When at half-past eight next evening Frank arrived at Stonedge House and
the footman, divesting him with critical thoughtfulness of his street
clothes, ushered him into the inner rooms, a lady, regally resplendent,
came out to meet him and, greeting him with spontaneous affability, took
him upstairs to the drawing-room, saying, “I can’t drag Uncle Rex from
the roasting fire in his room. He is always miserably cold.” But already
Lord Ottercove, festal in his immaculate tailcoat and pumps, was slowly
coming up the steps behind them, and--“How are you?” he asked.
A question to which it is difficult to say anything but, “Oh, very
well.”
They had not been in the blue, mirrored drawing-room many moments when
the butler flung open the doors and announced:
“His Majesty the Emir of Turkestania.”
A tall ample man, with a protruding shirt front, blew in like a
whirlwind and immediately began to register a vocal admiration of the
hostess’s sparkling sea-green gown. “The result of your Paris season I
can see, Lady de Jones?” he boomed in tones of teasing gallantry.
“As I know to my cost,” said her uncle. “This is Mr. Frank Dickin, your
Majesty. You’ve read his novels, of course.”
“Who hasn’t read them!” exclaimed the Emir and, turning to the hostess:
“A most artistic, subversively provocative gown!” when the butler again
appeared at the door on the landing and announced:
“Admiral Lord Battersea.”
Up the red carpeted steps came a corpulent figure with a visage,
familiar to readers of the picture press in a large-rimmed naval cap
tilted at a rakish angle over a wind-beaten sea-dog face, now projecting
out of a prosaic but discreetly confident tailcoat.
From time to time the butler appeared on the threshold, announcing the
guests as they came up the steps; and presently he ceased announcing,
and at a sign they all trooped down again to dinner. As the footman
pushed up the chair behind him, Frank began to take his dispositions. In
a moment of periodical unemployment when both his partners were engaged
in conversation, he would prick his ears--for he was curious about his
fellow men--and listen. Admiral Battersea was saying in his hoarse,
sea-grunting way to the pretty, dark-eyed woman at his side: “The Prince
of Wales, I hear, kept very fit during the trip by taking a great deal
of exercise....”
He found Lord de Jones at his side peculiarly congenial. Did he know
the Kerrs? Didn’t he! Eva? “The darling!” said de Jones. And Mrs. Kerr?
Lord de Jones’s silence seemed to hold a lot.
“She craved for impossible things,” Dickin suggested.
“And she got them,” said de Jones.
“What she wanted.”
“Exactly what she wanted. They were Impossible.”
They covered many a familiar field--Russia, Vienna, the Tyrol. “Did you
know her father?” asked de Jones. “I went out to Russia as a young man.
I was taken to their country place by him. She had just got married.
Lovely. She was lovely then; really lovely. Just like Eva now. If I’d
known her three days earlier she wouldn’t have married Kerr.” He was
pensive. “Eva might have been my daughter.” He stopped, as if realising
the superfluity of his reflections. “It doesn’t matter now. Nothing
matters now. A journey with her round the world. And then ... the _coup
de grâce_! It is finished....” The butler was removing his plate. He
looked ironically at Frank. “It is finished,” he said, a strange light
in his greenish eyes.
“Would you mind it awfully?” he asked Frank.
“What?”
“If I were to end it all.”
“How do you mean?”
“At a stroke. The world and its suffering.”
“Which world?” Frank asked, he felt, rather stupidly, but he had mixed
wine and his head was happily singing.
“The suffering world.”
“But I thought you were concerned to grow more wheat.” He thought Lord
de Jones could not be quite right in the head.
“Wheat!” said de Jones, drinking lugubriously, “Wheat!”
When the ladies had left them to their smoke and smirky wit Frank found
himself side by side with Admiral Battersea, who, he reflected, was
surely the extreme opposite of his own type, so much so that if Lord
Battersea had read his books, he would, given the chance, have gladly
got him hanged and considered it as a service to the community. Lord
Ottercove must have read his thoughts, for, “Admiral,” he said, “come
and sit by my side.” The conversation turned upon whisky, which was
described as a good thing; at which the Emir protested. “Wine,” he said,
“is a good thing; but whisky--?!”
“_Good_ whisky, your Majesty.”
Good whisky, it was urged, was a good thing.
From whisky they switched on to politicians who drank whisky and from
politicians to politics. “Ah, Joe,” said Lord Ottercove. “There’s nobody
like him. Just you wait till he is again in the saddle.”
“He is a long way off it,” grunted a guest.
“But he wants it, he wants it with all his heart. When a man day and
night thinks of the one thing he wants, he gets it.”
“He has oratory, inspiration, energy; he only lacks one thing: a goal,
an objective,” said another guest.
“What can you do?” said the host. “Liberals have no policy, since the
war. But now we have something. I am off myself with Chris”--he nodded
towards Lord de Jones--“on this stunt of ours and I hope”--he dropped
his voice to a whisper and his lips moved inaudibly--“to identify the
party with it.”
Upstairs in the ball-room, where chairs had been spread in rows, a dark,
passionate man was already singing and some guests had seated themselves
and were listening, while Lord Ottercove walked about, with a long fat
cigar in his mouth, looking pleased. Frank found the pretty girl on his
left, now looking beautiful, with melodious eyes. She closed her eyes at
him in bliss and said that passionate music stirred people’s passions.
To his right, leaning back leisurely, was Lord Battersea, puffing away
at his cigar, while the baritone squeezed juice and tears out of the
“Lotusblume.” And when the song was done, the British Admiral, who had
measured his strength on the high seas with von Scheer, each, on his own
admission, emerging the victor, now with eyes dim with beatitude
murmured ecstatically:
“_Die Lotusblume_ ... _Die Lotusblume_....”