“So you actually knocked him down,” said Lord Edward thoughtfully.
“Yes sir, I knocked him down,” repeated Swithin, and the faintest suggestion of unholy glee flickered in his bright blue eyes for an instant.
Frank Hazeltine coughed discreetly. “I do not think we need stress that point. In fact, the fewer details that are mentioned about this affair, even among ourselves, the better.”
“Among ourselves Hazeltine, I sincerely trust we can say what we damn well please,” remarked Lord Edward with some asperity. “As the senior member of the Club Committee present it is my duty to make myself acquainted with the facts.”
Major Faulkner Wilde drew slowly upon his cigar. “I’m afraid sir, that most of the details are pretty public already. Much as we should like to do so it is beyond our power to hush this wretched business up. At least fifty people must actually have seen them scrapping. Let’s face it. The story will be all over London by midday tomorrow.”
“Well, if this damn dago refuses to accept an apology I don’t see what more we can do about it,” declared the bellicose little Colonel.
“But will the matter be allowed to rest here?” inquired Lord Edward. “What do you think Hazeltine?”
The diplomat smoothed his long silky moustache. “I take rather a grave view,” he said after a moment. “You see, not only is Prince Ali of royal blood and a nephew of the ex-Sultan, but he is also a high official in the Turkish War office. We might get round one of those points, but it is trying them rather high to expect them to overlook both. I cannot express any definite opinion at the moment, but it is only fair to say that Captain Destime and Mr. Carew may have to consider the advisability of resigning from their regiment.”
“What!” snapped the Colonel.
“Damn it all! that’s a bit hard.” Major Faulkner Wilde’s bushy eyebrows shot up in astonished distress towards his bald forehead.
“No, no, Frank …” Sir George began in protest, but the choleric little fighting Colonel was off again in defence of his officers.
“It’s preposterous! I’ve never heard of such a thing.” He thumped the table with a small, very hard, fist. “D’you mean to tell me that because some garlic eating bounder comes down here and behaves like a rank outsider that I’m to be robbed of two of my officers who’re well up to their jobs. I won’t have it! By God I won’t! Not if I have to go on the mat myself in front of the Army Council.”
Peter Carew forgot that he was endeavouring to appear natural and unconcerned by leaning on the chair back. At first he had been a little scared by this solemn meeting. It was as though he were back at Wellington, still a fourth form boy who had been called on to give an account of himself in some escapade at a prefect’s meeting. He saw now that, whatever the outcome of the affair, the sympathy of the Olympians was with himself and Swithin. No horrid scene was therefore to be expected in which his father, his aunts and his grandmother would go into some awful family conference to reprove him for the error of his ways. He abandoned the chair back and stood upright.
Hazeltine endeavoured to pacify the Colonel by raising a deprecatory hand. “No foreign power can demand the resignation of a British officer,” he said a trifle unctuously. “It is unthinkable that we should allow ourselves to be dictated to in such a manner, but on the other hand, in view of our relations with the Turkish Government it might be considered expedient for the officers concerned voluntarily to send in their papers.”
“Damn the Turkish Government!” exclaimed the Colonel heatedly.
“My dear Frank,” Sir George broke in; “the banking activities of my firm in the Near East enable me to appreciate the fact that Prince Ali is a most important figure in Turkish national life. But I cannot think that because of this disgraceful incident any question can arise of two promising young officers being ruined in order to give him a satisfaction to which he has not the faintest right. He should be the first to desire to hush the whole thing up.”
Hazeltine shrugged. “I sincerely trust that their resignation will not be considered necessary. But unfortunately Prince Ali has no more power to hush this matter up than we have. It has gone too far. An opinion was expressed a few moments ago that the story will be all over London by to-morrow and I associate myself entirely with that view. I have already given a guarded account of the affair to the Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs, over the telephone, and he, of course, will consult the Minister. It will depend on his decision whether we can afford to ignore the matter as though it had never taken place, or if he feels that some gesture should be made to placate the Turkish Government for what they may well assume to have been a deliberate assault on one of their most prominent men.”
“That is the devil of it,” Lord Edward growled. “If this fellow proves vindictive, he will distort the whole story and spin some yarn of having endeavoured to intervene himself between Miss Duncannon and two drunken young officers who proceeded to knock him down.”
“Yes,” agreed Hazeltine quietly. “That is more or less what I have in mind.”
“No, no. He’ll come to his senses by the time he gets home,” Sir George protested reassuringly. “His two A.D.C.s witnessed the whole occurrence and they are probably gentlemen even if he is not. Most of the Turks I know are fine fellows. If they are any good at their job they will talk him into being thoroughly ashamed of himself and urge him to forget the whole affair.”
For a good quarter of an hour the elder men continued to discuss the situation, the argument swaying first one way and then another. Swithin watched them and listened to the debate with a certain sense of unreality. He had no father such as Peter’s and very little family to be bothered about. Yet his future was a very important thing to him. He could hardly realise that it was his career which was hanging in the balance. It seemed rather as though he were witnessing again the Club scene in Galsworthy’s play ‘Loyalties,’ in which a few nice elderly English gentlemen, who are in reality profoundly distressed, conceal their emotions with the outward calm that generations of tradition have imposed upon them—and discuss the fate of a junior member of their order.
In this case Swithin knew that he had all their sympathy and understanding. But there were rules in this game of life; sometimes unfair perhaps, but not to be broken even accidentally without the payment of a penalty. As he thought of all the long years of work that he had put in, the routine of everyday service, the interesting courses, the leaves spent in acquiring special knowledge, all to make himself a pretty useful soldier who would one day be really fitted for command, his thin mouth tightened under the small upturned moustache.
A Club waiter entered and said; “Mr. Hazeltine is wanted on the telephone.”
“You will excuse me.” Apparently unhurried but with his long legs covering the distance to the door quite swiftly Hazeltine left them. The others stood there for a few moments in silence.
When the diplomat returned he said slowly. “I am afraid the news is not very good. Prince Ali stopped his car in Slough and spoke to his Embassy on the telephone. Apparently they have been raising Cain already. The Foreign Secretary seems to think that some gesture must be made unless all the good work which we have put in during the Prince’s visit is to go for nothing. Needless to say, I cannot sufficiently express my personal regret for the situation in which these gentlemen find themselves.”
CHAPTER IV
THE MAN WITHOUT A JOB
Swithin Destime sat up in bed and took fresh stock of his unfamiliar surroundings. It was the first morning that he had woken in the narrow bedroom of the rather dingy hotel near the Adelphi which he felt, with his now uncertain financial prospects, was the best accommodation anywhere in central London that he could afford.
His guns, rods, books, and a whole mass of miscellaneous belongings, accumulated over a long period of years, lay scattered in the corners and piled against the walls, just as the porter had left them on his arrival the previous afternoon after taking leave of his old quarters in Well
ington Barracks.
The sympathy of his friends had been poured out in abundance and he had been no less touched by his batman’s murmured expression of just what he would like to do to ‘that ‘ere ruddy wop’ than by his fiery Colonel’s blasphemous denunciation of ‘these snivelling politicians who kowtow to any damned foreigner.’ But that was not very helpful now.
Swithin was thirty-five and jobless. His father had settled on him just sufficient funds to provide the few pounds a week private income which an unwritten regulation demands that every officer in the Brigade of Guards should possess; then died, practically penniless, having sunk the remainder of his capital in an annuity. Swithin knew that his record as an Army officer must be considered as a liability rather than an asset in seeking civilian employment. Yet if he could find nothing the appalling prospect opened up of endless empty days, eking out his tiny income, cheese-paring in some ghastly boarding-house, and a gradual decline to shabby gentility while he ate his heart out for some active occupation.
However, despite his financial instability, it was characteristic of the man that he had not hesitated to spend fifteen pounds the night before. He had claimed Diana Duncannon’s promise that, in compensation for the loss of his second dance, she would dine and do a theatre with him, and had rung her up the day after the affair at Maidenhead to ask her to fix a date.
She had chosen one ten days ahead and by the merest chance it had turned out to be the day upon which Peter Carew and Swithin had said good-bye to their Regiment. That it should be so tickled the latter’s sense of humour mightily. Peter had produced another girl and the four had deliberately gone out to cast dull care aside.
Peter, with the ease of youth, had taken the blow to his military ambitions better than Swithin had hoped. His father, a retired Major-General, had married the daughter of a Baronet whose forebears had supplied the worthies of three counties with beer for several generations, so there was no lack of money in the family. He talked now with considerable gusto of travelling the world and doing a dozen different things which had previously been impossible owing to his military duties.
The two girls had been a little silent at first. Knowing what had taken place that day they had been nervous of striking a false note by attempting any spurious gaiety, but Swithin’s irrepressible vivacity had soon carried them over the line and turned what might have been a grim and funereal party into a hectic and uproarious evening.
Diana had sought to probe him as to his future plans but he was most desperately anxious that she should not blame herself in any way for what had happened and above all learn nothing of his true position, so he had spoken airily of a projected fishing expedition to Norway and, to set her mind at rest, had even fabricated the existence of an immensely rich uncle whose joy in life it would henceforth be to see that his nephew lacked for nothing.
He had planted the story of his imminent departure for Norway deliberately, in order that she should not think it strange if he did not ring her up again for, much as he would like to do so, he knew that he could not possibly afford to take her about in the manner to which she was accustomed, and that to see more of her under such difficult circumstances was only to court future misery for himself.
Swithin reached for a cigarette from the box on his bedside table and, wrenching his thoughts from the charming subject of Diana, forced himself to face again the grim problem of what he was going to do.
He was too old to start in any of the ordinary professions even if his brain were still sufficiently plastic to absorb masses of new knowledge in arduous university courses. His commercial experience was absolutely nil so he would be lucky if he could even persuade a business magnate to entrust him with a bag of samples. He could go abroad of course but that did not offer the prospects that it had in the days before the War. Then, a fellow of his parts might have found a billet somewhere up country in the Tropics, overseeing native labour, which carried sufficient pay to ensure a decent time during long leaves to England and a pension at the end of a term of years if one could survive the fever; but all that had been altered, modern sanitation minimised the risk of disease in such places and wireless enabled the big companies to control their subordinates from offices in London. They no longer needed men who were willing to shoulder responsibilities and act on their own initiative now that every problem could be submitted day by day over the ether to headquarters. Young boys were sent out instead and the pay for most jobs in these outposts of Empire had dropped enormously in consequence.
He might work as a crammer perhaps, licking young cubs into shape before they went to Sandhurst, but he had nothing like enough capital to start a place of that kind on his own and to become a sort of under-usher did not seem to offer much of a life to a man of his temperament.
Suddenly the telephone shrilled beside his bed. He picked up the receiver and Diana’s voice came, joyous with youth and life, over the line.
“Hullo,” she said. “Is that Swithin Destime?”
“Yes,” he answered, his depression lifting in a moment. “You are up early after last night.”
“Why—did I wake you?”
“No—I’ve been awake some time.”
“Listen,” she went on urgently; “I want you to come to tea today—before you see father—about half-past four. Will that be all right?”
“But I’m not seeing your father,” he replied in some surprise.
“Aren’t you?” Diana sounded doubtful. “Perhaps you haven’t had his letter yet—but it’s in the post—he has just told me so. He has asked you to call here at five o’clock.”
Swithin hesitated for a second. To allow himself to become involved with her further, as things were at the moment, was sheer madness. Yet the temptation to accept was enormous—and if her father had asked to see him.…
“All right,” he said. “In that case I’d like to—ever so much.”
“Good—four-thirty then,” she repeated, and rang off. Swithin sent down for his mail at once and among it there was a letter from Sir George Duncannon which read;
My dear Destime,
As you are doubtless aware bankers have certain facilities for ascertaining the financial situation of their friends and I hope you will not consider it a gross impertinence that I have informed myself regarding yours. If excuse is needed believe mine to be a very real concern at the situation in which recent events have placed you.
I imagine that you will wish to secure some remunerative position at an early date and if you have not been fortunate enough to make your plans already I have an opening to offer which you might at least care to consider.
It is not a job which you need scruple to accept from any idea that I am offering it with a view to compensating you for the loss you have sustained through your service to my daughter since, although the pay is high, many people might hesitate before accepting it.
If you would care to hear more of the matter perhaps you could call at Belgrave Square to-morrow at five o’clock or, if that time is inconvenient to you, and you will telephone, we could arrange another appointment.
Yours, etc.
Recalling the fact that the banker’s firm had constant dealings with the Near East Swithin suddenly realised that they might well have a job for a man with his knowledge of Greek and Turkish. At the thought his mercurial spirits went up with a bound and he leapt out of bed. By the time he had shaved he was visualising himself as the traditional clerk who rises to a position of importance, saves his firm at a time of crisis, and marries the Chairman’s daughter.
Overflowing with good spirits and vitality he presented himself at half-past four that afternoon at the house in Belgrave Square and was shown at once into the small sitting-room that was Diana’s special sanctum.
She was busily tapping away at a typewriter but she rose at once to meet him and exclaimed, as her glance took in his neat lounge suit, “How nice you look in grey. Do you realise that I’ve never seen you, except in evening dress, before to-day?”
> His blue eyes twinkled. “Nor I you, yet we seem to have known each other for ages—don’t we?”
“Yes, I feel that way too,” she beckoned him over to the sofa and as he sat down he nodded towards the typewriter:
“What’s the great work. Are you writing a novel? Everyone seems to these days.”
“No—just some private papers of father’s. I help him now and then by typing out anything which is especially confidential.”
He took her hand and carefully examined the finger tips.
“If you’re looking to see if typing has worn down my nails you needn’t worry,” she laughed. “I protect them with rubber thimbles.”
“No,” he declared earnestly. “I was seeking inspiration in case I ever sit down to write a novel myself.”
“What—in my hands?”
“Yes, they say that the art of the game lies in accurate observation and one of the things to observe must surely be your heroine’s hands. You know—’ her tapering fingers strayed among his curling hair’—sort of thing. It would have been awful if yours had been short and fat but fortunately they look quite up to the heroine standard.”
“Swithin, you are an idiot!” As she pulled away her hand they burst into simultaneous laughter.
Tea arrived at that moment and Diana began to pour out, but paused with the teapot suspended in mid-air over the second cup: “I’m so sorry I forgot to ask, but perhaps you’d prefer a whisky and soda?”
“No really,” he protested and placing his hand dramatically upon his heart, he added:
“I’m only an old-fashioned soldier
So beer means nothing to me
And the sight of a whisky upsets me so much
That the Sergeant revives me with tea.”
The pot tilted dangerously as Diana’s sense of the absurd got the better of her. “There!” she exclaimed in mock anger. “Now you’ve made me upset the beastly thing. Do be sensible.”
The Eunuch of Stamboul Page 3