

“Great ...” said Lord Ottercove, eating. “Grand....”

“And a drop of port,” said Frank, “to gulp it down with.”

“Grand fellow....”

“The meal’s finished!” peremptorily.

“Yes, I must be off. I am speaking at the House of Lords to-night.” The guest rose. “Grand fellow!” to Frank. “Well, darling,” to Cynthia, “happy? eh?”

“Quite, Rex,” she said, doubtfully. And paused, as if to say, in the confidential way a woman has with a man worth confiding in: “Rex, dear, what about The Evening Ensign?” But Lord Ottercove, who was endowed with extraordinary powers of divination into human motive, accelerated his steps downstairs. His conscience, owing to the hospitality partaken of, or, perhaps, because of its lamentable inadequacy and the implications therefrom arising, pricked him on the third step down, and he turned his head to say to Frank:

“Look here, I’ll take another article from you.”

But Frank’s gestures, to the unspeakable annoyance of his wife, had now become quite Eastern in their obsequiousness. “Good, my lord,” he bowed. “Kind, my lord.”

Cynthia stood on the doorstep, while Frank went out into the road and stroked the car. The chauffeur and Gilbert had both jumped out and were assisting their master into its soft and spacious confines. Frank stood at the door of the winged chariot, smug and nimble with its wings tucked under its shining sides, and commented aloud:

“Tuck in his lordship’s feet. Look after him well, Gilbert.”

“Yessir.”

Lord Ottercove was pleased. The source of human pleasure is a hidden well: for one reason or another Lord Ottercove looked pleased. “Great!... Grand!...” he kept muttering.

“Evenberry, faithful steward,” Frank was addressing the chauffeur, “drive his lordship carefully. Avoid sharp corners. Keep well within the speed limit.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now then, Gilbert, I rely on you.”

“Yessir.”

“Good master you have. Take good care of him.”

“Yessir.”

“Good man, Gilbert,” said Lord Ottercove benignantly, as to a horse. “Good man. Good servant.”

“Gilbert, enter into the joy of your lord....”

Cynthia stood, shivering a little, on the doorstep.

As the car moved off, Lord Ottercove, as always, hatless, waved an indulgent hand. “Good-bye, sweetie!”

“Good-bye, Rex.”

The car, owing to the lack of space, did not take wing but prosaically turned the corner.

“If your hospitality is scant,” said Frank, “nothing like enlarging on your guest’s preserves.” He ran into the house, kicking the cat on the way, and wiping his shoes on the mat, to spare the first-floor people’s carpet, climbed upstairs.

“A joke’s a joke,” said his lordship to himself, since there was no one else to say it to, “but a fellow can’t make a decent speech on an empty stomach.” He took up the telephone tube and said to the chauffeur:

“Call in at the Kiss-Lick Club.”

XXII.

“Well, how are your sales?” cried Lord Ottercove as Frank crossed the threshold—a dangerous step, perhaps symbolical—into his office.

“Low—still low. Seven copies a day.”

“Low average,” agreed the newspaper baron.

“I know why it doesn’t sell.”

“Why?”

“It’s a poor novel. That’s why. Poor stuff.”

“Dam’ poor stuff,” agreed Lord Ottercove. “That’s why I am interested in it.”

The author looked up at him in surprise.

“Any fool can sell a good novel. But it takes genius to sell a poor book. That’s why I like pushing it.”

“That is why I come to see you, hoping you may succeed in pushing it.”

“When I like a fellow,” the baron said in loud, robust tones, his light-grey eyes glinting jovially, “there is nothing that I wouldn’t do for him! You saw the boy who was in my office when you came in? You know who he is?”

“Who?”

“The business-manager of all my newspapers.”

“That boy?”

“That boy. He’s seventeen. You heard our business conversation?”

“It was like machine-gun fire.”

“That’s how I do my business!” said Lord Ottercove. “That boy, the business-manager of all my newspapers, was a page, what they call a bell boy out there, at the Metropole in San Francisco four months ago. He took my luggage up, switched on the light, drew the curtains, unstrapped my suitcase, took out the slippers. I had forgotten Gilbert on the road, and this solicitude and efficiency in the bell boy touched me to the heart. ‘Good boy,’ I said. ‘Good heart. Kind soul.’

“‘I have a reason for it, sir,’ he said.

“‘What reason?’

“‘I want a job from you.’

“‘Well, look here,’ I said, ‘you come to England one of these days, into my office, and I will give you a job.’

“He came a month after, worked his passage, you know, and found his way into my office. ‘I’ve come for that job, sir.’

“‘Well, look here,’ I said, ‘I want a business-manager who can manage all the business of all my newspapers. Can you manage it? If you can’t manage it I will make you a lift boy.’

“‘I’ll manage it,’ he said. And, by George, he does! You’ve heard our conversation?”

“Like rapid fire.”

“That’s how I do my business!”

“You don’t let them climb up?”

“No. I put a good boy up. And if he isn’t any good I pull him down.”

“I’d like to get as much out of you as that bell boy.”

“And why not? I am a man of money, and I am bored to hell, and your rotten book amuses me.”

“Quite. But you’ve a personality so charming and magnetic and you like to talk about yourself and you do it so engagingly that as a rule one forgets about one’s ulterior motives and becomes disinterested!”

“Well, look here,” said Lord Ottercove, “we must do something about that book of yours. We’ll have to advertise it. As a rotten book. The rottenest book of the century. What do you say to that?”

“Might take on.”

“Sure to do!”

The success of this strategem, however, proved social rather than financial. A few nights later, Lord Ottercove, after talking to Frank of himself till midnight, suddenly rose and said: “I am taking you to-night to a ball.”

“Are you really! Had I better ring up Cynthia and ask her to come along too?”

“Oh, no! You’ll be bored to death with her. She’s all right for love and that sort of thing. But never take her out with you. She used to bore me stiff before she married you. Now let us go.”

As the chariot was turning into a side lane, the baron suddenly leaned over to his companion. “I must tell you before the chariot comes to a stop, for it may interest you as a novelist, that where I am taking you now is Society. Not quite the real society, but the lighter Mayfair Michael Arlen sort, somewhat polluted with actors and such. Bohemian and the like, and chorus girls. I am doing this to help you with atmosphere and local colour—invaluable for you, as a recorder of contemporary customs, to get first-hand and red hot.”

“You are too kind.”

They had scarcely had their coats removed from them when the hostess appeared at the door and quickly whispered something to Lord Ottercove who, acting on the hint, said to Frank in a hushed undertone: “Whiz like mad across the hall!”

Frank did as he was bid, and, rejoining him in the drawing-room, “You see,” Lord Ottercove explained, “we tried to get you safely past Lady Kennan and Mrs. Ashton who, having heard of your being acclaimed the author of the rottenest novel of the century, had come out into the hall to snap you up on your arrival. It’s the sort of rare distinction that they are all out to secure for their salons. There are three great literary hostesses in London: Lady Kennan, Mrs. Ashton, and Lady Isabel Croft, where you are to-night. The three hostesses tend to frequent one another’s parties and they stand out in the hall to snatch away a literary novelty before the hostess has had time to warn and welcome him, and your being acclaimed the rottenest author of our time was something quite unusual; they are all mad to have you. Now go and talk to them.”

Lord Ottercove was borne away by a couple of hearty men, while Lady Isabel, a tall, excited woman, came up to Frank and welcomed him effusively. “I’ve put the two there off the scent, said you hadn’t arrived yet, so they are waiting in the hall. I am so glad you’ve come. Rex rang me up this afternoon. ‘Shall I bring you a literary prodigy, a man who’s written the rottenest book of our time and century?’ ‘Actually the rottenest? Oh, do, Rex darling, do!’ I said, ‘and see that he isn’t kidnapped at the door.’ But you’ve escaped their claws beautifully. That was a gallant dash across the hall. Now come and have something to eat; you deserve it.” And she pressed champagne and caviare sandwiches upon him, and then led him into another room full of over-powdered, over-painted, over-talkative women here and there dotted by a white-black figure of a man, and she made him sit beside her on the floor very uncomfortably so that he was afraid that his shirt front having blown out, would next blow open and the studs fly out on to the parquet. And she introduced him to an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer: “Johnny, this is Mr. Dickin, who wrote the rottenest novel of our time.”

The ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer beamed with delight and shaking Frank, who had jumped up from the floor, heartily by the hand, said: “Have you written the rottenest book of our time? Excellent! Haw! haw! haw!”

“Come,” said the hostess, “I’ll introduce you to my daughters. I have two lovely daughters. They’ve heard all about you and are thrilled at the idea of meeting you. Pamela, this is Mr. Dickin.”

Pamela was blonde and serious and interested in literature. “Now are you the rottenest novelist?” she asked. “Because this afternoon I met a man who said that he was even more rotten than you.”

“I cannot believe it,” said Frank.

“Now what do you want to do?” asked the hostess. “Do you want to eat or drink or smoke or dance or—?”

“Dance.”

“Pamela, take him upstairs and dance with him.”

Pamela took him upstairs into the music-room and on the way thither introduced him to people sitting out on the steps.

“This is Eleonor de Jones.”

“Oh, but we know him!” Eleonor exclaimed.

“Mr. Dickin. Mr. Raymond Mosquito.”

“Have you written the rottenest novel?” Eleonor asked.

“I must have done.”

“How splendid!” And she wrung from him before she let him go the promise to attend her baby’s christening.

“Raymond’s been adopted, then?” he asked Pamela while they danced upstairs.

“Yes. They will be married very soon now. Have you seen the baby?”

“A boy?”

“A boy. The image of Raymond. Isn’t he beautiful?”

“He has Eva’s eyes. His sister’s,” Frank added as Pamela did not seem to know who he was speaking of. While he danced on with Pamela, who was blonde, Maisy, her younger sister, even more blonde, talked to him all the time, while dancing with another. “Who are you?” she kept asking him, and he would not tell.

As he was going, she held him back by the hand. “Don’t go,” she said. “Oh, don’t go. I’ve found out who you are,” she looked into his eyes long and intently. “It couldn’t be better!”

XXIII.

THE PRETENDER

In matrimony, Frank and Cynthia both proved themselves to be inveterate individualists; they would be untrue to each other several times every day, so that when, exhausted and full of champagne, they returned to their flat in the morning, they could but stare and feebly giggle at each other. Thus far their partnership was a success.

Frank, whose mind began to run on the rails of publicity, which he discovered to be an unparallelled art, sometimes, when her condition made it possible, discoursed on it before his wife. “There are,” he would say, striding about in his dressing-gown out of which he rarely emerged before dusk, “no end of ways of advertising oneself.”

“For example?” she questioned.

“For example, thanking prominent people extravagantly in the press for the least little thing they may have done for you. It’s a graceful and lucrative self-advertisement. If, for example, the Duke of Bamboo should happen to nod to you on a dark day, having mistaken you for someone else, write to The Times that you have been unspeakably touched by the kind and thoughtful attitude of his Royal Highness to yourself and your works. Next day other newspapers, with the befuddled inaccuracy of the daily press, will comment on the incident under some such head lines: ‘Novelist Discovered and Helped by the Duke of Bamboo. His Royal Highness as Reader and Critic.’ Furthermore, the Duke, seeing it, might feel really flattered and demand to see the actual book, and, old and of infirm memory, might think that it’s some other book that he has seen before and—who knows?—may create a sensation by what must be, for Royalty, an unprecedented reference to a printed volume. If he but sneezes over it, all other British subjects will follow suit. And you are made.”

But his sales, despite all his philosophy, fell below his least sanguine expectations. He complained bitterly to Lord Ottercove, who indulged in some detached speculation. “You must shed,” he said, “your old personality, and assume a new individuality. I am convinced that if the public hears you have shed your old personality they will get curious about your new individuality and will begin to want to read your books.”

“I think,” said Frank, “that if I shed my clothes with my personality, they would be more curious still.”

“You would make a real impression on the public.”

“You seriously mean it?”

“They would see you were serious. The public doesn’t like to be trifled with. As a serious artist you must be prepared to suffer for your art.”

“Have I not suffered enough!”

“I will get some one to interview you on your attitude.”

“What attitude?”

“Towards nudeness. Mrs. Prologue would be the right woman for you, I daresay.” He looked at Dickin as if measuring his stature, and took up the receiver. “Send Mrs. Prologue up to me.”

“But she won’t expect me to—” Frank blushed. “She won’t I hope—”

“No, no, of course not. What the hell do you think my office is? A house of convenience? It is enough if she reports it.”

“But how will she know?”

“Well, you’ve got to tackle her yourself.”

“Mrs. Prologue, m’lord,” announced the page.

“Show her in.—This, Mrs. Prologue, is Mr. Dickin, the novelist. No, not Dickens. He is ... how shall I say?... morbid, perverse, threatens to go about—well—you are a married woman, Mrs. Prologue, and I needn’t paraphrase these things for you—naked, in a word. It’s—how shall I say?—it’s—”

“A complex,” helped out Mrs. Prologue.

“That’s right. A complex.”

He was afraid that this spectacled and earnest-looking lady might “dare” him; but she was quiet and sensible and did not insist. “Is it”—she fixed a pair of competent eyes upon him—“your conviction that we should—”

“He, not we,” corrected her employer.

“That you should go about ... in that state?”

“It’s more—it’s a belief—a sort of religion,” said Frank.

“I see. Nacktkultur. I’ve been reading a story recently by Paul Morand who very amusingly deals with a club up in Norway devoted to the practising of these theories—”

“That’s right! That’s right! You’ve hit on it, Mrs. Prologue. You’ll be able to write a story about Mr. Dickin. You may say, in fact, that he has, while performing the cult of this Kultur or what, been surprised by a visit from ... we’ll have to think of some name ... to the roof of his house where he performs it. I leave him to you.”

Frank returned to Half-Moon-street, which Cynthia, by the way, it occurred to him, had deserted some days ago, in more buoyant spirits. He did not resent her disappearance. A man who had failed to provide his horse with a stable, the stable with a manger, the manger with fodder, would indeed be unjust and unreasonable to object to his horse’s grazing outside in the field. And in this harsh and difficult world Frank was not unreasonable. He watched, contentedly, her grazing on the greenest, most flourishing fields of London, Paris, and New York. He walked about in the flat, inspecting the shelves in the kitchen containing things in tins bought with her money; and in applying them to their uses drew on his common sense and such powers of divination as he possessed; and reflected that man’s needs were few, and woman’s less. He even attempted, with a certain misgiving, to boil himself an egg on the “Primus” stove, unable to foretell under what circumstances it might explode. How sweet it was to exist alone and owe nothing to anybody!

The post brought him a batch of press-notices. “The author of ‘Pale Primroses,’”read a cutting, “(who, it will be remembered, turned up naked at a recent literary gathering) is greatly in vogue and is, in fact, quite the lion of the moment.”

Also he seemed to be getting more and more homage from Liverpool, whereas the city of Glasgow appeared to despise him and he conceived in his heart a warm sympathy for Liverpool, and a shy hostility towards Glasgow took shape in his mind. (But when, a month later, he had occasion to arrive in Liverpool he was ignored; whereas at Glasgow straight away he hit it off with a Scotch lassie and they stepped it to jazz music and she was more than kissed by him forthwith.) And a different notion of the relative hospitality of Liverpool and Glasgow now formed itself in his receptive mind.

Mrs. Prologue’s article bore fruit. A week later he was able to inform the Baron of Ottercove that his sales were enormous. “Enormous!”

“Good!” said the baron, thinking. “Change the title to ‘The Diary of a Naked Man.’”

“There is nothing naked in it.”

“Tell them that there will be in Part II.”

“But I’m not writing a Part II. It’s complete.”

“I guess you’ll have to,” said Lord Ottercove.

“What else? Perhaps also change my name?” Frank’s tone was ironic.

“Your name?” Lord Ottercove reflected. “Your Christian name.”

“My Christian name?”

“Couldn’t you call yourself Charles?”

“I could call myself Jesus if necessary.”

“No, not Jesus. Charles. It goes well with your surname.”

“Well, I might, of course. It might help.”

“Bound to do! I start for Nice to-morrow. But telegraph to me twice a day how you are selling. Good-bye to you. And mind the step!”

With a little training one could move, Frank felt, about the modern world with ease and felicity and face with equanimity the deadliest of situations. He would find himself making ambiguous statements to reporters who interviewed him relative to his parentage.

“Are you the son of the late Nicholas II?”

“I do not propose at this juncture of events to say anything which might render the position of certain parties and persons involved more difficult than it is already.”

“Do you claim the imperial throne?”

“I do not consider the present moment propitious for the making of any definite statement bearing on this thorny and delicate question, which, moreover, may easily be misinterpreted. I follow the development of the political situation in Russia with equanimity, firm in the belief that when the time for expressing their choice is at hand the people of Russia will not fail in their wisdom, loyalty and courage.”

In all his public utterances Frank displayed unfailing moderation and restraint in reference to the situation that had spun itself into a web around him, and when a Russian Grand Duke in the Kiss-Lick Club heckled him in the vestibule and even hit him on the ear with an immaculately folded umbrella and otherwise tried to make himself disagreeable to him, with a view to consummating the quarrel in assassination, Frank did not lose his head, but tried to avoid him so as not to be involved too early in the Russian imbroglio. When a reporter interviewed him on the regrettable incident in the Kiss-Lick Club, Frank said:

“I feel—and I say it earnestly—that we who love Russia should know how to merge our petty differences in a common devotion to a holy cause, and, awaiting the grand moment, remember the magnitude of our responsibilities and the dignity imposed by a great and noble heritage.”

The restraint and moderation of his utterances won him a following among the anglicised Russian emigrés in London, who, suspicious of the qualities of their own race, had learnt to admire British parliamentary language as reported in the newspapers. But in proportion to his success as a pretender, he became increasingly aware of being watched by Chesham House, of being followed on his daily strolls by individuals who looked suspiciously like agents of the Tcheka. He applied, on the advice of friends, to Scotland Yard, and two plain-clothed policemen were assigned to accompany him on his walks and protect him from (a) those zealous puritans who wanted to destroy him so as to put an end to what they understood from certain references to the quality of his books to be his propagation of foul literature; (b) rival claimants to the throne of Russia; and (c) the Bolshevist agents of the Tcheka who resented his imperialism. His fame reached its apotheosis when the Soviet Foreign Minister, in reply to the now hackneyed British accusation of their spreading Bolshevist propaganda in the British Empire, cited Mr. Dickin in the Soviet note to Downing-street as an active instance of the fostering of an imperialistic movement by the British and their intervention in the domestic politics of Russia, and the British Foreign Secretary in the House of Commons disclaimed, while deprecating Mr. Dickin’s activities, responsibility for his acts and dissociated what he described to be the private views of a novelist from the considered policy of the Foreign Office. By that time Frank had sold over one hundred and twenty thousand copies of Pale Primroses, alias The Diary of a Naked Man; to say nothing of American rights, film rights, dramatic rights, translation rights, and second, third, and fourth British Empire (excluding Canada) serial rights. The resulting publicity procured him a lucrative commission for a series of articles in an American magazine, a lost relative, and three offers of marriage.

XXIV.

NICE

The day after the christening of the Kerr-de Jones baby, Frank, having received a telegram from Ottercove inviting him to come to Nice, went abroad. His wife was grazing somewhere—he didn’t know where.

He didn’t bother about Cynthia. He didn’t see why he should bother about her. He could have divorced her, or she could have divorced him, but he didn’t see why he should go to the bother of divorcing her. He simply didn’t bother about her. And, moreover, she didn’t bother about him.

Mrs. Kerr, he recalled, had been conspicuous at the christening of the Honourable Richard Mosquito, and Pilling had been loud in extolling, some felt rather indiscreetly, the Kerr strain in the baby. Raymond, hastily adopted by de Jones, officiated in the absence of his father at the side of Eleonor. He looked very red and hot and embarrassed at the arrival of his little son-brother and resented Pilling’s faux pas, who, conscious of his blunder, and anxious to agree that the baby was the image of de Jones, added inadvertently: “But of course! The image of his grandfather,” while Mr. Kerr walked about sardonically, as if saying: “This is my revenge.”

“Can’t stand that man Pilling,” Raymond said bitterly.

“I, on the contrary,” rejoined his mother, “find him a very charming, intellectual young man.”

“Why doesn’t he marry Zita?”

“My dear, he can’t. He is already married.”

“Then why doesn’t he leave her to marry another?”

“They live together—just the same as if they were married. That is a common custom nowadays among the more intellectual classes. Already in my youth it was accepted. You even find it in Turgenev and Dostoevski.”

In parting on the kerb, Frank overheard Mrs. Kerr thanking her son. “Chris can give me nothing now. And if he could, he would give it all to Eva.”

“Eleonor,” said Raymond, “has no banking account of her own. But she has a cheque book and draws on her uncle’s account to an unlimited extent.”

“A very nice, well-read, original young woman, and I am very fond of her,” was Mrs. Kerr’s reply.

Smiling thus over these insistent memories of yesterday, Frank pulled open the blinds in the morning: the blue train was touching the south coast of France.

Nice. The most beautiful thing about Nice is its name, full of a delicious springtide fragrance. Apart from the name, it may be questioned, Frank thought, whether there was anything else particularly beautiful about the town, that somewhat hard and heartless courtesan de luxe organised for the sale of dubious pleasure.

Already from the window of your carriage you behold the long train bending like a serpent as it races up the coast carrying dutifully its load of passengers who had dribbled from the four corners of the world, congregating towards Paris, rushed in the night through northern wet and wind and bleakness, to turn the corner at Marseilles at daybreak, and now gaily down the sunny Côte d’Azur, past all the pink and cream and white of basking villas, towards Nice.

In another three hours, Frank reflected, he would see Eva, and the benignant luxury of the scenery illustrated his anticipation. The train curved amid the rocky hills and flowery valleys, past the rose-white garden villas perched above the blue, blue sea—all swiftly whirling by.

Nice.

“His lordship is lunching in the restaurant and asks you to come in, sir.”

Entering the huge dining-room, Frank instantly perceived Lord Ottercove’s steel-grey eye peering at him in its essential hardness, but softened as it were by an air of bonhomie. There was about the baron’s face something at once fine and comic, stern and pantaloonish, Jehovahian and George Robian. His glinting eyes blazed with a righteous blue fire, while his tilted nose protruded a naïve, peeping curiosity about human affairs, and his noble brow frowned olympically. When he closed one eye at you to glint with double force with the other, he looked a satyr. At one side of him was Eva, gay and spring-like in appearance; on the other, Lord de Jones, more shark-like than ever. No one could look less a peer than de Jones.

“Why won’t you take off your coat and come and have lunch?” said Ottercove, genially. The three of them looked as though they had been revelling considerably.

“You do all look washed out,” said Frank.

“We’ve decided to make a halt here before going on to Rome,” said Ottercove. “I must recuperate my forces before I tackle Mussolini over the craters.”

“Do you expect any serious opposition?”

“Yuh,” said Ottercove. “I guess they’ll want heavy compensation. The Vesuvius alone, they argue, is a steady source of revenue, attracting hordes of tourists.”

“But he must see the international side of it if he has any good will in him.”

“The good will among men,” said the baron, “is a moral support physically precarious for individual man to lean on. But all the better for us. We are in no hurry since the General Election is again delayed. We must give the illusion of warring, of desperately battling with evil and sinister forces and win the battle of David and Goliath.”

“Well, you certainly look exhausted.”

“Don’t look at Chris,” said Eva. (So she already called him ‘Chris’!) “He is always dirty looking, he can’t help it. I mean he’s clean, but dirty-looking. There are such people. And there are others, who are dirty and always look quite clean.”

“You wise little girl, Eva,” said Ottercove tenderly.

“Lord Ottercove, have you read Ferdinand’s novel?” she asked.

“I’ve read it twice.”

“H’m.—I must read it again,” she said.

After lunch, Lord Ottercove took them up to his suite. On the table in the drawing-room copies of his newspapers were spread out invitingly. “I can’t,” said Frank, fingering The Evening Ensign, “behold this newspaper without an inward pang.”

Lord Ottercove frowned. He did not like to be reminded of it. Instead, and in pursuance of a certain association of ideas, he asked,

“What have you done to Cynthia?”

“Alas! Alack!” said Frank, who, in the absence of his host’s material interest in their marriage, did not see himself compelled to satisfy the baron’s idle curiosity.

Learning from Frank that he had put up at another hotel and would not move over to this for fear of being ruined, “Stay with me two or three weeks,” said Lord Ottercove. “You don’t know what pleasure it gives me.” His words were so warm and inviting. “Gilbert,” he said softly, “go and see if there are any more rooms on this floor.”

“Yes, m’lord.”

Gilbert returned to say that there was the choice of an imperial and an ordinary suite. Which of the two did his lordship wish him to reserve for Mr. Dickin?

“Mr. Dickin will see and choose for himself,” said Lord Ottercove. “And now I will jump into bed. I will see the three of you, I hope, at dinner and take you to the Opera at Monte Carlo.”

“Agreed!”

XXV.

When, dressed, that night he joined them in Ottercove’s private drawing-room, Frank was amazed by the new, modern aspect of Eva. How was it that he had never been so struck with her before? What ease! what grace! withal what beauty!

They dined at the Negresco in Nice and then hurried at a dangerous speed in a hired Rolls-Royce to Monte Carlo, and again in Ottercove’s box, alone with three men, Eva’s charm was conspicuous, as on the stage the melancholy chime of Kremlin bells determined the slow but steady ruin of a conscience-stricken man.

On the way back to Nice, they were pensive. Boris Godounov had made a deep impression on the baron, who never missed a performance. “Fine man Moussorgski!” he muttered. “A great and wonderful genius! To have written that!” He paused. “If he were alive to-day, I would have made him a duke, or editor-in-chief of all my newspapers.”

“Or given him The Evening Ensign as a wedding present,” added Frank.

Lord Ottercove closed one eye and glared at Frank with the other, and then closed it too and went to sleep in the depth of the car.

In the night, Frank could not sleep for jealousy. Why was she so intimate with de Jones and Ottercove? Why?

At three, he crept to her door and knocked gently.

She opened the door.

He went in.

“Darling!” he said.

“Darling!” she answered, and came into his arms.

“I am wretched,” he said, covering his face with his hands.

“Darling,” she watched him tenderly, “you are getting very thin. Your corner tooth is losing colour.” She looked at that thin individual with scanty hair and thought, without pressing the thought home to her: “Is that thing the thing on which I spent all my beautiful love?... Never mind, such as he is he is mine.”

“It is tragic,” Frank said, “to grow ugly without ever having been beautiful.”

She gave him a long kiss. And they were silent, and the silence seemed pregnant with memories. “Do you remember?” it seemed to say.

And for him there was fear and foreboding of loss in that kiss. He held her breathless and exulted in the thought that her naked heart beat against his.

She looked into his eyes. “Do with me what you like.”

How could he have ever parted with her? How could he ever part with her?

XXVI.

All next day they spent with Ottercove. Lord Ottercove habitually put up at Nice, with the sole purpose, it would seem, of dining at Monte Carlo. He came to the Riviera to relax after the strenuous social life of London. And his relaxation, by the force of habit, took the form of whizzing up and down the curved and much frequented road of the Côte d’Azur to lunch at Cannes, to dine at Mentone, or hurrying off to play golf, hurrying to get into bed and sleep hurriedly, to be wakened by Gilbert to dress and hurry along to dine at Rapallo. After a month of such relaxation, he would hurry back to London to rush from house to house (mysteriously preceded by Mrs. Hannibal and his telephone operator) and write hurried articles and print newspapers, and the news boys were already hurrying out of the building carrying batches of them and selling them at a run. Lord Ottercove privately claimed that since his descent on London he had “gingered up” the public life of Great Britain. His success was evidenced by his peerage; which is no guarantee of anything more than success.

His own personality and the effect it produced on his time and surroundings interested and stimulated him beyond all else. An American reporter in Nice had referred in the local Press to Lord Ottercove’s having the head of a musician, and he instantly sent out Gilbert to buy an album with the portraits of all the notable composers, and left it in his private drawing-room, and his friends (who had read the notice) said: “Rex, that chap Beethoven has your head to a t.” And another said, “Rex, upon my word you have mistaken your profession and we enjoin you, ere too late, to turn musical. Then, in a couple of years’ time, they will be saying: ‘Ottercove.... Who the hell is Ottercove?’—‘Oh, the man who wrote the Symphony in B flat.’”

He smiled indulgently. He went down the steps (forgetting the existence of the lift), whistling to himself and wondering ... really if ... and if really ... how nice.

In the car, since the question had been jarringly dropped as it seemed to him, he turned to Eva.

“Eva, do you think,” he said from his reclining, hatless attitude in the depth of the great car, “I look like a composer?”

“You look like an angel, Rex,” she said.

“Thank you, darling.”

“You’re not as beautiful as Ferdinand,” she added, “but you are very clever.”

“Thank you, darling, thank you, dear, that’s comforting.”

So she already called him Rex. Frank was astonished at the rapidity of progress possible to women; and even a little jealous.

“Chris,” said Ottercove, “how is your work getting on? Is it true I hear you mean to blow us all up?”

“If I didn’t others would. Ideas like these never come singly. There must be at least half-a-dozen men now harbouring this amiable idea.”

Lord Ottercove glanced at Frank and Eva. “I told you he was a lunatic.”

“It’s you who are lunatics. Any one could do and talk about doing it, for no one would believe him, everyone would think he was a lunatic.” De Jones looked away, detached.

“Let us change the conversation,” Eva said.

They were hurrying in the direction of Cagnes—a destination which at all times that it is mentioned is accompanied by a sort of footnote that it is a place other than, and therefore not to be confused with, Cannes. “You speak French,” said Ottercove. “Tell him to go to Cagnes. Cagnes, not Cannes.”

Frank took up the telephone tube and said to the chauffeur: “Cagnes.”

“Cagnes,” repeated Lord Ottercove. “Not Cannes.”

“Cagnes,” said Frank into the tube. “Not Cannes.”

“I understand perfectly,” said the chauffeur.

It seemed that the distinction was more familiar than generally supposed. Still, the similarity was unfortunate, and many a passenger for Cagnes must have found himself, unwittingly, in Cannes and, perhaps, with profounder astonishment and reluctance, many a passenger for Cannes must have discovered himself, with inward qualms and bitter questionings, in Cagnes. But there it was, and even Ottercove could not change this state of things.

They alighted on the green hillside by the sea, and Ottercove, perennially the host, opened the basket with the eatables. “Damn!” he said. “That jackass Gilbert has forgotten the glasses.” Inwardly they all cursed Gilbert. “You speak French,” said Ottercove to Frank, “Go and ask that peasant woman on the top of that hill to lend us a few glasses. Here—” He held out a batch of notes.

“I’ve got some money.”

“Here, give her this.”

The old peasant woman who was sitting on the ground beside her donkey could produce but two doubtful looking glasses, and Frank thrust the batch of bank notes—some four hundred francs in all—into her hand.

“But, monsieur!” she cried bewildered. “All this for a couple of glasses! No, no....”

They washed the glasses in champagne, drinking what was left of it and eating delectable sandwiches delicately prepared by a luxurious hotel. Then Lord Ottercove took his Bible out of his side-pocket and began to read:

“‘And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;

“‘And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

“‘And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

“‘And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;

“‘And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:

“‘For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’”

He shut the book, and for a while there was silence. De Jones took off his glasses and wiped them pensively with his handkerchief; then quoted softly:

“‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’”

Frank waved away the flies. “If I were God I would consign all flies to the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone. For don’t tell me that they know not what they do!”

Eva looked at him reproachfully. “You are so stupid, darling. You wave and shout at the flies.”

“But they do go away when I shout.”

“It’s not because you shout, but because you wave that they go away.”

“H’m, that’s possible. I never thought of that. I admit I am impractical.”

The secret of a successful picnic, in view of its invariable discomfort, is that it should be as short as possible. They—all of them towny people—discovered this very soon and rose as if by mutual consent.

“You speak French,” said Ottercove to Frank. “Go and take these glasses back to the old woman on the hill and tell her she can have all the sandwiches and fruit and champagne—”

“Bottles,” qualified de Jones.

“Bottles—all we’ve left, in fact.”

Frank did as he was bid.

They stepped into the hired Rolls-Royce, and as they drove away, this time in the direction of Cannes, on the hill-side, by the side of an old donkey, stood an old wrinkled woman who looked in their direction till they were lost to sight.

In the depth of the car, three men and a girl leaned back as far as it is possible for three men and a girl to do so in a car. Lord Ottercove was dozing, Eva gently playing the ukulele.

“I didn’t know you played the ukulele,” Frank remarked.

“There are things, Ferdinand, you do not know,” she said.

Ottercove opened one eye. “You are right, sweetie,” he said. “He is no good: I’m the man for you.”

“‘I’m the man! I’m the man!’ This is from Candida,” chimed in de Jones. “Let me quote, on my behalf, from the same work: ‘All the love in the world is waiting to speak: but it is shy—shy—shy....’”

“Eva,” said Frank. “Eva....”

“What?”

“Eyes as blue as the Mediterranean....”

“Now, Eva, you must choose,” said Ottercove, “between this decrepit Genius of the Untried who claims he can push up the grass but is only fit to push up the daisies; the dubious heir to a, if possible, more dubious throne; and a half-demented peer. Now come on, my love, and choose your prize. Spot the winner.”

Eva smiled and played the ukulele dreamily. And the music seemed to say, Why choose? when you are snug, at ease, sprawling in the depth of a great car rushing softly by the edge of the blue sea.