The Project Gutenberg eBook of The emerald of Catherine the Great
Title: The emerald of Catherine the Great
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Illustrator: G. K. Chesterton
Release date: August 11, 2022 [eBook #68727]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Harper & brothers, 1926
Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
THE
EMERALD
CATHERINE THE GREAT
By Hilaire Belloc
With Illustrations by
G. K. Chesterton
1926
Publishers
New York and London
Harper & Brothers
TO MAURICE BARING
MY DEAR MAURICE:
This is the fourth book I have dedicated to you, and you will see why if you read it—which no one need do.
First, emeralds are green; and, on principle, like the Green Overcoat, it owes to you of the Green Elephant, a dedication. Next, there is Catherine the Great. She plays no long part, but she founded the fortunes of them all; and we are in communion in the matter of that large and generous but regal soul; we agree that it is a pity she died before we were born. Also, you who know all about Russia, and I who know nothing, have, in the matter of Russia, this Monarch of all the Russias for a link.
Lastly, you have often urged me to write a detective story, because (you assured me) they have gigantic sales. I promised you I would, on condition there was nothing to find out.
Here it is.
KING'S LAND,
Whitsun, 1926.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TALE-PIECE
THE EMERALD OF
CATHERINE THE GREAT
CHAPTER ONE
William Bones was a stalwart man, some thirty-five years of age, the master of a Brig which sailed from the port of Boston in Lincolnshire and was half his own property. He was a native of that town, his father having been therein a pork butcher in a fair way of business, his mother the daughter of a small farmer in the Wring Land. He traded with the Baltic when George the Third was King—indeed, when George the Third was still young and long before George the Third first went mad.
Among other ports, he had found profit more than once in visiting that of the River Neva, and was acquainted with the Russian trade. The great city of St. Petersburg, still new but already splendid, became familiar to him; and he himself, in his humble visits to the local factors, became a familiar figure to the Secret Police of that capital. Even his most domestic and private actions during his dealings in this port were registered; and, it must be added, his strong English frame and handsome English face admired, but also duly noted and their description passed on to the proper authorities.
On his third voyage to Russia he was honoured by the invitation of a merchant somewhat wealthier than the common of his acquaintance and at that table met some official of the Court, of what exact situation his ignorance of Russian and of French forbade him to inquire. Before returning to his native Lincolnshire, his happy spouse and his young family, he enjoyed the singular privilege of a further unexpected invitation from this same Court official whom he had thus chanced to meet, and so found himself at supper in one of the smaller and more discreet rooms of the Palace, upon its mezzanine floor, in a choice company of both sexes.
It is characteristic of the Empress herself—a great woman!—that a large humanity and a laudable curiosity combined rendered her indifferent to the conventions of rank. No sooner had she heard of the British merchant captain's cheerful and manly habit than she desired a more exact description, upon her receiving which he was permitted an entrance to the Presence.
He enjoyed, partly by means of an elderly female who interpreted for him until he had improved his few words of German—the Empress's mother tongue and most familiar idiom—no little conversation with the august sovereign, who, when he arrived at this stage, deigned to keep him by her alone for some while. The interview was repeated upon more than one occasion and her Imperial Majesty was so good, upon his reluctant leave-taking some two or three weeks after his first arrival, as to press him with an invitation to return.
Next season, the moment the Baltic ice was melted, he did so, disposing of a mixed cargo; and, while leisurely awaiting his return charge, was almost daily conveyed to the Palace from his humble lodging. For four successive seasons running this strange adventure persisted.
Meanwhile his Boston neighbours could not but remark that his home in the British haven of which he was a native and mariner, showed a considerable advance in prosperity. His wife was better dressed, his growing family could boast an increasing and superior acquaintance among children of a rank with whom they would not earlier have mixed. It was even whispered that Bill Bones had made formidable investments in the City of London, which he certainly had visited more than half a dozen times during his last winter stay in England; and though his friends very charitably agreed that the profits of the Baltic trade might be large, and that Bill Bones might have had exceptional opportunities, they none the less talked among themselves upon the various possible sources of a fortune which that trade could hardly account for.
With the fifth season there came an end to what had certainly been a remarkable series. Whatever advantages communion with a throne might have had for William Bones, the future would no doubt show; but the fifth season was the end. There had been farewells, and yet no loss of the high regard in which, for some extraordinary reason, he had been held by the Semiramis of the North. He had acquired a certain assurance of bearing which marked his new fortunes, and indeed, in this final scene of his presence upon the quays of St. Petersburg, he seemed by his gait to be some one of consequence. And no wonder, for he had left the Palace for the last time bearing secreted in the bosom of his ample coat a jewel worthy to be a memorial of the greatest passages in any life.
It was an emerald, exceptionally large—the largest, he had been assured, in the world—square in shape, of the purest water and set in a delicate little gold mounting after a fashion which recalled the ornaments of the French Court.
It speaks well for Captain Bones that on his return to Boston he handed this jewel to his wife, who thenceforward had it fixed with a pin, to serve the office of a brooch, and wore it upon great occasions; notably at a dance given by the mayor of the town, to which she brought her eldest daughter, though barely of an age for such ceremonials.
The next year William Bones let his house in Boston and abruptly transported himself and his family to the metropolis. His neighbours were interested to discover that before abandoning them he had purchased not a little property in the town and had even appointed a substantial agent to deal with his rentals. He was clearly an advancing man and their respect for him grew profound when they learnt what figure he now cut in a world above their own. In London he was found entertaining largely and standing upon an equal footing with merchants of repute, though not perhaps as yet of the first fortune. Meanwhile he had preferred the name of Bone, in the singular, to that of his earlier life, conceiving it to be more consonant with his present position and his residence in Cornhill and his interests in the banking world.
His only son George, when of an age for such occupations, which was some five years after the family had come up to London, was taken in as a partner by Mr. Worsle the India merchant, partly, no doubt, as a testimony of friendship to his father, but partly also because William Bone, who would now indifferently sign himself Bone or Bohun—the original form of the name—had put at the young fellow's disposal a very considerable capital.
William Bohun himself died somewhat prematurely in the eighth year after his transmigration, and his wife, who, though much desiring to cut a proper figure in her new world, had never properly succeeded in doing so, followed him within three months to the grave. Her younger daughters had received an excellent education; her eldest, born in her father's earlier days, had perhaps less refinement of accent and deportment—but on the other hand, her solid worth and quite exceptional dowry had procured her alliance with the heir to Sir Philip Goole, a landed gentleman in the West of England possessed of a fine town house in Cavendish Square, but indifferent to politics.
George de Bohun—he had at first rejected but later began to use the prefix "de" which a friend in the Heralds' College had suggested to him—prospered, I am glad to say, exceedingly, as the son of such a worthy father should, and acquired the playful nickname of "The Nabob," which spread from the city to the more exalted circles into which he was welcomed, west of Temple Bar. It is a sufficient indication of the respect in which he was held when I say that he was elected to Brooks's Club, and there, by his generous behaviour at the card table, failed not to become a favourite with the most exalted of his contemporaries in Whig circles.
It may or may not interest the reader to know that upon his father's death it was discovered that the Emerald of Catherine the Great had been made an heirloom and was devised by an explanatory letter—since the law could not enforce such a succession—for the eldest son, or, failing sons, the eldest daughter of the reigning de Bohun on arriving at his twenty-first, or her eighteenth birthday, his or her parents or trustees being its successive custodians until that date. Failing such a personage, the jewel was to be passed to any cadet branch, the eldest in succession. If the great line of de Bohun should fail—which Heaven forfend!—the sacred object was to be buried with the last of that illustrious lineage.
The legal complications to which such a disposition would give rise need not concern us, for in fact they never arose. George de Bohun had but one son, Richard, born in the same year that saw the death of General Bonaparte, the famous Corsican adventurer. To this son in his old age he conveyed the jewel with the instructions concerning it, but he had previously got rid of its unfashionable Louis XVI mounting and had it set again, now as a pendant, after the fashion prevalent in the first years of Queen Victoria.
Mr. George de Bohun had acquired—perhaps from his father—an unusual reverence for the gem which he believed, with a mystical devotion curious in a business man, to be in some way the tutelary genius of his House. He would frequently tell young Richard, his heir, during the boyhood of that philanthropist, the story of how Catherine the Great herself had given it to his own father, the grandfather of the lad, when that powerful genius was engaged upon a secret diplomatic mission to the Russian Court. Hence had the emerald come to be known by the title of "The Emerald of Catherine the Great" in the private circle of the de Bohuns—pronounced "Deboons." That it should be preserved in the family, certainly never sold and—please God!—never lost, was a religion with George, which grew more fanatical as he approached the tomb. He came, perhaps from an idea inherited from his father, to regard it as a necessary condition of their prosperity, and he imbued his son Richard with I know not what vague fears of disaster should its possession be abandoned or should the stone itself be mislaid.
This second in the great line, George de Bohun—pronounced Deboon—the son of its founder, though born as long ago as 1780, lived to see the inauguration of the Hyde Park Exhibition by Queen Victoria in 1851, and, having refused a peerage, closed his eyes in the fine country house known as Paulings.
This mansion was—and is—situated in Herts, at no more than twenty-five miles from Westminster. The successful Russian merchant purchased it upon advantageous terms from the bankrupt and disreputable Parrall family, whose last and seventeenth representative not only proved incapable of preserving the patrimony of his ancestors, but had joined the Romish Church and perished miserably at Boulogne.
Richard de Bohun was of course the "Dirty Dick" of mid-Victorian politics, and an intimate friend of Lord Palmerston. There is little to record of him except that after doing good and lucrative work in two administrations he also refused a peerage; in which he was wise, for though the family fortunes had not diminished, the general increase of wealth around him made his position less conspicuous than that of his father had been in the City of London. Indeed, the family was now no longer connected with trade.
He died—as he had been born—at Paulings, a country house of such absorbing interest that I shall later be compelled to describe it in accurate if tedious terms.
The now reigning de Bohun, called Humphrey—after an illustrious ancestor, the Humphrey de Bohun who fought at Bannockburn under Edward II and undoubtedly held land, through his wife, in the neighbourhood of Boston—the son of this statesman, is the Mr. de Bohun—pronounced Deboon—of our own day: the highly respected Home Secretary who has already passed with such distinction through what he himself will call the Cursus honorum, having been Parliamentary Secretary to Harry Gates during all of the great Paramooka Scandal—when he was the Baby of the House—then successively rejected by Middleham West after the Seychelles Scandal—when Gates went to the Lords—elected after a second attempt by Middleham East, Under-Secretary during the period of the Second General Strike and at last, after the usual vicissitudes of public life, occupying the exalted position which he still adorns.
His figure is familiar to the public, I fear, rather by early photographs than by recent portraits. He is a man tall and carefully clothed, with a rather weary expression, set on a long face, with insufficient grey hair neatly brushed. He is of a courteous demeanour. He is much attached to his country life at Paulings, so happily convenient to London, and sheltered from the large growth of suburban villas about it by a dense fringe of more or less ancient trees. He is a widower, possessed of three motor cars, but with only a flat in town. He has refused a baronetcy, for he has (alas!) no son, but one daughter, now just entering her nineteenth year. The name of the charming child is Marjorie, and it was but recently, upon her eighteenth birthday, the 15th of January, that her father somewhat solemnly presented her with the famous heirloom.
He had used no little ceremonial, speaking a little pompously of her dead mother—a Ginningham—of the immemorial traditions of their house, and with curious insistence upon the supposed influence of the jewel upon their fortunes. He smiled somewhat lugubriously as he touched that point, but Marjorie, though not extravagantly intelligent, had brains enough to believe in omens, mascots, talismans, and was proud, as a girl should be at her age, to enter upon the possession of the Sacred Gem of the de Bohuns.
Her father had discarded, for so great an occasion, the Victorian gold setting which, he was assured by Mr. Marolovitch and other experts, was in deplorable taste. The jewel was now set once more—by Mr. Marolovitch—as a brooch, since a woman was to wear it. The new setting was in platinum, designed in the finest taste of Berlin, with writhing curves and dead square divisions of the most entrancing variety. Large as the Emerald was, and its new Prussian setting adequately broad, yet the whole lay easily on the palm.
If it be not blasphemy to suggest any inefficiency in our Teutonic cousins, I should suggest that the pin was a thought too long and capable, on careless handling, of biting the hand that fed it. But for any such trifling defect the grey colour of the new and more expensive mounting, resembling that of a leaded grate, and the awful severity of its odd rectangles and unexpected heavings of its re-entrant curves, made ample atonement. Such was the aspect of the Emerald of Catherine the Great in the winter when it entered upon its liveliest activities.
CHAPTER TWO
About a fortnight had passed since Mr. de Bohun had given his daughter Marjorie the family mascot. It was Friday, the 30th of January, 1930: the weather unpleasantly cold, overcast, with a threat of snow, and the dark already set in.
After the heavy strain of an English working week, especially in Parliament, complete relaxation is necessary from Friday after lunch to the Monday's return to town by the afternoon. Nor was any mansion more fitted to recuperate the exhausted energies of statesman or politician than Paulings.
It had been built in the classical manner some twenty years before the decline of the Parrall fortunes, which got their worst blow after the year 1745. It was classical and highly symmetric; its fine great doors had been designed to stand slightly above the level of the drive and looked upon a shallow sweep of stone stairway. Upon either side of them, windows in the Palladian fashion, with a pediment above each, announced the wealth within; a hanging wreath of flowers and fruit in stone went the length of the great wall, and against the sky was a balustrade.
That was all very well for the eighteenth century; but the nineteenth and the new wealth of the de Bohuns put on useful excrescences. There was a bulb to the east, and yet another bulb at the end of that, where new stables, now a garage, were added to new offices, and on the west there had been built, a little after the Crimean War, something like half as much again of house room, in a manner pleasingly different from all the rest. Here a new and more convenient door gave into a large hall, not without suits of armour purchased at considerable expense, and giving by various doors into the larger, older, and grander rooms of the house, into a panelled dining-room, a large drawing-room, too often changing in style, and on the extreme west a room very rarely used save for the reception of whatever was not wanted about the living parts of the house, or—in theory at least—for the complete seclusion of its master, when—in theory—his heavy responsibilities demanded heavy concentration.
This room we must know, for it was here that blind Fate, an all-seeing Providence, or—more probably—a lively and mischievous sprite had laid the scene of the loss of the Emerald.
The room was not large; it was in good proportions, for it dated from a time when we were still civilized. It was strangely apparelled. There was a large, rather shabby desk, at which the Home Secretary was supposed to write and where he did at least leave accumulated a few old letters and kept them down with a paper-weight of Chinese crystal, carefully chiselled into the form of a little god who smiled.
There were five deep chairs of the sort called lounge, upholstered in a leather almost black. There were as many more comfortable common chairs. There was a really good fireplace brought over from one of the old houses in Dublin, of marble with a Bacchic frieze. There was in front of that really good fireplace a rug made of the skin of a polar bear, singularly fierce in its open red mouth of ferocious grin, its gleaming teeth and staring eyes—the room was so deserted that no one had knocked that head to pieces with his feet. It seemed almost new, fresh from the Arctic.
There were six windows looking to the west, south, and north, and coming down close to the floor with deep sills forming seats after the fashion of our fathers. For the room projected out into the park upon three sides and the western one faced a long grass path between an avenue of trees. There were one or two tables which did nothing, after the fashion of most tables—outside dining-rooms, and even there they do no work which I can recommend. There was above the mantelpiece one of those looking-glasses of the First French Empire, round, lens-like, and diminishing the picture of all the room. It had a round, broad, gilded rim and upon its summit an eagle of the sort that flew from the Pyramids to Cadiz, from Cadiz to Paris, from Paris to Moscow, and from Moscow back again.
The floor was of the sort called, I believe, in the trade, antique Austrian parquet. That is, it consisted of some half dozen slabs of cheap pine firmly bolted together, on the top of it a veneer of herring-bone Baltic oak, chemically treated to simulate the age and dignity of Schönbrunn. The thing was designed for rapid laying down and lifting and fitted together simply upon joists with what are—again technically—called invisible screws, but at the corners of the room the contraption was held by certain clamps which wanted a hell of a lot of hammering down when it was fixed. On the surface of this dignified flooring lay, carelessly chucked about, a few Oriental rugs from Brighton and one charming little Chinese mat from London, damnably out of place and swearing with the rest of the room like a cat run up a tree from a dog.
What else was there in the room? Ah, yes, there was a parrot cage, and if you are wise, unfortunate reader, you will pay particular attention to that parrot cage, for later on it has a speaking part.
It hung by a chain from the ceiling against the west window looking out on the long avenue, and within it lived—not melancholy, for he was too stupid, but in a mixture of stolid age, indifference, and nothingness—the parrot Attaboy. Nor must I omit either the appearance of the parrot Attaboy, but only later can I tell you how the parrot Attaboy came by his name.
Of his lineage I know nothing, nor even of his age. He might well have been one hundred. Certainly there was nothing young about his eyes or gestures, and I have always heard that parrots, like family servants and others whom the gods hate, live to a great age.
Aunt Amelia had made a pompous present of him three years before to her beloved niece Marjorie after her beloved Marjorie had reached her fifteenth birthday; she bestowed not only the parrot but the cage, and simultaneously a kiss upon her niece's forehead. At first the recipient of the fowl did not appreciate the gift. But love will grow. The thing—by which I mean the cage and the parrot and all—was hung by a hook—at Aunt Amelia's expense—to the roof of this room simply because it was so little used.
It happened precisely at the opening of the flat racing season, three years before the opening of the story which you now have the ecstatic pleasure of reading, that young Lord Galton, Marjorie's cousin—recently acceded to the title by the sudden and unexpected death of his father from I know not what forms of excess—had pulled a horse.
He was one of our modern youths, loving the risks of life and living dangerously. Therefore had he pulled a horse and the horse he had pulled—his very own—he had named Attaboy.
It was never brought home to him, as the phrase goes; that is, everybody knew that it was true. Attaboy was famous at Paulings—a sort of family crime to be proud of—a word used as often as any other for the moment at Paulings; and the poor old parrot—we have no initiative in age—picked it up and refused to learn anything else.
In a way it was awkward. Tommy Galton would come to his uncle's house from time to time, and when he came it was rather important to keep him out of the West Room during daylight. For the parrot had a way of croaking quite suddenly, in the strong colonial accent of his tribe, "Attaboy!" at the most unexpected moments. However, the parrot Attaboy possessed a cover of black felt carefully put over his cage at night, and whenever it found itself in darkness it was habitually silent after the honourable fashion of parrots—and, after all, the room was not commonly used. There was little risk of Lord Galton's being in it save after the black cover was over the detestable bird.
Of Attaboy the parrot—Attaboy the horse had already gone to stud—Marjorie grew fond. For one thing, she was not unattracted by her cousin Tom, and Attaboy made a sort of bond between them. For another, she was at the age when women can be fond of anything, even Tommy Galton, let alone a parrot.
So much for Attaboy and the deserted room.
It has been remarked—without payment—by more than one philosopher that the great events of this world arrive through the action of agents who did not intend them. And this you will find to be true of Attaboy, of the Polar Bear, and the deserted West Room.
I think it only fair to add, since I am writing a detective story, that when Aunt Amelia visited her brother the Home Secretary, which was, all totted up, for something like a third of the year, she was given the principal guest room, known in the family as Bannockburn, which lay immediately above.
So much for Paulings and its now famous, then deserted, West Room; its Parrot, its Polar Bear.
I return to that winter week-end, that cold January Friday and the few gathered in the great drawing-room of Paulings round its tea table.
It was not a party: it was a family meeting of a very few people.
Old Lady Bolter, a much elder sister of the Home Secretary, known among the Great as "Aunt Amelia," we have seen was half a permanency. She had already given them three weeks of herself a month before; and she had now settled down to another bout. They suffered her in this fashion often enough; but as for her, she knitted. I have read in one of those books which are published anonymously upon the people of that world, that she had been famous in King Edward's day for her wit. Maybe. She would hardly be famous for it now. However, she was not nearly so blind nor so deaf as she pretended to be. She had met most people up to the Great War and resembled a sheep.
Victoria Mosel was there, Marjorie's friend of another generation, still sinuously moving round and round from house to house forever. There were two men, close relatives, cousins: an elder and a younger.
The first was the hippo-phile, the expert in things of the Turf whom you have just heard of, young Lord Galton, the son of the Home Secretary's first cousin, Cecily, who had brought to Algernon, first—and very nearly last—Lord Galton, a sufficient dowry, drawn from the then ample funds of the de Bohuns, for her father had been the younger brother of the Home Secretary. But this first—and very nearly last—Lord Galton indeed was dead, and so was Lady Galton his wife, and the young man, now his own father, found his inheritance less than he might have desired. The Galtons, wisely taking their title from their name, had not done well since they had left Liverpool; they had left that town too early. So here he was, a tall, dark young man, a little too solid and certain of himself, and—unhappily—attached to racing, a pastime for which his fortune might have been sufficient fifty years ago, but was not at all sufficient to-day.
It was not every house in England in which Lord Galton would have been welcomed; but family counts, and he was here, with his rather sullen face, strong chin and fixed mouth, and sub-challenging eyes. They were sub-challenging because of Attaboy the horse. He had not suffered as he might have done; he went a good deal less to one or two of his better clubs than he had done before the rumour spread, but he was still a constant member of the Posts and gambled there assiduously and with some success. Yet was he always embarrassed, and his embarrassment did not help his reputation.
He sat at the tea table that afternoon, fighting the boredom of Aunt Amelia with what was toleration if it was not courtesy, and looking at Marjorie without admiration but perhaps with intention. Now and then he cast a furtive sharp look, when he thought it was safe, at Victoria Mosel. She always knew too much, and as she stood there in front of the fire, with a sham vacant look on her shrewd face, and the eternal cigarette hanging from her lip, he wished her farther.
The second guest at that table, next to the Home Secretary himself, was yet another cousin, but a whole first cousin this time—the only son of the youngest uncle of all, who had married very young and very imprudently. Wherefore was the said cousin, William by name, unable to go into the City, and, compelled to become a Don, had become by profession a professor. For a first cousin he was rather absurdly older than the head of the family. The Home Secretary, who had himself married late, was not more than fifty-five; but the Don, William de Bohun, Fellow of Burford and holding the Chair of Crystallography, was quite ten years older—perhaps a little more. He had a simple pride in the excellence of his birth, a distracted manner due to his immense learning—not indeed in the general field of the Humanities or the Arts, but upon the particular point of dodekahedral crystals—and even of octohedrals he had a smattering. Such was his fame that he had been mentioned more than once in the proceedings of learned societies abroad and had been elected Corresponding Member to the Crystallographic Society of Berne.
Unmarried, with a small private income, the poor nest egg of his improvident father, amply endowed, with no pupils to speak of, and the dodekahedral hobby, he would have been as happy as it is possible for an atheist approaching death to be, had it not been for the existence of that infamous charlatan, Bertram Leader, not even a Fellow of St. Filbert's, and mere Reader to the University in Amorphic Crystallogy.
I need not insist on the gulf that separates crystallography, a true science, from crystallogy, its base mercantile application. To the one, as was but right, a chair was attached; a chair founded by Z. Leizler the philanthropist, before his flight, and now occupied by the aged figure of the de Bohun. The other was thought hardly worth a Readership at £600 a year, and only under secret threats had that wealthy college, St. Filbert's, been persuaded by certain City men whom B. Leader in his turn had threatened, to cough up. It took its revenge by admitting B. Leader to its high table, and refusing to elect him a Fellow.
He it was who, waging secret war upon university caste, dug his revengeful fangs into the Professor's naked soul. He it was who spotted with relentless eye all the misprints in the Professor's papers, and denounced them as enormities of ignorance in the British Crystallographic Review, with which is combined the Crystal Gazetteer and Bulletin. He it was who exploded de Bohun's ancient German doctrines with the recent research of horrid Dagoes, and exposed it to derision whenever he lectured to a class of more than a dozen; for his department being mixed up with commerce, there was money in it, and a few undergraduates on the scent of the same; not so the Professor's department. Now two, now one student, sought the well of learning, and sometimes none.
On the other hand, Professor de Bohun could—and did—nourish a burning happiness in his heart to remember that the infamous B. Leader was of no lineage and had no private income at all. Nay, worse; an accent—almost a twang.
But alas! for the alloyed happiness of risen man, in whom the highest have something in them of the ape, (Poggles General View, Vol. II, Ch. XXII, p. 222). B. Leader himself nourished a secret burning joy in his heart; for he had found out—what the great thought was peculiar to their own circle—the dreadful story of William de Bohun and the Mullingar Diamond.
Because he loved crystals—not because he loved wealth: because the Mullingar Diamond was the largest of its yellow kind in the world, and had a flaw which was confidently reported to be due—incredible!—to a bubble, William de Bohun had, eight years before, while stopping at the Abbey as an honoured guest, pinched the Mullingar Diamond—not for a permanency, but to make a close examination of the incredible bubble. He had returned it, but already his action had got known, and some people were cold to him. The less instructed among the great whispered that he had been a famous thief in youth; the more instructed believed that his profound science had produced a momentary lapse. The Family knew, but had long forgiven him; indeed, there was nothing to forgive—they said.
Let it be added that Professor de Bohun had acquired, from so much concentrated study upon dodekahedral crystals—with fatiguing excursions among the octohedrals—a pleasing habit of repeating a word, never less than three times, and sometimes six or eight.
In dress the old gentleman was careless, and, though perpetually washing, never apparently clean. However, he did shave—save for the whiskers which were the badge of his attainments in the learned world.
There was expected a third man, as young as, or younger than, Lord Galton, and of a very different and meaner kind, a certain Hamish McTaggart, who had become suddenly famous within the narrow circle of the people in the know, because the Prime Minister, upon reading an article of his upon Protection had said—in the full hearing of the very narrow circle—"This is the only man on Protection whom I really understand." The article had appeared by the order of McTaggart's master in The Howl, whence it may be rightly assumed that McTaggart knew no more of economics than would a warthog of Botticelli. Hence the lucid style which the Prime Minister had saluted with such discovering joy.
His argument had been very simple. If you prevent things coming in to the sacred Island, Albion, the Albionese will have to make these things for themselves, and that means more employment, doesn't it? The truth had struck the Prime Minister with far more effect thus set down in clean print, than when he had heard it, as he had heard it a thousand times, from the proprietor of The Howl, whom he had himself so rightly ennobled.
Therefore was Hamish McTaggart now glowing with a vivid, though, alas! restricted fame.
He himself was getting heartily tired of it. It had halved his income—that is, it had brought it down below five hundred pounds a year. No one would print him except upon the subject of Protection, and he had to write in the way that was really understood. And he was allowed to write only in those papers peculiar to the little inner circle with the little inner circulation corresponding—and there's no money in that! When he wanted to write about tigers, and get his expenses paid free to the East and a lump sum—a job he would have got for the asking two years before, when he wrote by the thousand words, to order, just after leaving the University—he was asked what on earth he knew about it? Tigers! And was bundled back to Protection.
Therefore was his future black; but in the little circle he was a sort of lion. Victoria Mosel was always talking of him; Marjorie was eager to see him once and then to discard his company for ever; Lady Bolter, full of the intellectual Victorian time, wanted to be able to say that she had been in the same room with a man of whom the Prime Minister himself had said that he was the only man whose writing he really understood. The Home Secretary had met him once or twice in other people's houses; Marjorie herself and her aunt were the only two for whom he was still quite a stranger.
"What train is he coming by?" said Tommy Galton, sunk into a deep chair.
The Home Secretary looked at his watch, then at the clock, noted they did not correspond, frowned, and said he'd be here any time.
"I'll give you evens," said Victoria Mosel, "that he calls you Dee Boe Hunn."
"Done!" said Tommy Galton, putting up a finger.
"Bradburys?" said Vic, sucking a pencil. "Gimme a bit o' paper."
Tommy Galton wrote on his cuff. "That'll do," he said.
"I often wish," bleated Aunt Amelia, "that you young people could have met John Bright. I was only in the schoolroom, of course, but my dear father had no scruples in——"
She was not allowed to go on.
"We can't all sit here kicking our heels till he's kind enough to parade," said Marjorie, with girlish simplicity.
"No one wants you to," said Vic, delicately tearing off the last cigarette like a plaster, and sticking in another one. "I'm clamped down. Me for Hamish!"
The Professor suddenly gave tongue. His exceedingly pale old eyes were wide open, and his foolish mouth almost as wide.
"Oh, I think it'll be exceedingly interesting—exceedingly interesting," he quavered. "Exceedingly interesting to meet one of the new generation of ... shall we say, ah! journalists? Yes, journalists.... Journalists."
"Yes, Bill," replied young Galton. "We'll say journalists." Marjorie yawned and stretched.
"Well, I'm not going to wait any longer," she said, when the buzz of a motor was heard on the gravel outside, the approach of middle-class feet, the door solemnly thrown open as for a dancing bear, and the unfortunate McTaggart appeared, his name preceding him.
The Home Secretary, who had preserved some of the traditions, unfolded himself painfully from his chair and stood up, greeting McTaggart with the wan smile of the public man.
"Good evening, Mr. de Bohun." And behold! he pronounced it Deboon. With the business-like rapidity that became her so well, Victoria Mosel handed a crushed ball of three one-pound notes undemonstratively to Tom Galton, who stretched forward to take it and elaborately crossed out the note on his cuff.
Young McTaggart stood there a moment, not daring to sit down, suffering great torture. Nor did any of the company relieve it, though Aunt Amelia, to do her justice, did tell him how glad they all were to see him, much as a spokesman for the Divinities might welcome any clod.
The poor devil was out of place. He did not know why he had come; he had come because he was pressed, because he had nothing else to do, because he was lonely, because he had heard of Paulings and wanted to see it, because he thought such a visit to such a house might improve his prospects; and now that he was here, he wished it had never been built.
He was never at his ease with his social superiors. His father and grandfather had been mere soldiers; his great-grandfather one of Nelson's captains; his father again a very small laird in Ayrshire—but one had to go back as far as that to get to gentility. He dressed awkwardly, and he knew it. He never seemed to know quite where to put the hands and feet at the extremities of his uncouth frame. He also had a rather irritating trick of never looking anybody in the face. It was nervousness, and came of writing too much. He was, I regret to say, terrified of women, but especially of Ladies; and he had already spent the first hours of his exile in wondering why on earth he had allowed himself to be over-persuaded and had come.
So much for the tea table and those that sat round it. The Home Secretary, damnably full of courtesy but rather silent, sat helpless; Victoria Mosel still stood by the fire surveying them all—and particularly McTaggart—not unsaturnine for the others, but with a singular touch of kindness in her slits of eyes for the embarrassed boy. Then she recovered the firm pressure of her lips, emphasised by the drooping cigarette, and the others looked on inanely or surlily, according as God had made them.
If you think I am going to describe to you in any detail how they passed their time between tea and dinner, you are mistaken. Some books are written like that, and there is an art of making them readable. I have it not.
To action, therefore—to the Emerald!