The Inheritors. Joseph Conrad
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that spring up in the neighbourhood of the Strand. It is one of their qualities that they are always just round the corner; another, that their stewards are too familiar; another, that they – in the opinion of the other members – are run too much for the convenience of one in particular.
In this case it was Fox who kept the dinner waiting. I sat in the little smoking-room and, from behind a belated morning paper, listened to the conversation of the three or four journalists who represented the members. I felt as a new boy in a new school feels on his first introduction to his fellows.
There was a fossil dramatic critic sleeping in an arm-chair before the fire. At dinner-time he woke up, remarked:
"You should have seen Fanny Ellsler," and went to sleep again.
Sprawling on a red velvet couch was a beau jeune homme, with the necktie of a Parisian-American student. On a chair beside him sat a personage whom, perhaps because of his plentiful lack of h's, I took for a distinguished foreigner.
They were talking about a splendid subject for a music-hall dramatic sketch of some sort – afforded by a bus driver, I fancy.
I heard afterward that my Frenchman had been a costermonger and was now half journalist, half financier, and that my art student was an employee of one of the older magazines.
"Dinner's on the table, gents," the steward said from the door. He went toward the sleeper by the fire. "I expect Mr. Cunningham will wear that arm-chair out before he's done," he said over his shoulder.
"Poor old chap; he's got nowhere else to go to," the magazine employee said.
"Why doesn't he go to the work'ouse," the journalist financier retorted. "Make a good sketch that, eh?" he continued, reverting to his bus-driver.
"Jolly!" the magazine employee said, indifferently.
"Now, then, Mr. Cunningham," the steward said, touching the sleeper on the shoulder, "dinner's on the table."
"God bless my soul," the dramatic critic said, with a start. The steward left the room. The dramatic critic furtively took a set of false teeth out of his waistcoat pocket; wiped them with a bandanna handkerchief, and inserted them in his mouth.
He tottered out of the room.
I got up and began to inspect the pen-and-ink sketches on the walls.
The faded paltry caricatures of faded paltry lesser lights that confronted me from fly-blown frames on the purple walls almost made me shiver.
"There you are, Granger," said a cheerful voice behind me. "Come and have some dinner."
I went and had some dinner. It was seasoned by small jokes and little personalities. A Teutonic journalist, a musical critic, I suppose, inquired as to the origin of the meagre pheasant. Fox replied that it had been preserved in the back-yard. The dramatic critic mumbled unheard that some piece or other was off the bills of the Adelphi. I grinned vacantly. Afterward, under his breath, Fox put me up to a thing or two regarding the inner meaning of the new daily. Put by him, without any glamour of a moral purpose, the case seemed rather mean. The dingy smoking-room depressed me and the whole thing was, what I had, for so many years, striven to keep out of. Fox hung over my ear, whispering. There were shades of intonation in his sibillating. Some of those "in it," the voice implied, were not above-board; others were, and the tone became deferential, implied that I was to take my tone from itself.
"Of course, a man like the Right Honourable C. does it on the straight, … quite on the straight, … has to have some sort of semi-official backer… In this case, it's me, … the Hour. They're a bit splitty, the Ministry, I mean… They say Gurnard isn't playing square … they say so." His broad, red face glowed as he bent down to my ear, his little sea-blue eyes twinkled with moisture. He enlightened me cautiously, circumspectly. There was something unpleasant in the business – not exactly in Fox himself, but the kind of thing. I wish he would cease his explanations – I didn't want to hear them. I have never wanted to know how things are worked; preferring to take the world at its face value. Callan's revelations had been bearable, because of the farcical pompousness of his manner. But this was different, it had the stamp of truth, perhaps because it was a little dirty. I didn't want to hear that the Foreign Minister was ever so remotely mixed up in this business. He was only a symbol to me, but he stood for the stability of statesmanship and for the decencies that it is troublesome to have touched.
"Of course," he was proceeding, "the Churchill gang would like to go on playing the stand-off to us. But it won't do, they've got to come in or see themselves left. Gurnard has pretty well nobbled their old party press, so they've got to begin all over again."
That was it – that was precisely it. Churchill ought to have played the stand-off to people like us – to have gone on playing it at whatever cost. That was what I demanded of the world as I conceived it. It was so much less troublesome in that way. On the other hand, this was life – I was living now and the cost of living is disillusionment; it was the price I had to pay. Obviously, a Foreign Minister had to have a semi-official organ, or I supposed so… "Mind you," Fox whispered on, "I think myself, that it's a pity he is supporting the Greenland business. The thing's not altogether straight. But it's going to be made to pay like hell, and there's the national interest to be considered. If this Government didn't take it up, some other would – and that would give Gurnard and a lot of others a peg against Churchill and his. We can't afford to lose any more coaling stations in Greenland or anywhere else. And, mind you, Mr. C. can look after the interests of the niggers a good deal better if he's a hand in the pie. You see the position, eh?"
I wasn't actually listening to him, but I nodded at proper intervals. I knew that he wanted me to take that line in confidential conversations with fellows seeking copy. I was quite resigned to that. Incidentally, I was overcome by the conviction – perhaps it was no more than a sensation – that that girl was mixed up in this thing, that her shadow was somewhere among the others flickering upon the sheet. I wanted to ask Fox if he knew her. But, then, in that absurd business, I did not even know her name, and the whole story would have sounded a little mad. Just now, it suited me that Fox should have a moderate idea of my sanity. Besides, the thing was out of tone, I idealised her then. One wouldn't talk about her in a smoking-room full of men telling stories, and one wouldn't talk about her at all to Fox.
The musical critic had been prowling about the room with Fox's eyes upon him. He edged suddenly nearer, pushed a chair aside, and came toward us.
"Hullo," he said, in an ostentatiously genial, after-dinner voice, "what are you two chaps a-talking about?"
"Private matters," Fox answered, without moving a hair.
"Then I suppose I'm in the way?" the other muttered. Fox did not answer.
"Wants a job," he said, watching the discomfited Teuton's retreat, "but, as I was saying – oh, it pays both ways." He paused and fixed his eyes on me. He had been explaining the financial details of the matter, in which the Duc de Mersch and Callan and Mrs. Hartly and all these people clubbed together and started a paper which they hired Fox to run, which was to bring their money back again, which was to scratch their backs, which… It was like the house that Jack built; I wondered who Jack was. That was it, who was Jack? It all hinged upon that.
"Why, yes," I said. "It seems rather neat."
"Of course," Fox wandered on, "you are wondering why the deuce I tell you all this. Fact is, you'd hear it all if I didn't, and a good deal more that isn't true besides. But I believe you're the sort of chap to respect a confidence."
I didn't rise to the sentiment. I knew as well as he did that he was bamboozling me, that he was, as he said, only telling me – not the truth, but just what I should hear everywhere. I did not bear him any ill-will; it was part of the game, that. But the question was, who was Jack? It might be Fox himself… There might, after all, be some meaning in the farrago of nonsense that that fantastic girl had let off upon me. Fox really and in a figure of speech such as she allowed herself, might be running a team consisting of the Duc de Mersch and Mr. Churchill.
CHAPTER FOUR
He might really be backing a foreign, philanthropic ruler and State-founder, and a British Foreign Minister, against