XXIV.

NICE

The day after the christening of the Kerr-de Jones baby, Frank, having received a telegram from Ottercove inviting him to come to Nice, went abroad. His wife was grazing somewhere--he didn’t know where.

He didn’t bother about Cynthia. He didn’t see why he should bother about her. He could have divorced her, or she could have divorced him, but he didn’t see why he should go to the bother of divorcing her. He simply didn’t bother about her. And, moreover, she didn’t bother about him.

Mrs. Kerr, he recalled, had been conspicuous at the christening of the Honourable Richard Mosquito, and Pilling had been loud in extolling, some felt rather indiscreetly, the Kerr strain in the baby. Raymond, hastily adopted by de Jones, officiated in the absence of his father at the side of Eleonor. He looked very red and hot and embarrassed at the arrival of his little son-brother and resented Pilling’s _faux pas_, who, conscious of his blunder, and anxious to agree that the baby was the image of de Jones, added inadvertently: “But of course! The image of his grandfather,” while Mr. Kerr walked about sardonically, as if saying: “This is my revenge.”

“Can’t stand that man Pilling,” Raymond said bitterly.

“I, on the contrary,” rejoined his mother, “find him a very charming, intellectual young man.”

“Why doesn’t he marry Zita?”

“My dear, he can’t. He is already married.”

“Then why doesn’t he leave her to marry another?”

“They live together--just the same as if they were married. That is a common custom nowadays among the more intellectual classes. Already in my youth it was accepted. You even find it in Turgenev and Dostoevski.”

In parting on the kerb, Frank overheard Mrs. Kerr thanking her son. “Chris can give me nothing now. And if he could, he would give it all to Eva.”

“Eleonor,” said Raymond, “has no banking account of her own. But she has a cheque book and draws on her uncle’s account to an unlimited extent.”

“A very nice, well-read, original young woman, and I am very fond of her,” was Mrs. Kerr’s reply.

Smiling thus over these insistent memories of yesterday, Frank pulled open the blinds in the morning: the blue train was touching the south coast of France.

Nice. The most beautiful thing about Nice is its name, full of a delicious springtide fragrance. Apart from the name, it may be questioned, Frank thought, whether there was anything else particularly beautiful about the town, that somewhat hard and heartless courtesan de luxe organised for the sale of dubious pleasure.

Already from the window of your carriage you behold the long train bending like a serpent as it races up the coast carrying dutifully its load of passengers who had dribbled from the four corners of the world, congregating towards Paris, rushed in the night through northern wet and wind and bleakness, to turn the corner at Marseilles at daybreak, and now gaily down the sunny Côte d’Azur, past all the pink and cream and white of basking villas, towards Nice.

In another three hours, Frank reflected, he would see Eva, and the benignant luxury of the scenery illustrated his anticipation. The train curved amid the rocky hills and flowery valleys, past the rose-white garden villas perched above the blue, blue sea--all swiftly whirling by.

Nice.

“His lordship is lunching in the restaurant and asks you to come in, sir.”

Entering the huge dining-room, Frank instantly perceived Lord Ottercove’s steel-grey eye peering at him in its essential hardness, but softened as it were by an air of bonhomie. There was about the baron’s face something at once fine and comic, stern and pantaloonish, Jehovahian and George Robian. His glinting eyes blazed with a righteous blue fire, while his tilted nose protruded a naïve, peeping curiosity about human affairs, and his noble brow frowned olympically. When he closed one eye at you to glint with double force with the other, he looked a satyr. At one side of him was Eva, gay and spring-like in appearance; on the other, Lord de Jones, more shark-like than ever. No one could look less a peer than de Jones.

“Why won’t you take off your coat and come and have lunch?” said Ottercove, genially. The three of them looked as though they had been revelling considerably.

“You do all look washed out,” said Frank.

“We’ve decided to make a halt here before going on to Rome,” said Ottercove. “I must recuperate my forces before I tackle Mussolini over the craters.”

“Do you expect any serious opposition?”

“Yuh,” said Ottercove. “I guess they’ll want heavy compensation. The Vesuvius alone, they argue, is a steady source of revenue, attracting hordes of tourists.”

“But he must see the international side of it if he has any good will in him.”

“The good will among men,” said the baron, “is a moral support physically precarious for individual man to lean on. But all the better for us. We are in no hurry since the General Election is again delayed. We must give the illusion of warring, of desperately battling with evil and sinister forces and win the battle of David and Goliath.”

“Well, you certainly look exhausted.”

“Don’t look at Chris,” said Eva. (So she already called him ‘Chris’!) “He is always dirty looking, he can’t help it. I mean he’s clean, but dirty-looking. There are such people. And there are others, who are dirty and always look quite clean.”

“You wise little girl, Eva,” said Ottercove tenderly.

“Lord Ottercove, have you read Ferdinand’s novel?” she asked.

“I’ve read it twice.”

“H’m.--I must read it again,” she said.

After lunch, Lord Ottercove took them up to his suite. On the table in the drawing-room copies of his newspapers were spread out invitingly. “I can’t,” said Frank, fingering _The Evening Ensign_, “behold this newspaper without an inward pang.”

Lord Ottercove frowned. He did not like to be reminded of it. Instead, and in pursuance of a certain association of ideas, he asked,

“What have you done to Cynthia?”

“Alas! Alack!” said Frank, who, in the absence of his host’s material interest in their marriage, did not see himself compelled to satisfy the baron’s idle curiosity.

Learning from Frank that he had put up at another hotel and would not move over to this for fear of being ruined, “Stay with me two or three weeks,” said Lord Ottercove. “You don’t know what pleasure it gives me.” His words were so warm and inviting. “Gilbert,” he said softly, “go and see if there are any more rooms on this floor.”

“Yes, m’lord.”

Gilbert returned to say that there was the choice of an imperial and an ordinary suite. Which of the two did his lordship wish him to reserve for Mr. Dickin?

“Mr. Dickin will see and choose for himself,” said Lord Ottercove. “And now I will jump into bed. I will see the three of you, I hope, at dinner and take you to the Opera at Monte Carlo.”

“Agreed!”