The Disentanglers. Lang Andrew
for him. His purse, or rather his cheque book, gaped with desire to be at Logan’s service, but had gaped in vain. Finding Logan grinning one day over the advertisement columns of a paper at the club, his prophetic soul discerned a good thing, and he wormed it out ‘in dern privacy.’ He slapped his manly thigh and insisted on being in it – as a capitalist. The other stoutly resisted, but was overcome.
‘You need an office, you need retaining fees, you need outfits for the accomplices, and it is a legitimate investment. I’ll take interest and risks,’ said Trevor.
So the money was found.
The inaugural dinner, for the engaging of accomplices, was given in a private room of a restaurant in Pall Mall.
The dinner was gay, but a little pathetic. Neatness, rather than the gloss of novelty (though other gloss there was), characterised the garments of the men. The toilettes of the women were modest; that amount of praise (and it is a good deal) they deserved. A young lady, Miss Maskelyne, an amber-hued beauty, who practically lived as a female jester at the houses of the great, shone resplendent, indeed, but magnificence of apparel was demanded by her profession.
‘I am so tired of it,’ she said to Merton. ‘Fancy being more and more anxious for country house invitations. Fancy an artist’s feelings, when she knows she has not been a success. And then when the woman of the house detests you! She often does. And when they ask you to give your imitation of So-and-so, and forget that his niece is in the room! Do you know what they would have called people like me a hundred years ago? Toad-eaters! There is one of us in an old novel I read a bit of once. She goes about, an old maid, to houses. Once she arrived in a snow storm and a hearse. Am I to come to that? I keep learning new drawing-room tricks. And when you fall ill, as I did at Eckford, and you can’t leave, and you think they are tired to death of you! Oh, it is I who am tired, and time passes, and one grows old. I am a hag!’
Merton said ‘what he ought to have said,’ and what, indeed, was true. He was afraid she would tell him what she owed her dress-makers. Therefore he steered the talk round to sport, then to the Highlands, then to Knoydart, then to Alastair Macdonald of Craigiecorrichan, and then Merton knew, by a tone in the voice, a drop of the eyelashes, that Miss Maskelyne was – vaccinated. Prophylactic measures had been taken: this agent ran no risk of infection. There was Alastair.
Merton turned to Miss Willoughby, on his left. She was tall, dark, handsome, but a little faded, and not plump: few of the faces round the table were plump and well liking. Miss Willoughby, in fact, dwelt in one room, in Bloomsbury, and dined on cocoa and bread and butter. These were for her the rewards of the Higher Education. She lived by copying crabbed manuscripts.
‘Do you ever go up to Oxford now?’ said Merton.
‘Not often. Sometimes a St. Ursula girl gets a room in the town for me. I have coached two or three of them at little reading parties. It gets one out of town in autumn: Bloomsbury in August is not very fresh. And at Oxford one can “tout,” or “cadge,” for a little work. But there are so many of us.’
‘What are you busy with just now?’
‘Vatican transcripts at the Record Office.’
‘Any exciting secrets?’
‘Oh no, only how much the priests here paid to Rome for their promotions. Secrets then perhaps: not thrilling now.’
‘No schemes to poison people?’
‘Not yet: no plots for novels, and oh, such long-winded pontifical Latin, and such awful crabbed hands.’
‘It does not seem to lead to much?’
‘To nothing, in no way. But one is glad to get anything.’
‘Jephson, of Lincoln, whom I used to know, is doing a book on the Knights of St. John in their Relations to the Empire,’ said Merton.
‘Is he?’ said Miss Willoughby, after a scarcely distinguishable but embarrassed pause, and she turned from Merton to exhibit an interest in the very original scheme of mural decoration behind her.
‘It is quite a new subject to most people,’ said Merton, and he mentally ticked off Miss Willoughby as safe, for Jephson, whom he had heard that she liked, was a very poor man, living on his fellowship and coaching. He was sorry: he had never liked or trusted Jephson.
‘It is a subject sure to create a sensation, isn’t it?’ asked Miss Willoughby, a little paler than before.
‘It might get a man a professorship,’ said Merton.
‘There are so many of us, of them, I mean,’ said Miss Willoughby, and Merton gave a small sigh. ‘Not much larkiness here,’ he thought, and asked a transient waiter for champagne.
Miss Willoughby drank a little of the wine: the colour came into her face.
‘By Jove, she’s awfully handsome,’ thought Merton.
‘It was very kind of you to ask me to this festival,’ said the girl. ‘Why have you asked us, me at least?’
‘Perhaps for many besides the obvious reason,’ said Merton. ‘You may be told later.’
‘Then there is a reason in addition to that which most people don’t find obvious? Have you come into a fortune?’
‘No, but I am coming. My ship is on the sea and my boat is on the shore.’
‘I see faces that I know. There is that tall handsome girl, Miss Markham, with real gold hair, next Mr. Logan. We used to call her the Venus of Milo, or Milo for short, at St. Ursula’s. She has mantles and things tried on her at Madame Claudine’s, and stumpy purchasers argue from the effect (neglecting the cause) that the things will suit them. Her people were ruined by Australian gold mines. And there is Miss Martin, who does stories for the penny story papers at a shilling the thousand words. The fathers have backed horses, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. Is it a Neo-Christian dinner? We are all so poor. You have sought us in the highways and hedges.’
‘Where the wild roses grow,’ said Merton.
‘I don’t know many of the men, though I see faces that one used to see in the High. There is Mr. Yorker, the athletic man. What is he doing now?’
‘He is sub-vice-secretary of a cricket club. His income depends on his bat and his curl from leg. But he has a rich aunt.’
‘Cricket does not lead to much, any more than my ability to read the worst handwritings of the darkest ages. Who is the man that the beautiful lady opposite is making laugh so?’ asked Miss Willoughby, without moving her lips.
Merton wrote ‘Bulstrode of Trinity’ on the back of the menu.
‘What does he do?’
‘Nothing,’ said Merton in a low voice. ‘Been alligator farming, or ostrich farming, or ranching, and come back shorn; they all come back. He wants to be an ecclesiastical “chucker out,” and cope with Mr. Kensitt and Co. New profession.’
‘He ought not to be here. He can ride and shoot.’
‘He is the only son of his mother and she is a widow.’
‘He ought to go out. My only brother is out. I wish I were a man. I hate dawdlers.’ She looked at him: her eyes were large and grey under black lashes, they were dark and louring.
‘Have you, by any chance, a spark of the devil in you?’ asked Merton, taking a social header.
‘I have been told so, and sometimes thought so,’ said Miss Willoughby. ‘Perhaps this one will go out by fasting if not by prayer. Yes, I have a spark of the Accuser of the Brethren.’
‘Tant mieux,’ thought Merton.
All the people were talking and laughing now. Miss Maskelyne told a story to the table. She did a trick with a wine glass, forks, and a cork. Logan interviewed Miss Martin, who wrote tales for the penny fiction people, on her methods. Had she a moral aim, a purpose? Did she create her characters first, and let them evolve their fortunes, or did she invent a plot, and make her characters fit in?
Miss