“No, no, ‘Me-Too,’ you’d better run away now, or sit and wait here in
the taxi.”
“But the taxi’s so expensive, darling.” (It was not at all like Eva, he
reflected, to object to his expenses.) “I’d better come upstairs with
you.”
“But no! I’ve an _appointment_ with Lord Ottercove!”
“But I’d like to see Lord Ottercove myself.”
“But he hasn’t asked to see you.”
“But he might like to--if he knew.”
“He doesn’t know you.”
“He would if I came up with you.”
How she added to his difficulties!
For a young man of his nervous complex, living in the fear of waiters
and hall porters and a general expectation that the next man he
solicited for information would come up, lower his pants and give him a
good hiding, an appointment with Lord Ottercove, though flattering, was
arduous enough. Before the porch of a tall Fleet Street building from
whose roof an electric sign proclaimed the fiery words _Daily Runner_,
they argued, while the taxi-meter ticked away the aeons, and the aeons
added shillings. From the pavement he gazed up at the huge inscrutable
building and reflected that, located somewhere in its innermost
recesses, like a spider waiting for him, was the great Lord Ottercove,
as the black hand of the hall clock moved towards the hour appointed for
the interview.
Leaving Eva in the taxi, he made away with a certain unnatural kind of
alacrity, a recklessly confident step, to face the braided
commissionaire who listened with faint but not unhopeful surprise to the
news of the visitor’s claim to an appointment with his lordship. Ever
jealous, however, like Peter, of his guardianship of the access to God,
he provided the applicant with a form to be filled in with information
of a biographical nature and outlining the general character of his
business: the form to precede him to the desired destination; the
aspirant to await below confirmation of the bona fides of his claim to
the exalted interview. The confirmation duly forthcoming, the faithful
steward handed the young visitor on to a lift boy who, taking him up
several floors, handed him on to a brother lift boy, who presently
handed him on to a third brother. Each new lift boy to whom he was
handed over looked more exclusive, had a manner at once more solemn and
more deferential--the mark of one who dwells in higher altitudes, more
immune from the grosser things of the earth. Up and up they went, higher
and higher, till the doors of the lift opened again and he was handed
out to a page altogether removed from the race of mere lift boys. The
page bade him follow him up the few remaining steps--the last golden
ladder to heaven--to a landing where the page divested him of his cruder
clothes of the street, took him up another three carpeted steps and,
bidding him wait, knocked reverently at the door. And opened it before
the visitor, who was pulling out his cuffs and, adjusting his tie, was
quite ready to step forward. With a jerky suddenness, not unlike that of
policemen in American comic films dashing off the ground in pursuit of a
criminal, he entered the room, the page shutting the door on him.
In a vast radiant space of yellow and blue, at an octangular table
surrounded by chairs, sat a slim middle-sized figure in a dark-blue
suit, a negligent lock over the brow. It rose promptly, shook hands,
gave the visitor one searching look with its penetrating grey eye, a
guarded smile revealing white affable teeth, and sat down again to the
octangular table, bidding the visitor to do likewise but taking no
further notice of him.
The visitor sat hushed and abashed, slowly taking in the surroundings,
and Lord Ottercove went on with his work, going through the small pile
of papers before him with record speed, while a trained lady-secretary
with a coyly grave manner and a voice attuned to the requisite pitch of
awed and concentrated attention received his instructions. From time to
time Lord Ottercove would take up the receiver and say, “Give me the
Prime Minister,” or “Give me the Duke of Liverpool,” and, incredible as
it seemed, the Prime Minister or the Duke of Liverpool was already
talking--and not from Liverpool. “Hello, Fred,” from Lord Ottercove.
“Oh, very well and full of mischief! What? Oh, I’m bored to hell. I’m
going in for a new hobby. Buying race horses. What? Let me know before
you start. Good-bye to you.”
The visitor had a feeling of sharing in Lord Ottercove’s multifarious
activities and interests, and when he smiled--his eyes were grey and
full of mischief--the visitor smiled too, involuntarily. But Lord
Ottercove still took no notice of him.
And now his eyes were scanning a batch of typescript. His mouth opened.
“_Pale Primroses_ by Frank Dickin,” he said and looked humorously at the
visitor. “Anything else?” he asked the secretary.
“Your spectacles.”
He stretched out his hand for them. “Good night to you.”
And while she was gathering her papers, Lord Ottercove leaned back, his
preoccupied air having deserted him, a leisurely smile having taken its
place. “Well, I am very interested to meet you, Mr. Dickin,” he said
(the secretary now having retired). “My serial editor submitted to me
the beginning of a proposed novel by you with a synopsis of its general
plot, and I am much intrigued by it for a reason that you won’t guess.
Your name--you will forgive me for saying so--was completely unknown to
me. Frank Dickin did not convey anything to me in itself, you
understand.”
“Frank Septimus Dickin.”
“You prefer it like that?”
“To redeem, I suppose, the plainness of the Dickin.”
“Of course, Dickin is not Dickens.” His lordship smiled indulgently.
“No, of course not.”
“Of course. Still, what attracted me--and that is chiefly why I wrote to
you--are the people in your book. So real. It seemed to me I knew them.”
“Well, I do try to make them living. I think it is up to a novelist----”
“I don’t mean that. I think I know the family you describe. Or, rather,
their connections and appendages. A remarkable coincidence, anyway,
about the names.”
Here Dickin smiled.
“So they _are_ ‘copies’?”
“Well, yes, to a considerable extent, I am bound to confess.”
“Have you brought me the continuation as I asked you to do in my letter?
If so, I will read it to-night.”
“I am afraid it is very rough manuscript. You would not feel very happy
with it.”
“Then you read it to me.”
“But it’s long.”
“Read it! I shall tell you when to stop.” Lord Ottercove pressed the
button. The page stood in the doorway. “Don’t let any of them bother me
for the next two hours. Keep them out, do you hear, and shut the door
behind you!”
“Yes, m’lord.”
To Captains of Industry time is said to be money. But Generals of the
Press are artists who express their sensibility in affairs. They have
risen to heights beyond time and avarice and avarice in time to a
condition of immanent immortality already in this world. Lord Ottercove
had suddenly expressed the wish to be relieved of the blazing heat and
burden of the day. For what does it profit a man to be rich if he cannot
please his own moods? He was interested, satisfied: the hours he devoted
to this visitor were of value to him: that was all. “Come and sit down
here, Mr. Dickin; you will get a better light.”
Dickin plunged into a delicate-looking armchair--and fell through. He
started up with a look as though he thought he was going to be thrashed
for it, but Lord Ottercove, with splendid unconcern for the chair, only
asked: “Have you hurt yourself?”
“On the contrary....”
“On the contrary what?”
“On the contrary: I have not hurt myself.”
“Thank God for that.”
“But I’ve hurt the chair.”
“Not a bit of it! Come and sit in this chair and read me your
manuscript. Now then.”
“It is difficult to relate these things in their proper sequence. Some
things stand out, others fade; that is all.”
“Are you talking now or reading?” asked Lord Ottercove.
“Reading.--I remember only a desultory Christmas Eve in the Tyrol. I
strolled about lonely, sad, because laden with memories, through the
winter streets of Innsbruck when a small group of people emerged from a
shop, arguing in Russian as to their next move. I had picked up a fair
amount of Russian in captivity during the war, quartered as we were with
Russian officers, and improved it later on our ill-starred mission in
Archangel, which, in the order of things, left behind memories. Was it
that snow called to snow? It was thawing, and the shop windows twinkling
in the winter dusk were faintly reminiscent. Memory calling to memory?
But I went straight up to them and, with a curt apology, expressed my
pleasure at hearing the dear language. In London I would have been
brought up at Marlborough Street Police Station next morning and fined
£5 for “annoying ladies in the street.” In New York I would have been
flung summarily into prison for attempted rape. But the Russian ladies
smiled with undisguised pleasure and expectation, and, talking eagerly,
we immediately repaired to the Maria-Theresien-Café and exchanged
experiences, attracting every one’s attention in the café by our voluble
reminiscences. One lady--the fair, small, good-looking one, bubbling
over with excitement--had married and divorced an Irishman, a certain
Mr. Kerr whom she had met in Russia before the war, and till recently
they owned a castle in Meran, but--she hinted at the Revolution, the
War, the Italian annexation of South Tyrol, and, well, at their large
and careless way of living. There had been debts. In fine, the castle
was no more. But there were children. Four of them: two boys, two girls.
Zita was the elder of the girls. She was sixteen. And, I perceived,
amazingly good-looking in her bright, fair way. The younger, Eva, was at
school in England. This little boy was John, the despair of her life! He
simply wouldn’t sit still. And, indeed, he was already fiddling with my
watch chain. But she had another son, the eldest of her children, who
had her eyes and loved her dearly. Raymond, the apple of her eye! He was
in England. They wished he might have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. Alas,
that was not possible now. He was in the motor trade. It wasn’t quite
the thing for him. He was more a poet at heart, melancholy, meditative,
interested in bird life. But how good-looking! Raymond and Eva were the
two best-looking of the family--her mother’s children. They had her
eyes. Now John was made for the motor trade. Let him see a wheel or a
piece of wire, and he must go and touch it.
“The other lady, dark and passionate but restrained by Mrs. Kerr’s
volubility, was Russian too, but married to a local Austrian
tram-driver. She told me her story. The daughter of a landowner, like
Mrs. Kerr, she met her future husband when he was a prisoner-of-war in
Russia; she a Red Cross nurse. Love at first sight. She married him and
helped him to escape, all very romantically. He had told her he was an
engineer by education and God-knows-what besides. They came to his
native Innsbruck and he resumed his duties as a tram-driver. And
everybody tells him he is a fool to have saddled himself with an
uncongenial Russian wife and he seems to resent the marriage more than
she resents his calling and has pawned the silver things she has managed
to smuggle out of Russia and has been unfaithful to her and treats her
brutally and she is now divorcing him because she hates him so. And yet
is curious about his doings and still goes by the name of Frau König and
works at a knitting establishment and is about to start work on her
own--if only somebody would provide her with capital. ‘But I can’t,’
immediately says Mrs. Kerr. ‘My husband can’t give me anything. I have
great hopes of getting some money from my parents in Russia, but my
mother writes that she can’t send us anything. They are starving
practically. Life is so hard for us who have come from Russia. And our
castle in Meran.... It’s all this awful Revolution.’
“Ah, the good old days in Russia! Did I know her father, the landowner
Pàvel Yàkovlevich Sabolenko? I didn’t? And yet everybody who had been
in Russia knew him. He owned mines, he owned railways, he owned heaven
knows what not. Everybody knew him. You had only to mention the name
Pàvel Yàkovlevich Sabolenko for everybody to say: ‘Sabolenko? Pàvel
Yàkovlevich? Why, of course!’ And now he said he couldn’t send her a
penny. It seemed a shame. But, of course, they have had a revolution.
Her father was seized by his own peasants (to whom he’d been a father
all his life; they even called him ‘our father’) and was led out into
the wood to be hanged, when a passing aeroplane attracted their
attention and they forgot about him. ‘But mother was seized by them on
their way back, by way of afterthought, and was about to be torn limb
from limb, when father butted in and shouted, “What’s the good of
wasting your time on an old hag like this? Get on with the Revolution!”
and they all shouted, “Hear! hear! Long live the Revolution!” and
elected father President of the Local Revolutionary Centre, which he is
still.’ But the trouble was that you could never be sure with such
erratic people, well-meaning but somehow not very certain of their
intellectual premises. Father was a genius, of course. He had graduated
at eight different universities and had written a philosophical
treatise, a sort of bridge work between Plato and Schopenhauer and had
of late much strengthened his position in regard to the Soviets by a
work on Socialism entitled “Beyond Lenin,” and was regarded as an
authority on mathematics. ‘I am telling you all this because you are a
writer. You can make use of it in your books. We Sabolenkos are a most
interesting, original family. One of my brothers shot himself; another
got drowned....’”
“Look here,” Lord Ottercove interrupted, “will you have a drink before
you continue?”
“Thanks awfully.”
“What will you have?”
“Wine. White wine.”
“Will you have champagne?”
“Thanks, I’ll have champagne. I adore it.”
Lord Ottercove rang in a special way. A butler sprang out of the floor.
“Give me the wine-list.”
The butler returned with a huge album bound in crocodile leather. “You
are looking at the binding, I notice. It is the skin of a crocodile I
shot myself on the Nile,” said the host. And he selected a half-bottle
of the year 1895. “According to historians,” he added, “a magnificent
vintage.”
Dickin drank the champagne and thought--because she too adored
champagne--of Eva waiting for him in the taxi. But the great room with
the drawn curtains and the electric radiators full on was so snug; and
already the champagne was doing its care-transcending work. He hoped
that Eva was very comfortable in the taxi.
“Well, go on,” said Lord Ottercove.
“It was arranged between us before we parted that we should spend that
Christmas Eve together at Frau König’s rooms. They had arranged to do
so before they met me. I arrived shortly before midnight, laden with
provisions. The Christmas tree was lit and John fiddling with everything
that he could fiddle with, and Zita all in white and somehow
marvellously seductive-looking. I marvelled at the lines of that young
body. I still marvel when I think of them. It was warm and cosy in Frau
König’s room on account of the lit candles. Mrs. Kerr was voluble and
took the words out of poor Frau König’s mouth.
“‘Charming!’ I exclaimed. The real Russian Christmas!’
“‘It’s what I wanted!’ cried Mrs. Kerr. ‘And I knew Frau König would be
pleased to spend Christmas Eve among Russian friends. And we regard you
as a Russian too.’
“‘As a matter of fact, I lived in Russia as a child, while my father was
Secretary at the British Embassy in Petersburg, and my earliest
reminiscences go back to Russia.’
“‘Well, there you are! I knew Frau König would appreciate a Russian
Christmas Eve. And so I said to her: ‘Tamara Leonidovna, you have a
larger room than I have; ask us to supper, and we will spend Christmas
Eve together.’ And we thought of writing a little story together: A
young brunette--Tamara Leonidovna--asked a--a young (I am not old, am
I?) blonde to her Christmas tree; and while they were thus together,
there looked in to them through the window a third guest--the Moon.’
“And, indeed, the moon looked through the tall blue pine of the forest.
‘Charming,’ I said.
“‘How much will they give us for it?’
“‘How do you mean?’
“‘How many dollars--in an American magazine?’
“‘Well--I don’t know--it depends, of course--’
“‘And in England? How many sterlings?’
“I am the last man to generalise about national characteristics; but
there was something perennially irresponsible about Mrs. Kerr’s nature.
She had taken part in a £1,000 competition for a General Election
forecast to be held in England on the Tuesday and arranged for a holiday
tour on the following Saturday on the strength of the £1,000 which she
hoped to win.”
“Ha!” laughed Lord Ottercove. “Incredible, isn’t it?”
Dickin, encouraged, continued with warmth, and without reference to the
manuscript: “The fate of these people! who had known affluent days in
genial surroundings on the accustomed background of Russian life, now
cast ashore in a foreign land which looks askance at them and knows them
not!”
Was it the champagne which spoke in him, or a look of dissension in his
listener’s eyes? But he brought down his fist on the table with a bang.
“Dammit, sir! They are too old to be acclimatised, too indolent to
start afresh. They have dragged themselves here and cast their living
carcasses upon the tide of life at this great turning point in human
destiny.”
“Come, come!” said Lord Ottercove. But Dickin, dazed with the wine, was
neither coming nor going. His heart was overwhelmed with love for
humanity. “They feel they dream. All familiar things by which they had
learnt their values had vanished overnight. They hear a tumult outside,
but they are at a loss to understand its meaning. They are no longer of
the past: it is not there: it has just vanished beneath their feet, and
its history is not yet. They are not of the present: they do not know
it, and it knows them not. They are silent, alone. They are alive, but
the shadow of death has crept over them. They are dead souls with just a
flicker of light on them....”
Lord Ottercove, listening, could not make out what this strange note of
emotion in Dickin connoted precisely: whether this was poetry, and, if
so, whether good or bad poetry. Dickin, conscious of discomfiture, felt
the need to excuse himself. “A beginning,” he said, “in the manner of
Guy de Maupassant in his more sentimental vein.” He had a feeling that
the air had gained that air-proof compartment in him in which alone pure
sentiment can thrive, and shrank at this contamination of
sentimentality. “I see I bore you.”
“Not a bit of it, my dear fellow. I cannot tell you how it all
interests me--for various reasons, of which I will tell you presently.”
“I will read on.”
“Whichever is quicker and more to the point.”
“I must read it all. It is nothing without the atmosphere.”
“I understand--about the atmosphere. Go on in your own way.”
“Both women vied to show me their photographs. Frau König took me aside
surreptitiously into her small bedroom--the Christmas tree was in the
kitchen--and there showed me photographs of her father, her mother,
herself and her brother, and even of the tram-driver. A man with a chin
and a moustachio. But when we got back into the kitchen Mrs. Kerr would
not let go of me. She had brought all her photographs with her so that
she might show them to me: her great genius of a father, her mother, the
brother who had shot himself, and the one who was drowned. ‘And this is
my husband.’
“From the cardboard in my hand Mr. Kerr gazed at me circumspectly.
“‘A handsome man, but a wicked, impossible temper. He left his people in
Ireland because he could not get on with them and bought the castle in
Meran and never wanted to go back. And even now, poor fellow, tries to
keep up appearances--eats nothing in the day but dines at night with an
old friend of his, a Rittmeister, at the station restaurant.’
“‘Daddy’s always very spick and span,’ said Zita.
“‘So he is still about?’
“‘Oh yes! He won’t go back to Ireland while his father is alive, and he
loves the Austrians.’
“‘Daddy is awfully stupid about learning languages,’ said Zita. ‘He’s
lived here all his life and can hardly speak a word of German.’
“‘But of course he can speak German,’ Mrs. Kerr butted in. ‘He always
speaks German with the Rittmeister. I heard him last night.’
“‘Mummy, he can’t, to save his life! When he orders three cups of coffee
he holds out three fingers and says: “Zwei.” And in Vienna when he
wanted to show us the Rathaus, he stopped a man in the street and said:
“Please show me the way to the rat house.’”
“‘He didn’t!’
“‘He did!’
“‘Still, your father is a fine man and if it hadn’t been for his temper
I should have never divorced him. But he used to throw things at me--a
flower vase, a candelabrum, a great big jug of water. I’d have to hide
in the garden all night. He was so insanely jealous!’ She smiled slyly.
‘Perhaps not without cause.’
“‘This, I forgot to show you,’ said Frau König, ‘is the photograph of my
fiancé.’
“‘Frau König,’ explained Mrs. Kerr, ‘is engaged to a very charming,
intellectual young man. A Russian student in Paris.’
“‘To a youth?’
“‘What age is he, Tamara Leonidovna?’
“‘Thirty-eight or nine. This is an old photo of him, taken about twenty
years ago on entering Tiflis University.’
“‘And what does he do now?’
“‘He wants to continue his course at the University in Paris in the
Faculty of Philosophy. Then, eventually, he will start a factory.’
“‘What kind of factory?’
“‘A knitting factory. We will direct it together. He is now, while
pursuing his course in philosophy at the University, putting aside money
for the factory by giving shorthand lessons in Paris.’
“‘A very active and sensible young man,’ commended Mrs. Kerr, ‘and I
congratulate you, Tamara Leonidovna, with all my heart.’
“‘Thank you, Vera Pavlovna, I am very proud and happy--’
“‘But wait, I haven’t shown you the photograph of our castle,’
interrupted Mrs. Kerr, ‘our Schloss (she sighed) in Meran.’
“‘Oh, a very lovely old castle.’
“‘Here all my four children were born. Raymond and Zita upstairs; Eva
and John here in the room next to the terrace. I changed my bedroom so
as to be able to take shelter in the garden.... But when he had calmed
down there was no kinder man than my husband. This was my
drawing-room--with the Japanese furniture. And they came and took
everything, everything....’ Tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘Like in _The
Cherry Orchard_....’
“‘But why? I do not follow. Your husband is a British subject, isn’t he?
The Italian annexation of Süd Tirol would not affect his property.’
“She nodded rapidly and sadly. ‘Debts ...’ she said. ‘How we lived!
Horses and motor-cars. Bouts. We used to give parties which must have
out-rivalled our Grand Duke’s! Spent without counting! My husband--they
are like that in Ireland--utterly unbusinesslike ... irresponsible!...
And now we are punished.’ She looked at Zita pensively. ‘Yes,’ she said,
‘this Revolution has done a great deal of harm and caused untold
suffering to us Russians of the cultured intellectual classes.... But
let us drink to Hope and a new and brighter Dawn!’
“We refilled our glasses with cognac, after which all things seemed
possible. ‘To the factory!’ I cried. ‘And here is to the future and an
even finer, greater castle!’
“‘I believe in what you say,’ chimed in Mrs. Kerr. ‘We shall be repaid
for our present suffering. Even the Bible says: _And many first shall be
last, and many last first._’”