Defenders of Democracy Part 12

"Your husband told me to leave it to him," answered the Poet, "and I've left it to him. There was a general feeling that I didn't know what I wanted--house or flat, north or south of the Park, all the rest of it--; they said there would be a scandal if I employed a young maid, I couldn't afford two, and an old one would p.a.w.n my clothes to buy gin. I am quoting your husband now; I know nothing of business. Every one agreed, too, that I must have a drain of some kind. Would you say it took long to find a bed-sitting room with use of bath?"

The Millionaire's wife hurriedly pushed back her chair?

"My husband's going abroad for the duration of the war," she said in loyal explanation, "but it's just possible that he hasn't started yet."

The Millionaire, returning on tip-toe from the loft over the garage, had sought asylum in the library, where he was smoking a cigar and reading the evening paper. As his wife entered he looked up with welcoming expectancy.

"How did you get rid of him?" he asked.

The Millionaire's wife pressed her hands to her temples.

"My dear! What HAVE you been promising him?" she cried.

The Millionaire swore softly, as the truth sank into his brain.

"Have another place laid for dinner," he ordered; "book two seats for a music-hall and take him out to supper afterwards. I can't afford to be disturbed to-night. To-morrow I must get in touch with the Iron King.... I don't see what more there is to be said."

Four weeks later the Poet drove in a six-cylinder car from Park Lane to Eaton Square on an indeterminate visit to the Iron King.

He was looking better for the month's good wine and food, in which the Millionaire's house abounded; but now the Millionaire, who based his fortune on knowing the right people in every walk of life, was arranging to have his house taken over by the Red Cross authorities.

In a week's time the house was to be found unsuitable and restored to him, but henceforth the Iron King was to have the honor of entertaining the Poet.

"How you ever came to make such a promise!" wailed the Millionaire's wife for the twentieth time, as they drove to Claridge's. "London's so full that you might have known it's impossible to get ANYthing."

"I feel that we have exhausted this subject," answered the Millionaire with the bruskness of a man whose nerves have worn thin; with the menace, too, of one who, having divorced his first wife, would divorce the second on small provocation.

The Iron King was not at home when the Poet arrived in Eaton Squire, but a pretty, young secretary, cultured to the point of transforming all her final "g's" into "k's" received him with every mark of welcome. She admired the Iron King romantically and was in the habit of writing his surname after her own Christian name to see how the combination looked; and, when he had departed each morning to contest his latest a.s.sessment for excess profits, she would wander through the house, planning little changes in the arrangement of the furniture and generally deploring the sober, colorless taste of the first Iron Queen. So far her employer returned none of her admiration. He addressed her loosely as "Miss--er" and forgot her name; he never noticed what clothes she was wearing or the pretty dimples that she made by holding down the inside flesh of her cheeks between her eye-teeth; further, he criticized her spelling spitefully and, on the occasion of the Millionaire's second marriage, had dictated a savage half sheet beginning, "A young man may marry once, as he may get drunk once, without the world thinking much the worse of him; habitual intemperance is, on first principles, to be deplored...."

The pretty young secretary knew from fiction and the drama that the Iron King would never appreciate her until he stood in danger of losing her. She welcomed the Poet as a foil and misquoted his poetry twice before tea was over; then she invited him to accompany her to a picture palace, but the Poet, once inside the citadel, was reluctant to leave it until his position was more firmly established.

Scarcely entrenched at Claridge's, the Millionaire telephoned derisively to the city, so that the Iron King returned home half an hour before his usual time, prepared to deal with the Poet as he dealt with querulous or inquisitive shareholders at General Meetings.

The Poet, however, was long and painfully accustomed to combat with enraged editors and lost no time in a.s.suming the offensive, demanding indignantly in a high head-voice, before the Iron King had crossed his own threshold, why no quarters had been found for him and how much longer any one imagined that he would put up with the indignity of being bandied from one wretched house to another.

The flushed cheeks and hysterical manner put the Iron King temporarily out of countenance.

"My dear fellow!" he interrupted ingratiatingly.

"I'm not a business man," continued the Poet hotly. "You all of you told me that, and I'm disposed to say: 'Thank G.o.d, I'm not.'"

The Iron King put his hat carefully out of reach and forced a smile.

"You mustn't take it like that, old chap," he said soothingly.

"I--we--all of us are doing our best. Now we won't bother about dressing; let's go straight in and thrash the thing out over a bottle of wine."

Instructing his butler very audibly to open a bottle of the 1906 Lanson, he slipped his arm through the Poet's and led him, sullenly murmuring, into the dining-room. With the second bottle of champagne, his guest ceased to be aggrieved and became quarrelsome; when the port wine appeared, he had the Iron King cowed and broken in moral.

"If you find fault with everything, why do you come here, why stay here?" complained the Iron King with a last flickering effort to recover his independence.

"Why don't you find me some other place to go to, as you promised?"

the Poet retorted, as he made his way to the morning-room and sat down to order a month's supply of underclothes from his hosier.

III

The Iron King always boasted that honesty was the best policy and that he was invariably willing to put his cards on the table.

The Millionaire had once professed himself likely to be satisfied if the Iron King would only remove the fifth ace from his sleeve, and a certain coolness between the two men resulted. In general, however, he had the reputation of a frank, bluff fellow.

On the morrow of the Poet's arrival, he remained in bed and announced in the quavering pencil-strokes of a sick man, that he was suffering from anthrax, which, he might add, was not only painful but infectious. The Poet scrawled across one corner of the note that anthrax was usually fatal, but that, as he himself had twice had it, he would risk taking it a third time in order to be with his friend. Thereupon the Iron King departed to the city, leaving the Poet to dictate blank verse to the pretty young secretary, who curled both feet round one leg of her chair, told him that she "loved his potry more'n anythink she'd ever read" and asked how all the hard words like "chrysoprase" and "asphdel" were spelt. That night a telegram arrived shortly before dinner, and the Iron King announced that the Ministry of Munitions was sending him to America to stabilize iron prices.

"Why can't you finish one thing before starting another?" demanded the Poet hectoringly. "You haven't YET found me any quarters, and you call yourself a business man. I shall of course stay on here till your return..."

The Iron King shook his head gravely.

"That's impossible," he interrupted. "My young secretary..."

"You must take her with you," answered the Poet obstinately.

The subject was not pursued, but at bed time the Iron King roundly asked the Poet how much he would take to go away.

"I require a home," answered the Poet frigidly, remembering the weary day spent by him in discovering the Glebe Place studio and the weary night spent by the Iron King in recommending Kensington boarding houses. "I do not want your money."

"We shan't fall out over a pound or two," urged the Iron King with a meaning motion of the hand towards his breast pocket.

"A thing is either a promise or it is not a promise," replied the Poet, as he turned on his heel. "I know nothing of business or what people are pleased to term 'commercial morality.'"

Four weeks later the Poet left Eaton Square for the Private Secretary's rooms in Bury Street. He looked thin and anemic after his month of privations, for the Iron King, improving in morale and recapturing something of the old strike-breaking spirit, had counter-attacked on the third day of the Poet's visit. The chauffeur, butler and two footmen, all of military age, had been claimed on successive appeals as indispensable, but on their last appearance at the Tribunal the Iron King had unprotestingly presented them to the Army. This he followed by breakfasting in bed, lunching in the city, dining at his club and leaving neither instructions nor money for the maintenance of the household. For a time the Poet was saved from the greater starvation by the care of the pretty young secretary, but without an Iron King there was no need for a foil. Sharp words were exchanged one morning over the propriety of grounds in coffee; the pretty young secretary declared that she would "have nothink more to do with him or his old potry"; and in the afternoon he packed his trunks with his own hands and with his own hands dragged them downstairs on to the pavement, leaving the pretty young secretary biting viciously at the corner of a crumpled handkerchief drenched in "White Rose."

The Private Secretary received him in a manner different from that adopted by either the Millionaire or the Iron King. The two men were of nearly the same age, but in a deferential, if mis-spent life the Private Secretary had learned to be non-committal. Well he knew that he had but one bedroom; well he knew that, on admitting it, the Poet would claim it from him.

"A spare bed?" he echoed, when the Poet dragged his trunks into the middle of a tiny sitting room. "Really, I have no statement to make."

"At least you will not deny," said the Poet with truculent emphasis, "that you undertook to find me suitable accommodation and to supply me with a bed until it was found."

"I must refer you to the reply given to a similar question on the twenty-third ultimo," answered the Private Secretary loftily. for a rich reward he could not have said where he had been or what he had done on the twenty-third ultimo, but to the Poet the reply was new and disconcerting.

"Where's my flat anyway?" he pursued doggedly.

"I have no statement to make," reiterated the Private Secretary.

After an awkward silence, during which neither yielded an inch of ground, the Poet dragged his trunks destructively downstairs and drove to the flat of the Official Receiver. Glowing with the consciousness of victory, the Private Secretary dressed for dinner and started out to his club. His good-humor was impaired, when he observed in his hall a pendant triangle of wall-paper flapping in the draught of the open door through which the Poet had dragged his trunks. Further on, the paint was scarred on the stairs, and the carpet of the main hall was rucked and disordered; there was also a lingering suggestion of escaping gas, and the Secretary observed a bracket hanging at a bibulous angle.

"This," he murmured through grimly set teeth, "is sheer frightfulness."

Returning to his rooms, he drawled a friendly warning by telephone to the Millionaire, who instantly gave orders that no one of any s.e.x or age was to be admitted. Next he called up the Iron King and repeated the warning; then the Lexicographer, the Official Receiver and the Military Attache were similarly placed on their guard, and there was nothing to do but to proceed to his belated dinner.

The Great War, which had converted staff officers into popular preachers, novelists into strategical experts and everyone else into a Minister of the Crown, had left the Poet (in name, at least) a poet and in nothing else anything at all. He acted precisely as the Private Secretary had intended him to act, driving first to the Lexicographer's house, where he was greeted by a suspiciously new "TO LET" board, and thence to the Official Receiver's flat, where a typewritten card informed him that this bell was out of order. Embarra.s.sed but purposeful, he directed his four-wheeler to Eaton Square, but the blinds were down, and a semblance of mourning draped the Iron King's house. In Park Lane a twenty-yard expanse of straw, nine inches thick, prayed silence for the Millionaire's quick recovery.

"I don't know where to go to next," murmured the Poet dejectedly.