Leaving the hotel next morning, they passed the gauntlet of waiting
menials and tipped their way through to the door to the total price of
their freedom, while the door porter waved his arms in the middle of the
street in an ostentatious display to arrest a taxi for them, and a page
boy craned his neck at the glass door to see if it was coming, to
receive, for looking interested, another sixpence.
At the bank he cashed, without any trouble, a cheque for one hundred
pounds, and indulged in some purchases for himself. Unlike Edith
Wharton’s American heroes and heroines, he did not buy a grand piano, a
motor-car, or a steam yacht, but invested in shirts, waistcoats, a new
pair of pyjamas, a bathing-suit and an opera hat. At a bookstall he
bought a booklet in a bright yellow jacket entitled _Dictators of the
Press_ and a recent volume of _Who’s Who_, and at lunch, having tired a
little of Eva’s conversation, absorbed himself in the literature he had
purchased.
_Who’s Who_, laconic but informative, recorded:
“OTTERCOVE, Rex Victor Alexander Green, P. C. 1st. Baron Ottercove of
Ottercove. _b_. Ottercove, New Zealand; unmarried; _heiress_: niece,
Eleonor Viscountess de Jones; _recreation_: controlling public opinion;
_address_: Bourne Abbey, Kent; Stonedge House, S.W. 1.”
He read it out aloud to Eva, who said that Pilling would approve of the
address.
The little yellow booklet related in a racy style the facts which were
more or less common knowledge to the public, but re-dressed them with
gay ribbons of fancy and let them scurry down the ebullient river of
facile imagination. Frank learnt that Lord Ottercove was probably the
greatest political and financial force operating in the England of the
twentieth century--greater than Lord Northcliffe, greater than Lord
Beaverbrook. Yes, greater! History records (said the little yellow book)
that if the latter two had chosen to pull together there was nothing in
the realm of the material universe that these two peers could not
accomplish. Now what they could do if they pulled together Lord
Ottercove, it seemed, could do alone. If you took the trouble to turn up
in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ the rubric recording the development of
journalism in the last half-century, you would learn that just as Lord
Northcliffe’s advent opens a new page, and Lord Beaverbrook’s another,
so the arrival of Lord Ottercove in Fleet Street definitely marks a
third and, possibly, last, stage.
He was born (the booklet said) of English missionary stock in New
Zealand, who, after working for the furtherance of what they regarded as
the Christian Cause, in heathen lands, retired to that Commonwealth upon
whose soil our hero first saw light. Human meteors had been known to
exist before: but never quite so swift, so bright, so deft, so certain.
By seventeen, Rex Green controlled the major part of the New Zealand
industries. By the time he was nineteen he exhausted all Colonial
possibilities and went to the United States and captured Wall Street. At
twenty-four he accumulated such a fortune that, from sheer revulsion, he
stopped making money (except for such as rolled in on its own momentum),
came to England and plunged into home politics. He unmade two Prime
Ministers, made a third, buried a fourth, and, tired of the game of
politics, accepted a peerage, buying a controlling share in the
_Universal Press of the United Kingdom Syndicate_. He bought fifty-one
per cent. of the shares of a daily newspaper, arranging that this
newspaper should purchase fifty-one per cent. of the shares of another
newspaper, which second newspaper he instructed to buy fifty-one per
cent. of the shares of a third newspaper, continuing the application of
this principle, till, controlling the first newspaper, he automatically
controlled all the worthwhile newspapers in the United Kingdom.
Yet despite his meteoric sweep, Rex Green was a man of strong
attachments. So when, with the offer of a peerage, the time arrived for
choosing a new name, and all the county, town, village, street and
railway names in England lay before him, the great man remembered the
little village in New Zealand that had been his landing-stage where he
alighted we know not whence upon the Realm of Matter, and decided by
adopting its name to distinguish the village. “In Ottercove I was born,
and as Ottercove I will die,” he was reported to have said at the
banquet given in his honour by the Ottercove inhabitants during his
visit there soon after his creation, thereby drawing tears from their
eyes; a banquet followed by a tour of inspection round the village,
small, and with a railroad station so embryonic that you could not even
buy a ticket there, but picturesque in its simple rustic way, quite a
dear little place full of coves, creeks, and little brooks with beavers
and otters, quite domesticated, it seemed, and almost eating out of your
hand. The guest of honour, it is reported, beamed with pleasure as he
beheld the place of his birth, and is said to have added to his
foregoing remark at the banquet: “And in Ottercove I wish to be buried,”
thereby drawing renewed tears from the onlookers’ eyes.
“Well,” said Frank, closing the book and leaning back luxuriously, “it
seems we’ve struck oil this time!”
“But why don’t you get Lord Ottercove to give you some money, darling?”
“I have,” he said.
“How much?”
“Well, I don’t know. He said ‘without limit.’” It was out before he had
meant it to be.
“Without limit,” she said. “But that means that you can buy yourself
everything, darling; horses and houses with grounds all over England and
Scotland and--”
“No, no--”
“But yes, darling. ‘Without limit’ means everything.”
“But no--”
“But it does, darling. Everything, everything without limit.”
He was sorry he had said it.
“We must tell Mummy,” she said.
“Great heavens, no! Why tell her?”
“She will be pleased.”
“Now then,” he said, rising and helping her with her coat and then
taking _Who’s Who_ under his arm. “No. I shall make the restaurant a
gift of it.”
“No, darling, don’t. Pilling would love to have it.”
“What does he want with a copy of _Who’s Who_?”
“He’d read and read it days and nights.”
“Whatever for?”
“To find out who is who.”
“But how will you get it over to him?”
“In a taxi.”
“Well, look here, you had better take a taxi and go straight to Pilling
with it.” There were moments, after prolonged social intercourse with
people, when his soul positively shrieked to be left alone.
“I shall ring you up at your club,” she said as she drove away with the
book.