VII.

“Well, I went to one or two of her intellectual tea parties, and once I just missed Lord de Jones by a hair’s breadth: he had left a minute or so before my arrival.”

“De Jones! You don’t say so!” exclaimed Lord Ottercove. “Ha!” And he shook his head.

“And how,” he asked after a pause, pulling out his watch and looking at it with mild alarm, “do you finish your serial? Does your hero marry both sisters and serve his time for bigamy?”

“No. I will read it to you.”

“Don’t: it suffices that I have your word for it. Shall _I_ tell you what becomes of your characters?”

“Do.”

“Shall I tell you where they are?”

“Where?”

“Here. In London.”

“I know.”

“But do you know who got them to come over?”

“I can guess.”

“You’re good at guessing, are you? And can you guess why he got them over?”

“I think I have shown through the pages of my serial that I am not insensible to his interest in the mother.”

“Or in the daughter.”

“In the daughter!?”

“The younger daughter.”

“Eva? Great heavens!”

“I am happy,” said Lord Ottercove, “to be able to introduce into your serial this little touch of suspense. Indeed, if there is an element lacking in your story it is this element of suspense. Between you and me, it is an element entirely unimportant and one which, I have always found, interferes with the peaceful enjoyment of a story as it tells itself through the growth and actions of the characters. But it is, nevertheless, an element upon which serial editors insist as a matter of tradition. But I am going to change all that. I am, perhaps you have noticed, changing the tradition of journalism in this country.”

“For the better,” said Frank.

“What?”

“For the better,” said Frank.

“Now I like your story. I think it is a corking tale. I accept it for my newspapers, and what is more I will pay for it. Now what do you want for it?”

Frank hesitated only a moment. Better men than he owed their fortune to a bold word put in in the proper accent at the proper moment. Big men act bigly, so that their gestures may go down to history. And what did Shakespeare say? “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

He closed his eyes. “£10,000,” he said.

Now, despite the opening given him, Lord Ottercove did not avail himself of the immortal gesture. Or, perhaps he couldn’t recognise a tide in the affairs of another man.

“Ha!” he said, and leaned back. “If I--if I gave you--gave you--” (The sum seemed to stick in his throat), “gave you £10,000, my staff would think I’d gone right off my chump; and I should have, of course.”

He took up the receiver and said: “I want Mr. Wilson.” And turning back to the visitor: “I can’t do these things over the head of my serial editor. I can’t do these things over the heads of my editors,” he repeated; and again: “I can’t do these things--“, to fill the interval of time it took Mr. Wilson to reach the office. And now Mr. Wilson, with eyes and crown discreetly lustrous, was shown in by the page.

“This, Mr. Wilson, is Mr. Dickin from whom I want to buy a serial. I asked him to name a price, and he said £10,000, which is, of course, preposterous.”

Mr. Wilson inclined his head a little, thus discreetly suggesting that it was preposterous.

“Mr. Dickin,” continued Lord Ottercove, “is not acquainted with the prices of serials paid by newspapers. Obviously so, to judge by the figure he named. What do you think we ought to pay him?”

“Well--” said Mr. Wilson. The situation was one warranting discretion. “The prices vary.” It was not wise to say more.

Lord Ottercove looked sad and troubled at having to be so.

“According to the serial and the author,” Mr. Wilson added.

“I suppose,” Lord Ottercove said doubtfully, “you are a fairly good author?”

“I suppose so,” Frank said gloomily.

“Has Vernon Sprott read any of your novels?” Vernon Sprott was the foreman of British fiction, proud of purse and dexterous with the pen.

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll ask him.--Give me Vernon Sprott--Vernon, old boy, how are you?” Frank had a feeling that he was at the centre of all things, in the very signal box from which all the wires were pulled and the signals flashed the wide world over. “Vernon, I say, have you read any of Frank Dickin’s novels? You have? Well, what do you think of them? What? They’re all right? Vernon, good evening to you!” He put down the receiver. “He says they’re all right.”

“That’s good.”

“Well--” said Lord Ottercove, still far from making history. But the next moment, as a cat is reputed nearly always to fall on its feet, he slipped into history. “Are you,” he said, “at all ready to leave it all to me?”

“To no one more!” Dickin said passionately, feeling that he was now treading a pivot on which fortunes turn, and henceforward fly round, multiplying incessantly.

“I’ll tell you what I will do for you. I’ll let you draw on my account.”

“On your account?”

“Yuh!”

“To--to what extent?”

“Without limit.”

“But how do you mean?”

“As much as you need.”

Frank, flushed, his scalp tingling, punctuated the air with words of embarrassed and bewildered gratitude. “ ... incredible ... incomprehensible....”

Lord Ottercove, as in an alternating duet, kept up with: “Not a bit.... I like doing it....”

“I cannot believe it....”

“My dear fellow, it’s a pleasure to me....”

“I’m staggered....”

“It shall be done!...”

“Speechless.... It’s a dream....”

“Which is your bank?”

“Barclays.”

He took up the receiver. “I want Mrs. Hannibal.”

Mrs. Hannibal was Lord Ottercove’s Secretary-in-Chief. This was, as she entered, already apparent from her general demeanour, from her outward calm and ease and the smiles and little graces she was able to bestow on visitors: that somewhat frozen smile of a lion trainer who, while smiling thus his careless smile at the fascinated audience, is yet, you notice by a certain pink light in the corner of his eye, not unaware of the gravity of the task in hand, of the fearful perils of the open cage with the unaccountable big lion.

“Mrs. Hannibal, will you arrange for Mr. Dickin to draw on my account at Barclays Bank to an unlimited extent, till further notice.”

Mrs. Hannibal had trained herself never to look astonished. “Yes,” she said, making a shorthand note of it in her book, and vanished with ease to complete it in practice. At that moment another visitor--a strange man in large ungainly boots--was ushered into the vast gay room.

“Hullo, Chris!” Lord Ottercove exclaimed.

“How are you, Rex?”

“Oh--bored to hell. Mr. Dickin has just been reading me his serial.” And without any further introduction, he rose and took the visitor across to the large blue sofa at the far end of the room, and both men sat down and engaged in a silent conversation in which the movements of their lips alone were perceptible (as so often happens on the stage). After a while they rose and sauntered towards Frank.

“Have you, Mr. Dickin, ever heard of a man who can grow two blades of grass for every one? You haven’t? Well, Lord de Jones is the man to do it, and, moreover, I am the man to get him to do it.--You know Mr. Dickin, Chris?”

“No,” said Lord de Jones, holding out a bony hand. “How do you do?”

“But he knows _you_, Chris. He’s put you into his blooming book!”

Lord de Jones smiled, revealing a row of shark-like teeth. There was something, Frank felt, uncanny and incalculable about him. Lord de Jones could be most suitably described as “a strange man.”

“Lord de Jones,” explained the host, “is a religious scientist. He belongs to the Adventist sect. His argument, if you make bold to disagree with him, is that any one unwilling to be converted to his faith is prevented from doing so by the Devil.”

“I believe,” said Lord de Jones earnestly, “that the world is approaching its prophesied end--”

“Creaking under the burden of his abominations,” laughed his wife’s uncle.

“It may be for that reason,” rejoined Lord de Jones, “that I have been chosen as His instrument to bring about an end.”

“It may be. But before you are instrumental in so doing you will be good enough to carry out your plan of increasing the crop-growing capacity and general fecundity of this lazy mother earth by closing all the craters in the world.”

“Oh?” said Dickin. “Is that a fact? I mean is it a fact that the closing of craters would inevitably have that effect?”

“Yuh,” said Lord Ottercove.

“Are you sure it’s good science?”

“It’s good politics, anyway. The only thing to give old Joe a leg up. The Liberal Party has no platform. Never had one since the Great War. But this crop-increasing stunt will appeal to all sections of the community, and will be the saving of the party. It appeals to me on two grounds. It’s sound economics--at least on the face of it; it’s got a Liberal smack about it: ‘International Good Will. Live and Let Live. Bread for the People.’ Why, it will simply swing him back into the saddle!--But you will exercise discretion, won’t you?” he turned to Frank. “I hope you don’t transcribe everything into your books, do you?”

“Everything,” said Frank.

For a while the three of them sat silent round the octangular table. Lord Ottercove looked kind and a little fatigued; Lord de Jones silent and pensive. Frank looked at the great newspaper proprietor, who was obviously tired but still genial and kind, and his heart swelled with gratitude and a love for Ottercove and the world that he graced and illumined. “I think,” he said, “I am really taking up too much of your time.”

“Not at all. Do stay. And will you dine with me on Friday night at half past eight at my house?”

The intimate warmth of the great room, the political confidences exchanged in his presence, all this filled Frank Dickin with a sense of loyal elation. At last he rose.

“I hope to see you several times before Friday,” said Lord Ottercove, rising and proffering a strong, sensitive hand. “Don’t forget to give your address to my secretary, and come and see me any time you like. Good-bye to you. And mind the step.”

On the landing, Mrs. Hannibal caught him and gave him a special cheque book. “This will be all right,” she said. “I have advised them.”

In the glass in the lift he saw red patches on his cheeks. He thought that unless he steadied his thoughts he might have a stroke. His heart ebbed and swelled and he walked unsteadily on his feet past the braided commissionaire into the lighted street.