Mrs. Cyril had received her guests.
It was a vast room in a house on the south side of Grosvenor Square.
There was a kind old Cabinet Minister, who was rather deaf and kept
on putting his hand to his left ear with a beatified look; a rich
young woman who had just married a still richer lord in the North
of England, and who wrote small, carefully-sculptured pieces of bad
verse; two ex-Lord Chancellors; a banker, and his wife too; Lady
Batton (Henry Batton’s wife, not the old lady); and Marjorie Kayle,
who had only one leg and was very witty. But great as these people
were, they were nothing like as great as the room. It was perfectly
enormous, and Mrs. Leonard Cyril, relict of the late Leonard Cyril,
who had no particular business but had certainly thriven wonderfully
by it, and who was herself the daughter of Pallins, the old artist,
gloried in the dimensions thereof. She murmured that Mr. Petre was
late; she lied, for she had deliberately given him an hour twenty
minutes later than the others. They fell to talking of him, of his
vast wealth, of his eccentricities, of his mania for avoiding the
world and his refusal of his name and movements.
“Oh, I can understand that,” sighed Marjorie Kayle, who was
perpetually in the papers; and the two ex-Lord Chancellors agreed.
But the kind old Cabinet Minister, putting up his left hand to his
ear, only said “What?” and beamed. “Petre,” bellowed Mrs. Cyril into
his better ear. “Petre. The American man. John K. Petre.”
[Illustration: “_... And the two ex-Lord-Chancellors agreed._”]
“Oh, the American man,” said the kind old Cabinet Minister, his
face suddenly changing, and assuming the expression proper to a
revelation. “Not J. K. Petre, the rotor man?”
“Yes,” roared Mrs. Cyril again. “The rotor man. J. K. Petre.”
“I can’t conceive,” said the noble poetess, “what possible good it
can do a man to have so much money.”
“I don’t see what possible harm it can do him,” said Marjorie Kayle
with asperity, for she herself, poor darling, felt strongly on that
point; she resented the great wealth of the woman who had just
spoken. “He does plenty of good with it. He gave £200,000 to Peggy’s
show last year, and it just got them round the corner.”
“Who got him to do that?” asked the hostess quickly.
“No one,” said Marjorie Kayle--who, indeed, knew nothing but the bare
fact, and had got that out of a newspaper. “He does those things
suddenly out of his head.”
The banker said “Humph!” and for a moment a solid little smile
appeared upon his face.
“It’s quite true,” said Marjorie Kayle, nodding her head, and now
launched in her new character as John K. Petre expert. “He simply
won’t answer a letter, even on business, and he’s mad against giving
anything--’cept when he feels inclined, like this, suddenly; an’ then
he does the most extraordinary things! He gave a quarter of a million
to the famine fund in Sicily, and it came long after the famine
because he only heard of it late, through a magazine called _Powler’s
Humanitarian Weekly_, and then they asked him what they ought to do
with it, and he cabled back a text out of the Bible, and they thought
he was mad and they divided it up.”
“Who?” said Mrs. Cyril severely.
“Oh, they,” answered Marjorie Kayle vaguely. “The Sicilians.” Then
she added simply, “He’s like that.”
“Is it true that he wears elastic-sided boots?” said the banker’s
wife in a weary, over-refined voice. She was a woman full of frills
and with a cameo face. Marjorie Kayle took the plunge.
“Not now,” she said, greatly daring; and being inwardly a believer in
the Higher Powers, she shot up a little prayer that when the great
man should come into that room he might not be wearing elastic-sided
boots. It was a fair risk, for they had not been seen in any great
number since the Boer War. On the other hand, she thought that his
boots would probably be very pointed, and might well be of patent
leather; but these surmises she kept hidden within her own heart. She
had gambled on him enough as it was.
While this enlightened conversation was proceeding one last guest
had said nothing. It was a Mr. Terrard; Mr. Charles Terrard, Charlie
Terrard, by courtesy the Honorable Charles Merriton Terrard, a
stockbroker and without guile. He had frank blue eyes and frank
yellow hair which curled; and he was very pleasant. He listened to
his elders and betters, to whom also he could often be of service.
There was a future before that man.
Mrs. Cyril had just begun, “They say that whenever he washes he----”
when the big yellow door was thrown open and a servant in archaic
clothes said mournfully, “Mr. Petre!”, introduced a gray, sturdy, but
lively figure, and shut the door very gently again behind him. There
was a silence as at the entry of God.
Mrs. Cyril came forward and seized him by the hand. She overwhelmed
him with apologies. Nothing would have persuaded her to take such a
liberty except her gratitude for all he had done for Leonard; and as
she murmured the word “Leonard” a touching moisture suffused her eyes.
The guests all stood around awkwardly, like provincial notables
awaiting an introduction to royalty. Mrs. Cyril went through them one
by one in their exact order of greatness, and shouted at the kind old
Cabinet Minister again, to give Mr. Petre some impression of the way
in which one had to talk to him.
Never was a man more deeply impressed than was Mr. Petre by the
solemn deference he received. One after another each of those men
and each of those women spiritually knelt before him, and there
was manifest in their eyes and in their gestures all the spirit
of religion. He who showed it least was young Terrard; yet even he
showed it plentifully, and Marjorie Kayle exceeded.
“Evidently,” thought Mr. Petre, remembering the hotel, “I was right.
I am somebody--or I was somebody.”
They sat at table, sneered at by six enormous portraits, in another
room as large as the first, and having a view through its windows of
a mews; and as they so sat the wine loosened their tongues and they
talked of things and people, of which Mr. Petre knew some by repute,
others not at all. He answered gently such questions as his hostess
put to him (he sat upon her right); he assured her that he had had an
excellent crossing (for she asked him what kind of crossing it had
been); but he was careful not to risk any details, as he had not the
slightest idea that he had crossed anything from anywhere. He assured
her that he was familiar with London; he told her that he had not yet
been to any other house--and all this while he was in terror lest
some question more searching than the rest might challenge him and
make him flounder past recovery.
The meal dragged on. They had come to coffee. The banker had looked
at his watch, and found it was already twenty past two. At each
succeeding phrase his hostess put to him Mr. Petre came nearer and
nearer to breaking-point under the strain.
He was saved by a magic word. Some one at the end of the table had
pronounced three syllables: “Touaregs.” At that sound the whole
conversation was in a blaze. Here was something in which all held
communion! Here was a subject which struck right at the heart of
every man and woman in the room--except poor Mr. Petre, to whom every
allusion and phrase and term was Greek and nonsense; of not one could
he make anything; yet he was relieved to think that they were off on
matters which imperiled him no more.
As the fowls of a farmyard strut aimlessly back and forth picking
aimlessly at the ground after the convention of fowls, but very empty
of interest in their lives, so had the people round Mrs. Cyril’s
table spoken first of a play, then of a novel, then of a politician,
then of a criminal; and then, still more languidly, of a coming
eclipse. Their words were the more vapid and without stuff, the
more like sawdust, because each man and woman had in his heart one
object only dominating all, and that object was John K. Petre, high
above the few lords of the free modern world: fifty million pounds
incarnate, and come to dwell amongst us. There, before them, in the
flesh.
As the fowls of a farmyard will change their whole beings, clucking
and chattering prodigiously and scrambling together in a swarm, and
the whole flock alive with appetite when a handful of grain is thrown
down; so did the people round Mrs. Cyril’s table change inwardly and
outwardly at once upon the appearance of Touaregs. Their souls and
bodies became alive, their wings were flustered, their minds clashed
and struggled.
Touaregs would go farther. No, they had touched top mark. They were
steady. No, they were rocketing. It was astonishing how mulish the
French Government was about the concession. Not so mulish as all
that: they knew which side their bread was buttered. Marjorie Kayle
said that Billy Wootton had squared the French Commissioner. The
banker then told the company in general that they knew nothing about
it, and Mrs. Cyril eagerly quoted what Charlie Byrne had told her,
only that morning, of the new deposits; whereupon one of the ex-Lord
Chancellors who had not yet given tongue said with great good sense
that when a market ran away like that it didn’t matter what news
came or didn’t come. And the other Lord Chancellor agreed with him.
At which the kind old Cabinet Minister smiled, nodded, and said,
“Just so!” because he had usually found it safe to use these words on
things he couldn’t hear.
But if the kind old Cabinet Minister had no notion what it was all
about, he was an expert compared with Mr. Petre. Mr. Petre, though
his hearing was quite sound, might as well have been listening to a
babel of rooks. What were Touaregs? Where were the deposits? What
of? How did the French Government come in? How do you square a
Government? What was a Commissioner? Who was Billy Wootton and with
what instrument did he perform his rite? And up what did Touaregs go,
or down what, and in what were they steady? What was it all about?
The eager judgment and counter-judgment, argument, affirmation,
bluff, falsehoods, tips, went back and forth in an amazing game:
for it is a game where every one plays his own hand, and where the
number of relations is the square of all those present. But it is a
game which works to a climax and then halts or languishes; it is a
fire of thorns, burning very quickly to ash; and Mr. Petre, dazed in
the babel and thanking his stars that it prevented questions which
might have destroyed his peace, was alarmed to find that the subject
drooped and that gaps of silence appeared.
At any moment the whole talk might turn; it might be a point-blank
question on his home, or some other matter in which he would be
agonized to reply. He was desperately concluding that he must take
the first step and say something to lead Mrs. Cyril on till some word
of hers should tell him what he did not know, when, just in time,
at the end of a silence longer than the rest, the decisive thing
happened.
The young broker, Charlie Terrard, deliberately said, looking at Mr.
Petre with a slightly quizzical look:
“Well, sir, what do _you_ think of them?” To which he bluntly added,
“You know more about it than most of us.”
One or two of the less controlled faces took on an awkward look, the
others went suddenly blank. The two ex-Lord Chancellors exchanged
glances covertly and both half smiled:--certainly Terrard had done
a monstrous thing! But then, great men like John K. are often
straightforward, and sometimes eccentricity of that sort pleases
them. They all waited for the answer, not breathing.
Mr. Petre was in torture. If he admitted complete ignorance,
what would follow? If he pretended knowledge, he would blunder
irretrievably. They were not helping him as he had hoped; they were
putting him into a fearful crux.
He made one last desperate effort to fence. He leaned forward with a
poised and equal look, like a man who has something to say, and put
such a question as he hoped must draw information and help. He said:
“What exactly do you mean?”
Young Terrard, having gone so far, went farther, and said with awful
simplicity, “Why, Mr. Petre, I mean, would you buy or sell Touaregs?
Now, this afternoon?”
The silence turned to ebony; the daring seemed too great, and in her
heart of hearts Mrs. Cyril feared a scene. Then Mr. Petre spoke, and
decided his fate.
“I shall buy,” he said, firmly and distinctly; and then, not having
the fear of God before his eyes, and determined only on plunging
through and saving himself alive from further perils, he pronounced
these memorable words, “I shall buy largely.” He looked round at the
stupefied assembly and smiled a genial smile.
Mrs. Cyril pulled the team together. She said with a little laugh,
“That’s all right.” One of the ex-Lord Chancellors said, “Oh, curse
it, look at that!” It was a passing shower on the pane. The poetess
asked Marjorie Kayle whether she could give her a lift. Mrs. Cyril
protested that it was early, but her protest was hollow. They were
all, for some reason or other, suddenly filled with an itch for
movement; they would be off, and Mr. Petre wondered why.
Dear friends, it was because the earlier you get into a market, if it
is a rising market, the better for you, and every man and woman of
them knew it, except Mr. Petre himself.
Perfect love casteth out fear; and in their intense love for what
each of them was bent on doing, and on doing now, and on doing at
once, convention was hard pressed, and fear was routed. What was red
and burning in them all--except the banker, the broker, and the kind
old Cabinet Minister--was an intense desire for the telephone.
First come, first served. Mrs. Cyril made a move. Lucky woman, _her_
telephone was within five yards.
She begged the men to stay behind, and the banker would have been
willing enough. _He_ wasn’t going to bother; and the kind old Cabinet
Minister (who, with Mr. Petre himself, was alone innocent of motive
in that roomful) wanted a glass of port. Charlie Terrard said
without haste that he must go, so with more haste did the two ex-Lord
Chancellors, looking at their watches in unison, like twins.
[Illustration: _Mrs. Cyril leaping to the telephone._]
As for Mr. Petre, he snatched at this general movement as a relief,
and was one of the first to excuse himself hastily. To whom, indeed,
young Terrard as the party broke up, and when all had said good-by to
their hostess (herself as hungry for the telephone as is the saintly
heart for heaven), with continued boldness (he was so frank and so
charming) said as they went through the door together:
“Mr. Petre, are you going my way?”
“I am going to the Splendide,” said Mr. Petre, caught.
“I am going past there,” said young Terrard; it was true enough, for
he had determined to be going wherever Mr. Petre might deign to be
bound.
The short shower had been over some few minutes. They strolled
southward, and in a leisurely conversation full of simplicity and
good humor and good sense Charlie Terrard with his frank blue eyes
and frank yellow hair (that curled) had discovered before they
reached Piccadilly that Mr. Petre had fixed on no broker in town:
not one more than another; it was just like his eccentricities to
buy at random and refuse to be bound; it was another millionaire
eccentricity to buy through Charlie, and Charlie was only too happy
to oblige. It was like yet another of his eccentricities not to
appreciate, or to affect to ignore, the danger of delay and the
necessity for early action. It was again so like the man, with his
reputation for indifference to wealth, oddly coupled with a passion
for accumulation, to leave it almost at a hazard how much he would
buy and to affect indifference to the hour at which he bought. He
seemed (really it was monstrous) not to know the price that day, and
to have no idea of what they would open at on the morrow. It was
Charlie Terrard who spoke tentatively of fifty thousand shares, “I
think I shall make it fifty thousand,” he said. Did he say “shall”
or “should”? Mr. Petre passed the figure almost with boredom. He
heard also that they were wobbling round 2½. Were they? It was very
interesting, no doubt. But he didn’t follow it up.
“All right!” said Mr. Petre. “Fifty thousand.” He wasn’t clear
whether Charlie Terrard was going to buy from him, or on his own.
He wasn’t clear upon anything, except his mortal dread that any
argument or discussion might bring forth a Monster Question which
would give him away.
“All right. Fifty thousand.”
An astonishing passage; but things happen like that in this world.
No, they don’t? Yes, they _do_.
The conversation continued leisured down the comparative freedom
from jostle of St. James’ Street and Pall Mall. Those fools who had
broken away from Mrs. Cyril’s like fragments from an exploding shell
might think these two would feel as they did the need for hurry.
Charlie Terrard knew perfectly well there was none, so far as he
and the great John K. were concerned. Touaregs were stagnant, and
it wasn’t half a dozen wretched punters from among the smart that
would reinstate them. Mrs. Cyril was not poor, but women don’t do
such things on a large scale, and the largest of her scale would
be insignificant compared with what he had in mind. As for the two
ex-Lord Chancellors, they might potter about with their few pounds
and be damned. Marjorie Kayle was a matter of shillings, and she
would have to borrow those. They might make their little profits.
He didn’t grudge them. It wasn’t things of that sort that affected
a market. It was something very different; it was a mighty rumor,
and the confirmation of that rumor: that was what moved a stock. And
Charlie Terrard now had the lever of that solidly between his hands.
Charlie Terrard was wrong; not in his judgment of the non-effect of
Mrs. Cyril’s purchase and the rest in such a big market--that any
fool could have judged. He was wrong in his judgment of the relative
scales of their purchases. For of all those who were buying their
little packets at that very moment over the wire while he sauntered
at his ease southward and eastward with his millionaire, it was
Marjorie Kayle who had plunged most deeply. She had stopped to
telephone from the Tube station. But she had not telephoned to any
broker. She had telephoned to something better than that; she had
telephoned to Lord Ashington, and he would act for him and for her.
But even his purchase was nothing at all to what was coming.
Charlie Terrard and his Catch were at the door of the Splendide. He
looked over his shoulder as he went off and nodded gayly to Mr. Petre.
“I’ll get you fifty thousand. Round about 2½ one ought to”; and was
gone.
Charlie Terrard hastened; he was in the City just at a quarter past
three, and he had said behind closed doors, and to his partner alone,
what he had to say. Only after hours was the thing released.
With the next morning every one--that is, all the fifty or sixty who
count--was full of it. John K. Petre was buying Touaregs.
* * * * *
When Mr. Petre reached his room he realized that panic is a bad
adviser.
In his terror and shame lest that roomful should guess his
misfortune, he had not only put himself in peril--he did not know
the law on these things, but he thought that he might very well have
committed a crime--but he had also brought in, with that peril,
the peril of a complete discovery. For if things went badly, and
that mad order to buy left him under a heavy obligation--whenever a
settlement should come (and he know nothing about the times and the
seasons--evidently in that mysterious former life of his, whatever
else he had been, he had not been a stockbroker, and yet he had
evidently been very rich, and must have made investments: it was
all exceedingly bewildering)--and if his inability to meet the same
losses (and he was unable to meet anything more than a few pounds)
led to a prosecution, everything would come out in Court. Could the
law act, he wondered? He didn’t know. If it could and did, the law
would charge itself with finding out who he was, and all the misery
he had desired to avoid would be upon him with tenfold force. Not a
mere roomful of rich people would merely suspect him; he would be a
laughing stock for the whole of England. And heaven only knew what
friends or nearer ones would be involved in the affair. It was too
late to undo it. The thing had gone through.
For a moment he had a wild idea of flight. Then he remembered the
diminishing sum that stood between him and disaster. He would do
better than that. He would hide himself. With infinite precaution he
would hide himself, until there was news one way or the other of what
had happened to that dreadful order for Touaregs.
And again, what were Touaregs? He was quite clear upon what shares
were; he was quite clear upon the buying and selling of the same;
perhaps he had cautiously speculated in a few hundreds once or twice.
No incident of the sort had any place whatever in his mind to-day,
and yet the terms seemed familiar enough to him. But fifty thousand!
And at what price? Two and one-half pounds, shillings, francs? What
had he let himself in for?... It maddened him.
A Bradshaw was part of the furniture of his room. He spread out the
map, noted affectionately one of those little curling lines which
leave a main railway and stop abruptly in the Wolds. He took the name
of the village; he packed his bag, looked up a train; he had half
an hour. He went down to leave his orders. He would keep the room;
nothing was to be forwarded to him; to any enquiry they were to say
that he had gone out of town, and were not to know when he would
return.
It gave Mr. Petre a moment’s relief in his suffering to notice with
what deference his old friend the clerk noted so strange a plan,
without deposit, without explanation. He was more convinced than ever
that this unknown Self was of vast consequence. Then, after all this
trouble, a new thought struck him. Would it not be better to wait an
hour or two? Could he not discover Terrard’s address and see whether
it had really gone through? Such a man must be in the reference
books. The miserable man hesitated, irresolute, when a shock hurled
him into a decision. He saw, standing between himself and the light,
a most extraordinary figure, tall, aquiline, with intense dark eyes,
a waxed and forbidding mustache, black (for it was dyed), and an odd
snarling way of speech, of which its owner was profoundly innocent,
and which, indeed, he took for the common tone of a man about town.
In that blotted-out mystery of the past he must--this sinister
apparition must--have known Mr. Petre abominably well. A light of
recognition shone in his eye. He strode up, a menacing smile upon his
lips; he addressed Mr. Petre with a dreadful familiarity; he even did
what your distant acquaintance commonly forbears to do, he darted out
a forefinger, thrust it out against Mr. Petre’s side, and winked.
“Not stopping here, eh? Not quite your style? Where’ve you been all
this time, eh? Hiding?”
Mr. Petre’s heart stopped beating.
“No,” he said, in a strained voice which he could hardly bring out.
“No ... I’m not stopping here.” Then he dashed out through the door,
leapt into a cab and was gone.
But in that little space to Waterloo, and in the train for two hours,
his terror grew and grew. What had he done? What had he been? What
thieves’ kitchen had he known? Who was that damnable stranger? How
many men possessed what secrets of his life--and he possessing not
the simplest, not the most innocuous detail of it?
Yes; he must, he must, he must discover; but he must discover before
any fatal guess, any frightened random answer of his to some chance
question, should destroy him.
* * * * *
One thing consoled him; the valiant loyalty of that Registration
Clerk at the Splendide, whom now he felt to be his own brother in a
world of misery and fear. For as Mr. Petre had leaped into that cab
he had shot a glance at the dreadful Mephistopheles, and had seen him
asking a question at the desk, and had seen the noble official, who
had all power in his hands, shake his read resolutely and turn away.
* * * * *
But the whole thing was getting worse and worse; those brief hours,
not forty-eight hours, only the second night after the blow had
fallen--and already he was in the net, caught.
But the inn at the little place, when he reached it, comforted him.
Surely in that past he had been of the English country and not of the
town, still less of any foreign outlandish place, America or another.
The simplicity and the goodness of the people wrapped him round like
a blanket against the cold of the abominable world. Here, he thought,
he could rest. And rest he did, sleeping deeply, exhausted, and woke
to the new day less troubled, and, to the next, reposed.