Peter Jameson: A Modern Romance

Gilbert Frankau

Peter Jameson

A Modern Romance

EAN 8596547249870

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [email protected]

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 7

PART ONE THE HOME AND THE OFFICE

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

PART TWO NIRVANA, LIMITED

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

PART THREE THE CREST OF THE WAVE

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

PART FOUR CRISIS

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

PART FIVE DECISION

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 7

§ 8

PART SIX PLAYING AT SOLDIERS

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

PART SEVEN ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

PART EIGHT DISSENSION

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

PART NINE TWO EXCUSES FOR FAILURE

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 7

§ 8

PART TEN GUNS, COUNTING-HOUSES, AND COUNTER-ESPIONAGE

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 6

PART ELEVEN MEN AND HORSES

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

PART TWELVE CONCENTRATIONS

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 7

§ 8

PART THIRTEEN PREPARE FOR ACTION!

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

PART FOURTEEN ATTACK!

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 7

PART FIFTEEN FORWARD

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 7

PART SIXTEEN ACTION LEFT!

§ 1

§ 2

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§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 7

§ 8

PART SEVENTEEN THE SUICIDE CLUB

§ 1

§ 2

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§ 4

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§ 6

§ 7

§ 8

§ 9

PART EIGHTEEN RESPITE

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

PART NINETEEN THE CITY OF FEAR

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

PART TWENTY THE HOME FRONT

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

PART TWENTY-ONE THE DROSS AND THE GOLD

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

PART TWENTY-TWO SUNFLOWERS

§ 1

§ 2

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§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

PART TWENTY-THREE BEER BATTERY

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§ 2

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§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 5

PART TWENTY-FOUR IN THE NIGHT

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§ 2

§ 3

PART TWENTY-FIVE THE LAST OUNCE

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§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 7

PART TWENTY-SIX BROKEN MEN

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

PART TWENTY-SEVEN THE NEW SCIENCE

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

PART TWENTY-EIGHT WOMANCRAFT

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

PART TWENTY-NINE THE LIFTING OF SHADOWS

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

PART THIRTY THE COMMENCEMENT OF DREAMS

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

PART THIRTY-ONE OUT OF IT

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

PART THIRTY-TWO END—OR BEGINNING?

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

EPILOGUE

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

FOREWORD

Table of Contents

§ 1

Table of Contents

If you take the Central London Tube to the Bank Station; fight for your place in the lift; climb the tortuous staircase to Lombard Street; pass along that narrow, money-glutted thoroughfare, where scarlet-vested, top-hatted bank-messengers take dignified way from the sign of the Phoenix to the swinging doors of the Crédit Lyonnais: if, crossing Gracechurch Street below the clock of the London & South-Western Bank, you enter less-aristocratic Fenchurch Street and take the first zig-zag turning on your left, you will find—hidden between a stationer’s shop and a grocer’s—two swing doors, each with a brass name-plate from which the black lettering, P. JAMESON AND COMPANY, CIGAR IMPORTERS, has been almost erased by forty years of incessant polishing. And if you care to penetrate yet farther round that gray curving Lime Street, past the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, into the heart of Havana cigardom, St. Mary Axe, you will still find—clustered round the maroon marble of the Baltic Exchange—the warehouses of Schornstein & Co., of Beresford & Beresford, of Samuel Elkins & Son, and others with whom Peter traded, intrigued, lunched and gossiped, between the years 1903 and 1914.

But you will not find, search the City as you will, Peter Jameson, sometime senior partner in Peter Jameson & Company, and chairman of Nirvana Limited, Manufacturers of High-grade Cigarettes. Because—whatever war may have accomplished of good or evil to us other millions whom it caught up into its vortex—to Peter it came like a great cleansing storm, terrifying in its violence, unfathomable in its purposes, but bearing him at the last, past many rocks of doubt and fear, to sure harbourage, to certainty of body and of soul—and, better even than these, to Love.

This, in so far as one man may tell another’s story, is the tale of that voyaging.

§ 2

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Three families—the Jamesons, the Gordons, and the Baynets—are principally concerned in this story. All three were originally English yeomen; country, not county folk; probably peasants—in the best sense of the word. In the Jamesons and the Gordons there is an admixture of exotic Hebraic blood: that of the Señora Elvira de Miranda y Miraflores, who married a Captain Bradley of the British West India Regiment, then stationed in Jamaica, and had by him two daughters, one of whom married Peter’s father in 1880, and the other—some three years later—John Gordon, father of Peter’s cousin, Francis Gordon. The Baynet stock is pure English.

Peter’s grandfather—Peter the First—deserted the country for the town at the beginning of the great manufacturing age (about 1840); married a cit’s daughter; tried his luck in the City; couldn’t stand it; and wandered out to the West Indies, trading first at Georgetown, Demarara, then in Bridgetown, Barbados; and finally settling down in the then Spanish colony of Cuba, where he bought a small estate near Guanabacoa, and grew tobacco—more for a hobby than a living, as he was a person of few wants, and tolerably careless about most things except his son, Peter the Second, whom he had educated in England, and to whom—on his death in the late seventies—he bequeathed the sum of £3,000, the verandah’d hacienda, and some hundred acres of not very saleable land.

It was on the Royal Mail steamer to Havana that our Peter’s father—thinking more of the newly acquired heritage and how best to turn it into cash, than of matrimony—first met Captain and Mrs. Bradley (née Miranda y Miraflores) returning with their two flapper-daughters to Kingston, Jamaica....

To cut a long story short, Peter the Second sold the tobacco-farm; found himself in love with Tessa Bradley; followed her to Jamaica; married her; realized that the interest on his capital could not possibly support them in comfort; and returned to England in the spring of 1882 with his wife, his wife’s sister (who found garrison-life in the tropics hardly to her taste), and twenty cases of Señor Larranaga’s very best Principes in which he had invested a considerable amount of money, and of which he subsequently disposed, owing to the machinations of his brokers and ignorance of the imported cigar trade, at a very unsatisfactory profit.

But Peter the Second—like his son Peter the Third, hero of this story—was an obstinate devil who disliked being beaten, especially over money. Taking—from an old school friend, John Gordon (who may have had ulterior motives in granting the facilities), a little room in the big, dingy offices of Gordon’s Limited, General Merchants, he imported another consignment of Havana cigars; had them sampled; hired a brougham; and hawked (he was, although he had married an officer’s daughter, by no means a snob) his sample-boxes round the West End tobacconist shops until he had disposed of his second shipment at a very different figure to that received on the first.

So began the firm of P. Jameson & Company, Cigar Importers, which—aided by the financial support of John Gordon (who married Dolores Bradley very shortly after that second shipment had been disposed of) and the boom-crop of 1884—soon needed offices of its own, two clerks, a country salesman, and all the paraphernalia of a regular business. It was not, of course—never would be—a huge affair like Gordon’s, who dealt the world over and in every conceivable commodity from quinine to molasses—still it was a solid, money-making, not too arduous concern; and, moreover, both Peter’s father and his salesman, Tom Simpson, whom he subsequently took into junior partnership, needed considerably less to live on than the profit which it earned.

§ 3

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Peter the Third, our Mr. Jameson, was not born until his parents had been married nearly four years: John Gordon’s son, Francis, antedating him by about a week. In both of them, you can trace the Miraflores strain fairly clearly. They are both of them of medium height; stocky rather than tall. Both have the same curious eyes which seem to change colour—from gray to darkest black—with their thoughts. Both are small-handed, small-footed, rather determined about the nose, dark-haired, intelligent-headed. But life—and war, which is the same thing—has dealt with them so differently that, nowadays, you would have great difficulty in finding more than a fugitive likeness. You would say, and perhaps rightly, that Peter is less, Francis more, the Miraflores.

Dolores Gordon, despite her husband’s twelve thousand a year, presented him with no more children; but Tessa Jameson had another son—Peter’s brother Arthur—born in 1888.

Meanwhile, both businesses flourished: Gordon’s Limited, the larger; Jameson & Co., the sounder—providing John Gordon with a rather elaborate mansion in Curzon Street, West (to which he would return, late, tired and neurotic from the new offices in London Wall), and the Jamesons with a solid, rather tyrannous edifice in Lowndes Square, Kensington, wherein Peter’s father found comfortable refuge from the reflector-lit warehouse in Lime Street. By the late nineties, Peter the First’s few thousand pounds had grown—thanks largely to the sole agency for Beckmann cigars (of which more later)—into a fairly comfortable fortune, so that when John Gordon suggested to Peter the Second that both Peter the Third and Francis Gordon had better be sent to Eton College, money did not stand in the way.

The two cousins (Peter’s brother Arthur went to a less exalted establishment) did not distinguish themselves greatly at school. Francis was rather too flamboyant, Peter too self-concentrated, for easy friendships. However, Peter managed to get both his Boats, his House Colours, and Corporal’s stripes on his Volunteer tunic before he left: while Francis undoubtedly acquired there—in some mysterious way of his own—the beginnings of that literary technique in which he is now beginning to be acknowledged past-master.

From Eton, Peter went straight into the business. He had always found idleness intolerable, and Jameson’s seemed—regarded as something to do—made to his hand. To Francis and other Etonian acquaintances, the choice appeared an amazing one: but the boy’s father—lonely since his wife’s death about a year before, and conscious that his other son Arthur, whatever else he might become, would never be a business man—both understood and stimulated this desire for work.

§ 4

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Peter’s entry into Jameson’s, early in 1903, synchronized with the formation of the Havana Tobacco Company—commonly known as The Trust; and the attempt by J. B. Duke and his colleagues (who, having fought the English cigarette and tobacco manufacturers to a standstill, were now controlling—almost unknown to the public—eighty per cent. of the world’s smoking-trade) to corner the market in Havana-manufactured cigars. Though a very small affair of outposts when considered in relation to the pitched battles which preceded it, the fight was, at the outset, not without interest to those whose livings were menaced by the billion-dollar corporation controlled from 111 Fifth Avenue, New York. To the boy, fresh from the monastic atmosphere of school, it gave just that touch of romance which his enthusiasm needed.

For Jameson’s—as agents of the German-owned but Havana-domiciled concern, Heinrich Beckmann & Co—lined up with the so-called Independents, and did doughty battle with tongue and typewriter against the invader.

Old Jameson and Tom Simpson, who, by now, had a fourth share in the concern, found the lad’s keenness amusing. Both elderly men—their capital intact and their blood chilled with twenty years of money-making—they did not take the situation very seriously. Even when Beckmanns, greedy for more trade, insisted that both Beresford & Beresford and Samuel Elkins & Co. should (under certain secret conditions) receive direct shipments of their goods, they only laughed tolerantly at the infringement of a profitable monopoly—leaving indignation to the newcomer.

Indignant, Peter certainly was. There had never been an actual contract about the Beckmann brand; but the boy, accustomed to his college code, perceived something in the transaction dishonourable to the other side, weak on his own. Unreasonably as it seemed at the time—reasonably enough as it shows in the light of history—he thus early conceived an instinctive distrust, not only of Beckmanns, but of German business people in general....

However, a year in the City effectively replaced the college code by the legal.

At the end of eighteen months—the fight resolving itself into a mere question of strong competition; each side more or less holding its own, with a slight sentimental balance in favour of those outside the Ring—Peter had settled down to the complacent routine of office life: ten till five, with an hour off for lunch and two Saturdays out of three absolutely workless. Sport—he was a safe shot, except at snipe for which he lacked the temperament; a good rider; and a really fine hand with the trout-fly—completed his existence. Dissipation, after one or two, experiments, he avoided—not from scruples, but because it bored him.

Then, just after his twenty-first birthday, the old man, never very strong, caught pneumonia and died within the week.

§ 5

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The death of his father was a vivid grief to Peter. For his mother, he had never experienced more than a lukewarm affection; Arthur had always been her favourite, and Peter—even as a child—had been conscious of the preference. But the governor, the old boy!—that seemed somehow or other different. They had worked together, talked together, driven home together, drank their port of an evening at the big mahogany table in the Lowndes Square dining-room, had their little rows, made them up again.... Sentimental ass! the boy said to himself, as he sat alone in the library that first night. But there were real tears in his eyes; tears that only work could dry.

And of work, in the days that followed, there was enough. As co-executor, with Simpson, for his father’s estate, even Peter found himself sufficiently occupied. The business, the Crown lease of the Lowndes Square house, sundry outside investments—all required valuation, tabulation, preparation for probate. Death duties, auditor’s fees, lawyer’s fees—each had to be scrutinized, queried, and ultimately overpaid. Arthur—who, at seventeen, was already wearied of school—demanded an advance of trust-monies; got it; departed for Australia.

In the end Peter recognized himself absolute possessor of some £30,000 (practically all in the business); and trustee for the £10,000 in stocks and shares which became his brother’s when he, too, reached twenty-one.

You will be an ass, said Francis Gordon, newly returned from two years of aimless wandering on the Continent, if you go on slaving away in that office of yours.

Can’t stand doing nothing, Peter had answered, and, if I wanted to get married, twelve hundred a year wouldn’t be enough. With both of which ends in mind, he signed a rather peculiar ten years’ partnership deed with Simpson, and resumed his hardly interrupted activities in Lime Street.

§ 6

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That same year, 1905, Francis’s own parents both died, leaving him master undisputed of a five-figure income; and the two cousins very nearly decided on living together, till Peter vetoed the idea on the grounds that as Francis never got up before lunch or came home to dinner, he didn’t see much sense in the proposed arrangement.

Nevertheless, bachelor existence in that barrack of a house at Lowndes Square, soon began to pall. I shan’t be dining at home to-night, Smith, became the almost daily word to the elderly, dignified, parlour maid as she handed our Mr. Jameson his top-hat of a morning; and on the rare evenings when he did dine at home, it was usually in company—business acquaintances, school friends, old cronies of his father’s, or—and this frequently—the Baynets.

Heron Baynet, the Harley Street diagnostician who was knighted in the 1918 Birthday List for his research-work in the treatment of shell-shock and other nervous disorders, had been one of the consultants attending Jameson senior in his illness. He had taken an instinctive liking to the young man; asked him to call. Peter, accepting the invitation, met a married daughter, Violet; a son in the Army; and Patricia—tall, blond, twenty-one, dignified, rather reserved in her speech, tolerably contemptuous of the average young man, cultivating alternately the critique of pure reason at home and the outside edge at Prince’s skating-rink.... Twelve months after their first meeting, in March, 1906, these two married.

A marriage of affection, kindred tastes and mutual respect. A marriage which appealed to them (both had a strong, youthful contempt for sentiment) as eminently reasonable. A marriage into which both entered with the definite certainty that there would be no passion, no misunderstandings, no petty economies, no vital divergences of opinion. A marriage which—as most marriages—ended by utterly confuting all their original ideas about it.

§ 7

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Followed two years of palship; at the end of which their first daughter, Evelyn, was born. Peter, who had hoped for a son, felt disappointment; showed it, perhaps a little too plainly: thereby heightening his wife’s love for the kiddie. But the disappointment faded; the easy relationship renewed itself.

About this time, Ivan Turkovitch became a frequent visitor to the Lime Street warehouse. A quaint man—born in some nameless province of Austria-Hungary; speaking English with an amazing accent; small; paunchy; tawny-bearded; very neat in his clothes, in his habits,—he had come to England with nothing but his wits; and built up in some subterranean manner the struggling firm of I. Turkovitch, manufacturers of Nirvana Cigarettes.

Turkovitch, an artist in his way, loved that business; cared less for its financial harvest than the joy of running it—with the inevitable result that, being as extravagant in his factory as he was economical in his home, he invariably found himself short of capital. Peter liked listening to the little man when he talked about his vork peoples; visited the factory, for the first time from curiosity, for the second time out of sheer interest. His own business existence at Jameson’s had settled down into a pretty humdrum affair. As senior partner by right of capital he drew a steady £3,000 a year; leaving Simpson to do the inside work and contenting himself with the selling end, which—as it meant pitting his brains against other people’s—rather amused him.

But when Turkovitch finally broached the point towards which he had been finessing, he found anything but a languid young capitalist to deal with. Peter Jameson was quite willing to put up the money, five thousand pounds of it if necessary (considerably more than the Hungarian either required or expected), but on one condition only—that, as majority shareholder, he should control the business.

Turkovitch, even in those early days, found Peter,—with his ideas of press-advertising, of new machinery, of up-to-dateness generally,—rather terrifying: but in the end, pressed by many long-suffering creditors, he yielded.

To Peter, the new concern grew swiftly from a mere plaything into a passion. He felt, for the first time, the real zest of commerce, the creative joy of it. This was no inherited money-making machine; but a task that needed a man’s every thought, all his energy: uphill work, worthy of accomplishment. Gradually it drew him, from Lime Street, from his shooting, from his riding, from his fishing, from his home. So that the coming of his second daughter, Primula, seemed to him less of a disappointment than an extraneous incident vastly concerning to Patricia, but to himself little more than item of interest.

Superficially the palship between husband and wife still existed; but the woman began to feel herself, more and more, an accessory and not a necessity to this absorbed young husband of hers. His real love, she felt, was—would always be, unless some miracle happened—Nirvana.

For the plant, irrigated and irrigated again with gold, began to grow; promised a great harvest. There were difficulties of course; but these only served to intensify Peter’s ardour. Tobacconists wouldn’t stock Nirvana—tobacconists must stock Nirvana, he would advertise until they were forced to. The export trade was hopeless, because one couldn’t get a reliable export-traveller—he, Peter Jameson, would do that part himself: and travel he did, from Christiania to Lisbon, from Aden to Shanghai, from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso....

So the thirty thousand pounds in Jamesons dwindled to twenty thousand; and the five thousand in Nirvana rose to ten. But already, they were round the corner, covering expenses. True that most of the capital was represented in the balance-sheet by that intangible mystery Goodwill and trademarks; true that Turkovitch grumbled and Sam Bramson, Pretty Bramson, the newly engaged sales-manager, required more and more travellers for the home-trade, seemed to do less and less work himself; true that old Tom Simpson began to shake his head at so much voyaging and successfully urged a heavy life-assurance: still—it grew, it grew; and Peter, working fourteen hours between the two businesses, felt success very near, gloried in it....

Meanwhile that resplendent person, Francis Gordon, wrote a novel in verse which excited some comment; married for caprice; lost his wife; wandered off, a not too disconsolate widower, round the world; lost most of his income; fell in love; renounced love; renouncing, found his vocation; and returned to England shortly before the opening chapter of this our romance, which now begins.

To my American readers.—Eton College is what we call a public school. Boys go at the age of 12-13 and leave at the age of 18-19. Originally founded for poor scholars—it has now some thousand students who pay fees of about £300 per annum each.Gilbert Frankau.

PART ONE

THE HOME AND THE OFFICE

Table of Contents

§ 1

Table of Contents

January, 1914. A cold, dry, foggy, London evening. The children—after much protesting—safely asleep. All the electric lights in the big first-floor double drawing-room—pink-walled, parquet-floored, elaborately, comfortably, but by no means artistically, furnished—glowing. A red coal-fire heaped profusely on the tiled, steel-fendered hearth. And, standing before the fire, firm fine hands smoothing the folds of her low-neck, black charmeuse evening-gown, Patricia Jameson.

Not a beautiful woman, this Patricia: yet by no means the bland, blond Kensingtonian nonentity which Francis Gordon had once called her. Very English in the poise of the quiet head on the white, well-sloped shoulders; in the repose of the full figure; in the lines of the athletic limbs. Very English, too, about the well-formed, almost Roman, nose, the red healthy lips, the perfect teeth, the firm cheeks. Lacking, perhaps, in vivacity—unless the brown slumbrous eyes, dark and dark-lashed, were an index to something deep, something as yet but half-awakened: something which, given but its chance, might yet turn the Mother into the Mate.

But tonight a hint of trouble showed in those eyes. For Patricia was thinking. Her thoughts came to her clear-cut, logical, in orderly and courageous sequence. Sloppiness—owing to her father’s teaching—had no place in this woman’s mental outfit.

And she thought: I am nearly thirty.... I have been married eight years.... I like this house, though it takes a lot of running.... I have no money troubles.... I adore Evelyn and Primula.... And I am very fond of my husband....

But here Heron Baynet’s system of common sense, of reason against sentiment, broke down—as it had broken down once or twice before when applied to the intimate relation of married life. The cold creed of pure reason did not work. It was no good for Patricia’s brain to tell her that she ought to be satisfied: her heart informed her, quite emphatically, that she wasn’t.

Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Rawlings, ma’m, announced Smith, the sour-faced but efficient parlour-maid.

Violet came in first—a slightly older, slightly tawdrier edition of her sister; thinner about the lips, fluffier of hair, not so neat in her over-elaborate clothes; but sprightly—unpleasantly sprightly.

Good evening, darling, she cried, kissing. Isn’t it perishingly cold? We walked from the Tube. Do let me come to that gorgeous fire.

Hubert Rawlings—tall, clean-shaven, foxy-faced, five years older than his wife—followed at her heels; shook hands.

Where’s Peter? he asked.

In Hamburg, answered Patricia; and noticed, rather annoyed, the disappointment caused by her reply. Though not by any means poor relations—(H. H. Rawlings, Publicity Specialist, made quite a decent income)—Hubert and Hubert’s wife had an intolerable habit of making private life an adjunct to business. Patricia was perfectly aware that, had Peter been at home, her brother-in-law would have seized the opportunity to convince him, once and for all, that the Nirvana advertising account could be better handled by Hubert Rawlings than by Charlie Higham. Remembering a phrase of her husband’s, I never do business with relatives: they always expect to be paid in advance, she smiled to herself, and turned the conversation.

Doctor Baynet and Mr. John Baynet, ma’m.

Then you can bring up dinner at once, Smith.

Not late, are we, Pat?

No, pater, punctual to the second. Patricia and her father shook hands. They were not in the least alike, these two. The doctor—two inches shorter than his younger daughter—had dark brown hair, just graying; the hands of a surgeon; pince-nez; a fine forehead, and an almost colourless face, set in stern lines. Since his wife’s death (he had been a widower twelve years) the already celebrated diagnostician had concentrated on work to the exclusion of every other interest but his children. His face showed the price paid for success.

Well, Jack, and how are things at Hillsea. I hear you’ve been disappointed in love?

Oh, shut up, Pat. Jack Baynet pulled uncomfortably at his white evening waistcoat; fingered his clipped moustache; trifled with his butterfly tie. As a subaltern in the Field Gunners, almost a senior subaltern too, he disliked being ragged by his older sisters—and, most particularly, he disliked being ragged about Alice Sewell. So, of course, Violet took up the running.

Poor dear! Fancy your own major cutting you out with her. It’s too bad.

Stark isn’t a major yet; only a captain, snapped Jack; then, realizing a tactical error, And anyway, I never was in love with her.

Dinner is on the table, ma’m, announced Smith....

Dinner, quietly served by two maids in the dark, square dining-room,—oak-panelled, lit only by electric candles, mauve-shaded, on the oval table and the huge Chippendalish sideboard—was a leisurely meal. Thick soup followed the smoked salmon, grilled sole the soup, a chick en casserole the sole. Talk, family gossip of no interest to outsiders, flowed—slowly at first, quicker as Peter’s second-best Burgundy loosened constraint.

And why, asked Rawlings suddenly, has Peter gone to Hamburg?

I think, answered Patricia, always on guard against her brother-in-law’s curiosity, that it’s something to do with cigars.

Cigars? You mean cigarettes, don’t you? He hardly bothers about the cigar business nowadays.

Perhaps you’re right, said Patricia—knowing he wasn’t.

When is he coming back?

Tomorrow, as far as I know.

Do you ever see Francis nowadays? put in Violet. I was trying to read something of his in the English Review just before we came out tonight. He’s a bit beyond me, you know.

Francis Gordon,—Heron Baynet spoke slowly, almost professionally—might become a great writer, if he weren’t such a neurotic.

Oh, pater, do keep off your hobby, just for this one evening, Patricia protested. But, once launched, her father was not an easy person to stop.

My hobby, he said, is merely life. Not animal life only, but mental life—which is the most important. Francis Gordon’s hobby is—Francis Gordon. That’s where he, and most of the literary young men nowadays, are making their mistake. They’re half-baked; emasculate. Instead of facing life, they run away from it; shut themselves up in their studies—usually with some equally epicene petticoat to assist their musings. Life, the battle of life, is the only thing worth writing about. Or, he added, reading about.

Again Patricia turned the conversation: Anyway, he’s much nicer, much more human, than he used to be.

You mean, since he lost his money, interrupted Violet.

Patricia nodded....

On the arrival of port and cigars, the three men were left alone; and Hubert Rawlings, who felt himself just a little out of the picture, attempted to talk himself into it.

Gunnery, he said to the young soldier, must be amazingly interesting. A client of mine—he’s in the steel trade—was talking to me only this morning about the Creusot factory. He says the French field-guns are infinitely better than ours....

Really. Jack Baynet had been trained not to talk shop in mess.

Oh, yes. My friend saw them firing tests. And he was amazed, absolutely amazed.

I’ve no doubt. Jack relented a little, finding it beyond him to keep off his hobby. I remember when our battery (he pronounced it bettery) was in India, we were ordered to demonstrate at dummy targets—just to show the infantry the effect of modern shrapnel-fire. He paused.

And ... queried his father.

After inspecting the targets, the General thought it better that the infantry shouldn’t see them. Bad for their morale, you know.

If ever we do have this European war that Lord Northcliffe is so fond of talking about, said the doctor, it will last about a week. Modern nerves will never stand it.

Oh, we shall have war, all right, announced his son.

The advertising agent and the nerve-specialist smiled cynically; demonstrated—till it was time to join the ladies—that the young man knew nothing whatever about international politics....

They played family bridge, half-a-crown a hundred, Violet and her husband permanently partnered. Patricia—who had cut herself out of the first rubber—stood watching them. And again thought troubled her.

This—family parties, theatre-going, houses in Kensington, five servants, a summer holiday with the children, mornings at home and afternoons at the skating-rink—oh! it was all right, a very reasonable and nice existence. But could it go on? Obviously, it had to go on.... Mentally, she shook herself; laughed a little. What did she want? A lover? No, very definitely no. She was not that sort of woman; had too much self-respect.... What then? Colour—the words came involuntarily to her mind: Colour! That’s what I need. Colour—and warmth.

But when her family had departed, and she sat alone again in the drawing-room, Patricia Jameson took herself firmly to task. If I don’t take more exercise, she decided, I shall become like one of those unpleasant creatures one meets in novels: the misunderstood married woman.

Before going to bed, she tiptoed through the night nursery; looked lovingly down on the two dark-brown heads of Evelyn and Primula; and thereafter slept—even as they—dreamlessly.

§ 2

Table of Contents

Punctually at nine o’clock next morning, Peter arrived.

Looking at him through the dining-room window, as he stood paying the taxi, as he walked—carrying his heavy leather dressing-bag easily as though it had been a dispatch-case—up the steps, he seemed to Patricia, above all things, an adequate person. The long, blue, belted Chesterfield over-coat—fur-lined but not fur-collared; the gray squash hat; brown gloves; ribbed socks; brown, carefully-polished brogue shoes; all betokened, in her eyes, efficiency. And when, after the usual greeting to Smith—(Mrs. Jameson in the dining-room? Right. Just take this coat of mine, will you? And you might unpack for me at once)—he came into the room, the impression deepened.

The cheek she kissed was newly shaven; the dark hair smooth-brushed; the moustache clipped soldier-fashion. He had—an invariable habit—taken his bath on the boat; arrived spick and span, ready for the day’s work. The gray eyes were clear, healthy: unusually merry, she thought.

Breakfast? she asked, after he had returned her kiss. It’s quite ready.

Rather. Eggs and bacon for choice. Something English after all that German tripe.

Peter, your language is really getting atrocious.

Sorry, old thing. But honestly, Hamburg is the limit. I haven’t averaged four hours’ sleep all this week. What’s happened to the town in the last six years—I don’t know. They’re all crazy, I think. What with old Beckmann’s lobsters and young Beckmann’s dressed crabs....

He relapsed into silence; seeing again the champagne dinners at Forti’s, the red-wine lunches at the Rathaus, the smoky, tinselled Tanz-klubs, the whole nauseous pageant of heavy-handed vice and tawdry luxury with which the commercial classes of Germany were trying to ape the natural gaiety of France.

Still, I got what I went for, he added, as Smith brought in the Sheffield-plate breakfast-dishes, the big silver tea-pot.

They sat down.

And what did you go for? asked Patricia, serving him.

It’s rather a long story, he began—Peter rarely talked business to his wife—but I’ll tell you if you like.

Yes, do.

Well, you know Jamesons have had the Beckmann cigar-agency for years and years....

But those Beckmanns live in Havana, don’t they?

The old man, Heinrich Beckmann—he’s the senior partner—lives in Hamburg: the junior partners—his nephew Albert, who’ll inherit the business when Heinrich dies, is one of them—run the factory and the banking show in Cuba. But nothing big is ever decided without the old boy’s consent. When that bally Trust started, Beckmanns thought our old firm wasn’t big enough to handle their English market. So they took in two other concerns. That was when I first went into business. The governor never had any contract about the brand; trusted to their honour. Peter sniffed: even after nine years the old sore still rankled. Can I have another egg? By Jove, it’s good to be home again.

Really good?

Rather.... He looked round the comfortable room appreciatively. But I was telling you about Beckmanns. Sometime ago I said to Simpson, ‘Simpson, let’s get that sole agency back again.’ Simpson said—he’s a pessimistic blighter—‘It can’t be done.’ That was six weeks ago. The contract’s in my bag upstairs.

He paused, preening himself, quietly but quite obviously vain. She thought him very young at that moment; more like a boy of twenty-three than a man of thirty. But how? she asked.

Bluff, my dear. Absolute and unmitigated bluff. Albert’s come home—to get married, I think. So I wrote him a chatty letter, saying—well wrapped-up, of course—that we were thinking very seriously of giving up our cigar business. I said Simpson wanted to retire, and that the cigarette business was so profitable.... He laughed. Anyway, it came off. The old man wrote imploring me not to decide in a hurry; Albert wrote to me; they wired Havana, and Havana wrote to me; they invited me, at their expense—they’re as mean as they’re rich—to come over to Hamburg. I kept them waiting ten days. Then I went. Pat, you would have laughed to see me allowing myself to be persuaded—on my own terms—to sign a ten-year agreement with them.

But, Peter, interrupted his wife, was it quite—she hesitated—straight.

Straight? He thought it over. Yes. Just as straight as raising the pot on a busted flush. I stood to look silly if they’d called my bluff, didn’t I? And anyway, it’s jolly good business.

They sat silent for a minute or two. And again she was conscious of his adequacy. What he went for, he got. By his getting, she and her children benefitted. That was the Law, inviolable since the days of the cave-man. Weaklings to the wall—to the strong man, the fruits of his brain, of his industry....

I’m glad about this contract, in more ways than one, he said suddenly. You see, it’s a certainty. And certainties are always worth having. Nirvana isn’t a certainty, not yet. It’s a gamble. The confident tone eased off a shade or two. Once or twice, I’ve been rather harassed about it. Finance....

We might run to a car next year now, he added.

Came Nurse’s tactful knock, and the children, merry-eyed, attired for the Park.

Hello, Daddy, they chorussed, and romped over to be kissed.

Where have you been, Daddy? asked Primula.

Germany.

Where’s Germany?

They catechized him for a few minutes; informed him of their own well-being, of a train recently purchased; kissed their mother; and hurried off—having tasks to perform, serious tasks with hoops and sticks, in which their parents had no part. In concentration on the immediate job, Peter’s kiddies were uncannily like their father.

I must be off to the office, he announced as soon as they were out of the room. Anything on for tonight?

No, dear.

Right. I may be a little late. About seven, I expect....

He’s very—American, thought Pat, as she watched him stride off, inevitable cigar in his mouth, towards the Tube.

For Patricia, like most English people at the time, recognized only two classes of Americans—the over-worked rich and the idle rich. Of the true America, of