How young people fall on their legs no one knows—least of all
themselves: no more than cats thrown off a roof. Those who have gone
out into the world on their own before they were twenty know that it
happens, and that is all they can say.
It happened to John Maple. He went through the string of those
adventures which all such lads go through, indifferent to the squalor
because he was too young; delighted with the uncertainty, and buoyed
up by the novelty of his life. It happened to him also (as it happens
to all such) that he was never cut off from his equals in real life as
such are cut off in melodrama. There was nothing about not darkening
doors again, or shaking dust off feet. He went down often enough to
Aunt Hilda’s (thinking himself a noble fellow enough for tolerating
Rackham). He made better and better friends with Corton, who always
thought of him as the only true Maple. He met his aunt’s friends. His
father’s old acquaintances looked him up, and asked him out in London.
If you had taken a couple of weeks out of the boy’s life and followed
it hour by hour, you would have found such a mosaic as only an early
experience of that strange kind knows—there are plenty of us alive
to-day who have known it and can remember it. John Maple came to know
them all.
Lodgings chosen for their peculiarity, their isolation; a single bare
room overlooking London from the height of an old building; a basement;
a dusty studio; one changed for another. Odd acquaintances from the
most different sorts of worlds. Broken-down actors, young men trying
to find work, and trying to forget the time when they were soldiers.
Pompous hosts in huge great mausoleums of houses (bad speculations on
the Crown property at Kensington—white elephants). Dull Bohemian nights
in Chelsea. Much more interesting revolutionary nights sandwiched
between foreign and domestic spies in reeking cellars off Houndsditch.
One or two really interesting parties in the houses of such people, for
instance, as Charles Baker, who had been his father’s friend for years
before the exile, and who was still in Parliament and still ridiculing
it, but whose real point was that he could paint; or tea with another
friend of his father’s of very many years’ standing, Lady Pattle,
the widow of the Admiralty Judge. There he met everybody—and there,
incidentally, he met Bo.
Lady Pattle liked pretty well everything, but if she liked one thing
more than another it was people who could talk crisply and dress
crisply. She liked them best when they were least English, and she
liked them best of all when they were American.
Now God in His providence had at this very moment provided for Lady
Pattle, and for England, precisely what was most needed in this line.
Hamilcar Hellup had not begun life upon a few copper coins, still less
had he walked as a barefoot child into New York, because he could not
afford to ride. He had been born of a very good family—that is to say,
of a family that had plenty of lineage (ten generations of it since
the first settlers); moderate in fortune; once Puritan, now atheist,
in religion. He had been brought up with the other lads of the village
under that fine tradition of social equality which for so long was,
and still is, in unspoiled places, the tradition of the United States.
He had made a large fortune without selling any material objects that
anyone had ever seen, dealing shrewdly in paper. He had never cheated
anyone, to his knowledge. What is far more remarkable, very few people
had cheated him; or, at any rate, very few with impunity.
His delight was to escape from New York and return at too brief
intervals to the place of his birth: and there his confidant was a
playmate who had remained poor and cunning on the soil, one Hiram Jake.
Hiram Jake remained in Hamilcar Hellup’s vision the symbol of his own
people, and years later, when he stole back home on brief escapes from
England, to talk of Mayfair to Hiram Jake over the broken fence of
that citizen’s lot was cold water in the desert to the millionaire.
When he was a little over fifty he became a widower, and was left with
an only child, a girl called Isabeau, then twelve years old, and to
enjoy, at eighteen, yet another fortune from her mother. His whole life
changed. He gave up the accumulation of further wealth—and therein was
wise, for he had an enormous lump of it. He came over to Europe with
his daughter. First he travelled with her to many places he himself had
seen in his former journeys; then he put her back into a school in his
own country; his wife would have wished it.
While Isabeau was thus growing up American, her father, fully
realising, what he had known at the back of his mind since first he had
seen the country, that England was the place where rich men should come
to die, made his arrangements to settle here.
Nearly seven years had passed since then, and Isabeau, whose name had
very naturally contracted into Bo, was on the point of coming back to
England, when Hamilcar Hellup (he had been Hamilcar J., but he had
dropped the J.—wherein again he was wise) was first pestered by our
hungry politicians to pay them money for a peerage.
Now Hamilcar, being an American, knew all about such things. The Press
of his native country had told him far more about English politics than
our own Press ever tells Balham or Tooting. He knew all about the
politicians, with their tongues hanging out for money—and he preferred
to keep his money to himself. Therefore had Hamilcar been standing on
guard, like a wicket keeper with the gloves on, for now some years:
ready to catch each attack on his purse and throw it back. Hitherto he
had succeeded. Of the last begging interviews, two had been attempted
by a tout of the Prime Minister of the day, very clumsily done, without
a proper introduction; the fellow simply rang the bell and sent in a
card. He was shown out; or, as Hamilcar put it, thrown into the street.
But appetite in politicians is over-mastering, and Hamilcar’s wealth
was notorious, illustrious, quite unconcealed.
[Illustration: _Neighbour Hellup and Neighbour Jake_]
The next attack was delivered in his club. It was delivered by an old
gentleman who had bothered him about a lot of other things. This cadger
was (to change the metaphor) deftly cut through the slips. But the
third attack came, only two days later, in the shape of a florid young
man in the Government, with whom he got on like a house on fire. It was
quite late in the evening during a party in Merton Street, when his
under-secretary suddenly asked him whether he would meet yet another
politician at lunch next day. Hellup very foolishly consented; and
there suffered a most brutal hammering, a torture of direct insistence
that he should pay. But there was plenty of hard wood in Hamilcar
Hellup, and he stood firm. There was nothing doing.
What did the trick was Lady Pattle. Lady Pattle had got to know him
just after he had landed. She was a dab at that sort of thing, and she
had managed it sideways, getting him kidnapped to tea in her house
under the guard of her niece and a Lord Chancellor in a large motor.
She had him by the Christian name within a year. She was not for
hurrying things. He was taking her advice during all the second year,
and still more during all the third year; and he had rarely found it
wrong. Lady Pattle it was who told him quite solemnly, after now six
years of acquaintance, that he ought to buy. Lady Pattle it was who
broke down that iron resolve and made Hamilcar Hellup a peer. No other:
Peggy, Lady Pattle.
Let me cast no suspicion on that honoured name. She took no commission.
She had been specially urged by no one. It was principally from
Hamilcar himself that she had learnt how he had set his teeth, and was
becoming obstinately proud as well as amused in turning the politicians
down. She desired to do only what might be good for him, for she was
really fond of him—and she advised him to yield. Her arguments were
sound. The Prime Minister was asking nothing exorbitant. A dozen new
peers had paid him from twice to ten times as much. Hamilcar was
very rich, and he would not feel it. It was not as if he had run
after them; they had run after him; and really a peerage was a solid
advantage—especially for an American.
“Not Home,” was Hamilcar’s comment; and Lady Pattle had answered
sharply, “No, but you are not living at home.” Whereat Hamilcar had
sighed, for it was true. And in his heart he longed for the wooden
houses and Jake, the playmate of his boyhood, and to see the smoke
rising from his own land, and after that to die.
“It is not,” she said, “as though you had a boy to take it on after
you. That would be a nuisance. But it will certainly help Bo. She’d
like it. She’s been too young so far to know what it means; but
she’d like it now. And it’s great fun, remember. You go and hear the
debates and if you like you can join in. Anybody can. Then, it helps
you abroad: on the Riviera especially, and in Paris too. Still. Even
to-day. It won’t last, but be an English peer while it lasts.”
“Raises prices?” said Hamilcar.
She shook her head.
“Not at the kind of places you go to. They couldn’t raise them.”
What clinched the matter—nothing less would have convinced him—was the
battery she brought up at the end of this memorable conversation.
“If you don’t pay that little bounder off and have done with it, you’ll
be plagued for the rest of your life. He’s worse in opposition than
in office,” she had said. What that meant Hamilcar Hellup hardly
understood; but he understood well enough the wisdom of cutting worry.
And that very week he bought the peerage. One thing, however, he stuck
to; he would not change his name. They tried hard to make him, but
he was adamant. The Hellups had been Hellups too long to change, and
Hellup he remained.
Therefore, when Bo came over from her school, and when Lady Pattle
presented her at Court, and when, with her straightforwardness and
beauty and (to be quite just) her hardness, she had duly impressed
herself upon London, she was the Honourable Isabeau Hellup. Why she was
not Lady Isabeau Hellup was explained to her, and she was reluctant to
accept the explanation. Then did she begin with a great verve a career
of conquest; and her father was prouder of her than of any deal he had
ever made in his life: not excepting the original great Paramount Paper
Merger, in the year ’95.
Bo had armed herself, as must every woman who proposes to conquer, with
a dog—by name Lovey-Lad, by nature swift and terrible, strong to seize
and to tear, strong also to growl, and of the bulldog breed. He became,
in the few hundreds of newspaper pictures which appeared on both sides
of the Atlantic, her cognitive sign, as is the Lion that of St. Jerome,
the Dog that of St. Roch, the Eagle that of Jupiter and St. John,
and an open Bible spread under the left hand that of the late Queen
Victoria at a certain epoch of her reign.
[Illustration: “_Our younger hostesses_”
_Pleasing sketch of the Honble. Isabeau Hellup with her dog Lovey-Lad;
from the pencil of Mr. Louth and appearing (syndicated) throughout the
Press of England and America_]
All guessed—some had arranged—whom Bo was to capture. There were
titles in the list—the more knowing ones had particularly good foreign
titles to put forward. There were also great untitled lumps of money,
still knocking about unmarried. There were even a few of the minor
Exalted Personages. Lady Pattle herself, though she was no fool, could
not help, being a hostess and a woman, having fixed plans of her own.
She had settled on and pinned down and labelled young Lord Ockley,
because he had no money, because he was nice, and because she knew him:
three very good reasons.
But these good people reckoned without the Hellup blood, which was
good, tested stuff; they had reckoned without its particular qualities
in Bo; above all had they fatally reckoned without the Bow and Quiver
of the Little God—the Unconquered in Battle—who perpetually scatters
the arrangements of possessing men, and falls like a bolt into the
midst of riches.
It had amused the Little God to bring Bo up against John Maple, and
John Maple up against Bo. It had amused him to shoot at them both;
first from a distance, to try his bow; then good and hard at short
range. They were already quite certain each of the other, before either
of them was quite certain who the other was. They were both married in
heaven—or whatever the process is—I mean, they had both known about
each other from all eternity, while Bo still had no more definite
knowledge of John than that somehow or other he was connected with
“that Mrs. Maple,” and was perhaps vaguely the heir to a Manor House
somewhere or other, with English lawns and oaks, and all the rest of
it: no title—at least, she thought no title. She had not yet thought
much one way or the other about anything connected with him, except
that she knew his soul as she knew her own: and liked it more.
As for John, he knew she was the daughter of one of these American
lords, and he did not honestly try to distinguish between them. But
he had liked her father. He liked the crispness, the exceedingly
well-brushed close short white hair; the equally well-groomed short
white moustache; the humorous, keen eyes and all the rest that goes
with the type. He liked the short sentences, the lively metaphor,
and he liked the man’s certitude in himself. It was as well. For
considering how fiercely John Maple loved that tall infant he might
have hated the rival affection even of her father. And considering how
much Lord Hellup doted on his daughter, he might most furiously have
disliked anyone else claiming her.
That Bo had a great fortune was present in John’s mind, but occupied
no place there. It is often like that. He knew her fortune was there,
as one knows that a big cloud is in the sky. It did not occupy his
thoughts as being anything prominent, still less as having any
effects. For remember, he was still very young. If he had thought of it
at all it would have worried him, I fear. But he did not think of it.
In the adventures of John Maple there had been one very simple motive
running through, which was to earn a living: though he put it to
himself not as earning a living, but as earning, making—_getting_,
anyhow—a certain fixed sum of money, to wit, £20,000, wherewith to buy
back Rackham.
Aunt Hilda had, in the interval since John had come up to town to make
his way, gone from bad to worse. It wasn’t enough for her to call the
old place Rackham Catchings; she sometimes used “Catchings” by itself.
And when John protested against _that_ innovation (as he had done
on one of his last visits) she had poured out a torrent of horrible
antiquarian stuff which she had got from an archæological society, and
which boiled down to this: that once, in one of the older title deeds,
the word “Catchings” appeared; it seemed to have been used for some
part or other of the estate. She was proud to add that they had also
found a certain Sir Harry Murtenshaw mentioned in a letter (undated,
but in a handwriting of the sixteenth century), and that in this
same letter there was mention of a Catchings. It was true this last
Catchings was in Norfolk; but that didn’t trouble Aunt Hilda. She had
already established her legend. The true name of Rackham was Rackham
Catchings, or even Catchings alone; and it had descended to the Maples
and so to herself diversely, by heiresses and marriage, from Sir Harry
Murtenshaw, Knight; a courtier of Gloriana’s, a jewel in the crown of
the Virgin Queen, an Elizabethan.
With John’s movements among the rich Aunt Hilda was insufficiently
acquainted. She kept in touch with him, and she was vaguely pleased
to know that whatever tricks he was playing in private to make a
living—and on these she did not yet inquire—he was at any rate, to the
world, her nephew and his father’s son. If he appeared to be living in
London instead of in Sussex, she liked to have it put down to his—or
rather her—opulence. And if he had to refuse many engagements, if he
mysteriously disappeared for days at a time, why, that was again a
proof of his ample leisure and power to choose his own recreations.
She knew, of course, and she half envied, the way in which she heard
him talked about, though it annoyed her more than it pleased her when,
in that world which had been his father’s, they asked her (as they
often did) whether she were not a cousin. For the truth is, that Aunt
Hilda did not know the rich as well as John did. Still, there were few
whom John knew and whom Aunt Hilda had not at least heard of: not many
houses where John was intimate and she had not at least called. She
addressed Lady Pattle by her Christian name, and had more than once
been called Hilda in return. Two warm friendships Mrs. Maple had made
in that world—one with Lord Hellup, who quite frankly admired her;
one with a certain Lord Mere de Beaurivage—or rather, with his wife,
Amathea, whom she had piloted through many straits and narrows. For the
wife of Lord Mere de Beaurivage had to learn the intricacies of high
life rather late, as indeed had her worthy husband. Fortune had come
upon him with horrible rapidity, like a shell, after his fiftieth year.
It was not till the first war Coalition Government that he had appeared
as Sir George Huggins. It was not till the second war administration
that he had come—by the usual cheque—to adorn the House of Lords. His
creation dated some months before Lord Hellup’s. He was senior to Lord
Hellup in the proud hierarchy of our nobility: senior by half a year.
Though Aunt Hilda could not but revere her dear Amathea’s husband
and have a strong attachment for Hamilcar Hellup, neither of these
noblemen, with wife or daughter, had happened to be at Rackham on
the same occasions as her nephew. She had learnt in roundabout ways
that the Hellups knew John and liked him, though she had not a
suspicion of the growing affair with Bo. As for Lord and Lady Mere de
Beaurivage—either they had not come across the young man at all in the
Great World, or if they had, they had forgotten it: he was no apparent
help to climbing folk. To put it in Lady Mere de Beaurivage’s simple
English phrase, when Hilda had cast out a feeler about it, “Your nevvy?
Not as I knows of, Ilda dear. But there, bless you! faces I knows,
but names I disremember.” Or as his lordship had put it with equal
simplicity, “John Miple? Wot? Sime nime as yer own? Not as I can call
to mind. But lor! There’s so many of ’em!” A sound judgment.
Such was the ambiguous situation—John on the fringes of Aunt Hilda’s
push; Aunt Hilda’s wishing that she was really received as John was
received. So John was asked with sincere affection to Rackham, but not
too often. When he came he played up, and he even helped Mrs. Maple
when she came to London in her abhorrent task of adding further and
more heavily to the Catchings—for some purpose of her own which as yet
John could not divine. It intrigued him.
That fixed idea of his that he would be master of Rackham sooner or
later led him to tolerate every grotesque purchase and addition, and to
help her whole-heartedly. It made him know more about the place ... and
he was free to be rid of the whole mass of that rubbish when he should
reign.
He accompanied her when she went to Burton’s studio to inspect the
absurd carved animals that were to appear on the stone pillars of the
new gate. He gravely approved her choice of the new gate itself, when
it was foisted upon her in the Euston Road—a sham Venetian horror in
new iron, and (oh! my God!) not even forged, but cast.
He did more. He helped her to buy the Ancestor.
The Maples, as he knew, had ancestors of a sort. They had the
cattle dealer. They had his son, the worthy Georgian squire who had
sat for the county. Indeed, they had a portrait of him in his wig
extraordinarily badly done by an artist of the local town whom the
gentry patronised in those days.
There were even other ancestors at Rackham, as ancestors go—for
ancestors in such houses do not mean _real_ ancestors, but any
collaterals. One was a captain of Nelson’s in his uniform and the
other was a very rich lady whom that captain had had the good fortune
to marry after the wars. There was also a horrible dingy thing which
used to hang in the schoolroom, and which John could vaguely remember
someone having told him as a child was “your great-aunt Jane.”
These had been good enough for Rackham. But they were not good enough
for Rackham Catchings, and Hilda Maple sailed forth in quest of
something more worthy. She set out on the uncharted sea to discover Sir
Harry Murtenshaw, Knight.
She sought him, just in that place where Oxford Street merges into
Holborn, in a shop where she had had the good fortune to find many
things already: a shop belonging to a gentleman of Esthonian
extraction called Curzon; at any rate, this gentleman (who appeared
in person) had the selling of the goods, and, on this occasion, after
so many others sold to Aunt Hilda, of the Ancestor. And a very good
Ancestor he was. Aged in time, though newly cleaned, painted on canvas
which an expert would have ascribed to our own day, but set in the
proper kind of old frame and duly sooted, fumed, and with nothing to
give him away.
He had a square, solid face, not unlike a pig’s, well pleased with
itself, and a square beard to match; and he was dressed in a period
which was either the very last days of Elizabeth or the very first days
of James: a man of about the same age as Shakespeare, but without his
genius. He cost Aunt Hilda surprisingly little, though surprisingly
more than he was worth. Whatever name he may have had in real life
he was now, for _her_, Sir Harry Murtenshaw, and she was always very
careful to explain that he was not a real Maple. Which was indeed the
case.
He was, for _her_, the founder of the family in this sense; that it was
through his daughter, the heiress of Rackham, that the Maples had come
into the property: a touching piece of family history. It had been a
love match; and that was very touching too.
Then, to the unconcealed annoyance of her nephew, she tacked a ghost
on to Sir Harry. At first a vague ghost, it turned more precise
and became a young relative of the knight’s, who had died a romantic
political death.
[Illustration: _The Ancestor_
_Sir Harry Murtenshaw, Knight; by Holbein_]
In a fine innocence upon the date of that eminent Hun, Hilda Maple
accepted the assurance that the portrait was by Holbein, and Sir Harry
Murtenshaw, bluff Englishman that he was, and stout supporter of the
Elizabethan (or Jacobean) settlement, was carried out by two assistants
of Mr. Curzon’s to be packed for delivery to Rackham Catchings. He was
heavy. He was large. He had to go out sideways. He travelled, finally,
upside down: but it in no way affected his imperturbable humour.
John Maple had helped his aunt to choose the picture; had warned
her that Sir Harry was no ancestor of his, whatever he might be of
his aunt’s husband; had received the naturally sharp reply of that
lady to such a comment; and later, when the great founder of the
fortunes of Rackham was unwrapped, had helped to choose the part of
the panelling into which he was to be incongruously forced, frame
and all. He presided over the dining-room, as an ancestor should,
the new dining-room—which was also the old. For though it was the
new dining-room in Corton’s phrase, and in John Maple’s the sham
dining-room, everything had been done to make it the oldest dining-room
in Sussex. When Hilda Maple told her guests that the picture dated with
the room, and that the panelling built around it was its contemporary,
she was not strictly truthful. For whereas the panelling was of early
1918, Sir Harry (as I have established by deep research) was painted by
a starving Frenchman in Soho as long a time back as 1893.
Anyhow, there he beamed over the Refectory table, the antique chairs
and all the caboodle, with virile if somewhat vacuous determination in
his contented eyes. It was men such as he, Aunt Hilda would explain to
her guests, who made us what we are. And God have mercy upon us all!
For we also are liars, my readers, yourselves not excepted.
Pray let my reader remember this also (if I may so burden her memory)
that the Ancestor was but the last of Aunt Hilda’s purchases—and she
had outrun the constable.
The gentleman of Esthonian extraction, Mr. Curzon, had let the
Ancestor go cheap—at thirty-seven times what he paid for him. But
he had sold Aunt Hilda valuable expert advice, panelling and chairs
as well, and tapestries which were not tapestries, and Jacobean
silver of the last few years (with Hall Marks let in) and Elizabethan
four-posters, Victorian on the carpenter’s side, and even bibelots
and fraudelquins; not to speak of fanfreluches and negligeables. And
for a long time past Mr. Curzon, the Esthonian, had not been selling
these to Aunt Hilda for cash, but for sundry promises of cash in time
to come. And these bore interest. For of such is the Kingdom of the
Esthonians—or, at any rate, of the Curzon sort.
[Illustration: _Progress of Sir Harry Murtenshaw, Knight, to his
ancestral home_]
* * * * *
I have digressed. I have been misled by the contemplation of Sir Harry
Murtenshaw, Knight (from the brush of Holbein—with a Jacobean ruff and
trunk hose).
Let me return to the adventures of John, and these shall be brief.