Chapter IV

Deep in the Surrey hills, and long secluded from the world, there runs a drowsy valley known to the rustics whom it nurtures as the Vale of Caterham.

Of late years our English passion for the countryside has discovered this enchanted spot; a railway has conveyed to it those who were wise enough to seize early upon its subtle beauties, and the happy homes of a population freed from urban care are still to be seen rising upon every sward. Here Purley, which stands at the mouth of the Vale, Kenley, Warlingham and Caterham Stations receive at morning and discharge at evening the humbler breadwinners whom economic circumstance compels to absent themselves from the haunting woods of Surrey during the labours of the day. Some few, more blest, in mansions more magnificent, can contemplate throughout untroubled hours the solemn prospect of the hills.

Here it was that Mr. Clutterbuck was building the new home.

The sense of proportion which had always marked his life and had contributed so largely to his financial success, was apparent upon every side. He was content with some seven acres of ground, chosen in the deepest recess of the dale, and, since water is rare upon that chalk, he was content with but a small lake of graceful outline, and of no more than eighteen inches in depth; in the midst an island, destined with time to bear a clump of exotic trees, stood for the moment a bare heap of whitish earth diversified rather than hidden by a few leafless saplings.

The house itself had been raised with businesslike rapidity under the directions of Mrs. Clutterbuck herself, who had the wisdom to employ in all but the smallest details, an architect recommended by the Rev. Isaac Fowle.

The whole was in the taste which the sound domestic sense of modern England has substituted for the gloomy stucco and false Italian loggias of our fathers. The first storey was of red brick which time would mellow to a glorious and harmonious colour; the second was covered with roughcast, while the third and fourth appeared as dormer windows in an ample roof containing no less than fifteen gables. The chimneys were astonishingly perfect examples of Somersetshire heading, and the woodwork, which was applied in thin strips outside the main walls of the building, was designed in the Cheshire fashion, with draw-pins, tholes and spring-heads tinctured to a sober brown. The oak was imported from the distant Baltic and strengthened with iron as a precaution against the gape and the warp.

The glass, which was separate from the house and stood in a great dome and tunnel higher up on the hillside where it sheltered the Victoria Regia, the tobacco plant, the curious and carnivorous _Hepteryx Rawlinsonia_, the palm and the common vine. A lodge guarded both the northern and the southern entrances and a considerable approach swept up past the two greyhounds which dignified the cast-iron gates; themselves a copy, upon a smaller scale, of the more famous Guardini's at Bensington, while the main door was of pure elm studded with one hundred and fifty-three large nails. The rooms within were heated not only by fireplaces of exquisite decoration, but also secretly by pipes which ran beneath the floors and had this inconvenience, that the captious, withdrawing from the fierceness of the blaze to some distant margin of the apartment, would marvel at the suffocating heat which struck them in the chance corner of their retirement.

Of the numerous bath-rooms fitted in copper and Dutch tiles, of the chapel, the vesting chamber and the great number of bedrooms--many with dressing-rooms attached--I need not speak.

The stables were connected with the mansion by a covered way, which the guests could use in all weathers when there was occasion to visit the stables and to admire Aster, West Wind, Cœur de Lion, Ex Calibur, Abde-el-Kader, and the little pink pony, Pompey, which was permanently lame, but had caught Mrs. Clutterbuck's eye at Lady Moreton's sale, and had cost no less than 250 guineas.

"The Plâs" was the simple name suggested somewhat later by Charlie Fitzgerald, but for the moment Mr. and Mrs. Clutterbuck, well acquainted with the hesitation of all cultured people to adopt pretentious names for their residences, were content to leave it unchristened, and to allude to it among their acquaintance by nothing more particular than the beautiful title of "Home."

In the spring of 1911 the last drier had been applied to the walls, and with the early summer of that year Mr. Clutterbuck and his wife sat before the first fire upon their new hearth. It was a fire of old ship logs, and they were delighted to confirm the fact that it produced small particoloured flames.

If it be wondered why a fortune of barely half a million should have been saddled with so spacious a building, it must be replied that a large part of every important income must of necessity be expended in luxury, and that the form of luxury which most appealed to this hospitable and childless pair was a roof under which they might later entertain numerous gatherings of friends, while, to those long accustomed during the active period of life to somewhat cramped surroundings, ease of movement and spacious apartments are a great and a legitimate solace in declining years. Here Mr. Clutterbuck, did he weary of his study, could wander at ease into the morning-room; from thence to the picture gallery which adjoined the well-lit hall, or if he chose to pursue his tour he could find the peacock-room, the Japanese room, the Indian room, and the Henri Quatre Alcove and Cosy Corner, and the Jacobean Snuggery awaiting him in turn. Had he been a younger man he would probably have added a swimming-bath; as it was, the omission of this appendage was all that marred the splendid series of apartments.

Doubtless he had overbuilt, as ordinary standards of wealth are counted, but the standards of financial genius are not those of commerce, and this very excess it was which brought him the first beginnings of his public career. It was impossible that display upon such a scale and so near London, should not attract the attention of households at once well-born and generous. Our political world is ever ready to admit to the directing society of the nation those whose prudence and success in business have shown them worthy of undertaking the task of government. In the height of the season, as Mr. and Mrs. Clutterbuck were sitting at their breakfast, a little lonely in the absence of any guests in that great house, the lady's post was found to contain an invitation from no less a leader of London than the widow of Mr. Barttelot Smith.

* * * * *

Mary Smith had about her every quality that entitled her to lead the world, which she in fact did lead with admirable power. She had been born a Bailey. Her mother was a Bunting; she was therefore of that well established middle rank which forms perhaps the strongest core in our governing class. Her husband, Barttelot Smith, of Bar Harbour, Maine, and the New Bessemer, Birmingham, Alabama, had died in 1891, after a very brief married life, which had barely sufficed to introduce him to the Old Country and a world of which the hours and the digestion were quite unsuitable to him.

The fortune of which his widow was left in command after her bereavement was ample for the part it was her genius to play; and though her means were not of that exaggerated sort to which modern speculation has accustomed us, yet her roomy house in St. James's Place, her Scotch forest, the two places in Cumberland, and the place she rented in the heart of the Quorn permitted her to entertain upon a generous scale; while large and historic but cosy Habberton on the borders of Exmoor afforded a secure retreat for the few weeks in August, which, if she were in England, she devoted to the society of her intimates.

She was a woman of high culture, the intimate friend of the Prime Minister--not as a politician, but as a poet--and through her sister, Louise, the sister-in-law of the leader of the Opposition, whose extraordinary polo play in the early eighties had endeared him to the then lively girl much more than could family ties.

Such other connections as she had with the political world were quite fortuitous. Her aunt, Lady Steyning, had seen, of course, the most brilliant period of the Viceroyalty in India, before the recent deplorable situation had destroyed at once the dignity and the leisure of that post; while a second aunt, the oldest of the three surviving Duchesses of Drayton, though living a very retired life at Molehurst, naturally brought her into touch with the Ebbworths and all the Rusper group of old Whig families, from young Lord Rusper, to whom she was almost an elder sister, to the rather disreputable, but extremely wealthy, Ockley couple, whom she chivalrously defended through the worst of the storm.

It would be a great error to imagine that this charming and tactful woman found her interests in such a world alone--she was far too many sided for that. Her collection of Fragonards had many years ago laid at her feet the whole staff of the Persian Embassy, and opened an acquaintance with a world of Oriental experience; with it she discovered and cultivated the two chief Eastern travellers of our time, Lord Hemsbury and Mr. Teak; upon quite another side her modest but sincere and indefatigable interest in the lives of the poor had naturally led to a warm understanding between herself and Lord Lambeth--the indefatigable empire builder whom the world had known as Mr. Barnett of the M'Korio, and who now, as the aged Duke of Battersea, had earned by his unceasing good deeds, the half-playful, half-reverend nickname of "Peabody Yid" among the younger members of his set.

It was not a little thing to have gained the devotion of such a man, and it was, in a sense, the summit of Mary Smith's achievement: but she was more than a sympathetic and universal friend; she was also--as such friends must always be--a power in both Political parties--and perhaps in three.

It was said--I know not with how much justice--that young Pulborough (who was his own father) owed his Secretaryship of State more to her direct influence than to his blood relationship to the aunt by marriage of her second brother-in-law, The MacClure; and there were rumours, certainly exaggerated, that when the Board of Trade was filled after Illingsbury had fled the country, Paston's marriage with her niece Elizabeth had decided his appointment.

I am careful to omit any reference to the Attorney-General of the day--it was mere gossip--nor will I tarry upon her brother at the Home Office, or her Uncle Harry at Dublin Castle, lest I should lead the reader to imagine that her well-earned influence depended on something other than her great soul and admirable heart.

It was a generous impulse in such a woman to send the large gilt oblong of pasteboard which was the key to her house, and to a seat at her board, to the lonely and now ageing couple in their retirement in the Caterham Valley. But Mrs. Smith, even in her most heartfelt and spontaneous actions, had always in view the nature of our political institutions. The sudden fortune of Mr. Clutterbuck had no doubt been exaggerated in the numerous conversations upon it which had enlivened her drawing-room; if so, it was an error upon the right side, and her instinct told her that she could not be much to blame in giving such a man the opportunity to enter into the fuller life of his country.

Every rank in our carefully ordered society has its conventions; one, which will doubtless appear ridiculous to many of my readers, is that which forbids, among the middle classes, the extension of a warm invitation to people whom one never happens to have seen. The basis for this suburban convention it would be impossible to discover, but then, convention is not logical; and whatever may be the historic origin of the fetich, certain it is that most of our merchants and professional men would never dream of asking a Cabinet minister or a peer to their houses until at least a formal introduction had passed between them and the statesman so honoured.

The converse is not true at all; our public men would accept or reject such an invite as convenience dictated, and would hardly remember whether they had the pleasure of an acquaintance or no: they approach men of lesser value with unaffected ease and find it difficult to tolerate the strict ritual of a narrower class; but their own society, as they would be the first to admit, has its own body of unreasoning etiquette, the more difficult to recognise because it is so familiar; Buffle himself, for instance, would hardly tolerate a question in Parliament upon his recent escapade.

The varying codes of varying strata of society are the cause of endless misunderstandings; such a misunderstanding might have arisen now, but once again it was a woman that saved the jar. Mary Smith had unwittingly gone near to the line of offence, in the eyes of Mr. Clutterbuck at least, when she posted her well-meant card for July 2. Mrs. Clutterbuck had not only a wider social experience than her husband, but could also rely upon the instinctive psychology of her sex. She overruled at once, and very wisely, the petty objections of her husband to the form in which the acquaintance had been offered them, and returned, by the morning's post in the third person and upon pink paper, an acceptance to the kindly summons.

There were three weeks only in which to anticipate and prepare for this novel experience, but they were three weeks during which Mr. Clutterbuck was so thoroughly convinced by his wife, as very sincerely to regret the first comments he had made upon a custom to which his ignorance of life had made him take exception.

Meanwhile, in St. James's Place, the large and comfortable rooms which had once been those of the exiled Bourbons and later of the Boxing Club were the scene of more than one conversation between Mary Smith and her friends in the matter of those whom Charlie Fitzgerald lightly called "the mysterious guests."

"The less mysterious they are to you," said Mary Smith, nodding at this same Charlie Fitzgerald one very private afternoon at tea, "the better for you." She shut her lips and nodded again at him with emphasis.

"Oh Lord! Mary," said Charlie Fitzgerald, "is it going to be another of them?"

He was twenty years and more her junior, but she tolerated anything from the son of her favourite cousin; besides which, every one called her Mary, and if she was to be called Mary she would as soon be called Mary by an intimate younger relation as by the crowd of chance men and women of her own age who used her name so freely.

"Yes," went on Mrs. Smith with decision, "it's going to be another of them; and this time I hope you'll stick."

Her trim little body was full of energy as she said it, and her face full of determination.

"It's never been my fault," said Fitzgerald reproachfully. "Was it my fault that Isaacs got into trouble, or that old Burpham lost his temper about the motor-car?"

"The last was your fault certainly," answered his cousin vivaciously. "If you take a man's money, you mustn't use his motor-car without his leave."

"He's an old cad," yawned Fitzgerald lazily.

"Every one knows that," said Mrs. Smith, "and no one thinks the better of you for not understanding an old cad. It's a private secretary's business to understand.... You won't get anything from me, anyhow, I can tell you."

"You've said that before," said Charlie, looking down at her with a smile.

"Yes, and I have kept it, too," said Mary.

To which he answered with some emphasis: "By God you have!" and looking out into the trees in the Green Park he fell into a reverie, the monotone of which was his large and increasing indebtedness. It did not trouble him, but it furnished a constant food for his thoughts and lent him just that interest in the acquirement of money which his Irish character perhaps needed.

Later, as the room filled with callers, the conversation upon the Clutterbucks became more general. A certain Mr. Higginson, who was very smart indeed and wrote for the papers, was able to give the most precise information: Old Clutterbuck had been worth four millions; he'd dropped a lot on house property in Paris. He was worth nearly three anyhow, but he was a miserly old beggar. He had made it by frightening Charley Hatton.

At this all of his audience were pleased and several laughed.

"I'd frighten the beggar for less than four millions," said Charlie Fitzgerald. He spread out his arms and made a loud roaring noise to show how he'd do it, to the huge amusement of an aged general who loved youth and high spirits, but to the no small annoyance of Mr. Higginson, who hated being interrupted.

"Nonsense!" said Mary Smith, pouring out tea for a new caller in the old familiar way (she detested a pack of servants and kept hers for the most part in the double-decked basement underground). "Nonsense! I believe he made it perfectly honestly. He's got a dear old face!"

Mary Smith had never seen his face, but a good word is never thrown away.

"He's got an old hag of a wife," blurted out the General, "an old----"

Mary Smith put up her hand. "Now do be careful--you used that word only last Thursday."

"Good Lord!" said Charlie Fitzgerald; "what a long time." And the General and he, who had lunched together that same day, were amused beyond the ordinary at the simple jest.

"I've never seen his wife," said Mary Smith severely and with perfect truth. "She's probably just like everybody else. You people make up ideas in your heads about classes that don't exist. Everybody's just like everybody else.... Look at old Bolney!"

"Damned if he's like anybody else!" said Miss Mosel, taking her cigarette out of her mouth and picking a long shred of yellow tobacco from her underlip at the same time. "Mamma calls him Cow Bolney."

"She's quite wrong, my dear, thoroughly wrong," said the old General fussily. "I wouldn't have believed it of your mother. I knew her when she was your age."

"Don't believe it now," said Mary Smith soothingly, "Victoria tells lies."

"No, I don't," said Miss Mosel stolidly. "Anyhow I'm coming to see old Clutterbuck."

"Not if I know it," said Mary Smith grimly.

"Oh, I don't mean at dinner," caught up Victoria Mosel lightly. "I wouldn't rag anybody's dinner, but you can't prevent my coming on, after."

Mrs. Smith gazed at her imploringly. "Don't play the fool, Vic," she begged.

"I shan't play the fool," said Victoria. "I only want to look on: I won't touch."

"Who you goin' to get?" asked Charlie.

"Well, there's _you_," spreading out her fingers in what had been for half a lifetime a pretty affectation of hers, and ticking them off. "And there's old Mother D. of Drayton, and I shall try to get the Duke."

"Oh, your perpetual Peabody Yid," began Charlie.

"Don't," said his cousin, laughing with great charm.

"Well, yes, the Duke, and I've got _him_ already," she said pointing to the General. "And ... and I must have William."

Vic Mosel and Mr. Higginson shouted together: "Risking William! Oh! I say!" while Charlie's eye gleamed at the mention of her brother's name and he gloated on the prospect of a really good shindy.

"Oh, fiddlesticks-ends," said Mary Smith. "He's a white man: besides some one must do host for me. _You're_ too green" (she said that to Fitzgerald), "and he'll behave all right. I'll warn him."

"Then," she went on hurriedly, "then there's Mrs. Carey and her mother, and the Steynings--I can't remember the whole lot. Perkins would tell you. There's sixteen, I know that."

"I'll hold the sponge for William Bailey," said Charlie solemnly; "the General supports the Duke."

"If there's any row," said Mary Smith to him vigorously, "I shall know who started it, and who will lose by it. William's a dear."

And so the flashing talk went round, while, with Mr. Clutterbuck in the Caterham glens, the hours crept on towards an appointed day; and the horses were exercised and the motors ran, and the lake slowly filled, and parties, a little larger with each succeeding week, groups of their old friends and of their new, met and drank champagne at lunch, at dinner, and at supper too, until June was ended.

The second of July was warm and fine: an open motor would have pleased Mr. Clutterbuck for the run to town,--but Mrs. Clutterbuck, Mrs. Clutterbuck knew! It was in the Limousine that they swept up the London Road, past the Palace and round into St. James's Place. Mr. Clutterbuck, who had long secretly wondered how those great houses upon the Park were approached at all, and who had half believed that some royal entry, hidden from the vulgar gaze, led into them, saw this great mystery solved: he was silent upon his discovery. He wondered whether one should tell the motor to go into the stables of the house, or what: and again Mrs. Clutterbuck knew. She left it for the motor man and the big flunkeys to thresh out between them.

When they were at table the many lights, the much wine and the more talk entered her husband's soul and warmed it. The lights greatly pleased him; the wine he drank freely. He was beginning to live.

He noted curiously the faces round the great table, and asked his neighbour the names of more than one; that neighbour was Mrs. Carey, than whom he could have had no better guide, for she knew every face in London, to the number of two hundred or more. She pointed out the large, beneficent features of the Duke of Battersea where he sat at Mary Smith's right, hardly able to take his eyes from her face. Mr. Clutterbuck in his turn gazed long and with increasing awe at the man whose name stood for the power of England in so many distant harbours, and whose career in finance was the model and the envy of all his own society. He strained to listen and catch some word falling from his lips, but the hubbub was too loud. The bright young laughing face to his left was that of Charlie Fitzgerald, but he did not need the information, for Mary Smith had been careful to introduce the lad with an unmistakable intonation, and, as though by inadvertence, twice over. The tall, square-faced, whiskered, spectacled man opposite who sipped his soup as though every taste of it were to be thought out and appreciated, was, he learnt, Mr. William Bailey, the brother of his hostess; and as Mrs. Carey told him that name, she laughed discreetly, for the eccentricities of Mr. William Bailey, though they were not always harmless, were never without point to women of Mrs. Carey's superficial character. She saw nothing in them but matter for her own amusement.

Nothing perhaps struck Mr. Clutterbuck more in the great society he had entered than the superb ease which distinguished it. Every member of that world seemed free to pursue his own appetite or inclination without restraint of form, and yet the whole was bound by just that invisible limit which is the framework of good breeding. Here on his right was Lord Steyning, talking at the top of his voice; a little nearer Charlie Fitzgerald was whispering across his neighbour, Miss Carey, to another guest whose name Mr. Clutterbuck did not know. The Duke of Battersea felt no necessity to talk to any one beside his hostess, or to take his eyes for more than a moment from her face; while Mr. William Bailey shocked no one by maintaining a perfect silence, and staring gloomily through his spectacles at a "Reynolds" of his great grandfather, the Nabob, which he had frequently declared in mixed company to be a forgery. It was this atmosphere of freedom that gave Mr. Clutterbuck his chief pleasure in an evening which he heartily, thoroughly, and uninterruptedly enjoyed.

When the women had gone away and the men were sitting at their ease, with the silent William Bailey for host, a maze of acute interest surrounded the merchant; he could hear the Duke of Battersea, a little grumpy in the absence of the hostess, praising Lord Steyning to his face for the arrangement of his garden, and turning his back on Mr. Bailey, which gentleman, speaking for almost the first time that evening, shoved up close to Mr. Clutterbuck and maintained his character for oddity by asking how he liked the Peabody Yid.

Mr. Clutterbuck, uncertain whether this were a novel, a play, or a new game, but unwilling to betray his ignorance, said that it depended upon taste.

"It does," said Mr. Bailey, with emphasis; "it's a jolly house, isn't it?"

Mr. Clutterbuck affirmed the grandeur and admirable appointment of the house, but he could not help wondering whether William Bailey would have been more pleased if he had found something to criticise. Then, as Charlie Fitzgerald turned to talk to Mr. Clutterbuck, William Bailey relapsed again into his silence, an attitude of mind which he diversified in no way save by pulling out a pencil and sketching, with some exaggeration of the ears, nape, and curled ringlets, the back view presented to him by the venerable Duke of Battersea.

Upstairs, Mary Smith, squatting familiarly beside Mrs. Clutterbuck, giggled into her private ear with that delightful familiarity which had ever put her guests into her intimate confidence, and swept away every vestige of _gêne_ and of disparity in status. This charm of manner it was for which those whom she still honoured chiefly loved her, and which those whom she had seen fit to drop most poignantly regretted.

Upon Mrs. Clutterbuck, as she reclined on a Tutu Louis XVII., in an attitude full of charm and of repose yet instinct with self-control, the spell of Mary Smith was powerful indeed. Her talk was of the great--and of their secretaries. She remembered stories of ambassadors, and of their secretaries as well; and in what she had to say concerning Secretaries of State, yet other secretaries of these secretaries appeared--unpaid secretaries and under-secretaries, parliamentary secretaries, and common negligible secretaries who did secretarial work. The functions, position, and weight of a secretary had never seemed so clear to Mrs. Clutterbuck before; nay, until that moment she had given but little heed to the secretary's trade. She saw it now.

But all this was done so deftly and with such tact, and interrupted with such merry little screams of laughter; in the course of it Mrs. Clutterbuck was herself compelled to make so many confidences that the atmosphere was one of mutual information, and the guest was confident that she had contributed more than the hostess. When Mary Smith moved off to play general post with the guests, and, as her charming phrase went, "to make them to talk to one another," Mrs. Clutterbuck found how singularly less a woman of the world was Mrs. Smith's somewhat prudish aunt, Lady Steyning, long at Simla, some time our ambassadress at Washington, and now about to be at the head of the Embassy in Paris. As for Mrs. Carey, Mrs. Clutterbuck regarded her with loathing.

Downstairs Charlie Fitzgerald had been drinking port, and, keeping his right hand firmly fixed upon the neck of the decanter, he had poured out wine at intervals for Mr. Clutterbuck with a gesture which he falsely termed "passing the bottle." He had not his cousin's manner or science in the handling of a conversation, but the wine, though bad, was a bond between them; they drank it largely, especially Fitzgerald: it enabled him to recite with passion and Mr. Clutterbuck to receive with faith, anecdotes of yet another batch of secretaries, and of Mr. Fitzgerald's own adventures in his confidential relations with the discredited Isaacs and the aged but irascible Lord Burpham; a last engagement which he had apparently terminated from his fixed decision to undertake no such work in the future, but to live the life of a private gentleman, and possibly to enter the House of Commons.

It was impossible for Mr. Clutterbuck not to contrast again the spontaneity and ease of the world round him with the much more sterile associations of his middle and later manhood. Nor did anything please him more in that ease and spontaneity than the Irish good nature with which Charlie Fitzgerald poured at his feet his wealth of social experience, and especially his experience in that secretarial phase which Mr. Clutterbuck sincerely regretted that he should have entirely abandoned. He could not help thinking, as he looked at the handsome curly head and merry eyes, and as he heard the names of the great and good flash constantly from the lips before him, how perfect would that arrangement be which should permit some humbler but similar man to be to him what Charlie Fitzgerald seemed to have been to the eminent financier and the hot-tempered politician; a-second-and-a-younger-eye-and-brain.

As they came into the drawing-room together, they were already fast friends, and such was the effect of the atmosphere about him and the exhilarating evening he had passed, that Mrs. Smith found it quite impossible to make her Clutterbuck speak to any one save his new-found acquaintance: a disappointment to those ladies who had heard exaggerated accounts of his wealth, and were already interested in his crescent-shaped moustaches and the fan of grey hair which he displayed over his considerable forehead.

Mr. Clutterbuck noticed with some astonishment--if anything could astonish him now--the entry of further guests at a late hour. They came, as it seemed to him, without introduction and without ceremonial. And he wondered, as he followed the imperial carriage and gestures of Victoria Mosel among the rest, whether he also in some future year might be found drifting thus through open doors free from the weary necessities of etiquette. He doubted it.

They left at half-past eleven, and all the way home Mrs. Clutterbuck complained of fatigue. But her husband, upon his arrival, felt it necessary to continue the evening, and far into the early morning drank yet more port, and considered the change in his life.