Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “That must have discouraged you, Sir,” Adrian rejoined. “For in the matter of depravity we’re one up on Pompeii.”

  “Are we?” cried Mr Trapp. “What if our roofs were off and anyone could walk into our houses? Look at this!”

  He produced a cutting from an English Continental newspaper two days old.

  “I picked it up on the bookstall here, ten minutes ago. Just read it!”

  Adrian took the cutting. On the top of it was written in pencil: “Use carefully in chapter on Social Degringolade.”

  Adrian read an account of a wedding in a great London church. An overtaxed great name was married to an heiress of the stews. Money upon one side, famous poverty upon the other. The equilibrium of things was thus properly restored and those who were “It” and those who were not had Rocked to the wedding. There had been pages in satin trousers and bridesmaids in tulle. The reception had out-rivalled a gala night at Covent Garden. The enthusiasm of the crowd in the street was fervid, like the welcome to a national hero.

  “What do you think of that?” Mr Trapp cried triumphantly. “Money smells good, whatever dung-heap it comes from, eh? ‘Unde habeas quaerit nemo, sed oportet habere.’ Your old snob, Juvenal! He’s the lad, I tell you!”

  Adrian was not prepared to discuss the value of Juvenal as a social historian in the bar of the Milan Railway Station. He would miss his train if he did, and his train was what he must not miss.

  “I have no doubt, Sir, that all big communities have extravagances in common,” he said, and he made for the platform.

  But Mr Trapp was on his heels.

  “I’ll see you off. I have half an hour. What have you been doing?”

  Adrian patiently condensed his life’s history into a few words. He had taken his degree last summer, with a second class in the Classical School. He had rowed in his College Eight. He had been President of the Union. He had been out to Jamaica since he took his degree and had disposed of his property there.

  “Nothing Ouidaesque about it all, I am sorry to say, Mr Trapp,” he added.

  “And where are you off to now?” asked Trapp.

  “Genoa,” Adrian replied, as his train drew up by the platform. “Though whether I’m doing any good by going there, I can’t tell you till tomorrow.”

  Mr Trapp stood at the door after Adrian had climbed up into his carriage.

  “You’re still going in for politics, I suppose?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I remember John always wanted you to. Odd idea for a soldier!

  “But soldierly, none the less,” Adrian returned. “He held that nowadays Parliament must be the battleground where courage or cowardice would decide whether England was to live or die. He wanted courage in the ministers to stand firm against the horde of officials and to put loyalty to the nation before loyalty to their departments. And he wanted courage in the ordinary members to believe that vote-catching doesn’t catch votes and to vote in that belief against all the thunders of the Treasury Bench. For myself—” Adrian leaned out of the window and explained his projects.

  “I have a great friend, a year or two older than myself, David Bletchworth. His family have a good deal of influence in the West Riding. He’s too busy to stand for Parliament himself, but he’s trying to make an opening for me in his constituency. Meanwhile I want to get a little experience of the machinery. Dr Elve, the Head of my College, knows Spencer Cratton of the Board of Trade, and hearing that he wanted a private secretary, wrote to him about me. I was to see Cratton in London when Parliament met after the Whitsuntide recess. But I read in the papers that he would land at Genoa today on his way home from Sicily. So I thought I would come out and try to see him before any other applicants.”

  “I see,” said Mr Trapp. “Good luck!” Suddenly his face lighted up. “I say! You’ll be able to help me! Yes, by Jove! Corruption, you know. I should like some instances of corruption in high politics. Think of me when you come across them, will you, Adrian? Too late for the first edition. But I’ll have an appendix about it in the second. All those freedmen who made colossal fortunes, Narcissus and Pallas and their modern parallels. See? Write to me and don’t put your feet up on the seat. It’ll cost you a pound if you do. Good-bye!”

  Flags waved, horns blew, and the train moved out of the station.

  Adrian had the compartment to himself He leaned back, without putting his feet up on the seat, and dismissed from his mind Mr Charles Trapp and his denunciations. Politicians might be scorned and belittled, but the world’s destiny was in their hands. They could do a great deal to make and everything to mar. Adrian was just twenty-three years old and eager to put his faith to the test. He was looking forward to this interview with Spencer Cratton, with a doubt lest he should seem too zealous — there was a touch of the high Toby about it, a suggestion of Stand and Deliver-and with anxiety lest he should be too late. Of those two sentiments the anxiety was the greater and not merely because of his ambition.

  A curious little incident, indeed, had done more than his political faith to send him out upon this journey. It had happened a month ago, just before Parliament had risen. Spencer Cratton lived in Grosvenor Street, and Adrian, looking about for a lodging in the neighbourhood, had come upon a small white house in a mews at the back of the street. It had a little courtyard or garden behind it, a few good rooms — in a word, it was the very place for a young bachelor with duties in the vicinity. Adrian, accordingly, bought a lease of it, furnished it, and moved in. The little incident occurred on the first night that he slept in the house.

  He had come home late. His two servants were in bed and the house was in darkness. His bedroom was at the back, with a big window overlooking the garden. Beyond his garden was another, and standing at his window he looked, thus, across the two gardens onto the back of a big house in Grosvenor Street. A terrace with a flight of steps into the garden was set out with chairs, and a big room opened onto it. The night was warm for the time of year, the French windows stood wide open, and the room, whose walls were painted in a bright indigo colour, was brightly lit. Adrian had not turned on the light in his own bedroom. For, as he had entered it, the glitter of the room on the far side of the two gardens had taken his eyes and stayed his fingers on the switch. He was thus standing in complete darkness like a very distant spectator watching a tiny stage illuminated with a particular sparkle.

  He saw a group of three people seated with their heads together within the room — a man of whom he could see nothing but his back and a greying head, a woman whom he judged to be of middle age and an elegant carriage, and a second man whose face he thought vaguely to recognize. The trio was engaged, obviously, in a conversation of an engrossing kind — if, indeed, that can be called a conversation where one lays down the law and the others do no more than ask a question or signify an assent. For, although the distance was too great for Adrian to hear a word, there could be no doubt that the conversation was of this character. The man with whose face Adrian was dimly familiar — he had no doubt that if he were near enough to see his features clearly he could put a name to its owner — was doing all the talking. There was something domineering in his manner. He was talking his small audience down with a vivacity of gesture unusual in an Englishman, a man between forty and fifty with a thick wave of hair brushed back from his forehead. All three were in evening dress and seemed to be carrying on a debate which had begun hours ago at the dinner table.

  They were still engaged in this way, when a door at the corner by the French windows was slowly opened. It opened into the room and against the panels there appeared a girl. She wore a coat of white ermine which was open in front and showed an evening frock, as though she had just come home from a ball; she had very dark hair, a slim figure, and so far as Adrian could make out, she was of a delicate beauty. But something in her attitude arrested him even more than her looks. For, as she saw the trio in the room, she shrank back. She did not attempt to close the door again, but she stood, her body tense,
and her eyes watching the group, her white-gloved hand clasping the handle. She gave to the watcher beyond the gardens an impression that she had been startled, perhaps alarmed, by the discussion in the room. It was the lecturer who first noticed the girl at the doorway. He broke off in the middle of some discourse; and Adrian could have sworn, from the brusque separation of the three, that her appearance there caused them all more than a little consternation. The man with his back to Adrian and the woman remained seated; the other rose and, crossing to the door, took the girl’s hand and raised it to his lips. It seemed that he invited her onto the balcony. Certainly she shook her head and, going to a side table, she filled a glass from a water jug. Her arrival broke up the little conclave, for in a few minutes the visitor with the wave of hair departed, and a short while afterwards the house was in darkness.

  The little scene acted by the four small figures did more than merely intrigue Adrian Shard. He got from some source the oddest sort of belief that he was himself concerned in it, or, rather, would be in the future concerned in it. The problem of the indigo room, in a word, seemed to touch him vitally, the repulsion and alarm of the girl to call upon his chivalry. He was the more sure of it when he discovered the next morning the name of the owner of that house. He was Spencer Cratton.

  Adrian, as he travelled in the train to Genoa, reflected that if, in addition, he were now to secure this secretaryship, a definite pattern in the woof of his life would be coming into view. The threads would be combining in a plan which might be worth while and, in any case, would not be meaningless.

  XXVII. “I DESIRE ANTIQUITIES”

  ALL THINGS SEPARATE, all things again greet one another, eternally true to itself remaineth the ring of existence.

  — Nietzsche

  At Genoa he drove to the great hotel on the hill. The evening was closing in and the ocean-going ships in the big harbour at his feet were lighting up like palaces. On one of them Cratton should that day have arrived.

  “But I can’t break in on him tonight,” Adrian reasoned, as he stood upon his balcony. “Decency suggests the morning.”

  A loom of bright light away to the east in the heart of the city caught his attention. Here, near about him, the houses were huddled along narrow lanes. There, an important street cut the town, and if one judged by the outline of the rooftops which bordered it, ran steeply down a hill. Adrian put on his hat and descended in the lift. He would go out and find this street. But it took more finding than he had expected. A maze of narrow ways guarded it, and a tunnel. But he came at last upon a fine crescent of high stone houses broken by a wide gap. The wide gap was the head of a broad road which ran straight as an arrow down to the bottom of a hill.

  “My street,” said Adrian, foolishly pleased that he had discovered it without once asking his way, and he hurried forward. But at the corner he stopped. There were arcades sheltering the wide pavement on each side. It was a street of cafés, theatres, and great shops, brilliantly lit up and at this hour busy with people. They jostled him as he stood, but he was hardly aware of them. He had been here before — though he had never seen Italy before this morning or the town of Genoa until tonight. It was all familiar to him, arcades and lighted windows and many people and the length and breadth and the unswerving alignment of the great thoroughfare itself He recognized it. He had walked here before, and not alone. With whom, then — ?

  He could not answer that question. And with a start he became aware of the crowd of men and women and girls, surging and chattering and eddying about him. He laughed at his bewilderment.

  “Of course, it’s always happening,” he argued. “There’s an explanation. One lobe of the brain gets the picture from the eyes a fraction of a second before the other lobe. Everybody has experienced it.”

  But so vividly, so distinctly? He had the illusion that centuries ago he had walked down this street from that high crescent. He seemed to remember that the shops had had no glazed windows — were rather stalls than shops. He began to play with the idea that the momentous thing which was to happen to him in Genoa was going to happen to him somewhere in this great street, rather than in Mr Spencer Cratton’s suite of rooms at the hotel. So he walked with watchful eyes; and saw nothing but what all the world may see in the shopping centre of any town of any country. A flower shop, the atelier of a modiste, a hosier’s. On the opposite side of the road a cinema flaunted its electric titles. Next to it was a restaurant with its white-clothed tables set out in an alleyway. Here again, on his own side, was a dealer in antiquities. Adrian Shard halted before the window and looked in. He saw five good chairs, some old brocades, a dresser upon which old glass ornamented with fine gold was ranged, a glass-topped table containing antique brooches and buckles. The window was attractively dressed — neither a jumble nor pretentious in its meagreness. A malacca cane leaned against one of the chairs and caught Adrian’s fancy. He had come out without a stick at all, and the one he had left at the hotel was a poor unseemly thing.

  “Now, there’s a walking stick!” Adrian reflected.

  It had a gold top which descended the shaft far enough to give it a fine solid appearance and increase the prestige of its possessor.

  “Dr Abernethy might have carried that cane,” he said. “But I will.”

  He opened the door and went into the shop.

  A jeweller’s counter ran across one side of it. Behind the counter a small old hunchbacked man stood like an ugly gnome protecting his treasures. In front of it a girl was leaning on the glass lid, gazing at something which she held in her left hand. Adrian could not see her face, for she stood sideways to him with her right hand to her cheek. But from her slim legs and figure and the suppleness of her carriage he judged her to be just a little on one side or the other of twenty. She wore a dark walking dress with a short skirt, white gloves, and a blue hat upon her small head, and from the polish of her slim shining shoes to the sheen of her raven-blue hair she was as trim and exquisite as if the gnome had just this moment taken her out of his glass case with whatever trinket she was poring over.

  “Miss,” he said, with a gesture of despair and in the oddest English Adrian had ever heard, “I do not ask the more to come down to the proper. The price is a fixation.”

  “I am sorry. For in that case I can’t take it,” the girl answered. She had a low and very pleasant voice which shook a little, her disappointment was so sharp. Adrian was quite unexpectedly moved. A girl on the edge of tears because she couldn’t afford an ornament she hankered after was matter for laughter. But she didn’t look and she didn’t sound as though she merely hankered after an ornament. There would have been vulgarity in such a longing, and she and vulgarity seemed the two poles apart.

  The old dealer had heard the quiver in her voice, too. He had a wide mouth, and his smile of invitation split his face.

  “Miss, you shall prove her over the head — no? I pray you. Carry her on the shoulders — to the mirror there. You will find her very sympathetical.”

  The girl took her hand down from her face with a jerk and looked straight at the dealer. She was startled by his chance use of a word which did actually describe the appeal the jewel made to her. Adrian could not, from where he stood, see distinctly what the jewel was; her fingers covered and caressed it. There was a glint of gold, he heard the rattle of a chain on the lid of the counter, and then, for a moment, a big blot of green fire burned in the palm of her white-gloved hand.

  But he could now see her profile and surely — surely — this was the girl who had come, in her ermine coat, into the indigo room and had stood, startled and frightened, with her hand clinging to the handle of the door. The profile was lovely. The delicious curve from the delicate small ear to the point of the chin, the full red lips, the clear white of the cheek and brow, the long eyelashes with the curl at the end of them, the glimpse of a big dark eye — Adrian wondered, almost with a gasp, whether nature had ever worked with a finer artistry. It could not be that, herself the world’s choice ornament, s
he longed for a mere strip of gold and an ember of green fire to set her off!

  “Sympathetic,” she said to the salesman, with a slow smile. “Yes, that’s the word.” And there was a brooding tenderness in her aspect as she bent over the ornament.

  “Then wear her, Miss,” the old man coaxed and wheedled. “For a few minutes. There is no hurry. Parade yourself—”

  The girl cut him short, but pleasantly.

  “No, you don’t understand. And I don’t either. I don’t want to wear it. But I would dearly love to own it, to carry it away with me and keep it. However, it’s impossible.”

  She laid it reluctantly upon the counter. She stooped a little as though she bade a living thing farewell. But for the presence of the dealer on the other side of the case, Adrian Shard was sure she would have kissed it tenderly. It was all very foolish, but, somehow, moving. She turned away then, quickly. But her feet lagged as she crossed the shop, and at the door she stopped and turned again. Adrian saw her now full face. She stood, indeed, looking straight at him but not seeing him, distressed and a little perplexed by the greatness of her distress, and perhaps, for there was a hint of laughter about her lips, a little amused at it, too.

  Yes, this was the girl whom Adrian had seen across the two gardens in the house of Spencer Cratton. He was quite sure of it now, and he stood without a movement. If he moved, why she would be aware of him and move too, and be indignant because he stared, or ashamed because she herself did. Let her stand so through the ages, with all the promise of her profile fulfilled in that broad forehead, the curve of her eyebrows, the width between the great dark eyes; and Mr Spencer Cratton and all his own fine plans could go to blazes. But she spoke.

  “Listen! Will you keep that chain for me until tomorrow? I shall be grateful if you will. I’ll see what I can do.”