by John Buchan
“Your power has been in the Unions?”
“I know. And all my loyalty has been with them. That’s what has made this step a bitter one for me. It would have been far easier to go on thumping the tub with Potter and Judson. It takes some nerve to break with old associations.”
“Did I ever deny your courage?”
Utlaw, who had been speaking to the tablecloth, looked up sharply.
“But you think I am wrong? You agree with old Amos?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. The question is, what at the bottom of your heart do you believe yourself?”
“I don’t know what I believe. My creed is a collection of layers, and I don’t know which is deepest. You think I may find that I have been mistaken. I don’t know. God, life is an awful muddle! But if I disregard one truth for the moment it is only because there are other and more urgent truths which have to be attended to. I haven’t forgotten what I stand for, and I’ll return to it.”
“But can you? You have lost your hold on the men’s instincts, and that is not compensated for by a temporary grip on their minds.”
Into Utlaw’s eyes came an expression of sheer misery.
“That’s maybe true. I’ve given up a good deal. The Union will spew me out. You think I have wrecked my career?”
“I think you are going to be a very successful man. You’ll be in the Cabinet in a year or two, if you want that. Only the poor devils who believed in you will have to find another leader. . . . I’m sorry. . . . They won’t find it too easy, and a man to lead them is the most important thing in life.”
The Birkpool metal-workers broke the strike and Utlaw became a figure of public importance. What was said about him in Labour circles did not reach print except in a bowdlerised form, but to nine out of ten newspapers he was a national hero. He had had the grit to defy his class, his Union and his party, and he had won; a hundred leading articles descanted on the scarcity and the potency of such courage. Speculations about his future were for a time the favourite pursuit of the gossip-writers. The East Flackington election was treated as a chance of testifying to a rare virtue. He was not yet disowned by his party, but at the last moment an Independent Labour candidate had appeared, so the fight was triangular.
Presently the rumour spread that things were not going smoothly there. One afternoon at Euston Adam met Florrie Utlaw, just returned from the North and looking rather weary and battered. She would not admit the possibility of defeat, but her confident words seemed to lack conviction. It was a horrible election, she said, of personalities and mud-slinging. The Tory candidate was behaving like a gentleman, and seemed to wish Joe to win, but Latta, the Independent, was a scurrilous savage. Joe was marvellous, but he had to fight against organised interruptions, and Judson and Porter and even Gray were up there doing mischief. “He will have his revenge on them,” she said, with a tightening of her determined little mouth. “He will show up Judson for the noisy fool he is.”
Three days later Kenneth Warmestre found Adam in the vestibule of the club and drew him towards the tape. “East Flackington is coming out,” he said, and edged his way to the front of the little crowd. He returned with a grin on his face.
“Utlaw is bottom of the poll,” he said. “Serve him dam’ well right. He should have stuck to his crowd, even if they had the wrong end of this particular stick, if he believed them right on the main point. I don’t like fellows that run out. I see he has resigned his Union job. He’ll have to get his friend Creevey to find him something else.”
IV
On an afternoon in May, when the London streets were bright with the baskets of flower-girls, and the smell of petrol and wood-paving could not altogether drown the vagrant scents of summer, Adam went to see Mrs Pomfrey at her great house in Curzon Street. He went by appointment. He had been summoned that morning by an urgent telephone message from Mrs Pomfrey herself. “I want to see you so badly,” she had said, “and we have much to talk over. Things have become extraordinarily interesting, haven’t they?”
Adam had a conviction as to whom he should meet in the big sunny drawing-room. Mrs Pomfrey was making tea, seated in a straight-backed chair with something of the look of a wise Buddha, and beside her was Frank Alban. Frank had abandoned his shapeless grey flannels and wore the ordinary garb of his profession. The clothes accentuated his leanness, but somehow they also gave him an air of greater solidity. He was no longer the lone wolf, but a member of a pack — perhaps of a hierarchy.
His eyes met Adam’s with some embarrassment, for that morning he had had a curious talk about him with his brother-in-law. He had found himself slipping into criticism, and that had roused Kenneth to a vigorous defence. He had called Adam self-centred, and had been roughly contradicted.
“You don’t understand what I mean, Ken,” he had said. “Not selfish. There isn’t a scrap of selfishness in him. But he has this mission of his, and it narrows him. He is like a wind forced through a funnel, terrific in its force, but limited in its area of impact, and that funnel is himself, remember. He couldn’t, if he tried, get outside himself.”
“Rot,” said Kenneth. “Adam’s power is just that he wants to be only a funnel. How can you call a man self-centred if he looks on himself as a tool to be used and then scrapped. He has the self-forgetfulness of a saint.”
“I don’t agree,” Frank had argued. “A saint is not only a servant of God, but a son. Adam is a bondman. He obeys, but without fellowship. He lacks what I call religion.”
“Your kind, anyhow,” Kenneth had answered rudely.
“We wanted you to be the first to hear our news,” said Mrs. Pomfrey. “Dr Colledge has got his deanery at last — it will be in the papers in the morning, and Frank is coming back to St Chad’s to take his place. Isn’t it wonderful? Now he will have a platform from which his voice can really carry. Mr Geraldine says he will very soon be the most important figure in the Church.
“Of course it is a terrible wrench for him,” she went on. “He hates leaving Birkpool and all the poor people who have come to love him. But it was his duty, don’t you think? He has to do the work he can do best. It would not have been right for him to bury his talent in a napkin, and Birkpool was a napkin. One oughtn’t to use a razor to peel potatoes.”
Frank spoke.
“No, Lilah, that’s not what I feel. My trouble is that I have only the one talent, and it is no use for peeling potatoes. If it were I’d be happy to peel them for the rest of my days, for I should be doing honest work. . . . But all I have got is a brittle thing and I must use it for the only job it is fit for.”
“Nonsense, my dear,” said Mrs Pomfrey. “You have ten talents and you must use them all for the good of the world. It would be sinful waste if you didn’t. Do you call vision a small thing? Or the gift of awakening people. Or poetry? Or the power of thought? What we need is a new revelation and you can give it us. All the battles of the world, you know, are first won in the mind.”
Frank looked a little shyly at Adam.
“Don’t believe her. She rates me far higher than I rate myself. I want something very humble. I’m the preaching friar going back to his cell. I told you, you know, that I was coming to feel that it was my only course — to find a cell.”
“Or a papal throne.” Adam remembered Scrope’s words.
A flicker which may have been pain shot across Frank’s eyes.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Only that your kind of cell may easily become a papal throne.”
Mrs Pomfrey clapped her hands.
“He is right. That is the way to put it. A papal throne. A new and better Vatican. The Power of the Keys to unlock men’s hearts. . . .”
At that moment Lord Warmestre was announced. At the sight of Adam he seemed for a moment put out. “Hullo! I didn’t expect to find you. . . . I’m looking for Jackie, and thought I might run her to earth here. She must have gone back to the flat. Yes, please, I’d like some tea. I’m going to Warmestre to-
night. You heard that we are going to live there and let the Court if we can. We are pretty well pinched by the death duties.”
“Surely you are not crying poverty,” said Mrs Pomfrey.
“No. We’ll be right enough presently. But Warmestre wants a deal of looking after. My father was old, and the agent was old, and things were allowed to slide. It’s wonderful farming land, and I’m going to try out some notions of mine.”
“And your ‘chasers?”
Kenneth glanced at Adam.
“Perhaps. It’s the right place for a training stable. Perfect downland without a stone in it. But that’s for the future. Meantime Jackie and I will have our work cut out getting the house habitable. It’s an immense barrack, and we shall have to begin by camping in a corner.”
The conversation passed to other topics. Mrs Pomfrey discoursed of Utlaw.
“He has come over to us. Oh yes, complete allegiance. Ours is the only party for him, for with us a man is given liberty to use his brains. He has behaved magnificently and has been abominably treated. Mr Creevey has found him a post in Addison’s — he is to look after the labour side of the business, and he is on the board of the new evening paper. He ought to be quite well off soon. A seat in the House? Yes, of course we want him there as soon as possible. There may be a vacancy in Birmingham, if Mr Platt gets a peerage in the Birthday Honours. Why do you smile like that, Kenneth?”
“I don’t like it. I wish Utlaw had gone the other way, for I fancied the chap. A man should stick to a half-truth, if it is his own, rather than swallow the truths of other people. . . . Not that I have any right to judge him.” And again he looked at Adam.
The two walked away from the house together. There seemed to be some constraint in Kenneth’s mind, for his manner lacked its customary exuberance.
“The may-fly will be on in another week,” he said. “You’ll be coming down to the Court. What about Friday week? I won’t be there, for I must stay on at Warmestre, but you’ll find Jackie when you go in for tea. Oh, by the way, I had a message to you from her. She specially wants to see you. Told me to tell you if I saw you that she had to have it out with you. Have you been getting into her black books?”
In Berkeley Square they met Florrie Utlaw, a very different being from the drab little woman whom Adam had first known. She had a new gown, a new hat, and what seemed to be a new complexion. Also she had acquired a new manner, vivacious, confident, pleasantly and audaciously youthful.
“I can’t stop,” she said, “for I’m late already. Yes, we’ve got a flat in Westminster. You must come and have tea with us. I saw Lady Warmestre last night at Jean Rimington’s dance. Were you there? Jos is very well, thank you.” (She had dropped “Joe” as too painfully reminiscent.) “He is desperately busy, but very happy. You see, he is working with white men now. But he has so much to do that I don’t know how he will manage the House. You’ve heard about that? Yes, it is practically certain.”
She cried them a gay good-bye, and tripped off in the direction of Mount Street.
The meeting unloosed Kenneth’s tongue.
“Ye gods, it’s a crazy world!” he said. “Utlaw in Creevey’s pocket and destined to be a Tory silver-tongue! . . . His wife Jean Rimington’s latest find! . . . Brother Frank returned from the styes to the fatted calf and soon to be a fashionable Pope! . . . It is a nice thing, Adam, to see virtue rewarded. All the same, they have left a lot of poor disappointed devils behind them.”
They stopped at the corner of Berkeley Street and Piccadilly. Kenneth looked round him at the motley throng on the pavement and the congested stream of traffic, and up to the blue May sky.
“It’s a crazy world,” he said, “but it’s a busy one. An amusing one, too. I’m going back to my corner of it. Yes, I’m chucking my work, for it wasn’t mine. I’m not man enough to knock the heads of a thousand idiots together and teach them sense, and for all I’m concerned they can go on with their jabbering. What’s the thing in the Bible? ‘Ephraim is joined to his idols — let him alone.’ I’ve had my run and I’ve failed, and I’m going back to my paddock.”
He put his hand on Adam’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry for you, old man. Sorry — and rather ashamed. You have backed three bad ‘uns, and two have gone soft and one has gone sour.”
CHAPTER IV
Adam had in his bag the three brace of trout which were the recognised limit of the water, the rise was over, and now he was amusing himself with idle casting, dropping his fly by the edge of a water-lily or a snag at the far side of the stream. It had been a day of gentle sunshine and light western breezes, the day of an angler’s dream. The hay in the meadows was already high, and the wind tossed it into eddies of grey and green, but by the riverside the turf was short and starry with flowers.
His fishing had had many interludes. He stopped to watch a kingfisher dart from a bole, and a young brood of moorhens scuttling under the shadow of the bank, and a diving dabchick. He sniffed the rich rooty scents of the water’s edge, moist and sweet, the fragrance of the summer midlands — and wondered why it seemed to change to something salt and fresh, as the terrestrial scene faded from his eyes and he looked inward at a very different landscape.
Disappointment had not troubled him. He had no sense of failure. These things were ordained and it was not for him to question the ordering. The long monotonous grind behind him, the struggle with imponderables, the effort to keep his grip on what in his hands became slippery and evasive, the anxious thoughts and the baffled plans — the memory of these did not oppress him. That had been his task and it was finished; he was waiting for fresh marching orders. He was only a subaltern obeying a command: the setting of the battle was with the general-in-chief. He was in a mood of passivity which was almost peace. He had aimed too high; now he waited for a humbler task.
As always in such moods his fancy ranged, and he was back in his secret world. As the vigour of midday declined to the mellowness of afternoon, his rod fell idle. He was not looking at the deep midland pastures or the green waters fringed with white ranunculus. He was on the western side of Sgurr Bàn, on the thymy downlands with their hollows full of wild-wood, their shallow glens and their singing streams. Nigel was with him, babbling happily, his small firm hand clutching one of his fingers, except when it was loosed to permit him to dart aside after a nest or a flower. This was their favourite afternoon ramble, when they could watch the sun moving down to the horizon and bask in its magic. The horizon should have been the sea, but Adam knew that it was not yet permitted to come within sight of it. He was aware of it — somewhere just a little ahead beyond the ridges of down and the hazel coverts — they could even hear the beat of the green waves on the white sands. Nigel was full of it, always asking questions about the wonderful pink and pearl-grey shells, and the strange nuts carried by the tides from remote lands, and the skerries where the grey seals lived, and far out the little isle called the Island of Sheep where had dwelt the last saint of the Great Ages. But Nigel was not impatient. They were going there of a surety, but perhaps not that afternoon. Meantime there were the blue rock-doves and the merlins and the furry rabbits in their burrows and an occasional loping hare — and his father’s hand which he sometimes pressed against his cool cheek. . . .
About five o’clock Adam woke from his absorption, and remembered his engagement at the Court. He crossed the stream by a plank bridge and turned up through a fir-wood over the intervening ridge of hill. He had regard and loyalty for his friends, but he was aware that it was not the fierce rapturous thing which it had been in the old days. For him the world had now sharper and harder lines and dimmer colours. But Jacqueline was a little different. She reminded him somehow of Nigel, and he felt for her just a little of the same wondering affection. Besides, she understood him best. When he was with her he had the comfortable feeling of being with one who comprehended him without the need of explanation — comprehended him, sympathised with him, humoured him a little, perhaps, as she humoured he
r small Jeremy. Those bright eyes of hers saw very far.
He reached the Court on the garden side and entered the house by the open window of the library. There was no one in the room, so he passed through the big drawing-room out on to the terrace. He found a tea-table set where a great magnolia made a forest in the angle of the east wing. Below was the Dutch garden, and the view was to the west through a glade in the park to far-away blue hills.
Jacqueline appeared on the terrace steps. She had been gardening among the lily ponds, and wore Newmarket boots a little splashed and stained. Her long limbs, her slimness, and her retinue of dogs gave her more than ever the air of the huntress.
The kettle was boiling, so she at once made tea. Then she flung herself into a chair, took off her gauntlets, and tossed them into another.
“Had a good day?” she asked. “You must have, for you’re late. When Ken has no luck he is back clamouring for tea by four o’clock. I hope you’re as hungry as I am.” She was busy cutting slices from a wheaten loaf and buttering them.
To Adam she seemed a little nervous. She talked fast and busied herself about giving him tea, all with a certain air of preoccupation. She had much to say about Jeremy, and she was not in the habit of talking about her son. Also of Warmestre — regret at leaving the Court, complaints of the magnitude of the task that awaited them in Devonshire. Adam listened with half an ear. Jacqueline’s presence always gave him a sense of well-being and ease, but now she was notably restless.
“Kenneth told me that you specially wanted to see me,” he said.
