CHAPTER FOUR
I went up to town bearing the Callan article, and a letter of warmcommendation from Callan to Fox. I had been very docile; had acceptedemendations; had lavished praise, had been unctuous and yet hadcontrived to retain the dignified savour of the editorial "we." Callanhimself asked no more.
I was directed to seek Fox out--to find him immediately. The matter wasgrowing urgent. Fox was not at the office--the brand new office that Iafterward saw pass through the succeeding stages of business-likecomfort and dusty neglect. I was directed to ask for him at the stagedoor of the Buckingham.
I waited in the doorkeeper's glass box at the Buckingham. I was eyed bythe suspicious commissionaire with the contempt reserved for restingactors. Resting actors are hungry suppliants as a rule. Call-boys soughtMr. Fox. "Anybody seen Mr. Fox? He's gone to lunch."
"Mr. Fox is out," said the commissionaire.
I explained that the matter was urgent. More call-boys disappearedthrough the folding doors. Unenticing personages passed the glass box,casting hostile glances askance at me on my high stool. A message cameback.
"If it's Mr. Etchingham Granger, he's to follow Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly'sat once."
I followed Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly's--to a little flat in a neighbourhoodthat I need not specify. The eminent journalist was lunching with theeminent actress. A husband was in attendance--a nonentity with a heavyyellow moustache, who hummed and hawed over his watch.
Mr. Fox was full-faced, with a persuasive, peremptory manner. Mrs.Hartly was--well, she was just Mrs. Hartly. You remember how we all fellin love with her figure and her manner, and her voice, and the way sheused her hands. She broke her bread with those very hands; spoke to herhusband with that very voice, and rose from table with that samegraceful management of her limp skirts. She made eyes at me; at herhusband; at little Fox, at the man who handed the asparagus--greatround grey eyes. She was just the same. The curtain never fell on thateternal dress rehearsal. I don't wonder the husband was forever lookingat his watch.
Mr. Fox was a friend of the house. He dispensed with ceremony, read mymanuscript over his Roquefort, and seemed to find it add to the savour.
"You are going to do me for Mr. Fox," Mrs. Hartly said, turning herlarge grey eyes upon me. They were very soft. They seemed to send outwaves of intense sympatheticism. I thought of those others that had shotout a razor-edged ray.
"Why," I answered, "there was some talk of my doing somebody for the_Hour_."
Fox put my manuscript under his empty tumbler.
"Yes," he said, sharply. "He will do, I think. H'm, yes. Why, yes."
"You're a friend of Mr. Callan's, aren't you?" Mrs. Hartly asked, "Whata dear, nice man he is! You should see him at rehearsals. You know I'mdoing his 'Boldero'; he's given me a perfectly lovely part--perfectlylovely. And the trouble he takes. He tries every chair on the stage."
"H'm; yes," Fox interjected, "he likes to have his own way."
"We _all_ like that," the great actress said. She was quoting from herfirst great part. I thought--but, perhaps, I was mistaken--that all herutterances were quotations from her first great part. Her husband lookedat his watch.
"Are you coming to this confounded flower show?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, turning her mysterious eyes upon him, "I'll go and getready."
She disappeared through an inner door. I expected to hear thepistol-shot and the heavy fall from the next room. I forgot that it wasnot the end of the fifth act.
Fox put my manuscript into his breast pocket.
"Come along, Granger," he said to me, "I want to speak to you. You'llhave plenty of opportunity for seeing Mrs. Hartly, I expect. She's tenthon your list. Good-day, Hartly."
Hartly's hand was wavering between his moustache and his watch pocket.
"Good-day," he said sulkily.
"You must come and see me again, Mr. Granger," Mrs. Hartly said fromthe door. "Come to the Buckingham and see how we're getting on with yourfriend's play. We must have a good long talk if you're to get my localcolour, as Mr. Fox calls it."
"To gild refined gold; to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet--"
I quoted banally.
"That's it," she said, with a tender smile. She was fastening a buttonin her glove. I doubt her recognition of the quotation.
When we were in our hansom, Fox began:
"I'm relieved by what I've seen of your copy. One didn't expect thissort of thing from you. You think it a bit below you, don't you? Oh, Iknow, I know. You literary people are usually so impracticable; you knowwhat I mean. Callan said you were the man. Callan has his uses; but onehas something else to do with one's paper. I've got interests of my own.But you'll do; it's all _right_. You don't mind my being candid, do you,now?" I muttered that I rather liked it.
"Well then," he went on, "now I see my way."
"I'm glad you do," I murmured. "I wish I did."
"Oh, that will be all right," Fox comforted. "I dare say Callan hasrather sickened you of the job; particularly if you ain't used to it.But you won't find the others as trying. There's Churchill now, he'syour next. You'll have to mind him. You'll find him a decent chap. Not abit of side on him."
"What Churchill?" I asked.
"The Foreign Minister."
"The devil," I said.
"Oh, you'll find him all right," Fox reassured; "you're to go down tohis place to-morrow. It's all arranged. Here we are. Hop out." He suitedhis own action to his words and ran nimbly up the new terra-cotta stepsof the _Hour's_ home. He left me to pay the cabman.
When I rejoined him he was giving directions to an invisible somebodythrough folding doors.
"Come along," he said, breathlessly. "Can't see him," he added to alittle boy, who held a card in his hands. "Tell him to go to Mr. Evans.One's life isn't one's own here," he went on, when he had reached hisown room.
It was a palatial apartment furnished in white and gold--Louis Quinze,or something of the sort--with very new decorations after Watteaucovering the walls. The process of disfiguration, however, had alreadybegun. A roll desk of the least possible Louis Quinze order stood in oneof the tall windows; the carpet was marked by muddy footprints, and amatchboard screen had been run across one end of the room.
"Hullo, Evans," Fox shouted across it, "just see that man from Grant's,will you? Heard from the Central News yet?"
He was looking through the papers on the desk.
"Not yet, I've just rung them up for the fifth time," the answer came.
"Keep on at it," Fox exhorted.
"Here's Churchill's letter," he said to me. "Have an arm-chair; thoseblasted things are too uncomfortable for anything. Make yourselfcomfortable. I'll be back in a minute."
I took an arm-chair and addressed myself to the Foreign Minister'sletter. It expressed bored tolerance of a potential interviewer, but itseemed to please Fox. He ran into the room, snatched up a paper from hisdesk, and ran out again.
"Read Churchill's letter?" he asked, in passing. "I'll tell you allabout it in a minute." I don't know what he expected me to do withit--kiss the postage stamp, perhaps.
At the same time, it was pleasant to sit there idle in the midst of thehurry, the breathlessness. I seemed to be at last in contact with reallife, with the life that matters. I was somebody, too. Fox treated mewith a kind of deference--as if I were a great unknown. His "youliterary men" was pleasing. It was the homage that the pretender pays tothe legitimate prince; the recognition due to the real thing from themachine-made imitation; the homage of the builder to the architect.
"Ah, yes," it seemed to say, "we jobbing men run up our rows and rows ofhouses; build whole towns and fill the papers for years. But when wewant something special--something monumental--we have to come to you."
Fox came in again.
"Very sorry, my dear fellow, find I can't possibly get a moment for achat with you. Look here, come and dine with me at the Paragraph roundthe corner--to-night at six sharp. You'll go to Churchill's to-morrow."<
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The Paragraph Club, where I was to meet Fox, was one of those sporadicestablishments that spring up in the neighbourhood of the Strand. It isone of their qualities that they are always just round the corner;another, that their stewards are too familiar; another, that they--inthe opinion of the other members--are run too much for the convenienceof one in particular.
In this case it was Fox who kept the dinner waiting. I sat in the littlesmoking-room and, from behind a belated morning paper, listened to theconversation of the three or four journalists who represented themembers. I felt as a new boy in a new school feels on his firstintroduction to his fellows.
There was a fossil dramatic critic sleeping in an arm-chair before thefire. At dinner-time he woke up, remarked:
"You should have seen Fanny Ellsler," and went to sleep again.
Sprawling on a red velvet couch was a _beau jeune homme_, with thenecktie of a Parisian-American student. On a chair beside him sat apersonage whom, perhaps because of his plentiful lack of h's, I took fora distinguished foreigner.
They were talking about a splendid subject for a music-hall dramaticsketch of some sort--afforded by a bus driver, I fancy.
I heard afterward that my Frenchman had been a costermonger and was nowhalf journalist, half financier, and that my art student was an employeeof one of the older magazines.
"Dinner's on the table, gents," the steward said from the door. He wenttoward the sleeper by the fire. "I expect Mr. Cunningham will wear thatarm-chair out before he's done," he said over his shoulder.
"Poor old chap; he's got nowhere else to go to," the magazine employeesaid.
"Why doesn't he go to the work'ouse," the journalist financier retorted."Make a good sketch that, eh?" he continued, reverting to hisbus-driver.
"Jolly!" the magazine employee said, indifferently.
"Now, then, Mr. Cunningham," the steward said, touching the sleeper onthe shoulder, "dinner's on the table."
"God bless my soul," the dramatic critic said, with a start. The stewardleft the room. The dramatic critic furtively took a set of false teethout of his waistcoat pocket; wiped them with a bandanna handkerchief,and inserted them in his mouth.
He tottered out of the room.
I got up and began to inspect the pen-and-ink sketches on the walls.
The faded paltry caricatures of faded paltry lesser lights thatconfronted me from fly-blown frames on the purple walls almost made meshiver.
"There you are, Granger," said a cheerful voice behind me. "Come andhave some dinner."
I went and had some dinner. It was seasoned by small jokes and littlepersonalities. A Teutonic journalist, a musical critic, I suppose,inquired as to the origin of the meagre pheasant. Fox replied that ithad been preserved in the back-yard. The dramatic critic mumbled unheardthat some piece or other was off the bills of the Adelphi. I grinnedvacantly. Afterward, under his breath, Fox put me up to a thing or tworegarding the inner meaning of the new daily. Put by him, without anyglamour of a moral purpose, the case seemed rather mean. The dingysmoking-room depressed me and the whole thing was, what I had, for somany years, striven to keep out of. Fox hung over my ear, whispering.There were shades of intonation in his sibillating. Some of those "init," the voice implied, were not above-board; others were, and the tonebecame deferential, implied that I was to take my tone from itself.
"Of course, a man like the Right Honourable C. does it on the straight,... quite on the straight, ... has to have some sort of semi-officialbacker.... In this case, it's me, ... the _Hour_. They're a bit splitty,the Ministry, I mean.... They say Gurnard isn't playing square ... they_say_ so." His broad, red face glowed as he bent down to my ear, hislittle sea-blue eyes twinkled with moisture. He enlightened mecautiously, circumspectly. There was something unpleasant in thebusiness--not exactly in Fox himself, but the kind of thing. I wish hewould cease his explanations--I didn't want to hear them. I have neverwanted to know how things are worked; preferring to take the world atits face value. Callan's revelations had been bearable, because of thefarcical pompousness of his manner. But this was different, it had thestamp of truth, perhaps because it was a little dirty. I didn't want tohear that the Foreign Minister was ever so remotely mixed up in thisbusiness. He was only a symbol to me, but he stood for the stability ofstatesmanship and for the decencies that it is troublesome to havetouched.
"Of course," he was proceeding, "the Churchill gang would like to go onplaying the stand-off to us. But it won't do, they've got to come in orsee themselves left. Gurnard has pretty well nobbled their old partypress, so they've got to begin all over again."
That was it--that was precisely it. Churchill ought to have played thestand-off to people like us--to have gone on playing it at whatevercost. That was what I demanded of the world as I conceived it. It was somuch less troublesome in that way. On the other hand, this was life--Iwas living now and the cost of living is disillusionment; it was theprice I had to pay. Obviously, a Foreign Minister had to have asemi-official organ, or I supposed so.... "Mind you," Fox whispered on,"I think myself, that it's a pity he is supporting the Greenlandbusiness. The thing's not _altogether_ straight. But it's going to bemade to pay like hell, and there's the national interest to beconsidered. If this Government didn't take it up, some other would--andthat would give Gurnard and a lot of others a peg against Churchill andhis. We can't afford to lose any more coaling stations in Greenland oranywhere else. And, mind you, Mr. C. can look after the interests of theniggers a good deal better if he's a hand in the pie. You see theposition, eh?"
I wasn't actually listening to him, but I nodded at proper intervals. Iknew that he wanted me to take that line in confidential conversationswith fellows seeking copy. I was quite resigned to that. Incidentally, Iwas overcome by the conviction--perhaps it was no more than asensation--that that girl was mixed up in this thing, that her shadowwas somewhere among the others flickering upon the sheet. I wanted toask Fox if he knew her. But, then, in that absurd business, I did noteven know her name, and the whole story would have sounded a little mad.Just now, it suited me that Fox should have a moderate idea of mysanity. Besides, the thing was out of tone, I idealised her then. Onewouldn't talk about her in a smoking-room full of men telling stories,and one wouldn't talk about her at all to Fox.
The musical critic had been prowling about the room with Fox's eyes uponhim. He edged suddenly nearer, pushed a chair aside, and came toward us.
"Hullo," he said, in an ostentatiously genial, after-dinner voice, "whatare you two chaps a-talking about?"
"Private matters," Fox answered, without moving a hair.
"Then I suppose I'm in the way?" the other muttered. Fox did not answer.
"Wants a job," he said, watching the discomfited Teuton's retreat, "but,as I was saying--oh, it pays both ways." He paused and fixed his eyes onme. He had been explaining the financial details of the matter, in whichthe Duc de Mersch and Callan and Mrs. Hartly and all these peopleclubbed together and started a paper which they hired Fox to run, whichwas to bring their money back again, which was to scratch their backs,which.... It was like the house that Jack built; I wondered who Jackwas. That was it, who was Jack? It all hinged upon that.
"Why, yes," I said. "It seems rather neat."
"Of course," Fox wandered on, "you are wondering why the deuce I tellyou all this. Fact is, you'd hear it all if I didn't, and a good dealmore that isn't true besides. But I believe you're the sort of chap torespect a confidence."
I didn't rise to the sentiment. I knew as well as he did that he wasbamboozling me, that he was, as he said, only telling me--not the truth,but just what I should hear everywhere. I did not bear him any ill-will;it was part of the game, that. But the question was, who was Jack? Itmight be Fox himself.... There might, after all, be some meaning in thefarrago of nonsense that that fantastic girl had let off upon me. Foxreally and in a figure of speech such as she allowed herself, might berunning a team consisting of the Duc de Mersch and Mr. Churchill.