by John Buchan
“Yes, of course.” She did not look at him, and was busy taking shots at a thrush on the terrace with bits of crust. “I always want to see you. I wanted to talk over our friends with you.”
“Which ones?”
She laughed. “Well, let’s begin with Mr Creevey.”
“Why Creevey?”
“Isn’t he the rock on which you have shipwrecked, Adam dear?”
“You think I have shipwrecked?”
“Haven’t you? I’m desperately sorry for you. But of course I don’t pity you. I would as soon think of pitying God.”
She sat upright and for the first time looked straight at him.
“You and I are too close friends to have secrets. What do you make of Mr Creevey?”
“I don’t know him well.”
“You don’t. No one does. But you can feel him. . . . Shall I tell you what I think about him? First of all, I don’t like him. His manners to women are atrocious. Not to Lilah Pomfrey, who is too old, or to Sally Flambard, who is too ethereal. But with anyone like myself whom he thinks good-looking he has a horrid streak of the common philanderer. But let that pass. We all know that he takes his pleasures rather in the farm-yard way. . . . Apart from that there’s nothing much against him. He has made a lot of money, but no one ever suggested that he was a crook. I took the trouble to ask a lot of questions about that. He is not supposed to go back on his friends. Lastly, he is amazingly, superhumanly clever. Everyone admits that. It’s the chief thing about him, and his chief passion. He lives for the exercise of his splendid brain and cares for nothing much else. Kit Stannix says that he is the perfect sophist, and I think I know what he means. Life is for him a very difficult and absorbing game of chess.
“Well, you have come hard up against him,” she continued. “The apostle against the sophist! And the sophist has won the first round. If you had any human failings, Adam, you ought to hate him. For he hates you.”
“He scarcely knows me.”
“But he feels you and you feel him. And he hates you like sin. Trust a woman’s instinct. Perhaps he fears you a little too. You don’t fear him? No, you wouldn’t, because you’re scarcely human. . . . Don’t you realise what he has done?”
“He has taken Utlaw away from me.”
“Yes. Utlaw was clay in his hands, and Mr Creevey succeeded just because he was mostly clay, not gold. I like the shaggy Jos — Jos, remember, for the future, not Joe. I prophesy that he will be a prodigious success — the one honest working man, the darling of the gentlemen of England. I like little Florrie too. In a year she will be so smart she will scarcely be able to see out of her eyes. She will drop me as too dowdy. Jean Rimington is a fool, but she always backs the right mare for those particular stakes. But the Utlaws were easy fruit. Mr Creevey made a bigger coup than that.”
“Your brother?”
She nodded.
“Brother Frank. Make no mistake about it — Frank is a saint. You’re not. You’re an apostle, which is something very different. Frank has a wonderful soul, which he is going to cosset and polish and perfect. You don’t care a rush about your soul. You’d sacrifice it to-morrow if you thought the cause was big enough. . . . How was it done? Through Lilah Pomfrey of course. Lilah was born to be a nursing mother to saints. She is full of all kinds of wonderful emotions and ideals, and she has the supreme worldliness which can make them all fit in nicely with each other. No, no. She won’t marry him. Frank is incapable of marrying, and she knows very well that Frank’s wife would never be more than a morganatic one. She’ll be his mother and his confidante and his good genius and — his impresario. I adore my Frank and want him to have a pleasant life. He’ll get it, I think. He will be a tremendous figure before he is done. He will be the greatest preacher in England, and there will be scores of little birthday-books with his comforting sayings, and little manuals about his teaching. He’ll do a lot of good too. All kinds of dingy beings will warm themselves at the fires he lights. And he’ll die in the odour of sanctity, and people will say that a prophet has fallen in Israel, and it will be quite true. Only — you see Frank is not a fool, and at the end I think that he may have some rather bad thoughts about it all.”
Jacqueline got up.
“Let’s walk,” she said. “A cigarette? Not for me, thank you. I give up smoking in summer because it spoils my nose for the flowers.”
They crossed the terrace, and descended into the Dutch garden, which with lupins and the first delphiniums was all a mist of blue. Jacqueline linked her arm in Adam’s, for she had the habits of a friendly boy.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked. “I’m anxious about you, Adam dear. You’ve been slaving — oh, I’ve watched you — slaving at what was no job for a man like you. You have been a bottle-holder to champions that won’t fight. What next?”
“I shall find champions who will.”
She withdrew her arm.
“Why will you be so absurdly modest? You say you are trying to find leaders. But you have more grit than anybody. Why won’t you do the leading yourself?”
Adam shook his head.
“You don’t understand. I could never make you understand. I am only a servant — a bottle-holder if you like. I can never lead. It isn’t the task I have been given.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” she said. “I have prophesied about Mr Utlaw and brother Frank, and now I’ll prophesy about you. You’ll be forced to come into the open and take charge. If you don’t you’ll go on being beaten. By people like Mr Creevey and Lilah Pomfrey. . . . And by me.”
Jacqueline moved away from him and stood with one foot on a low parapet — a defiant huntress.
“I have a confession to make, Adam,” she said. “It was I that took Ken away from you. He is far the best of them — far more grit and fire. He has the makings of an apostle. He would have followed you in sandals and a hair shirt. It was I that stopped him.”
She stood up, very slim and golden in the light of the westering sun, and if there was defiance in her pose there was also a sudden shyness.
“You couldn’t compete with me, you know. I often felt rather a cad about it, but I had a right to fight for my own. . . . How shall I explain? Four years ago I married Ken. I wasn’t madly in love with him — perhaps I wasn’t in love with him at all. But I greatly admired and liked him. There was no glamour about him, but he was the best man I knew, the most really good and reliable. A woman, you know, generally marries for safety. She may fall in love for all kinds of reasons, but when she marries she takes the long view. Ken stood for something in England which I wanted to see continue, and as his wife I could help to keep it going. Marrying him gave me a career. I knew that if I had a son he would have a career also — he would be born to all kinds of fine sturdy obligations — with a niche ready from the start. So I married Ken partly for himself — quite a lot for himself — and partly for the great system behind him. Do you understand me?”
Adam nodded. He remembered his feelings the first night when he had descended the broad oaken staircase at the Court.
“Well, since our marriage I have come to like him enormously — the solid affection into which people grow when they live together. And there’s Jeremy, too. Jeremy is Ken and Ken is Jeremy. . . . And I have found out things I never guessed before. When I married I thought that if Ken had a fault it was that he was commonplace, the ordinary banal Christian gentleman. I was a blind little fool. There are queer things in the Armine blood. I’m half Highland and therefore half daft, but my daftness is like summer wild-fire, and Ken’s might be a steady devouring flame. He has it in him to fling everything to the winds and tramp the world. . . . And I did not marry to be a beggar-wife.”
Jacqueline’s singing voice sunk to a whisper.
“I hadn’t the courage. I wasn’t good enough. Besides, it was all against reason. I saw his restlessness and at first I encouraged him, for I didn’t want him to sink into a rustic clod. That’s another side of the Armines. If they don’t ha
ppen to go crusading they will relapse into the perfect chaw-bacon. I encouraged him to become Mayor of Birkpool because that was a family job. But his doings there opened my eyes — and frightened me. And then I saw the power you had over him and that frightened me more. I realised that I had to fight for my rights. Not my rights only — it wasn’t altogether selfish. I was fighting for Jeremy and for all the old things — for the Court here and for Warmestre, and for the people who lie carved in stone in the chapel, and for all the kind, peaceful life that depended on him. I was fighting for Ken, too — for his peace of mind, for if he had gone crusading there would have been no more peace for him. He’s not a saint, you see, and he is only part of an apostle — the other strain in him would have been pulling hard and a good deal of his life would have been hell. . . . Do you blame me?”
“I don’t blame you.”
She sighed.
“It was a stiff fight and I only won on the post. I had all the chances, of course. I had Jeremy and I had Ken’s affection for us both to help me. I knew him much better than he knew himself and I could play on all kinds of secret strings. His love of country life and horses. His laziness — he has plenty of it. His sentiment — he is a mass of it. His feeling for the past and for his family — he is no respecter of persons, but he has a big bump of veneration. But I could not have won, I think, if Mr Utlaw had not run out — and brother Frank. That gave Ken a kind of nausea about the whole concern, and I worked on that. . . . So I have got him back to me and to Jeremy and to all the Armines that ever were. But sometimes I feel as if I had sinned against the Holy Ghost, the sin my old nurse used to frighten me with. I’m not sure that I mind that — I’ll face up to the Holy Ghost when my time comes — but I mind horribly having fought against you. I have beaten you, and I hate myself for it.”
She looked at him timidly, as if much hung on his words. He did not speak, and she continued, her voice low and rapid, as of one making a difficult confession.
“You see — you see I could have been madly in love with someone — you, perhaps — someone like you. I think you are the only one in the world who could have made me feel like that, and then I would have flung everything behind me. My grandmother used to say that the women of her family would either sell their shift for a man, or make a packman’s bargain with him. Nobody wanted my shift, so I have made my bargain. Do you blame me for fighting for my share in it? . . . I would like you to say that you forgive me.”
Jacqueline’s eyes had become solemn, like a wise child’s.
“There is nothing to forgive,” Adam said. “I think you did right — entirely right.”
She came towards him and put her hands on his shoulders. Her lips were trembling.
“I believe you mean that,” she said. “God bless you for it. . . . If I were a man I should wring your hand and wish you well. But I am going to kiss you. . . .”
Adam was scarcely conscious of her kiss. But there was something novel in his heart, which he recognised as tenderness. As he walked across the park the light touch of her lips seemed in the recollection like the clutch of Nigel’s hand.
A week later he had a letter from Jacqueline, who was in London.
“Last night,” she wrote, “I went to a wonderful little party at Lilah Pomfrey’s. Ken was asked but wouldn’t go — said he was sick of monkey-tricks. The Utlaws were there, and Mr Creevey was in great form, and Frank of course, and one or two young men and several yearning women. Lilah has a regular group now and this was their second meeting. The invitation card may amuse you.”
The card she enclosed had Mrs Pomfrey’s name in the centre, and neatly printed in the left-hand top corner The Seekers.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
The little low-roofed café in the Rue des Célestins in which Falconet sat on a certain October afternoon was flooded with the hazy golden light which is the glory of Paris in a fine autumn. The patron was busy in a corner with his own avocations; a party of four stout citizens were drinking bocks and disputing vivaciously; but otherwise the place was empty, for it was the slack period when déjeuner is over and the hour of apéritifs has not arrived. Falconet was waiting for Adam, and as he smoked a delayed after-luncheon cigar he let his mind run over the events of the past week, since he had landed in England.
In the retrospect the chief was a talk with Christopher Stannix, for whom he had acquired a puzzled respect. Falconet loved politics and their practitioners no more than the rest of his countrymen, but Stannix was unlike any politician he had ever met. He seemed to stand aside, intervening now and then to put his weight into the scales to adjust the balance. He was a noted pricker of bladders, and had deflated some of Falconet’s pet ones, but he was as much in earnest as Falconet himself. He called himself a “trimmer,” and had justified the name from a period of English history with which Falconet was not familiar. But above all he was Adam’s friend.
For Adam Falconet had come to entertain one of the passionate friendships which were as much a feature in his character as his passionate dislikes. At first Adam’s ways had seemed to him inertia and his fastidiousness mere pedantry. But his disillusionment with his own bustling methods across the Atlantic had made him revise his views. The breakdown of Adam’s plans the summer before had been to him less of a disappointment than a relief. His friend was free to start again, and to start again with him as an ally. For Falconet was at heart an artist, and could never be content with the second-rate. His own complex organisation in America he regarded without pride, as a useful nursery of talent. But it would not produce genius, the rare quality which was needed to heal the world’s ills. Now as ever he was a pioneer in quest of the major secrets.
Adam was a hard man to know, and Falconet, in spite of their months of close companionship in the Arctic ice, felt that he had only penetrated the outer fringe. His explorer’s instinct was aroused, and he sought enlightenment from Stannix; and Stannix, detecting an honest affection, opened his heart to him.
“Melfort,” he had told Falconet, “is a religious genius. I don’t know how to define that, for it is a thing which you can feel better than you can explain. I don’t know what his religion is — never talked to him about it — it’s sure to be very different from any orthodox brand. But whatever it is it is a living fire in him. . . . Yes, I have known him since he was a boy. As a young man he was, I think, the most remarkable fellow I knew—’remarkable’ is the word — you couldn’t help noticing him, for he was unlike anybody else. We used to put him in a class by himself, not for what he had done but for what he was. He had an odd spiritual distinction, and an extraordinary fineness — fine as a slim, tempered sword. Then the crash came and he went under. After that I can only guess, but some time eight or nine years ago — yes, in prison — he had a great visionary experience. Like Dante’s, and much about the same age as Dante. He has never breathed a word to me about it, but the results are there for anyone to see. Everything about him is devoted — dedicated — consecrated — whatever you choose to call it.”
Falconet had nodded. That much he had long been aware of. He asked further questions.
Stannix puckered his brow.
“Oh yes, there are flaws in him. One is that he is — just a little — inhuman, and he used to be the jolliest of mortals. I wonder if I can make you understand me, for it is not ordinary inhumanity. My old tutor, I remember, used to define Platonism as the love of the unseen and the eternal cherished by those who rejoice in the seen and the temporal. Adam rather lacks the second part. He thinks about God a great deal more than he thinks about the things and the creatures He has made. He is a little too much aloof from the world, and that weakens his power. If he could only be in love with a woman again! — but of course that’s all past and done with. I wonder how much he really cares about his friends. Not a great deal for them in themselves, only as instruments in his purpose. He might have made a better job of Utlaw and Frank Alban if he had got really close to them. There must have been something a
little chilly about those friendships. Kenneth Warmestre was different perhaps — I believe there was a sort of affection there — but, then, Warmestre was hopeless from the start.”
Falconet had dissented. “I know what you mean, but I don’t think I agree. My grouch with Adam is that he is too infernally modest. He rates himself too low and the other fellows too high.”
“You haven’t got it quite right,” Stannix had replied. “He doesn’t rate other people too high. He rates them too low — he’s bound to do that considering the sort of standard he has — and they are bound subconsciously to recognise it, and perhaps resent it. That is one bar to the proper sort of friendship. But you are right on one thing — he is too modest about himself. He’s always contrasting himself with perfection and feeling a worm. He has made up his mind that his business is only to serve — not to serve God only, but to serve other men who are the agents of God’s purpose, and the trouble is that there is nobody big enough for him to serve. He wants to untie our shoe-latchets, and none of us is worthy of it. He has the opposite of folie des grandeurs — the folly of humility, I suppose you might call it. But he hasn’t found the Moses whose hands he can hold up, and I don’t think he ever will.”
Falconet had agreed, but with a cheerful air. For he believed that he was on the track of a Moses.
An hour slipped away in the sunny café and Falconet still waited. The party of four finished their bocks and their argument and went out. A man in a blue blouse came in and talked to the patron. The patron himself came over to Falconet’s table and spoke of the weather, politics and the manners of travelling Americans, thereby showing that he took Falconet for an Englishman. Then a great peace fell on the empty place, and a white cat, who had been sunning herself outside on the pavement beyond the green awning, came in and slept on the top of the patron’s little desk.
A man entered, a typical French bourgeois, wearing a bowler hat, a tightly buttoned grey coat, a stiff white collar and a flamboyant tie. He ordered a vermouth, and after a glance at the empty table came towards Falconet. He took off his hat with a flourish, revealing a head of close-clipped fair hair — the familiar Normandy type.
