John had started with his little nest egg of £352, but it would not
last for ever. He had had the wisdom to begin earning at once. He first
took chance jobs at writing for next to nothing. Then he helped a
friend to read proofs. Then he catalogued a library (extremely badly),
but at any rate with a good knowledge of French and German—which
was useful—at 30s. a week. Then he put in a short time, through the
kindness of one of his father’s friends, as assistant to the agent of
an estate; but there he was paid no wages, the experience was held to
be a sufficient reward, so that could not last. Then he spent a rather
longer time, under an assumed name, in a curious little venture with a
chance acquaintance of his, a man of the stage who had a tiny capital;
it immediately dissipated in a cabaret show which failed. It was bad,
but it would have failed even sooner had it been better.
At last, having earned in rather less than a year somewhat under two
hundred pounds and having spent at least two hundred and fifty, he put
in three splendid weeks at sea without wages, but lodged and fed and
gaining time to think things over. He had come across the poor owner
of a small, old and ill-found ketch which traded with odd cargoes in
and out of London River, pottering up the creeks of the East Coast, and
sometimes standing across for the Hook or Ostend. John had a way with
him, and persuaded this acquaintance to let him sign on for a round
voyage across the North Sea and home by the East Coast ports, picking
up chance ladings and making what she could for her owner: her Mate and
Captain sharing. He was to grub with those officers in the after-cabin,
under one of those many odd titles whereby they excuse a supernumerary
on board. His presence delighted neither. He found the Old Man surly
and the Mate hostile. Yet he enjoyed himself hugely; and there it
was—of all places in the world!—that he discovered his talent and his
earning power, for we each of us have a talent—a saleable talent, I
mean—and happy is the man who discovers his while he is yet young.
The Mate and he were together in the cabin of that aged ketch during a
long wait outside Harwich for the tide. The Old Man was smoking on deck
watching for the turn. The Mate was more sour than ever that evening,
jealous of such a super-cargo, with his white hands and gentleman’s
accent. Yet it was the Mate who, there and then, brought John his good
fortune, as enemies often do. John Maple was standing by in the dark
corner of the little stuffy place, lit only by a swinging oil lamp,
with no sound but the dull plash of the shallow water outside, and in
his exasperation at something worse than usual which the Mate had just
grumbled at him, he muttered to himself a word not polite, but said
in such a low tone that he hoped it could provoke no quarrel. What it
did provoke in the Mate was an attitude quite unexpected. That worthy
looked up with a sudden startled air, and said in an awed tone, “What
was that? Didn’t you hear summat?” and with that he peered furtively
askance into the darkness.
“What was that?” said John Maple, rather surlily, thinking he had been
challenged.
“I ’eard a voice!” said the Mate in scared religious tones, and John,
looking at him, saw that he had gone quite white.
Those of the Unseen Powers who were looking after John’s affairs shot
into his head the right thing to do, though he hardly knew why it was
the right thing to do. He turned his face round again slowly away from
the Mate, put his hand to his temple, to cover his features, and again
gave that slight muttering; to be correct, it was the word “Swine!”
He heard something like a muffled shriek from the Mate:
“There it goes again! It said ‘Mine,’” moaned the Mate, now glaring
wide-eyed at the darkest corner of the cabin, where the reflector of
the lamp threw a deep shadow behind its smoky light.
“Whose? Eh? ’ose? Am I ’is? What’s ’ee mean?” The Mate may have been
drinking or may have knocked off, which is worse still for the nerves.
But there was no doubt as to his mistaking the direction of the slight
sound which had terrified him.
John Maple had discovered in those five minutes how easy it was—for him
at least, or in the right surroundings—to ventriloquise.
“I dursn’t hear it again,” whispered the Mate.
John Maple could not refuse to oblige, and he obliged for the third
time. The Mate sprang up all tense and said, trembling, that he didn’t
like it.
“What don’t you like?” said John Maple, pleasant and friendly, to show
that the quarrel was forgotten.
“Voices,” said the Mate scratching the little swinging table with his
nails nervously. “Don’t you ’ear nothin’?”
John Maple paused.
“Yes, I think I did,” he said slowly—which was true enough.
It was the First Episode, and a very slight one. It had no immediate
sequel.
On the return voyage (they carried bricks) John Maple was again
successful, not only in the cabin, but once at night on deck, when the
Mate and he had gone forward together; and again, when he had helped to
see whether there was any shifting in the hold (for a cargo of bricks
can work wonders if it shifts), the Mate heard voices. This time the
voices had something to say worth saying. They touched the Mate on
his immortal soul, the immediate perils of life, and advanced a strong
premonition of death. The Mate had fled up and aft, steadied himself
with a glass, and sworn at the end of the ordeal by all the gods below
London Bridge he would not sign on that vessel again.
The Old Man was not superstitious. He had many of the qualities of
wood: not only its toughness, endurance and colour, but also its lack
of sensibility. John wondered whether this new-found talent would work
on the non-superstitious.
Well, it had not that fine “first night” success which the Mate had
enjoyed; but it was beyond expectation all the same.
The Old Man heard very clearly a voice from his own bunk. He was on
the other side of the cabin at the time, though, it is true, his
attention had been directed to the couch. The voice, far off, ghostly
in the darkness, reminded him of the day when he had so nearly drowned
(through no fault of his own, but rather of Islington port), and warned
him of approaching trials. Had the Old Man remembered to whom he had
lately recounted that drowning episode (the only adventure of his life)
he might have had suspicions. As it was, he had none, for he told the
story so often that he could not remember who last had heard it. All
he knew now was that a whisper from the other world—from A Spirit that
knew his past—had bidden him remember and beware. It affected him
damnably.
His face did not go as white as the Mate’s had done, for it started
with a handicap of fixed mahogany, but it was changed when he looked
round at John and asked him, as the Mate had asked him, those few days
before, whether he had heard anything; and once more John truthfully
said he had. Then the Old Man asked him point-blank whether he
minded—as after all, he had done him the favour of taking him aboard,
and he was only a young chap—whether he minded sleeping in his, the
Captain’s, bunk that night, and giving him his own bunk. And John had
accepted with all the goodwill in the world. He even said it was an
honour.
When John Maple landed from his short but memorable and very happy
cruise (for he had loved the sea, though it was his first experience
of it), he had no idea that there was a living in the talent he had
discovered—if talent it were. At first he only thought it amusing
that by suggesting to another person where a voice was likely to come
from, and then keeping one’s features still and talking within one’s
mouth, one could make the voice seem to come from out of nothingness.
Then when he tried it on with chance Bohemian friends in London he
found that not everybody could do it as well as he: and most of his
friends could not do it at all. Then came the day when Percy Spegel
(so he chose to spell his name for the moment), hearing him practising
the trick during a little supper at the _Lord Milner_ in Puffin
Lane, watched him with fixed eyes, wherein any expert demon might
have discovered avarice, tenacity, fraud, and other varied characters
consonant with his enormous tie-pin.
Percy Spegel appealed to his constant parasite, whether John Maple had
not a marvellous talent? To which the parasite agreed. Whether it was
not a pity that such talent should be wholly untrained? To which the
parasite also agreed. Whether it would not be a dreadfully expensive
thing to train that talent? To which the parasite abundantly agreed.
Whether he would not probably be a loser if he attempted to put John
Maple on the Halls? To which the parasite said, he certainly would be.
Whether one was not foolish, out of mere enthusiasm, to risk such loss?
Which the parasite said was only what one would expect of a good fellow
like Percy.
The upshot of it was that John Maple found himself prepared to sign a
contract of a sort he had never seen before, but familiar enough to
those who live and die by the Halls, wherein he was to earn nothing for
so long—a short period enough—and after that what looked like a very
large sum every week.
John Maple knew nothing of what the out-goings of this profession are,
or of its temptations. He very luckily accepted, and that was why his
first steady employment—about a year after his return to England from
his father’s death-bed—was in the singular capacity of Lieutenant
Allegri, the world-famed ventriloquist. But such is the gulf between
the two worlds that no one among the rich whom he saw at his leisure
had an idea of the escapade; and no one among the Bohemians had an
idea of his acquaintance with the rich. He had fewer nights in which
he could go out, but he did go out sufficiently. He kept his contract
free; he would not be bullied: and he was so good that he could make
his own terms and times.
[Illustration: _John Maple as Lieutenant Allegri_]
The truth is, that if John Maple had been what young men of family in
this situation never are, and that is, devoted to his one talent, he
might have become rich. There are small fortunes made in these things.
He might have bought back Rackham after God knows how many years, if he
had cut himself right away from everything but slaving, and forgotten
every name but his own false one on the Halls.
It was after a very short time as Lieutenant Allegri that he bought for
his own pleasure a couple of dogs and trained them to do tricks. Then
he had added to their number and taught them more tricks. Then (since
he now knew the trade) he determined to change over, and in spite of
Spegel’s passionate appeals to heaven, he convinced that expert, who
knew human nature if he knew nothing else, that he must take his choice
between losing his own profit, which was considerable, or accepting
John Maple in the future as Don Herado de Madero and his Troupe of
Performing Dogs.
It was not as good as the ventriloquist show, but it drew better, for
the public is fond of dogs, and Spegel had put it about that it was all
done by kindness, not to say coddling: and the little brutes certainly
looked very happy as they ran about wagging their tails and doing
things which proved them wholly indifferent to pomposity. They barked
also, most winningly, to order, and grinned in the most endearing
fashion.
There, then, was John Maple’s singular situation at the moment when,
in that other life of his, he and Bo had met and made certain one of
the other. He had told her secretly of his profession; and he had given
her useful tips about Lovey-Lad, for he had become an expert upon dogs.
That Lovey-Lad had recognised in him a mysterious Master of Hounds
raised him enormously in Bo’s eyes. It is to be believed that one of
Don Herado’s troupe met Lovey-Lad in the park and had loyally exalted
the powers of his lord. For certainly John was the only male human
being to whom Lovey-Lad deferred; and Lovey-Lad was the only being on
earth whose opinion Bo respected.
* * * * *
But why had Aunt Hilda taken all this enormous trouble about the
Catchings? Why the new beam let into the ceiling, adzed, blackened and
chipped and dated 1487? Why the Ancestor? Why the panelling? Why the
antique chairs? Why the heraldic animals? Why anything? Why, why the
new family ghost? It’s true _that_ cost nothing, but the more solid
stuff cost a great deal. Why all this expenditure?
Had John Maple known more of the world, and wholly lost his innocence,
he could have answered, as you and I can answer, that there are only
two explanations of such feverish changes, when an old house is pulled
about and made vulgar. Either the Vandal has more money to spend than
she knows what to do with, or the Goth is embarrassed. Either the
barbaric hand is filled with the ruining gold, or the savage heart is
tortured by perpetual demands for payment from creditors and is salting
for a sale.
Either Aunt Hilda was spending money wantonly, or she was desperate for
money.
Well, it was the latter. Aunt Hilda was up to the neck in worry. She
didn’t know which way to turn.
When people change and rechange, and pull down and destroy and
theatricalise, you can tell which of the two motives is at work by a
simple test. If they act spasmodically, first putting this up and then
taking it down, changing an ornament from one place to another, pulling
out a wall and then regretting it and putting it back, they have too
much money. If they pursue one plan, continuously, and load it with
detail they are fighting debt.
Aunt Hilda was fighting debt.
Aunt Hilda was making a new Rackham and a new Catchings for the sake
of some purchaser heaven might send her. For Aunt Hilda must find a
purchaser or burst. And that was the truth.
William Maple, that careful business man, had left things in order
when he died. He had added appreciably to the value of the house and
the estate. He had allowed his wife to cover the brick part of the
front with a false veneer of half-timber because that at least gave it
uniformity with the older part; and he had allowed the new fake to be
toned down artificially so as to marry with the old. That also seemed
reasonable. More he had not allowed. But Hilda Maple, even before his
death, was already talking to her occasional guests about the antiquity
of the place, and what wonders would be revealed when all the old wood
could be uncovered and the later work which hid it could be taken away.
Her husband had not been dead two months when, in spite of all the
difficulties in getting work done during those last days of the war,
Aunt Hilda lashed out. Even then—my reader will remember, if she is
old enough—people with a pull could get things done. It was the moment
when one of the most luxurious of the new houses near the south coast
in Kent was being built by a politician. The difficulties of life were
not with the rich in those spring days of 1918, and though Hilda
Maple was not in the heart of that old gentry which had once governed
England, she was already close in touch with some of the new vulgarians
who were now beginning to govern England. Her friendship with Amathea
de Beaurivage alone was enough to get her the necessary labour. It was
enormously expensive, of course, but she was full of her new fortune,
and she began to tear down the structure of the house within, and to
ornament, and to build.
At the same time she did another thing, not unusual in women suddenly
possessed of capital, still less unusual in times when all values are
jumping up and down like the little ball in the circle of the roulette.
She gambled.
But Hilda Maple, like thousands of others in those days, was gambling
against the politicians, the peace-makers, the bankers, and the
international spouters of the millennium. They could see what was in
the game, for they held and stacked the cards. She—and the thousands of
others—could only see the backs of those cards.
There had come a moment—and that in a few months—when all was lost and
she had nothing to fall back on but Rackham itself, and Rackham she
must sell. Perhaps when she had spoken to her dying brother-in-law she
had honestly intended not to sell; but necessity knows no law, and she
excused herself to herself by the memory of what she had told him; that
she had a legal right to sell. But the selling of a house, like the
selling of a boat or the selling of one’s own soul, depends on external
effects. We “go on our clothes,” as a great American Leader of Modern
Thought has said. A boat sells on its paint and its brasswork. A house
sells by what furniture and faked wood and “period” front it can show.
Rackham might barely fetch its £20,000, for its own true worth; but let
it become Rackham Catchings and be varnished and vulgarised enough (not
that Hilda Maple thought it vulgarised—she thought it vastly ennobled)
and there was no knowing what it might fetch—especially from the right
kind of purchaser in these extraordinary times, when men stepped out
of the gutter on New Year’s Day and were in the House of Lords before
Christmas.
Therefore it was that Aunt Hilda had gone on building, pulling down,
ageing new wood, owing increasing sums for expert advice and goods from
the antique dealers, and in general playing the devil with Rackham.
She had got the house into the illustrated papers three times already;
first under “Our Elizabethan Heritage”; then under “The Quiet Homes of
England,” and then under “Minor Great English Houses, No. 51: Rackham.”
She herself had haggled a little over the “Minor.” But there she was
wrong; they ought to have haggled over the “Great.”
Aunt Hilda was not without commercial sense. She had on the occasion
of the last photographing purchased two peacocks and chivvied them on
to the lawn before the people from London snapped the front. She had
even borrowed from one of her few really important friends an enormous
photograph of a Royalty, in a vast silver frame leaning backwards,
which she draped and propped up on a little table, to go nicely into
the picture of the boudoir—little knowing that the word boudoir had
long sunk out of use. But if it comes to that, each of us is out of
fashion to others. Our English society has divided into something like
those moving ways at the old Paris Exhibition of 1889: one stream is
moving at one pace, one at another; and there still survive gentlefolk
who say “napkin,” side by side with those masters of our modern world
who say “serviette.”
Let me leave the boudoir and the photographs and all the rest of it and
get back to the Debt.
Aunt Hilda was embarrassed. Damnably! Hence the purchases in London;
hence the antiques; hence the Ancestor. That activity of hers which
had intrigued poor John Maple was plain enough. He would have been
less angry with his aunt had he known the causes of her perpetual
extravagances.
If you desire to know the amount of Aunt Hilda’s embarrassment, I can
tell it you simply enough. It was, at the moment when she was adding
her last efforts to Rackham, £17,000—and a little more. She had the
cunning common to those who lose money—and make it. She picked up ideas
on sharp dealing by listening to conversation around her. She had
learnt the tricks of the share-shufflers. Therefore she had continued
recklessly. Money was never made to-day by work or saving. The bigger
the overdrafts the better, and loans raised in Jermyn Street were
quicker and handier than mortgages. She would make Rackham Catchings
glorious in the eyes of possible purchasers—Jew, Rastaquouère, new War
Lord, Yankee millionaire—anybody. Then she could sell it, untrammelled,
for three times its worth and five times what she had spent on it. The
money-lenders would get back their loans and interest. There would
still be a large balance over, and with that balance she could buy
herself a sufficient annuity to live the life she desired. But she must
act quickly. Interest mounted up and heavy pressure had begun.
It is unfortunately true that men pursuing various trades will conceal
their activities under various names. The Esthonian gentleman, Mr.
Curzon, who had sold Aunt Hilda her Ancestor and so much more, had
already (as plain Charles Blunt of Bristol) advanced her money on note
of hand, and as Mr. de Vere of Jermyn Street advanced her more money
to satisfy the clamourings of plain Charles Blunt. Now Mr. de Vere of
Jermyn Street was beginning to press. But she would sell Rackham and
all would be well.
Such is the heart of woman that she told herself all this was quite
fair to John. He would be her heir—the fact that she would have nothing
to leave him did not alter that. She had made him an honourable offer
to send him to Oxford, and he had refused. She was perpetually asking
him down to Rackham, and wasn’t that kind of her? Indeed, he did not
come half enough. Well, perhaps John was too proud. She respected him
for that. It was the Maple blood—Aunt Hilda by this time had come to
believe that she herself was a Maple.
So there it was. Aunt Hilda with the hot breath of the pursuer on her
neck; John hating these insane renovations and gewgaws; the purchasers
advancing with open mouths and simple smiles.
For purchasers Aunt Hilda had—or believed she had. And in these her
faith held fast.
I have told how dear a friend she had become of Amathea Lady Mere
de Beaurivage, and of her husband, late Sir George Huggins; and now
there was something even warmer in her heart (and certainly something
warmer in his) for that first-rate man of business, Lord Hellup. To
neither, she believed, would Rackham be indifferent now that it had the
Catchings. And as competition is the soul of commerce, she hoped for
sixty—she made certain of fifty—thousand pounds, from the one or from
the other. Even fifty thousand, for what was, at the most, a twenty
thousand pound proposition, was Good Business.
* * * * *
Meanwhile John Maple was pegging away, irregularly but lucratively,
with the performing dogs for a livelihood, and with an increasing
circle of rich friends for a life.
He had three names. He was John Maple in that world of the people who
do nothing and have pale love affairs and go their weary round of
the Riviera and the Country Houses and all know each other by their
Christian names. He was Don Herado de Madero on the Halls. He was
Henry Pelton—a name like any other—for his Bohemian world, including
Spegel. One might have thought that it would be worth Spegel’s while
to track him down and find what he did in the big gaps which he left
in his engagements; and so it would have been worth Spegel’s while.
Later on there might have been blackmail, and blackmail is a staple
of the Spegels. Yet Spegel did not take the trouble, simply because
he accepted too facile an explanation of John Maple’s absences and
disappearances.
His judgment was that the Pelton whom he knew, the Herado de Madero of
the Dogs, suffered from quite incurable drinking bouts. His experience
of quite incurable drinking bouts—it was extensive, for it covered
about half the people he had exploited in his wicked little life—was
that they must be left alone. So when Don Herado (or Pelton) told
him that the dogs would not appear next week; that he must cut out
next Friday; or that Saturday and Monday were washed, Spegel made all
his arrangements accordingly. For Pelton was a great asset, however
irregular. Old ladies who still vote Tory will tell me, no doubt, that
John Maple was thus necessary on the Halls at his own terms because
“blood tells”—the blood of the original cattle-dealer and smith. Their
twin brethren who make money as Labour leaders in the House of Commons
will say, on the platform at least, that John Maple was privileged and
favoured because he had gentle blood—the blood, again, of the smith and
cattle-dealer. But I say that he could do what he liked, cut out days,
shift engagements and live in two worlds because he had talent, and
because on the top of that he was determined to have his own way. Also
because Spegel only cared for money, and because people who only care
for money will give any amount of rope to those whose genius they can
tap.
Here, then, was John Maple these few years after the war, making good
in his curious way; earning much more than he spent, leading two lives,
proud, and possessing already a solid balance at the bank, firmly
affianced in soul to a great heiress who had as firmly affianced him,
and neither of the children really appreciating where money came into
such affairs.
In John Maple’s mind, more prominent even than Bo, stood dominating and
overwhelming a figure—the figure of Twenty Thousand Pounds—the Lump
that would redeem Rackham. In the mind of Bo there stood John Maple.
Anyone might have told these two children that all was at sixes and
sevens with their lives. On which account, the wise, might foretell
that these two lovers would win, and that the enormous incongruities of
their lives would be triumphantly reconciled.