I
That evening I talked with my uncle in the Hardingham for the last time. The atmosphere of the place had altered quite shockingly. Instead of the crowd of importunate courtiers there were just half a dozen uninviting men, journalists waiting for an interview. Ropper the big commissionaire was still there, but now indeed he was defending my uncle from something more than time-wasting intrusions. I found the little man alone in the inner office pretending to work, but really brooding. He was looking yellow and deflated.
"Lord!" he said at the sight of me. "You're lean, George. It makes that scar of yours show up."
We regarded each other gravely for a time.
"Quap," I said, "is at the bottom of the Atlantic. There's some bills--We've got to pay the men."
"Seen the papers?"
"Read 'em all in the train."
"At bay," he said. "I been at bay for a week.... Yelping round me.... And me facing the music. I'm feelin' a bit tired."
He blew and wiped his glasses.
"My stomack isn't what it was," he explained. "One finds it--these times. How did it all happen, George? Your Marconigram--it took me in the wind a bit."
I told him concisely. He nodded to the paragraphs of my narrative and at the end he poured something from a medicine bottle into a sticky little wineglass and drank it. I became aware of the presence of drugs, of three or four small bottles before him among his disorder of papers, of a faint elusively familiar odour in the room.
"Yes," he said, wiping his lips and recorking the bottle.
"You've done your best, George. The luck's been against us."
He reflected, bottle in hand. "Sometimes the luck goes with you and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't. And then where are you? Grass in the oven! Fight or no fight."
He asked a few questions and then his thoughts came back to his own urgent affairs. I tried to get some comprehensive account of the situation from him, but he would not give it.
"Oh, I wish I'd had you. I wish I'd had you, George. I've had a lot on my hands. You're clear headed at times."
"What has happened?"
"Oh! Boom!--infernal things."
"Yes, but--how? I'm just off the sea, remember."
"It'd worry me too much to tell you now. It's tied up in a skein."
He muttered something to himself and mused darkly, and roused himself to say--"Besides--you'd better keep out of it. It's getting tight. Get 'em talking. Go down to Crest Hill and fly. That's YOUR affair."
For a time his manner set free queer anxieties in my brain again.
I will confess that that Mordet Island nightmare of mine returned, and as I looked at him his hand went out for the drug again. "Stomach, George," he said.
"I been fightin' on that. Every man fights on some thing--gives way somewheres--head, heart, liver--something. Zzzz. Gives way somewhere. Napoleon did at last. All through the Waterloo campaign, his stomach--it wasn't a stomach! Worse than mine, no end."
The mood of depression passed as the drug worked within him. His eyes brightened. He began to talk big. He began to dress up the situation for my eyes, to recover what he had admitted to me.
He put it as a retreat from Russia. There were still the chances of Leipzig.
"It's a battle, George--a big fight. We're fighting for millions. I've still chances. There's still a card or so. I can't tell all my plans--like speaking on the stroke."
"You might," I began.
"I can't, George. It's like asking to look at some embryo. You got to wait. I know. In a sort of way, I know. But to tell it-- No! You been away so long. And everything's got complicated."
My perception of disastrous entanglements deepened with the rise of his spirits. It was evident that I could only help to tie him up in whatever net was weaving round his mind by forcing questions and explanations upon him. My thoughts flew off at another angle. "How's Aunt Susan?" said I.
I had to repeat the question. His busy whispering lips stopped for a moment, and he answered in the note of one who repeats a formula.
"She'd like to be in the battle with me. She'd like to be here in London. But there's corners I got to turn alone." His eye rested for a moment on the little bottle beside him. "And things have happened.
"You might go down now and talk to her," he said, in a directer voice. "I shall be down to-morrow night, I think."
He looked up as though he hoped that would end our talk.
"For the week-end?" I asked.
"For the week-end. Thank God for week-ends, George!"
II
My return home to Lady Grove was a very different thing from what I had anticipated when I had got out to sea with my load of quap and fancied the Perfect-Filament was safe within my grasp. As I walked through the evening light along the downs, the summer stillness seemed like the stillness of something newly dead.
There were no lurking workmen any more, no cyclists on the high road.
Cessation was manifest everywhere. There had been, I learnt from my aunt, a touching and quite voluntary demonstration when the Crest Hill work had come to an end and the men had drawn their last pay; they had cheered my uncle and hooted the contractors and Lord Boom.
I cannot now recall the manner in which my aunt and I greeted one another. I must have been very tired there, but whatever impression was made has gone out of my memory. But I recall very clearly how we sat at the little round table near the big window that gave on the terrace, and dined and talked. I remember her talking of my uncle.
She asked after him, and whether he seemed well. "I wish I could help," she said. "But I've never helped him much, never. His way of doing things was never mine. And since--since--. Since he began to get so rich, he's kept things from me. In the old days--it was different....
"There he is--I don't know what he's doing. He won't have me near him....
"More's kept from me than anyone. The very servants won't let me know. They try and stop the worst of the papers--Boom's things--from coming upstairs.... I suppose they've got him in a corner, George. Poor old Teddy! Poor old Adam and Eve we are!
