by John Buchan
The other was Mrs Pomfrey. Of her he had no fear, for she made no advances, but he had a lively curiosity about her. He was aware of her as a quiet figure with intelligent eyes, content to wait in the background, but wielding enormous power in her apparent detachment. She had succeeded in imposing her personality on contemporary life without obviously exerting herself. She had of course the advantage of great wealth. Her husband had been a shipowner whose fortune had become colossal during the war, and at his death just before the Armistice all of it had been left to her. The Pomfreys had come to London from the North in 1912, and, though they professed to be plain folk without social ambition, their house in Charles Street had very soon become a meeting-place for important people of diverse types. The attraction was the wife, for Pomfrey was a silent man, concerned with the cares of many businesses. Lilah Pomfrey had no beauty to help her, and only a sketchy education. She had been her husband’s secretary in far-off days, and came out of a middle-class Northumbrian home; her one affectation was that she was disposed to exaggerate the humility of her origin, and to speak of herself as a “daughter of the people.” She was short and powerfully built — had she been a man her physical strength would have been remarkable. Her face was broad, with strong cheek-bones and a wide kindly mouth; her colouring was a little dusky, and with her coal-black hair and dark eyes it suggested some trace of gipsy blood.
Most people when they talked of her set down her attraction to her gift of sympathy and her staunch fidelity. She never betrayed a confidence and was the most loyal of friends; she had proved on more than one occasion that she could also be an unforgiving enemy. She had succeeded where her rivals had failed. Lady Bland ruthlessly pursued every notable, and by dint of much asking swept a motley crowd of celebrities into her drawing-room, but she remained a comic figure and the target for malicious gibes. Mrs Macrimmon collected bored royalties, most of them foreign, but her fame was confined to the picture-papers. Mrs Diamond from Chicago made a speciality of youth, and was consequently a frequent character in the novels of youth, and now and then the subject of odes in vers libres by young poets. These all had an ambition to be queens of salons to which intellect would gather and which would be a power-house of many movements; but their much-paragraphed entertainments were like circuses which were forgotten utterly when the last performer had made his bow.
Mrs Pomfrey was different. She did not seek, she was sought; her invitations were to most people like royal commands. She spoke little, but what she said in her deep voice with its pleasant north-country burr was remembered. She dispensed not entertainment but friendship. Men of every type, leaders in finance and politics, were believed to seek her advice, but, since she was not vain, she never talked about it. . . . Adam was nervous when he caught her deep, appraising eyes fixed on him. Twice she had asked him to dinner, and both times he had found an excuse for declining.
To-night he was dining with Lady Flambard in Berkeley Square. Sally Flambard was Mrs Pomfrey’s exact opposite, like her only in the absence of vanity. She was slight, fair, and volatile as a bird, living, as a French admirer once said, perpetually sur la branche. All that was new intoxicated her, but the waves of novelty passed through her life and left no mark. The basis of her character was her eager interest in things and her human warmth. She was prepared to do battle to the death for her friends, and never refused a challenge, but her affection was not yoked with prudence, and those who liked her best had to be most on their guard. She was popular because of her power of aerating the atmosphere, but she was a dynamo, not an anchor. Those who went to Mrs Pomfrey for counsel sought Lady Flambard’s company for stimulus.
There were five people in the long, low drawing-room, which was dim with summer twilight. Sir Evelyn Flambard had gone down to the country to look at his young horses, so there was no host. Creevey, wearing knee-breeches and decorations, for he was going on to a ceremonial ball, was talking to Jacqueline Armine. The latter rose at Adam’s entrance and came forward.
“Bless you, Adam,” she said, “where have you been hiding yourself? Ken is dying to see you. He’s Mayor of Birkpool, you know, and he’s down in that filthy city to-day talking sense to town councillors. No, we’re at the Court — we’ve no town house this summer — economy, I say — self-indulgence, Ken says, for he hates London. Have you heard the news about Frank? He has taken St Mark’s — the living is in the gift of the Corporation, and they were lucky to get him. . . . Hullo, here he is. Not dressed, too, like a sordid Member of Parliament. That’s an affectation, for he can’t be as busy as all that. . . .”
Lady Flambard took Adam’s arm.
“You take in Mrs Pomfrey. You know her, don’t you?”
He bowed to a lady in the dusk behind Jacqueline. Mrs Pomfrey was going on to the same ball as Creevey and wore a wonderful gown of black and red. Her jewels were emeralds. Adam realised anew the air of substance she carried with her — not material only, but a certain tough solidity of spirit. She seemed like one who could command all the apparatus of life, moving in a sphere in which she was securely at home. Beside her Jacqueline Armine and Sally Flambard looked like gossamer visitants from a more rarefied planet. Frank Alban, too, with his lean plain face and shabby clothes, suggested failure, disquiet, the uncomfortable struggles of a lower order of things. But Creevey paired well with her, and it seemed appropriate that they should both be in gala dress. They were both assured and successful children of their world.
At the little round dinner-table Adam sat between Mrs Pomfrey and Jacqueline. Sally Flambard and Frank Alban at the start did most of the talking. His hostess had much to say of Frank’s flight from London.
“Don’t tell me it’s the call of duty. You’re afraid, Frank, black afraid of the worshipping ladies in trouble about their souls.”
“Not their souls,” said Jacqueline. “Their emotions, my dear. It’s the idle young women in search of a new sensation who scare Frank. Well, he won’t have any in Birkpool. We’ve not a feminised society down there. Ken has forbidden me to powder my nose in public.”
“Frank’s afraid of women,” said Sally firmly. “That’s the drawback of British youth. In my country we bring up boys and girls together so that they mix naturally, but here you still hanker after the convent and the monastery till they reach what you call years of discretion. But discretion has to be learned and you expect it to come in a single dose. In America we break in our young bit by bit.”
“It works well with your adorable ladies,” said Creevey. “But what about the men?”
“They’re well enough. A little apt to be run by their womenkind, but that’s a fault on the right side. If I have any doubt it’s about the girls. They don’t transplant well. Our bright brittle young things should marry into their own kind. I know I’m giving away my case to Lilah, who hates Englishmen marrying Americans. But take me — I’m a warning. I love every inch of England, but I shall never belong here. If I hadn’t Evelyn to anchor me, I should be the most déraciné thing alive.”
“What has an angel to do with roots?” Creevey asked.
“You should have been an American, Mr Creevey,” Sally replied. “That’s just the kind of heavy compliment our menfolk are always paying. I mean what I say. When I look at the way you Englishwomen have your feet in your native mud, I could howl with envy. I know my cottagers at Flambard and all their troubles, and I doctor their babies, and look after the district nurse, and run a Women’s Institute, and get up every sort of show, and yet I no more belong there than my pekinese.”
“No, no, my dear,” said Jacqueline. “You’re a model. I wish I did my duty by Armine Court as you do yours by Flambard. All of us to-day are hopping about on the twigs. Ken gave me a talking-to yesterday — said I was of a composition to which water would add stability! He got that out of some book, and was very pleased with it.”
She turned to Creevey, who was her neighbour on the left.
“We’re becoming a new type — physically, I mean. There’s very
little need for slimming now. I agree with Julius Cæsar — I prefer people about me that are fat and comfortable, and I can’t find them. Look at us here. Sally and I are wraiths, and Frank is a mere anatomy. I often feel as wispish as a leaf in the wind. I want to be substantial. Lilah and Mr Creevey are better, but of course they’re not plump, and Adam looks like a prize-fighter in hard training. What has become of the nice, easy-going, well-padded people with soft voices and wide smiles? We don’t breed ‘em nowadays.”
“What about Jimmy Raven?” someone asked.
“Oh, Jimmy! He used to be a beautiful young man, and now he is fat and waddles — but that’s because he has taken up with some slushy religion, and believes that there is no such thing as pain or wickedness, and that we’re all in a Pullman express bound for the Golden Shore. Charles Lamancha says it’s biology — that atrophy of mind is usually attended by hypertrophy of body. Have I got the words right?”
“We’re lean,” said Creevey, and his voice belied his words, for its chalky richness seemed to argue a eupeptic body—”because we’re dissatisfied, and that is not a bad thing to be. We’re all seekers.”
Adam glanced across the table at Frank and saw a whimsical look on his face. These were the very words he had used during that walk home through the Birkpool streets.
“Seekers after what?” Frank asked. “A City of God? Or only some new thing?”
Creevey raised his massive head, and his eyes had an ironic seriousness.
“You can give it any fine name you like. Geraldine says it is a land fit for heroes, and President Wilson says it is a world fit for democracy, and the little poets call it a new renaissance. But we are not so much the slave of words to-day, and these pretty things are only meant for perorations. The motive at the base of everything is money. Call it economic stability if it pleases you, but that only means money. Everyone wants more out of the pool — workman, master, professional man, rentier, statesman, people. What’s behind the League of Nations? Not the horror of war, not humanity, except in the case of a few old ladies and imaginative youths. It’s disgust at having to waste good money in blowing things to bits.”
“But Ken says that there is no pool to grab things out of,” put in Jacqueline.
“My dear lady, there will always be a pool, and clever people will always have their hands in it.”
“But what is to happen,” Frank asked, “even if the pool turns out to be large enough and a great multitude can have a share in it? What are they going to do with their share? Is the new millennium to be like a Brighton hotel, all upholstery and rich cooking and a jazz band?”
“Why should it? Comfort need not be gross, it may have all the refinements. You can’t have civilisation without money behind it. The great day of Athens was when she was cock of the Aegean and levied tribute from her dependencies. I’m no materialist, but I thank my stars I live in an age when people have an eye for facts. A little sound biology is what is needed. You’ve got to have a quantitative basis, as the wiseacres say, for qualitative progress.”
“But how if quality is choked by quantity?” Frank asked.
“It needn’t be. That’s one of the arbitrary antitheses that your profession is always inventing — God or Mammon, the Church or the World, the Narrow Road or the Broad Road, and so forth. Quality may be choked by quantity, but it will most certainly be starved by scarcity.”
Adam, who had been talking to Mrs Pomfrey, addressed Creevey for the first time.
“Perhaps you’re right that the money motive is predominant with everybody. But assume that the confusion of the globe is only beginning, and that in a year or two the whole economic fabric will be cracking. Assume too that the only hope of saving it will be by a great effort of discipline and sacrifice. Will you get that effort merely for the money motive? Mustn’t you bring in an altogether different kind of appeal?”
Creevey shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t think there need be any cracking if people show common sense. If there is, you won’t mend it by any of the old-fashioned appeals. The world is out of the mood for them. It doesn’t understand the language.”
He broke off to answer a question from his hostess. Mrs Pomfrey was speaking in her low-pitched husky voice, and Adam had to incline his head to catch her words.
“I think Mr Creevey is wrong,” she said. “Our troubles are only beginning, and we need a change of heart if we are to meet them. I want to see a new Crusade and I want Mr Alban to be its Peter the Hermit.”
Frank Alban opposite seemed to be trying to catch her words, and Adam repeated them. The young man laughed, but there was no mirth in his laugh.
“I wish I had Peter the Hermit’s job. It was a simple affair to persuade men who believed in God to set out to reclaim God’s holy city from the infidel — and to go with them. To go with them, to share all their hardships and dangers. I have to persuade people that there is a God at all, and to make them believe that evil is a more awful thing than pain, and that a starved soul is worse than a starved body. I can’t tell them to pack up and follow me across the globe — that would be straightforward enough. I can only tell them to go on as they are and grub along in their deadly monotonous lives. And the infernal thing is that I can’t join them. I can’t make my life like theirs. If I tried it would only be a pose and they would see through it. People like me need never fear an empty belly or the loss of a roof over our heads. A preacher should be a little bit above his hearers, and I feel most of the time below mine. When I see a woman with a thin face and hands worn to the bone with toil, or a middle-aged workman struggling to keep his job against the handicap of failing strength — then I feel that my job is an infernal imposture. I wish that I were a penniless Franciscan in the fifteenth century, because then we should all be on a level. Only you can’t put back the hands of your accursed clock. I’m suffering from the nightmare of other people’s poverty . . . and I sometimes think that the nightmare is worse than the fact.”
Mrs Pomfrey nodded. “I think I know what you mean. But may not your suffering give you power? It will sharpen your sympathy.”
She turned to Adam. “Don’t you agree with me?”
“Melfort doesn’t know what we mean,” Frank said. “He’s the real Franciscan if you like. He has been through so many kinds of naked hell that a consumptive tramp on a winter day expects more from the world than he does. He is the man who should be at my job — only if my perch is too low his is too high, and he could never drag an ordinary fellow within sight of it.”
Adam shook his head.
“Nonsense, Alban,” he said, “I can’t lead men. The best I can do is to help those who can.”
Mrs Pomfrey turned to him.
“I wish you could tell me something about yourself,” she said. “I have only heard rumours. But I am afraid you won’t. You seem to me the only modest person left in an advertising world.” She looked on him with her friendly eyes, and then turned them on Frank, and Adam seemed to see in the way in which she regarded the other something more than friendliness, something possessive and affectionate.
Jacqueline had caught a word.
“Modest!” she exclaimed. “You’re utterly wrong, Lilah. Adam is the most immodest creature alive. We are wistful waifs compared to him. He knows where he is, and knows it so clearly that he never troubles to explain. Mr Creevey says that we are all seekers to-day. I don’t think Adam is one. He has found something — only he won’t tell.”
Creevey lifted his head, which as usual had sunk between his broad drooping shoulders. He looked at Adam with his inscrutable, challenging smile.
“That is my notion of success,” he said—”to have found what you want and to be able to keep it to yourself. Only there is no standing still in life. What one man has found may conflict with what others are seeking, and he may have to fight to retain it.”
He lifted his glass of port.
“I drink,” he said, “to the success of the best man. That the best should win is
all that matters.”
Afterwards in the drawing-room Adam talked to Jacqueline Armine.
“I can’t make Ken out,” she said. “I seem to have entirely lost the hang of him. He came back from the war declaring that he meant to enjoy himself for the rest of his natural life. He was crazy about the Court and started putting it to rights — got the coverts tidied up and began to rear pheasants in the old way. He spent a lot of money on the farms, far more than he’ll ever get back. He wouldn’t take the hounds, but he hunted regularly twice a week. Then you know how keen he is about horses — he has every kind of theory about how to breed up to an ideal — and he talked about a racing stable. Well, he seems to have forgotten all that. He’s had a call and has gone dotty about the public service, and I find it very wearing to keep pace with him.
“No, it’s not Birkpool only,” she said in reply to a question of Adam’s. “It was quite natural that he should be Mayor — that’s a family tradition. It’s everything else. He naturally wishes he was in the House — not the Lords, but the Commons — he has so much he wants to say. You’ve seen from the papers that he has taken to making speeches? He has heaps of queer friends up and down the country and they arrange meetings for him. Pretty strong meat he gives them too. The seventh Marquis has been sending anxious wires, and small wonder, if Ken said half the things he’s reputed to have said! He’s a mixture of high Tory and rampant Bolshie — says he doesn’t care a hoot for democracy and all the old Victorian idols, but that we have got to preserve the stamina of England, and that it can only be done by facing facts and having a fresh deal. He has big meetings and plenty of oppositions, for he slangs all sides impartially, but it looks as if he were getting a following, and where it’s to end I’m blessed if I know. The idyllic existence I had hoped for is all in smithereens.”
“What about Birkpool?” Adam asked.