Chapter IV

John had started with his little nest egg of £352, but it would not last for ever. He had had the wisdom to begin earning at once. He first took chance jobs at writing for next to nothing. Then he helped a friend to read proofs. Then he catalogued a library (extremely badly), but at any rate with a good knowledge of French and German—which was useful—at 30s. a week. Then he put in a short time, through the kindness of one of his father’s friends, as assistant to the agent of an estate; but there he was paid no wages, the experience was held to be a sufficient reward, so that could not last. Then he spent a rather longer time, under an assumed name, in a curious little venture with a chance acquaintance of his, a man of the stage who had a tiny capital; it immediately dissipated in a cabaret show which failed. It was bad, but it would have failed even sooner had it been better.

At last, having earned in rather less than a year somewhat under two hundred pounds and having spent at least two hundred and fifty, he put in three splendid weeks at sea without wages, but lodged and fed and gaining time to think things over. He had come across the poor owner of a small, old and ill-found ketch which traded with odd cargoes in and out of London River, pottering up the creeks of the East Coast, and sometimes standing across for the Hook or Ostend. John had a way with him, and persuaded this acquaintance to let him sign on for a round voyage across the North Sea and home by the East Coast ports, picking up chance ladings and making what she could for her owner: her Mate and Captain sharing. He was to grub with those officers in the after-cabin, under one of those many odd titles whereby they excuse a supernumerary on board. His presence delighted neither. He found the Old Man surly and the Mate hostile. Yet he enjoyed himself hugely; and there it was—of all places in the world!—that he discovered his talent and his earning power, for we each of us have a talent—a saleable talent, I mean—and happy is the man who discovers his while he is yet young.

The Mate and he were together in the cabin of that aged ketch during a long wait outside Harwich for the tide. The Old Man was smoking on deck watching for the turn. The Mate was more sour than ever that evening, jealous of such a super-cargo, with his white hands and gentleman’s accent. Yet it was the Mate who, there and then, brought John his good fortune, as enemies often do. John Maple was standing by in the dark corner of the little stuffy place, lit only by a swinging oil lamp, with no sound but the dull plash of the shallow water outside, and in his exasperation at something worse than usual which the Mate had just grumbled at him, he muttered to himself a word not polite, but said in such a low tone that he hoped it could provoke no quarrel. What it did provoke in the Mate was an attitude quite unexpected. That worthy looked up with a sudden startled air, and said in an awed tone, “What was that? Didn’t you hear summat?” and with that he peered furtively askance into the darkness.

“What was that?” said John Maple, rather surlily, thinking he had been challenged.

“I ’eard a voice!” said the Mate in scared religious tones, and John, looking at him, saw that he had gone quite white.

Those of the Unseen Powers who were looking after John’s affairs shot into his head the right thing to do, though he hardly knew why it was the right thing to do. He turned his face round again slowly away from the Mate, put his hand to his temple, to cover his features, and again gave that slight muttering; to be correct, it was the word “Swine!”

He heard something like a muffled shriek from the Mate:

“There it goes again! It said ‘Mine,’” moaned the Mate, now glaring wide-eyed at the darkest corner of the cabin, where the reflector of the lamp threw a deep shadow behind its smoky light.

“Whose? Eh? ’ose? Am I ’is? What’s ’ee mean?” The Mate may have been drinking or may have knocked off, which is worse still for the nerves. But there was no doubt as to his mistaking the direction of the slight sound which had terrified him.

John Maple had discovered in those five minutes how easy it was—for him at least, or in the right surroundings—to ventriloquise.

“I dursn’t hear it again,” whispered the Mate.

John Maple could not refuse to oblige, and he obliged for the third time. The Mate sprang up all tense and said, trembling, that he didn’t like it.

“What don’t you like?” said John Maple, pleasant and friendly, to show that the quarrel was forgotten.

“Voices,” said the Mate scratching the little swinging table with his nails nervously. “Don’t you ’ear nothin’?”

John Maple paused.

“Yes, I think I did,” he said slowly—which was true enough.

It was the First Episode, and a very slight one. It had no immediate sequel.

On the return voyage (they carried bricks) John Maple was again successful, not only in the cabin, but once at night on deck, when the Mate and he had gone forward together; and again, when he had helped to see whether there was any shifting in the hold (for a cargo of bricks can work wonders if it shifts), the Mate heard voices. This time the voices had something to say worth saying. They touched the Mate on his immortal soul, the immediate perils of life, and advanced a strong premonition of death. The Mate had fled up and aft, steadied himself with a glass, and sworn at the end of the ordeal by all the gods below London Bridge he would not sign on that vessel again.

The Old Man was not superstitious. He had many of the qualities of wood: not only its toughness, endurance and colour, but also its lack of sensibility. John wondered whether this new-found talent would work on the non-superstitious.

Well, it had not that fine “first night” success which the Mate had enjoyed; but it was beyond expectation all the same.

The Old Man heard very clearly a voice from his own bunk. He was on the other side of the cabin at the time, though, it is true, his attention had been directed to the couch. The voice, far off, ghostly in the darkness, reminded him of the day when he had so nearly drowned (through no fault of his own, but rather of Islington port), and warned him of approaching trials. Had the Old Man remembered to whom he had lately recounted that drowning episode (the only adventure of his life) he might have had suspicions. As it was, he had none, for he told the story so often that he could not remember who last had heard it. All he knew now was that a whisper from the other world—from A Spirit that knew his past—had bidden him remember and beware. It affected him damnably.

His face did not go as white as the Mate’s had done, for it started with a handicap of fixed mahogany, but it was changed when he looked round at John and asked him, as the Mate had asked him, those few days before, whether he had heard anything; and once more John truthfully said he had. Then the Old Man asked him point-blank whether he minded—as after all, he had done him the favour of taking him aboard, and he was only a young chap—whether he minded sleeping in his, the Captain’s, bunk that night, and giving him his own bunk. And John had accepted with all the goodwill in the world. He even said it was an honour.

When John Maple landed from his short but memorable and very happy cruise (for he had loved the sea, though it was his first experience of it), he had no idea that there was a living in the talent he had discovered—if talent it were. At first he only thought it amusing that by suggesting to another person where a voice was likely to come from, and then keeping one’s features still and talking within one’s mouth, one could make the voice seem to come from out of nothingness. Then when he tried it on with chance Bohemian friends in London he found that not everybody could do it as well as he: and most of his friends could not do it at all. Then came the day when Percy Spegel (so he chose to spell his name for the moment), hearing him practising the trick during a little supper at the _Lord Milner_ in Puffin Lane, watched him with fixed eyes, wherein any expert demon might have discovered avarice, tenacity, fraud, and other varied characters consonant with his enormous tie-pin.

Percy Spegel appealed to his constant parasite, whether John Maple had not a marvellous talent? To which the parasite agreed. Whether it was not a pity that such talent should be wholly untrained? To which the parasite also agreed. Whether it would not be a dreadfully expensive thing to train that talent? To which the parasite abundantly agreed. Whether he would not probably be a loser if he attempted to put John Maple on the Halls? To which the parasite said, he certainly would be. Whether one was not foolish, out of mere enthusiasm, to risk such loss? Which the parasite said was only what one would expect of a good fellow like Percy.

The upshot of it was that John Maple found himself prepared to sign a contract of a sort he had never seen before, but familiar enough to those who live and die by the Halls, wherein he was to earn nothing for so long—a short period enough—and after that what looked like a very large sum every week.

John Maple knew nothing of what the out-goings of this profession are, or of its temptations. He very luckily accepted, and that was why his first steady employment—about a year after his return to England from his father’s death-bed—was in the singular capacity of Lieutenant Allegri, the world-famed ventriloquist. But such is the gulf between the two worlds that no one among the rich whom he saw at his leisure had an idea of the escapade; and no one among the Bohemians had an idea of his acquaintance with the rich. He had fewer nights in which he could go out, but he did go out sufficiently. He kept his contract free; he would not be bullied: and he was so good that he could make his own terms and times.

The truth is, that if John Maple had been what young men of family in this situation never are, and that is, devoted to his one talent, he might have become rich. There are small fortunes made in these things. He might have bought back Rackham after God knows how many years, if he had cut himself right away from everything but slaving, and forgotten every name but his own false one on the Halls.

It was after a very short time as Lieutenant Allegri that he bought for his own pleasure a couple of dogs and trained them to do tricks. Then he had added to their number and taught them more tricks. Then (since he now knew the trade) he determined to change over, and in spite of Spegel’s passionate appeals to heaven, he convinced that expert, who knew human nature if he knew nothing else, that he must take his choice between losing his own profit, which was considerable, or accepting John Maple in the future as Don Herado de Madero and his Troupe of Performing Dogs.

It was not as good as the ventriloquist show, but it drew better, for the public is fond of dogs, and Spegel had put it about that it was all done by kindness, not to say coddling: and the little brutes certainly looked very happy as they ran about wagging their tails and doing things which proved them wholly indifferent to pomposity. They barked also, most winningly, to order, and grinned in the most endearing fashion.

There, then, was John Maple’s singular situation at the moment when, in that other life of his, he and Bo had met and made certain one of the other. He had told her secretly of his profession; and he had given her useful tips about Lovey-Lad, for he had become an expert upon dogs. That Lovey-Lad had recognised in him a mysterious Master of Hounds raised him enormously in Bo’s eyes. It is to be believed that one of Don Herado’s troupe met Lovey-Lad in the park and had loyally exalted the powers of his lord. For certainly John was the only male human being to whom Lovey-Lad deferred; and Lovey-Lad was the only being on earth whose opinion Bo respected.

* * * * *

But why had Aunt Hilda taken all this enormous trouble about the Catchings? Why the new beam let into the ceiling, adzed, blackened and chipped and dated 1487? Why the Ancestor? Why the panelling? Why the antique chairs? Why the heraldic animals? Why anything? Why, why the new family ghost? It’s true _that_ cost nothing, but the more solid stuff cost a great deal. Why all this expenditure?

Had John Maple known more of the world, and wholly lost his innocence, he could have answered, as you and I can answer, that there are only two explanations of such feverish changes, when an old house is pulled about and made vulgar. Either the Vandal has more money to spend than she knows what to do with, or the Goth is embarrassed. Either the barbaric hand is filled with the ruining gold, or the savage heart is tortured by perpetual demands for payment from creditors and is salting for a sale.

Either Aunt Hilda was spending money wantonly, or she was desperate for money.

Well, it was the latter. Aunt Hilda was up to the neck in worry. She didn’t know which way to turn.

When people change and rechange, and pull down and destroy and theatricalise, you can tell which of the two motives is at work by a simple test. If they act spasmodically, first putting this up and then taking it down, changing an ornament from one place to another, pulling out a wall and then regretting it and putting it back, they have too much money. If they pursue one plan, continuously, and load it with detail they are fighting debt.

Aunt Hilda was fighting debt.

Aunt Hilda was making a new Rackham and a new Catchings for the sake of some purchaser heaven might send her. For Aunt Hilda must find a purchaser or burst. And that was the truth.

William Maple, that careful business man, had left things in order when he died. He had added appreciably to the value of the house and the estate. He had allowed his wife to cover the brick part of the front with a false veneer of half-timber because that at least gave it uniformity with the older part; and he had allowed the new fake to be toned down artificially so as to marry with the old. That also seemed reasonable. More he had not allowed. But Hilda Maple, even before his death, was already talking to her occasional guests about the antiquity of the place, and what wonders would be revealed when all the old wood could be uncovered and the later work which hid it could be taken away.

Her husband had not been dead two months when, in spite of all the difficulties in getting work done during those last days of the war, Aunt Hilda lashed out. Even then—my reader will remember, if she is old enough—people with a pull could get things done. It was the moment when one of the most luxurious of the new houses near the south coast in Kent was being built by a politician. The difficulties of life were not with the rich in those spring days of 1918, and though Hilda Maple was not in the heart of that old gentry which had once governed England, she was already close in touch with some of the new vulgarians who were now beginning to govern England. Her friendship with Amathea de Beaurivage alone was enough to get her the necessary labour. It was enormously expensive, of course, but she was full of her new fortune, and she began to tear down the structure of the house within, and to ornament, and to build.

At the same time she did another thing, not unusual in women suddenly possessed of capital, still less unusual in times when all values are jumping up and down like the little ball in the circle of the roulette. She gambled.

But Hilda Maple, like thousands of others in those days, was gambling against the politicians, the peace-makers, the bankers, and the international spouters of the millennium. They could see what was in the game, for they held and stacked the cards. She—and the thousands of others—could only see the backs of those cards.

There had come a moment—and that in a few months—when all was lost and she had nothing to fall back on but Rackham itself, and Rackham she must sell. Perhaps when she had spoken to her dying brother-in-law she had honestly intended not to sell; but necessity knows no law, and she excused herself to herself by the memory of what she had told him; that she had a legal right to sell. But the selling of a house, like the selling of a boat or the selling of one’s own soul, depends on external effects. We “go on our clothes,” as a great American Leader of Modern Thought has said. A boat sells on its paint and its brasswork. A house sells by what furniture and faked wood and “period” front it can show.

Rackham might barely fetch its £20,000, for its own true worth; but let it become Rackham Catchings and be varnished and vulgarised enough (not that Hilda Maple thought it vulgarised—she thought it vastly ennobled) and there was no knowing what it might fetch—especially from the right kind of purchaser in these extraordinary times, when men stepped out of the gutter on New Year’s Day and were in the House of Lords before Christmas.

Therefore it was that Aunt Hilda had gone on building, pulling down, ageing new wood, owing increasing sums for expert advice and goods from the antique dealers, and in general playing the devil with Rackham.

She had got the house into the illustrated papers three times already; first under “Our Elizabethan Heritage”; then under “The Quiet Homes of England,” and then under “Minor Great English Houses, No. 51: Rackham.” She herself had haggled a little over the “Minor.” But there she was wrong; they ought to have haggled over the “Great.”

Aunt Hilda was not without commercial sense. She had on the occasion of the last photographing purchased two peacocks and chivvied them on to the lawn before the people from London snapped the front. She had even borrowed from one of her few really important friends an enormous photograph of a Royalty, in a vast silver frame leaning backwards, which she draped and propped up on a little table, to go nicely into the picture of the boudoir—little knowing that the word boudoir had long sunk out of use. But if it comes to that, each of us is out of fashion to others. Our English society has divided into something like those moving ways at the old Paris Exhibition of 1889: one stream is moving at one pace, one at another; and there still survive gentlefolk who say “napkin,” side by side with those masters of our modern world who say “serviette.”

Let me leave the boudoir and the photographs and all the rest of it and get back to the Debt.

Aunt Hilda was embarrassed. Damnably! Hence the purchases in London; hence the antiques; hence the Ancestor. That activity of hers which had intrigued poor John Maple was plain enough. He would have been less angry with his aunt had he known the causes of her perpetual extravagances.

If you desire to know the amount of Aunt Hilda’s embarrassment, I can tell it you simply enough. It was, at the moment when she was adding her last efforts to Rackham, £17,000—and a little more. She had the cunning common to those who lose money—and make it. She picked up ideas on sharp dealing by listening to conversation around her. She had learnt the tricks of the share-shufflers. Therefore she had continued recklessly. Money was never made to-day by work or saving. The bigger the overdrafts the better, and loans raised in Jermyn Street were quicker and handier than mortgages. She would make Rackham Catchings glorious in the eyes of possible purchasers—Jew, Rastaquouère, new War Lord, Yankee millionaire—anybody. Then she could sell it, untrammelled, for three times its worth and five times what she had spent on it. The money-lenders would get back their loans and interest. There would still be a large balance over, and with that balance she could buy herself a sufficient annuity to live the life she desired. But she must act quickly. Interest mounted up and heavy pressure had begun.

It is unfortunately true that men pursuing various trades will conceal their activities under various names. The Esthonian gentleman, Mr. Curzon, who had sold Aunt Hilda her Ancestor and so much more, had already (as plain Charles Blunt of Bristol) advanced her money on note of hand, and as Mr. de Vere of Jermyn Street advanced her more money to satisfy the clamourings of plain Charles Blunt. Now Mr. de Vere of Jermyn Street was beginning to press. But she would sell Rackham and all would be well.

Such is the heart of woman that she told herself all this was quite fair to John. He would be her heir—the fact that she would have nothing to leave him did not alter that. She had made him an honourable offer to send him to Oxford, and he had refused. She was perpetually asking him down to Rackham, and wasn’t that kind of her? Indeed, he did not come half enough. Well, perhaps John was too proud. She respected him for that. It was the Maple blood—Aunt Hilda by this time had come to believe that she herself was a Maple.

So there it was. Aunt Hilda with the hot breath of the pursuer on her neck; John hating these insane renovations and gewgaws; the purchasers advancing with open mouths and simple smiles.

For purchasers Aunt Hilda had—or believed she had. And in these her faith held fast.

I have told how dear a friend she had become of Amathea Lady Mere de Beaurivage, and of her husband, late Sir George Huggins; and now there was something even warmer in her heart (and certainly something warmer in his) for that first-rate man of business, Lord Hellup. To neither, she believed, would Rackham be indifferent now that it had the Catchings. And as competition is the soul of commerce, she hoped for sixty—she made certain of fifty—thousand pounds, from the one or from the other. Even fifty thousand, for what was, at the most, a twenty thousand pound proposition, was Good Business.

* * * * *

Meanwhile John Maple was pegging away, irregularly but lucratively, with the performing dogs for a livelihood, and with an increasing circle of rich friends for a life.

He had three names. He was John Maple in that world of the people who do nothing and have pale love affairs and go their weary round of the Riviera and the Country Houses and all know each other by their Christian names. He was Don Herado de Madero on the Halls. He was Henry Pelton—a name like any other—for his Bohemian world, including Spegel. One might have thought that it would be worth Spegel’s while to track him down and find what he did in the big gaps which he left in his engagements; and so it would have been worth Spegel’s while. Later on there might have been blackmail, and blackmail is a staple of the Spegels. Yet Spegel did not take the trouble, simply because he accepted too facile an explanation of John Maple’s absences and disappearances.

His judgment was that the Pelton whom he knew, the Herado de Madero of the Dogs, suffered from quite incurable drinking bouts. His experience of quite incurable drinking bouts—it was extensive, for it covered about half the people he had exploited in his wicked little life—was that they must be left alone. So when Don Herado (or Pelton) told him that the dogs would not appear next week; that he must cut out next Friday; or that Saturday and Monday were washed, Spegel made all his arrangements accordingly. For Pelton was a great asset, however irregular. Old ladies who still vote Tory will tell me, no doubt, that John Maple was thus necessary on the Halls at his own terms because “blood tells”—the blood of the original cattle-dealer and smith. Their twin brethren who make money as Labour leaders in the House of Commons will say, on the platform at least, that John Maple was privileged and favoured because he had gentle blood—the blood, again, of the smith and cattle-dealer. But I say that he could do what he liked, cut out days, shift engagements and live in two worlds because he had talent, and because on the top of that he was determined to have his own way. Also because Spegel only cared for money, and because people who only care for money will give any amount of rope to those whose genius they can tap.

Here, then, was John Maple these few years after the war, making good in his curious way; earning much more than he spent, leading two lives, proud, and possessing already a solid balance at the bank, firmly affianced in soul to a great heiress who had as firmly affianced him, and neither of the children really appreciating where money came into such affairs.

In John Maple’s mind, more prominent even than Bo, stood dominating and overwhelming a figure—the figure of Twenty Thousand Pounds—the Lump that would redeem Rackham. In the mind of Bo there stood John Maple. Anyone might have told these two children that all was at sixes and sevens with their lives. On which account, the wise, might foretell that these two lovers would win, and that the enormous incongruities of their lives would be triumphantly reconciled.