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_NEW BORZOI NOVELS_
_FALL, 1920_
MOON-CALF
_By Floyd Dell_
HUNGER
_By Knut Hamsun_
Translated from the Norwegian by George Egerton, with an
introduction by Edwin Björkman.
SEVEN MEN
_By Max Beerbohm_
YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA
_By Willa Cather_
HAGAR’S HOARD
_By George Kibbe Turner_
THE GATE OF IVORY
_By Sidney L. Nyburg_
DEAD MEN’S MONEY
_By J. S. Fletcher_
THE LOUDWATER MYSTERY
_By Edgar Jepson_
THE LONG, DIM TRAIL
_By Forrestine C. Hooker_
A MATING IN THE WILDS
_By Ottwell Binns_
PETER JAMESON
A Modern Romance
BY GILBERT FRANKAU
New York
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
GILBERT FRANKAU
_Published April, 1920_
_Second Printing April, 1920_
_Third Printing August, 1920_
_Fourth Printing November, 1920_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To the Average Man and Woman_
_of the English-Speaking Peoples_
CONTENTS
FOREWORD.
ONE. THE HOME AND THE OFFICE.
TWO. NIRVANA, LIMITED.
THREE. THE CREST OF THE WAVE.
FOUR. CRISIS.
FIVE. DECISION.
SIX. PLAYING AT SOLDIER.
SEVEN. ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS.
EIGHT. DISSENSION.
NINE. TWO EXCUSES FOR FAILURE.
TEN. GUNS, COUNTING-HOUSES, AND COUNTER-ESPIONAGE.
ELEVEN. MEN AND HORSES.
TWELVE. CONCENTRATIONS.
THIRTEEN. PREPARE FOR ACTION!
FOURTEEN. ATTACK!
FIFTEEN. FORWARD.
SIXTEEN. ACTION LEFT!
SEVENTEEN. THE SUICIDE CLUB.
EIGHTEEN. RESPITE.
NINETEEN. THE CITY OF FEAR.
TWENTY. THE HOME FRONT.
TWENTY-ONE. THE DROSS AND THE GOLD.
TWENTY-TWO. “SUNFLOWERS.”
TWENTY-THREE. ”BEER” BATTERY.
TWENTY-FOUR. IN THE NIGHT.
TWENTY-FIVE. THE LAST OUNCE.
TWENTY-SIX. BROKEN MEN.
TWENTY-SEVEN. THE NEW SCIENCE.
TWENTY-EIGHT. WOMANCRAFT.
TWENTY-NINE. THE LIFTING OF SHADOWS.
THIRTY. THE COMMENCEMENT OF DREAMS.
THIRTY-ONE. OUT OF IT.
THIRTY-TWO. END—OR BEGINNING?
EPILOGUE.
Peter Jameson: A Modern Romance
FOREWORD
§ 1
If you take the Central London Tube to the Bank Station; fight for your
place in the lift; climb the tortuous staircase to Lombard Street; pass
along that narrow, money-glutted thoroughfare, where scarlet-vested,
top-hatted bank-messengers take dignified way from the sign of the
Phoenix to the swinging doors of the Crédit Lyonnais: if, crossing
Gracechurch Street below the clock of the London & South-Western Bank,
you enter less-aristocratic Fenchurch Street and take the first zig-zag
turning on your left, you will find—hidden between a stationer’s shop
and a grocer’s—two swing doors, each with a brass name-plate from which
the black lettering, “P. JAMESON AND COMPANY, CIGAR IMPORTERS,” has been
almost erased by forty years of incessant polishing. And if you care to
penetrate yet farther round that gray curving Lime Street, past the
church of St. Andrew Undershaft, into the heart of Havana cigardom, St.
Mary Axe, you will still find—clustered round the maroon marble of the
Baltic Exchange—the warehouses of “Schornstein & Co.,” of “Beresford &
Beresford,” of “Samuel Elkins & Son,” and others with whom Peter traded,
intrigued, lunched and gossiped, between the years 1903 and 1914.
But you will not find, search the City as you will, Peter Jameson,
sometime senior partner in Peter Jameson & Company, and chairman of
Nirvana Limited, Manufacturers of High-grade Cigarettes.
Because—whatever war may have accomplished of good or evil to us other
millions whom it caught up into its vortex—to Peter it came like a
great cleansing storm, terrifying in its violence, unfathomable in its
purposes, but bearing him at the last, past many rocks of doubt and
fear, to sure harbourage, to certainty of body and of soul—and, better
even than these, to Love.
This, in so far as one man may tell another’s story, is the tale of that
voyaging.
§ 2
Three families—the Jamesons, the Gordons, and the Baynets—are
principally concerned in this story. All three were originally English
yeomen; country, not county folk; probably peasants—in the best sense
of the word. In the Jamesons and the Gordons there is an admixture of
exotic Hebraic blood: that of the Señora Elvira de Miranda y Miraflores,
who married a Captain Bradley of the British West India Regiment, then
stationed in Jamaica, and had by him two daughters, one of whom married
Peter’s father in 1880, and the other—some three years later—John
Gordon, father of Peter’s cousin, Francis Gordon. The Baynet stock is
pure English.
Peter’s grandfather—Peter the First—deserted the country for the town
at the beginning of the great manufacturing age (about 1840); married a
“cit’s” daughter; tried his luck in the City; couldn’t stand it; and
wandered out to the West Indies, trading first at Georgetown, Demarara,
then in Bridgetown, Barbados; and finally settling down in the then
Spanish colony of Cuba, where he bought a small estate near Guanabacoa,
and grew tobacco—more for a hobby than a living, as he was a person of
few wants, and tolerably careless about most things except his son,
Peter the Second, whom he had educated in England, and to whom—on his
death in the late seventies—he bequeathed the sum of £3,000, the
verandah’d _hacienda_, and some hundred acres of not very saleable land.
It was on the Royal Mail steamer to Havana that our Peter’s
father—thinking more of the newly acquired heritage and how best to
turn it into cash, than of matrimony—first met Captain and Mrs. Bradley
(_née_ Miranda y Miraflores) returning with their two flapper-daughters
to Kingston, Jamaica. . . .
To cut a long story short, Peter the Second sold the tobacco-farm; found
himself in love with Tessa Bradley; followed her to Jamaica; married
her; realized that the interest on his capital could not possibly
support them in comfort; and returned to England in the spring of 1882
with his wife, his wife’s sister (who found garrison-life in the tropics
hardly to her taste), and twenty cases of Señor Larranaga’s very best
“Principes” in which he had invested a considerable amount of money, and
of which he subsequently disposed, owing to the machinations of his
brokers and ignorance of the imported cigar trade, at a very
unsatisfactory profit.
But Peter the Second—like his son Peter the Third, hero of this
story—was an obstinate devil who disliked being beaten, especially over
money. Taking—from an old school friend, John Gordon (who may have had
ulterior motives in granting the facilities), a little room in the big,
dingy offices of Gordon’s Limited, General Merchants, he imported
another consignment of Havana cigars; had them sampled; hired a
brougham; and hawked (he was, although he had married an officer’s
daughter, by no means a snob) his sample-boxes round the West End
tobacconist shops until he had disposed of his second shipment at a very
different figure to that received on the first.
So began the firm of “P. Jameson & Company, Cigar Importers,”
which—aided by the financial support of John Gordon (who married
Dolores Bradley very shortly after that second shipment had been
disposed of) and the boom-crop of 1884—soon needed offices of its own,
two clerks, a country salesman, and all the paraphernalia of a regular
business. It was not, of course—never would be—a huge affair like
Gordon’s, who dealt the world over and in every conceivable commodity
from quinine to molasses—still it was a solid, money-making, not too
arduous concern; and, moreover, both Peter’s father and his salesman,
Tom Simpson, whom he subsequently took into junior partnership, needed
considerably less to live on than the profit which it earned.
§ 3
Peter the Third, _our_ Mr. Jameson, was not born until his parents had
been married nearly four years: John Gordon’s son, Francis, antedating
him by about a week. In both of them, you can trace the Miraflores
strain fairly clearly. They are both of them of medium height; stocky
rather than tall. Both have the same curious eyes which seem to change
colour—from gray to darkest black—with their thoughts. Both are
small-handed, small-footed, rather determined about the nose,
dark-haired, intelligent-headed. But life—and war, which is the same
thing—has dealt with them so differently that, nowadays, you would have
great difficulty in finding more than a fugitive likeness. You would
say, and perhaps rightly, that Peter is less, Francis more, the
Miraflores.
Dolores Gordon, despite her husband’s twelve thousand a year, presented
him with no more children; but Tessa Jameson had another son—Peter’s
brother Arthur—born in 1888.
Meanwhile, both businesses flourished: Gordon’s Limited, the larger;
Jameson & Co., the sounder—providing John Gordon with a rather
elaborate mansion in Curzon Street, West (to which he would return,
late, tired and neurotic from the new offices in London Wall), and the
Jamesons with a solid, rather tyrannous edifice in Lowndes Square,
Kensington, wherein Peter’s father found comfortable refuge from the
reflector-lit warehouse in Lime Street. By the late nineties, Peter the
First’s few thousand pounds had grown—thanks largely to the sole agency
for Beckmann cigars (of which more later)—into a fairly comfortable
fortune, so that when John Gordon suggested to Peter the Second that
both Peter the Third and Francis Gordon had better be sent to Eton
College, money did not stand in the way.
The two cousins (Peter’s brother Arthur went to a less exalted
establishment) did not distinguish themselves greatly at school. Francis
was rather too flamboyant, Peter too self-concentrated, for easy
friendships. However, Peter managed to get both his “Boats,” his “House
Colours,” and Corporal’s stripes on his Volunteer tunic before he left:
while Francis undoubtedly acquired there—in some mysterious way of his
own—the beginnings of that literary technique in which he is now
beginning to be acknowledged past-master.
From Eton, Peter went straight into the business. He had always found
idleness intolerable, and Jameson’s seemed—regarded as “something to
do”—made to his hand. To Francis and other Etonian acquaintances, the
choice appeared an amazing one: but the boy’s father—lonely since his
wife’s death about a year before, and conscious that his other son
Arthur, whatever else he might become, would never be a business
man—both understood and stimulated this desire for work.
§ 4
Peter’s entry into Jameson’s, early in 1903, synchronized with the
formation of the Havana Tobacco Company—commonly known as “The Trust”;
and the attempt by J. B. Duke and his colleagues (who, having fought the
English cigarette and tobacco manufacturers to a standstill, were now
controlling—almost unknown to the public—eighty per cent. of the
world’s smoking-trade) to corner the market in Havana-manufactured
cigars. Though a very small affair of outposts when considered in
relation to the pitched battles which preceded it, the fight was, at the
outset, not without interest to those whose livings were menaced by the
billion-dollar corporation controlled from 111 Fifth Avenue, New York.
To the boy, fresh from the monastic atmosphere of school, it gave just
that touch of romance which his enthusiasm needed.
For Jameson’s—as agents of the German-owned but Havana-domiciled
concern, Heinrich Beckmann & Co—lined up with the so-called
“Independents,” and did doughty battle with tongue and typewriter
against the invader.
Old Jameson and Tom Simpson, who, by now, had a fourth share in the
concern, found the lad’s keenness amusing. Both elderly men—their
capital intact and their blood chilled with twenty years of
money-making—they did not take the situation very seriously. Even when
Beckmanns, greedy for more trade, insisted that both “Beresford &
Beresford” and “Samuel Elkins & Co.” should (under certain secret
conditions) receive direct shipments of their goods, they only laughed
tolerantly at the infringement of a profitable monopoly—leaving
indignation to the newcomer.
Indignant, Peter certainly was. There had never been an actual contract
about the Beckmann brand; but the boy, accustomed to his college code,
perceived something in the transaction dishonourable to the other side,
weak on his own. Unreasonably as it seemed at the time—reasonably
enough as it shows in the light of history—he thus early conceived an
instinctive distrust, not only of Beckmanns, but of German business
people in general. . . .
However, a year in the City effectively replaced the college code by the
legal.
At the end of eighteen months—the “fight” resolving itself into a mere
question of strong competition; each side more or less holding its own,
with a slight sentimental balance in favour of those outside “the
Ring”—Peter had settled down to the complacent routine of office life:
ten till five, with an hour off for lunch and two Saturdays out of three
absolutely workless. Sport—he was a safe shot, except at snipe for
which he lacked the temperament; a good rider; and a really fine hand
with the trout-fly—completed his existence. Dissipation, after one or
two, experiments, he avoided—not from scruples, but because it bored
him.
Then, just after his twenty-first birthday, the “old man,” never very
strong, caught pneumonia and died within the week.
§ 5
The death of his father was a vivid grief to Peter. For his mother, he
had never experienced more than a lukewarm affection; Arthur had always
been her favourite, and Peter—even as a child—had been conscious of
the preference. But the “governor,” the “old boy!”—that seemed somehow
or other different. They had worked together, talked together, driven
home together, drank their port of an evening at the big mahogany table
in the Lowndes Square dining-room, had their little rows, made them up
again. . . . “Sentimental ass!” the boy said to himself, as he sat alone
in the library that first night. But there were real tears in his eyes;
tears that only work could dry.
And of work, in the days that followed, there was enough. As
co-executor, with Simpson, for his father’s estate, even Peter found
himself sufficiently occupied. The business, the Crown lease of the
Lowndes Square house, sundry outside investments—all required
valuation, tabulation, preparation for probate. Death duties, auditor’s
fees, lawyer’s fees—each had to be scrutinized, queried, and ultimately
overpaid. Arthur—who, at seventeen, was already wearied of
school—demanded an advance of trust-monies; got it; departed for
Australia.
In the end Peter recognized himself absolute possessor of some £30,000
(practically all in the business); and trustee for the £10,000 in stocks
and shares which became his brother’s when he, too, reached twenty-one.
“You _will_ be an ass,” said Francis Gordon, newly returned from two
years of aimless wandering on the Continent, “if you go on slaving away
in that office of yours.”
“Can’t stand doing nothing,” Peter had answered, “and, if I wanted to
get married, twelve hundred a year wouldn’t be enough.” With both of
which ends in mind, he signed a rather peculiar ten years’ partnership
deed with Simpson, and resumed his hardly interrupted activities in Lime
Street.
§ 6
That same year, 1905, Francis’s own parents both died, leaving him
master undisputed of a five-figure income; and the two cousins very
nearly decided on living together, till Peter vetoed the idea on the
grounds that “as Francis never got up before lunch or came home to
dinner, he didn’t see much sense in the proposed arrangement.”
Nevertheless, bachelor existence in that barrack of a house at Lowndes
Square, soon began to pall. “I shan’t be dining at home to-night,
Smith,” became the almost daily word to the elderly, dignified, parlour
maid as she handed our Mr. Jameson his top-hat of a morning; and on the
rare evenings when he did dine at home, it was usually in
company—business acquaintances, school friends, old cronies of his
father’s, or—and this frequently—the Baynets.
Heron Baynet, the Harley Street diagnostician who was knighted in the
1918 Birthday List for his research-work in the treatment of shell-shock
and other nervous disorders, had been one of the consultants attending
Jameson senior in his illness. He had taken an instinctive liking to the
young man; asked him to call. Peter, accepting the invitation, met a
married daughter, Violet; a son in the Army; and Patricia—tall, blond,
twenty-one, dignified, rather reserved in her speech, tolerably
contemptuous of the average young man, cultivating alternately the
critique of pure reason at home and the outside edge at Prince’s
skating-rink. . . . Twelve months after their first meeting, in March,
1906, these two married.
A marriage of affection, kindred tastes and mutual respect. A marriage
which appealed to them (both had a strong, youthful contempt for
sentiment) as “eminently reasonable.” A marriage into which both entered
with the definite certainty that there would be no passion, no
misunderstandings, no petty economies, no vital divergences of opinion.
A marriage which—as most marriages—ended by utterly confuting all
their original ideas about it.
§ 7
Followed two years of palship; at the end of which their first daughter,
Evelyn, was born. Peter, who had hoped for a son, felt disappointment;
showed it, perhaps a little too plainly: thereby heightening his wife’s
love for the kiddie. But the disappointment faded; the easy relationship
renewed itself.
About this time, Ivan Turkovitch became a frequent visitor to the Lime
Street warehouse. A quaint man—born in some nameless province of
Austria-Hungary; speaking English with an amazing accent; small;
paunchy; tawny-bearded; very neat in his clothes, in his habits,—he had
come to England with nothing but his wits; and built up in some
subterranean manner the struggling firm of “I. Turkovitch, manufacturers
of Nirvana Cigarettes.”
Turkovitch, an artist in his way, loved that business; cared less for
its financial harvest than the joy of running it—with the inevitable
result that, being as extravagant in his factory as he was economical in
his home, he invariably found himself short of capital. Peter liked
listening to the little man when he talked about his “vork peoples”;
visited the factory, for the first time from curiosity, for the second
time out of sheer interest. His own business existence at Jameson’s had
settled down into a pretty humdrum affair. As senior partner by right of
capital he drew a steady £3,000 a year; leaving Simpson to do the inside
work and contenting himself with the selling end, which—as it meant
pitting his brains against other people’s—rather amused him.
But when Turkovitch finally broached the point towards which he had been
finessing, he found anything but a languid young capitalist to deal
with. Peter Jameson was quite willing to put up the money, five thousand
pounds of it if necessary (considerably more than the Hungarian either
required or expected), but on one condition only—that, as majority
shareholder, he should control the business.
Turkovitch, even in those early days, found Peter,—with his ideas of
press-advertising, of new machinery, of up-to-dateness
generally,—rather terrifying: but in the end, pressed by many
long-suffering creditors, he yielded.
To Peter, the new concern grew swiftly from a mere plaything into a
passion. He felt, for the first time, the real zest of commerce, the
creative joy of it. This was no inherited money-making machine; but a
task that needed a man’s every thought, all his energy: uphill work,
worthy of accomplishment. Gradually it drew him, from Lime Street, from
his shooting, from his riding, from his fishing, from his home. So that
the coming of his second daughter, Primula, seemed to him less of a
disappointment than an extraneous incident vastly concerning to
Patricia, but to himself little more than item of interest.
Superficially the palship between husband and wife still existed; but
the woman began to feel herself, more and more, an accessory and not a
necessity to this absorbed young husband of hers. His real love, she
felt, was—would always be, unless some miracle happened—Nirvana.
For the plant, irrigated and irrigated again with gold, began to grow;
promised a great harvest. There were difficulties of course; but these
only served to intensify Peter’s ardour. Tobacconists wouldn’t stock
Nirvana—tobacconists must stock Nirvana, he would advertise until they
were forced to. The export trade was hopeless, because one couldn’t get
a reliable export-traveller—he, Peter Jameson, would do that part
himself: and travel he did, from Christiania to Lisbon, from Aden to
Shanghai, from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso. . . .
So the thirty thousand pounds in Jamesons dwindled to twenty thousand;
and the five thousand in Nirvana rose to ten. But already, they were
“round the corner,” covering expenses. True that most of the capital was
represented in the balance-sheet by that intangible mystery “Goodwill
and trademarks”; true that Turkovitch grumbled and Sam Bramson, “Pretty”
Bramson, the newly engaged sales-manager, required more and more
travellers for the home-trade, seemed to do less and less work himself;
true that old Tom Simpson began to shake his head at so much voyaging
and successfully urged a heavy life-assurance: still—it grew, it grew;
and Peter, working fourteen hours between the two businesses, felt
success very near, gloried in it. . . .
Meanwhile that resplendent person, Francis Gordon, wrote a “novel in
verse” which excited some comment; married for caprice; lost his wife;
wandered off, a not too disconsolate widower, round the world; lost most
of his income; fell in love; renounced love; renouncing, found his
vocation; and returned to England shortly before the opening chapter of
this our romance, which now begins.
* * * * *
_To my American readers.—“Eton College” is what we call a
“public school.” Boys go at the age of 12-13 and leave at the
age of 18-19. Originally founded for “poor scholars”—it has now
some thousand students who pay fees of about £300 per annum
each._ _Gilbert Frankau._
PART ONE
THE HOME AND THE OFFICE
§ 1
January, 1914. A cold, dry, foggy, London evening. The children—after
much protesting—safely asleep. All the electric lights in the big
first-floor double drawing-room—pink-walled, parquet-floored,
elaborately, comfortably, but by no means artistically,
furnished—glowing. A red coal-fire heaped profusely on the tiled,
steel-fendered hearth. And, standing before the fire, firm fine hands
smoothing the folds of her low-neck, black charmeuse evening-gown,
Patricia Jameson.
Not a beautiful woman, this Patricia: yet by no means the “bland, blond
Kensingtonian nonentity” which Francis Gordon had once called her. Very
English in the poise of the quiet head on the white, well-sloped
shoulders; in the repose of the full figure; in the lines of the
athletic limbs. Very English, too, about the well-formed, almost Roman,
nose, the red healthy lips, the perfect teeth, the firm cheeks. Lacking,
perhaps, in vivacity—unless the brown slumbrous eyes, dark and
dark-lashed, were an index to something deep, something as yet but
half-awakened: something which, given but its chance, might yet turn the
Mother into the Mate.
But tonight a hint of trouble showed in those eyes. For Patricia was
thinking. Her thoughts came to her clear-cut, logical, in orderly and
courageous sequence. Sloppiness—owing to her father’s teaching—had no
place in this woman’s mental outfit.
And she thought: “I am nearly thirty. . . . I have been married eight
years. . . . I like this house, though it takes a lot of running. . . .
I have no money troubles. . . . I adore Evelyn and Primula. . . . And I
am very fond of my husband. . . .”
But here Heron Baynet’s system of common sense, of reason against
sentiment, broke down—as it had broken down once or twice before when
applied to the intimate relation of married life. The cold creed of pure
reason did not work. It was no good for Patricia’s brain to tell her
that she ought to be satisfied: her heart informed her, quite
emphatically, that she wasn’t.
“Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Rawlings, ma’m,” announced Smith, the sour-faced
but efficient parlour-maid.
Violet came in first—a slightly older, slightly tawdrier edition of her
sister; thinner about the lips, fluffier of hair, not so neat in her
over-elaborate clothes; but sprightly—unpleasantly sprightly.
“Good evening, darling,” she cried, kissing. “Isn’t it _perishingly_
cold? We walked from the Tube. _Do_ let me come to that _gorgeous_
fire.”
Hubert Rawlings—tall, clean-shaven, foxy-faced, five years older than
his wife—followed at her heels; shook hands.
“Where’s Peter?” he asked.
“In Hamburg,” answered Patricia; and noticed, rather annoyed, the
disappointment caused by her reply. Though not by any means “poor
relations”—(H. H. Rawlings, “Publicity Specialist,” made quite a decent
income)—Hubert and Hubert’s wife had an intolerable habit of making
private life an adjunct to business. Patricia was perfectly aware that,
had Peter been at home, her brother-in-law would have seized the
opportunity to convince him, once and for all, that the Nirvana
advertising account could be better handled by Hubert Rawlings than by
Charlie Higham. Remembering a phrase of her husband’s, “I never do
business with relatives: they always expect to be paid in advance,” she
smiled to herself, and turned the conversation.
“Doctor Baynet and Mr. John Baynet, ma’m.”
“Then you can bring up dinner at once, Smith.”
“Not late, are we, Pat?”
“No, pater, punctual to the second.” Patricia and her father shook
hands. They were not in the least alike, these two. The doctor—two
inches shorter than his younger daughter—had dark brown hair, just
graying; the hands of a surgeon; pince-nez; a fine forehead, and an
almost colourless face, set in stern lines. Since his wife’s death (he
had been a widower twelve years) the already celebrated diagnostician
had concentrated on work to the exclusion of every other interest but
his children. His face showed the price paid for success.
“Well, Jack, and how are things at Hillsea. I hear you’ve been
disappointed in love?”
“Oh, shut up, Pat.” Jack Baynet pulled uncomfortably at his white
evening waistcoat; fingered his clipped moustache; trifled with his
butterfly tie. As a subaltern in the Field Gunners, almost a senior
subaltern too, he disliked being ragged by his older sisters—and, most
particularly, he disliked being ragged about Alice Sewell. So, of
course, Violet took up the running.
“Poor dear! Fancy your own major cutting you out with her. It’s _too_
bad.”
“Stark isn’t a major yet; only a captain,” snapped Jack; then, realizing
a tactical error, “And anyway, I never was in love with her.”
“Dinner is on the table, ma’m,” announced Smith. . . .
Dinner, quietly served by two maids in the dark, square
dining-room,—oak-panelled, lit only by electric candles, mauve-shaded,
on the oval table and the huge Chippendalish sideboard—was a leisurely
meal. Thick soup followed the smoked salmon, grilled sole the soup, a
chick _en casserole_ the sole. Talk, family gossip of no interest to
outsiders, flowed—slowly at first, quicker as Peter’s second-best
Burgundy loosened constraint.
“And why,” asked Rawlings suddenly, “has Peter gone to Hamburg?”
“I think,” answered Patricia, always on guard against her
brother-in-law’s curiosity, “that it’s something to do with cigars.”
“Cigars? You mean cigarettes, don’t you? He hardly bothers about the
cigar business nowadays.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Patricia—knowing he wasn’t.
“When is he coming back?”
“Tomorrow, as far as I know.”
“Do you ever see Francis nowadays?” put in Violet. “I was trying to read
something of his in the _English Review_ just before we came out
tonight. He’s a bit beyond _me_, you know.”
“Francis Gordon,”—Heron Baynet spoke slowly, almost
professionally—“might become a great writer, if he weren’t such a
neurotic.”
“Oh, pater, do keep off your hobby, just for this one evening,” Patricia
protested. But, once launched, her father was not an easy person to
stop.
“My hobby,” he said, “is merely life. Not animal life only, but mental
life—which is the most important. Francis Gordon’s hobby is—Francis
Gordon. That’s where he, and most of the literary young men nowadays,
are making their mistake. They’re half-baked; emasculate. Instead of
facing life, they run away from it; shut themselves up in their
studies—usually with some equally epicene petticoat to assist their
musings. Life, the battle of life, is the only thing worth writing
about. Or,” he added, “reading about.”
Again Patricia turned the conversation: “Anyway, he’s much nicer, much
more human, than he used to be.”
“You mean, since he lost his money,” interrupted Violet.
Patricia nodded. . . .
On the arrival of port and cigars, the three men were left alone; and
Hubert Rawlings, who felt himself just a little out of the picture,
attempted to talk himself into it.
“Gunnery,” he said to the young soldier, “must be amazingly interesting.
A client of mine—he’s in the steel trade—was talking to me only this
morning about the Creusot factory. He says the French field-guns are
infinitely better than ours. . . .”
“Really.” Jack Baynet had been trained not to talk “shop” in mess.
“Oh, yes. My friend saw them firing tests. And he was amazed, absolutely
amazed.”
“I’ve no doubt.” Jack relented a little, finding it beyond him to keep
off his hobby. “I remember when our battery” (he pronounced it
“bettery”) “was in India, we were ordered to demonstrate at dummy
targets—just to show the infantry the effect of modern shrapnel-fire.”
He paused.
“And . . .” queried his father.
“After inspecting the targets, the General thought it better that the
infantry shouldn’t see them. Bad for their morale, you know.”
“If ever we do have this European war that Lord Northcliffe is so fond
of talking about,” said the doctor, “it will last about a week. Modern
nerves will never stand it.”
“Oh, we shall have war, all right,” announced his son.
The advertising agent and the nerve-specialist smiled cynically;
demonstrated—till it was time to join the ladies—that the young man
knew nothing whatever about international politics. . . .
They played family bridge, half-a-crown a hundred, Violet and her
husband permanently partnered. Patricia—who had cut herself out of the
first rubber—stood watching them. And again thought troubled her.
This—family parties, theatre-going, houses in Kensington, five
servants, a summer holiday with the children, mornings at home and
afternoons at the skating-rink—oh! it was all right, a very reasonable
and nice existence. But could it go on? Obviously, it had to go
on. . . . Mentally, she shook herself; laughed a little. What did she
want? A lover? No, very definitely no. She was not that sort of woman;
had too much self-respect. . . . What then? “Colour”—the words came
involuntarily to her mind: “Colour! That’s what I need. Colour—and
warmth.”
But when her family had departed, and she sat alone again in the
drawing-room, Patricia Jameson took herself firmly to task. “If I don’t
take more exercise,” she decided, “I shall become like one of those
unpleasant creatures one meets in novels: the misunderstood married
woman.”
Before going to bed, she tiptoed through the night nursery; looked
lovingly down on the two dark-brown heads of Evelyn and Primula; and
thereafter slept—even as they—dreamlessly.
§ 2
Punctually at nine o’clock next morning, Peter arrived.
Looking at him through the dining-room window, as he stood paying the
taxi, as he walked—carrying his heavy leather dressing-bag easily as
though it had been a dispatch-case—up the steps, he seemed to Patricia,
above all things, an adequate person. The long, blue, belted
Chesterfield over-coat—fur-lined but not fur-collared; the gray squash
hat; brown gloves; ribbed socks; brown, carefully-polished brogue shoes;
all betokened, in her eyes, efficiency. And when, after the usual
greeting to Smith—(“Mrs. Jameson in the dining-room? Right. Just take
this coat of mine, will you? And you might unpack for me at once”)—he
came into the room, the impression deepened.
The cheek she kissed was newly shaven; the dark hair smooth-brushed; the
moustache clipped soldier-fashion. He had—an invariable habit—taken
his bath on the boat; arrived spick and span, ready for the day’s work.
The gray eyes were clear, healthy: unusually merry, she thought.
“Breakfast?” she asked, after he had returned her kiss. “It’s quite
ready.”
“Rather. Eggs and bacon for choice. Something English after all that
German tripe.”
“Peter, your language is really getting atrocious.”
“Sorry, old thing. But honestly, Hamburg is the limit. I haven’t
averaged four hours’ sleep all this week. What’s happened to the town in
the last six years—I don’t know. They’re all crazy, I think. What with
old Beckmann’s lobsters and young Beckmann’s dressed crabs. . . .”
He relapsed into silence; seeing again the champagne dinners at
_Forti’s_, the red-wine lunches at the _Rathaus_, the smoky, tinselled
_Tanz-klubs_, the whole nauseous pageant of heavy-handed vice and tawdry
luxury with which the commercial classes of Germany were trying to ape
the natural gaiety of France.
“Still, I got what I went for,” he added, as Smith brought in the
Sheffield-plate breakfast-dishes, the big silver tea-pot.
They sat down.
“And what _did_ you go for?” asked Patricia, serving him.
“It’s rather a long story,” he began—Peter rarely talked business to
his wife—“but I’ll tell you if you like.”
“Yes, do.”
“Well, you know Jamesons have had the Beckmann cigar-agency for years
and years. . . .”
“But those Beckmanns live in Havana, don’t they?”
“The old man, Heinrich Beckmann—he’s the senior partner—lives in
Hamburg: the junior partners—his nephew Albert, who’ll inherit the
business when Heinrich dies, is one of them—run the factory and the
banking show in Cuba. But nothing big is ever decided without the old
boy’s consent. When that bally Trust started, Beckmanns thought our old
firm wasn’t big enough to handle their English market. So they took in
two other concerns. That was when I first went into business. The
governor never had any contract about the brand; trusted to their
honour.” Peter sniffed: even after nine years the old sore still
rankled. “Can I have another egg? By Jove, it’s good to be home again.”
“Really good?”
“Rather. . . .” He looked round the comfortable room appreciatively.
“But I was telling you about Beckmanns. Sometime ago I said to Simpson,
‘Simpson, let’s get that sole agency back again.’ Simpson said—he’s a
pessimistic blighter—‘It can’t be done.’ That was six weeks ago. The
contract’s in my bag upstairs.”
He paused, preening himself, quietly but quite obviously vain. She
thought him very young at that moment; more like a boy of twenty-three
than a man of thirty. “But how?” she asked.
“Bluff, my dear. Absolute and unmitigated bluff. Albert’s come home—to
get married, I think. So I wrote him a chatty letter, saying—well
wrapped-up, of course—that we were thinking very seriously of giving up
our cigar business. I said Simpson wanted to retire, and that the
cigarette business was so profitable. . . .” He laughed. “Anyway, it
came off. The old man wrote imploring me not to decide in a hurry;
Albert wrote to me; they wired Havana, and Havana wrote to me; they
invited me, at their expense—they’re as mean as they’re rich—to come
over to Hamburg. I kept them waiting ten days. Then I went. Pat, you
would have laughed to see me allowing myself to be persuaded—on my own
terms—to sign a ten-year agreement with them.”
“But, Peter,” interrupted his wife, “was it quite”—she
hesitated—“straight.”
“Straight?” He thought it over. “Yes. Just as straight as raising the
pot on a busted flush. I stood to look silly if they’d called my bluff,
didn’t I? And anyway, it’s jolly good business.”
They sat silent for a minute or two. And again she was conscious of his
adequacy. What he went for, he got. By his getting, she and her children
benefitted. That was the Law, inviolable since the days of the cave-man.
Weaklings to the wall—to the strong man, the fruits of his brain, of
his industry. . . .
“I’m glad about this contract, in more ways than one,” he said suddenly.
“You see, it’s a certainty. And certainties are always worth having.
Nirvana isn’t a certainty, not yet. It’s a gamble.” The confident tone
eased off a shade or two. “Once or twice, I’ve been rather harassed
about it. Finance. . . .”
“We might run to a car next year now,” he added.
Came Nurse’s tactful knock, and the children, merry-eyed, attired for
the Park.
“Hello, Daddy,” they chorussed, and romped over to be kissed.
“Where have you been, Daddy?” asked Primula.
“Germany.”
“Where’s Germany?”
They catechized him for a few minutes; informed him of their own
well-being, of a train recently purchased; kissed their mother; and
hurried off—having tasks to perform, serious tasks with hoops and
sticks, in which their parents had no part. In concentration on the
immediate job, Peter’s kiddies were uncannily like their father.
“I must be off to the office,” he announced as soon as they were out of
the room. “Anything on for tonight?”
“No, dear.”
“Right. I may be a little late. About seven, I expect. . . .”
“He’s very—American,” thought Pat, as she watched him stride off,
inevitable cigar in his mouth, towards the Tube.
For Patricia, like most English people at the time, recognized only two
classes of Americans—the over-worked rich and the idle rich. Of the
true America, of the people with ideals, the quiet folk who are found
neither at the Ritz Carlton nor in the cabaret, she was utterly
ignorant. . . .
“He’s a splendid pal,” said Reason.
But, in Reason’s despite, instinct wished that he had remembered to kiss
her good-bye.
§ 3
As the Tube jerked him spasmodically to Bank station Peter’s mind ran
over the clauses of his new contract; pondered how best to exploit it.
This absolute control of the Beckmann brand gave a new interest to the
Jameson business; and with that interest, came a little flash of
sentiment. He remembered his first year in the City, Tom Simpson’s
doubting-Thomas attitude to a College boy, his father’s shrewd
help. . . . But the Mr. Jameson who pushed his way through the
swing-doors of 24 Lime Street and down the dark passage to the
warehouse, was very far from appearing a sentimentalist.
“Morning, Parkins,” he said to the young clerk who looked up at him from
the desk in the outside office—glass-panelled, electric-lit, heated by
a glowing gas-stove.
“Good morning, Sir,” answered the boy.
“Mr. Simpson inside?”
“Yes, Sir.”
Peter passed on through the warehouse; cast a rapid eye over the high
wooden racks piled with cigar-boxes, at the Triplex glass sky-lights, on
George the old warehouseman who was pottering about, duster-in-hand.
“Morning, George. How’s the rheumatism?”
“Thank you, Mister Peter, I can’t complain. And are you all right, Sir?”
“Never better, George,” said our Mr. Jameson; and added (to himself)
“_He_ won’t last much longer. I must talk to Simpson about pensioning
him off. Two quid a week, I suppose. Extravagance! but the old chap’s
earned his last bit of comfort. . . .”
Tom Simpson sat at his desk—an old-fashioned sloping-top desk of
ink-stained mahogany—in the back office; where, despite the aid of
reflectors, set slanting in the one high-up window, green-shaded
electrics burned for nearly ten months of the year. A bluff man of fifty
was Tom, fresh-complexioned and brown-bearded still; calm, of a certain
limited shrewdness, but unimaginative; dressed in black morning-coat,
City-tailored; gold “Albert” festooned across his ample paunch,
key-chain drooping from trouser-pocket.
“Well?” he asked, looking up from the smeared typewritten pages of the
Havana mail.
“Got it,” said Peter laconically; hanging hat, coat and stick on the
brass-hook behind the glass door—which he carefully closed.
“No!” Interrogatively.
“Yes.”
“Well I’m damned.” Simpson glanced admiringly at his partner. He never
quite understood Peter; had always been a little afraid of his
“recklessness”; had—for that reason—refused to invest any capital in
the Nirvana cigarette-factory.
Peter drew the contract from his breast-pocket; and they scrutinized it
together. It was written in English, rather Teutonic English, but
absolutely clear.
“Who drew this up?” asked Simpson.
“I did. A German lawyer went over it for me; but it’s enforceable in
London.”
“Good.”
They plunged into details.
“What’s this. Five thousand pounds open account? Anything over that to
be drawn for at six months? We don’t want all that credit, Peter.”
“Yes, we do. I may have to take some more of my capital out. The
factory, you know.”
Simpson put down the contract. “Of course it’s not for me to advise you:
but aren’t you getting just a little out of your depth?”
“You charge me with interest on the money which I draw out,” began
Peter, temper swiftly frayed. Then relenting, “Oh, it’s quite all right,
old man, I know what I’m doing.”
A huge black outline loomed up against the glass door, knocked, said in
a guttural voice “May I come in?”
Entered Julius Hagenburg: top-hatted, black-moustached, patent-booted,
flower at buttonhole: Hagenburg, naturalized Englishman, undoubtedly the
best salesman of fine cigars in Europe—and the worst payer. What
Peter’s investment in Nirvana meant to Simpson, Simpson’s credit to
Hagenburg meant to Peter. Yet it was a profitable account, amazingly so.
Hagenburg rarely bought less than thirty thousand cigars at a clip;
would pay anything from three to seven pounds a hundred for them.
How he disposed of the goods, neither of the partners knew; though
Peter, who had met the man frequently on his own Continental
cigarette-expeditions, had a shrewd idea that most of the cigars—which
went, under bond, in plain cases, from London to Amsterdam—eventually
found their way, at entirely fictitious prices, to such places as the
Sporting Club in Monte Carlo, the Jockey Club in Vienna, and even as far
as the gipsy-haunted private rooms in the night-restaurants of St.
Petersburg.
However, this time Hagenburg had brought money, nearly a thousand pounds
of it, in “ready.”
“You will give me a receipt now, please,” he said to Simpson, who went
out of the room, notes rustling in his hands, leaving Peter and his pet
aversion together.
“I hear you got back the sole agency of the Beckmann brand,” said the
German, sitting down and lighting a black cigar from the box that Peter
pushed across to him.
“Where the dickens did you hear that?”
“It’s true then?” Hagenburg smiled.
“Possibly.”
“I can increase my business with Beckmann cigars in—Holland, if you are
in a position to help me with a small discount, say five per
cent. . . .”
“Now I wonder how the hell he found out about that contract?” Peter said
to himself when the man had gone. But Simpson, to whom he mentioned the
matter, made light of it. “There’s been a good deal of gossip about your
going to Hamburg,” he said. “Probably it was only guess-work.”
Peter put on his hat; wondered, as he walked rapidly along Fenchurch
Street, why Simpson hadn’t possessed enough gumption to keep the
destination of such an important journey secret. “Didn’t think it
mattered. Never thought I’d get that contract,” he decided, turning down
Lombard Court, mounting the carpeted steps to the upstairs luncheon-room
of the Lombard Restaurant.
“Downstairs,” in the Lombard, hatted men jostle at communal tables;
steaks frizzle, crowded, on the grill; joints appear, dwindle, disappear
and are replaced; waiters bustle and the girl at the cash-desk has
barely time to smile. But “upstairs,” luncheon is a solemn and a costly
function.
At the small bar in the corner of the oak-panelled room, one hand
dallying with his vermouth, eye-glassed, faultlessly attired, a
miniature dude though well over middle age, stood Peter’s best
acquaintance (and Jameson’s most aggressive competitor), Maurice
Beresford of “Beresford and Beresford.”
He grinned at Peter, letting the monocle fall from his eye as he did so;
said laconically: “The usual Peter.”
“Thanks,” answered Peter; smiling a greeting to the lady behind the bar.
“We lunch together, I presume,” quizzed Beresford.
“You presume correctly, Maurice.”
“Toss you who pays—drinks included.”
“Not much. You asked me to have a drink. But I’ll toss you for lunch.”
The sovereign clinked on the bar-top. Peter won.
They finished their drinks; settled themselves at the usual reserved
table by the fire; ordered—after some wrangling—completely different
lunches: for Beresford (who possessed, despite his size, an enormous
appetite) grilled sole, fricassee of veal, and plum duff; for Peter,
surfeited with greasy food, cold beef and pickled walnuts.
“And now,” said Beresford, sipping his whisky and Perrier, “be a good
boy and tell me all you’ve been up to in Hamburg.”
“Lies, or the truth?”
“The truth. Just for a change.”
Peter cut a morsel of beef with great deliberation; decided that
Beresford probably knew.
“I think I’ve done you in the eye this time, Maurice.”
“I thought you had. We got a cable from Beckmanns this morning. Nothing
definite in it: but putting two and two together, you know. . . .”
They looked at each other, and laughed. The Beresfords, both bachelors,
were extremely well off; their transactions with the Beckmann factory of
no great importance. Still, by his next remark Peter knew that Maurice
was hit, in his business-vanity if not in his pocket.
“What I like about you, Peter,” he said, screwing the monocle back into
his eye, “is that although you are every bit as unscrupulous as the rest
of us, you manage to keep up a pose of old-fashioned respectability,
combined with modern straightforwardness, which I, for one, find it
impossible to adopt. How many cases did you have to guarantee
Beckmanns?”
“Oh quite a lot,” parried Peter.
“And what is going to happen about my pending orders? Will they be
shipped, or not?”
This being the crux of the conversation, Peter changed the subject;
began talking about shade-grown wrappers, the new schedule of Trust
prices and other mysteries unintelligible to the profane.
“It will be very unfair if they aren’t,” interrupted Beresford.
“I’ll have to talk it over with Simpson.”
“Great genius—Simpson,” said Beresford sarcastically.
“And, either way, you’ll have to pay us a profit on them. . . .”
Maurice Beresford walked back to his office distinctly disgruntled.
§ 4
Peter, on the other hand, returned to Lime Street in a state of quiet
elation. Money apart, it was amusing to have scored off Maurice.
Remained now to settle with the Elkinses. He called up young Charlie
Elkins; asked him to come round.
“All right. Four o’clock,” said the voice at the microphone. Then
“Pretty” Bramson rang up from the factory; and, listening to his
report—(“fifty thousand Virginians from Singapore; twenty thousand
Egyptian gold-tips from the Argentine; heaps of export orders but home
trade rather quiet. Are you coming up tomorrow, Sir?”)—Peter’s
new-found interest in Jameson’s suffered eclipse.
He hung up the receiver; looked across at Simpson, rereading the
contract for the tenth time. Undoubtedly the selling of cigars, of other
people’s cigars was—even as a sole agent—a pretty dull affair. Simpson
had been sitting at that very same desk twenty, twenty-five, thirty
years; would sit there till he died.
The bell rang again. Reid this time, of Reid, Chatterton & Reid,
Chartered Accountants. “Mr. Reid wished to ask Mr. Jameson if next
Monday would be convenient for the Nirvana board-meeting.”
“Quite convenient, thank you.”