[ILLUSTRATIONS]
[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[CHAPTER VI]
[CHAPTER VII]
[CHAPTER VIII]
[CHAPTER IX]
[CHAPTER X]
[Transcriber’s Note]

MR. PETRE

Mr. Petre wondering who or what he may have been.

MR. PETRE

A novel by

HILAIRE BELLOC

Illustrated by

G. K. CHESTERTON

Robert M. McBride & Company

NEW YORK MCMXXV

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
PUBLISHED
AUGUST
1925
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Dedication
To All Poor Gentlemen

ILLUSTRATIONS

MR. PETRE

MR. PETRE

CHAPTER I

It was the 3rd of April, 1953. As the big rotor came up through the Sound at the end of her ten days’ passage from New York, a passenger standing alone forward upon her decks looked at the very shores of Devon close at hand on either side, and delighted in the Spring.

It was nearly two years since he had seen his own country, and he felt the eagerness of his return almost as though he were a boy again. He was a short, rather stout man in later middle age, with gray curling hair, clean shaven, and in his gesture and expression most unmistakably English. His clothes and his boots were American, and his hat; and what was more, when he spoke there was just that trace of American accent and that habitual use of American locutions which so often mark the man who has lived, though for no more than a few months, in wholly American surroundings.

Everything was ready for his landing. He would not be troubled with so much as a handbag. The blessed abolition of passports in 1933 as for Englishmen landing in England saved him the trouble of even that small encumbrance; and as he hated his pockets bulging with papers, he had locked all, down to the least important notes, in a little dispatch box and handed it to his steward. He had nothing on him but one of the tickets under the new system, the ordinary railway ticket for London which they exchange on board against the steamship receipt; and a good wad of £63 in English notes, with a handful of change; he had not even kept a nickel for remembrance. He could recover what he required by the time he had taken his seat in the train; and all this disembarrassment, coupled with the long vacuity of the sea voyage, gave him an odd sense of freedom.

Odd ... and he knew that it was odd. It was a little too complete. His mind seemed to be holding nothing but the scene before him: the vigorous sky, the leaping water and the green above the gray of the rocks with their white fringe of foam.

He felt unnaturally careless. And when his thoughts turned to his luggage and its arrangement, to the petty incidents of that same morning, they were blurred and faded. Nor did he concern himself with their increasing faintness ... he enjoyed relief in it. But he knew that the relief was strange.

His daily life in America had been too much preoccupied, and that for a long time past. He had gone over to judge and help direct an investment in land, which had not turned out too brilliantly. He had not even been able to sell out as he wished; he was still held to it and its mortgage. He had not put things right. He had found it of no purpose to remain. He had turned back homewards—and yet he suffered an uneasy fear that in his absence things might go worse. Too much of his small fortune had been locked up in that venture, and the prospect before him, when he should reach his rooms in London, was not over bright. He was not sure that he could keep up the modest scale of living on which he had arranged his life for the last ten years before this voyage to the States. The place he had inherited in Dorsetshire, and which had been at his disposal since his mother’s death fifteen years earlier, he had let; but there were heavy charges upon it, and he could see little income in what remained of its revenue.

Nevertheless, he did now feel that curious sense of lightness and of carelessness. It was not connected with the returning home: it seemed a new mood of a kind by itself. It came in deep successive waves, each washing out, while it lasted, all responsibility and care; and twice, as they neared the breakwater, he went through an abnormal moment or two of complete freedom, like that of a man who has just wakened from a profound sleep, and has not yet remembered the burdens and details of life.

When he had landed with the other passengers that unknown mood returned upon him with greatly increased force and with more permanence. It enveloped him like a mist. It made him neglectful of all appointment and watch. He forgot his steward altogether; and his luggage, as though it had never been. He found himself doing only that which he could do without any effort of recollection. His empty-handedness, his neglect, made him the first to walk up the platform along the train for London. He took no heed of the reserved places. He chose out an empty seat in a first-class carriage at the head of the train and took a corner looking forward. There he sat in the same continued mood of content and vacuity.

The train filled, and the crush of porters hurrying and crossing each other upon the platform made confusion all along its line. One in particular, badly chivied by an anxious steward, who had implored leave to land in search of a missing client, was asking what he should do. That porter had put a dispatch box, a rug and a small strapped packet upon a reserved place. He had noted the name. But no one had come to claim them. The porter and the steward, looking back to where a couple of belated men were running, saw no sign of the expected figure. The glorious official to whom a clamorous appeal was made refused to delay the train. The whistle sounded, the rotor buzzed, the train drew out. The porter and the steward felt each in his own degree that agony of loss which greater men know when they open their paper of a morning and read of a slump. The one was widowed of a sovereign. The other of half a crown.

Meanwhile the author of their misfortunes sat all alone in his comfortable carriage, looking at the houses slipping by and the beginning of the countryside. Then he grew drowsy and sank into his corner and fell asleep. He half awoke at a hand tapping upon his shoulder and a voice asking him for his ticket. He had it upon him; he felt for it, found it in an inside pocket and handed it over, and in a moment was asleep again.

When he woke it was but slowly, for evidently he had been more fatigued than he knew, and the strain of a rough voyage had weighed upon him. The express was already roaring past Newbury Race-course.

He recognized the place and suddenly connected it in his mind with a name ... the name of some one living thereabouts.... Yes, ... it was certainly some one connected with those trees and heaths beyond ... but what was the name? He sought and sought, and nothing would come. It was very aggravating, this little lapse. He remembered how often of late he had had slight trouble of that kind. Then he set out to try and recover the name by a chain. He had passed a race-course. He knew it of old. He would connect things up link by link. First he looked at his watch. It was just at 12.30. He had started from.... Where had he started from?

That really $1m> exasperating ... that was even serious.

He shook his head with the sharp gesture a man makes when he is trying to be rid of some passing nervous affection, and he did what the efficiency men call “concentrating.” But his concentration was poor. Not a word would come.

Then overwhelmingly, in a flash, the truth broke upon him. He had lost all conception of his past: every image of it. He knew where he was. All about him, the landscape, the type of railway carriage—everything was familiar, but of any name or place or action or movement in connection with himself prior to that sleep nothing whatsoever remained.

He passed his hand across his forehead, and stared at the empty cushions opposite him, waiting for this very unpleasant mental gap to close up, and for his normal self to return. It did not return. What was worse, he felt a sort of certitude within him that it had gone for ever—that it was no good looking for it. It was as though he had died.

Through all the remaining hour of the run into Paddington he was seeking, seeking, seeking. The Thames, distant Windsor, Slough went past, the first houses of London: he knew them all as well as he knew his own voice; but of any link between these and himself, of any action or emotion of his past identity, there was no trace at all. It was not even blank. It was nothingness.

The train drew up, the herd of passengers bundled out, and he, at the head of the train, among the first. He went uncertainly sauntering down the platform. He was half inclined to ask some one where the train had come from. He even found himself listening to one or two groups of people in the hope that he should hear its name; but he was ashamed to listen too long, and still more ashamed to put the question which had at first occurred to him. It was a pity. If he had acted there and then he would have saved himself a great deal of coming trouble. But he had already begun to feel a mixture of shame and fear lest his humiliation should be discovered. That dangerous mood was to grow.

Mechanically he hailed one of the new rotor taxis—he recognized them, though he could not tell where or how (they had just been coming in the year before he left England; but of that year there was nothing now in his mind). It suddenly broke upon him that he could not tell the taxi where to drive.

Now the man who drove the taxi judged tips by wealth and wealth by external signs. So he said, with simple judgment, “The Splendide?”

His fare nodded hastily and got in. Anywhere would do. Here again the name was perfectly familiar to him. The picture of the big hotel in his mind was quite clear. He could have told you exactly where it was in London. But for the soul of him he couldn’t have told you how he knew. He nodded, and the rotor cab jerked and plunged and pulled up sharp and jerked forward again for its half-hour to the Splendide, with the stricken man inside concentrating away for dear life and getting nowhere.

During the Berkeley Street block, and to the whirring of the mighty little engine and the shaking of the cab, he suddenly shouted PETRE at the top of his voice. The driver opened the door sharply and barked at him, “What say?”

“Nothing,” said the greatly relieved man, sighing deeply. “I was talking to myself.”

The taxi driver slammed the door, looked at the policeman whose hand still barred the traffic, jerked his thumb towards the inside of his cab, touched his forehead and smiled. The policeman also deigned to smile. Then the flood was released and they jerked off again.

Petre, that was it ... Petre.... That was his name! But what Petre? He could not tell. The sound was perfectly clear and perfectly familiar.... Petre. Petre it was: he was quite certain of that.—Thank God, he was certain of that!... And during the next three blocks in the traffic his certitude grew firmer and firmer. He clung to the protection of that word Petre as does a drowning man to a deck chair. That was something to go on, anyhow.... He could not see it as P-e-t-e-r or P-e-t-r-e. It was only the sound he was sure of. But when he came to think of it, it must be Petre, for he had not in his mind any savor, not even the slightest, of a grotesque connotation, and if it had been “Peter,” however familiar to him, it would have sounded a little silly in his ears.... No, it must certainly be Petre. It was a good name.... There was—he had a vague idea—a Lord Petre. He did not think he was—or had been—a lord. He would have remembered that at least, though all the rest had gone. No, it was Mr. Petre all right.... Mr. something Petre, as Mr. J. Petre.... But what was that Christian name, or those Christian names?

He had reached the Splendide. Mr. Petre (for he could now securely call himself by his right name, an anchor-hold in such an awful tide) got out and vastly overpaid the cab. The new rotor cabs had the fare marked up in large red ticking figures inside. It was a rule brought in by Jessie Anderson when she was at the Home Office in the last Administration. It had always annoyed her to peer through the glass, and she was no longer young. Mr. Petre quite understood the meaning of those figures; shillings and pence were familiar to him and the connection of their symbols with the coins in his hand was part of himself, though he could not have told you where or when he had last handled such coins.

Now and then he would hesitate over a detail. He had puzzled a minute before getting the name of Oxford Street as they crossed it. But the run of London life was as common to him as to any of the myriads around. It was only the bond between them and his past self that had snapped.

He knew the Splendide. He knew the ritual of registration. He even knew the liveries with their absurd gold crowns. He knew it was strange to take a room without luggage. He feared resentment. Yet he rightly judged such eccentricity stood a better chance at the more expensive hotels than the less.

He was full of the ordeal before him, and he approached it rather nervously. But he put on as bold a front as he could, and gave the name “Petre” in rather a loud voice, and with that slight American intonation which was his though he knew it not.

He was surprised at a certain note in the clerk’s reply, something between the tone in which a man addresses a great lady advanced in years and that in which he would address (were addresses paid to such things) a unicorn or any other apparition; and the voice using these tones said quite low, so that no one around should hear, and with a certain thrill of reverence displayed and of astonishment controlled:

“Mr. John K. Petre?”

Mr. Petre nodded rapidly. It was no good seeking for the real Christian names: these would do as well as any other for the time being.

He was relieved to see the right spelling coming out from the tip of the clerk’s pen in the register: “John K. Petre.” No place of residence followed. The clerk knew too much for that. He made an inclination that was nearly a bow as he sent for the boy in buttons, and begged Mr. Petre in a still lower voice to let him know if the suite he had chosen would do: it had only three rooms, he said, but it was the best unoccupied and over the garden. Two hundred dollars—forty pounds.

“... As though he were a Unicorn.”

Mr. Petre recollected the £63 he had upon him and the very strange condition under which he was attacking this stronghold. He firmly refused anything but a plain bedroom and bathroom. He would not even have a sitting-room, and the clerk this time really did bow, as a worshiper might incline to a saint who was beyond the pale of mortal kind. He whispered rather than spoke the number “44,” and Mr. Petre, before going to the lift, said:

“One moment, I have no luggage.” He said it in the over-emphatic tone which men use to say anything startling that has to be forced down; he repeated it in that same firm voice in which the slight American accent was emphasised: “I have no luggage.”

The clerk showed no surprise at all. If Mr. John K. Petre chose to travel without luggage, it seemed to be in the clerk’s eyes but one more evidence of more than human greatness.

“I shall go out and buy what I need,” continued Mr. Petre, still firmly, “when I have washed, in a few minutes.”

“Can we——” insinuated the clerk.

“No,” said Mr. Petre yet more firmly, and almost readily. “I always do these things myself.”

But when and where he had done these things himself he could not possibly have told, for Mr. Petre had no idea what things he did and what things he did not do. His new life had begun less than a couple of hours before, and the old one was lost.

He followed the boy to the lift, and as he went he was reassured. For he said to himself, “I am some one of consequence. I am known.” But on that thought followed its terrifying successors—The more imperative his need for caution (the lift was taking him up to No. 44); the worse the ridicule if his secret were discovered before he had found himself (the lift had reached the landing); the deeper his humiliation and (the door of 44 was opened for him—no, he needed nothing; it shut upon him and he was seated alone in despair) the more intolerable his lot. What if that unknown life of his had been passed in some great household, a grandeur of spouse and children and domestics; lived for years with intimates who should know what had befallen him? He would be marked. A diminished man. One who had “had an accident.” Pitied, despised, his relapse awaited. He recoiled at the thought!...

No! There must be no discovery by others. With infinite caution, catching and comparing every word, he would pick up piece by piece the truth about himself. He would secretly effect his own restoration. But what of questions? How should he answer them?

While Mr. Petre was moving towards the lift, magnificently waved forward by dazzling liveries and piloted in procession by the boy in buttons, a young fellow who had been sitting in the lounge of the hotel talking to an older man got up and sauntered towards the registration counter.

He had heard a name—and that name was gold. For though the clerk had whispered Mr. Petre had spoken loudly and without discretion.

The young man dug his hands into his trousers pockets, looked for a moment through the windows toward the street, and then turned sharply beyond the register book to the office where inquiries were made. As he did so he kept his head well to the left, outwards from the counter; but his eyes shot furtively to the right, and he spotted the name upon the open page. It was John K. Petre all right. He had thought as much.

At the Inquiry he asked whether there was a telegram for Gadget, and was not surprised to hear that there was none; indeed, he had only that moment made up the name. But such is the spell of association over even the sharpest crook that he could not help saying, “John K. Gadget”; so much was the famous name of John K. Petre now branded upon his brain.

He sauntered back again to his chair, sank down, and took up speech again with his companion.

The young man himself was tall, just an inch or two overdressed, with black hair, greased, brushed back over a high narrow forehead and thin face, of the bony sort, which is also called “distinguished,” the long narrow chin and the high narrow forehead were each a long way from the advanced cape of the squeezed nose. He made delicate gestures with his right hand. He spoke leisurely and high.

His companion was of no such exalted station. He was squat, round-headed, double-chinned, with a thick, frowsy, gray mustache; short, ill-combed hair; and dressed in clothes so loose and creased that they disgraced that cavern of the rich. His boots were shameful, and even his collar was dubious.

“Well, Arthur?” said he to the young man.

“Well, Batterby, he’s come here.”

“Oh, he has, has he? I told you so!” said Batterby, not without pride.

“Yep,” answered the more elegant Arthur. “There’s the name right enough. John K. Petre. But you know what I told you. He makes it a point to keep low and dark. I’d use it—but I wouldn’t print it. I’ve heard what he does when he’s given away. Oh! He’s savage! The clerks are paid in all these places to keep it quiet whenever he does come over. Once they did get hold of him in the Howl, when he came over four years ago, and they printed a story about him. Then they found he controlled half the poison ads.: Rodney’s Cure, and the Pain-killer and Voler’s Pills—and he made ’em print a denial too, displayed. And then he broke ’em! Oh! he’s savage.”

“It was I tracked him to that boat on my own risk,” said Batterby doggedly. “I paid the clerk at this end out of my own pocket, and he said John K. would be on it, as sure as one can be of him. He’d booked as Carroll, so’s not to be pestered on board. If I liked to take the trouble I could find out that he’d landed and what train he took. It’s a cruel shame if I can’t make a story for the Messenger out of it! His Grace’ll want it too,” he added plaintively. “It’s for him to print or not as he likes. He knows his way about, does the Duke.”

Arthur shrugged his shoulders. “You can tell your gang if you like, Batterby, but it’s at your own risk. He’ll ferret you out and he’ll never let go of you. He bites to the bone: specially newspaper men. That’s what he hates most. You know what he is. If they print they’ll get hell, and even if they only talk you’ll get hell. I’ve told you all I know about him. He comes to London, Paris, Naples, anywhere. Nobody to know when he passed, except his men. And what’s more, he’ll get plenty of people to swear to his being somewhere else. If he makes a row, it isn’t my fault. At any rate, he’s here.... I’ve got to be off. Will you wait while I get my hat and coat?”

Batterby, who had his hat in his hand and his coat on his back, looked uneasy and said, “Yes, if you like.” Arthur sauntered off at his slow pace, and the older, heavier, less consequent man watched him slyly well round the corner, and then lumbered up to the Registration Desk. The book was shut. He leaned with a foolish grin of cunning over the desk, winked, and said to the clerk: “Any one o’ the name o’ Petre registered to-day?”

The clerk said curtly, “No.”

“Nothing like it?” said Batterby, taking out a case with cigarettes upon the one side and notes prominently showing upon the other.

“Nothing,” said the clerk icily.

Batterby tapped the thick red leather binding with a square, short forefinger, and winked again. For answer the clerk put the big book on one side and turned away. His questioner waddled back again to the easy chair and wished he could earn money so easily. He looked at his watch, and wondered that Arthur was so long. Yet there was nothing wonderful in the delay. Arthur was telephoning. He was telephoning to Mrs. Cyril.

Before he had returned to the lounge and to the impatient Batterby a stout, rather bewildered man, middle-aged and gray, but active in his step, had passed by him, and had gone rapidly through the great turning doors into the street. It was Mr. Petre, seeking a Gladstone bag and linen and hair brushes, and all that might be necessary to restore him to citizenship. Had Batterby known what presence it was that thus passed he would have been a changed man. But Batterby did not know. Arthur rejoined him, the two went out into the street in their turn.

The Strand is not a good place for conversation in these days, but Batterby was anxious and eager. It was a scoop, if he could bring it off; and poor Batterby lived and kept an unhappy household in Golder’s Green upon scoops; and Arthur was his informant on the great world, in return for services rendered before Arthur had climbed—through a knowledge of Arthur’s earlier days. Arthur knew every one now, and yet could still be squeezed. The shorter and older man looked up at his young companion as they jostled eastward towards Fleet Street.

“Don’t you think I could risk it, Arthur?”

“Oh! I’ve told you,” said Arthur impatiently. “It’s at your risk. But mind you, if he is here he’ll have it denied, and if he isn’t, it comes to the same thing. You’ll get hell. You can’t fight fifty million pound.”

Batterby sighed. It would mean a great scoop.... And he might have had the interview given him. His Grace had given him just that job when he had spotted the secret visit of the French Prime Minister six months before. But French Prime Ministers are small game compared with Americans on the scale of John K. Petre.... Then again, if things went wrong, and he could not make the news good, that meant the sack. His Lordship could be terribly firm; and Batterby thought of the little house in Golder’s Green and the nagging, dissatisfied wife, and inwardly trembled.... No, he couldn’t risk it.... At least, not unless Arthur would guarantee him, and Arthur wouldn’t. Arthur had sworn he would know nothing about it.... So there was an end of it. But it was astonishing how full Batterby’s mind was of John K. Petre; almost as though he had him there by his side, arm in arm. It is said that very great men thus permeate the air of the cities through which they pass. It may be so. Arthur and Batterby melted into the crowd.

Mr. Petre was a full two hours in making his purchases. One very good reason for such delay was that he had no idea of his measurements. Another, that his recent, his overwhelming misfortune had made him mistrustful of himself. He kept on wondering whether he had filled up a sufficient list. At last he had fully packed his newly-purchased bag; he had brought it back to the hotel; he had followed it up to No. 44. He sat down beside it, counted out what remained of his capital and found fifty-two pounds and a few shillings left. He plunged again into that depth of thought wherein he groped like a diver in dim water to find some recollection or some clew—and he found none. The enormous loneliness of the position was upon him: it appalled him even more than the approaching end of his resources. He felt all the millions of London round about him, aloof and hostile: dumb ... when the telephone on the table in his room rang suddenly, and he took it up.

A woman’s voice, very clearly articulate, rather too high, asked if that were Mr. Petre, and announced itself as Celia Cyril. It then cleared its throat, but in a very ladylike manner, and Mr. Petre boldly answered “Yes” and waited; concluding, as he waited, that he ought certainly to have answered “No.” The voice told him it knew he hated being fussed, but he had always made an exception of dear Leonard, hadn’t he? So the voice had taken the liberty to send a note which would explain; but the voice had thought (it said) that it seemed better first to ring up before the note would get to him; because the voice knew that he hated being fussed. And then thought that perhaps it ought not perhaps to have rung up after all. But it did hope he didn’t mind. All of which clear-headed and decisive stuff Mr. Petre received in a complete confusion.

“My only excuse,” the voice went on, “is that you were so good to dear Leonard, to my dear husband when he was in the States two years ago. You know all that has happened since. You don’t mind my asking? Do you? You remember my Leonard?”

Now at this moment—I write it down without comment, for all that follows is a commentary upon it, but I think it excusable in a man so hungry to know and so dazed as was Mr. Petre—at this moment, I say, Mr. Petre again answered “Yes.” The clearly articulate voice continued in a tone of relief.

“Ah, I am so glad. I knew it was a liberty. I know you hate to be fussed. But I do hope you will be able to come, and you will get my note. It ought to be with you any time now. I sent the car with it.” Then the voice said “Good-by” in a fashion which oddly reminded Mr. Petre of pink sugar—but after his great catastrophe he dared not guess whether it were because the late Mr. Cyril or Sir Leonard Cyril, or Lord Leonard Cyril or Leonard Lord Cyril had been connected with sugar, or whether it was only the tone of the voice.

But the recitation of such names suggested to him rather suddenly a book the name of which he perfectly remembered, and he telephoned down at once for the year’s Who’s Who. Now he would make a serious search. He was on a clew.

The first thing he did was to look out Cyril. He found nobody, and in good time it was to be made very clear why he had found nobody of that name. Leonard Cyril was dead. Then he looked out Petre—brilliant thought, and he found many Petres, and read all that was to be read of them closely; but not one suggested anything to his knowledge. He was certainly John K. The clerk had made that clear. There was no John K. in Who’s Who. He sighed. It was a heart-breaking business. Then, the processes of his mind working more fully, but his sense of personality as blank as ever, he tried the telephone book of London. There was a Mrs. Cyril right enough, and she seemed to be well-to-do, for what she had said about her car corresponded with her address. But when he turned to the Petres he was baulked again: there were too many, and not a John K. in the bunch ... and after all, why hadn’t he thought of it? The States!... Was he not an American?... There was evidence that he had been in America. That would make it less incomprehensible—but more difficult to trace through London.... And he didn’t feel American somehow.... What a business!

Then came the note. A young child, dressed in yet another uniform and with bright, active eyes brought it in. It was but an expansion of the telephone message he had had before. Mrs. Cyril had only just heard of him from a friend who had caught sight of him (he trembled!) in the hotel. She was taking a great liberty, but her late husband had spoken so warmly of him and of the kindness Mr. Petre had shown him when he visited the United States, that she presumed upon that acquaintance and asked him whether he could not lunch with her next Wednesday?

Mr. Petre delved down again into the depths of his mind. Whatever he may have been in that past life of his, he had evidently been courteous, for he felt the necessity of answering by writing and by messenger, and not by telephone. The more he thought of the affair, the more he discovered at once its possibilities and its dangers. In the last few hours the shrinking from humiliation had become an obsession. He was now fixed in a mood such that he would rather have died than admit his hidden trouble. All around him, perhaps, would be people who would know who he was; some perhaps would have met him; his hostess at least would have heard much of him. He would have to play up to all that he could hear, to glean everything that he could, and yet not give away his secret.

For some little time he hesitated. Then he considered that if he never took the plunge he might be lost. Either he must recover his past by clews or by inferences, and these could only be had from witnesses; or else live on a few weeks to the end of his money, and then—what?

Evidently he had been—whatever he was—not only a courteous man, but a man of decision. He took up his pen and wrote a rapid note to Mrs. Cyril, saying how pleased he would be to lunch. He rang at once and sent it off by the messenger. He was a little alarmed to learn that her car had been waiting all the time to take that answer back. Mr. Petre might be a man of decision, but he could not compare with Mrs. Cyril. Whoever he (Mr. Petre) might be, and whoever she (Mrs. Cyril) might be, she (Mrs. Cyril) gave points to him (Mr. Petre). And Mr. Petre drew another deep sigh as he considered the peculiar misfortune of his life, and wondered why he had been pitched upon to suffer so extraordinary a fate.

He could not tell. But I know and I will tell the reader. It was holiday in heaven and a Dæmon, genial, ironic, had been given Mr. Petre for a toy to play with a little while.

He glanced again at the letter, turned over the sheet and found a postscript. “You know how discreet I shall be and how familiar I am with your rules. The Press shall not hear a word of it. It was by the merest accident that I heard of your presence in London myself, and even if you send an answer that you are not there at all, I shall quite understand.—C.C.”

Mr. Petre held those words before him and stared. Then he began to put everything together in a sort of summary. He had been in the States; perhaps he was a native of the States. He didn’t think so; he felt it in his bones that he was not an American. Yet ... at any rate, he had been in the States.

There was another point. The man he had been had some reason or other for keeping very secret; the clerk’s manner had proved that. It made him feel anxious. Had he committed a crime?... No! On reflection, no. If he had Mrs. Cyril would not be so keen to have him to lunch with her. He must have had the power to do some good to the late Cyril; he must have had some great position out there in America.... What?

For a moment he was on the point of drafting an advertisement to sundry American papers, and then that shame came upon him and he put down his pen. He gave it up; he trusted to chance; he awaited Wednesday; and having been apparently in that past of his a naturally hopeful man, he took it for granted that at Mrs. Cyril’s table some light might break. Then he went down to dinner.

He sat there at his lonely table, perfectly clear upon the roof under which he was (it was familiar to him), upon the date, upon the meaning of all that he read in the paper (he was consecutive upon this, not only for the news of the last twenty-four hours, but also, after a gap of about a fortnight, with many older allusions). Oddly enough, certain dull fragments of American news, meaningless to an Englishman, struck him with particular familiarity; and the name of one town in which a bishop in the middle west had denied his Saviour struck him with a feeling of home; but of himself and of who he was—nothing. It was like standing in a well-lit room and looking through the window at a dense fog outside pressing against the panes.

Then he went upstairs again to No. 44 and took off all his clothes and looked on every edge of shirt and collar and vest and drawers and socks for initials. He found a New York price ticket on his shirt, the word “Paramount” on his collar and “Zenith” woven into his socks, but of initials not a sign, and as for his night-shirt, he had just bought it—not pajamas; was that instinct a clew? He was tired out. He put it on and went to bed.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. cyril had received her guests.

It was a vast room in a house on the south side of Grosvenor Square. There was a kind old Cabinet Minister, who was rather deaf and kept on putting his hand to his left ear with a beatified look; a rich young woman who had just married a still richer lord in the North of England, and who wrote small, carefully-sculptured pieces of bad verse; two ex-Lord Chancellors; a banker, and his wife too; Lady Batton (Henry Batton’s wife, not the old lady); and Marjorie Kayle, who had only one leg and was very witty. But great as these people were, they were nothing like as great as the room. It was perfectly enormous, and Mrs. Leonard Cyril, relict of the late Leonard Cyril, who had no particular business but had certainly thriven wonderfully by it, and who was herself the daughter of Pallins, the old artist, gloried in the dimensions thereof. She murmured that Mr. Petre was late; she lied, for she had deliberately given him an hour twenty minutes later than the others. They fell to talking of him, of his vast wealth, of his eccentricities, of his mania for avoiding the world and his refusal of his name and movements.

“Oh, I can understand that,” sighed Marjorie Kayle, who was perpetually in the papers; and the two ex-Lord Chancellors agreed. But the kind old Cabinet Minister, putting up his left hand to his ear, only said “What?” and beamed. “Petre,” bellowed Mrs. Cyril into his better ear. “Petre. The American man. John K. Petre.”

“... And the two ex-Lord-Chancellors agreed.”

“Oh, the American man,” said the kind old Cabinet Minister, his face suddenly changing, and assuming the expression proper to a revelation. “Not J. K. Petre, the rotor man?”

“Yes,” roared Mrs. Cyril again. “The rotor man. J. K. Petre.”

“I can’t conceive,” said the noble poetess, “what possible good it can do a man to have so much money.”

“I don’t see what possible harm it can do him,” said Marjorie Kayle with asperity, for she herself, poor darling, felt strongly on that point; she resented the great wealth of the woman who had just spoken. “He does plenty of good with it. He gave £200,000 to Peggy’s show last year, and it just got them round the corner.”

“Who got him to do that?” asked the hostess quickly.

“No one,” said Marjorie Kayle—who, indeed, knew nothing but the bare fact, and had got that out of a newspaper. “He does those things suddenly out of his head.”

The banker said “Humph!” and for a moment a solid little smile appeared upon his face.

“It’s quite true,” said Marjorie Kayle, nodding her head, and now launched in her new character as John K. Petre expert. “He simply won’t answer a letter, even on business, and he’s mad against giving anything—’cept when he feels inclined, like this, suddenly; an’ then he does the most extraordinary things! He gave a quarter of a million to the famine fund in Sicily, and it came long after the famine because he only heard of it late, through a magazine called Powler’s Humanitarian Weekly, and then they asked him what they ought to do with it, and he cabled back a text out of the Bible, and they thought he was mad and they divided it up.”

“Who?” said Mrs. Cyril severely.

“Oh, they,” answered Marjorie Kayle vaguely. “The Sicilians.” Then she added simply, “He’s like that.”

“Is it true that he wears elastic-sided boots?” said the banker’s wife in a weary, over-refined voice. She was a woman full of frills and with a cameo face. Marjorie Kayle took the plunge.

“Not now,” she said, greatly daring; and being inwardly a believer in the Higher Powers, she shot up a little prayer that when the great man should come into that room he might not be wearing elastic-sided boots. It was a fair risk, for they had not been seen in any great number since the Boer War. On the other hand, she thought that his boots would probably be very pointed, and might well be of patent leather; but these surmises she kept hidden within her own heart. She had gambled on him enough as it was.

While this enlightened conversation was proceeding one last guest had said nothing. It was a Mr. Terrard; Mr. Charles Terrard, Charlie Terrard, by courtesy the Honorable Charles Merriton Terrard, a stockbroker and without guile. He had frank blue eyes and frank yellow hair which curled; and he was very pleasant. He listened to his elders and betters, to whom also he could often be of service. There was a future before that man.

Mrs. Cyril had just begun, “They say that whenever he washes he——” when the big yellow door was thrown open and a servant in archaic clothes said mournfully, “Mr. Petre!”, introduced a gray, sturdy, but lively figure, and shut the door very gently again behind him. There was a silence as at the entry of God.

Mrs. Cyril came forward and seized him by the hand. She overwhelmed him with apologies. Nothing would have persuaded her to take such a liberty except her gratitude for all he had done for Leonard; and as she murmured the word “Leonard” a touching moisture suffused her eyes.

The guests all stood around awkwardly, like provincial notables awaiting an introduction to royalty. Mrs. Cyril went through them one by one in their exact order of greatness, and shouted at the kind old Cabinet Minister again, to give Mr. Petre some impression of the way in which one had to talk to him.

Never was a man more deeply impressed than was Mr. Petre by the solemn deference he received. One after another each of those men and each of those women spiritually knelt before him, and there was manifest in their eyes and in their gestures all the spirit of religion. He who showed it least was young Terrard; yet even he showed it plentifully, and Marjorie Kayle exceeded.

“Evidently,” thought Mr. Petre, remembering the hotel, “I was right. I am somebody—or I was somebody.”

They sat at table, sneered at by six enormous portraits, in another room as large as the first, and having a view through its windows of a mews; and as they so sat the wine loosened their tongues and they talked of things and people, of which Mr. Petre knew some by repute, others not at all. He answered gently such questions as his hostess put to him (he sat upon her right); he assured her that he had had an excellent crossing (for she asked him what kind of crossing it had been); but he was careful not to risk any details, as he had not the slightest idea that he had crossed anything from anywhere. He assured her that he was familiar with London; he told her that he had not yet been to any other house—and all this while he was in terror lest some question more searching than the rest might challenge him and make him flounder past recovery.

The meal dragged on. They had come to coffee. The banker had looked at his watch, and found it was already twenty past two. At each succeeding phrase his hostess put to him Mr. Petre came nearer and nearer to breaking-point under the strain.

He was saved by a magic word. Some one at the end of the table had pronounced three syllables: “Touaregs.” At that sound the whole conversation was in a blaze. Here was something in which all held communion! Here was a subject which struck right at the heart of every man and woman in the room—except poor Mr. Petre, to whom every allusion and phrase and term was Greek and nonsense; of not one could he make anything; yet he was relieved to think that they were off on matters which imperiled him no more.

As the fowls of a farmyard strut aimlessly back and forth picking aimlessly at the ground after the convention of fowls, but very empty of interest in their lives, so had the people round Mrs. Cyril’s table spoken first of a play, then of a novel, then of a politician, then of a criminal; and then, still more languidly, of a coming eclipse. Their words were the more vapid and without stuff, the more like sawdust, because each man and woman had in his heart one object only dominating all, and that object was John K. Petre, high above the few lords of the free modern world: fifty million pounds incarnate, and come to dwell amongst us. There, before them, in the flesh.

As the fowls of a farmyard will change their whole beings, clucking and chattering prodigiously and scrambling together in a swarm, and the whole flock alive with appetite when a handful of grain is thrown down; so did the people round Mrs. Cyril’s table change inwardly and outwardly at once upon the appearance of Touaregs. Their souls and bodies became alive, their wings were flustered, their minds clashed and struggled.

Touaregs would go farther. No, they had touched top mark. They were steady. No, they were rocketing. It was astonishing how mulish the French Government was about the concession. Not so mulish as all that: they knew which side their bread was buttered. Marjorie Kayle said that Billy Wootton had squared the French Commissioner. The banker then told the company in general that they knew nothing about it, and Mrs. Cyril eagerly quoted what Charlie Byrne had told her, only that morning, of the new deposits; whereupon one of the ex-Lord Chancellors who had not yet given tongue said with great good sense that when a market ran away like that it didn’t matter what news came or didn’t come. And the other Lord Chancellor agreed with him. At which the kind old Cabinet Minister smiled, nodded, and said, “Just so!” because he had usually found it safe to use these words on things he couldn’t hear.

But if the kind old Cabinet Minister had no notion what it was all about, he was an expert compared with Mr. Petre. Mr. Petre, though his hearing was quite sound, might as well have been listening to a babel of rooks. What were Touaregs? Where were the deposits? What of? How did the French Government come in? How do you square a Government? What was a Commissioner? Who was Billy Wootton and with what instrument did he perform his rite? And up what did Touaregs go, or down what, and in what were they steady? What was it all about?

The eager judgment and counter-judgment, argument, affirmation, bluff, falsehoods, tips, went back and forth in an amazing game: for it is a game where every one plays his own hand, and where the number of relations is the square of all those present. But it is a game which works to a climax and then halts or languishes; it is a fire of thorns, burning very quickly to ash; and Mr. Petre, dazed in the babel and thanking his stars that it prevented questions which might have destroyed his peace, was alarmed to find that the subject drooped and that gaps of silence appeared.

At any moment the whole talk might turn; it might be a point-blank question on his home, or some other matter in which he would be agonized to reply. He was desperately concluding that he must take the first step and say something to lead Mrs. Cyril on till some word of hers should tell him what he did not know, when, just in time, at the end of a silence longer than the rest, the decisive thing happened.

The young broker, Charlie Terrard, deliberately said, looking at Mr. Petre with a slightly quizzical look:

“Well, sir, what do you think of them?” To which he bluntly added, “You know more about it than most of us.”

One or two of the less controlled faces took on an awkward look, the others went suddenly blank. The two ex-Lord Chancellors exchanged glances covertly and both half smiled:—certainly Terrard had done a monstrous thing! But then, great men like John K. are often straightforward, and sometimes eccentricity of that sort pleases them. They all waited for the answer, not breathing.

Mr. Petre was in torture. If he admitted complete ignorance, what would follow? If he pretended knowledge, he would blunder irretrievably. They were not helping him as he had hoped; they were putting him into a fearful crux.

He made one last desperate effort to fence. He leaned forward with a poised and equal look, like a man who has something to say, and put such a question as he hoped must draw information and help. He said: “What exactly do you mean?”

Young Terrard, having gone so far, went farther, and said with awful simplicity, “Why, Mr. Petre, I mean, would you buy or sell Touaregs? Now, this afternoon?”

The silence turned to ebony; the daring seemed too great, and in her heart of hearts Mrs. Cyril feared a scene. Then Mr. Petre spoke, and decided his fate.

“I shall buy,” he said, firmly and distinctly; and then, not having the fear of God before his eyes, and determined only on plunging through and saving himself alive from further perils, he pronounced these memorable words, “I shall buy largely.” He looked round at the stupefied assembly and smiled a genial smile.

Mrs. Cyril pulled the team together. She said with a little laugh, “That’s all right.” One of the ex-Lord Chancellors said, “Oh, curse it, look at that!” It was a passing shower on the pane. The poetess asked Marjorie Kayle whether she could give her a lift. Mrs. Cyril protested that it was early, but her protest was hollow. They were all, for some reason or other, suddenly filled with an itch for movement; they would be off, and Mr. Petre wondered why.

Dear friends, it was because the earlier you get into a market, if it is a rising market, the better for you, and every man and woman of them knew it, except Mr. Petre himself.

Perfect love casteth out fear; and in their intense love for what each of them was bent on doing, and on doing now, and on doing at once, convention was hard pressed, and fear was routed. What was red and burning in them all—except the banker, the broker, and the kind old Cabinet Minister—was an intense desire for the telephone.

First come, first served. Mrs. Cyril made a move. Lucky woman, her telephone was within five yards.

She begged the men to stay behind, and the banker would have been willing enough. He wasn’t going to bother; and the kind old Cabinet Minister (who, with Mr. Petre himself, was alone innocent of motive in that roomful) wanted a glass of port. Charlie Terrard said without haste that he must go, so with more haste did the two ex-Lord Chancellors, looking at their watches in unison, like twins.

Mrs. Cyril leaping to the telephone.

As for Mr. Petre, he snatched at this general movement as a relief, and was one of the first to excuse himself hastily. To whom, indeed, young Terrard as the party broke up, and when all had said good-by to their hostess (herself as hungry for the telephone as is the saintly heart for heaven), with continued boldness (he was so frank and so charming) said as they went through the door together:

“Mr. Petre, are you going my way?”

“I am going to the Splendide,” said Mr. Petre, caught.

“I am going past there,” said young Terrard; it was true enough, for he had determined to be going wherever Mr. Petre might deign to be bound.

The short shower had been over some few minutes. They strolled southward, and in a leisurely conversation full of simplicity and good humor and good sense Charlie Terrard with his frank blue eyes and frank yellow hair (that curled) had discovered before they reached Piccadilly that Mr. Petre had fixed on no broker in town: not one more than another; it was just like his eccentricities to buy at random and refuse to be bound; it was another millionaire eccentricity to buy through Charlie, and Charlie was only too happy to oblige. It was like yet another of his eccentricities not to appreciate, or to affect to ignore, the danger of delay and the necessity for early action. It was again so like the man, with his reputation for indifference to wealth, oddly coupled with a passion for accumulation, to leave it almost at a hazard how much he would buy and to affect indifference to the hour at which he bought. He seemed (really it was monstrous) not to know the price that day, and to have no idea of what they would open at on the morrow. It was Charlie Terrard who spoke tentatively of fifty thousand shares, “I think I shall make it fifty thousand,” he said. Did he say “shall” or “should”? Mr. Petre passed the figure almost with boredom. He heard also that they were wobbling round 2½. Were they? It was very interesting, no doubt. But he didn’t follow it up.

“All right!” said Mr. Petre. “Fifty thousand.” He wasn’t clear whether Charlie Terrard was going to buy from him, or on his own.

He wasn’t clear upon anything, except his mortal dread that any argument or discussion might bring forth a Monster Question which would give him away.

“All right. Fifty thousand.”

An astonishing passage; but things happen like that in this world. No, they don’t? Yes, they do.

The conversation continued leisured down the comparative freedom from jostle of St. James’ Street and Pall Mall. Those fools who had broken away from Mrs. Cyril’s like fragments from an exploding shell might think these two would feel as they did the need for hurry. Charlie Terrard knew perfectly well there was none, so far as he and the great John K. were concerned. Touaregs were stagnant, and it wasn’t half a dozen wretched punters from among the smart that would reinstate them. Mrs. Cyril was not poor, but women don’t do such things on a large scale, and the largest of her scale would be insignificant compared with what he had in mind. As for the two ex-Lord Chancellors, they might potter about with their few pounds and be damned. Marjorie Kayle was a matter of shillings, and she would have to borrow those. They might make their little profits. He didn’t grudge them. It wasn’t things of that sort that affected a market. It was something very different; it was a mighty rumor, and the confirmation of that rumor: that was what moved a stock. And Charlie Terrard now had the lever of that solidly between his hands.

Charlie Terrard was wrong; not in his judgment of the non-effect of Mrs. Cyril’s purchase and the rest in such a big market—that any fool could have judged. He was wrong in his judgment of the relative scales of their purchases. For of all those who were buying their little packets at that very moment over the wire while he sauntered at his ease southward and eastward with his millionaire, it was Marjorie Kayle who had plunged most deeply. She had stopped to telephone from the Tube station. But she had not telephoned to any broker. She had telephoned to something better than that; she had telephoned to Lord Ashington, and he would act for him and for her. But even his purchase was nothing at all to what was coming.

Charlie Terrard and his Catch were at the door of the Splendide. He looked over his shoulder as he went off and nodded gayly to Mr. Petre.

“I’ll get you fifty thousand. Round about 2½ one ought to”; and was gone.

Charlie Terrard hastened; he was in the City just at a quarter past three, and he had said behind closed doors, and to his partner alone, what he had to say. Only after hours was the thing released.

With the next morning every one—that is, all the fifty or sixty who count—was full of it. John K. Petre was buying Touaregs.

When Mr. Petre reached his room he realized that panic is a bad adviser.

In his terror and shame lest that roomful should guess his misfortune, he had not only put himself in peril—he did not know the law on these things, but he thought that he might very well have committed a crime—but he had also brought in, with that peril, the peril of a complete discovery. For if things went badly, and that mad order to buy left him under a heavy obligation—whenever a settlement should come (and he know nothing about the times and the seasons—evidently in that mysterious former life of his, whatever else he had been, he had not been a stockbroker, and yet he had evidently been very rich, and must have made investments: it was all exceedingly bewildering)—and if his inability to meet the same losses (and he was unable to meet anything more than a few pounds) led to a prosecution, everything would come out in Court. Could the law act, he wondered? He didn’t know. If it could and did, the law would charge itself with finding out who he was, and all the misery he had desired to avoid would be upon him with tenfold force. Not a mere roomful of rich people would merely suspect him; he would be a laughing stock for the whole of England. And heaven only knew what friends or nearer ones would be involved in the affair. It was too late to undo it. The thing had gone through.

For a moment he had a wild idea of flight. Then he remembered the diminishing sum that stood between him and disaster. He would do better than that. He would hide himself. With infinite precaution he would hide himself, until there was news one way or the other of what had happened to that dreadful order for Touaregs.

And again, what were Touaregs? He was quite clear upon what shares were; he was quite clear upon the buying and selling of the same; perhaps he had cautiously speculated in a few hundreds once or twice. No incident of the sort had any place whatever in his mind to-day, and yet the terms seemed familiar enough to him. But fifty thousand! And at what price? Two and one-half pounds, shillings, francs? What had he let himself in for?... It maddened him.

A Bradshaw was part of the furniture of his room. He spread out the map, noted affectionately one of those little curling lines which leave a main railway and stop abruptly in the Wolds. He took the name of the village; he packed his bag, looked up a train; he had half an hour. He went down to leave his orders. He would keep the room; nothing was to be forwarded to him; to any enquiry they were to say that he had gone out of town, and were not to know when he would return.

It gave Mr. Petre a moment’s relief in his suffering to notice with what deference his old friend the clerk noted so strange a plan, without deposit, without explanation. He was more convinced than ever that this unknown Self was of vast consequence. Then, after all this trouble, a new thought struck him. Would it not be better to wait an hour or two? Could he not discover Terrard’s address and see whether it had really gone through? Such a man must be in the reference books. The miserable man hesitated, irresolute, when a shock hurled him into a decision. He saw, standing between himself and the light, a most extraordinary figure, tall, aquiline, with intense dark eyes, a waxed and forbidding mustache, black (for it was dyed), and an odd snarling way of speech, of which its owner was profoundly innocent, and which, indeed, he took for the common tone of a man about town. In that blotted-out mystery of the past he must—this sinister apparition must—have known Mr. Petre abominably well. A light of recognition shone in his eye. He strode up, a menacing smile upon his lips; he addressed Mr. Petre with a dreadful familiarity; he even did what your distant acquaintance commonly forbears to do, he darted out a forefinger, thrust it out against Mr. Petre’s side, and winked.

“Not stopping here, eh? Not quite your style? Where’ve you been all this time, eh? Hiding?”

Mr. Petre’s heart stopped beating.

“No,” he said, in a strained voice which he could hardly bring out. “No ... I’m not stopping here.” Then he dashed out through the door, leapt into a cab and was gone.

But in that little space to Waterloo, and in the train for two hours, his terror grew and grew. What had he done? What had he been? What thieves’ kitchen had he known? Who was that damnable stranger? How many men possessed what secrets of his life—and he possessing not the simplest, not the most innocuous detail of it?

Yes; he must, he must, he must discover; but he must discover before any fatal guess, any frightened random answer of his to some chance question, should destroy him.

One thing consoled him; the valiant loyalty of that Registration Clerk at the Splendide, whom now he felt to be his own brother in a world of misery and fear. For as Mr. Petre had leaped into that cab he had shot a glance at the dreadful Mephistopheles, and had seen him asking a question at the desk, and had seen the noble official, who had all power in his hands, shake his read resolutely and turn away.

But the whole thing was getting worse and worse; those brief hours, not forty-eight hours, only the second night after the blow had fallen—and already he was in the net, caught.

But the inn at the little place, when he reached it, comforted him. Surely in that past he had been of the English country and not of the town, still less of any foreign outlandish place, America or another. The simplicity and the goodness of the people wrapped him round like a blanket against the cold of the abominable world. Here, he thought, he could rest. And rest he did, sleeping deeply, exhausted, and woke to the new day less troubled, and, to the next, reposed.

CHAPTER III

John k. petre was buying Touaregs.

The news had penetrated to a little room, paneled in the dark oak of Shakespeare’s day; for the paneling had come from Arden out of old Kirlby Hall when they pulled it down. It was half lit by four soft candles standing on a glorious table of two hundred years. They shone on silver as old; on quills ranged in order by a royal inkstand. Over the door hung a deep curtain of tapestry which clothed the place with silence. All the air of that room was an air of lineage and endurance and repose.

Yet it was but a backwater in the noisy, the sordid, the very modern iron and concrete offices of the Messenger, the offices of that great newspaper which was the Duke’s instrument of power.

The Duke himself sat there at that table, which in his heart he felt to be a desk. A very large cigar was cocked up at an angle in the far corner of his considerable mouth, his flabby-fleshed, artificially determined face was bent over the proofs of an article which a secretary had written but himself had signed—for he could read better than he could write—and he was puzzling as to what he could print above his name and what he could not. He puzzled long; for he had got the problem wrong before now and had paid dear for the blunder.

People said that the Duke deserved his position; and when for the first time in so many years Mrs. Fossilton (whom he had made Prime Minister) had advised the King to give him that supreme title, and to honor Commerce with it, men, though they thought the thing revolutionary—in our time every new step looks revolutionary—at least admitted that the man had made himself, and rightly revered his ruthless expression, his flair for any weakness in others, and his rapid clutch at money.

He had begun life at what is called “the bottom of the ladder”—selling matches as a lad in Melbourne, and an orphan at that, under the plain name of Higgs.

Between those early years and his appearance as an agent, humble enough, put on to bully the smaller fry and to watch the larger fry at Marogavatcho’s place in Cairo, there is a gap. It is presumed that even as a boy his strength of will, his grasp of opportunity, had served him. He had perhaps made a beginning by some rapid piece of minor acquisition—we have no particulars—that had set him upon the status of possible clothes and possible grooming; from that, no doubt, he had gone on. At any rate, he had got somehow to know William Carter when William Carter meant so much in Australia, and yet William Carter wished him away. It was William Carter who had casually dropped his name as a pushing, energetic young fellow for whom some little job might be found, and from the Australian Branch they had sent him to Cairo; again because William Carter said he would do as well as another. It was in Cairo that he worked what is still known there as “Higgs’ Great Double Cross,” the details of which he never himself explained. I have had them given me by those who understood them (and they were usually given with a good deal of chuckling admiration not unmixed with fear) but they were quite beyond my comprehension.

At any rate, it was a quick rise, and he was in London with a fortune before three more years were out—in 1936; he was then thirty-five years old. This idea of buying the Messenger came to him late. He had gone through the usual mill, first in Parliament, then a baronetcy, keeping himself to himself, never speaking, but doing many a generous deed of which the public heard nothing, especially among the politicians of his own group. He had even (it was said) paid a regular subsidy to one of the most worthy and the most needy of them. His first peerage was startling; but it would not have been if his private activities had been more publicly known. He had preferred to avoid publicity.

He enjoyed no increase of rank until, his fortieth year long passed, he had purchased the great daily, and there, as in everything he did, he succeeded. It was after the negotiations which established Mrs. Fossilton in office that the last step was taken and that a new ducal title, an honor which had been for so long unknown—longer than men could remember—was suddenly given him.

It did not mean what it would have meant in the old days before the War, days which those of us who are now not so far on in middle age can still remember, but of which the younger generation knows nothing. But he wanted it, and therefore it was right that he should have it. There was no great harm done. It is true he had an heir, but the boy had been born late in his life, and had never known anything but the atmosphere of a Public School, so it was safe enough; and though he had built his own place in the country, instead of buying it, it did not swear with his rank.

He finished reading the proof, ticked it off, and rang. He asked for his secretary, and when the secretary came he said:

“Say, see here, boy, how’s all this shout ’bout John K. Petre and Touaregs?”

“It’s quite true,” said the secretary, who was where he was because he knew everything and knew it rightly, and who had become so necessary that he had promotion and now said “Duke” instead of “Your Grace.”

“How d’yer know it?” said his Grace, mumbling, with the big cigar jerked to the other corner of his mouth, but by a feat of dexterity, learned in a distant clime, kept admirably at its exalted angle.

“Oh, it’s everywhere, Duke,” said the younger man quietly, lighting a cigarette without leave, and sitting down.

“Quite sure, now, boy?”

“Quite.”

There was a pause during which the Duke frowned thoughtfully. Then he took the cigar out of his mouth between the first and middle finger of his right hand—a gesture which he only used in great moments—and said:

“Well, let ’em rip. I’m not touching the blamed things, anyway,” and having said that, he stopped frowning.

“He’s here in London,” went on the secretary, smiling slightly and watching his master.

“Here!” shouted the Duke suddenly. “Here? In London? Have they got it?” He jumped up in his excitement. “Have they got it upstairs?” He had his hand out for the bell.

The secretary began: “If I were you, Duke ...” but the Duke cut him short and snapped back, “Y’re not me, so that’s that.” Then as though he were ordering the least of his servants, “Send me Batterby, and keep yer mouth shut.”

The secretary rose quietly and without offense—he was used to it; and Batterby was shown in. Batterby wondered what it could be. He stood humbly turning his greasy soft hat round and round in his hands with nervousness, looking up humbly once or twice into his master’s face. The Duke leaned back with his legs crossed and the big cigar still going.

“Batterby,” said the chief, “did yer know about John K.?”

“Yes, y’r Grace,” said Batterby, almost inaudibly.

“And yer didn’t tell me, nor no one in this shop?”

“No, y’r Grace.”

“Well, it’s the boot, Batterby,” said the Duke genially, “De Order of de Boot. D’yer hear?” He uncrossed his legs and turned to the table again.

The unfortunate Batterby tried to stammer out, “Oh, your Grace, I understood....”

His master turned round like a barking dog: “Git out!” he said. “D’yer hear? Git out!” And Batterby got out, still humbly, and went through the luxurious little corridor, past the outer office, stumbled down the broad dirty stone stairs of the place; he was as near tears as a man of his age can be. He wondered how he would dare to face the little house in Golder’s Green. It was ten o’clock.

He elbowed his way into the “Dragon” under the arch; there were always some of the fellows there, and he began to take something for his despair, and to talk shop with the others of that sad, drifting, lost crowd of the newspaper men, the publicists, the slaves. Meanwhile in that luxurious little room a hundred yards away the Duke had sent for his secretary again.

“Whose to worry John K.?” he said.

The secretary’s quiet reply surprised him.

“Don’t send any one, Duke; don’t have a word of it in the paper.”

His Grace the Proprietor of the “Messenger” conferring the Order of the Boot on Mr. Batterby, of Golder’s Green in the County of Middlesex.

The master of so many lives had become used to such comment. Time and again it had saved him from pitfalls and from crashes. Though he made up for it by occasional violence, advice from that quarter, when he got it in a certain tone, he never dared neglect; but he growled and he wanted to know the reasons.

Then did his Grace’s secretary gently, evenly and without embroidery tell him the story of what John K. Petre had done to his competitor, the Chicago Judge, when the Chicago Judge had opened its mouth too wide. After that he told another story of what John K. Petre had done to the man on the Riviera who had let the newspapers know the name of his guest. And the Duke in his heart, though he knew very well that the Messenger was something bigger than the Chicago Judge, and that he counted more in what the modern world reveres, and had more power over it than any host upon the Riviera, yet felt a certain chill in his breast, and there tolled in it the knell of that sentence which everybody used when John K. was on the carpet, “You can’t fight fifty million pounds.”

“It’s a scoop,” he said bitterly.

The secretary shook his head: “It’s ruin and damnation!” Then he explained himself. “Where’s the scoop? He wouldn’t give an interview; and just to say he’s in London—what’s the good of that?”

“Lord, man!” shouted the Duke suddenly, “doesn’t he ever want a write up?”

“I think he manages to do without them,” said the secretary drily.

The cigar was finished and the Duke threw it away. He handed his coat to the secretary without true courtesy, and the secretary, who knew exactly how far to go, held it for him while he put it on.

“The man’s mad,” said the Duke, as he struggled into the coat.

“They all say that,” said the secretary, pulling the coat collar down and valeting his master as in duty bound.

“They’re ruddy well right,” said the Duke, and he stamped out to his private lift.

In the “Dragon” Batterby told his tale. There was nothing to be lost by telling it: there was everything to gain. He had his value. Some one might yet take him on.

“You’ve got a contract?” said a friend sympathetically.

“Yes,” said poor Batterby over his second. “What’s the good of that?”

“Why, it’s always something,” said a third. “The Messenger’s always on the nail. You’ll get your check to-morrow morning.”

“What’s the good of that?” said Batterby again gloomily, as a distant member of the group ordered another round.

“Room to turn round,” said the first friend.

Then up spoke a little man whom they all knew but whom they none of them knew enough; he was kind, he was reticent, and he had a reputation for getting things done.

“I’ll go round to Jerry now,” said the little man.

“What’s the good of that?” said Batterby for the third time.

“You’re an ungrateful beast,” said the little man. “The good is he’ll see you.”

“And nothing’ll come of that,” said Batterby again into his glass.

But the little man never minded ingratitude or folly or human grief; he enjoyed doing things.

“I bet you I’m back here in twenty minutes, and that Jerry is seeing you in half an hour,” he said.

“Jerry’s not there this time of night,” said Batterby, still determined upon woe.

“Jerry’s always there,” said the little man, and he disappeared.

He was back as he had said, and in less than twenty minutes. Batterby had got no farther than his fifth; but in the extravagance of penury he ordered another round for them all.

“You’re to see Jerry now, at once,” he said. “Up you go.”

Batterby would have discussed, but the other pushed him good-naturedly forward; and it was as his benefactor had said. Within half an hour of the first suggestion Batterby was sitting comfortably in a chair which Sir Jeremiah Walton had courteously pushed toward him with his own hands. Sir Jeremiah was a great editor. He knew the House of Commons above and Fleet Street below. He had wanted Batterby for years. Batterby had the reputation for finding out things, and the right things, better and quicker than any newspaper man in the “Street.”

“Well now, Mr. Batterby, this is what one may call sudden like,” said Sir Jeremiah genially. “Ef I had known as you were free, why, man”—then he gave a cunning glance at the simple face before him, and said, “Ye’ve not been trying on any games, ’ave yer?”

“I was told you wanted me, sir,” said Batterby. “I don’t know what you mean by games.” He was still sore.

“No offense, Mr. Batterby,” said Sir Jeremiah. “No offense,” and he handed his cigarette case to him to emphasize the good feeling. Mr. Batterby took a cigarette. “So you’ve left the Messenger, ’ave you? That’s what they tell me. Well, I don’t suppose you’d mind our crowd.”

“No, sir,” said Batterby, taking care not to grasp the lifebuoy with too much enthusiasm.

Sir Jeremiah laughed pleasantly.

“Thought they could make a story about John K., did they?” he said. “Funny how child-like people do stop! I wouldn’t have thought it of ’em. Of the Duke, I mean. ’Owever, you can’t ever tell. Now, if I ’ad been asked,” went on Sir Jeremiah with the happiness of his very considerable fortune spread all over his face, “if I ’ad been asked what risky thing I wouldn’t do, just now this minute, I should ’a said, touching Touaregs; and if I had been asked what was suicide, I should ’a said, touching John K. D’yer get me?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Batterby, thawing a little. “That’s what I thought, sir. I told his Grace that.”

“Ah? And what did ’e say?”

Sir Jeremiah Walton, God’s Servant.

“Well, sir,” said Batterby slowly, recalling the exact terms of the conversation in the inner room of the Messenger, “his Grace gave me to understand that he greatly needed this piece of news, and he told me that he could not conceal his regret that I had not imparted it to him. I told him that I thought I had acted for the best, and he answered: ‘I am sure, Batterby, you did what you thought best. But don’t let it occur again.’ Well, sir, I may have been wrong, but that’s a tone I am not used to; so what I answered was this. I said: ‘Well, your Grace, I am afraid if I don’t give satisfaction here I am not where I should be.’ ‘Oh, don’t say that,’ he said; but I was firm and I said: ‘Yes, your Grace, I don’t say which is to blame, but I do say that I must regard my connection with the Messenger as being at an end,’ and then, sir, I went out. You mustn’t blame me, Sir Jeremiah, I think I was acting as one gentleman should to another.”

During this long speech Sir Jeremiah Walton had put his head more and more on one side and watched with greater and greater interest the features and the delivery of Batterby. But all he said was: “You were right about John K., Batterby. And s’posing we wanted a story from yer to-night, Batterby, what could yer give us?”

“Well, Sir Jeremiah,” answered Batterby, thinking slowly, “there have been no letters or anything between us.”

“That’s all right,” said Sir Jeremiah, waving his hand. “We’ll ’ave that settled before you leave,” and he named a figure.

“I have got what they’re saying of the Duke’s own last little affair,” said Batterby at last. “The Hotel in Rome. Him being kicked down the main staircase,” he explained with a beautiful candor.

“Don’t want that,” said Sir Jeremiah, shaking his head, but this time laughing openly. “Dog don’t eat dog.”

“I’ve got the story they’re sending to Paris to-night, which was to have come out first in Paris and then in London next day. They’ve squared the Messenger, Sir Jeremiah. If you like it you can have it.”

“Eh?” snapped that politician eagerly. “Not the Foreign Office Note?” Batterby nodded. “By Go—Gum! That’s the style!” The knight was radiant. He was so moved that he opened a bottle of ginger ale, filled a glass and offered it to his guest. “That’s the style! Ye’re a trump, Batterby! Ye’re a trump!”

“Best respects,” said Batterby, lifting the ginger ale and falling into the manner of his youth.

“Granted, I am sure,” said Sir Jeremiah courteously. “We don’t allow anything stronger than that, yer know, Batterby.” And he winked, “Not ’ere, any’ow.” And he winked again.

“I know, sir, I know,” answered the other, conscious that the “Dragon” was within call.

Thus did Mr. Batterby recover what he had lost and rise from where he had fallen; and thus were the fortunes of one man unmade and made in one night, and the Duke’s reputation put in peril and just saved, and the secrets of Great Britain prematurely disclosed; and all this through the unconscious action of poor Mr. Petre, who would not have hurt a fly, and who at that hour of the night was already sleeping his good sleep down in the peace of the Hampshire country-side.

There is among the many departments of our well-ordered State a department which would be known if we were Chinese as “The Board of Things to be Known and Not to be Known.” Its seeming simple and deceptive name wild horses shall not tear from my sealed lips; and the reader must content himself with surmise.

Over this small but exceedingly important and admirably efficient cell of the executive presides a man of good birth, education and manners (for it is a permanent). He is elderly and a little jaded, but astonishingly on the spot.

Some hours before those much greater men, the Duke and the Knight, had been exchanging civil nothings with the ingenuous Batterby, this permanent official (K.C.B., Porter Mansions, £3,500, Eton and Trinity. Recreation, Golfing. Clubs, Travelers’, Blue Posts) was saying not more than half a dozen phrases to an equal in social rank, an inferior in years and office.

“You know that damned Yankee’s in town?”

“Yes.”

“They’ve told you it’s the usual note?”

“Oh! Yes—and Jessie Malvers said she particularly hoped....”

“That’s all right. She’s not the only one. You sent round to the Press Department?”

“Yes. Nothing’ll come out—as usual. But I don’t think we need worry much. He’s put the fear of God into everybody.”

“He was at Celia Cyril’s, all the same—at lunch to-day,” said the older man, getting up and mechanically settling a sheaf of paper on his table, as he prepared to go out. “His name’s not to get about, in spite of that. I don’t think he’ll go out much. You’ve had the division warned?”

“Johnson saw to that. They’ve got a plain clothes man both sides and another following.”

“That’s all right,” said the superior. “Going my way?”

“Yes.”

They took down their hats and coats from the lobby and sauntered off side by side till they came to the Horse Guards’ Parade, and so up the Duke of York’s Steps to the Club.

That same night a young and guileless constable of Division Phi, his head relieved of its preposterous helmet and his hands swinging at ease between his knees as he sat on a bench with betters, enjoying a brief and well-earned leisure, said: “That foreign millionaire at the Splendide, him as they call....”

“Never mind what they call him, me lad,” broke in a voice of authority, years and stripes, “the less you call him anything the better for you. Them’s orders.” And a deep silence reigned.