Part 5

“He has guarded you well,” Frank said, not without bitterness. “What about Zita?”

“He’s taken a fancy to Zita long ago at the Arcadia Ball Rooms, where he’s a professional with her.”

“He has, has he? A fine guardian and no mistake! What is their relation?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know quite well what I mean.” He looked bluntly into her eyes. “Yes ...?”

“Yes,” she nodded.

“And so he’s taken you both under his wing?”

“Yes. And Mr. Pilling said I was not to go out except to take the terrier out for exercise. And I took him every morning out into the Park and wandered all over Kensington Gardens, hoping I might come across you suddenly.”

“And you did!”

“And I did!”

“Darling Eva!” He pressed her to his side.

The taxi-cab had reached the bottom of the Strand and was rounding Nelson’s Column into Pall Mall. “I must think of a hotel,” he said. “I daresay I will find a room at the Madrid Palace.”

“No, no,” she said, “that is not a smart hotel. Mr. Pilling will say it isn’t smart.”

“Hang Mr. Pilling! Besides, why can’t you tell him I am staying at the Ritz?”

She thought a while. “I didn’t think of it. Yes, I will tell him you are staying at the Ritz.”

He gave directions to the driver; ran up the steps into the hotel, ordered a room, and came back to her. “Darling, what do you want to do now?”

“Let us get out, darling, and walk and think. I am so tired of living in this taxi.”

He dismissed the man, after paying the full penalty of his caprice, and they walked on into Piccadilly and inadvertently turned into New Bond Street. “What do you want to do?” he asked again. “You are surely not going back to your sister’s to-night, are you?”

“No, no, I am not!”

Her reassurance weakened his resolve. “But if she searches for you; if she goes to Scotland Yard?” he asked uneasily.

“I don’t care, darling. I want to be with you.”

“We’ll dine.”

“Yes, and after dinner go to a dance.”

“All right,” he said, unenthusiastically. “What your mother used to call ‘making a night of it.’”

“Mummy writes that she is very dull in Ireland.”

“What is she doing there?”

“She’s gone to visit daddy’s people to see what they can do for us. I’d like,” she added, “to go to the Kiss-Lick Club.... It isn’t really expensive.”

“No. All right.”

“But I--”

“But you--?”

“But I haven’t a gown. The old Meran orange crêpe-de-Chine one is an old rag now.”

“We’ll get one.”

“But, darling, are you rich enough?”

“Just enough,” he said, not wishing to encourage her in her extravagance.

Now she was already standing at a shop window, trying to decide between two equally attractive gowns. But as they went in, the choice, and with it the difficulty of selection, and the perils of subsequent remorse, increased alarmingly. Seated, like a royal pair, in luxurious armchairs, the mannequins parading with studied step before them, they displayed, in return for the united efforts of the selling staff, an increasingly dispersed appreciation. From time to time, Eva disappeared behind a screen to emerge from it as an exhibit, to the venal praises of the saleswoman, who, anxious to bring matters to a head, gradually narrowed down the field of selection to two expensive gowns.

“I really can’t make up my mind which I should take.”

“Take both,” he said.

The saleswoman looked up at him as though she thought he was a fine young gentleman, and he felt pleased to have risen in her estimation.

“But are you sure--?”

“I think I can just do it.” Lucky to have cleared his entire bank balance that morning! To-morrow he would draw a cheque on Ottercove. It seemed scarcely credible. The affair smacked of the fairy godfather type of Christmas tale in an all-fiction magazine for juveniles. Yet Ottercove, his cheque book, and his bank balance were presumably realities. In the midst of life we’re in a dream, he mused, as they were bowed out into the street, when, a few paces off, Eva suddenly remembered that she had no shoes to match the gowns, and he took her to the nearest shop where she selected competently, while asking him, “Are you quite sure--?” the best the shop could offer.

“I think I’ll manage,” he replied, more by way of secret loyalty to Ottercove, who, he recalled, had said, “As much as _you_ need,” not “as much as your women folk may feel they need,” which was not the same.

The shops were just closing; but, of his own accord, he suggested that she indulge in lingerie, and here, despite the closing hour, Eva’s fancy ran adrift, while his new-born tenderness for her prevented him from curbing her desires. So long as he had money enough to last out till the morning, what did it matter?

But he did not himself indulge in any purchases that evening, as an ascetic act of abstinence before the pure image of the kindly Ottercove which, like an ikon illumined by a candle, always shone before him. Nevertheless the devil tempted him from time to time. Suppose, he thought, Lord Ottercove had gone mad. It was not impossible. He could then gradually appropriate all his property. Till the executors stopped him. If so, was that not a cause for hurry? And Eva’s impulse was right? But it would never do to tell her. Not even if Lord Ottercove was mad.

He whispered in her ear as they pushed through the revolving door into the hall of the hotel, and she signed her name--with a, to unsuspecting eyes surely imperceptible, hesitation--“Nancy Dickin.” As they ascended in the lift, he was tendering excuses:

“It’s a poor room, you know.”

“Is,” she asked, “my room as poor as yours?”

“It’s the same,” he said.

Forgetting to kiss him, she immediately began to inspect her purchases, till he suggested it was time she put them on.

“It’s cold,” she twitched her shoulders.

“There’s a gas fire.”

“Yes, yes. Darling, ring the bell for me.”

And to the maid, in a commanding, knowing way:

“Put on the gas fire at eleven o’clock so it should be warm when we return. My husband likes it warm.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

At the Kiss-Lick she beamed all the time. While they danced she talked to him of himself. “Pilling said ... Zita said ... I said to Pilling: ‘Mr. Dickin doesn’t care a rap for your opinions! He wouldn’t look at you--’” Or, suddenly, without preliminary introduction, she would volunteer such isolated bits of information as: “He hurt me with my teeth. I cried.”

“Who? Pilling?”

“No, the dentist. And the man in the Tube thought I was a little Russian girl because I had a grey fur cap and was reading the translation of a Russian novel.”

Eva, he noticed, was very observant and ironic about Mr. Pilling. “He tries to speak French to Zita, because he thinks it’s grand. Pilling thinks she has influence.”

“With whom?”

“With Lord Ottercove. Through Lord de Jones, you know, who is Mummy’s friend. He is very funny.”

“Who? Pilling?”

“No, Lord de Jones. He goes about muttering funny things to me about wanting to blow up the earth. I think he is not quite all there. But Pilling would like Lord Ottercove to finance him.”

“Whom? Lord de Jones?”

“No, Pilling. He’d like to open out on his own. A dancing place, a night club like this one. Only he says he wants Lord Ottercove or somebody to finance him, because it will cost a lot of money. Pilling is very high class. He has bought a cottage at Marlow and called it ‘Villa Esperanza.’”

“Full of hope, evidently!”

“And he makes up to a man there because he is a member of the motor-boat club, and Pilling can’t be a member of the motor-boat club because he has no motor-boat. And he says he only needs Lord Ottercove to finance him to buy himself a motor-boat. That is why I wanted to meet Lord Ottercove this afternoon; and you wouldn’t let me.”

“You wanted to speak to Lord Ottercove to--to--” he stammered with incredulity.

“To ask him if he’d like to finance Pilling.”

“But why?”

“I thought it would please Pilling.”

While they supped, her legs touched his and he had but one thought and one desire: to return with her to the hotel, to grasp her, clutch her, smother and devour her just as she was now with her wistful violet eyes and her thoughts of Pilling. She sipped her champagne. She was silent, completely content. Her large eyes were bright dewy flowers.

Ensconced in a taxi, she at once fell over him and brought her mouth to his for kissing. But kissing, by this time, was nothing new to him. He wanted to explore new avenues, new vistas of experience.

Then they were back, alone. He clutched her in his arms. “Come, come, come,” he pleaded. She had quickly slipped into bed before he returned to the room and looked at him doubtfully.

“Ah!” he cried in the accents of the primitive man and leaping to her side.

But she had turned her back to him. “Darling....” she murmured.

“What?” he cried.

“Yes,” she said, “it isn’t always easy to be a woman, darling.”

He looked at her blankly. “Where is my revolver?”

“Your revolver?”

“Or I shall go out and hang myself--”

“What do you mean?”

“On the nearest lamp-post.”

After pacing the room up and down for a space, he lay down. But he could not sleep. At last he dressed and, to the astonishment of the night porter, went out and, incurring the suspicion of a lone policeman, loitered in empty Piccadilly Circus. He had calmed down and his thoughts turned back to his miraculous acquaintance with Lord Ottercove and his unlimited offer of money, so unusually generous that he could hardly force himself to take advantage of it. He would rather assassinate his old grandmother for the meagre contents of her purse than overdraw Lord Ottercove’s account. Wandering aimlessly about the quiet streets, tears dimmed his eyes as he reflected on the essential goodness of human nature. His look was moist, peculiarly naïve, and if a confidence-trickster had that moment come up to him, he would have been inclined to accept his offer, convinced that he would and could not harm him.

Eva was not asleep when he came back. Where had he seen it? Ah, she reminded him of that picture of a kitten tucked away in a big bed, with one paw over the quilt, one eye closed, the other open and looking at the world. In the dark they talked across the bedside table which separated their two beds, and she told him of all that had happened to her since he saw her last in Vienna. “Lord de Jones got Mummy to put me into a Secretarial College as he said he would need a secretary to go on his mission with him round the world to close all the craters and Mount Vesuvius and such for which Lord Ottercove is financing him for propaganda and such like purposes and that he could see from the colour of my eyes that he could trust me. Mummy wants to go with Lord de Jones on his mission all round the world because she says she hasn’t been round the world and would like to see it as his private secretary, but Lord de Jones says he’d rather I went with him, much rather than Mummy. And so he put me into this Secretarial College to learn shorthand and typewriting, and the Principal was making up to him, because he was Viscount de Jones, and used to write silly letters to him trying to flatter him because he thought Lord de Jones would appreciate deep thoughts. And so he wrote to Lord de Jones to congratulate him on the nobility of his scientific thoughts and researches and said: ‘Your philosophical mind, I am sure, will appreciate what a small fraction time is of eternity.’”

“And Lord de Jones?”

“He simply laughed, and I told the Principal what a fool Lord de Jones thought him. But he was making up to me.”

“Who? The Principal? Or Lord de Jones?”

“The Principal. And Lord de Jones, too. But I don’t mind Lord de Jones because he is an old friend of Mummy’s. But the Principal was a real rotter. He had a sort of conservatory behind his study where he used to receive visitors, and there was a palm tree there and an aquarium with goldfish, and he said to me when I said I was leaving him because he was a fool, ‘We had better kiss and be friends,’ and he tried to kiss me there among the goldfish.”

“No!”

“He did! And he used to pay his teaching staff at the end of the week in silver money. Three or four half-crowns, not more. They all stood huddled together at the end of the room and he’d recline in his chair at the desk and call out: ‘Jones!’ ‘Ferguson!’ ‘Gould!’ (Never ‘Mrs. Ferguson,’ or ‘Miss Gould!’) ‘Here!’ and give them three or four half-crowns each. And the typewriting mistress, Miss Gould, only got two half-crowns and a shilling.”

“And they seemed pleased?”

“No, not pleased, but kind of dumb, cowed, hungry looking. And when Mummy was behind with the payment because Lord de Jones had quarrelled with his wife and she wouldn’t let him have any more money, Mr. Bumphill got very ratty and said I had a bad character. I asked him what I had done; and he said: ‘You are lazy, and where is your loyalty to the College? Have you ever recommended it to a single human being?’

“‘I have,’ I said.

“He suddenly looked very interested. ‘And to whom, pray?’ said he.

“‘To Mr. Gorilla,’ said I, ‘a Spanish young gentleman.’

“‘Oh, indeed! I am interested to hear it,’ says he. ‘Take his name down, Miss Frazer.... H’m! And what is his address?’

“‘The Zoological Gardens,’ said I.”

“And then?”

“Then I left his Secretarial College. Mr. Pilling thought I should study to become a Nurse.”

“And why must you listen to Mr. Pilling.”

“I told you he is our guardian.”

“A fine guardian!” said Frank bitterly. “I’d like to bash his head for his treatment of Zita.”

“But what about yourself?” she asked, it seemed to him rather tactlessly.

“That was different. That was on a hill.”

“It was lovely. And Zita too thought it was lovely. But she said she could never tell Pilling about it. She doesn’t know what he’d do to you if he knew.”

“No need for him to know,” Frank said, gloomily. And then: “I say, is he ... Pilling a great reader of novels?”

“I don’t know, darling. I don’t remember having seen any of yours in their flat, though Pilling once said about you, ‘He is very clever. I wish I had his brains. I would not be a professional, nor Zita either.’”

“Why don’t they marry?”

“Pilling told her from the start that he couldn’t marry her as he was already married but separated from his wife, but Zita being always business-like and practically minded asked Pilling to guarantee to her on paper that he would remain true and loyal to her all his life. But Pilling said he couldn’t do such a thing as a man can never trust himself. Zita then met a doctor--an old consumptive fellow, full of gout and ischias and sciatica and heart disease--who fell in love with her and wanted her to be his own eternally and everlastingly, and as he also could not marry her he gave her the guarantee she asked in writing that he would be true to her during all his lifetime and even had it stamped at Somerset House; and then she became just like his wife. But he died in a week--from heart failure.”

“And what did Zita say?”

“She said: ‘I could have murdered him for it.’”

“Poor thing! And now?”

“Now she has gone back to Pilling unconditionally. She did ask him for a guarantee, but he only laughed at her. She still warns me about men. But I also laugh at her.”

“Yet she controls your movements?”

“Yes, she does. Once, when I got so tired of sitting at home with Zita and Pilling and went for a walk by myself, and a fat gentleman I met on the station platform at Victoria took me to a dance, Zita gave me an awful hiding and told Pilling to give me a dressing-down, and then slapped me.”

“Really slapped you hard?”

“Yes, darling, I haven’t had an easy kind of life, I can tell you.”

“And so Pilling sent you to the hospital to study to become a Nurse, did he?”

“He did. I had to cram my poor brains with so much anatomy. And the things they made us look at, the operations and things. Once I fainted; then I got used to it.”

“And do you really know something about it?”

“I know every little bone in your body.”

“Really?”

“There was a doctor there, an Irishman. He used to help me with my examinations and kiss me.”

“You let him?”

“He loved me, he said. And it was Spring like that time on the hill, and so stuffy at night, and the textbooks so difficult, and he so clever!”

“And then?”

“And then I ran away. I didn’t come back after my annual leave. I went to London to Mrs. White’s boarding house.”

“Why?”

“Because you wrote to me from Paris that you wanted me to meet you in London, and so I came to London from Colchester and waited for you--weeks and weeks, till my sister came--the matron at the hospital had started a hue and cry--and took me away.”

“And then?”

“Then Pilling said I must go back to the hospital, but I said I’d rather die than go back to the hospital, so I had a row with Pilling. He was furious, and I was furious, and so I went away to Mother Martha’s boarding house and took a room, but I had no money, so had to look for a situation.”

“You all alone in London looking for a situation! while I was lounging lazily in Paris!”

“Yes. I went to the shops asking for a job, and I didn’t know where I could get a reference. The managers were all the same. They said, ‘You have intriguing eyes.’ Or, ‘If you’ll be nice and friendly with me, I’ll give you a good cushy job.’ I had a good job in a draper’s shop in Holborn; I got twenty-five shillings a week. But as they began to reduce their staff and I was the lastcomer I was the first to go. Then I got a job as part cashier, part waitress in a tea-shop in the City. It was quite interesting. Business men would come up and talk to me and promise me a job. They said I had intriguing eyes. One man said, ‘You have eyes like violets.’ They would come up to the counter and we’d discuss together City topics. And one fat man asked me if I knew what Nero was doing while Rome was burning, and I said I didn’t know, and he said: ‘Fiddling.’ And we’d all burst laughing. It was quite intriguing.”

His heart ached for her. Poor child, all alone, men like vultures, ready to pounce on her: forgetting that men, old and young, common and cultivated, were to her a navigable ocean whereon indeed she was an A-1 skipper.

“Then I lost my job as part cashier because the manageress said I added up all wrong and she couldn’t make head or tail whether the shop was making profits or losses and I said she had better add up herself to make sure, and I went back to Mother Martha’s boarding house and waited, waited for you, while Mother Martha swilled whisky by herself upstairs. And when the Irish Doctor from the hospital came to see me Mother Martha, who was full of whisky, said I had a lover in my room and that she’d write and tell my father in Ireland. But I said: ‘I shall inform my Solicitor: False Accusation,’ and she got scared like a rabbit and crawled upstairs to swill down some more whisky.”

“And then?”

“Then I went to see what Zita and Pilling were doing and left Mother Martha severely alone.”

“Do you know what time it is? It’s four o’clock!”

“Good night, darling.”

“Good night, darling.”

IX.

Leaving the hotel next morning, they passed the gauntlet of waiting menials and tipped their way through to the door to the total price of their freedom, while the door porter waved his arms in the middle of the street in an ostentatious display to arrest a taxi for them, and a page boy craned his neck at the glass door to see if it was coming, to receive, for looking interested, another sixpence.

At the bank he cashed, without any trouble, a cheque for one hundred pounds, and indulged in some purchases for himself. Unlike Edith Wharton’s American heroes and heroines, he did not buy a grand piano, a motor-car, or a steam yacht, but invested in shirts, waistcoats, a new pair of pyjamas, a bathing-suit and an opera hat. At a bookstall he bought a booklet in a bright yellow jacket entitled _Dictators of the Press_ and a recent volume of _Who’s Who_, and at lunch, having tired a little of Eva’s conversation, absorbed himself in the literature he had purchased.

_Who’s Who_, laconic but informative, recorded:

“OTTERCOVE, Rex Victor Alexander Green, P. C. 1st. Baron Ottercove of Ottercove. _b_. Ottercove, New Zealand; unmarried; _heiress_: niece, Eleonor Viscountess de Jones; _recreation_: controlling public opinion; _address_: Bourne Abbey, Kent; Stonedge House, S.W. 1.”

He read it out aloud to Eva, who said that Pilling would approve of the address.

The little yellow booklet related in a racy style the facts which were more or less common knowledge to the public, but re-dressed them with gay ribbons of fancy and let them scurry down the ebullient river of facile imagination. Frank learnt that Lord Ottercove was probably the greatest political and financial force operating in the England of the twentieth century--greater than Lord Northcliffe, greater than Lord Beaverbrook. Yes, greater! History records (said the little yellow book) that if the latter two had chosen to pull together there was nothing in the realm of the material universe that these two peers could not accomplish. Now what they could do if they pulled together Lord Ottercove, it seemed, could do alone. If you took the trouble to turn up in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ the rubric recording the development of journalism in the last half-century, you would learn that just as Lord Northcliffe’s advent opens a new page, and Lord Beaverbrook’s another, so the arrival of Lord Ottercove in Fleet Street definitely marks a third and, possibly, last, stage.

He was born (the booklet said) of English missionary stock in New Zealand, who, after working for the furtherance of what they regarded as the Christian Cause, in heathen lands, retired to that Commonwealth upon whose soil our hero first saw light. Human meteors had been known to exist before: but never quite so swift, so bright, so deft, so certain. By seventeen, Rex Green controlled the major part of the New Zealand industries. By the time he was nineteen he exhausted all Colonial possibilities and went to the United States and captured Wall Street. At twenty-four he accumulated such a fortune that, from sheer revulsion, he stopped making money (except for such as rolled in on its own momentum), came to England and plunged into home politics. He unmade two Prime Ministers, made a third, buried a fourth, and, tired of the game of politics, accepted a peerage, buying a controlling share in the _Universal Press of the United Kingdom Syndicate_. He bought fifty-one per cent. of the shares of a daily newspaper, arranging that this newspaper should purchase fifty-one per cent. of the shares of another newspaper, which second newspaper he instructed to buy fifty-one per cent. of the shares of a third newspaper, continuing the application of this principle, till, controlling the first newspaper, he automatically controlled all the worthwhile newspapers in the United Kingdom.