It was the custom of our grandfathers and grandmothers--when they had
any of them been fool enough to write a novel--to wind it up with a
description of what the various characters in the beastly thing were
doing at the moment when the book appeared--that is, supposedly, in a
future some little while after the closing of the tale.
Those of you who still read the novels of my own youth--and I for one
read no others--will remember that they are invariably concerned with a
well-to-do young woman of exquisite beauty who marries a manly young
fellow of her own status, after various ups and downs. Then the book
goes on to tell you that they have twenty-six boys and girls with long
curly hair, all gold. And then the band plays.
It is not easy for me to give you an appendix of this kind, because I
have always thought it prudent to throw my own novels into the future,
lest I should be sent to gaol for insulting the rich. Moreover, even if
I did describe the final fate of my characters, I cannot make it a very
pleasant one without treason to the realities of human life and the
flattering of fools: and rather than flatter fools let me be torn to
pieces by wild horses after the fashion of the Merovingian queens.
However, I propose to give you some idea of how the various people you
have come across in these pages continued their not too significant
lives.
When Marjorie had divorced Galton--having got married to him by way of
preliminary--she was herself divorced by Pemberton--who had no further
use for Lady Meinz--and then married--only last year--an extraordinarily
fleshy man called (at the moment) Henry Munster. They are still
happy--at least, she is. The child of the first union--if I may so
describe it--is a girl; so that's the end of the Galton peerage.
Aunt Amelia is dead: and high time.
Her brother, the former Home Secretary, has in the interval developed
astonishing talents which have fitted him for the Colonial Office, the
India Office, and the Treasury, in rapid succession--and would doubtless
have fitted him for the Foreign Office but for the determined opposition
of the permanent officials. During the four years in which it had been
arranged to let the other batch of professional politicians have a suck
at the salaries, he acted as President (at £2,500) of the Commission
for the Second Reduction of Wages, wrote a book of reminiscences
(£3,000 Gubbins & Gubbins 42_s._). He was badly stoned during the
progress of the fifth General Strike--some call it the seventh, but I
follow the usual numeration. He had been taken by the mob for Henry
Gaston, a man nearly forty years younger and twenty times as able--which
only shows how important it is to educate the poor, and also, by the
way, how important it is not to print in the papers pictures of people
taken hundreds of years before the date of their appearance.
[Illustration: _Last portrait of Professor de Bohun, a sketch
reproduced in the "Figures Modernes"
of Berne (Switzerland)._]
William de Bohun is still Professor of Crystallography in the
University, where he has still further attained a European reputation.
He is now mentioned not only in Swiss papers, but occasionally in German
ones. He is not more than seventy-nine, and there is every chance of his
retaining the position for a few more years. He has not made it up with
the reader in Crystallogy, Mr. Bertran Leader.
I am sorry to say that these two distinguished men actually had a fight
in the main street of their academic town, their weapons being
umbrellas. Nor would the victory of the younger champion, Mr. B. Leader,
have been for a moment doubtful had it not been that the umbrella of the
elder, Professor de Bohun, was suddenly blown open by a gust of wind,
affording him a sure and certain shield against the frenzied blows of
his opponent.
McTaggart has gone under for good. It seems shameful, considering the
excellent position on the British Intelligence into which he had been
put on a weekly contract at fifteen pounds by the influence of the Home
Secretary, who thought some reparation due to him, and still more by the
influence of Victoria Mosel, who had squeezed Lord Bernstein's hand. On
the other hand it hurts nobody but himself. He is still unmarried.
George Whaley, with his accumulated savings, purchased immediately upon
his leaving the service of Humphrey de Bohun, the good will of the Bohun
Arms, which I need hardly tell you does not belong to the family, but to
a limited company. The pub stands at the gate of the park. Therein he
regales the countryside with comic stories of his former employers; the
rich middle-class motorists with scandal of the Great; the upper classes
who deign to halt there on their way north in their superb cars with
obsequience and silence, at a profit of about 30_s._ the bunch. He has
done very well indeed, because it is a convenient lunching place for
people motoring out from London to the north. His son is in this year's
Oxford eight, but his daughter, I very much regret to say, has
published, a book of verse--in Chelsea!
Ethelbert, a bright lad of nineteen, ordered by his master into the
special constabulary during the third General Strike--I use the
conventional numeration--was so unfortunate as to crack smartly upon the
head a high dignitary of the Church of England, and was thereupon put in
prison at the instance of Lady Sophia--the eminent cleric's wife--who
would take no denial. Upon release, the General Strike being still in
progress--it was the first of the really _long_ General Strikes, as you
will remember, he joined the regular police force, which is ever ready
to welcome men of varied experience and initiative. But he never
developed the intelligence required for the _agent provocateur_, in
which capacity such members of the service as have had personal
experience of the cells are commonly employed. He is now past thirty and
doing clerical work in the Lost Property Department.
What else remains? The horse, Attaboy, is dead, worn out in faithful
labours at the stud. He was the sire of Get-On out of Get-Out. Get-Out,
I need hardly tell you, was the sire of Success by Morning Star. Success
was the sire of Repetition by Raseuse; and that is how Tabouche won the
Oaks. I always did say the little filly would do well, for I have
followed the strain--as, long ago, the form--of Attaboy, who now sleeps
with his fathers--I means, sires, let alone dams.
[Illustration: _Controversy conducted with umbrellas between a
Professor (of Crystallography) and a Reader
(in Crystallogy) to the University._]
As for the parrot, whom I may call the second Attaboy, he is still the
cherished, the beloved, of that constant heart, Marjorie; Mrs. Munster,
_née_ de Bohun, sometime Lady Galton, as also Mrs. Pemberton--yes,
Pemberton. So far as I can remember, she is nothing else--so far. Such a
charming woman! Touching upon the lovely confines of middle age with
large bulges under rather weary eyes. But her father provides
handsomely.
As for that father, the head of the family, Humphrey de
Bohun--pronounced Deboon--he looks no older. It would be odd if he
could. He feels no older--that would be impossible. But he is inclined
to colds in the head. He now tells the same story over and over again,
the story of the Emerald. And it always ends, "Now guess who it was?"
They do not murder him, they give it up; and he dodders out, "Why! It
was a jackdaw!"
Victoria Mosel has, since the date of the great discovery of the
Emerald, spent week-ends at Basingthorpe, Prawley, Hammerton, Gainger,
Bifford, then again at Hammerton, then again at Gainger, after that at
Little Wackham. Then at Bifford again, then at Gainger, and, of course,
at Prawley. She also stayed at the Breitzes' place in Silesia for three
months, where she shot the bailiff's dog--by accident. May I tell you
that she has spent six weeks in every year on the Riviera? Can I deny
that, at this very moment of writing, she is stopping at Hammerton,
having passed the last week-end at Gainger and purposing to go on to
Bifford?
The years leave no mark upon her temporal frame, for the skin was ever
tight upon her bones. But she knows that she is getting on--and not in
the City sense of that term either. She already envisages the tomb. I am
fond of her. I think she will save her soul.
One great asset which endears her to the rich of her circle. Sir William
Collop is always ready and even eager to come at her bidding to any
country house, and there she puts him through his paces, to the enormous
joy of the assembled hosts and guests. But she is a good girl--I use the
word of a woman now nearing sixty--and she does him no harm. Only, she
_does_ make him dance. And why _not_?
After dinner, in the palaces of the rich, Sir William Collop is
compelled to tell quaint stories of the other rich over whom his
position in Scotland Yard gives him insight. Nor is he unwilling. They
all call him a good fellow, by which they mean that his accent is as
thick as cheese. He will be Collop till he dies. His original name is
drowned ten fathoms deep; he is just coming into his pension, and he is
an O. B. E. of the third crop.
And the emerald? Ah, my friends! My brothers! I will tell you what
happened to the emerald!
When Mrs. Pemberton, formerly Lady Galton, then Mrs. Munster[1] _née_
de Bohun, was making the straddle between the Pemberton and the Munster
connections--what we call joining the slats--she needed five hundred
pounds. It sounds ridiculous. But she did. One often does. She had
outrun the constable. She did not want to bother her father, and for the
very good reason that he had just got damnably knocked in the Hungarian
Phosphates on the erroneous advice of that silly man Mowlem. Well, she
had taken the emerald to the man who, Vic had told her, was the best
expert in London--Mr. Marlovitch, Junior--and (behold!) he had proved to
her by infallible tests that it was _paste_. What is more, he had given
her proof out of learned books that no emerald of such size ever had
existed, or could exist.
The Bohuns had patriotism in their blood. Marjorie gave the famous
trinket to the State--let me say to England!--under very easy conditions
which earned her, I am glad to say, the entry of her daughter into
Parliament. These conditions were modest: the emerald was to be
permanently exhibited, in a very large case all by itself, in the
British Museum, with a tablet engraved at the expense of England--I mean
the State--describing it as the largest Emerald in the world--which it
would have been if it had been an emerald--and assuring the honest
public that it had been given by Catherine the Great to that member of
the ancient family of de Bohuns who had served the interests of the
State--or rather, let me say, of England--at the Court of All the
Russias, in those days when the Semiramis of the North was the
admiration of Europe.
"What!" you'll exclaim (it's just like you!), "would that regal woman,
that generous if somewhat demanding lady, that broad German strong in
her nobility, that Monarch of the Snows, Empress of all the Russias,
have fallen to deceiving handsome Bill Bones with a piece of paste?"
Not a bit of it. You little understood the nature of those who serve
power. She had given her emerald--and an emerald it was--to a man in
whom she had the fullest confidence; she had given it him with the order
to bestow it at once upon the English captain. But her messenger had
preferred his own interest and had substituted that larger and false one
round which all this dance has been led.
And, as the Prime Minister said of his colleague on the front bench who
got into trouble over the insurance shares, who shall blame him?
Not I.
[Footnote 1: Oh! Yes! I know all about it. She would have gone on
calling herself Lady Galton from husband (save the mark!) to husband.
No, child! It's already getting doubtful. In the future time of which I
write it was unknown.]