Читать книгу People of Position - Stanley Portal Hyatt - Страница 8

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The Marlow motor-car, large and luxurious, with red panels and an expensive alien chauffeur, met Jimmy at the station. Mrs. Marlow hurried down to the hall as she heard the throbbing of the engine outside the front door, and greeted her brother with emotion which verged on tears.

"I am very glad to see you again, Jimmy, dear," she said, kissing him a second time. "And Henry, too, is delighted to have you. Of course, you have grown a great deal older, but I don't know that you have changed very much." She scrutinised his face, then noted, with something akin to dismay, that his clothes, though well cut, were neither new nor fashionable.

Jimmy, on his part, was trying to readjust his ideas. He had been picturing May as still rather rosy and inclined to plumpness, essentially suggestive of good nature and repose; now, he saw her thin, almost angular, a little hard of feature, though retaining some of her good looks. In his calculations, he had forgotten the four children she had brought into the world since he had seen her last.

May asked him a number of questions about himself, his health, and his doings, hardly waiting for his answers before passing on to something, fresh, and hardly listening when she did allow him time to reply; then—

"I'll take you up to your room," she said. "Your trunks have gone up already. I have had to give you one of the smaller spare rooms, because my sister-in-law will be back to-night—you remember Laura, of course—and there may be someone else coming to-morrow." At the door of his room she paused. "Dinner is at half-past seven. We always dress, but don't you trouble, if you would rather not, or, or——" She stammered a little.

Jimmy understood. "I always retained my suit through all my ups and downs," he said with a smile. "It is the one absolute essential. It will get you credit when nothing else will. Many a time I have gone to an hotel with only the suit and a lot of old newspapers in my trunk, and not five dollars in my pocket."

Mrs. Marlow did not smile. Instead, she looked as she felt, shocked and pained; and as she went downstairs she was casting round for some scheme to stop Jimmy's flow of reminiscences. It would never do for him to talk in that way before people like the Graylings or the Bashfords; whilst, if the servants were to hear him, it would be all round the neighbourhood in a couple of days that Mrs. Marlow's brother was, or had been, a penniless adventurer.

Jimmy did not come down till the dinner gong went; consequently, after he had shaken hands with Henry Marlow, they went straight into the dining-room, and May lost her chance of saying anything.

Marlow himself was hungry and ate heartily, and the guest was distinctly tired, thanks to Douglas Kelly; as a result, there was little said during the first three courses, except by Mrs. Marlow, who gave her husband a full account of all her own and the children's doings for that day, and the names of the people on whom she had called, and of other visitors whom she had met at their houses. Once or twice she tried to include Jimmy in the conversation, by asking if he did not remember this one or that, friends she had known before she was married; but, in every case, they were merely names to him; they had all been grown up when he was still at school, and now, after having forgotten their very existence for ten years, he could not feel the slightest interest in them.

After a while, Marlow, having taken the edge off his appetite, asked him a few questions about his wanderings, but paid little heed to his answers. Even when Jimmy told, in his essentially picturesque way, the story of John Locke's death, his brother-in-law merely remarked that such things were never allowed to occur in the British Empire, though, doubtless, they were to be expected under governments which had injured the market so greatly in the past by repudiating their bargains. Their debased silver currency and their worthless paper money were an absolute scandal, he added.

May, on her part, gave a little gasp when told of the end of Locke's slayer; then, looking up, and seeing the parlour-maid standing open-mouthed, with a sauce-boat balanced on a tray at a most dangerous angle, she felt it was time to intervene.

"Please don't give us any more horrors, Jimmy. We are not used to them here. Mary," severely, to the parlour-maid, "the master's plate."

Jimmy flushed and said no more; and, apparently, they were perfectly content that it should be so, for the subject of his travels dropped, and was not resumed, either then or afterwards. He saw that they were not interested, even though they were his own people; and he listened in silence when his sister went back to the apparently inexhaustible subject of their friends. Certainly, whilst they sat smoking after dinner, Henry Marlow did ask his guest some more questions, a great many more in fact, and listened with considerable attention to the replies; but, as Jimmy noted with a kind of grim amusement, they were all of an impersonal nature, having reference solely to mining conditions in South American states. Jimmy's own experiences at the hands of Dago patriots left his brother-in-law unmoved, being things which belonged rather to books, and certainly had no part in the lives of people of position; but the effect of those same patriots' doings on the development of the country, and, consequently, on the profits of British Enterprise, aroused his bitterest wrath. Once, some years before, he had lost over a thousand pounds through a new president revoking a lead-mining concession which his predecessor had granted; and, that predecessor having been sent where neither letters nor writs could reach him, none of the purchase money had been recovered despite the efforts of the Foreign Office. Mr. Marlow, himself, had never forgiven either the Dagos or the diplomatists, especially as the concession had eventually gone to a German firm, which had made a clear half-million out of it; and he argued, not without reason, that the most effective form of negotiation would have been a whiff of grapeshot, or its modern equivalent, from the guns of a British cruiser.

Jimmy listened patiently to the grievance, which took some time in the telling, involving, as it did, full details of the careers and financial standing of the directors of the ill-fated company, men of position and weight in the City, who deserved very different treatment.

"Disgraceful business, disgraceful," Henry added. "To think that the British Government should allow us to be robbed by a snuff-coloured rascal like that. Did you ever come across him?"

"Who? President Montez?" Jimmy laughed apologetically. "I'm very sorry; but I helped him with that revolution. I was pretty hard up at the time, and I knew something about field guns, so they gave me a job."

Mr. Marlow apparently saw nothing at which to laugh; in fact, he frowned slightly. He held rather strong views on the subject of law and order; moreover, there were people who would be very ready to sneer if they heard Jimmy's story of the affair. But his chief thought was, as usual, for his wife, who would be annoyed were she to learn the part Jimmy had played.

"I shouldn't tell May, if I were you," he said. "In fact, I don't think I should tell anyone. You see, it's not—what shall I say?—quite the thing to be mixed up in those affairs, and it would stand in your light over here, socially as well as from a practical point of view. You understand?"

Jimmy nodded; at least he was beginning to understand.

May was doing some fancy work when they joined her in the drawing-room; but she glanced up with a smile as Jimmy entered, and told him to take the chair next to hers. After all, he looked presentable, this brother of hers, at any rate, in evening dress, a little thin for his height and rather yellow in the face perhaps, but still there was about him a certain indefinable air of distinction which most men she knew lacked. There were girls who might even call him handsome. As she thought of that, her mouth hardened momentarily. She must guard against any folly of that sort by not introducing him in dangerous quarters until he was in a very much better position financially. The last thought suggested a question she had been intending to ask him at the first opportunity.

"What are you thinking of doing now, Jimmy? I suppose you still intend to remain at home?"

Henry Marlow muttered something about the evening paper. He was always tactful where his wife was concerned, and this was a Grierson concern, in which he might seem an intruder. May would tell him anything there was to tell later.

Jimmy, remembering Walter's reception of his news, hesitated slightly. The assurance with which Douglas Kelly's words had filled him was oozing out rather rapidly. It was one thing to decide on a literary career when one was in a Bohemian club and the time was long after midnight; but, somehow, in an essentially staid drawing-room, where there was more than a hint of Victorian influence in the furniture, and with a sense of a heavy dinner still oppressing him, matters seemed different. After all, it was only natural that it should be so. He was a Grierson, with a veneration for conventions in his blood, and, in the appropriate surroundings, the force, so long latent as to be practically forgotten, began to make itself felt, not very strongly, perhaps, but still the fact remained that it was there. Just as his father had given in at last, and gone to the City, so, for a moment, it seemed to Jimmy that he must go. But then he remembered Walter's office, where you could not smoke, and the only spot of colour was that inartistic insurance calendar with its grim lists of figures.

"I'm going to write," he said, "or at least try to write. I think I can make a living at it. It's worth trying. There's nothing else, you see," he added, a little lamely.

May stopped in the middle of a stitch, and stared at him with something akin to dismay. She remembered an article of his she had once read, unsigned to be sure, and only in an obscure Hong Kong paper, but so painfully outspoken that she had shown it to no one, not even to her husband; and then rose up before her the vision of him writing similar articles for London journals, and of the world, her world, knowing him to be the author. She recognised her brother's cleverness, and it never entered into her head to doubt that he could get his work into print; she knew nothing of the financial side of journalism, and, for the moment, what had formerly seemed the all-important question, Jimmy's method of livelihood, was thrust into the background, owing to her fear that he would do something to compromise both himself and his family.

Yet, the idea had taken her so greatly by surprise that at first she did not know what to say. She was not afraid of offending Jimmy or of hurting his feelings. To her, he was still a boy, who would; or at least should, listen to her advice.

"Surely you don't mean that, Jimmy," she began. "I never dreamt of your contemplating such a thing; and I shall be very sorry if you go on with it. I am certain you will do yourself a lot of harm, for I know from your letters that you have picked up a number of curious, and even improper, ideas. We are all aware that there is a low public taste which likes these things; but there are already more than enough writers providing them. We had hoped that when you came home you would settle down to regular work of some sort."

Jimmy had coloured a little. "What sort?" he asked quietly.

It was May's turn to flush; she did not quite like his tone, and, moreover, she had no answer ready. "Some business, of course," she answered tartly. "You have no profession. Henry has promised to see if any of his friends have vacancies in their offices. I suppose you have saved enough to keep you for a little while?"

Her brother got up rather suddenly. He had been alone so long, playing a lone hand, that he had forgotten the great unwritten law of the Family Inquisition, whose main clause is that the common rules of courtesy do not apply when two of the same blood meet; but still, he recognised the genuine kindness underlying the inquiry, and stifled his resentment, which May would not have understood, because she and Walter and Ida were in the habit of asking each other similar blunt questions.

"For a short time," he answered. "Enough for a week or two, and a friend on the Press has put me in the way of getting one commission already. As for a City office, I couldn't stand it for a day."

Mrs. Marlow put another stitch in her fancy work, then pulled her thread a little viciously, breaking it. "Well, I hope you will be careful, and not write anything we need feel ashamed of. Remember, that though you may have no position to lose, we have one."

"You needn't be afraid of that, May." There was a suspicion of scorn, and more than a suspicion of anger, in his voice. "It doesn't make much difference if I don't write under my own name, so long as I can get the dollars, which are what I'm out for."

Mrs. Marlow gave in with a sigh. After all, so long as he kept the family name out of print, there would not be much harm done; and it was a relief to find that he looked at matters from a practical point of view. Of course, he ought to have accepted Henry's assistance and gone into the City; but if he would not do so, as seemed to be the case, it was some consolation to find that he was apparently anxious to make money in other ways.

But when she talked the matter over with her husband after Jimmy had gone up to bed, Henry Marlow shook his head. His opinions coincided exactly with those of Walter Grierson. "A most precarious occupation," he said, "and one which I should certainly not allow our boys to take up. It's a great pity, as I believe I could have got him into Foulger's office—Foulger and Hilmon, you know, the jobbers."