“Yes,” said Levina.
Then Halterton went on in a much more hesitating voice:
“Mr. Levina, will you do me a personal favour?” Levina made no answer. It did not seem the moment for personal favours.
“I mean, will you let me ask you to have no question of insurance between us, or anything of that kind? I want to do what I possibly can—everything I can— everything!”
“I don’t see what you …” began Levina in an even but almost threatening voice.
“Please,” said Wilfrid Halterton eagerly. “Please! If you only knew what I’ve been feeling these last few hours!”
And Levina was astonished to see tears in the eyes opposite to his own.
He had seen them cry, these alien people, at least, he had seen the poor ones cry before now. He had seen them cry, always at their own distress, and usually at the distress which he himself had caused, and for which he cared nothing—why should he care? All the debt was on their side—immensely on their side. Why should he pity or forgive? They would always begin again. Yet when he saw these tears something changed in him.
“Mr. Halterton,” he said at last with difficulty, “it was not your fault.”
“God knows it wasn’t,” said Halterton, from his heart. “I’d kill myself if it was, I think! But you will let me see him?”
“Of course, Mr. Halterton. It’s nothing to do with me. But of course I would if it did depend on me.”
“And you’ll let me do all I can?”
“Moneysh!”—Levina almost hissed the word, speaking without parting his teeth, which showed between his lips.
“No! No! No I Mr. Levina—all you or he need is there freely—but God knows I mean …” He looked anxiously at the other, thinking he saw the sudden scorn sinking somewhat. Then he added: “But all else I can do in the way of friendship—there may be lots of things.”
Levina was silent again, but he managed to say “Yes” at the end of a very long silence.
“I do mean it,” said Halterton, “I do indeed.” And with that, giving the hour at which he would certainly be at the hospital, he said good night and went.
The next morning they met again at the hospital, but in the interval Wilfrid Halterton had rung up his father and gone down there in a hired motor and had had a talk, late into the night. He had told his father what he meant to do, and the old man thought it quixotic; but after all, Wilfrid’s money was his own, and even though he thought it quixotic, he was half proud of his son for feeling thus.
“I should have done the same at his age,” he thought to himself. “The young people are better than us. I hope when he gets to my age he won’t be as dried up as I am.”
With that the old boy had gone to bed, protesting no more, and next morning Levina and Halterton met again at the bedside of the boy.
That was the beginning, all those years ago. More than thirty years ago. Much followed on it.
The lad was a cripple. Not a wreck, but never to be straight and hale again. Wilfrid Halterton watched the convalescence. His solicitude had grown, he had really taken every trouble. And in spite of a fixed pride, Aaron Levina was grateful. He was grateful in that inner hidden depth of his closest being, which had hitherto held but two emotions, closely intermingled; his devotion for his people, and his passionate love for the brother who was now to be a cripple for life. The constant solicitude, the constant attention of the Gentile, which Halterton was always pressing on him during the convalescence moved him, and formed a habit, until a new distant but strong affection of gratitude at last became part of Aaron Levina’s spirit. In all those millions in England who were not of his kind, there was only one man whom Aaron Levina would have crossed the street for; there was only one man whom he was glad to welcome, and that man was Wilfrid Halterton. Here again I must ask my reader to understand and excuse what they may think exaggerated. They are dealing with a type unfamiliar to them, not of our blood. You and I would not feel such strongly fixed enduring gratitude for one brief episode in early youth. Aaron did. It was part, I suppose, of that strange tenacity which all see, and most fear, in men of his race.
They met but rarely after Jacob was back at his work again. Each was a little shy of the other. But Aaron would write at regular intervals and call to renew his thanks. What made a new and final step in the affair was the question of Jacob’s going to the University.
There could be no question of money relations, which Halterton by this time would have dreaded even to mention.
But he was his own father by this time; the old man had gone, he himself was a man of some position, not very wealthy indeed, but of some position. He had just got into Parliament, the family fortune (though lessened) was still large; his old College would listen to him, it was beholden to the name of Halterton. It was through Wilfrid, then, that young Jacob was accepted, and went up to Cambridge.
Aaron had insisted that he should go up as Lawson, for Aaron still prospered, and much more through that little office of his than through the shop; and Aaron was Arthur Lawson by this time—at least in the West End of London, where he had taken a house. Jacob, who was of another view in these things, stood out, but at last compromised. He would not be James, he would still be Jacob; but as for Lawson—well, let it go at that. So it was Arthur Lawson, rapidly growing wealthy, and Jacob Lawson, his brother, who in the vacation lived at Arthur’s side under his roof and was more and more his pride and his idol.
Of greater importance still to the relations of Wilfrid Halterton with Lawson was what happened four years later. The young physicist was brilliant enough—but Fellowships do not go by talent. There was another candidate besides himself, a young Englishman of some standing and a Blue—not without private means and good relations. Halterton made just the difference. And Jacob Lawson became Fellow of Merrion College; and, as you may imagine, the Blue and the friends of the Blue put it down to a Jewish conspiracy.
Having taken the plunge, the College went the whole hog and boomed the new Fellow for all they were worth. Thenceforward Jacob Lawson had a real claim to fame, and maintained it. And thenceforward what Arthur Lawson felt for Wilfrid Halterton was as permanent and as deeply rooted as human feeling can be.
Yet the two men were not intimate. Their characters were not possessed of things in common. Of all the trades, the trade of the politician was the one Arthur Lawson looked on with the most contempt. Of all frailties in character, impulsiveness and hesitation were the frailties with which Arthur Lawson had the least sympathy—and found to be the most common in the alien ruck around him: as common in their race as they were uncommon in his own. All that didn’t lessen by the least his fixed devotion to Halterton, but it prevented close communion.
Moreover, with the passage of the years the complete difference in their occupations and in their circle of friends told more and more. So did the growing desire of Arthur Lawson for seclusion, as his fortune swelled and swelled. That fortune was in six figures before he was forty; it had become enormous before the day of the Television Contract. Halterton’s own slipping back in the way of money—and he had invested badly— had not helped; for though Lawson, like all such men, made no sort of connection between wealth and worth, yet Halterton’s embarrassments made him shyer. All these things separated the two men; but they saw each other from time to time, on Lawson’s own initiative. His old feeling remained deeply rooted and as strong as ever.
Arthur Lawson would be beholden to nobody. He had refused a peerage, with a contemptuous phrase that was still remembered against him. He saw less and less of his fellow men; he had become more and more a legend or fable, so that even his great wealth was exaggerated in whispers and rumours about him. But whenever he turned his eyes upon that hobbling figure of the very distinguished brother whose company was everything to him and whose fame was the one delight of his life, he remembered Halterton.
Halterton himself, as may be imagined, had less place in his mind for Arthur Lawson. He was one of those men with wh
om familiarity and constant intercourse is necessary if intimacy is to be maintained. But as I say, the two men saw each other two or three times a year. Lawson would not allow a drifting apart, and Halterton was glad enough that it should be so.
Thus things stood between the Millionaire and the Statesman in the days of the two envelopes, the game of billiards and the rest. But of all that Lawson had heard nothing beyond vague talk on the ups and downs of shares in which he did not deal.
Chapter XI
During that same week-end Lady Papworthy had not been idle. On the Saturday morning she had been visited all alone by the faithful Reginald Butler; she had been more gracious to him than ever she had been before. She had learned, for he told her everything, of yet another of those interminable mares’-nests of his. The ardent young poet was for ever crusading after such in his defence of sound morals in public life. He had just unearthed one, and was full of it, and she abounded in her support of his enthusiasm.
There had been a horrid deal between the corrupt Postmaster-General and the infamous McAuley! To the eternal shame of our public life, Durrant’s, in the teeth of the Committee’s report, had privately received a promise that the contract should go to them!
Reginald Butler continued to pour out his soul, lavish of detail. He was indignant, as only the flaming heart of the Mutt can be indignant.
Joan Papworthy’s activities lay in all directions, and therefore in the direction of High Politics. But she was one of those political wives who are passengers— and there are almost as many of them as there are of the political wives who command the ship. She heard the news, but more from her attendant court of outsiders than from her husband—she never heard the key to the news, and she never heard even what was common property to those in the know till long after it had ceased to amuse.
If public life had an interest for her it had the interest of money, as it has for all of us. Her husband was very rich, but he did not allow her to be even moderately so. She had come to know him thoroughly on that point. It was the only resistant thing about him, and he would not change. Therefore political news that meant buying and selling stock had interest for her as it has for all of us; but she had not yet plunged even in her small way. It was enough for her to work on petty certainties, to buy when the risk was nearly over, to sell some two days after big public men had begun to unload. She made little, but she made it steadily. Hitherto she had almost doubled her insufficient allowance. She was on that scale.
Now she had news of the Television contract and the rivalry for it. She had heard of the Committee’s report in favour of Reynier’s. She had then heard—three days later—rumours of a check, but nothing more. This fresh instalment from her lover was something out of the way—a chance—a certainty.
She continued her deep communion that morning with Butler, and was loving and praising, as only the queens of literary and artistic coteries can be loving to their chosen favourite among the geniuses who crowd about their throne. The admiration in her eyes had seemed to him, as was his right, more than admiration. If she had known to what heights such communion of ideals would have carried him, she would not have gone so far; but she did go very far. Reginald Butler loved her after that morning’s close enhancement of affection not only with the triumphant feeling of a lover but with a new valour, as of a martyr, if martyrdom must come—and martyrdom comes galloping to Mutts. Mutts are its passion.
After he had softly left her room with bowed head, Joan Papworthy stood listening intently till she heard the front door slam behind him. She went immediately to the telephone, and bought Billies. She had no idea, poor girl, what they ought to cost her—when she was told rather doubtfully that they were about thirty, it meant nothing to her. All she knew was that the contract was fixed, and in her innocence, or rather in her considerable distance from the great world of which she believed herself to be the hub, she made certain that she had got in on the ground floor. The Other End of the telephone didn’t tell her she had got in late, why should they? They had heard more than she had, and they were delighted to unload. Lady Papworthy’s tiny transactions were hardly worth their while.
She risked more than she could afford to risk, since Lord Papworthy—having, as men of such artistic observation often have, that one solid thing about him, a sense of money—kept her allowance not only much too limited, but strictly accounted for.
However, she felt no risk at all on this occasion. It would be all gain. Had not her Reginald told her that Durrant’s had the contract at last?
By midday, about an hour after Reginald had left her, she was already covering some five thousand Billies at forty shillings. A modest sum, you will say, for a Cabinet Minister’s wife—but ten times more than she could afford, overdrawn as she already was on her modest quarter.
There was one thing at which Reginald Butler had always drawn the line—Print.
He was willing to denounce, he was willing to expose, he was willing to do anything of that sort—in spoken words, especially spoken words with those whom he knew would agree with his high motives. Mere babble. It got him all the glory he wanted, and all the inward glow of virtue, and it had no consequences. But Print is a serious thing. Print is indictable. So are words, for that matter, but for a very good reason best understood by politicians, lawyers and detectives, blackmailers, and many another type of man, print is more dangerous than speech. It can get you into the Courts.
But to-day, all glorified from Joan’s recent radiance, Reginald Butler had passed the limits of prudence, he had soared into the high regions wherein men reach heaven through dreadful sacrifice; and print he would.
It was not easy. It was easy to determine that he would print—at least, easy in that new exalted mood of his, but it was not so easy to find someone who would take the risk of printing. He was flying for high game. The people he would attack were in power and armed also; and there is a fine provision in our law that the printers who strike off truth or falsehood about politicians shall be as liable to suffer for it as the wretched fellow who provides the copy.
Even Butler, though he was not very realist in these things, knew at the back of his mind that he had no evidence—no evidence in what may be called the base and paltry legal sense; but he had evidence before the high tribunal of impartial justice. Everything combined to assure him that the rumours now universal were abominably true. Halterton had received, had pocketed (Butler used the sneering words to himself, as he fed his anger upon the affair) a huge bribe. They all did it. They were each as bad as the others. But the Postmaster-General seemed to have done it more shamelessly than the rest. Moreover, the thing could never have gone through unless the Treasury and the Whips had been squared; the Treasury because it had the last word in anything concerned with public expenditure, the Chief Whip because it lay with him whether the plot should be ruined by premature debate or not.
Butler’s duty was now clear. He must act. He must rout out this nest of vermin.
A man such as Butler, knowing nothing of the world and thinking that he knows everything, could not know that the nest in question was the nest of a female horse. Had he been sane—and I fear such men are hardly sane, at any rate in these exalted moments of theirs—he would have known how temperately men regard the necessary adjustments of public life.
There had been nothing extraordinary in giving the contract to Durrant’s—if indeed it had been given, and even on this he would have known perfectly well, had he had the intelligence to examine everything coolly, he had no certitude. The contract had to be given to one of the two companies, and Durrant’s was certainly that which stood highest before the world. No man with a sense of proportion would concern himself much over whatever advantage—if advantage there had been—the Minister of the Department might obtain for an act which was, after all, an act of public service, and one the doing of which might make him merit well of his country.
As for the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Chief Whip, it is of course possible to re
member these gentlemen whenever an arrangement of this kind is being concluded. Dodgson, the latest and the best authority on modern constitutional practice, says as much in his “Recent Developments of Cabinet Government.” But the thing is pure convention. They are not even obliged to accept whatever small routine offers are made to them. In the mass of small contracts they take no interest, and even in much the greater part of the large ones they are not so much as approached. The few exceptions aim at no serious personal advantage in what is a mere incident of life at Westminster, and the Chief Whip has the less reason to trouble in such matters as he is now permitted by custom to accumulate a large “personal fund” from the regular commission charged on honours.
In this case, had Reginald Butler known the world, he could easily have learned that neither the Chancellor of the Exchequer nor the Chief Whip had done anything upon a scale which the most exact censor of political morals could condemn. They had, of course, been familiar with the fact that Durrant’s was the favoured company, and naturally it was McAuley’s brother, the Attorney-General, who, because he was their colleague, had acted in the matter. He had met his two fellow ministers at an informal breakfast at Number 11, and handed them, merely as a formality, an insignificant parcel of shares, worth no more than the nominal sum of £3,000 at par. What is more, it had of course been arranged that the shares should be owed for; he had been particular to tell them that they could pay when they liked. But small sums of that kind are not likely to live in the memory of men occupied in high affairs of State.
On such materials as this, or rather out of the fantastic rumours based upon such materials, the unfortunate Butler constructed the mass of nonsense which was to lead him to his doom.
But when men like this get the bit between their teeth there is no saving them. He spent something like one hour of violent inward fever casting about who would have the courage, or who, as I should rather say, would be so foolish as to print that letter of his. He decided upon the quite insignificant and absurd Rashdell.
The Postmaster General Page 12