If you take the Central London Tube to the Bank Station; fight for your place in the lift; climb the tortuous staircase to Lombard Street; pass along that narrow, money-glutted thoroughfare, where scarlet-vested, top-hatted bank-messengers take dignified way from the sign of the Phoenix to the swinging doors of the Crédit Lyonnais: if, crossing Gracechurch Street below the clock of the London & South-Western Bank, you enter less-aristocratic Fenchurch Street and take the first zig-zag turning on your left, you will find—hidden between a stationer’s shop and a grocer’s—two swing doors, each with a brass name-plate from which the black lettering, “P. JAMESON AND COMPANY, CIGAR IMPORTERS,” has been almost erased by forty years of incessant polishing. And if you care to penetrate yet farther round that gray curving Lime Street, past the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, into the heart of Havana cigardom, St. Mary Axe, you will still find—clustered round the maroon marble of the Baltic Exchange—the warehouses of “Schornstein & Co.,” of “Beresford & Beresford,” of “Samuel Elkins & Son,” and others with whom Peter traded, intrigued, lunched and gossiped, between the years 1903 and 1914.

But you will not find, search the City as you will, Peter Jameson, sometime senior partner in Peter Jameson & Company, and chairman of Nirvana Limited, Manufacturers of High-grade Cigarettes. Because—whatever war may have accomplished of good or evil to us other millions whom it caught up into its vortex—to Peter it came like a great cleansing storm, terrifying in its violence, unfathomable in its purposes, but bearing him at the last, past many rocks of doubt and fear, to sure harbourage, to certainty of body and of soul—and, better even than these, to Love.

This, in so far as one man may tell another’s story, is the tale of that voyaging.

§ 2

Three families—the Jamesons, the Gordons, and the Baynets—are principally concerned in this story. All three were originally English yeomen; country, not county folk; probably peasants—in the best sense of the word. In the Jamesons and the Gordons there is an admixture of exotic Hebraic blood: that of the Señora Elvira de Miranda y Miraflores, who married a Captain Bradley of the British West India Regiment, then stationed in Jamaica, and had by him two daughters, one of whom married Peter’s father in 1880, and the other—some three years later—John Gordon, father of Peter’s cousin, Francis Gordon. The Baynet stock is pure English.

Peter’s grandfather—Peter the First—deserted the country for the town at the beginning of the great manufacturing age (about 1840); married a “cit’s” daughter; tried his luck in the City; couldn’t stand it; and wandered out to the West Indies, trading first at Georgetown, Demarara, then in Bridgetown, Barbados; and finally settling down in the then Spanish colony of Cuba, where he bought a small estate near Guanabacoa, and grew tobacco—more for a hobby than a living, as he was a person of few wants, and tolerably careless about most things except his son, Peter the Second, whom he had educated in England, and to whom—on his death in the late seventies—he bequeathed the sum of £3,000, the verandah’d hacienda, and some hundred acres of not very saleable land.

It was on the Royal Mail steamer to Havana that our Peter’s father—thinking more of the newly acquired heritage and how best to turn it into cash, than of matrimony—first met Captain and Mrs. Bradley (née Miranda y Miraflores) returning with their two flapper-daughters to Kingston, Jamaica. . . .

To cut a long story short, Peter the Second sold the tobacco-farm; found himself in love with Tessa Bradley; followed her to Jamaica; married her; realized that the interest on his capital could not possibly support them in comfort; and returned to England in the spring of 1882 with his wife, his wife’s sister (who found garrison-life in the tropics hardly to her taste), and twenty cases of Señor Larranaga’s very best “Principes” in which he had invested a considerable amount of money, and of which he subsequently disposed, owing to the machinations of his brokers and ignorance of the imported cigar trade, at a very unsatisfactory profit.

But Peter the Second—like his son Peter the Third, hero of this story—was an obstinate devil who disliked being beaten, especially over money. Taking—from an old school friend, John Gordon (who may have had ulterior motives in granting the facilities), a little room in the big, dingy offices of Gordon’s Limited, General Merchants, he imported another consignment of Havana cigars; had them sampled; hired a brougham; and hawked (he was, although he had married an officer’s daughter, by no means a snob) his sample-boxes round the West End tobacconist shops until he had disposed of his second shipment at a very different figure to that received on the first.

So began the firm of “P. Jameson & Company, Cigar Importers,” which—aided by the financial support of John Gordon (who married Dolores Bradley very shortly after that second shipment had been disposed of) and the boom-crop of 1884—soon needed offices of its own, two clerks, a country salesman, and all the paraphernalia of a regular business. It was not, of course—never would be—a huge affair like Gordon’s, who dealt the world over and in every conceivable commodity from quinine to molasses—still it was a solid, money-making, not too arduous concern; and, moreover, both Peter’s father and his salesman, Tom Simpson, whom he subsequently took into junior partnership, needed considerably less to live on than the profit which it earned.

§ 3

Peter the Third, our Mr. Jameson, was not born until his parents had been married nearly four years: John Gordon’s son, Francis, antedating him by about a week. In both of them, you can trace the Miraflores strain fairly clearly. They are both of them of medium height; stocky rather than tall. Both have the same curious eyes which seem to change colour—from gray to darkest black—with their thoughts. Both are small-handed, small-footed, rather determined about the nose, dark-haired, intelligent-headed. But life—and war, which is the same thing—has dealt with them so differently that, nowadays, you would have great difficulty in finding more than a fugitive likeness. You would say, and perhaps rightly, that Peter is less, Francis more, the Miraflores.

Dolores Gordon, despite her husband’s twelve thousand a year, presented him with no more children; but Tessa Jameson had another son—Peter’s brother Arthur—born in 1888.

Meanwhile, both businesses flourished: Gordon’s Limited, the larger; Jameson & Co., the sounder—providing John Gordon with a rather elaborate mansion in Curzon Street, West (to which he would return, late, tired and neurotic from the new offices in London Wall), and the Jamesons with a solid, rather tyrannous edifice in Lowndes Square, Kensington, wherein Peter’s father found comfortable refuge from the reflector-lit warehouse in Lime Street. By the late nineties, Peter the First’s few thousand pounds had grown—thanks largely to the sole agency for Beckmann cigars (of which more later)—into a fairly comfortable fortune, so that when John Gordon suggested to Peter the Second that both Peter the Third and Francis Gordon had better be sent to Eton College, money did not stand in the way.

The two cousins (Peter’s brother Arthur went to a less exalted establishment) did not distinguish themselves greatly at school. Francis was rather too flamboyant, Peter too self-concentrated, for easy friendships. However, Peter managed to get both his “Boats,” his “House Colours,” and Corporal’s stripes on his Volunteer tunic before he left: while Francis undoubtedly acquired there—in some mysterious way of his own—the beginnings of that literary technique in which he is now beginning to be acknowledged past-master.

From Eton, Peter went straight into the business. He had always found idleness intolerable, and Jameson’s seemed—regarded as “something to do”—made to his hand. To Francis and other Etonian acquaintances, the choice appeared an amazing one: but the boy’s father—lonely since his wife’s death about a year before, and conscious that his other son Arthur, whatever else he might become, would never be a business man—both understood and stimulated this desire for work.

§ 4

Peter’s entry into Jameson’s, early in 1903, synchronized with the formation of the Havana Tobacco Company—commonly known as “The Trust”; and the attempt by J. B. Duke and his colleagues (who, having fought the English cigarette and tobacco manufacturers to a standstill, were now controlling—almost unknown to the public—eighty per cent. of the world’s smoking-trade) to corner the market in Havana-manufactured cigars. Though a very small affair of outposts when considered in relation to the pitched battles which preceded it, the fight was, at the outset, not without interest to those whose livings were menaced by the billion-dollar corporation controlled from 111 Fifth Avenue, New York. To the boy, fresh from the monastic atmosphere of school, it gave just that touch of romance which his enthusiasm needed.

For Jameson’s—as agents of the German-owned but Havana-domiciled concern, Heinrich Beckmann & Co—lined up with the so-called “Independents,” and did doughty battle with tongue and typewriter against the invader.

Old Jameson and Tom Simpson, who, by now, had a fourth share in the concern, found the lad’s keenness amusing. Both elderly men—their capital intact and their blood chilled with twenty years of money-making—they did not take the situation very seriously. Even when Beckmanns, greedy for more trade, insisted that both “Beresford & Beresford” and “Samuel Elkins & Co.” should (under certain secret conditions) receive direct shipments of their goods, they only laughed tolerantly at the infringement of a profitable monopoly—leaving indignation to the newcomer.

Indignant, Peter certainly was. There had never been an actual contract about the Beckmann brand; but the boy, accustomed to his college code, perceived something in the transaction dishonourable to the other side, weak on his own. Unreasonably as it seemed at the time—reasonably enough as it shows in the light of history—he thus early conceived an instinctive distrust, not only of Beckmanns, but of German business people in general. . . .

However, a year in the City effectively replaced the college code by the legal.

At the end of eighteen months—the “fight” resolving itself into a mere question of strong competition; each side more or less holding its own, with a slight sentimental balance in favour of those outside “the Ring”—Peter had settled down to the complacent routine of office life: ten till five, with an hour off for lunch and two Saturdays out of three absolutely workless. Sport—he was a safe shot, except at snipe for which he lacked the temperament; a good rider; and a really fine hand with the trout-fly—completed his existence. Dissipation, after one or two, experiments, he avoided—not from scruples, but because it bored him.

Then, just after his twenty-first birthday, the “old man,” never very strong, caught pneumonia and died within the week.

§ 5

The death of his father was a vivid grief to Peter. For his mother, he had never experienced more than a lukewarm affection; Arthur had always been her favourite, and Peter—even as a child—had been conscious of the preference. But the “governor,” the “old boy!”—that seemed somehow or other different. They had worked together, talked together, driven home together, drank their port of an evening at the big mahogany table in the Lowndes Square dining-room, had their little rows, made them up again. . . . “Sentimental ass!” the boy said to himself, as he sat alone in the library that first night. But there were real tears in his eyes; tears that only work could dry.

And of work, in the days that followed, there was enough. As co-executor, with Simpson, for his father’s estate, even Peter found himself sufficiently occupied. The business, the Crown lease of the Lowndes Square house, sundry outside investments—all required valuation, tabulation, preparation for probate. Death duties, auditor’s fees, lawyer’s fees—each had to be scrutinized, queried, and ultimately overpaid. Arthur—who, at seventeen, was already wearied of school—demanded an advance of trust-monies; got it; departed for Australia.

In the end Peter recognized himself absolute possessor of some £30,000 (practically all in the business); and trustee for the £10,000 in stocks and shares which became his brother’s when he, too, reached twenty-one.

“You will be an ass,” said Francis Gordon, newly returned from two years of aimless wandering on the Continent, “if you go on slaving away in that office of yours.”

“Can’t stand doing nothing,” Peter had answered, “and, if I wanted to get married, twelve hundred a year wouldn’t be enough.” With both of which ends in mind, he signed a rather peculiar ten years’ partnership deed with Simpson, and resumed his hardly interrupted activities in Lime Street.

§ 6

That same year, 1905, Francis’s own parents both died, leaving him master undisputed of a five-figure income; and the two cousins very nearly decided on living together, till Peter vetoed the idea on the grounds that “as Francis never got up before lunch or came home to dinner, he didn’t see much sense in the proposed arrangement.”

Nevertheless, bachelor existence in that barrack of a house at Lowndes Square, soon began to pall. “I shan’t be dining at home to-night, Smith,” became the almost daily word to the elderly, dignified, parlour maid as she handed our Mr. Jameson his top-hat of a morning; and on the rare evenings when he did dine at home, it was usually in company—business acquaintances, school friends, old cronies of his father’s, or—and this frequently—the Baynets.

Heron Baynet, the Harley Street diagnostician who was knighted in the 1918 Birthday List for his research-work in the treatment of shell-shock and other nervous disorders, had been one of the consultants attending Jameson senior in his illness. He had taken an instinctive liking to the young man; asked him to call. Peter, accepting the invitation, met a married daughter, Violet; a son in the Army; and Patricia—tall, blond, twenty-one, dignified, rather reserved in her speech, tolerably contemptuous of the average young man, cultivating alternately the critique of pure reason at home and the outside edge at Prince’s skating-rink. . . . Twelve months after their first meeting, in March, 1906, these two married.

A marriage of affection, kindred tastes and mutual respect. A marriage which appealed to them (both had a strong, youthful contempt for sentiment) as “eminently reasonable.” A marriage into which both entered with the definite certainty that there would be no passion, no misunderstandings, no petty economies, no vital divergences of opinion. A marriage which—as most marriages—ended by utterly confuting all their original ideas about it.

§ 7

Followed two years of palship; at the end of which their first daughter, Evelyn, was born. Peter, who had hoped for a son, felt disappointment; showed it, perhaps a little too plainly: thereby heightening his wife’s love for the kiddie. But the disappointment faded; the easy relationship renewed itself.

About this time, Ivan Turkovitch became a frequent visitor to the Lime Street warehouse. A quaint man—born in some nameless province of Austria-Hungary; speaking English with an amazing accent; small; paunchy; tawny-bearded; very neat in his clothes, in his habits,—he had come to England with nothing but his wits; and built up in some subterranean manner the struggling firm of “I. Turkovitch, manufacturers of Nirvana Cigarettes.”

Turkovitch, an artist in his way, loved that business; cared less for its financial harvest than the joy of running it—with the inevitable result that, being as extravagant in his factory as he was economical in his home, he invariably found himself short of capital. Peter liked listening to the little man when he talked about his “vork peoples”; visited the factory, for the first time from curiosity, for the second time out of sheer interest. His own business existence at Jameson’s had settled down into a pretty humdrum affair. As senior partner by right of capital he drew a steady £3,000 a year; leaving Simpson to do the inside work and contenting himself with the selling end, which—as it meant pitting his brains against other people’s—rather amused him.

But when Turkovitch finally broached the point towards which he had been finessing, he found anything but a languid young capitalist to deal with. Peter Jameson was quite willing to put up the money, five thousand pounds of it if necessary (considerably more than the Hungarian either required or expected), but on one condition only—that, as majority shareholder, he should control the business.

Turkovitch, even in those early days, found Peter,—with his ideas of press-advertising, of new machinery, of up-to-dateness generally,—rather terrifying: but in the end, pressed by many long-suffering creditors, he yielded.

To Peter, the new concern grew swiftly from a mere plaything into a passion. He felt, for the first time, the real zest of commerce, the creative joy of it. This was no inherited money-making machine; but a task that needed a man’s every thought, all his energy: uphill work, worthy of accomplishment. Gradually it drew him, from Lime Street, from his shooting, from his riding, from his fishing, from his home. So that the coming of his second daughter, Primula, seemed to him less of a disappointment than an extraneous incident vastly concerning to Patricia, but to himself little more than item of interest.

Superficially the palship between husband and wife still existed; but the woman began to feel herself, more and more, an accessory and not a necessity to this absorbed young husband of hers. His real love, she felt, was—would always be, unless some miracle happened—Nirvana.

For the plant, irrigated and irrigated again with gold, began to grow; promised a great harvest. There were difficulties of course; but these only served to intensify Peter’s ardour. Tobacconists wouldn’t stock Nirvana—tobacconists must stock Nirvana, he would advertise until they were forced to. The export trade was hopeless, because one couldn’t get a reliable export-traveller—he, Peter Jameson, would do that part himself: and travel he did, from Christiania to Lisbon, from Aden to Shanghai, from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso. . . .

So the thirty thousand pounds in Jamesons dwindled to twenty thousand; and the five thousand in Nirvana rose to ten. But already, they were “round the corner,” covering expenses. True that most of the capital was represented in the balance-sheet by that intangible mystery “Goodwill and trademarks”; true that Turkovitch grumbled and Sam Bramson, “Pretty” Bramson, the newly engaged sales-manager, required more and more travellers for the home-trade, seemed to do less and less work himself; true that old Tom Simpson began to shake his head at so much voyaging and successfully urged a heavy life-assurance: still—it grew, it grew; and Peter, working fourteen hours between the two businesses, felt success very near, gloried in it. . . .

Meanwhile that resplendent person, Francis Gordon, wrote a “novel in verse” which excited some comment; married for caprice; lost his wife; wandered off, a not too disconsolate widower, round the world; lost most of his income; fell in love; renounced love; renouncing, found his vocation; and returned to England shortly before the opening chapter of this our romance, which now begins.

To my American readers.—“Eton College” is what we call a “public school.” Boys go at the age of 12-13 and leave at the age of 18-19. Originally founded for “poor scholars”—it has now some thousand students who pay fees of about £300 per annum each. Gilbert Frankau.

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.

PART TWO
NIRVANA, LIMITED

§ 1

“Pretty” Bramson—black well-oiled hair, curled moustaches, blue eyes and general dapperness had earned the nickname when, as East County salesman for his cousin Marcus Bramson, owner of Bramson’s “Pulman” Virginias, he had first gone “on the road”—sat pensive in the sales-manager’s office of Nirvana Ltd., Manufacturers of High Grade Cigarettes. The room was large, well carpeted, glinting with mahogany. On the walls hung sales-charts, specimen advertisements for the Press, show cards—gaudy but efficient—for tobacconists’ windows. Through the thin partition, he heard the whirr of fly-wheels, subdued chatter of work-girls, Turkovitch’s voice raised in sharp expostulation, occasionally the thump which told him that the new “U.K.” machine—their fourth—was being swiftly erected. But “Pretty” Bramson thought only indirectly of Nirvana.

He had dined, the night before, with his cousin Marcus; and Marcus had asked, quite casually, about the factory. “Were they earning dividends yet? Why didn’t one see the stuff about more? How about the export trade?” Marcus had hinted too, barely hinted, that if at any time. . . .

“Pretty” Bramson put the temptation resolutely behind him. Jamesons had plenty of capital; could always find more if they wanted it. Besides, he had a little money put by himself. Probably, if things continued to go well, “young Peter” would let him in as a minority shareholder. Afterwards, they would float it on the public. Meanwhile, £500 a year plus a sliding-scale commission on the constantly increasing output was not to be sneezed at by a man of thirty-two.

§ 2

Peter Jameson paid his taxi; threw away the stump of his after-breakfast cigar; and walked straight through the open doors of the goods entrance into his factory.

He was neither an over-imaginative nor a romantic person, this quiet gray-eyed young man in the bowler hat and the well-cut tweed overcoat: but he never could look at that big glass-roofed building, at the work-girls in their clean smocks, at the vague forms of machinery whirling away behind their frosted-glass partitions, at the men pricking and soldering the vacuum export-tins (plunged base-deep in hot sand to expel the corrupting air), at the great bins of sweet-smelling tobacco,—at the whole paraphernalia of this living entity he was creating—without a certain thrill of satisfaction. He had given up a good deal for this same Nirvana—leisure, money, his gun in the little Norfolkshire shoot, trout fishing, the possibility of a car. But Nirvana, almost home! was worth it.

Ivan Turkovitch bustled out from behind one of the partitions; trotted over.

“Vell, Petere. And how are you? Come overe and see de new machine. Ve are just getting him put up. Peautiful!”

The small hands gesticulated satisfaction; the tawny beard waggled accompaniment. Like the rest of his “vork-peoples,” Turkovitch wore a smock. It made him a rather grotesque little figure.

But Turkovitch’s satisfaction, as an artist, with the growth of the factory, was only superficial. As a man, a man of small ideas, he could not grasp the ultimate scheme, the big conception which inspired Peter. Frankly, it frightened him. More orders and more orders! More expenses and more expenses! What would be the end? He—Ivan Turkovitch—had never wanted a vast business; felt himself incapable of controlling it.

“Peautiful,” he said again, as they stood in the machine-room. Overhead, fly-wheels whirled, driving-belts clacked. On the clean hardwood floor, the three machines stamped and clicked at their endless tasks. Perched on high seats, girls fed the hoppers with flocky golden armfuls of tobacco. The machines swallowed it; spewed it forward, forcing it through steel tubes into a rod: drew up paper from the slow-moving reels; wrapped it about the tobacco; printed it; chopped the paper-covered rod into cigarettes; delivered them to the waiting hands of the girls who patted them into wooden trays. A shirt-sleeved mechanic tended each machine, now this part, now that. Sparks spurted as deft grindstone met swift-revolving knife. The fourth and newest “U.K.” was not yet working: by it, adjusting, measuring, screwing up a bolt here and there, stood a German workman.

For the “United Kingdom” Cigarette-machine was not made in this England, where craftsmen starved while Free Traders preached to them!

Turkovitch spoke to the German; queried something.

“Dass ist mir verboten,” said the man. “Es muss genau so gemacht werden.”

“What does he say?” asked Peter.

“He says he cannot do what I ask him. It is forbidden. Never mind, when he goes back to Hamburg, we do it ourselves. They do not know everything, these Germans.”

They passed on; through the drying-rooms; and the cutting-rooms where girls picked-over the dried leaves and “blenders” fed them into presses that forced the thick mass forward to the dropping knife; through the label-printing room; into the main factory again; past the box-making tables where more girls laboured with paste-brush and zinc-board; and the packing tables, piled high with filled boxes waiting their seals; into the stock-room.

“Rather low, aren’t we?” queried Peter, looking at the half-empty shelves.

“Very low, Sir?” said the dispatch-forewoman, busy making up the day’s orders.

“You go on with your vork, Mary,” snapped Turkovitch. The woman went out of the room, leaving them alone.

“Look here, Turkovitch”—Peter’s gray eyes had grown just a shade darker—“you know I won’t stand that sort of thing. I spoke to the girl; and she answered me. You’ve no right to be rude to her.”

The little man became apologetic. . . . “But you do not understand the vork-peoples, Petere. You have never been one of the vork-peoples. I have. De vork-peoples they do not respect you ven you talk nicely to them.”

“Don’t you believe it, Turkovitch”—the quarrel between them was an old one—“the ‘vork-peoples,’ as you call them, respect a man who respects them; who knows what he wants, and tells them how he wants it done—decently.”

Ivan, inventing an excuse, went back to the machine-room. “How on earth I shall ever be able to introduce the copartnership system into this place with that Hungarian obstructionist in charge,” thought Peter, “the Lord knows.” He stood there with his hands in his pockets for a minute or two: then, lighting a cigar, strode off to Bramson’s room.

§ 3

“Bramson,” said Peter—greetings over—“how much do you know about the manufacturing part of this business?”

“Well, Sir. . . .”

“Oh, never mind about the ‘Sir.’ You’re not a clerk.”

“Well, when I was with my cousin, I used to spend a good deal of time in the various departments.” The Jew looked up shrewdly, intimately. “Why? Is anything wrong with T.?”

“No. I was asking—for information. One-man shows are never safe. Supposing Turkovitch were taken ill, could you run the place for—say three months?”

“I ran it while he was on his holidays.”

“H’m. That’s rather different. Know anything about blending?”

“Not much.”

“We could get a foreman to do that,” remarked Peter reflectively. “And I’m not entirely ignorant on the subject myself. How about the rest of it—printing, box-making, looking after the girls? . . . That new master-printer seems a pretty efficient kind of fellow.” He broke off; said, “Don’t let this conversation go any further”; and took up the routine of the day.

Bramson, in addition to his principal duty of sales-manager, acted as Peter’s right-hand man in the not-always-smooth financing of the concern: so that their discussion lasted—uninterrupted save for occasional telephone calls—till the whistle blew, and a shuffle of moved stools on the hard-wood floor presaged the midday break. Nirvana provided free cooking for its employés; and the three principals shared the facility.

“Vell,” said Turkovitch, peeling off his smock as he entered, “now ve have some lunch. You join us, eh, Petere?”

One of the girls brought in a table; laid it; produced three chops, potatoes, beer. The Hungarian had apparently got over his huff. “Orders is plentiful, especially de export,” he said.

“Bramson and I have just been discussing that. Something’s got to be done about the home trade. We must have two more travellers. The press-advertising wants gingering up. I’ve telephoned for Higham to come and see me this afternoon. And I think we ought to have one or two electric signs. Big ones. Flashing, if we can afford them.”

“But the money? . . .” remonstrated Turkovitch.

“Oh, damn the money. Don’t you worry about that. I’ll find the money all right, if you’ll only get the orders out quickly. That last big lot for the Argentine took nearly six weeks.”

Turkovitch protested; and a wrangle ensued. Bramson sat very quiet. He was not a shareholder in the concern—yet. But, if he knew anything about anything, “young Peter” would get his own way; even if he had to buy Turkovitch out. Then that thousand pounds of savings would go into “ordinary” shares of Nirvana Ltd. . . .

“We’d better have all this out at the board-meeting next Monday,” said Peter finally. “Reid will have the year’s figures ready by then.”

§ 4

Reid, Chatterton and Reid, Chartered Accountants, inhabited a cold gloomy office on the fourth floor of Great Winchester House—an office by no means in keeping with their status as one of the premier auditing firms in the City. George Reid himself—a deliberate-looking middle-aged man of University education, square-chinned, clean-shaven, lined of face but twinkling of eye—welcomed Peter; led him into the “board-room”—a shabby apartment furnished with twelve wood-seated chairs, an enormous table and a rather gimcrack sofa.

“The others haven’t arrived yet. Have some tea?”

“Thanks,” said Peter. “Tell me,” he went on, after the two cups had been brought, “has Turkovitch been to see you?”

“Unofficially,” grinned Reid. “Yes. What have you been doing to the little man? He’s in a rare stew. Says he wishes he could get his money out.”

“He can,” said Peter laconically. “I’m about through with friend Ivan. It isn’t that I grudge him the eventual profits. But the chap’s no good for a show like this. He hasn’t got the spunk.”

“Well, don’t lose your temper with him this afternoon,” warned Reid, who knew Peter of old. “By the way, how’s Jameson’s getting on these days? You really ought to have their accounts audited, you know.”

“Simpson won’t. He’s very old-fashioned; says he can’t stand outsiders prying into his affairs.”

Bramson and Turkovitch came in, shook hands, sat down. Reid opened the “minute-book,” gabbled off the minutes of the last meeting which Peter signed perfunctorily. (Nirvana was a private company, the requisite number of shareholders being made up by clerks.)

“And now,” began Reid, “for the accounts. As far as I can see—there are one or two adjustments still to be made—we have managed, for the first time, to pay all our expenses and earn a small dividend.”

“Do ve pay out de dividend?” asked Turkovitch.

“Of course we don’t,” snapped Peter, “the money’s wanted for expansion.”

“Den vot’s the good of making it?” growled Turkovitch.

“One moment, gentlemen,” went on Reid. “I find, on careful analysis of the figures, that—had it not been for the high profits earned on the export trade—we should have made, not a profit, but a loss.” He gave details, and concluded, “I don’t think that’s a sound position.”

“Nor I,” commented Peter.

But here Turkovitch—tact thrown to the winds—boiled over. It was his business; his name was on all the brands; he knew quite well what “Petere” wanted; “Petere” wanted to be a millionaire; “Petere” wished to spend all the profit in some crazy scheme of advertising; why should they advertise? the cigarettes were the finest cigarettes in the world; he, Turkovitch, guaranteed them. . . .

“Oh, shut up,” muttered Peter, exasperated.

“I vill not shut up. You are always interfering. You interfere with me and de vork-peoples. You interfere vith my tobacco merchants. And now you vant to interfere vith de dividends.”

“Damn it, you draw a salary of seven hundred a year; and I haven’t had a penny piece out of the concern yet.”

Turkovitch became plaintive, even less intelligible than usual. “But vy not pay out de dividend? A leetle dividend. Drei per cent on de cabital.”

“Because, there’s no money to do it with: because we’re trading on bank-credit: because. . . . Oh, you try and explain things to him, Reid,” said our Mr. Jameson hopelessly.

Reid plunged into an exhaustive bath of facts and figures. There was big money to be made out of Nirvana. Reid knew it; Peter knew it; Bramson knew it. The hopeless period of an advertising business, the pay-pay-pay-and-not-a-jitney-of-it-back stage had been passed. Now, all they needed was work, a little more capital, and—supremely—confidence. But the Hungarian didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t see it.

“Dis is not business, eet is gambling,” he kept on saying. “You spend and you spend. And dere are no deevidends. I vish I had my cabital out of de gompany. . . .”

Reid glanced at Peter, who took the cue, screwed the butt of his cigar into the corner of his mouth, and said, very slowly:

“Look here, Turkovitch. You’re being a frightful ass. I don’t like to see any man who has worked with me throwing away a fortune. . . .”

“Fortune?” sniffed Turkovitch. “Vith no deevidends.”

“Do let me speak for a minute. As I was saying, you’re being very foolish. But if you really mean what you say, you shall have your capital out. I’ll buy your shares off you. At a fair price.”

“Vot price?”

Peter, who had devoted the week-end (Poor Patricia!) to a careful study of the anticipated problem, drew a piece of paper from his pocket.

“When I first consented to join you in this show,” he began, “you were worth, at an outside estimate, two thousand pounds. For six years, you’ve been drawing £700 a year.”

“Dat,” said Turkovitch, slightly mollified already, “vos for my vork, for my experience.”

“Quite right. I wasn’t asking you to give it me back, was I? Then there’s six years’ compound interest at, say, five per cent. Call it two thousand eight hundred. I’ll give you”—Peter hesitated for a moment, went up two hundred in his mind—“Three thousand pounds for your shares in Nirvana. The lot, of course.”

And so—after about a fortnight of negotiation—they got rid of the obstructionist. He went, in the end, quietly; delighted with his cheque; saying: “Now, I and my wife, ve take a little trip to Salonica. Perhaps, ven I come back, ve do some business in de leaf-tobacco, eh, Petere?”

“Right you are,” said our Mr. Jameson, who had no patience with fools but never bore malice.

PART THREE
THE CREST OF THE WAVE

§ 1

“Limousine-Landaulette body would be best,” said Peter. “We want something that will do either for town work or touring.”

“How about a cabriolet?” asked Patricia.

“If it’s not too heavy for you to drive.”

It was a Saturday afternoon, the first in July; and they were lunching in the low-roofed, cabin-like grill-room of the Carlton Hotel. The brass clock on the white mantelpiece pointed a quarter to three; most of the tables had emptied; but Peter and his wife sat on. The choice—that of their first automobile—needed careful discussion.

It pleased her to see him sitting there, boy-like for the moment, liqueur-glass poised steadily in his firm hand, inevitable cigar between his lips. The six months since his return from Hamburg had not been over-happy ones for Patricia. Always, she had felt the City pulling against her, taking him from her. Always, he grew more absorbed, more reticent. But now it seemed as though, just for a flash, the pal she had married was hers again.

“Aren’t I getting a little old to drive a car?” she asked.

He looked at her carefully before he spoke; took in at one glance smooth complexion, perfect teeth, the clear eyes and the glossy hair under the gray toque. Then he said, “Don’t talk rot, old thing.”

“And either way,” she went on, “it’s an extravagance.”

“An extravagance we can afford.”

For, really, it looked as though dreams would come true. Turkovitch’s defection—owing to Bramson’s application for shares—had only meant two thousand pounds instead of the anticipated three. Nirvana’s bank, approached with a profit-earning balance-sheet and guaranteed by Peter, had loaned the five thousand for their new advertising campaign. Jamesons, in sole control of the Beckmann brand, were making more money than ever before. Only that morning, Hagenburg had placed an order on which the profit made even Peter a little dizzy.

Of course there had been difficulties. Elkins and Beresford did not surrender their customers without a struggle. The re-organization of the manufacturing staff proved a shade less simple, Bramson a shade less capable, than anticipated. Home-trade climbed a trifle too slowly. Still, it climbed; and Peter was winning, winning all along the line. Now, only the finest of hairs divided gamble from certainty.

“An extravagance we can afford,” he repeated.

“I’m so glad,” she said, “not for the sake of having a car but because. . . .” For the first time in their married life, she almost felt shy with him.

“Because of what?”

“Because I know you can’t bear failure.”

“Failure,” he laughed; then, growing serious, “No. I’ve no use for failures. The man who ‘goes under’ doesn’t strike me as pathetic—only as idiotic.”

“You mean the man who fails to make money.”

“Good Lord, no. Money’s nothing. At best, only the counters with which we are paid for winning certain games. Mine, for instance. By failure, I mean not getting what you go for. Never mind what it is—fame, money, tranquillity, distinction. A girl or a seat in the House of Lords. As long as you know what you want, and get it, you’re a success.”

“But some people don’t want anything in particular.”

“I’ve no use for that kind.”

Her trained mind told her that the man had voiced his whole creed. Her woman’s instinct resented it. “He didn’t want her like that. She was only a side-issue. ‘Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his’—cigarette-factory.”

“Idiot” said her reason. “Idiot! You’ve been married eight years. . . .”

“If we want to be with Francis in time for tea,” said her voice, “you’d better ask for your bill.”

Peter paid; and they passed out, picking up his hat and stick from the cloak-room; climbed the carpeted stairs into the Haymarket.

It was the zenith of London’s last, maddest “season”; but her pleasure crowd—the dancers in her night-clubs; the befeathered scantily-draped women of her Opera House; the placemen, the panderers and the nincompoops who made pretence of governing her—had departed; were “week-ending” in pseudo-rusticity, twenty, thirty, a hundred miles away. And real London, heart of Empire, rested quietly in the soft sunshine—glad to be free of such parasites—as Peter and Patricia made way through her empty streets to Bloomsbury.

§ 2

When a young man, who has never done a day’s work except “to amuse himself,” comes down with a crash from ten thousand pounds a-year to about five hundred, it seems to him at first as though Life (with a capital L) were finished. Later on, the adaptability of the human animal begins to assert itself; a new standard of values replaces the old one; and the man—as apart from his chattels—emerges. Bruised, broken or strengthened according to his nature.

Peter’s cousin, Francis Gordon, had come down with just such a crash: but in Francis’ case the human animal had more than altered conditions to which it needed adapt itself. For Francis Gordon at the very moment when Life (with a capital L) had looked its blackest, met a girl, the girl, the ideal to whom his soul had been, was, and would always be, faithful.

He looked up now—from the papers on the table where he sat working—at her photograph, the only one in the room.

Beatrice Cochrane! A very ordinary, very human, very idealistic American girl. The sort of girl a man may meet in her hundreds from Los Angeles to Atlantic City; from New Orleans to Flushing, Long Island; from Dubuque, Iowa to Dallas, Texas. A girl still in her ’teens; slender-handed; with pale-gold hair and pale-gray thoughtful eyes.

A very ordinary American girl, of the old Anglo-Saxon stock—but tempered and refined by struggle: child of very ordinary American parents, educated rather to beauty of thought than to “beauty roses.” But, in the mind of Francis Gordon, she stood for all the flowers; for poetry and romance, for self-sacrifice and achievement, for every decent impulse which had helped him through the black hours of crisis.

He had not married her, not even asked her to marry him. He had not—in that brief fortnight of a shipboard friendship—deemed himself worthy. It had seemed to him as though God—a visible speaking God—forbade their union; commanding His creature, Francis Gordon, abandon that dream; take up, in its stead, the burden of vocation, the Work of writing for which He had endowed him with a tiny spark of His own genius.

And so Francis—who imagined himself to have seen, for a moment, behind that Veil of God which does not lift until the time appointed—returned to London; sold his house in Curzon Street, his cars and his pictures, his gold plate and his Aubusson carpets; and retired, taking with him only Prout, his old manservant, to this high apartment at the top of the eighteenth-century Georgian building in Mecklenburgh Square.

All “literary” London knew a Francis Gordon, a versifier whose technique they admired, whose pose they applauded. But the Francis, they did not know. Nor, had they known him, would they have, at that time, admired.

For the Francis—the man who, for all his fine aspirations, was still utterly incapable of formulating clean thought into simple words—had conceived another dream. And this was the shape of it.

He had learned from Beatrice, and from her parents, something—though very little—of the real America. He had taught her something—though very little—of the real England. He realized, as few Englishmen of his time, how the two nations had drifted apart; misunderstood one another. And it seemed to him, in his presumption, that a few words, a trumpery poem, could set this misunderstanding right.

Of course—(he was too much in love with the phantom of Beatrice for any except a prejudiced judgment)—he blamed his own countrymen exclusively. Equally of course, the great poem of his projecting, became—the moment pen touched paper—an artificial web of phrases through which the man’s real belief in a Spiritual Federation of the English-speaking Peoples oozed to nothingness. Still, it says something for the influence of a girl who only wrote in calm friendship, confident of his ultimate success as a writer, but by no manner of means—consciously at any rate—in love with him, that Francis Gordon should have held to this belief, unflinchingly, through all those weary months when other Englishmen—better informed on material points though utterly ignorant of the spiritual reluctance to realize that a world-crime was being committed (which reluctance alone kept America so long out of the War)—were saying to themselves, “Can’t they see things? Won’t they see things? Must we fight this greatest of all battles without them?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Jameson, Sir,” announced the elderly manservant.

§ 3

Nothing in the outward appearance of the Francis Gordon who rose at the entrance of his cousin’s wife, suggested the conventional (or unconventional) poet. Short dark hair parted at the side, clipped moustache, well-cared-for hands, creaseless gold-pinned soft collar, well-tailored blue suit—all proclaimed the ordinary idle young man of the period. And as such, to tell the truth, his cousin Peter—to whom, except for a certain lack of dourness about the expression, he bore an amazing resemblance—regarded him.

His surroundings, too, helped this illusion of the idle commonplace. The room was large, white-walled and green-carpeted; crowded mahogany book-shelves completely lined one wall; a spacious writing-table—scrupulously tidy—set square in the centre of two big windows—the other. Chippendale chairs, a tea-table already laid, and a revolving bookcase filled with foreign dictionaries, Roget’s Thesaurus, and other reference-works, completed the furniture. Two mahogany doors—one, through which Patricia and Peter had just entered, leading to the narrow hall—the other to the bedroom and bathroom—glowed darkly against the rough white of the wall-paper.

“This doesn’t look much like poverty,” commented Peter. (Francis had only just taken the flat. This was their first visit to him.)

“I don’t think you’d make much of a welfare inspector, old man,” replied Francis. “Fourth floor. No lift. No telephone. Geyser-bath. Shilling-in-the-slot electric-light meter. A complacent landlord. And the relics of the Curzon Street furniture. Guess again about my poverty.”

“And a manservant,” commented Patricia, taking off hat and gloves, sitting down—as by right—at the tea-table.

“Oh, Prout! Prout would pay to stay on, I believe. Francis Gordon and his faithful valet; or the loyalty of an old retainer. . . .”

But Patricia knew that the supercilious remark hid real affection for that “old bounder Prout.” She had seen a good deal of Francis since his return to England; revised many of her early unfavourable opinions about him. The good-will was mutual: though Francis, who still thought “Pat.” rather a commonplace young woman, would have been more than surprised to know how near she had come to divining the change in his mentality—and the real reason for that change.

“Who’s this?” commented Peter, his inspection of the new quarters having brought him to Beatrice’s photograph.

“Friend of mine,” said Francis curtly. “Don’t touch those papers.”

“I won’t touch your precious papers.”

At which little passage of arms, Patricia’s last doubts settled into a comfortable certainty.

Prout, bringing tea, restored harmony. They sat long over it, smoking and talking—mostly, as is the habit of near relations, about themselves.

“By Jove,” said Peter—interrupting himself in the middle of a long monologue about advertising—“I almost forgot. We’ve taken a house at Wargrave for a month. Lodden Lodge. It’s rather a decent place. Tennis lawn; river-frontage; bath, h. and c.; usual domestic offices; et cetera et cetera. You are expected to stay with us.”

“Hukkum hai? (Is it an order?),” asked Francis.

“Oh, we all know you spent three months in India,” chaffed Peter. “Question is: are you coming?”

“Of course I’m coming,” said Francis, “and so is Prout—if Patricia doesn’t object.”

§ 4

“Some car!” thought Peter as he stepped into the front seat; slammed the door home; said “You take her for a bit, Murray,” to the uniformed chauffeur; and acknowledged “Pretty” Bramson’s rather overdone salute with a wave of his hand. They purred out from the factory-gates into Brixton Road; swung first right, then left; headed for Hounslow.

Certainly, “some car”—a long, low stream-lined cabriolet, royal-blue in colour, the Crossley cross on her radiator. Peter had discovered her through the advertisement columns of the Morning Post; clinched the deal a week before. But his thought did not centre long on the new purchase.

It was the Thursday before August Bank Holiday 1914. To get away so early, had meant cramming the week’s work into three and a half days. Still, he could afford to take a rest now. For a few minutes, he allowed himself the rare luxury of a dream. Nirvana had arrived! July sales proved it. Nothing could stop their automatic increase. Already, the capital he had sunk was in sight again. Then—what a business he would make it! All over the world, too. . . . India, China, New Zealand, South Africa. He must have his own factory in the States, in Canada; defeat their confounded protective tariffs. . . .

“Will you take her now, sir?” asked Murray, as they wriggled out through Hounslow High Street.

“Not for another mile or so.”

Peter’s mind came back to details; wandered off them again. Nothing could stop that automatic increase. Nothing. The political situation? Blow the political situation! Nobody with any sense cared for political situations. Except retail tobacconists, to whom they furnished a good excuse for curtailing orders.

“I’ll take her now, Murray.”

The chauffeur slowed down sufficiently to allow a change of places. Peter took the wheel; opened the throttle; slammed her into “top”; and whisked off down the Bath Road.

For the first time in six years, our Mr. Jameson felt a little above himself!

§ 5

Lodden Lodge, Wargrave, is a square, comfortable, late Victorian house, ivy-covered, backing on a quiet side-road and fronting the Thames mainstream with sloping close-clipped lawns.

Peter arrived towards tea-time; found his wife and Francis (over-immaculate in creased white trousers and buckskin shoes), just sitting down to the silver-laid sun-dappled table under the willow-trees.

“Where’s your brother, Jack?” asked Peter.

“He’s not coming after all,” said Patricia. “I had a wire this morning. Manœuvres, I expect.”

“Don’t you believe it, Pat,” put in Francis. “He’s off to fight the good fight in Ulster. What a lark! Fancy Teddy Carson, mounted on a ‘sable destrier,’ charging the guns.”

“Idiot!” commented Peter; and added, “Confound the fellow. That spoils our four for tennis.”

“We shall be all right for tennis.” Patricia filled the cups; passed them. “Violet and her husband have invited themselves for the week-end.”

“Oh Lord,” began Peter; but—catching his wife’s eye—desisted. After all, Rawlings didn’t play such a bad game of tennis; and Violet’s bridge, though not pleasant, was perfect. Tea over, Peter changed into flannels; came down to find Evelyn and Primula, barelegged, muslin-frocked and sun-bonneted, waiting for him.

“We want to go on the river,” they chorused, “we want to go on the river.”

“It’s too late for the river,” said Patricia.

“It isn’t too late. It isn’t too late. Is it Daddy? . . .”

“They do like him, don’t they?” Francis said to their mother. Peter, over-ruling her objections, had picked up the two laughing bundles; packed them into the cushioned punt; and was now poling slowly out into main stream.

“Why shouldn’t they?” laughed Patricia. But, all the same, she felt a little twinge of jealousy. The children meant so much to her, so little to Peter. Yet, at a lift of the finger, they would desert her for him. . . . Perhaps it was because that finger so seldom lifted. . . . If only one of them had been a boy!

She watched her husband’s strong figure, black now against the glow of the water, bending to the pole as he met the current. The punt glided under the railway bridge, out of sight.

“Of course they ought to have been boys.” Francis Gordon’s voice interrupted her reverie. He seemed—as often when they were quite alone,—to have dropped the mask of superciliousness. She looked at him; wondered how much he realized. A disturbing person, this new cousin of hers. Almost uncanny at times, this way in which his mind seemed to penetrate her thoughts. . . . And again that night, at table in the long low dining-room, she speculated about this man.

He sat, facing the sunset, immaculate as ever but unusually silent. Every now and then, it seemed to her as though his eyes saw—beyond the rose glow of the horizon—into vision-land. “He’s thinking about that girl,” she reasoned, “the girl whose photograph we saw at the flat.” And then, remembering the eyes of a man she had once seen at a revivalist meeting, she began to doubt her theory of a love-affair.

Sunset darkled to twilight, twilight to blackness, as they finished dinner.

Patricia, pleading tiredness, went upstairs early; heard, as she undressed in the cool fragrance of the river-night, the sound of canvas-chairs, dragging first across the gravel, then over grass; saw the points of two cigars burning redly under the willow-trees.

“Beckmann, Coronas,” announced Peter. “Good, aren’t they?”

“Very,” admitted Francis.

For nearly ten minutes, neither spoke. It was a night for confidences. Silent save for the river-chuckle; star-dusted; peaceful. But the two Englishmen smoked on; reticent, each busy with his own dreaming: the one seeing a great business, world-wide, endless in opportunity: the other, vignetted in silver radiance against the sable background of his thought, the features of a girl—of a girl five thousand miles removed from England—a girl for whose sake and without hope of reward he had vowed himself to the dissatisfying god of Work.

“Why don’t you get married again?” asked Peter suddenly.

“Only because I can’t afford it,” lied Francis Gordon.

§ 6

Violet Rawlings, sprightly as ever, even more fluffily dressed than usual; and her husband Hubert, determined that ninety-six hours of personal suggestion should at last secure him some part of the Nirvana advertising account, arrived in time for lunch next day. The foxy-faced publicity agent lost no time in opening his campaign.

“We went to the Palace last night,” he began, almost before they had sat down to their meal. “On our way home I noticed that your new sign in Piccadilly wasn’t burning properly.”

“Really,” said Peter stiffly.

“Lobster mayonnaise, or some of these cold eggs?” asked Patricia, hoping to turn their conversation.

But her brother-in-law took no notice. “I’m somewhat of an expert on signs,” he continued. “And, frankly, I don’t think they have much selling value on a high-grade article like yours. I pin my faith to full pages in the six-penny weeklies. And of course, Punch. Although Punch is a humorous paper. . . .”

“I beg your pardon,” interrupted Francis.

“I said—although Punch is a humorous paper.”

Francis, feeling satire useless with a creature of this type, gave up the struggle. Hubert accepted an egg, as less liable than lobster to impede talk; and continued his harangue.

Peter, who knew that Rawlings, despite his personal unpleasantness, possessed knowledge, listened interestedly—asking a question every now and then. The others started a conversation on their own.

Said Violet, monopolizing it, “Oh but we never leave London while the ‘House’ is sitting. I think politics so interesting, Mr. Gordon. Don’t you? Though I suppose as an author—so clever, that last poem of yours—you take more interest in the affairs of the heart.”

She ruffled herself; rattled on.

“But of course, politics are the thing nowadays. I’m afraid”—her voice dropped to the confidential whisper of the person who has no news to impart—“we’re going to have trouble. Not with Servia, of course: but in Ireland. People are saying. . . .”

“Amazing,” thought Francis, “how a nice woman like Pat. can have such a sister.”

Smith, bringing the joint, interrupted the Rawlings duo in their monologues.

“I always wonder,” went on Hubert a few minutes later, “why you didn’t take your brother into partnership. He seemed an awfully nice fellow, the only time I met him.”

“Arthur?” queried Peter. “Why, Arthur wouldn’t take a partnership in Rothschilds! He ran away from school when he was fifteen; and he’s been running from somewhere or other ever since. The last time I heard from him, he was in the Dutch Indies—planting. Wrote to ask my opinion about tobacco prospects in Java. Beastly stuff, Javanese tobacco; though they use a lot of it for making so-called Borneo cigars.”

Luncheon over, Peter and Patricia challenged the two men at tennis: Violet, languid in a long chair, alternately watched the match; and picked her way expertly through The Tatler. To see her own photograph in that periodical, not once but regularly, was a small part of Violet’s many unrealized ambitions: which included a knighthood and a seat in the House of Commons for her husband, a Rolls-Royce limousine (painted black and white for preference) for herself, and all the usual appurtenances of the politico-parisitical set which both of them alternatively aped and envied. Neither she nor her husband belonged to the class who “didn’t want anything in particular”!

Peter, playing brilliantly at the net, and Patricia, backing him up accurately from the base-line, defeated their opponents in three straight setts. Followed tea, a languid paddle towards Shiplake, the dressing-gong, stiff shirts and low frocks, auction bridge. . . .

July the Thirty-first, Nineteen Hundred and Fourteen! And yet, not one of those fairly well-informed five dreamed the False Peace actually at an end. Already, the Beasts in Gray,—murder, rape and plunder in their swinish eyes,—were abroad. Already the Crime, so long premeditated, had been committed. Even as these four sat at their game, less than fifty miles away from them, up in London, the womanizers and the wine-bibbers of Westminster were scuttling hither and thither, incredulous, anxious to compromise, fearful. The scum which had floated to the surface! They trembled now, those false guardians. For they and they alone in all England feared the Beast. But more than the Beast, they feared their own People;—knowing them not, neither their strength, nor their courage, nor their infinite forgiveness.

But already (one man’s work!), silent, forethoughted, utterly equipped, the People of the Sea were wheeling to their battle-stations. Already, Anglo-Saxondom had flung its first bulwark across the world.

It was the commencement of the Great Cleansing!

PART FOUR
CRISIS

§ 1

To comprehend the deliberate sacrifice which Peter Jameson made for the cause of humanity, it is essential that you should realize both the man and the offering he brought. It was not, primarily, the sacrifice of money, but the giving-up of a great ambition. For money, regarded purely as the purchase price of material comfort, he cared very little. As a spender, he had small sympathy with the exotic luxury of his time. His amusements were essentially simple—a gun, a trout-rod, a horse, a good glass of wine. All these, he might have possessed without working.

But Peter had been picked up, while still a boy, into the fascinating game of business; and in that game he had found both work (which was vital to his temperament) and enjoyment. His personal qualities—resoluteness, concentration on the immediate job, a certain creative instinct, clear thinking, moral courage and a controlled imagination—fitted him eminently for the sport of commerce.

Nirvana Limited, which would have been to the average individual merely a machine for the making of an income, represented to Peter Jameson—at the outbreak of war—the ultimate aim in life. He loved that business, not only for the sake of what it might eventually bring him, but for itself. He loved it, like a good gardener loves his garden, as much for the labour as for the result. He had seen it grow, in six years, from starved plant to a goodly tree—fruit almost ripe for the plucking. He felled that tree deliberately, in cold blood, under no compulsion save that of his own soul. And he waved no flags to console him for the felling!

For the man was, despite the admixture of Miraflores strain, an Anglo-Saxon: responded—though he knew it not—to the blind spirit of that race which came out of Italy through France, welded itself to dour Saxon and berserk Viking, and so spread, fighting always but always fighting as an ultimate issue for Independence, to Virginia and Quebec, to the Falkland Islands and the Hebrides, to South Africa and Australasia; till it became—scarcely conscious of its own oneness—the final arbiter in the great world-struggle of Decency against the filthy doctrines of the Beasts in Gray.

And behind the man, equally resolute, equally blind to the spirit which moved her, stood Patricia, the Anglo-Saxon woman—thoroughbred, unflinching.

§ 2

England’s declaration of war did not make Peter Jameson “burn to avenge gallant little Belgium,” or eager, in the phraseology of the period, “to do his bit.” His commercial position was too damned awkward for the indulgence of any such sentiments.

He left Wargrave at ten o’clock on the morning of August the fifth; and reached the outskirts of London in forty-five minutes. Then he gave the wheel to Murray, and began to think. Throughout, his hand had been perfectly steady at the throttle, his foot firm on the accelerator. Their speed had averaged forty miles an hour.

Behind him, in the tonneau, sat Francis Gordon, acting as always on inspiration rather than reason, decision already reached. Francis Gordon talked to himself, under his breath: first in Dutch and then in German. He was testing, not his knowledge of those languages, but his accent. “Ich kann es tun. Ich bin einer der einzigen die es tun konnen,” he muttered. Then he began to recite, very slowly and almost inaudibly, the first speech from Schiller’s Republican Tragedy:

Leonora. “Nichts mehr. Nichts mehr. Kein Wort mehr.

Es ist am Tag.”[^[1]]

Peter was not talking to himself; had reached no decision. His brain went over the salient facts of the situation; weighing them up. Discarding details. Selecting essentials. The Jameson-Beckmann problem must wait. How would Nirvana be affected? Home-trade, for the moment at any rate, would collapse. The export-business might hold up. Might. Probably wouldn’t. Remained the fact that if the worst came to the worst he stood to loose seventeen thousand pounds. . . . After all, people must smoke. Wars didn’t last for ever. Could he see the thing through? Financially? . . .

“London & Joint Stock Bank, Pall Mall,” he said to the chauffeur.

They swirled through Piccadilly; nipped round past the Ritz; slowed down St. James’ Street; and pulled up.

“Afraid I can’t lend you the car, old man,” said Peter. “I shall want it all day. Are you coming down again to-night?”

“No,” answered Francis. “Prout’s bringing up my things on the afternoon train.” He stepped out of the tonneau; brushed himself carefully; and walked off down Pall Mall. Peter, telling Murray to wait, climbed the flat steps to the glass doors of the Bank. They were closed: but his knock brought a commissionaire, who recognized him; opened them.

“No business today, sir,” said the commissionaire.

“Manager in?” asked Peter.

“Yes, sir.”

“Ask him if he’ll see me.”

The Bank, always quiet, seemed—that morning—like a tomb. Clerks bent over their ledgers; lights burned: but no customers waited at the iron-grilled counters, no sovereigns clinked in the brass shovels.

“Step this way, sir,” said the commissionaire.

Peter followed him across the stone floor, through the glass doorway into the manager’s parlour—soft-carpeted, lavishly furnished with dark mahogany and saddle-bag chairs.

Mr. Davis, the branch-manager, was a gray-bearded man with the clothes of a prince and the manners of a diplomat. As a West End Branch, “Pall Mall” did not seek mercantile business. They had taken the Nirvana account, officially, “to oblige their old client Mr. Jameson, whose private account they had handled for so many years.” This courtesy had not gone as far as a reduction in their usual rates of interest!

“Good morning, Mr. Jameson. I half expected you.” Mr. Davis rose; shook hands. “Won’t you take a seat?”

“Thanks. I came to ask you about the financial position. This war, you know. The papers talk about a moratorium. I understand that to mean a suspension of credit. . . .”

“Only in extreme cases, Mr. Jameson. Only in extreme cases. Of course, we are not desirous, at the moment, of increasing facilities. We are, if I may use the expression, sitting on the fence. But my directors—I have a letter from them before me now—are anxious for me to impress on all our clients, that they do not anticipate any financial crisis. Measures, as I am given to believe, have been taken; temporary expedients adopted; by which. . . .” He went on to explain them, at some length.

“Then I take it,” said Peter, “that on the resumption of banking-business. . . .”

“Matters will be exactly as they were a week ago.” Mr. Davis rose again, shook hands, made his point courteously. “Naturally, Mr. Jameson, as Nirvana Limited will not be under the necessity of making payments, they will not require any addition to the overdraft which you have guaranteed for them.”

“Of course not,” said Peter. The interview had turned out according to anticipation. If Nirvana wanted any more money, it would have to be found in cash.

He stood for a moment on the steps of the Bank. London had not altered in a night. The straight aristocratic thoroughfare seemed a little busier than usual. That was all. Then he looked for the gaudy sentries outside Marlborough House; saw that they were in khaki!

“The factory, please, Murray; and as fast as you can,” said our Mr. Jameson. . . .

[1]	“No more. No more. Not a word more. It is the Day.”

§ 3

To describe “Pretty” Bramson as nervous, would be a gross understatement. The man was scared stiff; had been for two days. Peter found him wandering about the half-empty building—(the English workman does not usually put in an appearance till twenty-four hours after “Bank Holiday”)—damp cigarette between his lips, white about the gills, alternatively fidgeting and depressed. The famous black moustaches were distinctly out of curl: the brilliantined hair lacked its usual polish.

“Morning, Bramson. You look rather out of sorts.”

Bramson led melancholy way into the private office.

“It’s all U P with us now,” he said. “We’re ruined. That’s about the long and short of it.”

“Rats!” snapped Peter, lighting a cigar.

“The Bank will be down on us for that overdraft. . . .”

“Don’t be a fool. To begin with, they can’t call in any loans. There’s a moratorium. Secondly, if they do want their money, I can pay it. Do you really think I guarantee liabilities I can’t meet?”

“I hadn’t thought of the moratorium,” began Bramson, plucking up courage.

Peter, puffing slowly at his cigar, got over the flash of temper.

“Worried about that thousand of yours?” he queried suddenly.

“No-o. Not exactly. But. . . .”

“You are worried. Of course you’re worried. So am I. So’s everybody else. Let me remind you that I’ve got twelve thousand pounds in the concern, in addition to that confounded overdraft. But we shan’t either of us save our money by worrying. For goodness’ sake, pull yourself together, man. Let’s have a look at last month’s figures. . . .”

Bramson went to the safe; opened it; took out some papers “Get a pencil,” said Peter, “and write down what I tell you. . . . Ready. . . . Right. . . . Now then: Assets . . .” He dictated steadily; picking out the amounts from the big type-written statement. “Liabilities. . . .” The dictation continued. “That’s the lot, I think. Add them up please.”

Bramson read out the figures: “Assets £27,862, Liabilities, including overdraft, £22,396.”

“Which means,” commented Peter, “that your thousand and my twelve are worth—about five between them. Roughly forty cents on the dollar. If we could sell the factory as a going concern.”

“You haven’t taken anything for the good-will of the business,” put in Bramson.

“Of course I haven’t. That’s the whole question. Up to the end of last month, we were making profits. That was why you bought Turkovitch’s shares, wasn’t it? Do you think we’re going to make a profit this month?”

“We might.”

“Forget it,” said Peter genially. “The best we can hope for is to nurse the show through this damned war—if it doesn’t last too long. Now listen to me. . . .”

He plunged into details, giving his orders succinctly. This must go: that be curtailed. Publicity account, selling expenses, manufacturing charges, clerical work—Peter dealt with each seriatim, hardly referring to the figures on the table. “As for the finance,” he concluded, “I’ll deal with that myself. But mind you, the whole thing’s a gamble . . . Play poker, Bramson?” he asked suddenly.

“Occasionally.”

“Well, if you ever put up your last table-stake to bluff the jack-pot on a busted flush—you’ll understand the present position of Nirvana Limited.”

Two minutes later the car was purring Citywards.

§ 4

Passing over London Bridge, through Gracechurch Street and Fenchurch Street, Peter saw that the City had in no wise altered. The same drays, motor-omnibuses, taxicabs and motor-cars fought their way through its streets. The same bareheaded clerks hurried along its pavements. The same hawkers proffered the same wares. Only the closed doors of the banking-houses portended the unusual.

In his own office at Lime Street nothing spoke of world-crisis. Parkins still sat at the enquiry desk. Old George was still dusting cigar boxes. Miss Macpherson’s typewriter clicked and tinkled from the clerks’ office beyond the stock-rooms. Simpson, just back from his chop at “The George and Vulture” showed no signs of depression. He, too, had interviewed his bank manager.

“And what did Smollett say about Beckmann’s bills?” asked Peter.

“It looks as though we shall have to meet them after the moratorium,” said Simpson. “You see they’ve been discounted through an English bank. As far as I can make out, Beckmann’s aren’t technically Germans at all. The firm’s domiciled in a neutral country—so Smollett says. . . .”

“Do you mean to say we shall be allowed to go on importing the brand?”

“I don’t see why not,” said Simpson.

That there could be any patriotic reasons for not trading with Beckmanns, did not strike them. The war was not yet twenty-four hours old; and neither the obtuse Simpson nor the concentrated Peter had realized it as more than a disturber of business.

“Elkins and Beresford will be sure to try and use this to prejudice customers against the brand,” suggested Peter.

“Let them.” Somehow, the crisis seemed to have nerved Simpson. Peter never remembered him so decided.

“We must go slow,” was his verdict. “Of course trade will absolutely disappear for the first week or so. Then it’ll begin to pick up again. There’ll be no difficulty about supplies. Whatever happens on land, our Navy’s got the Germans beaten at sea. Go slow, and keep our resources liquid—that’s my idea. . . . By the way, how about that factory of yours?”

Peter hesitated a moment—Simpson had always been rather hostile about Nirvana—then said, “I’ve been up there this morning. Bramson’s rather rattled. We shall have to go slow there too. It’s a pity the brand couldn’t have had another two years’ hard advertising before this happened. As it is—everything depends on how long the war lasts. If it goes on more than six months, I may have to find a partner. That means parting with a big slice of my shares. You see, I don’t feel I ought to take any more of my capital out of this business.”

“No. I agree with you there. Though if it became absolutely necessary. . . . By the way, you won’t mind my saying so, but I never understood why you took on ‘Pretty’ Bramson. He hasn’t got a very good reputation in the trade. And then his cousin Marcus being a competitor. . . .”

“Oh, he’s not a bad little chap.” Peter, like all good men of business, was over-loyal to his staff. “The only trouble is that he hasn’t got much guts. But he’s all right as long as you keep an eye on him. . . . Good Lord, it’s nearly three o’clock, and that poor devil of a chauffeur of mine hasn’t had his lunch yet.”

“Had any yourself?” asked Simpson.

It was the one detail of the day which our Mr. Jameson had forgotten!

§ 5

“And are we quite ruined?” chaffed Patricia as they finished dinner the same evening. Prout and the Rawlings had taken the afternoon train to town, leaving her lonely and—to tell the truth—more than a little worried.

“Not quite, old thing,” retorted Peter. . . .

But that night, for the first time in years, he woke up suddenly; saw her sleeping peacefuly in the white bedstead next his own—and realized that his responsibilities were not exclusively confined to the financing of Nirvana Limited.

PART FIVE
DECISION

§ 1

Passed the first week—a week of rumours and counter-rumours, barren of certainty. Mealy-souled politicians,—protected by a Navy they had done their best to weaken—gabbled high words of hope. The few trained men, laughed at for years, departed silently about their business: the half-trained set themselves to learn. For already, the spirit of the English-speaking Peoples was astir. Slumbering, the spirit awoke: a blind spirit, conscious only of resentment, of independence mysteriously threatened, of Something Wrong in the world: finding its quaint vent in shibboleth phrases, in deep drinkings, in wagging of flags: but growing, growing always, not to be denied. Already, through the domino-cafés of London, at the long bar in the English Club at Shanghai, in dank bungalows of the Malay Peninsula, on Canadian ranches and Australian “stations,” there ran the Word: “I think I ought to go, old boy. Well, mate, are you going?”

But no Word had yet reached Peter Jameson. The City held him. For the moment, the old game played itself on.

It was a “quiet” time; but not so bad as he had anticipated. Jameson’s customers, disregarding the moratorium, paid their accounts; gave niggling orders. The week’s shipment arrived punctually from Havana. Nirvana, to the untrained eye, seemed hardly to have suffered. The four machines stamped and clicked all day; girls bent over the packing tables; the tin-men pricked and soldered as before. Only the pink slips of “unfilled orders” dwindled and dwindled, the piles of unsold cigarettes in the stock-room rose and rose.

Peter was sitting alone in the back-office at Lime Street, thinking how soon he would have to begin paying off his “hands,” when Parkins announced, “Mr. Raymond P. Sellers.”

“What does he want?” asked Peter.

“I think it’s an American gentleman, Sir. He said he had a ‘proposition’ to put before you.”

“Ask him to come in.”

There entered a clean-shaven young man with gold eye-glasses, in square-shouldered clothes, square-tipped patent leather shoes, carrying a Panama hat in one hand and a reporter’s note-book in the other, who ejaculated: “Say, Mr. Jameson, I’m real glad to meet you,” in a voice which no citizen of the United States ever used on land or sea.

Peter started to shake hands; looked up at his visitor; and burst out, “Francis, you blithering idiot, what on earth are you doing in that get-up?”

Francis looked round to see if the door were closed. Then he said, in his ordinary voice, “It is a bit grotesque, isn’t it? But as the special representative of an anonymous American newspaper syndicate, I think it will pass for the next few days.”

“You always were a bit of a lunatic,” said Peter gruffly, “but this is the limit. What do you propose doing in your fancy-dress?”

“I’m leaving for Amsterdam on tonight’s boat, if you want to know,” answered Francis. “After that, my plans depend on circumstances. Look here,” he became suddenly serious, “this isn’t a joke. I should get into the devil’s own row if ‘they’ knew I’d been down here. You mustn’t tell a soul, Peter. Honestly. Not even Patricia. I know it sounds like a penny-novelette—but most of the penny-novelettes are coming true at the moment. Word of honour, old man, you won’t tell a soul.”

Peter glanced at his cousin; saw that the slackness had disappeared from his face. The lips were tight-set, the eyes dark with suppressed emotion.

“Word of honour, Francis. I won’t tell a soul. Not even Patricia. Why did you come here though, if it was against—” he stumbled over the word—“orders?”

“Because there’s no one else I can trust. It’s a question of my correspondence, and the flat. I want you to look Prout up occasionally. He thinks I’ve enlisted. Here”—he fumbled in his pocket—“are eight letters for him. From me. Have one posted every three weeks. I’ve pencilled the dates on the flap. You can get some one to post them from the country, I suppose.” Peter took the letters; nodded comprehension. “There’s a cheque in each of them, so you needn’t worry about giving the older bounder any money. I’ve told him you’ll call, and that he’s to give you any correspondence that comes for me.”

“What am I to do with it?” asked Peter.

Francis hesitated a perceptible second before saying, “I want you to open everything that comes except—letters from America. Answer them all. Say I’m away, if you like. Joined the Army. I don’t think there’ll be any bills. If there are, they can wait.”

“And the letters from America?”

“Those, I don’t want you to open on any account. Keep them for me till I come back. If you don’t hear from me in six months, better say eight months, burn them. And post this.” He took another envelope from his pocket, handed it to Peter, who saw, in his cousin’s sprawly handwriting, “Miss B. Cochrane. C/o The Guaranty Trust Company of New York. To be forwarded.”

There was the usual awkward silence which betokens sentiment among English people. Then Peter got up, walked over to the safe, pulled out his private cash-box, and locked up the letters.

“That’ll be all right,” he said. “But why eight months? You don’t expect the war to last as long as that, do you?”

Came footsteps outside, a hand at the door-catch.

“Well, good-bye, Mr. Jameson. I’m sure I’m very much obliged to you for the information.”

Mr. “Raymond Sellers” shook hands effusively; half bowed to Simpson, and departed.

“Who was that chap?” asked Peter’s partner.

“That was only . . .” Peter stopped himself in time, “an American newspaper fellow—cadging advertisements for one of their trade-journals.”

“Tobacco Leaf or the other one?”

“The other one,” said Peter nonchalantly.

§ 2

To Peter Jameson’s rather narrow imagination, as yet untouched by the new melodramatic world, the whole interview with Francis appeared fantastic. He could neither visualize the steps which preceded that interview—the coming of the idea, the remembering of an old school-friend in the Foreign Office, the chivvying about from pillar to post necessary for the securing of “peculiar” employment, the two days of schooling by the quiet little civilian at “S,” the final instructions; nor the resultant arrival of “Mr. Raymond P. Sellers” at a certain hotel in Amsterdam, where he waited in his clean bedroom overlooking the canal till a very ordinary-looking Dutch merchant—having closed the door carefully behind him—said, “Hello, Gordon. I didn’t know you were one of us.” . . .

No! Peter certainly couldn’t visualize his cousin in the rôle of a secret-service agent. And such a secret-service agent—Philips Oppenheim in the flesh! He remembered, of course, that Francis had always been rather a dab at languages; remembered his talking German at a not too savoury dancing-hall in Singapore where they had once foregathered.

But surely there never was a man so utterly unfitted for such a job, so absolutely certain to make a muck of it, as Francis Gordon.

“Fantastic,” decided our Mr. Jameson; and went on with his work.

§ 3

Nevertheless, the interview left its mark in more ways than the pencilled notes “Post F’s letters” in Peter’s business-diary.

Two more weeks drifted by; news, unsatisfactorily scanty at the beginning, grew unsatisfactorily complete. So far, the enemy had it all their own way. Business, on the other hand, showed a tendency to revive—Nirvana business especially. With the economies effected, a little more trade—provided nothing interfered with their exports—would ensure them against actual loss. Bramson had cheered up, Simpson and the cigar-business dropped back into their usual lethargy. But our Mr. Jameson, for the first time in years, felt himself lacking in concentration.

This lack of concentration, as he carefully explained to himself, was in no wise due to the bad news. As an Englishman, and one who vaguely recollected the South African campaign, he had never expected a walk-over. Things looked pretty bad at the moment. Paris might possibly fall—though it hardly seemed likely. That would be awkward, of course: but by no means an irretrievable disaster. . . .

Nor, he decided, had business anxieties affected his grip of things financial. Nirvana could be saved. The main problem had been grappled with. Now—granted his continued personal attention—it was only a question of patience. . . . Then, why the devil this strange inability to concentrate, this growing annoyance?

A good many people had begun to annoy Peter—Julius Hagenburg among others. The man, proud possessor of a British naturalization certificate taken out in 1912, had of course every right to change his name if he thought fit. But Peter could not get accustomed to him as “James Hartopp, Esq.” And his loud-mouthed patriotism, even though he had squared off almost all his old account, and given a large order, somehow offended.

There were a good many such naturalized Germans in the Havana cigar-trade; many of them with sons who had already enlisted. But every time he met one of them—old Schornstein, for instance, with his “Ve must vait and see, my poy. Ve must vait and see,” or Blumberg eager to explain that “De liperal barty had saved de gountry,”—Peter experienced a new prejudice.

But Jameson’s connexion with Beckmanns provided the crowning annoyance of all. Peter and Simpson had decided—as soon as the legal position became clear—that it would be ridiculous to stop importing the brand immediately. They must, of course, do their best to replace the goods with those of another factory. On the other hand, to give them up without finding a substitute, would merely mean turning over an important advantage to some less-scrupulous competitor.

Still,—whatever the “Proclamation as to trading with the Enemy” might say about “firms domiciled in neutral countries”—Peter could not get out of his mind that the actual owners of the concern were Germans. Every Friday afternoon, as Simpson dictated his careful letter to them, ending with the old stereotyped phrasing “with kind regards, Yours very sincerely,” Peter would remember Heinrich Beckmann, in his heavy boots, his black tail-coat, his hard bowler-hat, iron-moustached and curt of phrase, gobbling oysters and swilling wine at Fortis’; would see young Albert Beckmann, fat, flabby, blond, over-manicured, frothing glass at his lips, eyeing the Tänzerinnen in the gaudy night-club where they had celebrated the signing of the contract. “Huns,” Peter would say to himself—(the appellation “Hun” had just come into vogue)—“bloody Huns!”

§ 4

But in addition to this growing revulsion against the enemy—(dislike of the Germans had been ingrained in the man’s character since his first day in business)—the thousand emotional flea-bites of the period began to affect Peter. That he could be hearing whispers of the English-speaking spirit—the spirit that was even then driving Francis Gordon, nervous to the depths of his imaginative soul, into dangers beyond belief, dangers that had to be faced in cold blood and absolutely alone—never struck the Chairman of Nirvana Limited.

He was conscious only of a Questioning; it seemed as though every one and everything asked him something, something he could not answer.

The morning newspaper began that Questioning. It lurked, somehow or other, behind the war-news, the casualty-lists. More than one name which conjured up the face of a boy known at Eton, figured in those early columns. Challis minor, in his own house, who had held onto his position till the last moment: “dying,” wrote his Colonel to his mother, “as I am sure you would have wished him to die.” Latham of the Artillery, who had fought his gun single-handed till he dropped dead over the breech-block. Peter caught himself trying to explain to a shadowy Challis minor how impossible it was for certain people, people with responsibilities like his own, to join the Army. . . .

Evelyn and Primula too, now back at Lowndes Square, accentuated uncertainty. They could talk of nothing but the soldiers they had seen drilling in Kensington Gardens, the motor that had dashed—astounding phenomenon—down the Broad Walk. They reminded him of the episode, trivial at the time but constantly recurring, of Patricia’s brother, Jack Baynet. Jack had been mobilized with the 6th Division; had asked Peter and Patricia to visit him in Camp at Cambridge. Peter had promised to go, cried off at the last moment. One couldn’t very well mingle, an able-bodied civilian in mufti, with men who were going to France within the week. . . .

An eternal Questioning! Everything, everybody, seemed an embodied and personal demand. Everything, everybody—the khaki, blossoming now like a brown flower at every street-corner; the boy Parkins who had to be assured that his place would be kept before he enlisted; a traveller and two mechanics at the factory who went first and asked afterwards; Miss Macpherson’s eyes when she dictated the Havana mail; Pat. For Patricia grew very silent those days. . . .

By the first week in September Peter had solved the Questioning; reduced it to a question. And the question, briefly, was this: “To join up meant the almost certain sacrifice of Nirvana. Not to join up, meant the definite loss of self-respect. Which should he do?” He had no fear of the soldiering part: on the contrary—being entirely and blessedly ignorant of warfare’s actualities—it seemed to him the obvious, glorious and easy solution of his problem. To abandon his business-responsibilities, on the other hand, implied—quite apart from the pang of giving up the thing he most loved—a lack of moral courage, a yielding to popular clamour.

Curiously enough, it was not Patricia but Hubert Rawlings who clinched Peter’s decision.

§ 5

It was a month and three days since the outbreak of war. Paris—thought Peter, as he sat alone in the back office at Lime Street—was practically safe. Still, it might easily be six months before the Cossacks got to Berlin. Meanwhile. . . .

The telephone-bell jangled; he took up the receiver, heard his brother-in-law’s voice.

“Peter Jameson speaking. . . . That you, Hubert? . . . Right, I’ll be in if you come along at once.”

Hubert Rawlings, Publicity Agent, had not been worried with any whispers of the “English-speaking spirit.” The contemptible cry of “business as usual” found him a ready convert. Government officials, eager to do anything except fight, had decided on a campaign of advertising, as wasteful to the country’s purse as it was degrading to its patriotism; and in Hubert Rawlings they discovered an invaluable henchman. Posters, leaflets, newspaper-stereos—one more revolting to decent folk than the other—spawned themselves in his lower-middle-class mind, spewed themselves over London and the provinces. Officially, he made no profits on these transactions, actually. . . . And in addition, there was always the advantage of being “in with the Government.” One might get . . . Heaven knows what one mightn’t get. . . . Also, one had “opportunities.”

Such an “opportunity” brought Hubert Rawlings to Peter’s office.

He came in, silk-hatted, morning-coated, flower in buttonhole, perfectly at ease. Already his voice had assumed a faint touch of the “Whitehall manner.”

“How do you do, Peter?” he said. “I hope you didn’t wait for me.”

“Afternoon, Hubert. Take a pew. What’s the trouble?”

“I came,” announced Rawlings mysteriously, “to ask you if you’d like to have a share in a—little deal some friends of mine are interested in. I need hardly tell you it’s all fair and above-board, or of course I shouldn’t have anything to do with it. Still—” he dropped his voice. “Naturally, anything I say remains strictly between the two of us.”

“Of course,” said Peter.

“It’s like this,” went on Rawlings. “I, we, happen to know that there will shortly be a big demand for a certain article.” Encouraged by Peter’s non-committal attitude, he waxed confidential. “I may as well tell you what the article is. It’s overcoats.”

“Overcoats?”

“Yes. For Kitchener’s Army. You know, I presume, that owing to shortage of dye, there has been a delay in the deliveries of khaki. A very serious delay. So the men are to be provided, as a temporary expedient, with civilian great-coats. Ready-made. Do you follow me so far?”

“Perfectly,” said Peter stiffly. The other, had he been looking, might have noticed a dangerous quietness in his brother-in-law’s attitude.

“Now I, we, have an option on ten thousand of these overcoats. There are four of us in the deal so far. The coats work out, for cash, at fifteen shillings. . . . The War Office is paying twenty-five. That”—the voice became unctuous—“means a profit of. . . .”

“Five thousand pounds,” snapped Peter. For a moment, old habits asserted themselves; he was tempted. A thousand more for Nirvana! Then all the emotions of four weeks blazed into cold flame. He got up from his chair, eyes black with rage; controlled himself in time; and said slowly:—

“Don’t slam the door as you go out, Rawlings.”

“But surely . . .” began the other.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Damn your eyes, will you get out of this office before I throw you out? . . .”

Rawlings went.

§ 6

Two nights later—at the very moment when the Beasts in Gray, muttering “Grosses Malheur” as they shuffled through darkling towns, were reeling back to the Aisne before the Armies of France and a handful of Englishmen—Peter Jameson and his wife sat over their coffee in the drawing-room at Lowndes Square.

All through dinner, he had been absorbed and reticent. Now, he put down his empty cup on the little table by the side of his armchair; took a long pull at his cigar; began to speak. For a month she had watched him; speculated about him; hoped; doubted; realized his difficulties. But she had given no hint of her feelings: this was a matter for a man’s own conscience; no woman, not even his wife, possessed the right to influence him.

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

“Yes, dear.” A little of what he must say, she knew. Her eyes kindled to the prospect of it.

“Pat,” he began, “I don’t think I can keep out of this thing any longer. It wouldn’t be”—he fumbled for the expression—“quite playing the game. But if I go, there are risks. . . .”

“Naturally.” She schooled her voice to calmness.

“I don’t mean those sort of risks. If anything happened to me, the Insurance would be paid. I went round to see the Phoenix People about that this morning.” Unaccountably, the reasonableness of the view irritated her. “I mean business risks. To begin with, there’s the factory.”

He began to talk about Nirvana; tried to show her only the financial position. His personal feelings, he felt, must not be allowed to complicate a simple issue. But the intonation of his voice betrayed the feelings behind it; and she realized, for the first time, how much Nirvana meant to him.

“You would hate to give it up,” she interrupted.

“It would be rather,” he hesitated for a moment, “a wrench. Still I’ve discounted that. Of course, the whole thing’s a gamble. But I’m not going to quit yet. After all, I shan’t go out for some time. Meanwhile, I can keep in touch. Only I won’t put any more capital in. If Reid and Bramson between them—I saw Reid yesterday and he’ll do his best—can manage to keep her going: well and good. If not, we must cut our losses.”

“Will they be very heavy?”

“They might be. But that isn’t all. . . .”

“Oh, what do you care about losses?” her heart cried out in her. “He’s going. He’s a man. What else matters?” And then, suddenly, fear held her, battling down reason, patriotism, pride, everything except itself. . . .

But the man’s voice went on talking—coolly, logically, impersonally. That he was voicing the spirit of a great sacrifice, that Patricia realized the sacrifice, loved him for it, that the “pal” he had known for eight years existed no longer, had become at a word his mate, his woman to do with as he would—these things were hidden both then and for long after from Peter Jameson, cigar merchant. . . .

“So you see,” he said, summing up the case as he saw it, “it means a big risk. If the factory goes down, if Jameson’s business doesn’t improve, if Simpson won’t renew the partnership agreement in January, if one or any of these things happen, it might mean giving up this house. . . .”

Inwardly, the bathos of it made her laugh. If he could give up so much, surely she could give up her little. Reason and the training of years came to her aid. To him, she was still the pal, only the pal. Nothing more than that!

“I quite follow, dear,” she said.

“But we won’t consider the black side, old thing. Don’t let’s panic. The War may be over by Christmas. Till then, we’ll carry on just as we are. I shan’t even get rid of the motor.”

Now that the awkward task of putting the position before his wife was over, optimism held him. For a moment, the sense of having done the right thing blurred his business judgment.

“You’re a topping pal, Pat,” he said to her as they kissed good-night. . . . But Patricia, waking to the first shimmer of dawn through the chinks of the silk curtains, felt herself, for the first time, woman indeed. For now she loved him, utterly, beyond friendship: and lying there, quite still in her own narrow bed, she vowed this new love to his service in whatsoever guise he most should need it. . . .

§ 7

“The whole thing’s a farce, Pat.”

It was already three weeks since Peter had been promised his commission; two since his “kit” had been delivered from his tailors.

Outwardly the situation between husband and wife had not altered. Reason told her that this new love she felt for him could win its reward only by patience. And she needed all her patience those days. Disorganization held no humour for Peter Jameson. His patriotism, if it could have found expression, would have vented itself in few words: “There’s a job to be done. A rotten job. Let’s do it, and get back to our businesses.” He was still—in the intervals of importuning the War Office—running those businesses; hearing telephoned reports; suggesting this, vetoing that. But more than a fraction of the old-time keenness had evaporated. The blind spirit of War had caught him, was carrying him onwards. . . .

He walked over to the bureau between the windows; picked out a telegraph-form from the racked paper-holder; began to write.

She looked at him across the breakfast-débris—calm, golden-haired, very fresh in her white blouse, her blue walking-skirt; guessed, from the bent back, the concentration in his taut brain. Looking, love leaped into her dark eyes, moistening them.

“I think this’ll do,” he said, turning so suddenly that she scarcely had time to drop her lashes: “Colonel Thompson. Room 154. War Office. Reference our recent interview am now ready and shall be glad of instructions to report for duty. Reply paid. Jameson. 22a, Lowndes Square, W.”

“You can’t send that,” said Patricia.

“Can’t I?” He rang for Smith, gave instructions for immediate dispatch of the wire.

§ 8

Patricia, coming in from her afternoon walk with the children, found a tawny envelope on the hall table. The telegram was addressed “Jameson,” and she opened it casually; felt her heart stop as though two fingers had clutched it; heard Primula’s voice: “What’s the matter, Mummy?” . . .

“Nothing’s the matter, dear,” she said calmly. “You and Evelyn had better go upstairs to Nanny.”

She watched them, running up the broad stone staircase, out of sight. Then she read the pencilled message again: “Report for duty 10th Chalkshires Shoreham Camp immediately. Thompson. War Office.”

“What a fool I am,” she said to herself. “What a selfish unpatriotic fool!”

PART SIX
PLAYING AT SOLDIERS

§ 1

Except for the newness of his “Cavalry-cord” tunic and a slight lack of suppleness in the carefully-browned belt, nothing about the quiet gray-eyed young man in the otherwise-empty first-class compartment on the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway betrayed the civilian of a day ago. The battered valise and an old-fashioned Army basin, leather-covered—relics of a trip to the East—did not smack of the newly-joined. Close-cut dark hair, clipped moustaches, correctly-wound puttees and dubbined shooting-boots, completed the illusion. But Peter Jameson’s mind had not yet cast off its old allegiances.

Rather, as he whirled Sussexwards, did those discarded problems assume acuter import. One by one he conned over the arrangements made—fortnightly reports from Lime Street, weekly statements and a bi-weekly letter from Bramson, accurate statistics from Reid; wondered if they might have been improved upon. And speculating on these things, Peter began to feel—for the first time—the real pang of parting from Nirvana. It was as though he had cut the main interest out of life; as if the entity of his creating had died. Symbolically, he seemed to see his two flashing signs, as they had been before the new lighting restrictions; “NIRVANA OR NOTHING,” they had blazed. Now, they blazed no more. Nothing!

He pulled his “Infantry Training” from his pocket; began to study Battalion Drill. “A battalion in mass. . . .”

But the subconscious mind would not visualize battalions either in mass or other formations. The mind returned to its old love, refused to be comforted. The mind did not recall the morning’s partings—with Patricia, careful to display no emotion,—with the children, excited at their first vision of “Daddy in khaki.” Instead, it called up figures from balance-sheets, the factory working at full pressure, that dim-lit back-office in the City: till gradually, came recollection of Mr. “Raymond P. Sellers.” . . .

Peter had already posted two of the letters to Prout, visited the Bloomsbury flat as promised, found everything in order. Only a photograph, a girl’s photograph, was missing. And that, Peter had not noticed. But from Francis Gordon himself had come no word. The War seemed to have swallowed him up, utterly, mysteriously.

So Peter sped on, through the bright countryside, thinking of his cousin. . . . And at that very moment thousands of miles away, in a great hotel at Los Angeles, California, a girl said to herself: “Even if he has gone to the war, it’s mean of him not to write and tell me so.” She stood at the window for a moment, looking out onto the sunlit lawn. Till suddenly, the lawn seemed to grow dark. “He can’t have been killed,” she whispered. “He can’t have been killed.”

It is not easy for “agents in enemy countries” to keep up a regular correspondence with the young women whose photographs they carry in their pocket-books!

§ 2

To get from London to Shoreham, you must change trains at Brighton. Peter used the opportunity to lunch at the Royal York Hotel. Seeing him alone at a table by the window, Harry Preston, most vigilant of proprietors, came over; proffered an old brandy in celebration of the new uniform.

“That’s the Chalkshire badge you’re wearing, isn’t it?” asked Harry Preston.

“Yes, I’m joining them at Shoreham this afternoon.”

The little man whistled.

“What’s the joke?” queried Peter.

“Not for me to say, of course. But I’ve been doing business with your firm for some years; and if you’ll take my advice—don’t play cards with a gentleman named Locksley-Jones.”

“Who’s he?”

“You’ll find out when you get there.”

“Thanks for the hint,” smiled Peter. “Have a cigar, won’t you?”

§ 3

Colonel Andrews, a diffident, not unkindly man of the pre-Boer-War school, expressionless of face, and stocky of figure, stood talking to his Adjutant in the recently-occupied camp on the flat fields near Shoreham Railway Station. Rattled a taxi down the road; stopped at the gate.

“Another officer, I suppose,” said the Colonel. “Might be a ‘regular’ by his old valise. You’d better go and look after him. I’m off home for tea. Send up to the house if you want me for anything.” He strode back across the parade-ground, through the lines of tents; and disappeared.

Peter acknowledged the salute of a sentry, still in civilian clothes except for a swagger-cane; paid his taxi; gave instructions for his kit to be dumped at the guard-tent till further orders.

“That’s the Adjutant, Sir,” said the sentry, pointing to a bow-legged figure in khaki making his way across the parade-ground towards them. Peter—saluting although the newcomer only wore the two stars of a full lieutenant,—saw a pair of puffy eyes under a thatch of sandy hair, two ears rather full in the lobe, a goodish nose, and a set of bad teeth between thin lips. “And what can I do for you?” said the other, carelessly acknowledging the compliment.

“Are you the Adjutant of the 10th Chalkshires?”

“I’m Lieutenant Locksley-Jones, at present acting in that capacity.”

“The deuce you are,” thought Peter; then aloud, “My name’s Jameson. I’ve been ordered by the War Office to join this battalion.”

“I don’t know anything about you. The W.O. haven’t sent us any instructions.” Locksley-Jones fingered scraggy moustache doubtfully; scrutinized the telegram Peter produced.

“All right,” he said. “You’ll have to share a tent with the other fellows. Meanwhile you’d better come and have some tea. Those are the officers’ lines,” he pointed to a row of tents by the road, “the men are over there,” his stick switched across the parade-ground, “and we mess in this big marquee.”

“I don’t wonder Harry Preston whistled,” thought Peter, as they picked their way across the tent-ropes to Mess; passed through the deserted “ante-room” where a red stove glowed welcome, into the main part of the marquee.

Scattered about in groups at the trestle-tables under the swinging oil-lamps, little knots of officers sat eating and drinking. Civilian waiters bustled about, serving them.

“Hello, Adjutant,” exclaimed a tall thin Major, twinkling face red-veined with port and the open air. “What’s this? Another budding Napoleon?”

Locksley-Jones introduced Peter deferentially; the Major shook hands; asked the usual “Done any soldiering before?”; was told “Yes, Sir. Eton Volunteers”; apologized for talking shop in Mess; and buried his nose in a large cup of boiling tea.

“Peter Jameson?” he said, emerging. “Let me think. Name sounds familiar somehow. You’re not Tessa Bradley’s son, by any chance, are you? She married a man named Jameson.”

“My father, Sir,” said Peter.

“Good Gad,” said Major Fox-Goodwin, “why I was at their wedding. Thirty-five years ago or I’m a Dutchman. Fancy, little Tessa having a grown-up son. I say, Jones,—beg pardon, Locksley-Jones. . . .”

“Yes, Major.” The Adjutant was visibly irritated; firstly by his superior’s reception of the newcomer, secondly at the mistake (which he knew intentional) in his own name.

“Young Jameson will be posted to my company. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Major.”

“And if he knows his drills, you’re not to put him ‘on the square.’ See?”

“Quite, Major.” The acting adjutant finished his tea hurriedly; went out.

“Between you and me and the gatepost,” whispered Fox-Goodwin, “Andrews will make the mistake of his life if he keeps that young bounder in the Orderly Room much longer.”

Peter nodded comprehension; and the old man—he was, as he informed his new subaltern, “rising sixty-five”—began to reminisce. He had soldiered under “Chips” Bradley in the late seventies, or was it the early eighties? “Damned if he knew, but Chips Bradley had the best eye for a pretty gal . . . and as for his two daughters, Tessa and Dolores: bit Jewish-looking though . . . they got that from their mother of course.” He rambled on for nearly ten minutes; then called across the room. “Here, Bromley, come and be introduced to our latest.”

Harold Bromley lounged over with the unmistakable gait of the ex-Cavalryman. A tall unsmiling fellow, heavy-moustached, light-blue of eye and auburn-haired, who wore the two South African ribbons, yellow-red-black green-white, across his rather crumpled tunic.

“Leave you two youngsters alone,” announced the Major, introductions over; and wiping his gray moustache with a brown bandanna handkerchief, withdrew to the ante-room.

“Marvellous old chap,” commented Bromley. He spoke rather slowly but without any drawl. “Always reminds me of a character in Thackeray. Do you read Thackeray?”

“I’m not much of a bookworm,” said Peter; and waited for more information. He had knocked about the world enough to learn the advantage of listening much and talking little on first acquaintance. But his liking for the grave man—whom in spite of the single star on the shoulders of his high-collared tunic, he judged to be nearly forty—was instinctive.

“I’m glad you’re coming to ‘B’ Company,” went on Bromley. “The Major’s a great sport—but he doesn’t know a word of his drill; and now that he’s acting second-in-command, most of the work falls on myself and the Sergeant-Major. I suppose you know enough to come on parade right away, without bothering about recruit-drill.”

“Oh, I think so,” said Peter; and proffered his inevitable cigar-case.

Bromley accepted a cigar; and the two sat talking for a few minutes. Characteristically, neither spoke of his life before joining the army; their conversation confined itself to generalities.

“Let’s go into the ante-room,” suggested Bromley.

They found two comfortable basket-chairs near the stove. Locksley-Jones, returned from the Orderly-room, had established himself at one of the baize-covered tables, was tearing the wrapper from a fresh pack of cards. “Care for a game, Jameson?” he called across the room.

Bromley looked sideways at his new friend (the instinctive liking had been mutual); saw his eyelashes just flicker; heard him say, “No, thanks, not tonight.” The ante-room began to fill up; grew loud with talk, hazy with tobacco-smoke. The Adjutant’s rubber soon filled. Bromley, in a discreet undertone, began pointing out various worthies.

There was Captain Mosely, a great ox of a fellow, ex-Regular newly-rejoined, who sat by himself in a far corner, writing letters—the flimsy chair creaking each time he dived for ink (“O. C. ‘D’ Company,” whispered Bromley): and Simcox who commanded “A”—a fat stockbroker of forty, looking curiously out of his element among a group of very junior subalterns. There was Fanshawe (“son of Judge Fanshawe”) beetle-browed, black-locked, long of leg and short of temper, discussing Military Law with Bareton, a tall clean-shaven young lawyer, light-haired, stubborn in temperament, a puritan fanatic with a tendency to dreaming, (“they’re running ‘C’ between ’em, rather efficient fellows,” confided Bromley): and Peabody, a brown-faced kid of eighteen, looking the child in his converted cadet tunic; Arkwright, tall and lank with the unmistakable stoop of the junior master in an English Public School; Mackenzie, a round-faced Scotch boy who had been studying for “the Ministry” when war broke out—and many others. A curious team to be driven by a Colonel of limited outlook, who had made his first mistake when he decided to live out of Mess, his second when he confided the acting-Adjutancy to the astute but unscrupulous Locksley-Jones.

“Care to come round the lines?” asked Bromley. “I usually go about now.”

They found their caps and canes, sauntered out.

§ 4

Already, it was dusk—a chill dry night, moonless. Under the shadows of the trees in front of them, tents glowed—warm orange cones in the darkness. Figures passed them as they walked across the dry grass; touched caps awkwardly; muttered “Good-night, sir.”

Bromley made way towards a light that shone out like an eye from the open doorway of the first tent. Approaching, Peter saw, under it, a head in a khaki cap, bowed over an open book. The head lifted to the sound of their footsteps; the body underneath jerked itself to attention.

“Good-evening, sir,” said Company-Sergeant-Major Gladeney—a fierce little alert-eyed man with the waxed moustaches of the old-time non-com.

“Evening, Colour Sergeant,” Bromley acknowledged the salute. “May we come in?”

“With pleasure, sir.”

They stepped over the tent-fly; and were made welcome on two packing-cases.

“This is Mr. Jameson, one of our new officers, Colour Sergeant”—it must be explained that Bromley had not yet accustomed himself to the new title of “Company-Sergeant-Major”—“do you think you can find him a good servant?”

“I think so, sir. There’s a man here, name of Priestley, who was with us in South Africa. He ought to take a stripe but he won’t. . . .”

“Knows the game too well, I suppose,” suggested Bromley.

“That’s about the size of things, sir. He’s out now; but if your batman could look after Mr. Jameson for tonight, I’ll send him over first thing in the morning.”

“Very well, Colour Sergeant. How are the boys?”

“All right, sir. They’re shaking down pretty well.” He relaxed a little, put a match to his pipe. “Wonderful thing to me, sir, how they put up with things. Those boots you bought in Brighton were a God-send, sir. They may be able to march now. Before, half of them couldn’t do more than hobble. And tomorrow we’ll be serving out the new uniforms.”

“What, khaki?” interrupted Peter.

“No, sir. Workhouse stuff, sir—at least that’s what they look like to me. Blue slops and forage-caps for the most part. And a few of our old militia uniforms.”

“Not the old scarlet-runners.” This from Bromley.

“The identical, sir, with the old white facings. Don’t know what they’ll look like when we get ’em dressed up, sir. But it’ll be better than their civvies anyway.” He patted his own be-ribboned khaki tunic, pulled hard at his pipe.

“Any need for me to go round the lines, Colour Sergeant?”

“I don’t think so, sir. Mr. Fanshawe is Orderly Officer tonight.”

Bromley got up; said “Thank you, Colour Sergeant. I think that will be all then”; acknowledged Gladeney’s salute, and stepped back into the darkness. Peter followed.

Walking back, Bromley linked arms; said, “Look here, old chap, you’d better come into my tent tonight. I’m a quiet old stick—but you’ll find the kids a bit trying.”

§ 5

So began a real friendship.

Began too, for Peter Jameson, a new life—the life which every untrained gentleman of the Empire who could spoof a recruiting doctor into passing him young enough or fit enough for service, was then living. A life neither of comfort nor—as many wrote and made much money by their writing—of good humour. A life of adults gone back to the irritation of school: save that for school-house they had sodden camps; for dining-hall, a draughty tent where fleecing contractors served half-cold meals; for schoolmasters, the incompetence of brave fellows wrongly employed.

But neither Peter nor Bromley concerned themselves over much, in those first weeks, with generalities. They realized, none better, that all was not well with the “Voluntary System,” with the Chalkshires; that Locksley-Jones’ influence with their Colonel continued to grow, that his pernicious example had already affected the junior officers. They realized—and went on with their work. For them, as for Fanshawe and Bareton in “C” Company, nothing save their men existed. And for every minute they lavished on their men, their men repaid them a hundredfold.

Those men! For, of the officers, one does not write. The well-educated, the well-off, the comfortable classes, must needs defend the country from which they draw their riches and their education: and he who did not do so—voluntarily, without compulsion or fear of compulsion—whatever his fancied responsibilities to his profession, to his businesses, to his housen, to his women or his children, is surely anathema maran atha, the moral leper, the pariah among his kind.

But those men! men of the People: uneducated, unwashed, foul-mouthed, drinkers and womanizers if you will; the “proletariat,” product of shop and Board School, of mill and mine, of farm and factory; those men who came voluntarily from all the earth, waving no flags, moved only by that dumb blind Anglo-Saxon spirit which has made and unmade Kings since the beginning of time! how shall one write of these?

They had, in those early days, neither leaders nor equipment. They trained, grotesquely, with blocks of rough wood—hewn to the semblance of a rifle. They were herded fourteen, sixteen and twenty together, in leaking tents, with never a floor-board between their one blanket and the mud below. They were flung out into our towns in suits of sloppy blue, in overcoats cobbled together by sweated aliens—a mockery on the public streets. They had scarcely any leave. Their wives and children starved because their separation-allowances were not paid. Their own food was cooked, weather permitting, in shallow trenches on the bare ground—with civilian houses fifty yards away.

And when the sodden camps chosen for them stood two feet deep in greasy slime, when neither their single blankets nor their single suits could be dried, when the fires would not burn and the sick-parade marched double-company-strong to the doctor’s tent half-a-mile away—then, they were vaccinated, willy-nilly, and left to cure their swollen arms as best they might, jostling against each other in their crowded styes!

Till gradually that first fine enthusiasm, which made them trainable even by the untrained, oozed from their souls—even as the mud oozed up through the ground on which they slept: till all the keenness, and all the joy, and all the glory of the finest profession in the world evaporated; leaving nothing save the dour stark spirit of Anglo-Saxondom to carry them on.

And as, in mud and muddle and incompetence, these early volunteers began their soldiering; so, in blood and incompetence and disaster, most of them ended it. Yet though they grumbled, they never weakened; though the song died on their lips and the jest from their eyes, neither their hearts nor their limbs flinched from the tasks appointed.

Let library-historians give the palm to this Field-Marshal or that Statesman if they will, we who did our best for him know that it was the “common man,” “poor bloody Tommy”—on his lorry or his ration-cart, at his telephone-station or his observation-post, in his trench or his gun-pit—“poor bloody Tommy,” hungry sometimes, tired mostly, frightened to the depths of his unimaginative soul, but enduring always, who staved off every British defeat and won every British victory all the way back from Mons to Compiègne and all the way forward from Compiègne back to Mons again.

Pray God that he find honest leaders—for leaders he must have—in this future he has won for us!

PART SEVEN
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

§ 1

“Take it from me, P.J.,” said Bromley, as he dumped himself down on the untidy camp-bedstead and began re-winding his puttees, “this is a damn good battalion—to get out of.”

It had rained during the night, making early parade impossible, postponing the morning’s route-march for an hour so as to enable the men to get some breakfast.

“Oh, I don’t think it’s quite as bad as that, old man. The Company’s getting on all right,” said Peter, picking up the letters which Private Priestley had deposited—according to custom—on his canvas pillow.

“I wasn’t talking about the Company. Nothing wrong there. Considering the circumstances, the way they’ve come on is a miracle. I was talking about the Battalion in general, its Adjutant in particular. You see this isn’t a new game to me, P.J. I’ve seen bad fellows ruin the finest shows before now.”

“Why can’t you leave Locksley-Jones alone? He’s not doing us any harm. Besides the Colonel’s all right—although he did tell me at last night’s lecture that ‘the machine-gun is not a weapon of precision.’ ”

“He wouldn’t say that if he’d been shot in the stomach by one, like I was,” commented Bromley. “Not that he’s a bad chap, all the same. But he leaves too much to Locksley. Locksley’s playing for his own hand all the time. I don’t mind his rooking the youngsters at Bridge, or running them over to Brighton in his car every night. If they’re fools enough to go with him, that’s their hunt. But when it comes to his interfering with Company Commanders in their recommendations for promotion. . . .”

“But he hasn’t done that, surely?”

“Yes, he has. I didn’t mean to tell you, but the Major put both of us in for our second star”—(the Major had actually put Bromley’s name down for a Captaincy and Bromley knew it)—“and Locksley blocked it with the Colonel.”

“Well, I don’t care about promotion anyway,” said Peter, starting to open his letters.

“Don’t be a fool, P.J. Everybody who’s any good wants to go up. And can’t you follow what Locksley’s game is? I can. He’s keeping the Captaincies for his pals. Especially these new blighters who keep on coming down to see him in mufti. You mark my words, they’ll all be turning up as officers in a week or two. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the men and the old Major, I’d apply for a transfer tomorrow.”

Such conversations were not unusual between them. Locksley-Jones, confirmed in his Adjutancy, was all (and more) than Bromley had hinted. But for the moment Peter had forgotten the Chalkshires.

He was reading, very carefully, a long letter written by his brother Arthur—a letter from Java, which had been two months under way. Arthur put his case very clearly. The tobacco-farm, newly established, carried a mortgage of £2000. Arthur’s capital had gone in farm-implements, in seedlings, in the cheese-cloth with which he was experimenting. He couldn’t realize, owing to the drop in land values. The mortgage-money had been lent by a Hun trading-house. Under the Dutch laws, they could prevent his leaving the country. “I can’t even get to Singapore, unless you’ll lend me the money,” wrote Arthur. “I’ve asked them to foreclose, but they won’t. The interest is 8% and they say I can make it for them as long as I stop here. Damn them!”

Peter knew enough about the tobacco-farming industry to realize that the “mortgage” Arthur spoke of must include a lien on the growing crop; enough about Hun methods of peaceful penetration to understand the seriousness of the position: decided, after railing inwardly at the untimeliness of the demand, that he would have to find the cash somehow.

“Fall in, ‘C’ Company,” boomed Sergeant-Major Gladeney’s voice. Peter shuffled the remainder of his correspondence into his tunic-pocket; pulled on his cap and gloves; switched stick under arm; and stalked out.

“Something’s upset P.J.,” thought Bromley, following at leisure.

§ 2

In those early days of “Kitchener’s Army” week-end leave for officers was more of a habit than a privilege; and though Locksley-Jones demurred slightly at the irregularity, Friday evening found Peter, haversack at side, waiting for the 4:30 upon the bleak, dirty station of Shoreham-on-Sea.

The human animal is amazingly adaptable, amazingly restricted. Peter had been scarcely four weeks a soldier; but all the way up to town the old life seemed almost a thing of the past. Only arrival at Victoria, bright under its arc-lamps against the darkness outside, brought it back.

His mind, now concentrated on the question of whether to borrow the two thousand from his own bank or overdraw it from Jameson’s, did not allow of careless merrymaking. So that Patricia, although he fell in readily enough with her suggestion of two stalls at the Palace Vaudeville, found him curiously unaltered. He kissed her, but no more warmly than if he had just returned from a business-trip. She had expected nothing else: nevertheless she felt unreasonably disappointed. Physically, fresh air and exercise had tanned his cheeks, hardened his muscles: mentally, she could detect no change. And as they sat in the theatre, she could not but envy the obvious good spirits, the excited affection of the other couples about them.

He told her about Arthur; talked of “B” Company; answered questions about his new life readily. Nirvana, she heard, went as well as could be expected; Jameson’s sales had been rather disappointing. It was nice of her to offer to drive him back on Sunday in the car; but he thought the journey home, in the dark and without a chauffeur, might be too much for her.

Simpson too, asked by wire to be in the office on Saturday, could not see much difference in our Mr. Jameson. His grip of things did not seem to have suffered. He enquired about customers by name; about Hartopp (geborener Hagenburg) in particular. He mentioned the partnership deed; suggested a tentative renewal—say for two years or the “duration”—on the old terms. The older man, warning him vaguely about taking two thousand pounds out of the business at such a time, met with a curt, “I don’t like it any more than you do, but a fellow must stand by his own.” Mention of Beckmanns evoked another flash of temper.

Bramson, on the other hand, summoned peremptorily to give up the better part of his Saturday afternoon off, found Peter rather overbearing: confided the fact to his cousin Marcus with whom he dined that evening.

Said Marcus, “My boy, you forget that you’re a civilian to him now.”

Whereafter, the two settled down to piquet—with occasional references to the stationary condition of Nirvana trade as compared with the leaping canteen business of “Pullman Virginias.”

“Pretty” Bramson was perfectly straight: but after all “a fellow must stand by his own!”

§ 3

In the crowded Pullman car of the last Sunday night train back to Shoreham, Peter fell in with his Colonel. The diffident, kindly man—usually shy with his subalterns—offered a whisky-and-soda; grew a little talkative.

“I wish I were out in France,” he confided. “I’d rather be a Major out there than a Colonel in England any day. But the powers-that-be won’t hear of it. It looks like a long war, Jameson—a really long war. But of course it might end tomorrow—and then one would never have had one’s chance.”

“Do you think we shall be going out soon, sir?” Peter asked the stock-question from pure habit.

Colonel Andrews began to talk the other side of war, the difficulties of finding seasoned wood for rifle-stocks, the lack of dyes for khaki. His outlook, if limited, was—except on the question of machine-guns—extraordinarily sound: and Peter, when their homeward way separated in the rain at the cross-roads by the cycle-shop, found difficulty in realizing how so decent a chap could have let himself be misled into taking Locksley-Jones for Adjutant. . . .

Turning into the Camp, Peter could see immediately that something must be wrong. Although it was nearly one o’clock in the morning, lights glowed in most of the officers’ tents. Across the blurr and rain drizzle of the parade-ground, under the acetylene flares by the latrine-buckets, figures moved, lanterns swayed. He heard voices calling.

“What’s up?” he asked the sentry.

“Trouble over in the lines, I’m afraid, sir. They do say as ’ow ‘D’ Company’s flooded out altogether.”

Peter stumbled across the darkness towards his own lines; nearly collided with a dripping figure in gum-boots. A torch flashed in his face.

“That you, P.J.?” said Bromley’s voice. “Been out on the tiles, and come to have a look round at the picnic?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing much. Only most of the Camp flooded; about twenty tents blown down; and half the men soaked to the skin. ‘A’ and ‘D’ have got it worst. Hark at Mosely’s voice.”

They heard it, raised like a foghorn above the din: “Now, then, you chaps, form up, will you? Never mind your blasted blankets.”

“Come and have a look-see. It’s worth while. Reminds me of a stampede in South Africa.” Peter had never known Bromley speak so crisply.

They pashed back to the lines; found confusion indescribable. Mosely had by now got his company into some sort of order; they stood there, dripping and shivering, faces white under the big flare, unlaced boots flopping as they stamped on the lime-washed slime: but Simcox’s lines looked as if a tornado had struck them. Tents lay in writhing coils; from under them, men crawled, mud-soaked and cursing; the stockbroker, in gum-boots and pyjamas, a “British Warm” coat to complete the costume, alternately damned their eyes and adjured them to “buck up”; his subalterns scuttered about, still half asleep, laughing and quite useless. “C” were already away, making for the railway-station. Peter heard Bareton’s high voice shepherding them, “Don’t straggle there. Keep together,” and a man in the rear four grousing, “Bloomin’ fine weather for ducks. . . .”

“But what’s happened to us?” he asked Bromley—for “B” Company’s tents stood dark and deserted.

Bromley chuckled: “Oh, they don’t catch me that way, P.J. Our men are all tucked up comfy round a big stove in the Schoolhouse. I saw this coming at about half-past eight: so I sent Gladeney to find a good billet; routed the chaps out; posted a sentry to tell the leave-men where to make for. . . . And we slacked our tent-ropes when the rain started.”

“Why didn’t you warn the others?”

“I did; but they wouldn’t listen. I’m a quiet old stick, I am.” He chuckled again, with all the “old soldier’s” delight at having scored off his colleagues.

Far away, on the high road, they heard the roar of a car; saw the glare of a single headlight; watched it nosing for the Camp gates.

“That’s our friend the Adjutant,” commented Bromley, “back from one of his little jaunts to Brighton.”

The engine stopped; the headlight was cut off. A minute or two later, Locksley-Jones’ bow-legged figure came waddling towards them. Bromley flashed the torch in his face; and they saw his puffy eyes flinch as the light struck them.

“Who are you?” he called.

“Friend.” Bromley, a little above his usual grave self, had gone clean back to South African days. The amenities of home service were, for the moment, completely in eclipse.

“Oh, it’s you, Bromley, is it? What’s all this skylarking?” blustered Locksley.

The situation was curtly explained to him; and he turned for advice—as weak men will in a crisis—to the stronger character.

“What do you think I ought to do?”

“Do!” said Bromley contemptuously. “Do? Well, if I were you, I should go to bed. This is a man’s job.”

“He’ll never forgive you for that,” said Peter, snuggling gratefully between his Jaeger blankets.

“My part!” chuckled Bromley across the darkness of the tent.

PART EIGHT
DISSENSION

§ 1

A man and his wife can occasionally (if they are very circumspect) conceal matrimonial disturbances from their servants: but, in a Regiment, the slightest tension between officers is known to the lower ranks almost at the moment of its occurrence. Mess-waiters gossip; batmen gossip; the Sergeant’s Mess gossips: between a parade and a parade, twelve hundred men are taking sides in the quarrel of two. And the Chalkshires were no ordinary peace-time regiment: volunteers to a man; of different social gradings but almost every one a Londoner; intensely curious about their new profession; it did not take them long to discover—“B” Company especially—how matters stood between 2nd Lieutenant Harold Bromley and Captain and Adjutant Locksley-Jones.

By the time that the late-November rains (and various hints in the Press about “the scandalous state of some of our Camps”) drove the Chalkshires out of the Shoreham slime into billets at Worthing Green, a suburb of Worthing-on-Sea, bets were being freely laid (in beer) on the result.

“Bet any of you,” said Private Longstaffe, who had been a bookmaker’s clerk before he joined, “that old Bromley downs the blighter before we’re a month older.” He looked furtively round the snuggery of the “Dog and Bun.”

“Well, per’aps he will; and per’aps he won’t,” said Peter’s batman Priestley—an old soldier with curling moustaches and a roving eye. “Anyway, I ’ope ‘P.J.’ won’t go if Bromley has to.”

“P.J.’s orlright.” The verdict came from a little man in the corner. “ ’E’s orlright: though ’e does damn and swear like ’ell. My sister, she works for ’im up in the Brixton Road. ‘ ’Addick,’ ’e says to me the other dai—you know the wai ’e ’as of cockin’ ’is cigar up in the corner of his mouf,—‘ ’Addick,’ ’e says, ‘ ’aven’t I told you a ’undred bloodstained times not to crorss your bloodstained bootlices?’ ‘You certainly ’ave, sir,’ I says. ‘Then why the ’ell,’ says ’e, ‘don’t you do what you’re told?’ ’Ee don’t know I know ’e’s got a factory. . . .” This secret knowledge seemed to give Private Haddock a peculiar satisfaction.

Conversation meandered on.

§ 2

Meanwhile, Peter and Bromley—ignoring though quite conscious of Locksley’s growing animosity—went on with their jobs.

The two friends billeted at a low white cottage in the village street, about a hundred yards from the Mess—now established in two parlours and a long, bare dining-room at “The Feathers.” Bromley’s prophecy about Locksley bringing in his own pals was already coming true; they arrived almost daily, and the War Office added aspirants of its own. By the first week in December, officers numbered fifty.

Inevitably, cliques formed. The tiny differences of English “caste” (imperceptible to a foreigner) drew these together, separated those. Still, with few exceptions, all were keen. Without Locksley, Andrews might have driven them comfortably; made his selection at leisure; jettisoning the less trained when the Battalion proceeded overseas. But Locksley-Jones, an intriguer by instinct rather than design, shrewd without character, self-seeker and not patriot, made harmony impossible. One by one, he succeeded in securing the promotion of his favourites, posting them over the heads of men like Fanshawe and Bareton; who grumbled but carried on—loyal to their men at all personal costs.

So far, however, Major Fox-Goodwin had prevented any such interference with “B” Company. But the average Englishman’s distaste for trouble prevented him from forcing-through Bromley’s promotion to Captain.

§ 3

Peter, who, unlike Bromley, had not quarrelled openly with Locksley, and whose experience of bossing men did not include being bossed himself, failed to realize the exact position. During the day, work occupied him: through the long evenings when they sat together in the lamp-lit study, his mind was busy with other problems.

He discovered himself, for the first time in his life, missing Patricia—not the woman Patricia, but the pal Patricia: looking forward eagerly to her letters. Murray had enlisted—she wrote. She herself was busy; had taken up volunteer war-work; driving soldiers-on-leave across London in the car. But she accepted his suggestion that they should spend Christmas together at the Royal York.

But Patricia was not the main problem. Deliberately, Peter had postponed decision on the Nirvana gamble till the completion of the year’s trading. But instinct already warned him of the worst. Reid’s dissected statistics revealed, all too clearly, a serious decline in the export-business. Home-trade held stationary—but could hardly remain so on their limited advertising. Bramson’s letters had lost “snap”: he deplored, without suggesting remedies, the increase of competition—especially from his cousin’s travellers. “The Pullman business is going ahead. They’re not cutting down their advertisements,” was the burden of his cry: a cry which did not deceive our Mr. Jameson.

Peter realized perfectly, had done for some time, the danger of employing a competitor’s relative. On the other hand, if it became vital to sell out, that very danger might be turned to advantage. Marcus Bramson would not let his cousin lose a good job (“and the best part of a thousand pounds,” argued Peter) if there were a chance of acquiring Nirvana as a going concern.

But the ease with which, he felt, he could dispose of the business was poor consolation at best. Although decision had been reached, and reached irrevocably, before joining the Army, Peter could not contemplate without emotion the cold fact of giving up his factory.

The thing had meant so much to him; meant much still. If only he could save it! But Arthur’s two thousand precluded drawing another penny of capital from Jamesons: and, though it was not impossible to secure money in other ways—on his assurances for instance—the gamble would be too dangerous. . . .

To Peter, considering these points over the wreckage of tea, and Bromley, plunged as usual in a book, entered—on an afternoon early in December—Jack Bareton of “C” Company; said, “Hallo, you chaps. Just thought I’d look you up,” and dropped onto the horse-hair sofa in the corner of the tiny sitting-room.

“Don’t see you round often,” commented Bromley. He pushed the cigarettes across the table, and added: “What’s the matter?”

“Locksley.” The newcomer’s voice was curt; but his eyes, the eyes of a fanatic, blazed. “Locksley, blast his dirty soul.”

“Oh, chuck it,” said Peter, “I’m sick of Locksley.”

“So am I; so’s Fanshawe; so’s every decent chap in this show. If you two came into Mess a bit more often you’d know. But he’s gone too far this time.” The tone became shrill. “Too damn far altogether; and I’m going to have him out of this battalion or go myself. The man’s a blasted traitor. A traitor, I tell you.”

“Easy on, Bareton,” Bromley spoke very calmly. “You can’t make accusations like that about him.”

“I can. And I do. He said just now, over tea, right in front of everybody, that we should lose this war.”

“We probably shall,” put in Peter.

“It depends how these things are said. He meant it, I tell you. He meant it. And damn it, oh, damn it”—there were tears in the man’s eyes—“my governor was killed yesterday! Killed, I tell you. At Ypres. And all these bastards here can do is to talk about their bloody promotions. . . .”

Bromley got up; put his hand on Bareton’s shoulder. “I’m awfully sorry, old chap,” he said gruffly, “but your governor wouldn’t want you to lose your head, you know.”

The man pulled himself together with a huge effort; took a cigarette; puffed at it in silence. Came a knock on the door, and Fanshawe, tall, beetle-browed, obviously on the trail of his friend.

“Hallo, Fan,” said Peter.

“Hallo, P.J.” Then to Bareton, “Oh, here you are, are you? I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Come down town and have a drink.”

“I’m going to see the Colonel first,” said Bareton stubbornly.

“No, you’re not. You’re coming to the Club with me.” Fanshawe walked over, pulled his friend to his feet. “Come on, you old ass,” he said kindly. . . .

They went out.

“Poor devil,” said Peter, “he must have bolted straight here from Mess. . . .”

“And Fanshawe followed him.”

Both men, though neither would have admitted the fact to the other, were on edge.

“Fanshawe was right not to leave him alone,” went on Bromley. “You never know what a chap will do when he gets into that sort of state. Thank goodness, I’m a quiet old stick, I am.”

He shook his big frame; tugged at his moustache; sat down again. Peter lit a cigar. But neither Peter’s smoke nor Bromley’s book could keep Bareton out of their minds. He seemed to be still on the sofa, blazing tears in blazing eyes.

“Let’s call up a taxi and go into Brighton,” said Peter suddenly. “I can’t stick this room any more tonight.”

Bromley looked up from “The Newcomes”—“We’ll share it, then.”

“No, we won’t. My taxi and my dinner. Go and get your slacks on. I’ll run out and telephone for the car.”

§ 4

The Hotel Metropole at Brighton is a monstrous edifice of red-brick and iron balconies, which leers stolidly across an asphalt “Front” to the sea. The stone steps of its entrance, occupied of a morning by fat couples in wicker chairs, lead under a glass-roofed portico, through a revolving door past the mahogany “Reception Offices” to a narrow hall—fire-placed and crowded with comfortable Maplesque upholstery. Beyond, are marble corridors, lifts, and a dark lounge which opens out into a vast conservatory of glass-and-iron work, wherein the band plays and love-birds (some caged, some in coats and skirts) twitter behind dusty palm-trees.

In front of the fire-place in the hall, cocktail in hand, looking down on his wife’s blond head, stood “Weasel” Stark of the Gunners.

His nickname fitted the dapper fresh-complexioned little soldier well. He had reddish hair, inclined to curl: eyes of clear cold blue: flat auburn moustache over firm lips. The tight long-skirted tunic, beltless for dinner, fitted like a skin over the muscled shoulders, the in-curved back: his slacks fell straightly creased to shining brown shoes. His hands—clean capable hands—showed a hint of freckling, the suspicion of auburn fluff. The domed forehead betrayed intelligence. A brand-new D.S.O. ribbon completes the picture.

Alice Stark (once, as Alice Sewell, the object of Jack Baynet’s none-too-stable affections) was a comfortable little person, brown-eyed, a little rabbity about the mouth. Her low dress, blue and girlish, revealed excellent shoulders, firm arms and slim hands.

The pair had been married six months: three of which the husband had spent on active service. A wound in the foot, now almost healed, had re-united them.

“Almost time for dinner, I think,” said the Colonel, putting his empty glass on the mantelshelf behind him.

“Yes, dear.” Alice looked up; saw, pushing squirrel-wise through the revolving door, a familiar figure.

The figure came towards her, and she recognized—after a minute’s hesitation at the disguise of khaki—our Mr. Jameson.

Bromley, following leisurely, heard her say, “Is it really you, Peter?” and then, “This is Douglas.”

“How do you do, sir,” Peter shook hands, introduced his friend.

“Cocktails, I think,” remarked the Weasel.

“Who is he?” he asked his wife, while the two were depositing hats and coats in the cloak-room opposite.

“Peter Jameson. He married a great friend of mine,” she whispered.

“Better invite ’em both to dinner.”

Alice nodded: and the invitation was accepted over the cocktail glasses. They passed through the glass door into the dining-room—Bromley, always shy with strangers, last—and were escorted through the crowd to an empty table.

Said the Colonel, handling the wine-list, “We can manage a Magnum, I think.”

They settled down to hors d’œuvres and gossip.

“Are you on leave, sir?” Bromley ventured his first remark.

“Leave? No such luck. I’m commanding one of these Kitchener Brigades.” He gave the number. “Southdown Division, I believe they call it.”

“Then we are going to have some Artillery,” put in Peter. “I was told at the War Office, when I applied for my commission that there wasn’t going to be any Artillery with the new Armies.”

“Who told you that fairy-tale?” said Stark.

“A Colonel Thompson.”

“Oh, Cocky Thompson. Just like him. Pulling your leg, of course. So you joined the Infanteers, thinking the war would be done before you could get your kit. And you”—he turned to Bromley—“you’re a Cavalryman if ever I saw one!”

Bromley explained himself: the Colonel, who never put questions without a reason, following sharply.

“Like the Chalkshires?” he queried suddenly: and gathered, from the tone of the answer, all he wanted to know. The Weasel, in addition to having one of the best heads for strong liquor in the Gunners, was no mean judge of a man. Also, the “fourth Southdown Brigade” of the R.F.A.[^[2]] needed officers badly. He let his wife change the conversation.

“And how does Pat like you’re being a soldier?” she said to Peter. “Fancy her being only a subaltern’s ‘poor thing,’ and me a ‘Colonel’s lady’! Does she come down here often?”

“She’s coming down for Christmas.”

Bromley and the Weasel began to talk horse; the dinner went on. . . .

“And Francis?” asked Alice. “What is our Francis Gordon doing for his country?”

Bromley broke off from a discussion on “Birdcatcher blood,” said “That isn’t the Francis Gordon, is it? The chap who wrote ‘The Nut Errant’?”

“Extraordinary,” thought Peter, having explained the relationship, “how many people do know that weird cousin of mine.” And he wondered, for the fiftieth time, what could have happened to Francis. But of Mr. “Raymond P. Sellers” and the Amsterdam trip, he said nothing. . . .

Dinner over, they settled themselves with coffee, liqueurs and cigars, before the fire in the hall. The band was playing in the Winter Garden, the hall almost deserted.

Stark, whom two cocktails, the best part of a bottle of fizz and three liqueur brandies had left quite unmoved, began a tactful catechism. He wanted to know the number of subalterns in the Chalkshires; what chance they had of promotion: who their Colonel was; and how they got on with him: if Peter knew anything about horses; and why he had given up fox-hunting. Having assured himself on these points, he threw his cigar into the grate, and asked suddenly:

“I suppose neither of you two would care for a change?”

Bromley said, “I don’t quite understand?” Peter, who had followed the drift of the conversation almost from the first, did not speak.

“Well, quite entre nous,” began Stark, “I’m eight officers short of my twenty-four. I’ve written to Dawson at the W.O. and he says”—drawing a letter from his tunic-pocket—“ ‘Why not hunt about among the Infanteers? They’re hundreds over establishment in your Division.’ . . . So I thought perhaps. . . .”

There fell a short silence: then Peter said: “It’s the men I’m thinking about;” and Bromley: “I shouldn’t care to leave the old Major.”

“Well, take your time about it. There’s no hurry. We’ve only got fifty horses out of our seven hundred so far.” The Weasel pulled down his tunic; rang the bell; ordered three whiskies and sodas, a lemonade.

Shortly afterwards, with a “See you two again, I hope,” from the Colonel, and a “Yes. Do come in and dine with us, won’t you?” from his wife, the couple stepped across to the lift, shot upwards out of sight.

“Another drink?” asked Peter, lighting a cigar.

“Not much.” Bromley, a little flushed about the gills, tapped a cigarette on the back of his case. “That Colonel friend of yours must have a head like a balk of teak.”

They settled themselves comfortably in front of the fire. It lacked five minutes to half-past ten. Thought Bromley: “P.J. doesn’t realize how near we are to a bust-up. If anything happened to the old Major, Locksley would soon put his foot on us.” Thought Peter: “If ‘B’ Company weren’t so jolly good: and if we hadn’t made it ourselves: there might be something in a transfer.” But the evening had yet to provide its finale.

“Hallo, P.J.” interrupted a voice.

Peter looked up; saw the bow legs, the unpleasant features of Locksley-Jones. The fellow came over to the fire; stood with his back to it; said—taking no notice of Bromley—“Care for a drink, P.J.?”

“Thanks. No.”

“Devilish pretty woman you were talking to just now. Wish you’d introduce me, some time. . . .” Peter did not answer: he thought, suddenly, of the tears in Bareton’s eyes.

“By the way,” went on Locksley, taking no notice of the snub, “have you chaps got a taxi? My car’s broken down. The magneto’s gone wrong, I believe. If you have, I’d like a lift. . . .”

Bromley never moved.

“I’m sorry,” said Peter, very politely, “but our taxi only holds two. However”—he glanced at his wrist-watch—“You’re in nice time for the last train.”

“That’s put the lid on it,” remarked Bromley in the darkness of the jolting car: and, just before they went to sleep, “Mark my words, there’ll be some trouble in this ruddy Battalion.”

There was!

[2]	Royal Field Artillery.

§ 5

It started with Bareton. Bareton, disregarding both Locksley and his new Company-Commander (a full Lieutenant by right of being over thirty), went straight to Colonel Andrews. He told the Colonel, very respectfully until he began to lose his temper, that on no account would he, Jack Bareton, continue to serve in the same regiment as Locksley-Jones. The Colonel asked him, very mildly, why he objected to Locksley.

Said Bareton—they were alone in the Orderly Room—“With all due respect to you, sir, the man isn’t fit to hold His Majesty’s Commission.”

Said the Colonel, “If you have any accusation to make against my Adjutant, you must make it in his presence. Meanwhile, go back to your billet and consider yourself under open arrest till I send for you.”

The Mess seethed.

On the following day, Jack Bareton (without his belt) confronted Locksley before the Colonel’s table:—Major Fox-Goodwin, as temporary second-in-command, lounging, slightly contemptuous, by the fireplace.

Decided the Colonel, having listened to ten minutes of tight-lipped vituperation—all true, but entirely incapable of proof, and some clever dialectics for the defence: “It doesn’t, er, seem to me, Bareton, that you’ve made out any case at all. It seems to me that, er, having heard the Adjutant’s explanation of what are, er, obvious misconceptions on your part, it’s your duty to apologize.”

Jack Bareton stood very quietly for six seconds. Then he said: “As I am not satisfied with your ruling, sir”—he was, it will be remembered, a lawyer by profession—“I believe I am entitled to call for a Court of Enquiry.”

The Colonel sent both juniors out of the room. “What had we better do?” he asked Fox-Goodwin. The Major’s eyes twinkled.

“Get rid of ’em both, me dear fellow. Get rid of ’em both.”

“I can’t do that. Locksley’s a very capable fellow, very capable indeed. Locksley’s saved me a great deal of trouble.”

“Has he?” thought the Major. But discipline is discipline.

“A Court of Enquiry won’t do the Regiment any good,” went on Andrews. “Besides, it might break Bareton. Bareton’s a good subaltern, and a patriotic chap. . . . I hate trouble,” he added pathetically. . . .

Bareton, re-called, found himself alone with the Major who said: “Look here, me lad, take a tip from a fellow who’s old enough to be your grandfather. Don’t you press this Court of Enquiry. Ask for a transfer, see!”

“But it’s so damned unfair, sir.”

“I know that as well as you do, me lad. But we’ve got to think of the men. . . .”

A week later, Bareton and Fanshawe transferred to the Reserve Battalion. (Fanshawe died at Festhubert: Bareton still lives—all that the Hun prison-camps have left of him).

But matters did not end there. Locksley-Jones, confirmed in his position, sent for Peter privately. Peter, who was shooting on the miniature range at the time, finished his score with a “highest possible”; looked about for Bromley; couldn’t find him; strolled very slowly to the Orderly Room. Locksley, alone, went on writing for a clear minute. Then he said, “Oh, is that you, Jameson? I just wanted to have a private talk with you. You know, you’re a very clever fellow, Jameson. But you’re not clever enough to tackle me.”

Peter deliberately took off his cap, and sat down—at the Colonel’s table.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose I must take your word for that. Go on.”

Our Mr. Jameson was not an easy person to “discipline”—especially if one happened to have put oneself in the wrong by making the talk unofficial.

“Can’t we pull together, P.J.?” went on Locksley. “You know I can do you much more good than your pal Bromley. There’s your second star, for instance. . . .”

Peter couldn’t help admiring the audacity of the fellow. He wanted to consolidate his position; didn’t care how, so long as he achieved his purpose.

“And supposing I were to tell the C.O. what you’ve just suggested?”

“He wouldn’t believe you—any more than he believed Bareton. The old man’s as weak as water. You know that as well as I do.”

Peter controlled the impulse to hit Locksley in the face, and asked: “Is that all?”

“Oh, of course”—Locksley fell into the trap—“when we come to alloting the Captaincies. Let’s see”—he referred to a list—“you haven’t got any Captains in ‘B’ yet. If the Major goes. . . .”

This was news indeed. Now, Peter saw the plan whole. With complacent Company-Commanders and a weak Colonel, Locksley’s position would be unique.

“Is the Major going?” he asked—playing for time.

“Between you and me and the gatepost”—Locksley winked—“the W.O. has just asked if he is ‘considered fit to command a battalion.’ ”

Thought Peter: “What a swine! Still—if it weren’t for Bromley, I’d accept. I could run the show as well as most people.” Said 2nd Lieutenant Peter Jameson: “There’s a good deal in what you say. But I must have a little time to make up my mind. By the way, you don’t object to my taking a day or so extra at Christmas.”

“Not a bit, my dear fellow, not a bit.”

Meanwhile, men died in Flanders.

PART NINE
TWO EXCUSES FOR FAILURE

§ 1

Peter’s Patricia was essentially a simple woman. The early training received from her father, her education, her first nine years of married life, had all taught her the necessity of “balance,” the advantage of reasoning things out for herself—but they had only developed, not altered, her original character: the matehood and the motherhood in her.

This new love for Peter, suddenly (and as she now believed reasonlessly) conceived on the night he informed her of his decision to apply for a commission, had struck deep roots. But, as yet, it gave neither leaf nor blossom.

Always, she felt conscious of it. Nearly always, the consciousness irritated her. To begin with, married women with completed families—she argued—ought to have got over that sort of thing. Secondly, there was no likelihood—“very little likelihood” corrected instinct—of the love developing into a mutual passion: they had become too set in their matrimonial comradeship for any such occurrence. And thirdly—this formed the main irritation—her sudden change of feeling towards the man was not reasonable.

One might—she decided—hate a husband because he wouldn’t fight for his country. One needn’t on the other hand fall madly in love with him (after eight tranquil years) just because he decided to do the right thing. Besides, he hadn’t “gone out,” yet—perhaps he never would. For Patricia’s experiences in driving tired mud-stained men from the cold darkness of Victoria Station to their outlying homes, had taught her the sharp difference between training in England, however uncomfortable, and the rigours of active service: taught her that difference better than her brother Jack’s careful letters from the front itself.

Resultantly, she arrived at the “Royal York,” (tooling the Crossley like a professional chauffeur), very much on her guard.

§ 2

Brighton-on-Sea’s first war-Christmas betrayed no lack of prosperity. Its hotels, booked up weeks in advance, its saloons, its piers, its theatres and its picture-houses palpitated gaiety. From their billets in Shoreham Town and Portslade, in Worthing and beyond Worthing, the Southdown Division poured in a constant stream of blue-clad men and khaki-clad officers: London sent flappers and chorus-ladies, middle-aged business men and elderly idlers, frisky matrons and demure maidens. The whole town seemed one strolling, dancing, theatre-going, drinking promenade.

“Preston must be making a lot of money,” said Peter, as he and his wife took their first meal together in the crowded dining-room.

“I suppose so.” She had never known him quite so absorbed. “Is there anything the matter, Peter?” she went on.

“Lots. I’ll tell you after lunch. I wrote you about Alice being here, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but you didn’t say where she was staying.”

“At the Metropole. We’re to dine with them this evening. There’s a dance or something, I believe.”

He was enormously glad to have her with him: but far too occupied about regimental and other matters to shew it. The handsome woman sitting opposite to him—tight chinchilla motor-bonnet and plain Lovat-tweed tailor-made accentuated both figure and fairness—summoned many eyes in that room: but not her husband’s.

Luncheon over, they settled themselves in the little apartment leading off the lounge; drew chairs to the fire: and he sketched for her the position as between himself and Locksley, Bromley and Locksley, the regiment and Locksley.

Her limited experience of men could not grasp it.

“But, Peter, it all seems so childish. Like a lot of boys at school. And surely, with people being killed every day, this is not the time for you others to quarrel.”

“You’re perfectly right, old thing. That’s what I told Harold only last night. What makes me mad is that one man can do so much harm. Honestly, if it weren’t for Locksley I believe we should never have had any of this trouble. As it is,” he paused a moment, “we two have decided to get out.”

“But isn’t that,” she said the words deliberately, “an admission of failure?”

Peter Jameson: A Modern Romance

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 7

PART ONETHE HOME AND THE OFFICE

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

PART TWONIRVANA, LIMITED

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

PART THREETHE CREST OF THE WAVE

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

PART FOURCRISIS

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

PART FIVEDECISION

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 7

§ 8

PART SIXPLAYING AT SOLDIERS

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

PART SEVENALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

PART EIGHTDISSENSION

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

PART NINETWO EXCUSES FOR FAILURE

§ 1

§ 2