It seems to me now but a step from the buying of Lady Grove to the
beginning of Crest Hill, from the days when the former was a stupendous
achievement to the days when it was too small and dark and inconvenient
altogether for a great financier’s use. For me that was a period of
increasing detachment from our business and the great world of London;
I saw it more and more in broken glimpses, and sometimes I was working
in my little pavilion above Lady Grove for a fortnight together; even
when I came up it was often solely for a meeting of the aeronautical
society or for one of the learned societies or to consult literature or
employ searchers or some such special business. For my uncle it was a
period of stupendous inflation. Each time I met him I found him more
confident, more comprehensive, more consciously a factor in great
affairs. Soon he was no longer an associate of merely business men; he
was big enough for the attentions of greater powers.
I grew used to discovering some item of personal news about him in my
evening paper, or to the sight of a full-page portrait of him in a
sixpenny magazine. Usually the news was of some munificent act, some
romantic piece of buying or giving or some fresh rumour of
reconstruction. He saved, you will remember, the Parbury Reynolds for
the country. Or at times, it would be an interview or my uncle’s
contribution to some symposium on the “Secret of Success,” or such-like
topic. Or wonderful tales of his power of work, of his wonderful
organisation to get things done, of his instant decisions and
remarkable power of judging his fellow-men. They repeated his great
_mot:_ “Eight hour working day—I want eighty hours!”
He became modestly but resolutely “public.” They cartooned him in
_Vanity Fair_. One year my aunt, looking indeed a very gracious,
slender lady, faced the portrait of the King in the great room at
Burlington House, and the next year saw a medallion of my uncle by
Ewart, looking out upon the world, proud and imperial, but on the whole
a trifle too prominently convex, from the walls of the New Gallery.
I shared only intermittently in his social experiences. People knew of
me, it is true, and many of them sought to make through me a sort of
flank attack upon him, and there was a legend, owing, very
unreasonably, partly to my growing scientific reputation and partly to
an element of reserve in my manner, that I played a much larger share
in planning his operations than was actually the case. This led to one
or two very intimate private dinners, to my inclusion in one or two
house parties and various odd offers of introductions and services that
I didn’t for the most part accept. Among other people who sought me in
this way was Archie Garvell, now a smart, impecunious soldier of no
particular distinction, who would, I think, have been quite prepared to
develop any sporting instincts I possessed, and who was beautifully
unaware of our former contact. He was always offering me winners; no
doubt in a spirit of anticipatory exchange for some really good thing
in our more scientific and certain method of getting something for
nothing....
In spite of my preoccupation with my experiments, work, I did, I find
now that I come to ransack my impressions, see a great deal of the
great world during those eventful years; I had a near view of the
machinery by which an astounding Empire is run, rubbed shoulders and
exchanged experiences with bishops and statesmen, political women and
women who were not political, physicians and soldiers, artists and
authors, the directors of great journals, philanthropists and all sorts
of eminent, significant people. I saw the statesmen without their
orders and the bishops with but a little purple silk left over from
their canonicals, inhaling, not incensen but cigar smoke. I could look
at them all the better because, for the most part, they were not
looking at me but at my uncle, and calculating consciously or
unconsciously how they might use him and assimilate him to their
system, the most unpremeditated, subtle, successful and aimless
plutocracy that ever encumbered the destinies of mankind. Not one of
them, so far as I could see, until disaster overtook him, resented his
lies, his almost naked dishonesty of method, the disorderly disturbance
of this trade and that, caused by his spasmodic operations. I can see
them now about him, see them polite, watchful, various; his stiff
compact little figure always a centre of attention, his wiry hair, his
brief nose, his under-lip, electric with self-confidence. Wandering
marginally through distinguished gatherings, I would catch the
whispers: “That’s Mr. Ponderevo!”
“The little man?”
“Yes, the little bounder with the glasses.”
“They say he’s made—“...
Or I would see him on some parterre of a platform beside my aunt’s
hurraying hat, amidst titles and costumes, “holding his end up,” as he
would say, subscribing heavily to obvious charities, even at times
making brief convulsive speeches in some good cause before the most
exalted audiences. “Mr. Chairman, your Royal Highness, my Lords, Ladies
and Gentlemen,” he would begin amidst subsiding applause and adjust
those obstinate glasses and thrust back the wings of his frock-coat and
rest his hands upon his hips and speak his fragment with ever and again
an incidental Zzzz. His hands would fret about him as he spoke, fiddle
his glasses, feel in his waistcoat pockets; ever and again he would
rise slowly to his toes as a sentence unwound jerkily like a clockwork
snake, and drop back on his heels at the end. They were the very
gestures of our first encounter when he had stood before the empty
fireplace in his minute draped parlour and talked of my future to my
mother.
In those measurelessly long hot afternoons in the little shop at
Wimblehurst he had talked and dreamt of the Romance of Modern Commerce.
Here, surely, was his romance come true.