“Yes,” and he told her of the early morning when his father had waked him in the dark and they had listened in a room in Jamaica to Big Ben striking midnight at Westminster.
“A day was to come when I was to hear those strokes above my head. You see—” He found it easy to talk to Sonia. She listened to him with her great eyes fixed so earnestly upon his face, she had so quick a comprehension, so lovely and friendly a smile.
“It’s the one way of service nowadays. A Roman might build roads and carry Rome across the world. An Elizabethan might sail to the Main and break Spain’s power. But now it’s at Westminster that the things are done or not done which mean ruin or salvation, which mean service. You may fly or motor a mile an hour faster than anyone else has ever done and get great honour. But it doesn’t help very much.”
He poured out his dreams to Sonia that morning as he had never thought to do to anyone; and she was warm with pride at hearing them. He told her the very little that he knew of whence they came. Some he could trace back to his father, but most had been born in him or arrived suddenly out of the dark of time, with odd elusive associations like memories which could just not be revived, or almost obliterated pictures of strange, fantastical people who lived in long-since vanished days. Never was a young couple more earnest or more aspiring; and behind his words and her attention something else was growing very clear to both of them. A tremendous event had happened, the kaleidoscope had been shaken and a new and lovely pattern had come into view. The time had not yet come for either of them to speak of it, but it bound them in a sweet companionship which each was aware of and neither, half an hour ago, could have foreseen.
“Sonia! Sonia!”
A woman’s voice outside the door called out the name.
“My mother,” said Sonia. “You must meet her.”
She pushed back her chair as the door was opened. Lydia Cratton was a beautiful woman and a shrewd one. She had experience and intuition. A glance at the tender colour in her daughter’s cheeks and her eyes like stars, another at this stranger caught in the full flight of a boy’s eloquence, and she knew that here were two young people walking arm in arm on air. But whether she was pleased or disappointed or even surprised, there was neither a frown nor a smile to show.
“This is Mr Shard, Mother,” said Sonia.
“Yes,” said Lydia Cratton.
“He is, I hope, going to be my stepfather’s private secretary until he goes into Parliament himself”
Lydia Cratton turned her head slowly towards Adrian. She was exquisite in her dress, in her soft colour, in the porcelain look of her. She smiled, too, with her lips, but her eyes were the most unfriendly he had ever seen.
“Oh, yes, we have heard of you, of course,” she said. “You have made friends with Sonia already. That’s well.”
She was trying to conceal her resentment of his presence, but her eyes betrayed her. Her eyelids widened and widened as she stared at him. He had imagined nothing so cruel as the look of them. He felt suddenly that his back was cold. Yes, the stare of her eyes made him shiver.
“My secretaryship has gone west,” he thought ruefully, as she went out of the room. She was the woman whom he had seen in the indigo room. Adrian had no experience, as Spencer Cratton had said. He had possibly, also, as little judgment as Charles Trapp allotted to him; and he was of no greater vanity than any other of his age. But he could not help guessing, with a pleasant little leap of the heart, a plausible reason for Lydia Cratton’s dislike of him.
XXIX. THE PRIVATE SECRETARY
I HAVE BEEN in many shapes; I have been a narrow blade of a sword; I have been a drop in the air; I have been a shining star; I have been a word in a book; I have been a boat on the sea; I have been a director in battle; I have been the string of a harp.
— Taliesin
But, to his surprise, the secretaryship had not gone west. He called upon Spencer Cratton at five o’clock that afternoon and was received with as much cordiality as that languid statesman could display.
“Admirable work, Mr Shard. Will you take a chair? A seggiolone, I see.” The little red dictionary seemed never out of Cratton’s palm, which it did little more than cover. “An absurd name, suggestive of a sausage. I need hardly say that the first quality in a private secretary is discretion.”
“I understand that, Sir,” said Adrian meekly, taking a chair.
“For instance,” Mr Cratton continued easily— “it’s a mere trifle, of course — you recognized my visitor this morning.”
“Yes, Sir. Mr George Andros. I have seen his likeness in the papers.”
“Exactly. Andros himself was sure of it. I’m afraid that I’m not so observant. Well, he has a passion for mystery. He takes a child’s pleasure in it. It’s his long suit — or should I say, suiting? No, that’s what the tailors say. He adores being caught by the photographers being mysterious. So I humour him,” Mr Spencer Cratton’s eyes rested for a moment quietly upon Adrian’s face, “and you must, too. He’s useful, you see, especially to me and my department. He has his fingers — I know this is the correct phrase, I’ve heard it on so many platforms — on the pulses of the world’s Money Markets. He can give me valuable information. But he’s a man of mysteries. Everything, however simple and open, must be very private. I must see him in a corner, so to speak.”
Adrian was inclined to wonder whether this pen picture of the financier would have been sketched for him had he not heard those first few words which Cratton had himself spoken when he was ushered by the courier unexpectedly into the room. He was to accept them as a concession to the financier’s hobby and as quite meaningless otherwise.
“I understand, Sir,” he said.
“Good! One other thing. I can’t have a crisis every day. That’s what my last secretary used to present me with. A charming fellow — we all liked him very much. But he had a new crisis for me every morning after breakfast — and, you know, I’ve a day’s work every day to do.”
Spencer Cratton passed his hand over his face. The mere anticipation of a day’s work every day overwhelmed him, apparently, with fatigue. He recovered sufficiently to enter into details. “There’s an office in my house for you, of course. I shall expect you at ten o’clock every morning. You must have a salary; however small. No? Well, think it over!”
Mr Spencer Cratton held out his hand and Adrian rose to his feet.
“Three days from now, then, at my house at ten in the morning. Good!” He took Adrian’s hand languidly and languidly let it drop, and suddenly, under the man’s indolent manner, something volcanic began to stir-a creed.
“I’ll tell you something which you youngsters don’t nowadays seem to understand as clearly as we, the older men, do. England can’t be beat. People talk about the Will to Victory, in capital letters. That implies the Will to Defeat in other people. There’s no Will to Defeat in Englishmen. In the worst days of ‘18, apart from a few disgruntled Generals and Admirals, it never occurred to Englishmen that they could be beaten. So they weren’t.”
Adrian drew a breath and laughed.
“You wanted to hear that, did you?” Cratton asked. And indeed the boy had wanted. Management of affairs — management of men — and here at last was the faith which meant service. Adrian had been longing to hear of it.
“I’ll tell you something else,” Spencer Cratton continued. “The best brains in America and Europe are quite aware that the world can’t get right again until England’s on top once more. She knows about money, you see. She doesn’t put it in a tin box and lock it up in a cellar. She lends it. For two hundred years she’s handled the world’s money, and she’s the only country in the world which knows how to do it. But I seem to be talking, don’t I? Why talk?” and he waved talk away as a superfluity. “Here endeth the first lesson, Mr Shard.” He looked again into his dictionary. “A Rivederla!”
Adrian walked away to his big wide street, and at a table outside the café which was opposite to his curiosity shop he drank a mixe
d vermouth. His dash out to Genoa had been the most fortunate adventure. The hostility of Mrs. Cratton had, somehow, been appeased. Here he was with his foot on the first rung of the political ladder and already acquainted with the girl who must ascend it with him or leave both their lives unfulfilled. He was sure of that.
“Great Shepherd, now I know thy saw of might.
Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”
The lines rang in his head sweet as distant bells upon a summer night. Yet, after all, he was not sure that they applied. True that he had never seen Sonia close until yesterday and that she had seemed to him then unimaginable unless he had seen her. But he had talked with her since, they had sat together, something secret in each of them calling loudly to the other; and now it seemed that she must have been right when she claimed that long ago, somewhere, they had been friends. The second lobe of the brain would not serve any more. It offered too trivial an explanation. He had a feeling that she had swum out of the mists of a thousand years to rejoin him.
For the next three months Adrian Shard had little leisure. There was first the morning’s work in Grosvenor Street. He was given as his office a small room overlooking the garden and communicating with the indigo room, which Cratton used, by a door close to the window. There he sat during the morning, answering letters from constituents, arranging schedules, making out checks — not so many of these — deferring by this or that plea the payment of bills — a good deal of that. He was given the freedom of the Lobby of the House of Commons, and he was much in attendance there or in Cratton’s private room during the afternoon and evening. The Session was a very busy one for Spencer Cratton. There were important questions of industrial organizations perpetually cropping up, and behind them all loomed the great unsettled question of the Basra Oilfields. Adrian filled in his spare time by issuing Lydia Cratton’s cards of invitation and making lists of her guests — a task which almost claimed a secretary by itself. For the house was run with an imperial magnificence and an Irish disdain for its cost.
In the last days of July this circumstance obtained a peculiar corroboration. The butler, looking rather hot and flustered, knocked on his door at half-past ten, and being told to come in, said: “There’s a person at the door, Sir, who wishes to see Mr Spencer Cratton.”
Adrian shook his head.
“That’s out of the question. Will you ask him to write, stating his business?”
“I have already done that, Sir.”
“Well?”
“The person was most offensive,” said the butler. “He used language almost unbeknown to me.”
Adrian looked up from his table.
“And what is the person’s name?”
“Bunt,” said the butler with his nose in the air. “A plebeian, Sir.”
Adrian might justifiably have smiled. But he did not; he became more serious.
“I think that I had better see Mr Bunt myself,” he said.
“Very well, Sir.”
Mr Bunt was a red-faced man of a raucous voice, dressed in a check suit of a pronounced pattern, with a tail coat. He carried a light-coloured cane with knots in it in his left hand, and a white bowler hat in his right. Adrian was, no doubt, as ignorant of affairs as Spencer Cratton and Mr George Andros supposed him to be, but he did know a bookmaker when he saw one.
“Will you take a chair?” said Adrian politely.
“I will not,” replied Mr Bunt, not politely at all.
“What can I do for you, then?” Adrian asked.
“Nothing, Mister. I want to see your boss.”
Adrian shook his head.
“Mr Spencer Cratton is very busy this morning. He has given definite instructions that he must not be interrupted.”
Mr Bunt smiled grimly.
“My young man says that, too.”
Adrian tried another opening.
“You are, no doubt, one of Mr Cratton’s constituents?” he suggested.
“If a constituent is a man who’s owed money, I am,” said Mr Bunt aggressively.
That seemed, to Adrian, to end the conversation. He held out his hand.
“I’ll take your card in to Mr Cratton.”
“Right! There you are.” Mr Bunt slapped his card down on Adrian’s table. “B B Bunt. Soberiket, the Busy B’s. And whilst you’re about it, you may tell him—”
“‘Sh, Mr Bunt,” said Adrian, wagging his finger at him. “Don’t you ask me to say one harsh thing to Mr Spencer Cratton which you would object to your young man saying to you.
Mr Bunt was a little taken aback.
“Well, that’s reasonable,” said he. He hitched up his trousers and sat down, spreading his knees wide apart. He wore bright yellowish brown button boots with cloth tops.
“I suppose your place is worth keeping for the perks. But I reckon your wages is in ‘arriers.”
“Neither in ‘arriers nor in beagles,” said Adrian gravely, and he passed through the door into the big room where Mr Spencer Cratton sat with a mass of reports about the world’s oil supplies in front of him.
“I can’t see anyone, Shard,” he said. “Here’s a subject on which the Cabinet will have to make an important decision, and as it falls in my department, I’ve got to master it.”
“So I said, Sir. But the man seems confident that you’ll see him when you hear his name. He’s probably a constituent,” Adrian explained tactfully. “A Mr Bunt.”
Mr Cratton looked up.
“Bunt!” he repeated, and again, “Bunt!” like a man trying unsuccessfully to identify some unimportant visitor. He reached out a long and languid hand for the card. Adrian had often admired the self-possession of his employer. It seemed that he could neither be alarmed nor surprised. If you had shown him the Victoria Falls he would only have said, “What a lot of water,” and lit another cigar. But Adrian had never been so impressed as at this moment.
“Turf Accountant!” said Mr Spencer Cratton indifferently. “The passion for respectability is perhaps the most universal feature in the English character. Why not B. B. Bunt, Bookie? So much better! The poor fellow’s worried about the Tote, I expect. They all want Parliament to suppress it. Well, I’ll give him five minutes.”
He stretched his arms above his head and yawned.
Bunt, however, remained with Spencer Cratton for the better part of an hour, and came out a different man. As the chairs were pushed back in the indigo room, Adrian hurried out into the hall. It would be better that he and not a servant should see this plainspoken slave of the Ring off the premises. But Spencer Cratton himself was beforehand with him, and Mr Bunt was wriggling with pleasure like a spaniel. If the tail of that flamboyant coat could have wagged of its own volition, it would surely have swept all the hats and coats from the hall table.
“No, reelly, Mr Spencer Cratton! You mustn’t come to the door with me. Bless my soul, what a film it would make! — the busy B’s and the Right Honourable! I wish you good morning, Sir. Good morning, young man!” This to Adrian, and Mr Bunt was out in the street, strutting along as if he had just left Buckingham Palace with the Order of the Garter in his pocket.
“An interesting person, no doubt, to the detached student of human nature,” said Spencer Cratton, “but to a distracted Cabinet Minister a mere wasted hour,” and with a wave of his hand he disappeared into his library, looking as little distracted as a man could.
Adrian returned to his office. He stood with his hands in his pockets, gazing out of the window to his own little house across the gardens.
“And I’ll bet he hasn’t gone away with a bob more than he came with,” Adrian reflected. “My chief’s a perfect marvel.”
Yes, but how long could he carry on? Adrian, during his three months of service, could not but learn some of the secrets of the household. Apart from the extravagance with which the establishment was run, Cratton gambled. Cards, the Stock Market, and now the horses.
“The horses are a new one on me,” Adrian observed, as he stood gloomily a
t the window of his room.
How long could Cratton carry on? He was undisturbed — that was perhaps a good sign. But he was always undisturbed — just as he was always indolent and yet got through more work than many a Minister with a name for industry. And, on the other hand, he was the only one of the family who was undisturbed. The rest were conscious of a menace. Even Sonia was troubled.
She was coming towards the house when he left it at one o’clock, and though she smiled, there was a look of distress in her eyes.
Sonia, he said, and she stopped. I never see you properly, do I? There’s always something or someone in the way.”
“Someone,” said Sonia.
“Yes.”
There was no need for either of them to mention a name.
“We get a miserable few minutes at a party, now and then — that’s about all.”
“Yes.”
The world was a gloomy place for the moment to these two young people.
“And it’s not enough. You see,” Adrian laughed, “you give me a little shock every time I see you, and I’d like to get over that. I thought perhaps you’d help by coming to lunch with me tomorrow.”
Sonia breathed a sigh of pleasure.
“I will.”
“Good!” said Adrian. “You remember I spoke of a friend of mine, David Bletchworth, who was trying to get me accepted as a candidate. Well, he and his wife are coming.”
“Oh! It’s a party, then!” Sonia cried, with disappointment in every inflection of her voice.
Adrian felt an impulse to throw the party overboard at once. But he held onto his plans.
“Such a small party! I really want the Bletchworths to know you. You’ll come?”
Sonia nodded her head.
“The Ritz. Half-past one. I’ll bring my little car round and fetch you.”
“No!”
The veto was as final as fear could make it. Sonia threw a startled look towards the house a few yards away. “I’ll join you at the Ritz,” she said, and hurried away.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 633