XXIX.

When Frank knocked at Eva’s door there was no answer. As he flung himself into bed the sun already pressed itself through the curtain.

The glowing earth swam in a silver sky. It swam and swam. And a shark came out and followed it wanting to devour it. The poor earth had but two fins and swam helplessly out of the reach of de Jones’s jaws. There she was with all her cities and towns labouring to get away, panting dreadfully; how hard he pushed her and how ineffectively. That was because he was a passenger upon her and helpless as a man endeavouring to accelerate the motion of a train. In his office on the top of the roof, from the captain’s bridge, Ottercove shouted orders through a megaphone: “Faster! faster! faster!” he cried. And the capitalists whipped up the slaves and made them row faster. But a Trade Union strike was just on and the miners and rowing men quitted their tools. And the Prime Minister, as he urged the policemen to hearten them up with their bayonet points, appealed to the galley slaves’ sense of duty and patriotism and called on them “by a supreme effort, their loyalty and solidarity in the cause of Humanity to save this planet, our Mother Earth, the common heritage of all our race, from the treacherous jaws of that monster,” while Ottercove from the bridge, whence there opened a limitless view of the world, including Ludgate-hill and St. Paul’s, shouted at them through the megaphone: “Faster, damn you! Still faster!” Already de Jones’s huge lower jaw dropped and took water as he swam up very close, and Frank’s heart stopped beating. The shark’s jaws opened quite wide about to swallow the earth with London and Paris and Vienna and all, and the men in the fields and the women and animals and the suffering; and Ottercove from his bridge (pushing aside the Prime Minister) encouraged the rowing men with a long, big stick, as de Jones’s sharp teeth fastened upon the green flanks of the earth--an enormous stick like the trunk of a tree: Bang! bang! bang! The knocking grew louder.

Frank opened his eyes. “Come in,” he said.

The door opened admitting Gilbert’s tremulous frame. “Sorry to waken you, sir, but his lordship asks if you will take breakfast with him in his bedroom.”

He threw on his dressing-gown and followed the valet into his master’s apartment, where he found the baron in bed, which was littered with newspapers. “Well,” said Lord Ottercove genially, “I’ve got away with the goods.” The balcony door was wide open. The blue Mediterranean stretched out its paws and basked in the sun.

De Jones came in, and at the same time Eva in her pink dressing-gown and red-heeled slippers sidled in from the adjoining room. “Gilbert,” she said, “please wrap these up for me.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Let me introduce you to my wife,” said Ottercove.

“Your wife--?”

“We went and got married last night,” she explained.

“A brain wave,” said Ottercove. “I get such brain waves sometimes.”

“A happy thought,” said Eva.

“The second inspiration,” de Jones looked at Frank.

“Anyway I got the better of you two there,” said Ottercove uncertainly.

“You did,” said Eva. “It never occurred to them to do it. And I am sure I gave you plenty of opportunities, Ferdinand.” Her tone was meek and propitiating. “So it’s not my fault.”

“No, of course not. Still, it is a blow. One is never so keen on a thing as when one has just lost it.”

Lord Ottercove smiled pleasantly. The assertion seemed to rehabilitate his doubting judgment as to whether he had acted wisely overnight. “Of course,” he said, “she’s a nice girl and wanted encouraging with marriage to a man of brains and money who can do something with her. I felt all along it would have been sheer waste throwing her away on either of you. Casting pearls before swine, though I don’t, of course, mean anything personal. Will you both lunch with us?”

At lunch Lord Ottercove was subdued. All competition had suddenly ceased with his acclaim as the winner; yet he did not look at all as though he had won the Derby. He looked as he must have felt: as if he had rolled head over heels in his best trousers and torn a hole in the seat, and that instead of everyone laughing and clapping they merely said to him, “Go and change.” In passing things during lunch and helping himself he looked a little shame-faced, and the three men were all glad when the meal was over and they could go for a drive. Each wanted to be sure that Eva took the ukulele with her to help them slide over the blank minutes. Frank enjoyed riding about with Lord Ottercove in powerful motor-cars, rapidly, rapidly, with a purposeful air, to no particular destination. It was somehow, he felt, symbolical of Ottercove’s whole person. “Now, Chris, shut up and let us hear what Dickin has to say.” And after listening to Frank, “Now, Dickin, shut up. You’ve said enough. Chris, let’s hear you.” Then: “Well, neither of you seem to have anything very illuminating to say. I had better think it out myself.”

“You’re a genius,” said Frank. “A genius of God-knows-what; but a genius!”

“Yes,” concurred de Jones, “there is no doubt at all about your greatness; there may be some doubt about the quality of your greatness, but no doubt about the greatness.”

“Yes, when you are without your spectacles, Rex, you look a genius,” said Eva. “But the moment you put them on you look like a doctor or a harassed business man, or a clergyman who says, ‘How are we this morning?’”

“My heart,” said Lord Ottercove, “very jumpy to-day.”

“I think it’s the stomach,” said Eva.

“I think it’s the stomach,” said Ottercove gravely, but reassured.

“I think so,” said Frank. “Complete stoppage of the bowels.”

“Better go back and telephone for the doctor,” said Eva.

Lord Ottercove was touched if you chanced to ask about his health, and now at Eva’s solicitude his eyes brimmed with tears. He took her hand and stroked it. He was so moved by her attitude that he could not speak, and only swallowed several times, and looked away. His health was not too good. His boiler would suddenly demur in the midst of festivities and pursue a mood of its own, and looking at the baron now as he reclined hatless in the depth of the limousine, Dickin wondered if the centre of his lordship’s mind was not--his expression suggested it--superintending the issues fought within him.

“No wonder,” Eva said, “your nose is red and shiny with all this whizzing up and down in motor-cars and not a moment’s quietness.”

He stroked her hand and went to sleep.

Frank looked a long time at Eva, reproachfully, before he asked in a whisper: “Why, why did you marry him? Why?”

“I thought it would please Pilling.”

“And I am forgotten! It didn’t take long.”

“But you are married yourself.”

“True. I’d forgotten.”

“Rex telegraphed last night after we had got married for Mummy and Zita and Pilling and Raymond and all to come out. ‘Let ’em all come out, the whole bag o’ tricks of them!’ he said. And we were married by a funny-looking parson; Rex had to pull him out of bed to marry us. He gave him five minutes to slip into some clothes, and a hundred pounds of money, and he married us in the sitting room without any trouble; said it would be all right. I was so pleased it was definite. But Rex looked puzzled and worried and talked to himself all the time, and when we were back in the car he said he must have walked upstairs to the clergyman’s flat in his sleep and wondered whether what he had just done could not be undone perhaps by the Pope if he said he was a sleep-walker. But I said the law was sacred and definite for better or worse. And when we were all alone in the car and I began kissing him because he was my husband and expected him to behave like a bridegroom, he was so scared and looked through the window as though he wanted to jump out. And I held him back and tried to calm him down, and he kept saying: ‘My God! My God!’ And he asked me what had happened on the hill then? And I said, ‘Read Ferdinand’s serial.’ And he said, ‘Did it happen as in the serial?’ I said, ‘Read the serial and never mind what happened.’ And so he looked as though he’d gone and paid a huge price for something he’d bought at a shop and then got home and found it was quite rotten.”

“You may be his wife, Eva,” de Jones said, “but first and foremost you are my secretary. And you shall remain with me for the duration of my mission.”

“Yes, I will do my best, Chris, to help you grow wheat.”

He laughed. “They will believe anything--anything. But if ever you conceive something really terrible, nobody will hinder you but they will let you blow them up into smithereens with the sympathetic assistance of the Ottercoves and such who will believe the first cock-and-bull story that you choose to tell them.”

Lord Ottercove opened one eye and glared with it at de Jones, then closed it.

“Let us change the conversation,” Eva said.

Pointing at a pillared villa, “I like that pillared thing,” Frank said. “It asserts itself on the surrounding landscape. It’s a yea-saying to life! None of your snivelling English houses looking like half-built factories of red brick, hiding their faces as if ashamed of themselves.”

“Buy it, Rex, just for the two of us,” said Eva.

“I’ll buy it,” said the baron.

They got out and bought it, and then motored back to Nice in time for tea.

After tea, de Jones took Frank by the arm and marched him up and down the deserted, wind-swept Promenade des Anglais. “Why did he marry that girl, Dickin? He had no notion of it when he left us at Maxime’s last night. Just to be able to say to us in the morning: ‘I’ve got away with the goods.’ For the love of the phrase. And mind you, he didn’t seduce her--no fun in that, no advertisement! altogether too ordinary--but he married her to do something more striking that may arouse comment. He just felt that he owed it to himself and his brains and his money and all to afford a real piece of folly.”

“No, de Jones, it is we who are the fools for not having married her. His second inspiration has not failed him. It never does. He has enriched the rest of his life. Her sheer livingness is inexhaustible and--I can see it in your eyes, hear it in your voice--you love her as I do, more and more, to my dismay. All art is the translation of the subjective into an object. Thus I prefer Eva to earnest women who can talk of Pessimism and Buddhism but have no living and spontaneous form themselves. When an object like Eva shows no visible sign of containing a subject but appeals beyond all analysis, it may be taken that the divine spirit has found in her a happy home. She is God’s art, perfect like a flower.”

“You are right, Dickin. The soul wants fresh food, just the same as the body. And what some please to call the divided soul is the taste of a spiritual epicure whose crime and curse is that he does not care for preserved food. My excellent uncle Lord O. must always have everything of the best.”

“Oh, the memory of that first kiss! How she came into my arms, pliable like a young plant. The hot sun, the menace of our end, and the longing not to die unmarried. De Jones, I can’t believe that I have lost her. She will have all his houses and horses and servants to play with.”

“But not all the King’s horses, not all the King’s men, can put Humpty-Dumpty together again.”

When in the evening Frank returned to his rooms, he found a gold watch on his table. The watch was studded with large diamonds and inside was the engraved inscription:

“_From Eva Ottercove_ _With Love._”

When he entered the Ottercove’s suite and lingered in the drawing-room he was startled by the animated conversation which reached him from the adjoining bedroom. “Now don’t you think,” said a grieved, perhaps somewhat sarcastic voice, unmistakably the baron’s, “you should have taken me into your counsels instead of first disposing of the watch and then sending the jeweller to me for the money?”

“But you haven’t seen it!” the baroness rejoined impatiently. “It’s not at all expensive for what it is; it’s all in diamonds. What’s the use of your saying anything when you haven’t _seen_ it?”

“Just so. Don’t you think I should have seen it, in view of your youth and inexperience, instead of laying yourself out to be swindled?”

“It’s nothing to you even to be swindled, so why make any bones about it?”

This seemed to disarm the other for a space. “Why do you do these things?” he then asked sadly.

“I wanted to please him.”

“But you could have waited a little, or asked.”

“You are an awful old miser,” she said, “and I am sorry I ever married you.”

“I see that I shall have to engage a governess to go about with you and chaperone you for a bit.”

“You are a walking mountain of impudence!” said the baroness, “and I don’t know what God was about when he made you!”