“We don’t even believe in our ancestors. All the same, we’re beginning to copy them again. D’you know a book called ‘The Sobbing Turtle’ that’s made such a fuss? – sheer Sterne, very well done; but sheer Sterne, and the author’s tongue in his cheek. That’s it in a nutshell, Miss Collins–our tongues are in our cheeks–bad sign. Never mind; I’m going to out-Piero Cosimo with this. Your head an inch higher, and that curl out of your eye, please. Thanks! Hold that! By the way, have you Italian blood? What was your mother’s name, for instance?”
“Brown.”
“Ah! You can never tell with Browns. It may have been Brune–or Bruno–but very likely she was Iberian. Probably all the inhabitants of Britain left alive by the Saxons were called Brown. As a fact, that’s all tosh, though. Going back to Edward the Confessor, Miss Collins–a mere thirty generations–we each of us have one thousand and seventy-four million, five hundred and seventy-three thousand, nine hundred and eighty-four ancestors, and the population of this island was then well under a million. We’re as inbred as racehorses, but not so nice to look at, are we? I assure you, Miss Collins, you’re something to be grateful for. So is Mrs. Mont. Isn’t she pretty? Look at that dog?”
Ting-a-ling, indeed, with forelegs braced, and wrinkled nose, was glaring, as if under the impression that Victorine was another bone.
“He’s funny,” she said, and again her voice sounded far away. Would Mrs. Mont lie here if he’d asked her? SHE would look pretty! But SHE didn’t need the fifteen bob!
“Comfortable in that position?”
In alarm, she murmured:
“Oh! yes, thank you!”
“Warm enough?”
“Oh! yes, thank you!”
“That’s good. Just a little higher with the head.”
Slowly in Victorine the sense of the dreadfully unusual faded. Tony should never know. If he never knew, he couldn’t care. She could lie like this all day–fifteen bob, and fifteen bob! It was easy. She watched the quick, slim fingers moving, the blue smoke from the cigarette. She watched the little dog.
“Like a rest? You left your gown; I’ll get it for you.”
In that green silk gown, beautifully padded, she sat up, with her feet on the floor over the dais edge.
“Cigarette? I’m going to make some Turkish coffee. You’d better walk about.”
Victorine obeyed.
“You’re out of a dream, Miss Collins. I shall have to do a Mathew Maris of you in that gown.”
The coffee, like none she had ever tasted, gave her a sense of well-being. She said:
“It’s not like coffee.”
Aubrey Greene threw up his hands.
“You have said it. The British are a great race–nothing will ever do them in. If they could be destroyed, they must long ago have perished of their coffee. Have some more?”
“Please,” said Victorine. There was such a little in the cup.
“Ready, again?”
She lay down, and let the gown drop off.
“That’s right! Leave it there–you’re lying in long grass, and the green helps me. Pity it’s winter; I’d have hired a glade.”
Lying in long grass–flowers, too, perhaps. She did love flowers. As a little girl she used to lie in the grass, and make daisy-chains, in the field at the back of her grandmother’s lodge at Norbiton. Her grandmother kept the lodge. Every year, for a fortnight, she had gone down there–she had liked the country ever so. Only she had always had something on. It would be nicer with nothing. Were there flowers in Central Australia? With butterflies there must be! In the sun–she and Tony–like the Garden of Eden!…
“Thank you, that’s all for today. Half a day–ten bob. To-morrow morning at eleven. You’re a first-rate sitter, Miss Collins.”
Putting on the pink stays, Victorine had a feeling of elation. She had done it! Tony should never know! The thought that he never would gave her pleasure. And once more divested of the ‘altogether,’ she came forth.
Aubrey Greene was standing before his handiwork.
“Not yet, Miss Collins,” he said; “I don’t want to depress you. That hip-bone’s too high. We’ll put it right tomorrow. Forgive my hand, it’s all chalk. Au revoir! Eleven o’clock. And we shan’t need this chap. No, you don’t!”
For Ting-a-ling was showing signs of accompanying the larger bone. Victorine passed out smiling.
Chapter VIII.
SOAMES TAKES THE MATTER UP
Soames had concentrated, sitting before the fire in his bedroom till Big Ben struck twelve. His reflections sum-totalled in a decision to talk it over with ‘old Mont’ after all. Though light-brained, the fellow was a gentleman, and the matter delicate. He got into bed and slept, but awoke at half-past two. There it was! ‘I WON’T think of it,’ he thought; and instantly began to. In a long life of dealings with money, he had never had such an experience. Perfectly straightforward conformity with the law–itself so often far from perfectly straightforward–had been the sine qua non of his career. Honesty, they said, was the best policy. But was it anything else? A normally honest man couldn’t keep out of a perfect penitentiary for a week. But then a perfect penitentiary had no relation to prison, or the Bankruptcy Court. The business of working honesty was to keep out of those two institutions. And so far he had never had any difficulty. What, besides the drawing of fees and the drinking of tea, were the duties of a director? That was the point. And how far, if he failed in them, was he liable? It was a director’s duty to be perfectly straightforward. But if a director were perfectly straightforward, he couldn’t be a director. That was clear. In the first place, he would have to tell his shareholders that he didn’t anything like earn his fees. For what did he do on his Boards? Well, he sat and signed his name and talked a little, and passed that which the general trend of business decided must be passed. Did he initiate? Once in a blue moon. Did he calculate? No, he read calculations. Did he check payments out and in? No, the auditors did that. There was policy! A comforting word, but–to be perfectly straightforward–a director’s chief business was to let the existing policy alone. Take his own case! If he had done his duty, he would have stopped this foreign insurance business which he had instinctively distrusted the moment he heard of it–within a month of sitting on the Board, or, having failed in doing so, resigned his seat. But he had not. Things had been looking better! It was not the moment, and so forth! If he had done his duty as a perfectly straightforward director, indeed, he would never have become a director of the P. P. R. S., because he would have looked into the policy of the Society much more closely than he had before accepting a position on the Board. But what with the names, and the prestige, and not looking a gift horse too closely in the mouth–there it had been! To be perfectly straightforward, he ought now to be circularising the shareholders, saying: “My laissez-faire has cost you two hundred odd thousand pounds. I have lodged this amount in the hands of trustees for your benefit, and am suing the rest of the directors for their quotas of the amount.” But he was not proposing to do so, because–well–because it wasn’t done, and the other directors wouldn’t like it. In sum: You waited till the shareholders found out the mess, and you hoped they wouldn’t. In fact, just like a Government, you confused the issues, and made the best case you could for yourselves. With a sense of comfort Soames thought of Ireland: The late Government had let the country in for all that mess in Ireland, and at the end taken credit for putting an end to what need never have been! The Peace, too, and the Air Force, and Agriculture, and Egypt–the five most important issues they’d had to deal with–they had put the chestnuts into the fire in every case! But had they confessed to it? Not they. One didn’t confess. One said: “The question of policy made it imperative at the time.” Or, better still, one said nothing; and trusted to the British character. With his chin resting on the sheet, Soames felt a momentary relief. The late Government weren’t sweating into THEIR sheets–not they–he was convinced of it! Fixing his eyes on the dying embers in the grate, he reflected on the inequalities and injustices of existence. Look at the chaps in politics and business, whose whole lives were passed in skating on thin ice, and getting knighted for it. They never turned a hair. And look at himself, for the first time in forty years on thin ice, and suffering confoundedly. There was a perfect cult of hoodwinking the public, a perfect cult of avoiding the consequences of administrative acts; and here was he, a man of the world, a man of the law, ignorant of those cults, and–and glad of it. From engrained caution and a certain pride, which had in it a touch of the fine, Soames shrank from that coarse-grained standard of honesty which conducted the affairs of the British public. In anything that touched money he was, he always had been, stiff-necked, stiff-kneed. Money was money, a pound a pound, and there was no way of pretending it wasn’t and keeping your self-respect. He got up, drank some water, took a number of deep breaths, and stamped his feet. Who was it said the other day that nothing had ever lost him five minutes’ sleep. The fellow must have the circulation of an ox, or the gift of Baron Munchausen. He took up a book. But his mind would only turn over and over the realisable value of his resources. Apart from his pictures, he decided that he could not be worth less than two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and there was only Fleur–and she already provided for more or less. His wife had her settlement, and could live on it perfectly well in France. As for himself–what did he care?
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