IX.

Leaving the hotel next morning, they passed the gauntlet of waiting menials and tipped their way through to the door to the total price of their freedom, while the door porter waved his arms in the middle of the street in an ostentatious display to arrest a taxi for them, and a page boy craned his neck at the glass door to see if it was coming, to receive, for looking interested, another sixpence.

At the bank he cashed, without any trouble, a cheque for one hundred pounds, and indulged in some purchases for himself. Unlike Edith Wharton’s American heroes and heroines, he did not buy a grand piano, a motor-car, or a steam yacht, but invested in shirts, waistcoats, a new pair of pyjamas, a bathing-suit and an opera hat. At a bookstall he bought a booklet in a bright yellow jacket entitled _Dictators of the Press_ and a recent volume of _Who’s Who_, and at lunch, having tired a little of Eva’s conversation, absorbed himself in the literature he had purchased.

_Who’s Who_, laconic but informative, recorded:

“OTTERCOVE, Rex Victor Alexander Green, P. C. 1st. Baron Ottercove of Ottercove. _b_. Ottercove, New Zealand; unmarried; _heiress_: niece, Eleonor Viscountess de Jones; _recreation_: controlling public opinion; _address_: Bourne Abbey, Kent; Stonedge House, S.W. 1.”

He read it out aloud to Eva, who said that Pilling would approve of the address.

The little yellow booklet related in a racy style the facts which were more or less common knowledge to the public, but re-dressed them with gay ribbons of fancy and let them scurry down the ebullient river of facile imagination. Frank learnt that Lord Ottercove was probably the greatest political and financial force operating in the England of the twentieth century--greater than Lord Northcliffe, greater than Lord Beaverbrook. Yes, greater! History records (said the little yellow book) that if the latter two had chosen to pull together there was nothing in the realm of the material universe that these two peers could not accomplish. Now what they could do if they pulled together Lord Ottercove, it seemed, could do alone. If you took the trouble to turn up in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ the rubric recording the development of journalism in the last half-century, you would learn that just as Lord Northcliffe’s advent opens a new page, and Lord Beaverbrook’s another, so the arrival of Lord Ottercove in Fleet Street definitely marks a third and, possibly, last, stage.

He was born (the booklet said) of English missionary stock in New Zealand, who, after working for the furtherance of what they regarded as the Christian Cause, in heathen lands, retired to that Commonwealth upon whose soil our hero first saw light. Human meteors had been known to exist before: but never quite so swift, so bright, so deft, so certain. By seventeen, Rex Green controlled the major part of the New Zealand industries. By the time he was nineteen he exhausted all Colonial possibilities and went to the United States and captured Wall Street. At twenty-four he accumulated such a fortune that, from sheer revulsion, he stopped making money (except for such as rolled in on its own momentum), came to England and plunged into home politics. He unmade two Prime Ministers, made a third, buried a fourth, and, tired of the game of politics, accepted a peerage, buying a controlling share in the _Universal Press of the United Kingdom Syndicate_. He bought fifty-one per cent. of the shares of a daily newspaper, arranging that this newspaper should purchase fifty-one per cent. of the shares of another newspaper, which second newspaper he instructed to buy fifty-one per cent. of the shares of a third newspaper, continuing the application of this principle, till, controlling the first newspaper, he automatically controlled all the worthwhile newspapers in the United Kingdom.

Yet despite his meteoric sweep, Rex Green was a man of strong attachments. So when, with the offer of a peerage, the time arrived for choosing a new name, and all the county, town, village, street and railway names in England lay before him, the great man remembered the little village in New Zealand that had been his landing-stage where he alighted we know not whence upon the Realm of Matter, and decided by adopting its name to distinguish the village. “In Ottercove I was born, and as Ottercove I will die,” he was reported to have said at the banquet given in his honour by the Ottercove inhabitants during his visit there soon after his creation, thereby drawing tears from their eyes; a banquet followed by a tour of inspection round the village, small, and with a railroad station so embryonic that you could not even buy a ticket there, but picturesque in its simple rustic way, quite a dear little place full of coves, creeks, and little brooks with beavers and otters, quite domesticated, it seemed, and almost eating out of your hand. The guest of honour, it is reported, beamed with pleasure as he beheld the place of his birth, and is said to have added to his foregoing remark at the banquet: “And in Ottercove I wish to be buried,” thereby drawing renewed tears from the onlookers’ eyes.

“Well,” said Frank, closing the book and leaning back luxuriously, “it seems we’ve struck oil this time!”

“But why don’t you get Lord Ottercove to give you some money, darling?”

“I have,” he said.

“How much?”

“Well, I don’t know. He said ‘without limit.’” It was out before he had meant it to be.

“Without limit,” she said. “But that means that you can buy yourself everything, darling; horses and houses with grounds all over England and Scotland and--”

“No, no--”

“But yes, darling. ‘Without limit’ means everything.”

“But no--”

“But it does, darling. Everything, everything without limit.”

He was sorry he had said it.

“We must tell Mummy,” she said.

“Great heavens, no! Why tell her?”

“She will be pleased.”

“Now then,” he said, rising and helping her with her coat and then taking _Who’s Who_ under his arm. “No. I shall make the restaurant a gift of it.”

“No, darling, don’t. Pilling would love to have it.”

“What does he want with a copy of _Who’s Who_?”

“He’d read and read it days and nights.”

“Whatever for?”

“To find out who is who.”

“But how will you get it over to him?”

“In a taxi.”

“Well, look here, you had better take a taxi and go straight to Pilling with it.” There were moments, after prolonged social intercourse with people, when his soul positively shrieked to be left alone.

“I shall ring you up at your club,” she said as she drove away with the book.