X.

At the club he found a message from Mrs. Hannibal that Lord Ottercove expected him to tea at five o’clock at his house. Frank, who was late, having failed by sheer strength of will to accelerate the movement of the train in the Inner Circle, jumped into a taxi at Dover-street, imploring the driver to make a dash for Stonedge House. But the vehicle, freighted with his dismay and anxiety, got jammed in a mesh of other vehicles. A march through London by the Unemployed, the taxi-driver put him wise: a call to Direct Action. Not for the first time. Frank jumped out, paid the fare, and made a dash through the crowd. A cordon of policemen barred his way into the square. Gaping suspiciously at him, they none the less let him pass through to Stonedge House.

The butler informed him that his lordship was expecting him, but had not yet come in from his walk, and conducted him into a great bare lounge with windows overlooking the Park, a huge marble chimney-piece, as in a club room, with an oil portrait of a member of the Royal family hung over it, and a lady sitting by the log fire. She smiled to him and said Lord Ottercove had asked her to meet him so that she might write an article about him for one of Lord Ottercove’s newspapers, probably the _Evening Ensign_. They had barely exchanged a few words when Lord Ottercove strolled in somberly across the soft carpet with a cloud on his face.

Frank wondered whether the cause of it was not his cashing forthwith one hundred pounds of Lord Ottercove’s money. “Why aren’t you having any tea?” asked the host, and rang for the butler. “Well, have you talked it over?” he asked rather wearily.

“Mr. Dickin has only just come,” said the lady, thus giving her partner away, Frank felt, rather cruelly.

Lord Ottercove gave his visitor a searching look, as though he thought this was a bad beginning. “They wouldn’t let me pass through the crowd,” Frank proffered his excuses.

“Nor would they let me,” said Lord Ottercove.

“A bewildering procession of the Unemployed,” the lady journalist remarked. “More ominous than the last one.”

“Yes. I don’t know what is going to happen. Processions are indelicate manifestations and are best discouraged by indifference. But an idle curiosity sends everyone out into the streets to see what is happening and swells the ranks of the dissatisfied. It is the same with revolutions. Mankind is periodically beset by mass dissatisfaction when, at some obscure, unmeaning signal, men suddenly begin to air their private grievances in a mass--as though that could possibly help them; and then, growing hearty, and with that corporate look in their eyes, they are ready to track down the Evil in their life to any handy bogey--the capitalist, the Jew, the profiteer, the Bolshevik, or any foreigner. It used to be religion--the Jesuit, the Pope, the Turk, or the Free-Mason--but that is now out of fashion. I do not see that anything is likely to side-track their present agitation saving some big stunt which would appeal to their imagination--such as the increased crop-growing scheme which Lord de Jones and myself have in mind. Miss Henderson, will you make a note of that for your Sunday article. Lord de Jones, who is a scientist by training, and myself, under the auspices of the re-dressed and re-bandaged Liberal Party (with Joe pleased as Punch at last to have a party policy) are travelling round the world to agitate public opinion in the countries concerned in favour of the closing of craters, wherever such are known to exist, to increase the crop-growing capacity of weary Mother Earth, for the general benefit of the human race, irrespective of class or nationality. The policy is to be launched in the broadest Liberal terms, and I want my newspapers to give it the widest possible publicity.”

“When do you hope to start on your journey, Lord Ottercove?”

“I cannot tell you. We have to time it with the General Election. It wouldn’t do to have it all behind us before the General Election begins. A policy is only a policy if it is a promise. A difficulty is only a difficulty if it needs overcoming. A difficulty overcome is like your last year’s birthday present. You cannot talk of it with any credit to yourself. And in politics you must boast in order to get credit, and though you cannot boast of what you have done, you can boast of what you will do, if they let you do it for them.”

“Do you expect any difficulties ahead of you?”

“Our difficulty is that there will not be any to enable us to overcome them with glory. But I expect we will be able to overcome that difficulty by creating a few difficulties of the spectacular order we require to swing old Joe back into the saddle at the next General Election, which cannot now be long delayed.”

“Is it an established scientific fact,” Frank ventured, “that the closing of the craters _would_ increase the crop?”

Lord Ottercove frowned. “You’ve asked me that before. I cannot tell you. It’s a journalistic fact, anyhow.” He paused. “But I have no reason to doubt it. It stands to reason if you reflect. More heat, more pressure from the bowels of the earth, and the quicker the blades pushed to the surface. That’s how I read the scientific aspect of it. But de Jones ought to know; he is a scientist.”

“Rather a genius by the looks of him,” said Frank, in order to hear Lord Ottercove reply with deliberation:

“A Genius of the Untried.”

“I see,” said Frank, “you will leave nothing untried, not even questionable science, if you may thereby alleviate the lot of the people.”

“I am a man of the people,” said Lord Ottercove, “and my sympathies are with the people. But here it is not a case of alleviating the lot of the people. Increased crops will cheapen bread, undoubtedly, but only to lower wages. I know my capitalists!”

“But there are socialist weapons for that.”

“Strikes,” said Lord Ottercove. “Direct action. Revolutions.”

Frank was not so much disarmed as submerged by the intensity of Lord Ottercove’s self-assurance.

“No,” said Lord Ottercove. “My aim is somewhat different. In ancient Rome the people were given bread and shows. They will have their bread and plenty of it, the Lord and Lord de Jones willing; but I am out to give them shows, grip their attention, side-track the vicious trend of idle minds--or I am not a journalist.”

He paused to give both listeners an opportunity to survey the boldness and originality of his vision.

“I am a journalist, and I love my newspapers. You, Miss Henderson, and you, Mr. Dickin, must have known love in the course of your lives; my love is akin to yours, but rather than being wasted on a mistress” (he looked at Dickin), “or on a lover” (he looked at Miss Henderson enquiringly), “_my_ love is lavished on my newspapers. I love my newspapers.” Tears stood in his eyes as he spoke, and Miss Henderson and Frank lowered their heads as though they were in church. “I am amazed, with a sweet amazement, when I suddenly look into my heart and discover the depth of my love for these journals of mine.” Miss Henderson and Frank suspended their breath and continued suspending it so far as this is possible. “They were nothing. I witnessed and sponsored their birth; guarded their adolescence; tended their youth; exulted in their maturity....” He paused as if having revealed too much of his heart.

“There is also an intellectual side to it,” he said at last, as if to prove that such things were not foreign to him. “I have slowly come to the realisation that things, the ordinary common things we see and grip, _are_ not: they only seem.... They are phantoms, dreams of some one great Dreamer who has dreamt us and presently awakes to congratulate himself.”

“And are we the dream or the dreamer?”

“Well,” said Lord Ottercove, pensively, “I haven’t so far rounded off my philosophy, though now that you have put this question it is already clear to me that two courses of enquiry are feasible.”

“I mean, are we included in the congratulation?”

“Well,” said Lord Ottercove, “my original thesis was in the negative. But now I have come to think that for a series of Sunday articles in which I want to incorporate my philosophy the notion that we are the Dreamer and everything unpleasant in life the Dream about to be dissolved in the reality of our awakening is rather more cheerful and more suitable from a journalistic point of view and I will pursue the Dreamer as against the Dream course.”

“But is that a ground?”

“Certainly. A journalistic ground.”

“But I thought you were going to write philosophy.”

“Journalism, as I was going to explain, is philosophy. Life is a dream, according to my philosophy, a dream of illusions. And this faculty of creating illusions in a world of appearances is, I claim, the function of the journalist.”

“Make-belief?”

“If you like to--to put it so crudely,” said Lord Ottercove, evidently hurt. It seemed strange to see this rich, successful, powerful, middle-aged newspaper magnate, once Cabinet Minister, hurt. So it seemed he was vulnerable?

Miss Henderson rose, and her host and employer, in his double capacity, saw her out into the hall, murmuring, “So you have grasped the trend of the Wheat-Growing Story?”--completing his instructions in an undertone. “And will you do a story on Mr. Dickin? Dwell on the strange similarity of his name to another famous novelist?”

“Which one, Lord Ottercove?”

“Dickens, my girl. Author of _David Copperfield_, _The Pickwick Papers_, _Oliver Twist_, _The Tale of Two Cities_. You might work Mr. Dickin into these tales. Perhaps suggest a common ancestry. Here’s a title for you: ‘Is Genius Hereditary?: The Unpublished Story of the Dickens Issue.’ You might add that modesty, a fastidious dislike to shine in the blinding light of his grandparent caused this shy, blinking, unassuming-looking youth who, nevertheless, in the course of years is groping after the crown of his illustrious forbear, to drop the ‘s’ in his name--and substitute ‘i’ for ‘e’.”

“I see.”

“Well, I’ve given you two stories. Write them to-night and send them in to me before breakfast to-morrow. I will read them in bed directly on waking. Good-bye to you.”

* * * * *

Frank was about to follow Miss Henderson, and rose; but “Don’t go,” said the host, and each sank back into an enormous leather chair, Lord Ottercove opening his mouth to pose a question--perhaps why had Frank cashed so much money--when the butler strode in, announcing:

“Mr. Atkinson, my lord.”

“Come in! Come in, Atkinson!” roared Lord Ottercove. “You bloody ruffian ... come right in. Well, how’s New Zealand? Gone to hell, I suppose, since I left it, what? This is Mr. Dickin. You’ve read his books, of course. _The Tale of Two Cities. David Copperfield._”

“Of course, of course.”

“Bloody liar, you’ve read nothing!”

“Too busy, too busy ...” murmured Mr. Atkinson.

“How would you like turning out twenty motor-cars a day Mr. Dickin? This man here earns more money in an hour of his sleep by growing fat than you with all your artistry and intelligence and talent can earn in a year!”

“I assure you,” Mr. Atkinson protested, “there is great artistry in designing a new model ... and the machinery, too, trickish ... devilishly trickish.... At least Archie thinks so. But then Archie--”

“Is a liar,” supplied Lord Ottercove, looking humorously at Frank, who, not knowing Archie, smiled at them both noncommittally.

“Did I tell you Archie’s latest?” asked the guest.

“No.”

“He’d gone out hunting lions in East Africa. ‘I advance,’ he says, ‘under cover, and straight before me sits a lion. I aim--and bang! down goes the lion. But there, a few paces off, if you please, sits a second lion. Bang! And down he goes. I shoulder my gun and advance under cover, and there, just in front, sits the third lion--’”

The telephone at Lord Ottercove’s feet rang discreetly, and taking it up, “Of course,” he said. “Use your judgment. What’s the use of my having a great editor like you if I am to do all the work? Quite. In the question of National Defence I am supporting the Admiralty against the Air Force. All you need know. Good-bye to you.”

The motor-car manufacturer was evidently only waiting for the host to put down the receiver, for:

“‘And there to the side of me was the fourth lion,’” he said, smiling all over.

Lord Ottercove looked pensive. “Excuse me,” he said, and taking up the telephone from the floor spoke, “Give me Lady de Jones. How are you, Eleonor? Look here, you’d better have Admiral Battersea to your right and the Emir to your left to-morrow night. I want to mark my support of the Admiralty. What? You would rather I gave you the £30,000 necklace for your birthday? You’re welcome to it, of course. But I advise you against it. Why? I don’t think it will do you any good having it. Why? It would not make you happy. Why not? The remorse at imposing on your uncle. Not a bit, you are welcome to it, my dear; it is only advice. Good day, to you.”

“‘And there,’” said Mr. Atkinson, watching his friend put down the telephone, “‘was the fifth lion.’”

“Excuse me,” said the host, and uttered forth a strange wood-note like a bird (which he must have learnt when as a boy he tended to spend his school hours in the wood behind Ottercove); in answer to which vocal sign Mrs. Hannibal came into his presence. “Tell Franklin,” said Lord Ottercove, completing his instructions in an undertone with an almost silent movement of his robust lips. The instructions were so long and explicit that the car manufacturer, despairing of securing Lord Ottercove’s attention, buttonholed Frank Dickin and was saying to him in a tone hushed to a level likely not to interfere with their host’s business conversation but adequately forceful and dramatic:

“‘And there,’ says he, ‘to either side of me were the sixth and seventh lion. Bang! Bang! Down they went.’”

“What’s that?” Lord Ottercove questioned, Mrs. Hannibal having gone to execute his instructions.

“‘Down they went....’”

“Who?”

“The sixth and the seventh lions.”

“H’m.”

“‘And there,’ he says, ‘to the front of me ... was ... the eighth lion!’”

Here the car manufacturer paused for appreciation, a little tardy in coming; and then, not waiting for it and holding his curved sides to prevent them from splitting, burst out into a Homeric roar.

“Well,” he said, cheerily, linking this his leave-taking to the humorous anecdote, but his face growing serious, “thank you for your hospitality. What message have you for me to take back with me to New Zealand? Is the Old Country all right? Will keep the flag flying? Eh? What?”

“Sure!” from Lord Ottercove, more forced than spontaneous.

“If,” said the car manufacturer, “you can keep Labour down and their wages you’ll be all right in this old country yet.”

“This is a point,” Lord Ottercove said coldly, “on which I differ from you,” looking to Frank for recognition of this sympathetic attitude to the workers.

“But ain’t we both of us Conservatives?”

“In New Zealand, yes, but not in this country, Atkinson.”

“How so?” the dull, blood-shot look of an uncomprehending bull coming into the manufacturer’s face.

“In so far as I wish to conserve the liberties won by the Liberals in the past, I am a Conservative; but in as much as I would gain new liberties worth the conservation, I am a Liberal.”

He paused, and added:

“I stand for tolerance--for the complete toleration of everything short of the intolerable.”

The car manufacturer, shaking his head at the brainy madcapness that overtakes some successful business men, made for the door, followed cheerily by Ottercove, proffering, with subversive gusto, advice to a man he knew incapable of following it. “Atkinson, you should stop making money and go in for Thought.”

“Why should I, if it keeps me occupied?”

“It’s a vice. A man should stop when he has made enough. I’ve stopped.”

Frank made a mental picture of Lord Ottercove stopping. “You don’t make any more money, Lord Ottercove?” he asked.

“No. Except for such as makes itself. Of course, every year I am called upon to invest fresh capital. But that is not for want of any facility of imagination in the art of spending it.”

Lord Ottercove followed Mr. Atkinson into the hall, and as he waited for his host’s return Frank Dickin’s mind sang and tingled at the thought of money. Money! Money! Money! How did Lord Ottercove make so much money? “Business ability,” was the saying. But what was it? Frank’s ideas were vague and nebulous. Lord Ottercove, he thought, bought consols, sold them at valuation, at contango, and depreciation; bought debentures at quotation; accumulated stock, multiplied it by going into liquidation ... and made a fortune. Frank believed High Finance to be closely allied with Mysticism. It was ineffable and inutterable: it could be revealed, but not explained; its priests were inspired. As Lord Ottercove returned to him, with a smile, he blessed Lord Ottercove’s entire organisation for the kindly light that emanated from him. Lord Ottercove’s bias, he was pleased to note, was artistic. He turned his turnovers like a virtuoso, delighting in what he could do with so little effort. His friendships, his natural disposition, were all for artists. His collar and negligent tie bore witness to it. Whenever Frank was about to rise Lord Ottercove would say, “Don’t go.” And when at last the guest, feeling the indecency of lingering any longer, rose convincingly, Lord Ottercove reminded him that he was dining with him to-morrow night.

“I am afraid for my own sake,” said the visitor, “that the more you see of me, the sooner will the reaction in you, to borrow the language of critics, make itself felt.”

“My dear fellow,” said Lord Ottercove, “you don’t know how all this delights me. Are you,” he asked in the hushed tones of a doctor who enquires if your stomach is in order, “drawing all the money you want?”

“Yes. Thanks awfully.”

“Good-bye to you!”