Chapter 9

I had a pretty bad night after that, and was not much in the mood for Fox on the morrow. The sight of her had dwarfed everything; the thought of her disgusted me with everything, made me out of conceit with the world--with that part of the world that had become my world. I wanted to get up into hers--and I could not see any way. The room in which Fox sat seemed to be hopelessly off the road--to be hopelessly off any road to any place; to be the end of a blind alley. One day I might hope to occupy such a room--in my shirt-sleeves, like Fox. But that was not the end of my career--not the end that I desired. She had upset me.

“You’ve just missed Polehampton,” Fox said; “wanted to get hold of your ‘Atmospheres.’”

“Oh, damn Polehampton,” I said, “and particularly damn the ‘Atmospheres.’”

“Willingly,” Fox said, “but I told Mr. P. that you were willing if...”

“I don’t want to know,” I repeated. “I tell you I’m sick of the things.”

“What a change,” he asserted, sympathetically, “I thought you would.”

It struck me as disgusting that a person like Fox should think about me at all. “Oh, I’ll see it through,” I said. “Who’s the next?”

“We’ve got to have the Duc de Mersch now,” he answered, “De Mersch as State Founder--written as large as you can--all across the page. The moment’s come and we’ve got to rope it in, that’s all. I’ve been middling good to you ... You understand...”

He began to explain in his dark sentences. The time had come for an energetically engineered boom in de Mersch--a boom all along the line. And I was to commence the campaign. Fox had been good to me and I was to repay him. I listened in a sort of apathetic indifference.

“Oh, very well,” I said. I was subconsciously aware that, as far as I was concerned, the determining factor of the situation was the announcement that de Mersch was to be in Paris. If he had been in his own particular grand duchy I wouldn’t have gone after him. For a moment I thought of the interview as taking place in London. But Fox--ostensibly, at least--wasn’t even aware of de Mersch’s visit; spoke of him as being in Paris--in a flat in which he was accustomed to interview the continental financiers who took up so much of his time.

I realised that I wanted to go to Paris because she was there. She had said that she was going to Paris on the morrow of yesterday. The name was pleasant to me, and it turned the scale.

Fox’s eyes remained upon my face.

“Do you good, eh?” he dimly interpreted my thoughts. “A run over. I thought you’d like it and, look here, Polehampton’s taken over the Bi-Monthly; wants to get new blood into it, see? He’d take something. I’ve been talking to him--a short series... ‘Aspects.’ That sort of thing.” I tried to work myself into some sort of enthusiasm of gratitude. I knew that Fox had spoken well of me to Polehampton--as a sort of set off.

“You go and see Mr. P.,” he confirmed; “it’s really all arranged. And then get off to Paris as fast as you can and have a good time.”

“Have I been unusually cranky lately?” I asked.

“Oh, you’ve been a little off the hooks, I thought, for the last week or so.”

He took up a large bottle of white mucilage, and I accepted it as a sign of dismissal. I was touched by his solicitude for my health. It always did touch me, and I found myself unusually broad-minded in thought as I went down the terra-cotta front steps into the streets. For all his frank vulgarity, for all his shirt-sleeves--I somehow regarded that habit of his as the final mark of the Beast--and the Louis Quinze accessories, I felt a warm good-feeling for the little man.

I made haste to see Polehampton, to beard him in a sort of den that contained a number of shelves of books selected for their glittering back decoration. They gave the impression that Mr. Polehampton wished to suggest to his visitors the fitness and propriety of clothing their walls with the same gilt cloth. They gave that idea, but I think that, actually, Mr. Polehampton took an aesthetic delight in the gilding. He was not a publisher by nature. He had drifted into the trade and success, but beneath a polish of acquaintance retained a fine awe for a book as such. In early life he had had such shining things on a shiny table in a parlour. He had a similar awe for his daughter, who had been born after his entry into the trade, and who had the literary flavour--a flavour so pronounced that he dragged her by the heels into any conversation with us who hewed his raw material, expecting, I suppose, to cow us. For the greater good of this young lady he had bought the Bi-Monthly--one of the portentous political organs. He had, they said, ideas of forcing a seat out of the party as a recompense.

It didn’t matter much what was the nature of my series of articles. I was to get the atmosphere of cities as I had got those of the various individuals. I seemed to pay on those lines, and Miss Polehampton commended me.

“My daughter likes ... eh ... your touch, you know, and...” His terms were decent--for the man, and were offered with a flourish that indicated special benevolence and a reference to the hundred pounds. I was at a loss to account for his manner until he began to stammer out an indication. Its lines were that I knew Fox, and I knew Churchill and the Duc de Mersch, and the Hour. “And those financial articles ... in the Hour ... were they now?... Were they ... was the Trans -Greenland railway actually ... did I think it would be worth one’s while ... in fact...” and so on.

I never was any good in a situation of that sort, never any good at all. I ought to have assumed blank ignorance, but the man’s eyes pleaded; it seemed a tremendous matter to him. I tried to be non-committal, and said: “Of course I haven’t any right.” But I had a vague, stupid sense that loyalty to Churchill demanded that I should back up a man he was backing. As a matter of fact, nothing so direct was a-gate, it couldn’t have been. It was something about shares in one of de Mersch’s other enterprises. Polehampton was going to pick them up for nothing, and they were going to rise when the boom in de Mersch’s began--something of the sort. And the boom would begin as soon as the news of the agreement about the railway got abroad.

I let him get it out of me in a way that makes the thought of that bare place with its gilt book-backs and its three uncomfortable office-chairs and the ground-glass windows through which one read the inversion of the legend “Polehampton,” all its gloom and its rigid lines and its pallid light, a memory of confusion. And Polehampton was properly grateful, and invited me to dine with him and his phantasmal daughter--who wanted to make my acquaintance. It was like a command to a state banquet given by a palace official, and Lea would be invited to meet me. Miss Polehampton did not like Lea, but he had to be asked once a year--to encourage good feeling, I suppose. The interview dribbled out on those lines. I asked if it was one of Lea’s days at the office. It was not. I tried to put in a good word for Lea, but it was not very effective. Polehampton was too subject to his assistant’s thorns to be responsive to praise of him.