CHAPTER II

A SMALL YACHTSMAN AND AN OLD DEALER

Coming down the stairs he was quite a different person from the man who had gone up only half an hour before.

Only women and wine are able to work magic like that.

He felt warmed and cheered, and his work seemed worth doing. A little appreciation goes a long way with a writer, and though Martia Hare had said little enough in the way of appreciation, what she had said was genuine. But though the appreciation had cheered, it was the woman who had warmed.

For the last three months he had been leading a pretty lonely life. When he had dropped Fleet Street he had lost touch with a great number of people, women and men, fellow-workers and fellow human beings; the smash his father had come in the financial world had made him chary of approaching the people he had known in better days, and as a result he had been living in an isolation excellent for work but bad for the worker.

If you want to find loneliness do not go to the Sahara desert. Go to London, with its population of seven million people crowded within a radius of a few miles. Here you will find the real thing as Bobby had found it, and here you will appreciate at its full value the interest of a fellow man or woman.

Out in the desolation of roaring Fleet Street he found that he was not alone. The pleasant image of the girl of the literary agency was with him. She had not only attached herself to his work, but also in some way to himself. It was not a question of love at first sight, or of love at all, but of something more subtle; even, perhaps, more mysterious--liking.

It was fifteen minutes to one, and reckoning that it was useless to call on Behrens till later in the afternoon, Bobby hailed a taxi, got in, and told the driver to take him to the Café Chianti in Old Compton Street.

Here when he had paid and dismissed the driver, he found that he had left his walking-stick in the cab, a fact that, so far from annoying him, made him chuckle. How did Miss Hare know his bias in this respect? And what an amazingly fortunate thing it was that he had not left the picture behind in the cab instead of a half-crown walking-stick. The picture that carried with it the good-will of the editor of the _Paternoster Magazine_.

She had saved him from the effects of his own forgetfulness, and it was as though another little bond had been tied between them.

The angel who looks after lonely young men was busy that day with the affairs of Bobby, for, as he took his seat at a table to the right of the doorway and picked up the menu, a man at the next table on the left leaned across and touched him on the arm.

It was Hackett, unseen for several years. Samuel Hackett, otherwise known as Sam, who had been sent down from St. John's for screwing a tutor so firmly up in his rooms that a carpenter had to be called in.

Sam looked just the same, rather disreputable--no tailor could ever dress him--just the same, but for an attempt at a beard and the deep bronze of an out-of-door man.

"I've got a boat," said he, after greetings had been exchanged and in answer to inquiries as to his doings. "I used to keep her up the Hamble, but I've shifted to Poole Harbour. Do you know Poole Harbour?"

"No I don't," said Bobby; "only that it is near Bournemouth. But what are you doing with the boat?"

"Living in her," said Sam. "It's the only life. No rates and taxes, only harbour dues; no servants, only one man; fishing as much as you want, and the whole Channel to cruise in."

"You're not married?"

"No," said Sam. "You don't want to be married if you have a boat. She wants all your attention, and women are a nuisance, anyway, at least on board a boat."

"Well, I'm jolly glad to see you," said Bobby. "What are you doing to-night? Let's have some dinner somewhere and go to a theatre afterwards."

"No," said Hackett. "I only came up to get some gadgets and a spare suit of oilskins in the East India Dock Road. I'm going back by the five train; but I'll always be glad to see you at Poole. Anyone will show you my boat--she's the _Sandfly_--everyone knows me at Poole."

A feeling had come to Bobby that the joyous Sammy of other days must have encountered strange influences to make him like this, so indifferent to pleasure, so different from his old self. He did not know the type yet, or the fact that he was talking to an almost perfect specimen of the full-blown small yachtsman; a being for whom towns existed only as suppliers of mast-winches and oilskin suits, and in whose eyes God made the ocean as a practice ground for five to forty tonners.

They parted outside the café, Hackett making east for the delights of the Dock Road and Bobby north for Museum Street and the shop of Behrens.

Museum Street is the conduit that leads from Oxford Street and to-day to where antiquity sits sheltered by the roof of the Museum and amidst the well-preserved ruins of the world she once knew as young.

Miss Hare was right. Museums are destructive to inspiration, and hunting for mushrooms in Labrador would be a fruitful occupation compared to hunting for a living story amidst the marbles.

But Museum Street is a different matter, and Behrens' shop, which stands half-way down on the right hand side, is another matter still.

I have never seen anyone pass Behrens' without stopping to look in. By "anyone" I mean of course strangers to the street and people not in too great a hurry.

Behrens is the man who beat Wangenheim at the great Sale of Japanese Surinomo held in London in 1912, securing the whole of a Baron Kamekura's collection for the British Museum.

Surinomo are Japanese Christmas cards, the newest craze among collectors, and invaluable, some of them, especially when signed by Hokuga, whose signature looks like a corkscrew, or Korinsai, whose device suggests three five-barred gates and a gridiron. It was Behrens who outbid the Americans for the Hispano Mauro lustre-ware at the Huth sale, a collection which beats even that at Warwick Castle; and it was he who declared the wax bust of the hunting Diana, attributed to Benvenuto Cellini by a certain great critic of art, to be an impudent fake.

But in the windows of his shop there is little to indicate these activities of mind and purse; a chair of Beauvais tapestry, an arquebus inlaid with silver, a set of crystal vases, always something attractive without ostentation, and appealing to the sense of form or colour.

Bobby pressed the latch and entered the shop of Behrens, releasing as he did so a bell that rang wildly in the back premises and fell dumb when the door closed on the street.

Then he stood in the silence, looking around him and waiting for someone to come.

The centre of the shop was taken up with a show-case, flat like a table and filled with all sorts of small coloured and glittering things from the antique world. It was as though a magic net had been cast in time, a net sweeping the shores of the Roman and mediæval worlds and the world of later days, a net made only for the catching of gems and bibelots and bringing up everything from a snuffbox of Pettio's to a chaplet by Benvenuto Cellini.

On either side and lining the shop walls, tall glass show-cases exhibited armour and swords, crystal cups and goblets, German chest-locks, carvings of John Voyez, and, occupying two large cabinets, reposed a wonderful collection of Japanese masks, almost life-sized faces in ivory, carved to represent Diakoku the god of Wealth, the Rice god, the god of Roads, and twenty others, to say nothing of mousmés and mouskos, old women and comic actors.

Bobby was looking at these things, when from the back of the shop and past a tapestried screen came Behrens.

Behrens looked exactly as a man ought to look who is seventy-five, and who has spent sixty years of his life face to face with antiques in the stuffy atmosphere of cities, and surrounded always by either the silence of the show-room or the noise of the market.

He wore glasses with tortoiseshell rims, after the modern fashion, and a grey beard and moustache that hid the expression of his lower face.

An old fellow with a grey beard and spectacles; quite commonplace to anyone but a connoisseur of men, who would have at once noticed his hands; delicate, extraordinary sensitive-looking hands, that seemed never quite at rest, but always questing to touch, to weigh and to feel.

"I believe I have the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Behrens?" said Bobby. "Miss Hare, of the firm of Beaman & Hare, asked me to call. At least, she suggested that I should call--she said you knew her."

"I know her well," said Behrens. "And what can I do for you, Mr.----"

"Lestrange. My name is Lestrange."

"Any relationship to Mr. Nicholas Lestrange?"

"He was my father."

"Think of that now," said Behrens. "I have had many dealings with your father, Mr. Lestrange, and now that I come to look at you closely I seem to see a likeness. I always found him an easy customer to deal with and I think he always found me an honest dealer, two things that rarely come together in this world, Mr. Lestrange."

"I suppose you know that my father is dead?"

"Yes, I know that," said Behrens. He did not add that he had attended the sale at Bramshott in Kent and bought half the pictures and all the china, over which he had made a considerable profit.

Behrens, though a man with a heart, believed in the motto of Balzac: "There is no friendship in business," and though he had felt an affection for the good-hearted Nicholas Lestrange, he had had no qualms at all about profiting from his estate.

"My father was ruined," said Bobby. "He was speculating in things and they went the wrong way. So I've just had to set to to earn my living."

Behrens, half sitting on a great Elizabethan chest covered with red leather, took a cigarette case from his pocket, and offered it while he examined the young man before him with the terrible eye that could tell worth from dross in men no less than in antiques.

"And how are you setting about that, if I may ask?" inquired he.

The question covered Bobby with confusion. It was perhaps the matter-of-fact and businesslike air of the art dealer that made story-writing for a living seem, suddenly, an occupation of the feminine gender, an employment on the embroidery side of things, good enough for girls but not good enough for a young man beginning life.

"I started with newspaper work," said he, "and then I turned from that to writing."

"And what do you write?" asked Behrens.

"Stories."

"Ah, stories. And do you manage to sell these stories that you write?"

"Yes, some."

"And they are published?"

"I believe so," said Bobby, laughing. "I believe there are publishers crazy enough to publish my work and pay for it."

"There are no crazy business men in London," said Behrens. "Take my word for it as a trader. If publishers take your work and pay for it, you may be sure that it is worth what they pay, twice over. That is not flattery, it is an axiom. Why are you ashamed of your work?"

"I'm not," said Bobby, brought to a halt in his mind by this alarming old man who seemed to see his thoughts. "Only sometimes it seems to me that storytelling is too easy to be called work--isn't exactly the work for a man."

"How old are you?" asked Behrens.

Bobby told, and the art dealer was silent for a moment. Then he spoke.

"What work is easy that is difficult? And is a man any the less a man because his work has pleasure for its objective and not utility or destruction? All the same, I see what you mean. But if you go about the world collecting material for your stories, you will find the business, I think, eminently the work for a man."

"How do you mean collecting material?"

"How do I mean? Well now, look here. How can any man who paints pictures or writes stories or poems convey to his audience the effects of hate, of love, of passion, of dread, of fear, on the human mind if he has not experienced those emotions? How can he show you Spain if he has never seen Spain, or a storm at sea if he has never known the sea except at Margate? You think you are talking to an art dealer, Mr. Lestrange. You are not. You are talking to Jacob Behrens, who has always been a dealer in Life, and who owes all the money he has in the bank to his recognition that a real work of art is a living thing, and that the study of man is as important to the success of an art dealer as the study of textures and surfaces and forms. Also," added Behrens, with a chuckle, "to the fact that he is an adventurer at heart.

"Do you want my advice? Well, then, throw down your pen for a while and go and have adventures: see the world in all its various forms, get robbed, get heart-broken by women, get anything you like, but get experience, before you get rheumatism, like me, and wealth and possessions, which are worse than rheumatism as far as the adventurous spirit of a man is concerned."

"I'd like nothing better," said Bobby; "only knocking round the world takes money."

"Then knock around the world and make money," said Behrens, with another of his little chuckles.

"How?"

"Well, that depends. You are talking to Jacob Behrens, who never wastes time and who knows that the surest way of wasting time is to spend it in giving advice to young men."

"Well, seems to me you have been doing it."

"No, I have just been preparing the ground for a suggestion. When I had been speaking to you only a few minutes and found you were the son of your father and read your face, I said to myself, 'Here is the man you want. Here is a young man strong and healthy and to be trusted. The only question is, has he the spirit for a big adventure?' That I have not yet found out."

Bobby said nothing. Things were taking a strange turn--unless, indeed, Behrens was a little bit touched in the head, which he did not seem to be.

"It's sudden," said the old man, "my talking like this and asking a question like that, seeing I've only known you ten minutes. But my name is Jacob Behrens, and if I hadn't been sudden all my life, I wouldn't have the money I have in the bank to-day. I can't abide slow thinking or dilatory acting, and I'm going to ask you a snap question. Would you on the chance of making anything from five to twenty thousand pounds take a risk, pack a bag, and go where I tell you?"

"Depends on what you call the risk," said Bobby.

"That's a fair answer," replied Behrens, "and shows your head is screwed on right. Well, now, I've no more time to waste to-day, but if you will call upon me to-morrow evening at nine o'clock and have a cigar and a cup of coffee, I'll tell you what is in my mind, unless I have concluded the business with someone else--which is possible, but not probable."

"I'll come," said Bobby.

Mad or not, Behrens pleased him. Like the guns in the shop window, the old gentleman had induced in his mind the atmosphere of adventure. One could not fancy Behrens chasing as much as a rabbit, and yet the effect of his talk was almost as though some bold buccaneer had clapped the young man on the shoulder.

"If I have no business to offer you," said Behrens, "you shall at least have a good cigar and we will talk of art and these things." He waved his hand at the treasures around whilst he began to walk Bobby to the door. "These pretty trifles from the courts of France and the old courts of Italy, and these pieces of armour from a greater age than ours."

He opened the door, and Bobby was about to say good-day when he remembered something that he had forgotten, something even more important than the walking-stick he had forgotten in the cab.

"That reminds me," said he. "The reason I came to you to-day was to find out all about Tanagra statuettes. I had to write a story about them. It's stupid of me, for now I have taken up so much of your time I don't like to bother you on the subject."

"You are talking of the figurines found in the olive groves of Tanagra and dating from the fourth and fifth century before Christ. Well, it is an interesting subject, and to-morrow night, if we have no better business to discuss, we will talk about them."

Saying this, Behrens bowed his visitor into Museum Street and closed the door.

In the street, and released from the spell of the old gentleman and his shop, Bobby felt for a moment cheap. He had failed in the business he had set out upon, and, instead of gathering the information he desired, had allowed himself to be hypnotised by an interesting personality, wound up in a bobbin of talk, and dismissed like a child.

This unbusinesslike habit of forgetting things had gone against him in the newspaper world and was pursuing him in Storyland. He felt depressed, but the depression did not last long. The spell of Behrens returned on him, and, as he walked towards the Museum, failure was forgotten in the interest of the question: "What on earth can he want to see me about to-morrow night?"