I remember we began by talking about rifles. I had done a good deal of shikar in my time, and I could see that this man had had a wide experience and had the love of the thing in his bones. He never bragged, but by little dropped remarks showed what a swell he was. We talked of a new .240 bore which had remarkable stopping power, and I said I had never used it on anything more formidable than a Scotch stag. “It would have been a godsend to me in the old days on the Pungwe where I had to lug about a .500 express that broke my back.”
He grinned ruefully. “The old days!” he said. “We’ve all had ’em, and we’re all sick to get ’em back. Sometimes I’m tempted to kick over the traces and be off to the wilds again. I’m too young to settle down. And you, Sir Richard—you must feel the same. Do you never regret that that beastly old War is over?”
“I can’t say I do. I’m a middle-aged man now and soon I’ll be stiff in the joints. I’ve settled down in the Cotswolds, and though I hope to get a lot of sport before I die I’m not looking for any more wars. I’m positive the Almighty meant me for a farmer.”
He laughed. “I wish I knew what He meant me for. It looks like some sort of politician.”
“Oh, you!” I said. “You’re the fellow with twenty talents. I’ve only got the one, and I’m jolly well going to bury it in the soil.”
I kept wondering how much help I would get out of him. I liked him enormously, but somehow I didn’t yet see his cleverness. He was just an ordinary good fellow of my own totem—just such another as Tom Greenslade. It was a dark day, and the firelight silhouetted his profile, and as I stole glances at it I was struck by the shape of his head. The way he brushed his hair front and back made it look square, but I saw that it was really round, the roundest head I have ever seen except in a Kaffir. He was evidently conscious of it and didn’t like it, so took some pains to conceal it.
All through luncheon I was watching him covertly, and I could see that he was also taking stock of me. Very friendly these blue eyes were, but very shrewd. He suddenly looked me straight in the face.
“You won’t vegetate,” he said. “You needn’t deceive yourself. You haven’t got the kind of mouth for a rustic. What is it to be? Politics? Business? Travel? You’re well off?”
“Yes. For my simple tastes I’m rather rich. But I haven’t the ambition of a maggot.”
“No. You haven’t.” He looked at me steadily. “If you don’t mind my saying it, you have too little vanity. Oh, I’m quick at detecting vanity, and anyhow it’s a thing that defies concealment. But I imagine—indeed I know—that you can work like a beaver, and that your loyalty is not the kind that cracks. You won’t be able to help yourself, Sir Richard. You’ll be caught up in some machine. Look at me. I swore two years ago never to have a groove, and I’m in a deep one already. England is made up of grooves, and the only plan is to select a good one.”
“I suppose yours is politics,” I said.
“I suppose it is. A dingy game as it’s played at present, but there are possibilities. There is a mighty Tory revival in sight, and it will want leading. The newly enfranchised classes, especially the women, will bring it about. The suffragists didn’t know what a tremendous force of conservatism they were releasing when they won the vote for their sex. I should like to talk to you about these things some day.”
In the smoking-room we got back to sport and he told me the story of how he met Greenslade in Central Asia. I was beginning to realise that the man’s reputation was justified, for there was a curious mastery about his talk, a careless power as if everything came easily to him and was just taken in his stride. I had meant to open up the business which had made me seek his acquaintance, but I did not feel the atmosphere quite right for it. I did not know him well enough yet, and I felt that if I once started on those ridiculous three facts, which were all I had, I must make a clean breast of the whole thing and take him fully into my confidence. I thought the time was scarcely ripe for that, especially as we would meet again.
“Are you by any chance free on Thursday?” he asked as we parted. “I would like to take you to dine at the Thursday Club. You’re sure to know some of the fellows, and it’s a pleasant way of spending an evening. That’s capital! Eight o’clock on Thursday. Short coat and black tie.”
As I walked away, I made up my mind that I had found the right kind of man to help me. I liked him, and the more I thought of him the more the impression deepened of a big reservoir of power behind his easy grace. I was completely fascinated, and the proof of it was that I went off to the nearest bookseller’s and bought his two slim volumes of poems. I cared far more about poetry than Macgillivray imagined—Mary had done a lot to educate me—but I hadn’t been very fortunate in my experiments with the new people. But I understood
