THE Petheringtons’ house, to which Mary Smith drove on the evening of 12th of April, under the two pretty little electric lights of her car, one for either side of her face, was one of a hundred similar London houses, a huge brown cube in the middle of Grosvenor Square. It was no longer called Petherington House; it had once again regained its more familiar appellation of No. 89, under which it had been famous for the complete lack of entertainment of any sort which had distinguished the short session of 1912. Then old Hooker had died, the changes in the Cabinet had come, Hooker’s wife had married the Bishop and also died immediately, and finally the Petheringtons had taken the place, foolishly called it by their own title for a few months, and finding it unknown to cabmen and to their friends’ chauffeurs also under this appellation, they slowly reverted to the old name.
If hospitality is a fault when pushed to an extreme, the Petheringtons exhibited that fault. But so excellent were their arrangements—for business will out even in the smallest details of domestic life—that[54] no one suffered in the crush, and that it was perfectly easy in the time a guest ordinarily allowed himself for the function, to go up the stairs and down again, though perhaps too much time was wasted at the necessarily narrow entrance where men must seek their hats and coats.
The movement of Society in this particular case was rendered the more facile by the emptiness of the hall, from which everything had been taken except the Great Stuffed Bear which had been shot by the servant of a trapper who had sold it to the correspondent of the furrier of Lady Petherington, and which now stood holding a tray, with an expression of extreme ferocity, and labelled “The Caucasus, 17th June, 1910,”—for in those mountains Mr. Petherington—as he then was—had travelled.
Mary Smith was not disappointed. Mooning aimlessly about the crowded rooms above, in an atmosphere surcharged with mauve Moravian music—the loudest of its kind—shuffled the anxious and slightly bowed form of Dolly, the young and popular Prime Minister.
A foreigner might have thought him to have few friends, so slowly did he proceed and with so curious a gaze from one group to another, seeming half stunned by the vigour of the band and fascinated by the vigorous contortions of Mr. Arthur Worth who conducted it for all he was—I mean with his utmost capacity of gesture and expression. That foreigner would have suffered an illusion. The Prime Minister[55] was perfectly well known in face and figure to every one in that room, and there were few who did not hope for some advantage from his presence, but fewer, far fewer still, who attempted to obtain it. I must of course except Professor Kahn.
Dolly knew his Mary Smith, and resigned himself to suffer. She had not come there that night for nothing. She got up to him within half a minute of the view, and found him with peculiar dexterity through a maze of wealthy people. She quietly took him away, and sat him in a large chair that stood in a remote recess, where the light was subdued; she took advantage of a deafening crash in the music to which its previous successes were child’s play, and shouted:
“When are you going to have your next move?”
The Prime Minister implored her not to talk shop. Then somewhat inconsequently he added, weakening: “Why do you want to know?”
The music was now whining and part of it was taking breath for another charge. It was therefore in quite a low but exceedingly business-like tone that Mary Smith remarked:
“Because I want you to do something for Dimmy.”
The name suggested to the Prime Minister one of twenty little jobs; he thought of a jolly little one in Ireland. But she added: “You know what has happened?”
He didn’t.
[56]She told him briefly: Ole Man Benson was broke.
The Prime Minister remembered the explosion of Popocatapetl: he had vaguely connected the news with something at the time: now he knew what it was. He looked extremely grave. And when Mary went on to tell him that Mrs. Demaine had only ￡1500 he looked graver still.
“There isn’t anything of a big sort going just now, Mary,” he said in quite another tone. But he was thinking his clearest. “I don’t know him as well as you do,” he added. “Can he do anything?”
“No,” said Mary Smith decidedly, “he can’t. But he’d go well in harness.”
The Prime Minister seemed to live more actively as he considered the problem. The warm air, the scent of clothes and flowers suited him well.
The trouble with his left lung which had so endeared him to his fellow-citizens, he felt far less keenly in the beginning of a warm spring than at any other time, and evenings such as this rewarded him for the sacrifice he made every winter to his duty and to England. Of the four years during which he had held the highest of human offices he had spent but one winter on the Riviera, and though it had been necessary in one year to forego an Autumn session, such a session had not in the other three years delayed the meeting of Parliament beyond the end of February. His youth stood him in good stead during this ordeal; but there were those (and they were they who loved him most) who looked with[57] anxiety upon the frail form and thought, although they dared not say, that the years were slipping by and that what a man could do with impunity when still upon the right side of fifty, would become another matter when his fifty-fifth year was passed.... There was of course always the hope of opposition and its leisure.... The Broadening of the Streets Bill had roused a tempest of Party passion.... He had already been publicly stoned in the North.... But no matter; for the moment the Prime Minister was full of appreciation, and for his cousin’s purposes in the kindliest of moods.
Nevertheless he thought (and his cousin read his thoughts) that she was asking the impossible. An idea struck him.
“Has Dimmy been called to the Bar?” he asked.
She looked up, puzzled. “I don’t think so.... No, I know he hasn’t. I put up a hundred for him in 1908 and he buzzed it. I should certainly have heard if he had done anything more before his marriage. Naturally since then....”
“Yes, naturally,” said the Prime Minister sympathetically. He mused. “He wouldn’t go abroad?” he said, looking round.
“What on earth’s the good of that?” said Mary Smith a little testily.
“Well,” answered the Prime Minister vaguely, as he reviewed certain posts in his mind, “... No. There isn’t much in that. Anything that could be[58] of any use wants leading up to.” And he plunged into thought again.
Then with a gesture that many had noticed in him and had thought a mere idle trick but which was really an accompaniment to calculation, he put his ten fingers down upon his knees and lifted them slowly one after another. When he had so lifted nine (it was the ring finger of his left hand) a touch of animation passed over his face, an expression his cousin could see even in that subdued light.
“How long does he want it for?” he asked.
Mary Smith was inclined to say “For ever,” but she checked herself; she remembered the face and manner of Theocritus C. Benson, she trusted his future fortune, and she said:
“I think even a little while would make a difference.”
They were both thinking of the same thing. But the Prime Minister understood what perhaps she did not, that there is no such thing as autocratic intervention in our public life, that time is required for every innovation, and that he who leads must also follow. He was reviewing as she spoke the prejudices and the ambitions of perhaps twenty men, and the power of each. When he spoke again it was as though his decision were final:
“I don’t see how I could do anything for him in the House. He’s hardly ever spoken, and when he did he made a fool of himself.”
“Of course,” said Mary sympathetically.
[59]“He’s the only man,” went on Dolly reflectively, “whom I’ve ever seen fall right off a bench in the House of Commons....”
“You mean he’s physically awkward?” replied Mary in the tone of a woman who knows how to despise such trifles—but she scented danger. “I’ve never known Dimmy betray one word that was confided to him,” she continued gravely.
“If one were beginning all over again,” said Dolly, as though thinking aloud. “But then,” he added, getting up from his chair and making as though to walk away,—“that’s impossible,—there’s Repton.”
It has been said that women are inconsequent in their conversation and that if they desire to obtain a favour they do so by disconnected hints which men cannot follow. It may be so. But perhaps on this very account do they succeed. At any rate from the moment that the Prime Minister had let drop the phrase “there’s Repton,” Mary Smith’s plan was formed. She did not like Sir Charles Repton, largely because he had not known her well. She had half forgotten him; she understood now that in some way he stood as an obstacle to what she desired for poor George, and from that moment she determined that Repton should be thrust into the House of Lords. All she said was:
“Yes, I forgot Repton.”
And then she went back into the crowded rooms, pushing the friend of her girlhood playfully before her with her forefinger pressed into the small of his[60] back, until they reached the open door and entered the main rooms.
The music of Mr. Arthur Worth’s band rose, a triumphant tyrant over, the howling talk, when, during a sharp momentary and calculated pause in the tornado of violins came the loud and unexpected crash of some heavy object falling violently in the hall below. Mary Smith moved very rapidly and silently downstairs towards the sound.
It was as she expected; George Mulross had come! A little flushed and very much annoyed, he had upset the Great Stuffed Bear which stood near the door of the house. George was looking at the Prostrate Monster with angry defiance, and nothing but his dignity forbade him to attempt to raise it. The accident was enough to decide Mary. She dreaded the impression Dolly might receive if the poor lad went up now and was flurried again. She went up and put her hand on his shoulder as he stood there. He jumped round and discovered her.
“Oh Lord!” he said.
“Dimmy,” she commanded firmly, “go out at once. A great deal depends on it. Go out at once. Don’t wait!”
He began to say something about his wife and a carriage.
“Go out at once!” said Mary Smith.
He tried to say something about his hat and coat.
Some yards before them at the open door the noise of a carriage was heard and there were servants[61] waiting. Behind them more servants. But Mary Smith knew her world.
It was a choice of evils, and George Mulross Demaine went out into the night, hatless and coatless. The policemen were pleased to see such familiarity among the great. They doubted not that the gentleman was taking the air, but they wondered why he walked so very rapidly eastward through Mayfair.
Meanwhile from the carriage the daughter of Theocritus C. Benson came out, not without decision, and very soon the rooms of that house were filled and even its Moravian music dominated by the acuteness of her laugh and the tremendous decision of her tread.
When every one had gone, one hat and coat remained. The footman pawned them: they were those of George Mulross Demaine.
He, poor fellow, saw in all this nothing but that eternity of bad luck to which he was born. When his wife asked him next day why he had left the Petheringtons’ so early, he told some ordinary lie: he had left indeed because one wiser than he had told him to leave, but he could make neither head nor tail of the whole affair: and his foot hurt him where the Bear had crushed it.