by John Buchan
The others agreed. Mr. Algernon, the elder brother, expanded the theme. “Reggie,” he declared (they had very soon got on to Christian name terms), “can be the link between supply and demand, and a benefactor to both sides. He might be a sort of English Rosenbach. In every shire there are families who just manage to keep going. They have family possessions which they are far too proud to send to a sale, except in the very last resort. But very often they would gladly sell a picture or a book privately, if they knew how to do it, and such a sale might make all the difference to their comfort.”
The maiden aunt assented, and told how a family of her acquaintance in Shropshire had been saved from penury by a discovery in a garret, through the medium of a visiting Cambridge don, of three Shakespeare quartos. One of the cousins recounted a similar event in Westmorland.
“Money is tight, no doubt,” continued Mr. Algernon, “but there’s more of it about than people imagine. Fortunes are made on a falling as well as on a rising market. And people who have it do not know how to invest it. Industrials are too precarious, government stocks have lost caste, and, since every part of the globe is under the weather, there is not the old attraction about foreign securities. I believe that there will be a growing tendency for people who have an ample margin of income to do what the Germans did when the mark was tumbling, and buy objects of art. But it must be something which is going to increase in value. Now, the fashion in pictures fluctuates, but not in books. There are only, say, twenty copies of an old book known to exist, and the numbers cannot be added to. An association book—say one which Walter Scott presented to Wordsworth with an autograph inscription— can never be duplicated. These things are better than banknotes— they are solid bullion. The Americans have recognized this. A new millionaire in the States, as soon as he has made his pile, starts to found a library, though he may be scarcely literate. He knows what is certain to appreciate. He remembers the Huth and the Britwell sales.”
“And think of the charm of the business!” said Verona. “You are dealing in spiritual as well as in commercial values. And the cleanness of it!”
“But it needs careful handling,” said Mr. Shenstone. “You cannot depend upon yourself, Mr. Daker. You must get a staff together, and lay down your lines carefully, for what you want is an intelligence department and a scientifically arranged clearinghouse. You have to organize the buying side, and know just where to lay your hands on what you want. And you have to organize your customers—to get into touch with the people on both sides of the Atlantic who are hungering for your services. Your watchword must be organization.”
“Rationalization,” said Mr. Michael with a pleasant smile. “You must be in the fashion, my dear Reggie.”
Reggie was flattered that his ideas should be taken so seriously by such a company, for he had the reverence for the businessman which is often an obsession with the unbusiness-like. He was excited, too. He saw himself becoming a figure, a power, a man of wealth, all that he had ruled out as beyond his compass—and this without sacrifice of the things he loved . . . But, as he caught Verona’s beaming eyes, he had far down in his heart a little spasm of fear. For he seemed to see in them a hint of fetters.
Chapter 5
The transformation of Reggie into a businessman was begun at once, and it was Verona who took charge of it. Politics at the moment were exciting, and in order to attend critical divisions I had to dine more than I liked at the House. The result was a number of improvised dinner parties there, and at one of them I found Verona. No doubt Reggie had talked to her about me, so she treated me as if I were his elder brother. I thought her attractive, but I am bound to say a little formidable also, for I have rarely met any woman who knew her own mind so clearly.
The first thing to do was to get Reggie to organize his life. “You cannot achieve anything,” she said sagely, “unless you make a plan.” It was idle to think of running a business from the house in Brompton, so she had induced him to take an office—a pleasant little set of rooms which were fortunately vacant in the Adelphi neighbourhood. She had got him a secretary, a girl who had been at college with her, and she had started a system of card indexes, on which she dwelt lovingly. There was one for books, another for possible buyers, and a third for his acquaintances. She made a great point about codifying, so to speak, Reggie’s immense acquaintance, for it was his chief asset in the business. Properly managed, it should give him access to quarters into which no dealer could penetrate. She nodded her head, and emphasised her points by tapping her right-hand fingers on her left-hand palm, exactly like a pretty schoolmistress. And several times she said “we,” not “he,” when she mentioned the undertaking.
She thought that he had better limit its scope. Incunabula and missals and such-like might be put aside as too ambitious. He should specialize on his old love, the seventeenth century, with excursions into the eighteenth and early nineteenth. There was already a vigorous interest in the Augustans, and she predicted a revival in the post-Romantics and the Victorians. Above all, he should specialize in “association books” and manuscripts, which were the kind of thing to which he was likely to have access. More was needed than an intelligence bureau: they wanted a research department to verify provenances. There would have to be a good deal of work in the museum, and for this she could enroll several young women who had been with her at Oxford. She was compiling a list of experts in special branches, university dons and so forth, to whom they could turn in special cases for advice . . . Also they must make friends with the dealers, for it was no use antagonizing the professionals; they could work in with them up to a point, and put little things in their way. Reggie knew a good many, and they were having some carefully selected luncheon parties to extend his acquaintance. As for buyers, her brothers could help, for, being in the city, they knew where money was. Especially with America, she thought; both Algernon and Michael had a great deal of American business passing through their hands, and were frequently in New York. The American rich, she said, were an easier proposition than the English, for they talked freely of their hobbies instead of hiding them away like a secret vice.
I confess that I was enormously impressed by the girl’s precision and good sense, and I was still more impressed when a few days later I ran across Reggie in the Athenaeum, a club which he had taken to frequenting. She had made a new man of him, a man with a purpose, tightened up and endowed with a high velocity. His eagerness had always been his chief charm, but now, instead of being diffused through the atmosphere, it seemed to have been canalized and given direction. “I’m one of the world’s workers,” he announced. “Office hours ten to five, and longer if required. I hop about the country too, like a bagman. I never knew that a steady grind was such fun.”
“How is your colleague?” I asked.
“Marvellous!” It was his favourite adjective. “By Jove, what a head she has! Already she has forgotten more about my job than I ever knew!”
“What do you call yourself?”
“Ah, that’s a puzzler. We must have a little private company, of course. We rather thought of ‘The Interpreter’s House.’ Bunyan, you know. You see the idea—the place where things are explained to people and people are explained to themselves. It was Verona’s notion. Jolly good, I think.”
It seemed an ambitious name for a dealer in old books, but it was not for me to damp Reggie’s ardour. I could only rejoice that someone had managed to break him to harness, a task in which his friends had hitherto conspicuously failed. I met him occasionally in the company of the Cortal brothers, and I fancied that these glossy young men had something of the air of horsebreakers. They peered at the world through their glasses with a friendly proprietary air, and clearly regarded Reggie as their property. I was never quite at ease in their presence, for their efficiency was a little too naked; they were too manifestly well equipped, too elaborately men of the world. But Reggie was fascinated. He, whose clothes had never been his strong point
, was now trim and natty, and wore, like them, the ordinary city regimentals.
I asked my nephew Charles what he thought of the brothers, and he laughed. “The shiny Cortals!” he replied. “Good enough chaps in their way, I believe. Quite a high reputation in their own line. Can’t say I care much for them myself. Their minds are too dashed relevant, if you know what I mean. No margin to them—no jolly waste—everything tidied up and put to its best use. I should think more of them if now and then they condescended to make a bloomer. Their gentility is a little too self-conscious, too. Oh, and of course they haven’t a scrap of humour—not what you and I would call humour.”
One night I dined with one of the livery companies, and sat next to the uncle, Shenstone, who was prime warden. Under the influence of some wonderful Madeira he became talkative, and I realized that the harness laid upon Reggie’s back was going to be something more than a business set. For Shenstone spoke of him as if he were a member of the family, with just that touch of affectionate candour with which one speaks of a promising but still problematical relative. “Dear old Reggie,” said the uncle. “Best of good fellows and full of stuff, you know. Slackly brought up, and needs to learn business habits, but improving every day.” I forbore to mention Verona’s name, for I feared confidences. But I understood that Reggie was no more the unattached spectator of life; he had been gathered into the fold of a tightly knit and most competent clan.
Just before I went abroad for Easter I dined again in Verona’s company, and had the privilege of a long and intimate talk. I learned why the name of “Interpreter’s House” had been selected. Verona had visions which soared far beyond the brokerage of old books. She wanted to make the firm a purveyor of English traditions, a discreet merchant of English charm. It would guide strangers of leisure into paths where they could savour fully the magic of an ancient society. It would provide seekers with a background which, unless they were born to it, they could never find. It would be a clearing house for delicate and subtle and indefinable things. It would reveal and interpret the sacred places of our long history. In a word, it would “rationalize” and make available to the public the antique glamour of these islands.
It all sounds preposterous, but there was nothing preposterous about her exposition. She had a trick, when excited, of half-closing her lids, which softened the rather hard vitality of her eyes, and at such times she lost her usual briskness and was almost wistful. “You must understand what I mean. We are all agreed that England is Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye.” (I quote her exact words.) “But to how many is that more than a phrase? It is so hard to get behind the veil of our noisy modernism to the lovely and enduring truth. You know how sensitive Reggie is to such things. Well, we want to help people who are less fortunate. Strangers come to London—from the provinces—from America—steeped in London’s romance which they have got from books. But the reality is a terrible anticlimax. They need to be helped if they are to recapture the other Londons which are still there layer on layer, the Londons of Chaucer and the Elizabethans, and Milton and Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb and Dickens . . . And Oxford . . . and Edinburgh . . . and Bath . . . and the English country. We want to get past the garages and petrol pumps and county council cottages to the ancient rustic England which can never die.”
“I see. Glamour off the peg. You will charge a price for it, of course?”
She looked at me gravely and reprovingly, and her lids opened to reveal agate eyes.
“We shall charge a price,” she said. “But moneymaking will not be our first object.”
I had offended her by my coarse phrase, and I got no more confidences that evening. It was plain that Reggie was being equipped with several kinds of harness; his day was mapped out, he was inspanned in a family team, and now his vagrant fancies were to be regimented. I thought a good deal about him on my holiday, while I explored the spring flowers of the Jura. One of my reflections, I remember, was that Moe’s moment of prevision had failed badly so far as he was concerned. Reggie was not likely to undertake any foreign adventure, having anchored himself by so many chains to English soil.
Chapter 6
Some time in May I began to have my doubts about the success of the partnership.
May is the pleasantest of months for a London dweller. Wafts of spring are blown in from its green cincture, the parks are at their gayest, there is freshness in the air, and the colours, the delicate half-shades of the most beautiful city on earth, take on a new purity. Along with late October, May had always been Reggie’s favourite season. First there would be the early canter in the park. Then a leisurely breakfast, the newspaper, and his first pipe, with the morning sun making delectable patterns on the bookshelves. He would write a few letters and walk eastward, dwelling lovingly on the sights and the sounds—the flower girls, the shoppers, the bustle of the main streets, the sudden peace of the little squares with their white stucco and green turf and purple lilacs and pink hawthorns. Luncheon at one of his clubs would follow, or perhaps an agreeable meal at a friend’s house. In the afternoon he had many little tasks—visits to the museum, the sales or the picture galleries, researches in bookshops, excursions into queer corners of the city. He liked to have tea at home, and would spend the hours before dinner over books, for he was a discriminating but voracious reader. Then would come dinner; with a group of young men at a club or restaurant; or at some ceremonial feast, where he enjoyed the experience of meeting new people and making friendly explorations; or best of all at home, where he read till bedtime.
He had his exercise, too. He played a little polo at Roehampton and a good deal of tennis. He was an ardent fisherman, and usually spent the weekends on a Berkshire trout stream, where he had a rod. He would have a delightful Friday evening looking out tackle, and would be off at cockrow on Saturday in his little car, returning late on the Sunday night with a sunburnt face and an added zest for life . . . I always felt that, for an idle man, Reggie made a very successful business of his days, and sometimes I found it in my heart to envy him.
But now all this had changed. I had a feverish time myself that May with the general election, which did not, of course, concern Reggie. When I got back to town and the turmoil was over, I ran across him one afternoon in the Strand, and observed a change in him. His usual wholesome complexion had gone; he looked tired and white and harassed—notably harassed. But he appeared to be in good spirits. “Busy!” he cried. “I should think I was. I never get a moment to myself. I haven’t had a rod in my hand this year— haven’t been out of London except on duty. You see, we’re at the most critical stage—laying down our lines—got to get them right, for everything depends on them. Oh yes, thanks. We’re doing famously for beginners. If only the American slump would mend . . .”
I enquired about Miss Cortal, as I was bound to do. No engagement had been announced, but such a relationship could only end in marriage. People had long ago made that assumption.
“Oh, Verona’s very well. A bit overworked like me.” There was an odd look in his eyes, and something new in his voice—not the frank admiration and friendliness of the pre-Easter period—something which was almost embarrassment. I set it down to the shyness of a man in first love.
I asked him to dine, but he couldn’t—was full up for weeks ahead. He consulted a little book, and announced his engagements. They all seemed to be with members of the Cortal family. Luncheon was the same. On my only free days he was booked to Shenstone, the maiden aunt, and cousins from Norfolk who had taken a house in town. He left me with the same hustled, preoccupied face . . . Next day I saw him on the Embankment walking home with the Cortal brothers. They were smiling and talking, but somehow he had the air of a man taking exercise between two genial warders.
I spoke to my cynical nephew about it. “The Shinies!” Charles exclaimed. “Not the Sheenies—there’s nothing Jewish about Cortal Frères. When will the world realize that we produce in England something much tougher than any He
brew? We call them the Shinies, because of their high varnish . . . Old Reggie is corralled all right, shoes off, feet fired and the paddock gates bolted! . . . Will he marry the girl? I should jolly well think so. He’s probably up to his ears in love with her, but even if he loathed her name he would have to go through with it . . . And he’ll espouse a dashed lot more than the buxom Miss Verona—all her uncles and her nephews and her cousins and her aunts for ever and ever. They say that when a man marries a Jewess he finds himself half-smothered under a great feather bed of steamy consanguinity. Well, it will be the same with the Cortals, only the clan will be less sticky. Reggie will never again call his soul his own. I’m not sure that he’ll want to, but anyhow he won’t. They’ll never let him alone. He used to be rather a solitary bird, but now he’ll have his fill of relations, all as active as fleas. What does the Bible say? ‘He shall receive an hundredfold houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers—with persecutions . . .’ With persecutions, mark you. Reggie is for it all right.”
As it happened I was so busy with arrears of cases that my life was cloistered during the last week of May and the first of June, and I thought no more of Reggie’s fortunes. But on the seventh day of June I had a letter from him, enclosing the proof of a kind of prospectus and asking me what I thought of it.
I thought many things about it. It was a statement of the aims of the “Interpreter’s House,” which was to be circulated to a carefully selected list in England and America. In every sentence it bore the mark of Verona’s fine Roman hand. No man could have written it. There was an indecency about its candour and its flat-footed clarity from which the most pachydermatous male would have recoiled.
In its way it was horribly well done. It was a kind of stores list of the varieties of English charm and the easiest way to get hold of them. Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye had at last got its auctioneer’s catalogue. Not that it was written in the style of an estate agent. It was uncommonly well written, full of good phrases and apposite quotations, and it carried a fine bookish flavour. But ye gods! it was terrible. Relentlessly it set down in black and white all the delicate, half-formed sentiments we cherish in our innermost hearts, and dare not talk about. It was so cursedly explicit that it brushed the bloom off whatever it touched. A June twilight became the glare of an arc lamp, the greenery of April the arsenical green of a chemist’s shop. Evasive dreams were transformed into mercantile dogmas. It was a kind of simony, a trafficking in sacred things. The magic of England was “rationalized” with a vengeance . . . There could be no doubt about its effectiveness. I could see the shoddy culture of two continents seizing upon it joyously as a final statement of the “English proposition.” It was a magnificent commercial prospectus for the “Interpreter’s House.” But I wondered how Reggie felt about it—Reggie who had always had a maidenly shyness about his inner world.
