PART ONE

THE HOME AND THE OFFICE

§ 1

January, 1914. A cold, dry, foggy, London evening. The children—after much protesting—safely asleep. All the electric lights in the big first-floor double drawing-room—pink-walled, parquet-floored, elaborately, comfortably, but by no means artistically, furnished—glowing. A red coal-fire heaped profusely on the tiled, steel-fendered hearth. And, standing before the fire, firm fine hands smoothing the folds of her low-neck, black charmeuse evening-gown, Patricia Jameson.

Not a beautiful woman, this Patricia: yet by no means the “bland, blond Kensingtonian nonentity” which Francis Gordon had once called her. Very English in the poise of the quiet head on the white, well-sloped shoulders; in the repose of the full figure; in the lines of the athletic limbs. Very English, too, about the well-formed, almost Roman, nose, the red healthy lips, the perfect teeth, the firm cheeks. Lacking, perhaps, in vivacity—unless the brown slumbrous eyes, dark and dark-lashed, were an index to something deep, something as yet but half-awakened: something which, given but its chance, might yet turn the Mother into the Mate.

But tonight a hint of trouble showed in those eyes. For Patricia was thinking. Her thoughts came to her clear-cut, logical, in orderly and courageous sequence. Sloppiness—owing to her father’s teaching—had no place in this woman’s mental outfit.

And she thought: “I am nearly thirty. . . . I have been married eight years. . . . I like this house, though it takes a lot of running. . . . I have no money troubles. . . . I adore Evelyn and Primula. . . . And I am very fond of my husband. . . .”

But here Heron Baynet’s system of common sense, of reason against sentiment, broke down—as it had broken down once or twice before when applied to the intimate relation of married life. The cold creed of pure reason did not work. It was no good for Patricia’s brain to tell her that she ought to be satisfied: her heart informed her, quite emphatically, that she wasn’t.

“Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Rawlings, ma’m,” announced Smith, the sour-faced but efficient parlour-maid.

Violet came in first—a slightly older, slightly tawdrier edition of her sister; thinner about the lips, fluffier of hair, not so neat in her over-elaborate clothes; but sprightly—unpleasantly sprightly.

“Good evening, darling,” she cried, kissing. “Isn’t it _perishingly_ cold? We walked from the Tube. _Do_ let me come to that _gorgeous_ fire.”

Hubert Rawlings—tall, clean-shaven, foxy-faced, five years older than his wife—followed at her heels; shook hands.

“Where’s Peter?” he asked.

“In Hamburg,” answered Patricia; and noticed, rather annoyed, the disappointment caused by her reply. Though not by any means “poor relations”—(H. H. Rawlings, “Publicity Specialist,” made quite a decent income)—Hubert and Hubert’s wife had an intolerable habit of making private life an adjunct to business. Patricia was perfectly aware that, had Peter been at home, her brother-in-law would have seized the opportunity to convince him, once and for all, that the Nirvana advertising account could be better handled by Hubert Rawlings than by Charlie Higham. Remembering a phrase of her husband’s, “I never do business with relatives: they always expect to be paid in advance,” she smiled to herself, and turned the conversation.

“Doctor Baynet and Mr. John Baynet, ma’m.”

“Then you can bring up dinner at once, Smith.”

“Not late, are we, Pat?”

“No, pater, punctual to the second.” Patricia and her father shook hands. They were not in the least alike, these two. The doctor—two inches shorter than his younger daughter—had dark brown hair, just graying; the hands of a surgeon; pince-nez; a fine forehead, and an almost colourless face, set in stern lines. Since his wife’s death (he had been a widower twelve years) the already celebrated diagnostician had concentrated on work to the exclusion of every other interest but his children. His face showed the price paid for success.

“Well, Jack, and how are things at Hillsea. I hear you’ve been disappointed in love?”

“Oh, shut up, Pat.” Jack Baynet pulled uncomfortably at his white evening waistcoat; fingered his clipped moustache; trifled with his butterfly tie. As a subaltern in the Field Gunners, almost a senior subaltern too, he disliked being ragged by his older sisters—and, most particularly, he disliked being ragged about Alice Sewell. So, of course, Violet took up the running.

“Poor dear! Fancy your own major cutting you out with her. It’s _too_ bad.”

“Stark isn’t a major yet; only a captain,” snapped Jack; then, realizing a tactical error, “And anyway, I never was in love with her.”

“Dinner is on the table, ma’m,” announced Smith. . . .

Dinner, quietly served by two maids in the dark, square dining-room,—oak-panelled, lit only by electric candles, mauve-shaded, on the oval table and the huge Chippendalish sideboard—was a leisurely meal. Thick soup followed the smoked salmon, grilled sole the soup, a chick _en casserole_ the sole. Talk, family gossip of no interest to outsiders, flowed—slowly at first, quicker as Peter’s second-best Burgundy loosened constraint.

“And why,” asked Rawlings suddenly, “has Peter gone to Hamburg?”

“I think,” answered Patricia, always on guard against her brother-in-law’s curiosity, “that it’s something to do with cigars.”

“Cigars? You mean cigarettes, don’t you? He hardly bothers about the cigar business nowadays.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Patricia—knowing he wasn’t.

“When is he coming back?”

“Tomorrow, as far as I know.”

“Do you ever see Francis nowadays?” put in Violet. “I was trying to read something of his in the _English Review_ just before we came out tonight. He’s a bit beyond _me_, you know.”

“Francis Gordon,”—Heron Baynet spoke slowly, almost professionally—“might become a great writer, if he weren’t such a neurotic.”

“Oh, pater, do keep off your hobby, just for this one evening,” Patricia protested. But, once launched, her father was not an easy person to stop.

“My hobby,” he said, “is merely life. Not animal life only, but mental life—which is the most important. Francis Gordon’s hobby is—Francis Gordon. That’s where he, and most of the literary young men nowadays, are making their mistake. They’re half-baked; emasculate. Instead of facing life, they run away from it; shut themselves up in their studies—usually with some equally epicene petticoat to assist their musings. Life, the battle of life, is the only thing worth writing about. Or,” he added, “reading about.”

Again Patricia turned the conversation: “Anyway, he’s much nicer, much more human, than he used to be.”

“You mean, since he lost his money,” interrupted Violet.

Patricia nodded. . . .

On the arrival of port and cigars, the three men were left alone; and Hubert Rawlings, who felt himself just a little out of the picture, attempted to talk himself into it.

“Gunnery,” he said to the young soldier, “must be amazingly interesting. A client of mine—he’s in the steel trade—was talking to me only this morning about the Creusot factory. He says the French field-guns are infinitely better than ours. . . .”

“Really.” Jack Baynet had been trained not to talk “shop” in mess.

“Oh, yes. My friend saw them firing tests. And he was amazed, absolutely amazed.”

“I’ve no doubt.” Jack relented a little, finding it beyond him to keep off his hobby. “I remember when our battery” (he pronounced it “bettery”) “was in India, we were ordered to demonstrate at dummy targets—just to show the infantry the effect of modern shrapnel-fire.” He paused.

“And . . .” queried his father.

“After inspecting the targets, the General thought it better that the infantry shouldn’t see them. Bad for their morale, you know.”

“If ever we do have this European war that Lord Northcliffe is so fond of talking about,” said the doctor, “it will last about a week. Modern nerves will never stand it.”

“Oh, we shall have war, all right,” announced his son.

The advertising agent and the nerve-specialist smiled cynically; demonstrated—till it was time to join the ladies—that the young man knew nothing whatever about international politics. . . .

They played family bridge, half-a-crown a hundred, Violet and her husband permanently partnered. Patricia—who had cut herself out of the first rubber—stood watching them. And again thought troubled her.

This—family parties, theatre-going, houses in Kensington, five servants, a summer holiday with the children, mornings at home and afternoons at the skating-rink—oh! it was all right, a very reasonable and nice existence. But could it go on? Obviously, it had to go on. . . . Mentally, she shook herself; laughed a little. What did she want? A lover? No, very definitely no. She was not that sort of woman; had too much self-respect. . . . What then? “Colour”—the words came involuntarily to her mind: “Colour! That’s what I need. Colour—and warmth.”

But when her family had departed, and she sat alone again in the drawing-room, Patricia Jameson took herself firmly to task. “If I don’t take more exercise,” she decided, “I shall become like one of those unpleasant creatures one meets in novels: the misunderstood married woman.”

Before going to bed, she tiptoed through the night nursery; looked lovingly down on the two dark-brown heads of Evelyn and Primula; and thereafter slept—even as they—dreamlessly.

§ 2

Punctually at nine o’clock next morning, Peter arrived.

Looking at him through the dining-room window, as he stood paying the taxi, as he walked—carrying his heavy leather dressing-bag easily as though it had been a dispatch-case—up the steps, he seemed to Patricia, above all things, an adequate person. The long, blue, belted Chesterfield over-coat—fur-lined but not fur-collared; the gray squash hat; brown gloves; ribbed socks; brown, carefully-polished brogue shoes; all betokened, in her eyes, efficiency. And when, after the usual greeting to Smith—(“Mrs. Jameson in the dining-room? Right. Just take this coat of mine, will you? And you might unpack for me at once”)—he came into the room, the impression deepened.

The cheek she kissed was newly shaven; the dark hair smooth-brushed; the moustache clipped soldier-fashion. He had—an invariable habit—taken his bath on the boat; arrived spick and span, ready for the day’s work. The gray eyes were clear, healthy: unusually merry, she thought.

“Breakfast?” she asked, after he had returned her kiss. “It’s quite ready.”

“Rather. Eggs and bacon for choice. Something English after all that German tripe.”

“Peter, your language is really getting atrocious.”

“Sorry, old thing. But honestly, Hamburg is the limit. I haven’t averaged four hours’ sleep all this week. What’s happened to the town in the last six years—I don’t know. They’re all crazy, I think. What with old Beckmann’s lobsters and young Beckmann’s dressed crabs. . . .”

He relapsed into silence; seeing again the champagne dinners at _Forti’s_, the red-wine lunches at the _Rathaus_, the smoky, tinselled _Tanz-klubs_, the whole nauseous pageant of heavy-handed vice and tawdry luxury with which the commercial classes of Germany were trying to ape the natural gaiety of France.

“Still, I got what I went for,” he added, as Smith brought in the Sheffield-plate breakfast-dishes, the big silver tea-pot.

They sat down.

“And what _did_ you go for?” asked Patricia, serving him.

“It’s rather a long story,” he began—Peter rarely talked business to his wife—“but I’ll tell you if you like.”

“Yes, do.”

“Well, you know Jamesons have had the Beckmann cigar-agency for years and years. . . .”

“But those Beckmanns live in Havana, don’t they?”

“The old man, Heinrich Beckmann—he’s the senior partner—lives in Hamburg: the junior partners—his nephew Albert, who’ll inherit the business when Heinrich dies, is one of them—run the factory and the banking show in Cuba. But nothing big is ever decided without the old boy’s consent. When that bally Trust started, Beckmanns thought our old firm wasn’t big enough to handle their English market. So they took in two other concerns. That was when I first went into business. The governor never had any contract about the brand; trusted to their honour.” Peter sniffed: even after nine years the old sore still rankled. “Can I have another egg? By Jove, it’s good to be home again.”

“Really good?”

“Rather. . . .” He looked round the comfortable room appreciatively. “But I was telling you about Beckmanns. Sometime ago I said to Simpson, ‘Simpson, let’s get that sole agency back again.’ Simpson said—he’s a pessimistic blighter—‘It can’t be done.’ That was six weeks ago. The contract’s in my bag upstairs.”

He paused, preening himself, quietly but quite obviously vain. She thought him very young at that moment; more like a boy of twenty-three than a man of thirty. “But how?” she asked.

“Bluff, my dear. Absolute and unmitigated bluff. Albert’s come home—to get married, I think. So I wrote him a chatty letter, saying—well wrapped-up, of course—that we were thinking very seriously of giving up our cigar business. I said Simpson wanted to retire, and that the cigarette business was so profitable. . . .” He laughed. “Anyway, it came off. The old man wrote imploring me not to decide in a hurry; Albert wrote to me; they wired Havana, and Havana wrote to me; they invited me, at their expense—they’re as mean as they’re rich—to come over to Hamburg. I kept them waiting ten days. Then I went. Pat, you would have laughed to see me allowing myself to be persuaded—on my own terms—to sign a ten-year agreement with them.”

“But, Peter,” interrupted his wife, “was it quite”—she hesitated—“straight.”

“Straight?” He thought it over. “Yes. Just as straight as raising the pot on a busted flush. I stood to look silly if they’d called my bluff, didn’t I? And anyway, it’s jolly good business.”

They sat silent for a minute or two. And again she was conscious of his adequacy. What he went for, he got. By his getting, she and her children benefitted. That was the Law, inviolable since the days of the cave-man. Weaklings to the wall—to the strong man, the fruits of his brain, of his industry. . . .

“I’m glad about this contract, in more ways than one,” he said suddenly. “You see, it’s a certainty. And certainties are always worth having. Nirvana isn’t a certainty, not yet. It’s a gamble.” The confident tone eased off a shade or two. “Once or twice, I’ve been rather harassed about it. Finance. . . .”

“We might run to a car next year now,” he added.

Came Nurse’s tactful knock, and the children, merry-eyed, attired for the Park.

“Hello, Daddy,” they chorussed, and romped over to be kissed.

“Where have you been, Daddy?” asked Primula.

“Germany.”

“Where’s Germany?”

They catechized him for a few minutes; informed him of their own well-being, of a train recently purchased; kissed their mother; and hurried off—having tasks to perform, serious tasks with hoops and sticks, in which their parents had no part. In concentration on the immediate job, Peter’s kiddies were uncannily like their father.

“I must be off to the office,” he announced as soon as they were out of the room. “Anything on for tonight?”

“No, dear.”

“Right. I may be a little late. About seven, I expect. . . .”

“He’s very—American,” thought Pat, as she watched him stride off, inevitable cigar in his mouth, towards the Tube.

For Patricia, like most English people at the time, recognized only two classes of Americans—the over-worked rich and the idle rich. Of the true America, of the people with ideals, the quiet folk who are found neither at the Ritz Carlton nor in the cabaret, she was utterly ignorant. . . .

“He’s a splendid pal,” said Reason.

But, in Reason’s despite, instinct wished that he had remembered to kiss her good-bye.

§ 3

As the Tube jerked him spasmodically to Bank station Peter’s mind ran over the clauses of his new contract; pondered how best to exploit it. This absolute control of the Beckmann brand gave a new interest to the Jameson business; and with that interest, came a little flash of sentiment. He remembered his first year in the City, Tom Simpson’s doubting-Thomas attitude to a College boy, his father’s shrewd help. . . . But the Mr. Jameson who pushed his way through the swing-doors of 24 Lime Street and down the dark passage to the warehouse, was very far from appearing a sentimentalist.

“Morning, Parkins,” he said to the young clerk who looked up at him from the desk in the outside office—glass-panelled, electric-lit, heated by a glowing gas-stove.

“Good morning, Sir,” answered the boy.

“Mr. Simpson inside?”

“Yes, Sir.”

Peter passed on through the warehouse; cast a rapid eye over the high wooden racks piled with cigar-boxes, at the Triplex glass sky-lights, on George the old warehouseman who was pottering about, duster-in-hand.

“Morning, George. How’s the rheumatism?”

“Thank you, Mister Peter, I can’t complain. And are you all right, Sir?”

“Never better, George,” said our Mr. Jameson; and added (to himself) “_He_ won’t last much longer. I must talk to Simpson about pensioning him off. Two quid a week, I suppose. Extravagance! but the old chap’s earned his last bit of comfort. . . .”

Tom Simpson sat at his desk—an old-fashioned sloping-top desk of ink-stained mahogany—in the back office; where, despite the aid of reflectors, set slanting in the one high-up window, green-shaded electrics burned for nearly ten months of the year. A bluff man of fifty was Tom, fresh-complexioned and brown-bearded still; calm, of a certain limited shrewdness, but unimaginative; dressed in black morning-coat, City-tailored; gold “Albert” festooned across his ample paunch, key-chain drooping from trouser-pocket.

“Well?” he asked, looking up from the smeared typewritten pages of the Havana mail.

“Got it,” said Peter laconically; hanging hat, coat and stick on the brass-hook behind the glass door—which he carefully closed.

“No!” Interrogatively.

“Yes.”

“Well I’m damned.” Simpson glanced admiringly at his partner. He never quite understood Peter; had always been a little afraid of his “recklessness”; had—for that reason—refused to invest any capital in the Nirvana cigarette-factory.

Peter drew the contract from his breast-pocket; and they scrutinized it together. It was written in English, rather Teutonic English, but absolutely clear.

“Who drew this up?” asked Simpson.

“I did. A German lawyer went over it for me; but it’s enforceable in London.”

“Good.”

They plunged into details.

“What’s this. Five thousand pounds open account? Anything over that to be drawn for at six months? We don’t want all that credit, Peter.”

“Yes, we do. I may have to take some more of my capital out. The factory, you know.”

Simpson put down the contract. “Of course it’s not for me to advise you: but aren’t you getting just a little out of your depth?”

“You charge me with interest on the money which I draw out,” began Peter, temper swiftly frayed. Then relenting, “Oh, it’s quite all right, old man, I know what I’m doing.”

A huge black outline loomed up against the glass door, knocked, said in a guttural voice “May I come in?”

Entered Julius Hagenburg: top-hatted, black-moustached, patent-booted, flower at buttonhole: Hagenburg, naturalized Englishman, undoubtedly the best salesman of fine cigars in Europe—and the worst payer. What Peter’s investment in Nirvana meant to Simpson, Simpson’s credit to Hagenburg meant to Peter. Yet it was a profitable account, amazingly so. Hagenburg rarely bought less than thirty thousand cigars at a clip; would pay anything from three to seven pounds a hundred for them.

How he disposed of the goods, neither of the partners knew; though Peter, who had met the man frequently on his own Continental cigarette-expeditions, had a shrewd idea that most of the cigars—which went, under bond, in plain cases, from London to Amsterdam—eventually found their way, at entirely fictitious prices, to such places as the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo, the Jockey Club in Vienna, and even as far as the gipsy-haunted private rooms in the night-restaurants of St. Petersburg.

However, this time Hagenburg had brought money, nearly a thousand pounds of it, in “ready.”

“You will give me a receipt now, please,” he said to Simpson, who went out of the room, notes rustling in his hands, leaving Peter and his pet aversion together.

“I hear you got back the sole agency of the Beckmann brand,” said the German, sitting down and lighting a black cigar from the box that Peter pushed across to him.

“Where the dickens did you hear that?”

“It’s true then?” Hagenburg smiled.

“Possibly.”

“I can increase my business with Beckmann cigars in—Holland, if you are in a position to help me with a small discount, say five per cent. . . .”

“Now I wonder how the hell he found out about that contract?” Peter said to himself when the man had gone. But Simpson, to whom he mentioned the matter, made light of it. “There’s been a good deal of gossip about your going to Hamburg,” he said. “Probably it was only guess-work.”

Peter put on his hat; wondered, as he walked rapidly along Fenchurch Street, why Simpson hadn’t possessed enough gumption to keep the destination of such an important journey secret. “Didn’t think it mattered. Never thought I’d get that contract,” he decided, turning down Lombard Court, mounting the carpeted steps to the upstairs luncheon-room of the Lombard Restaurant.

“Downstairs,” in the Lombard, hatted men jostle at communal tables; steaks frizzle, crowded, on the grill; joints appear, dwindle, disappear and are replaced; waiters bustle and the girl at the cash-desk has barely time to smile. But “upstairs,” luncheon is a solemn and a costly function.

At the small bar in the corner of the oak-panelled room, one hand dallying with his vermouth, eye-glassed, faultlessly attired, a miniature dude though well over middle age, stood Peter’s best acquaintance (and Jameson’s most aggressive competitor), Maurice Beresford of “Beresford and Beresford.”

He grinned at Peter, letting the monocle fall from his eye as he did so; said laconically: “The usual Peter.”

“Thanks,” answered Peter; smiling a greeting to the lady behind the bar.

“We lunch together, I presume,” quizzed Beresford.

“You presume correctly, Maurice.”

“Toss you who pays—drinks included.”

“Not much. You asked me to have a drink. But I’ll toss you for lunch.” The sovereign clinked on the bar-top. Peter won.

They finished their drinks; settled themselves at the usual reserved table by the fire; ordered—after some wrangling—completely different lunches: for Beresford (who possessed, despite his size, an enormous appetite) grilled sole, fricassee of veal, and plum duff; for Peter, surfeited with greasy food, cold beef and pickled walnuts.

“And now,” said Beresford, sipping his whisky and Perrier, “be a good boy and tell me all you’ve been up to in Hamburg.”

“Lies, or the truth?”

“The truth. Just for a change.”

Peter cut a morsel of beef with great deliberation; decided that Beresford probably knew.

“I think I’ve done you in the eye this time, Maurice.”

“I thought you had. We got a cable from Beckmanns this morning. Nothing definite in it: but putting two and two together, you know. . . .”

They looked at each other, and laughed. The Beresfords, both bachelors, were extremely well off; their transactions with the Beckmann factory of no great importance. Still, by his next remark Peter knew that Maurice was hit, in his business-vanity if not in his pocket.

“What I like about you, Peter,” he said, screwing the monocle back into his eye, “is that although you are every bit as unscrupulous as the rest of us, you manage to keep up a pose of old-fashioned respectability, combined with modern straightforwardness, which I, for one, find it impossible to adopt. How many cases did you have to guarantee Beckmanns?”

“Oh quite a lot,” parried Peter.

“And what is going to happen about my pending orders? Will they be shipped, or not?”

This being the crux of the conversation, Peter changed the subject; began talking about shade-grown wrappers, the new schedule of Trust prices and other mysteries unintelligible to the profane.

“It will be very unfair if they aren’t,” interrupted Beresford.

“I’ll have to talk it over with Simpson.”

“Great genius—Simpson,” said Beresford sarcastically.

“And, either way, you’ll have to pay us a profit on them. . . .”

Maurice Beresford walked back to his office distinctly disgruntled.

§ 4

Peter, on the other hand, returned to Lime Street in a state of quiet elation. Money apart, it was amusing to have scored off Maurice. Remained now to settle with the Elkinses. He called up young Charlie Elkins; asked him to come round.

“All right. Four o’clock,” said the voice at the microphone. Then “Pretty” Bramson rang up from the factory; and, listening to his report—(“fifty thousand Virginians from Singapore; twenty thousand Egyptian gold-tips from the Argentine; heaps of export orders but home trade rather quiet. Are you coming up tomorrow, Sir?”)—Peter’s new-found interest in Jameson’s suffered eclipse.

He hung up the receiver; looked across at Simpson, rereading the contract for the tenth time. Undoubtedly the selling of cigars, of other people’s cigars was—even as a sole agent—a pretty dull affair. Simpson had been sitting at that very same desk twenty, twenty-five, thirty years; would sit there till he died.

The bell rang again. Reid this time, of Reid, Chatterton & Reid, Chartered Accountants. “Mr. Reid wished to ask Mr. Jameson if next Monday would be convenient for the Nirvana board-meeting.”

“Quite convenient, thank you.”

Entered, from the side door which led to the bookkeeping office, Miss Macpherson, chief of the clerical staff—a dour loyal Scotchwoman of forty, dressed in the usual blouse and skirt, the bad boots of her order. She carried “the post” in one hand, her note-book in the other; took the vacant stool next to Simpson; said “Your letters, Mr. Simpson,” in a firm, tired voice.

Simpson began to dictate, hesitatingly; querying this; consulting her about that.

“In reply to your favour of even date. . . .”

Peter got up; wandered out into the warehouse; began a leisurely inspection of some newly-arrived dock-samples; pushed an oily _Corona_ from the centre of a ribboned bundle; lit it.

Came Elkins. “Smooth” is the only adjective applicable to the new-comer. He had a smooth voice, smooth hair, smooth hands, a smooth manner and a very smooth silk-hat. He was clean-shaven, jet-haired; looked more like a junior clerk in Rothschild’s Bank than junior partner in a mercantile business.

“Good afternoon, Peter,” he said. “What’s the trouble?”

“Afternoon, Elkins. Come inside, won’t you?”

Peter led the way into a tiny room off the warehouse: a room furnished with two chairs, a small gas-stove, and many cedar cabinets of cigars.

“Coffin department?” queried Elkins, sitting down. . . .

“I wanted to speak to you about Beckmanns,” began Peter, not acknowledging the trade jest.

“Oh, we’ve been doing very little with the brand lately. The stuff’s no good, you know. Too strong. And the dollar-prices on current sizes too high.”

“Really,” said Peter, who had for some years been drawing a small clandestine commission on the imports of both his competitors. “Then of course you won’t mind having to stop importing them.”

At this, it seemed as though little wrinkles creased themselves all over Elkins’ smoothnesses.

“Stop importing them? What do you mean?”

Peter told him; not omitting to mention that “pending orders” would not be shipped.

“But this is outrageous,” burst out young Elkins. “Positively outrageous. Why, we’ve been handling their goods for years. For years and years. Got customers for them. Customers who won’t take anything else.”

“Yes, I know,” sympathized Peter: and named them.

Elkins changed his note. “You don’t really mean to cut us off, Peter.”

“Of course I do.”

“But we’d buy the goods from you; pay you cash for them.”

“Till you’d persuaded your customers to try something else. Not much. Besides, I want _all_ the profit; not just a percentage.”

“But the pending orders. They’re mostly sold in advance. It will make us look ridiculous. Positively ridiculous. I don’t know _what_ my father will say. . . .”

It was five o’clock by the time that Peter—having reluctantly promised to “think over” the matter of the pending orders—got rid of him; joined Simpson for a cup of tea.

“You know,” said Simpson, “I simply can’t get over this contract business.” He pulled a piece of scribbling paper towards him, started figuring. “It means at least £1500 a year more profit. There’s the Cunard Company—they’ve been buying from Beresfords. And Towle at the Midland—that’s Elkins’ account. . . . I must talk to the travellers about this. Hargreaves is in the suburbs today; he won’t be in till the morning. I’ve written Mallabone to come up on Saturday. . . .”

“Oh, damn the travellers,” pronounced Peter. “They’re no good for this sort of job. We’ll have to do it ourselves.”

* * * * *

He took the Tube as far as Oxford Circus; walked slowly down Regent Street into Piccadilly Circus. All about him lights blazed, motors thrummed and hooted, people jostled. London, London as she was towards the end of the Great Peace! London,—tango-dancing, theatre-going, night-clubbing London! London! City of the seven millions, where—scum that floated upwards, glistening, utterly useless—loose women and vicious politicians, emasculate authors and popularity-hunting actors, rag-time dancers and company-promoters, preened and bloated, spent and gambled, fooling away the night-time. Yet London—for all this scum that fed upon her fineness—solid at heart, worthy if deceptive capital of an Empire compared with whose achievements Rome was a weakling and Athens a nonentity.

But Peter Jameson, worker, cared for none of these things!

He looked up at the electric signs that winked and glinted on the darkness: at the “Paripan Paint” sign, and the two whirling clock-faces over Saqui and Lawrences’s, at the snaky twirls of “Oxo” and the high circles of “O. O.” Whisky. And he visioned—vaguely, for it was three years since his last visit—Broadway, New York: Rosbach’s burning fountain, “Owl” Cigars, “Anargyros” Cigarettes, the theatre lamps and the drugstore lamps. “They, the Americans, understood advertising; responded to it. Compared with them, we were only children,” thought Peter Jameson. “Confound it, why should the home-trade of Nirvana lag behind the export?”

Then he glanced at the watch on his wrist; saw it was nearly half past seven; remembered—for the first time since leaving Lowndes Square in the morning—that he possessed a wife.