Part 4

‘“Are de Government mad?” said my friends to me. “Dey might haf taken de whole ting wid deir retchiment of men; and dey let it all go to one shendlemann. An’ now dere can neffer be a war for it; it is brivate broperty. Dey leaf it to de Soochinks? Goot! Someday de Soochinks rebel; dey oppose de Ettucation law, de Tynamite law, de Church law: de Government take it away from dem. Goot! Dat is Bolitics. But dey have made it Broperty: dere is no Bolitics wid Broperty. We shall see big row. De Government will fall.”’

‘They have many things to answer for.’

‘It is solid gold!’

‘Ten thousand butchered Bulgarians lie at their door.’

‘Polgarrians? What are your ten tousand Polgarrians to me, ten hunderd tousand Polgarrians, ten million Polgarrians? A tousand tons of solid gold, I tell you. Dey know nussing, your Government. All de land is one big reef. I haf known it tree munt, you haf known it, efferybody haf known it; but de Government knows nussing, de Brivy Gouncil knows nussing.’

‘Do you mean that the gold runs right across this map, where these marks are?’

‘Natürlich.’

‘I never even guessed it.’

‘Is it a choke? Bah! Den why haf you made soch friends of de Brince?’

‘What’s your proposal?’

‘Wait!’ He put his head out of window and shouted to the driver: ‘Kvicker! Kvicker!’.... ‘I tell you at home. Haf a smoke?’ He held out a fat cigar-case.

‘No thank you.’

‘Take it! take it! Fifty pount a box.’ Mr. Cato still refused.

Gates opened before them; they drove over a gravel court, and ascended broad steps on a red carpet rolled down by footmen.

‘To de English room.’

They flew through a monstrous hall, with three footmen after them; fountains, palms, mosaics, tiles, pillars, galleries, lights; a card-table, dwarfed by the vastness; card-players, lounging men, thin contemptuous women smoking cigarettes. As they bowled rapidly by, the Baron waved flickering red fingers:

‘My exguses laties. Come along Max: beesness!’

A young Jew arose from the table, threw down his cards, made apologies, and followed quickly.

In the English room the Baron cast rapid gestures at the pictures on the walls:

‘Reynolds, Cainsborough, Dicksee, Constable, Leader, Freeth. Come along, Max. Bring champagne,’ he said to the footmen.

‘Not for me, thank you,’ said Mr. Cato.

‘Goot! I will drink it mysailfe.’

They sat in a blaze of electric light, velvet, gold, Venetian glasses; everything exhaled a fat smell of luxury. This was the stunning atmosphere in which the Baron preferred to make his ‘broposition.’ Papers flitted about the table; champagne and diamond rings flickered before Mr. Cato’s eyes.

The Baron planned an amalgamation, a monopoly; harmony and understanding; big handling and cheap production; the sales regulated; the market chosen; the rate of exchange manipulated. A mass of companies, with different names, different directorates, even different supposititious localities.

‘If I call him Cato Deeps, and say he is in Mexico, who knows? who cares? De enchineer? I pay him. De public? De diffidends are all in Treadneedle Street.’

An oscillation of good reports and bad reports, share-prices going up and down, with the Baron and his friends in the middle of the see-saw, and money rolling to them from alternate ends of the plank.

‘Gold is goot, but gompanies are better,’ he said.

But the Baron must have a free hand; it amounted to a purchase, a right to exploit. Everything depended on the Prince, and evidently the Prince depended on Mr. Cato. For the one there waited the 500,000_l._ a year in perpetuity, guaranteed on his own property; for the other, directorships, fees, shares, pickings at every corner; a safe income of at least ten thousand to be had for the asking. He had only to get the Prince’s consent to the bargain.

Mr. Cato flipped aside the personal question without a word. But for the Prince? 500,000_l._ a year. No one could reasonably ask more of life. Had he a right to refuse it? But these companies! tricks of promotion! all the garbage of the money market. Had he a right to accept it? He hesitated.

The butler came in, and murmured in the Baron’s ear.

‘Where?’

‘Just outside, sir.’

‘Gif him a smoke, and tell him to vait.’

‘Can I come in?’ said a voice at the door.

‘Aha, cher Duc!’ cried the Baron with brazen-voiced, brutal _bonhomie_: ‘go to de pilliard room and vait.’

‘Can’t you spare a moment?’

‘Ne voyez-vous pas?’ The _bonhomie_ passed to imperial fierceness. ‘I am peezy!’

‘Well?’ he said, as Mr. Cato still sat plunged in thought. ‘For you it is leetle question--for de Brince, leetle question: it is me or somebody else. Fife hunderd tousand pount, effery year.’

Mr. Cato still pondered. He thought he saw his duty clearing before him.

‘Well? De Duke vaits; I vait. You impoverish de world: you widdraw me from circulation. Is it Yes?’

‘No!’ said Mr. Cato, pushing back his chair. ‘It is No.’

‘Ah?... Who will manage de mines?’

‘The Prince will manage the mines. _I_ will manage the mines.’

‘Goot! You hear, Max? Dis shendlemann will manage de mines.’

Max only stared palely at Mr. Cato. The irony was too great for laughter. He saw a man putting to sea on a plank, unconscious of the deep voice of the gathering tornado; a child going out with a wooden gun to make sport of an angry crowd of _sans-culottes_.

‘Can I get a copy of the corrected map anywhere?’ asked the Child.

‘Gif him de map, Max,’ said the Baron, with a short, indulgent laugh. ‘My secret achents haf brepared it, Mr. Cato. Gif him de figures, all de papers. Let him haf efferyting. Goot-bye, Mr. Cato. See him to de carriage, Max.’

‘I’ll walk, thank you.’

‘Better drive. Goot-bye.’

‘Good-bye.’

‘You will haf deeficulties, Mr. Cato.’

Mr. Cato went home by omnibus. His heart sank as he looked at the map, divorced from the purple finger.

There is lightheartedness in great conflict: we see the larger outline; our forces are fed by the consciousness of it. A field of gold, still in possession; a thing still to sell, if need be: it was an impregnable position. But courage is needed after the battle; we see partially, at short range. To have rejected a magnificent offer, to have so little in its place--some papers, an idea, a consciousness that needed an atlas to explain it. To have rejected the proposals of confident authority creates a helpless mid-air terror; that is the power of religions. Mr. Cato felt like a heretic of the Middle Ages, wondering, on the way to the stake, if after all the Pope were not right.

He went straight to his bedroom; walked up and down in his slippers, lay awake for hours in long moods of elation and depression, and fell asleep at last very cold.

XIII

The wheel had begun to turn. Nothing could stop it now. Next morning came a fresh-looking elderly gentleman in grey, who announced himself as ‘of the Colonial Office.’ He looked about him as if he meant to buy the place; but modestly, as if for someone else. Mr. Cato received him in the drawing-room. He hoped the Prince was well. The Colonial Office had heard of the Prince’s improving fortunes. His business concerned the Prince, but it could most conveniently be broached to Mr. Cato. He would see the Prince afterwards.

It had probably struck Mr. Cato that the time had now arrived for the Prince to set up a separate establishment. The Colonial Office, which was ultimately responsible for him, felt that Mr. Cato’s kindness must not be trespassed on. He must not be allowed to monopolise the Prince.

Mr. Cato had probably noticed that native potentates always had, what you might call, for want of a better word, ‘keepers’ attached to their persons while they were in England. The actual title varied. As a rule it was some tall muscular military man who was said to be ‘in attendance on His Majesty the So-and-so.’ It was this functionary’s duty to keep him generally out of mischief; for these Oriental fellows would play the very deuce if left alone. Well, as far as Prince Dwala was concerned, the Colonial Office had decided that a Private Secretary would meet the case, and they had in fact selected the man.

‘Who is it?’ asked Mr. Cato, repressing a pang of jealousy.

‘One of the Huxtables--John Huxtable, a son of the Bishop.’

This again smelt of large success. Mr. Cato knew nothing of this particular John; but he was a Huxtable, and Huxtables are, like Napoleon, not men but institutions. Nature has such caprices. Out of many million wild rough briars, one rougher and crabbeder than all the rest is chosen by her for a fathering stock; whatever is grafted on it thrives. Another is richer, larger, better-flowered, the pride of the field--it is wise, courteous, a soldier, a leader of men; it is made a Duke; it is grafted with the delicatest buds of Paestum. But the bloom is frail and mean; shelter and fine feeding avail not, it has a good place in the garden, but it is fragrant only in its name. The Huxtables came of a rough and crabbed stock. Their great-grandfather was somebody’s gamekeeper. His sons throve in business. His grandsons were great men--soldiers, lawyers, priests. His great-grandsons, an innumerable rising generation, were destined for greater greatness. It had become an English custom to see large futures before them. They were big and bony, they played at Lord’s, they abounded in clubs and country houses; their handsome, strong-toothed sisters married well, breeding powerful broad-browed babies that frowned and pinched.

This particular Huxtable had tutored a Prince of the blood. He had been secretary to a philanthropic commission; he would be a Cabinet Minister, a Viceroy--anything he pleased. For the present he would be private secretary to Dwala: he would manage him, regulate him, assert him, protect him, establish him, marry him perhaps, and pass on to another broad stage in the regal staircase of his career.

As for the mines, the gentleman in grey had no advice to offer. It was a private affair of Prince Dwala’s; no concern of the Colonial Office. Why not consult some big financier? Baron Blumenstrauss, for instance.

Mr. Cato made no reply.

‘Well, after all,’ the grey gentleman concluded, ‘it had better be left to Mr. Huxtable.’

XIV

The Huxtable came later--a terrifying young man, who said little, but listened with a tolerant smile--and after him a host of others, entailed by his plans for Dwala. A house had been found in Park Lane. The owner, who was travelling in the East, had left the thing intact; his creditors wished to sell it as it stood. The appointments were passable; he had been a rather random collector of good things--some rubbish must be weeded out and replaced, but there was nothing to delay possession.

However, it must be paid for. If Mr. Cato would produce his accounts, the Huxtable would be glad to go through them with him.

‘Oh, I have no accounts to show.’

‘Why not?’

‘Dwala has been my guest. There is nothing to account for.’

‘But the property in Borneo--you have an account of that?’

‘No.’

‘This is all very curious. A man has a fortune of some hundreds of thousands a year, and no account is kept of it!’

‘But he hasn’t got it yet. It lies buried in the earth in Borneo.’

‘Yes; it consists of mines, I know. But, of course, the fortune was realisable as soon as the Privy Council gave their decision.’

‘Well, it hasn’t been realised.’

‘But the decision was given a week ago. Do you mean to say it has been _neglected_ all this time?’

‘“Neglected” is a piece of impertinence, Mr. Huxtable.’

‘A week’s income lost means something like 10,000_l._’

‘How dare you come to me--me, who has been toiling night and day in the Prince’s interest--in this authoritative, censorious way--I, who am old enough to be your grandfather--talking of neglect?’

‘You regard it as an aspersion? Well, and what are the results of all your labour?’

‘I have secured him justice.’

‘Justice is a matter of law, Mr. Cato: the Privy Council has attended to that. If you were incapable of realising his fortune yourself, why not have applied to some big financier--Baron Blumenstrauss, for instance?’

‘I have seen Baron Blumenstrauss.’

‘Well, what did he say?’

‘He made an offer. He volunteered to buy all the Prince’s rights for 500,000_l._ a year.’

‘Then, surely, you have realised it?’

‘No, sir, I have not.’

‘You don’t mean that you refused his offer? You weren’t expecting anyone to offer more, I suppose?’

‘I refused his offer.’

‘On what ground?’

‘I regard Baron Blumenstrauss as an immoral man. I regard his business methods as immoral. If I had accepted the offer on the Prince’s behalf, I should have been advising him to lend himself to a vile system of exploitation, which I regard as one of the most infamous curses of our modern civilisation. I would rather see Dwala starve.’

‘You have taken a very great responsibility on yourself, Mr. Cato.’

‘I am quite willing to bear it.’

A smile flickered round the Huxtable’s nose, and Mr. Cato felt that he was being betrayed into melodrama. Silence ensued.

‘Your sentiments are very noble, Mr. Cato,’ said Huxtable at last. ‘I should say that they did you every credit, if it were your own fortune that we were talking about. But it is not. And if you think it over, you will see that your conduct lies open to the very gravest criticism. By a series of unusual circumstances you find yourself practically master of the disposal of a vast fortune belonging to someone else. Instead of accepting an excellent offer for the benefit of the person whose interests you for some reason claim the right of defending, you go off at a tangent in pursuit of your own political theories.’

‘Political theories?’

‘Yes, sir; political theories. Your views are well known. You regard the ways of the money market as immoral; you preach saintliness in the conduct of business; you think our social and financial system a mistake; you are, in fact, opposed to our civilisation as you find it. Those are your politics. Excellent! Charming! That is what makes your speeches a success. Moreover, you have a perfect right to practise your theories with your own property if you please. This Sermon-on-the-Mount way of doing business would make you a delightful customer in the City, no doubt. But when it comes to Prince Dwala’s affairs, the case is different. You are in the position of a trustee.’

‘Then is a trustee to be without a conscience?’

‘Certainly not; that’s just the point. I wonder you mention it. A trustee’s conscience ought to be a very delicate affair.’

‘Do you mean to insinuate that I have acted without conscience?’

‘I don’t insinuate it, sir; I say it straight out. You have acted unconscientiously.’

‘You have the insolence to say that!’ cried Mr. Cato, jumping up, with tears of fury in his voice. ‘You dare to sit there and tell me I have no conscience; you ... you damnable young prig!’

The Huxtable sat with folded arms, looking at him coldly, magisterially. This young untroubled man was the World, the unrighteous, unanimous World, sitting in judgment on him.

‘You don’t improve your case by losing your temper and being abusive,’ said the World. ‘Your conscience, your whole conscience, should have been bent on serving the Prince’s interests; it was your duty to divest yourself of all personal theories, all prejudices, all principles, and devote yourself only to getting the best price you could. You are not a business man, and you had no right to experiment on the Prince’s behalf with theories of business that never _have_ worked, never _will_ work, and never _could_ work. Nobody will offer you a better price than the Baron, because no one can afford a better price.’

‘Well, you have succeeded me. There are the mines intact. Go to the Baron and get him to renew his offer.’

‘The Baron will not make the same offer again.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I have seen the Baron.’

‘You have seen him!... Then all this long discussion was a trap for me?’

‘You can call it a trap if you like, though I think the word is a damaging one for you. I have seen the Baron, and he at once stated that he washed his hands of the whole affair.’

‘But if his only motive is money, things are just as they were a week ago. He can still make his money.’

‘You only expose your ignorance of the man you were so ready to abuse--a man of unsullied reputation, by-the-bye. Money is _not_ his only motive.’

‘What other motive has he?’

‘Pride.’

‘Him?’

‘Yes, sir; pride. When a man of that magnitude steps off his pedestal and comes down to a suburban house to offer his services to a private individual, he expects to be treated at least with consideration. He is accustomed to dealing with Empires, Governments, National Banks; not with obscure gentlemen in Hampstead villas. What happened? The Prince fell asleep, and you gave the Baron a blunt rebuff.’

‘It’s not my business to keep Prince Dwala awake.’

‘It’s not your business to settle his affairs while he’s asleep. You made an enemy of Baron Blumenstrauss.’

‘The Baron’s enmity to me is of no importance.’

‘Quite true; of no importance. But you made him the Prince’s enemy--an enemy of the estate. He began negotiating against us at once, floating companies over our head. He is omnipotent, and you turned him against the Prince. His pride was hurt.’

‘Surely he can swallow his pride!’

‘No doubt; but not at the same figure. He offers only 400,000_l._ a year.’

‘Well, what do you mean to do?’

‘I have accepted his offer.’

‘Ha!... I hope you made a good thing out of it?’

They both rose to their feet.

‘In what way, Mr. Cato?’

‘There was, I suppose, some commission attached to the negotiation?’

‘No, sir; there was no commission. Baron Blumenstrauss knew me better than to offer me any such thing.’

It was perfectly true. It would have been inapt. There were other ways in which the Baron could discharge his debt of gratitude to a young man with a great future.

‘Where is the Prince?’ said Huxtable.

‘What do you want with him?’

‘I am going to take him into London.’

‘His house isn’t ready.’

‘Yes, it is. Will you make out your bill?’

‘What bill?’

‘For the expenses of his keep.’

‘He has been my guest, I tell you.’

‘As you please. Where is he now?’

‘He has gone for a walk with his governess.’

‘I will wait for him.’

This imperturbable young man sat quietly down in an armchair and cracked his thumb-joints. Mr. Cato looked at him with silent wonder, and left the room. He envied the Huxtable his nerves: his own were in a tumult; he could not have stayed with him a moment longer.

XV

Meanwhile Dwala, all unconscious, was standing on Parliament Hill, with Miss Briscoe’s tall figure at his side. It must have been some unwitting prescience which took them there that day.

London lay at their feet: London, which Dwala had never seen; London, where his life would lie from this day forth. Not the formless, endless, straight-ruled London seen by the man in the street; not a pervading, uniform, roaring, inevitable presence: but London apart; in the distance; without sound; without smell; set to a foreground of sun-beaten grass and a gambolling wind from the fields and seas; a thing with a shape; a whole; bounded, surrounded, grim and grimy, sprawling down the dishonoured valley; murky, random, ridged and toothed, like the _débris_ of Ladoga’s ice, piled in the Neva by December.

Dwala laughed.

It was a joke of a magnitude fitted to his monstrous mind. ‘Man is the laughing animal:’ he had proved himself human. Behold, he had worshipped Man and his inventions; he had come forth to see the sublimest invention of all; he had travelled over half the world for it; everywhere they spoke of it with awe. And now he had seen it. It was London.

The hill shook with his laughter. All the birds and beasts in the big city heard it and made answer--cheeping, squeaking, mewing, barking, whinnying, and braying together; forgetful, for the moment, of their long debates on the habits of mankind, their tedious tales of human sagacity, their fruitless altercations as to whether men had instinct or were guided only by reason.

The commotion escaped Miss Briscoe’s notice: she heard only one deep guttural laugh beside her, and looking up, beheld a grave impassive face.

‘There is St. Paul’s: do you see, Prince? How grand it looks, watching over the great city like a shepherd over his flock. “Toil on, toil on, my children,” it seems to say: “I am here in the midst of you, the Church, the Temple builded of the lowly Carpenter, with my message of strength for the faint-hearted, consolation for the afflicted, peace for all when the day’s task is done. Toil on, that the great work may be accomplished at last.”’

‘Work? Ah, you may well say work,’ said a voice from the bench beside them.

An old man was sitting there; a handsome old man, with a strong, bony face. His knobbed hands rested on the top of a walking-stick, his chin on his hands. He wore the unmistakable maroon jacket and black shovel-hat of the workhouse; corduroys clothed his lean and hollow thighs.

‘Bless you, there’s work for everyone as _wants_ to work. See that chimney down there, that biggun? That’s Boffin’s, where I was. Three and fifty years I worked at Boffin’s.’

‘Was it a happy life?’ asked Miss Briscoe.

‘Happy? Bless you, the times I’ve had there when I was a youngster. Always up to larks. There’s three of my grandsons there now.’

Miss Briscoe admired his furrowed, placid face. ‘Take this,’ she whispered.

The old man looked coldly at a shilling.

‘No, thanky ... but if the gentleman has some tabacca on him, I could do with a bit.’

As they neared the bottom of the hill, Mr. Cato came hurrying towards them. There were tears in his eyes, and wet hollows in his cheeks.

‘Well, Dwala my boy, I’ve brought you news. You’re going into London to-night, to your new home.’

Dwala put up his face to the sky and laughed again.

XVI

Dwala was a social success, an object of multiple affection. His large grave ways, his modesty, his kindliness, made him personally beloved. He was, of course, always a ‘native’; there was no escaping that. But to be tolerated, if you are tolerated everywhere, is social greatness.

One thing he lacked, they said--the sense of humour. The tiny shock that makes a human joke was too slight for his large senses. But humour, after all, is a rather bourgeois quality.

He was adopted from the beginning, pushed, trumpeted, imposed, by that powerful paper the ‘Flywheel.’ He had captivated Captain Howland-Bowser, its correspondent, at the first encounter. The ‘Flywheel,’ descending after a century, from its Olympian heights, into the arena of popular favour--by gradual stages, beginning with the great American ‘pill competition’--had put itself on a level with the rest by adding a column of ‘Beau Monde Intime’ to its daily issue. The thing was done on the old Olympian scale. The column was not entrusted to a chattering magpie-newswoman, or to a broken-winged baronet, as is the way with lesser sheets; but to an eagle of the heights--the famous Captain Howland-Bowser, our modern Petronius, the Grand Old Man of Pall Mall; the Buck from Bath, as envious youngsters called him; the well-known author of ‘Furbelows’ and the ‘Gourmet’s Calendar.’

The fateful evening is recorded in his ‘Memoirs of a Man about Town,’ that farrago of entertaining scandal, which proved a mine of wealth to his sorrowing wife and family, to whom he bequeathed the manuscript when he died, as a consolation for a somewhat neglectful attitude in life: