Part 4

“A long tale. She had come back with the ruby ring and for some time at all events they lived quite comfortably on the proceeds. When they had spent their last, ‘I went,’ she said, ‘and threw myself on the charity of the police authorities, who were very kind and sent the three of us, John, Eva, and myself, by goods train to Vienna. An English lady had taken Zita back to England with her as a companion. Arrived in Vienna, I went straight to the policeman on the platform and said: “Here we are--destitute, without means. What do you propose to do with us?” It’s always better to be downright: no good doing things by half. Once destitute, throw all responsibility on the police. He looked very worried and said: “Follow me,” and took us to the gendarme, who told us to wait in the waiting-room. We waited three or four hours. Meanwhile the first policeman came back, with a confused look and something clenched in his fist. “I am not a rich man,” he said, opening his fist, “but please accept that.” I was touched. 30.000 Kronen--almost two shillings. The gendarme came to invite us into his chief’s office. A nice grey-haired old gentleman. He had tears in his eyes as he looked at the children, and was all milk and honey when I related to him of our Schloss in Meran, now in the hands of the Italians, and said softly: “_Sic transit gloria mundi!_”

“‘Anyhow, they took John off my hands. They put him in an orphanage. You won’t believe how nice it is for him there. Never been so happy before! Warm and cosy and plenty of boys of his own age to play with. And, do you know, he heckles them all and fights them. We visited him the next day, Eva and I. He was at his midday meal. Very good food. But he said, “Mummy, what is the matter with this meat? It chews and chews and doesn’t eat up.” Made them all laugh.

“‘“Me-Too” and I were conveyed to the workhouse. And, fancy, crossing the Landstrasse-Hauptstrasse, we saw two of the Bulgarian students--the thin one and one of the small ones. Eva shouted to them across the street, but they couldn’t hear. The workhouse--not too bad, only no privacy. A huge barrack-like room and lots of low, fallen women who use dreadful language. I don’t like it on Eva’s account. Yesterday, when “Me-Too” came in and left the door open, there was such a volley of abuse from an old hag that I shut my ears so as not to hear. But Eva said never a word, only looked at her like that. You could see the race in her.

“‘We found out your address through police records--they are really so well organised in this town--and, well, we’ve come to see you and to ask if you won’t take us out to some dance or other to-night. We are so tired of the regulation workhouse meals. I still have my smart yellow satin gown in which Khan Balalykin admired me so much and thought I looked like a Queen of the Steppes. And “Me-Too” still has her orange crepe-de-Chine gown. She hid it in her purse--it folds ever so small--when the bailiffs came into our Schloss in Meran and took everything away from us.’

“I expressed my willingness, my pleasure. I asked her tactfully if I could not lend her a little money. She took the note with charming simplicity, ‘on condition,’ she said, ‘that you will let me pay it back later--when things mend up in Russia.’

“At the cabaret, the ‘Nachtlokal,’ which she had selected as being the most elegant according to her husband when in the affluent old days he used to take her to Vienna for the season, she nevertheless complained of the general inferiority and paucity of Vienna night life as compared with that of Petrograd or Moscow, and that brought her back again to Russia. ‘Ach, Russia!... We upper classes in Russia have been thrown in the dirt and trampled on with the muddy feet of the coarse proletariat.’ It would have been heartless for me to remind her of the complete independence of her personal misfortunes of the fate of Russia, heartless and uncalled for, ‘But we will go back and find, I truly expect and believe, our reward in riches and pleasures as yet undreamt of, and then when you come and visit us there, Fyodor Ferdinandovich, we shall have such a binge together as will outshine anything previously known in that line.’

“‘Of course we will,’ I said tenderly, laying my hand on her own.

“‘_I believe in it!_’ she cried, ‘hotly and passionately! In the face of all the calamities and disasters falling upon me, it shall not be said that I have lost faith!’ She looked passionately at the orchestra.

“I filled her champagne glass. The band played doleful music. She touched my arm. ‘But I do not regret these experiences. The kind hearts, the interesting people one comes to meet. That policeman. The grey-haired Colonel’s tears.’ Her eyes filled; and, indeed, she looked at that moment like ‘the Madonna kissing the finger-tips of her Child.’ ‘And, you know, even the workhouse women. That old hag who shouted so at “Me-Too”--well, I’ve chummed up with her. Not a bad woman at heart. She has had a hard life. A great beauty. An early seduction....’

“She sighed. ‘We have no luck. Imagine, my mother has managed to get out of Russia at last and even smuggle through some jewelry, so Eva and I both wrote to her to be quick and send us some money till the authorities can find us situations. But she is in Monte Carlo, gambling heavily, it seems, and writes back: “I can’t. I am bust.’”

“Eva, while her mother talked to me, flirted with me over her mother’s head. ‘Come and talk to me,’ her look seemed to say.

“It was cruel after the dance-supper to take them back in a taxi to the workhouse. But what could I do? I was, after paying for the supper, stony broke myself. I could not have arranged to keep them at an hotel indefinitely, and the authorities who were charged with finding work for them would have discontinued their efforts on their leaving the workhouse.

“A week later, she came in to me, jubilant. They had both got positions, Eva as nurse to small children, Mrs. Kerr as housekeeper to a solitary Austrian colonel. ‘An intellectual, original man. We read Dostoevski together and I am keeping a journal which eventually I hope to develop into a novel. We are both of us so happy, Ferdinand Fyodorovich--’

“‘Fomitch,’ I corrected. ‘My father was called Tom--Foma, in Russian.’

“‘ ...Ferdinand Fomitch, that we want you to take us out this evening, make a night of it. The other night “Me-Too” and I went out to a night club together, to celebrate our release from the workhouse and our good fortune in getting situations so soon, and we struck up an acquaintance with two Russian gentlemen: Ivan Andrèiech Zshikov, and the other: Fyodor Yàkovlevich Suhomlinski. Suhomlinski fell in love at first sight with “Me-Too”; and Zshikov with me. Zshikov has long almond eyes and looks like that into mine all the time. Jokes, little flirtations. Very delightful and charming. From there we went together to another cabaret. In the street some other unknown men fell into step with us, and we all went along together to an underground tavern--like the one in Innsbruck, only larger and gayer. And all the men in love--either with Eva or me. All Russians in exile, huddled together, helping one another to bear up. Very charming and touching. The Hussar Kòlenka Shavèlenkov; Olèg Aleksèiech Pevtsòff, disappointed in love and seeking a meaning in life; and Captain of Lancers, Rotmister von Bologovski. Yes, calls himself “von”--“von Bologovski.” All intellectual, original people. We revel till three in the morning, and, do you know, when Eva had to go back to her charges the mistress made quite a scene, in spite of “Me-Too” explaining to her that she had been out with her mother; and nearly dismissed her. It was her first day there, you see. But I slipped in noiselessly with my latch key; my old Diogenes of a colonel was still snoring, and there are no servants. He leaves early and does not come back till six. So I give little parties when he is away. I try to make a kind of Russian intellectual centre, to attract interesting, original people, a sort of nucleus of the Russian Colony in Vienna. A large dining room. I give them tea with lemon. They feel very pleased. All interesting, well-read people of unconventional views. Zshikov came, and Suhomlinski (to see Eva, who slips in with her elder charges when she can), and also Kòlenka Shavèlenkov, and Olèg Aleksèiech Pevtsòff, the disappointed, and the Lancer Rotmister von Bologovski; all came, drank tea and smoked and argued, very sincerely and passionately, about politics and art. I was very pleased on Eva’s account. Very beneficial and instructive for her. I was sorry Zita wasn’t there. But she writes this morning that she has left the English lady and has taken a post as professional dancing partner at a dancing place in Hammersmith. She is very pleased, for the lady she was companion to she says was a stuffy old thing.’”

VII.

“Well, I went to one or two of her intellectual tea parties, and once I just missed Lord de Jones by a hair’s breadth: he had left a minute or so before my arrival.”

“De Jones! You don’t say so!” exclaimed Lord Ottercove. “Ha!” And he shook his head.

“And how,” he asked after a pause, pulling out his watch and looking at it with mild alarm, “do you finish your serial? Does your hero marry both sisters and serve his time for bigamy?”

“No. I will read it to you.”

“Don’t: it suffices that I have your word for it. Shall _I_ tell you what becomes of your characters?”

“Do.”

“Shall I tell you where they are?”

“Where?”

“Here. In London.”

“I know.”

“But do you know who got them to come over?”

“I can guess.”

“You’re good at guessing, are you? And can you guess why he got them over?”

“I think I have shown through the pages of my serial that I am not insensible to his interest in the mother.”

“Or in the daughter.”

“In the daughter!?”

“The younger daughter.”

“Eva? Great heavens!”

“I am happy,” said Lord Ottercove, “to be able to introduce into your serial this little touch of suspense. Indeed, if there is an element lacking in your story it is this element of suspense. Between you and me, it is an element entirely unimportant and one which, I have always found, interferes with the peaceful enjoyment of a story as it tells itself through the growth and actions of the characters. But it is, nevertheless, an element upon which serial editors insist as a matter of tradition. But I am going to change all that. I am, perhaps you have noticed, changing the tradition of journalism in this country.”

“For the better,” said Frank.

“What?”

“For the better,” said Frank.

“Now I like your story. I think it is a corking tale. I accept it for my newspapers, and what is more I will pay for it. Now what do you want for it?”

Frank hesitated only a moment. Better men than he owed their fortune to a bold word put in in the proper accent at the proper moment. Big men act bigly, so that their gestures may go down to history. And what did Shakespeare say? “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

He closed his eyes. “£10,000,” he said.

Now, despite the opening given him, Lord Ottercove did not avail himself of the immortal gesture. Or, perhaps he couldn’t recognise a tide in the affairs of another man.

“Ha!” he said, and leaned back. “If I--if I gave you--gave you--” (The sum seemed to stick in his throat), “gave you £10,000, my staff would think I’d gone right off my chump; and I should have, of course.”

He took up the receiver and said: “I want Mr. Wilson.” And turning back to the visitor: “I can’t do these things over the head of my serial editor. I can’t do these things over the heads of my editors,” he repeated; and again: “I can’t do these things--“, to fill the interval of time it took Mr. Wilson to reach the office. And now Mr. Wilson, with eyes and crown discreetly lustrous, was shown in by the page.

“This, Mr. Wilson, is Mr. Dickin from whom I want to buy a serial. I asked him to name a price, and he said £10,000, which is, of course, preposterous.”

Mr. Wilson inclined his head a little, thus discreetly suggesting that it was preposterous.

“Mr. Dickin,” continued Lord Ottercove, “is not acquainted with the prices of serials paid by newspapers. Obviously so, to judge by the figure he named. What do you think we ought to pay him?”

“Well--” said Mr. Wilson. The situation was one warranting discretion. “The prices vary.” It was not wise to say more.

Lord Ottercove looked sad and troubled at having to be so.

“According to the serial and the author,” Mr. Wilson added.

“I suppose,” Lord Ottercove said doubtfully, “you are a fairly good author?”

“I suppose so,” Frank said gloomily.

“Has Vernon Sprott read any of your novels?” Vernon Sprott was the foreman of British fiction, proud of purse and dexterous with the pen.

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll ask him.--Give me Vernon Sprott--Vernon, old boy, how are you?” Frank had a feeling that he was at the centre of all things, in the very signal box from which all the wires were pulled and the signals flashed the wide world over. “Vernon, I say, have you read any of Frank Dickin’s novels? You have? Well, what do you think of them? What? They’re all right? Vernon, good evening to you!” He put down the receiver. “He says they’re all right.”

“That’s good.”

“Well--” said Lord Ottercove, still far from making history. But the next moment, as a cat is reputed nearly always to fall on its feet, he slipped into history. “Are you,” he said, “at all ready to leave it all to me?”

“To no one more!” Dickin said passionately, feeling that he was now treading a pivot on which fortunes turn, and henceforward fly round, multiplying incessantly.

“I’ll tell you what I will do for you. I’ll let you draw on my account.”

“On your account?”

“Yuh!”

“To--to what extent?”

“Without limit.”

“But how do you mean?”

“As much as you need.”

Frank, flushed, his scalp tingling, punctuated the air with words of embarrassed and bewildered gratitude. “ ... incredible ... incomprehensible....”

Lord Ottercove, as in an alternating duet, kept up with: “Not a bit.... I like doing it....”

“I cannot believe it....”

“My dear fellow, it’s a pleasure to me....”

“I’m staggered....”

“It shall be done!...”

“Speechless.... It’s a dream....”

“Which is your bank?”

“Barclays.”

He took up the receiver. “I want Mrs. Hannibal.”

Mrs. Hannibal was Lord Ottercove’s Secretary-in-Chief. This was, as she entered, already apparent from her general demeanour, from her outward calm and ease and the smiles and little graces she was able to bestow on visitors: that somewhat frozen smile of a lion trainer who, while smiling thus his careless smile at the fascinated audience, is yet, you notice by a certain pink light in the corner of his eye, not unaware of the gravity of the task in hand, of the fearful perils of the open cage with the unaccountable big lion.

“Mrs. Hannibal, will you arrange for Mr. Dickin to draw on my account at Barclays Bank to an unlimited extent, till further notice.”

Mrs. Hannibal had trained herself never to look astonished. “Yes,” she said, making a shorthand note of it in her book, and vanished with ease to complete it in practice. At that moment another visitor--a strange man in large ungainly boots--was ushered into the vast gay room.

“Hullo, Chris!” Lord Ottercove exclaimed.

“How are you, Rex?”

“Oh--bored to hell. Mr. Dickin has just been reading me his serial.” And without any further introduction, he rose and took the visitor across to the large blue sofa at the far end of the room, and both men sat down and engaged in a silent conversation in which the movements of their lips alone were perceptible (as so often happens on the stage). After a while they rose and sauntered towards Frank.

“Have you, Mr. Dickin, ever heard of a man who can grow two blades of grass for every one? You haven’t? Well, Lord de Jones is the man to do it, and, moreover, I am the man to get him to do it.--You know Mr. Dickin, Chris?”

“No,” said Lord de Jones, holding out a bony hand. “How do you do?”

“But he knows _you_, Chris. He’s put you into his blooming book!”

Lord de Jones smiled, revealing a row of shark-like teeth. There was something, Frank felt, uncanny and incalculable about him. Lord de Jones could be most suitably described as “a strange man.”

“Lord de Jones,” explained the host, “is a religious scientist. He belongs to the Adventist sect. His argument, if you make bold to disagree with him, is that any one unwilling to be converted to his faith is prevented from doing so by the Devil.”

“I believe,” said Lord de Jones earnestly, “that the world is approaching its prophesied end--”

“Creaking under the burden of his abominations,” laughed his wife’s uncle.

“It may be for that reason,” rejoined Lord de Jones, “that I have been chosen as His instrument to bring about an end.”

“It may be. But before you are instrumental in so doing you will be good enough to carry out your plan of increasing the crop-growing capacity and general fecundity of this lazy mother earth by closing all the craters in the world.”

“Oh?” said Dickin. “Is that a fact? I mean is it a fact that the closing of craters would inevitably have that effect?”

“Yuh,” said Lord Ottercove.

“Are you sure it’s good science?”

“It’s good politics, anyway. The only thing to give old Joe a leg up. The Liberal Party has no platform. Never had one since the Great War. But this crop-increasing stunt will appeal to all sections of the community, and will be the saving of the party. It appeals to me on two grounds. It’s sound economics--at least on the face of it; it’s got a Liberal smack about it: ‘International Good Will. Live and Let Live. Bread for the People.’ Why, it will simply swing him back into the saddle!--But you will exercise discretion, won’t you?” he turned to Frank. “I hope you don’t transcribe everything into your books, do you?”

“Everything,” said Frank.

For a while the three of them sat silent round the octangular table. Lord Ottercove looked kind and a little fatigued; Lord de Jones silent and pensive. Frank looked at the great newspaper proprietor, who was obviously tired but still genial and kind, and his heart swelled with gratitude and a love for Ottercove and the world that he graced and illumined. “I think,” he said, “I am really taking up too much of your time.”

“Not at all. Do stay. And will you dine with me on Friday night at half past eight at my house?”

The intimate warmth of the great room, the political confidences exchanged in his presence, all this filled Frank Dickin with a sense of loyal elation. At last he rose.

“I hope to see you several times before Friday,” said Lord Ottercove, rising and proffering a strong, sensitive hand. “Don’t forget to give your address to my secretary, and come and see me any time you like. Good-bye to you. And mind the step.”

On the landing, Mrs. Hannibal caught him and gave him a special cheque book. “This will be all right,” she said. “I have advised them.”

In the glass in the lift he saw red patches on his cheeks. He thought that unless he steadied his thoughts he might have a stroke. His heart ebbed and swelled and he walked unsteadily on his feet past the braided commissionaire into the lighted street.

VIII.

EVA

Eva did not reproach him for his inordinately long absence. And the taxi-driver, whatever he may have looked like before, now looked resigned, as if hoping for the best. “I stopped him ticking after a time,” she said, “and I told him you would pay him well. So he looked quite pleased and stopped ticking.”

“I know it was a long time. It must have seemed a terribly long time.”

“Oh, it seemed ages and ages and ages! I thought perhaps you had had a stroke or that Lord Ottercove had strangled you. And then I simply ceased worrying and fell asleep.”

“And the taxi-driver?”

“He fell asleep too. I told him it would be all right.”

“And yet,” said Frank, looking at his watch, “I haven’t been away three hours!”

“And I dreamt that it was a big mystery case, and that they dragged out your body and hanged Lord Ottercove for instigating the affair and--”

“I’ve been reading my book to him.”

“Your book?”

“About you, darling.”

“Oh, darling!”

As the taxi-driver, who had by now outgrown the faculty of astonishment, asked for a clue, they directed him, provisionally, to Piccadilly Circus. Alone, Eva at once pressed herself to his side and brought her mouth to his for kissing, before he was really ready for it; for he had drunk too much champagne and had read aloud so long and now was hiccupping all the time.

“Stop hiccupping,” she said.

For him the day was too rich in new impressions to allow him to savour his happiness. That morning, after a long absence, he had come back from Paris. The Calais boat sidling to the Dover pier. British porters, big, sturdy ruffians, elbowing, like a football team, by the gang-plank; suddenly charging the decks, making away with your boxes and bags. Then the bright shining boat-train gliding away and racing along through the dim countryside, London-ward, without stop. Victoria at last. The vast hideous metropolis blinking through the milky mist. And Eva’s letter in his pocket-book:

“_Darling Blue Eyes.--So sorry you are ill. And here I’m waiting for you all alone in London Town._”

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

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

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

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

“Through Scotland Yard.”

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

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

“Waiting?”

“For you, darling.”

“Oh, darling! And who paid?”

“She paid.”

“Rather generous of her.”

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

“Oh! how mean! how cruel!”

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

“But what is Mr. Pilling to you!”

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