“Here?” he asked with an expression of sudden interest and curiosity which Elinor found rather offensive and embarrassing. Was he imagining something, was he daring to suppose … ?
“Yes, here,” she nodded curtly.
“I won’t forget,” he assured her emphatically, and there was still something about his expression which made her suspect a private significance behind the obvious words.
“Thank you,” said Elinor, without cordiality. “And now I must fly.” She gave the word to the driver. The taxi backed up the mews, under the archway, turned, and was gone.
Spandrell walked slowly up to Hyde Park Corner. From the public call box in the station he telephoned to Illidge.
Everard Webley was striding about the room, dictating. Sedentary composition he found impossible. “How do people write when they’re grafted to chairs all day long, year in year out?” He found it incomprehensible. “When I’m sitting in a chair, or lying on a bed, I become like the furniture I’ve combined myself with—mere wood and stuffing. My mind doesn’t move unless my muscles move.” On days when his correspondence was large, when there were articles to dictate, speeches to compose, Everard’s working day was an eight-hour walking tour. “Doing the lion” was how his secretaries described his methods of dictation. He was doing the lion now—the restless lion, a little before feeding time—pacing from wall to wall of his big bare office.
“Remember,” he was saying, frowning, as he spoke, at the grey carpet; under his secretary’s pencil the shorthand scurried across the page, “remember that the final authority is in all cases mine and that, so long as I remain at the head of the B.B.F., every attempt at insubordination will be promptly and ruthlessly suppressed. Yours etcetera.” He was silent and, walking back to his desk from the spot where the conclusion of his thoughtful and leonine pacing had left him, he turned over the scattered papers. “That seems to be all,” he said, and looked at his watch. It was just after a quarter to six. “Have these last letters ready for me in the morning,” he went on. “I’ll sign them then.” He took his hat from the peg. “Good evening.” And slamming the door, he descended the stairs two at a time. Outside the house he found his chauffeur waiting with the car. It was a powerful machine (for Everard was a lover of furious driving) and, since he also enjoyed the sensation of battling with the weather and the wind of his own speed, open. A tightly stretched waterproof sheet covered the whole of the back part of the touring body like a deck, leaving only the two front seats available for passengers. “I shan’t need you any more this evening,” he said to the chauffeur, as he settled into the driver’s seat. “You can go.”
He touched the self-starter, threw the car into gear, and shot off with a violent impetuosity. Several dozens of horses were bottled in the three litres of Everard’s cylinders; he liked to make them work their hardest. Full speed ahead and then, a yard from the impending accident, jam on the brakes; that was his method. Driving with Everard in town was almost too exciting. Elinor had protested the last time he took her out. “I don’t so much mind dying,” she had said, “but I really should object to passing the rest of my life with two wooden legs and a broken nose.” He had laughed. “You’re quite safe with me. I don’t have accidents.” “You’re above such things, are you?” she had mocked. “Well, if you like to put it like that …” The brakes were applied with such violence that Elinor had had to clutch at the arms of her seat to prevent herself from being thrown against the wind screen. “Imbecile,” he had shouted at the bewildered old gentleman whose hen-like indecisions in the roadway had so nearly landed him under Everard’s Dunlops. “If you like to put it like that”—and the car had shot forward again with a jerk that flattened Elinor against the back of her seat—“you may. I don’t have accidents. I manufacture my own luck.”
Remembering the incident, Everard smiled to himself as he drove along Oxford Street. A railway delivery van held up his progress. Horses oughtn’t to be allowed in the streets. “Either you take me,” he would say to her, “and in the end that means you’ll have to make the thing public—leave Philip and come to me” [for he intended to be entirely honest with her; there were to be no false pretences of any kind]—“either that, or else …” There was an opportunity to pass the delivery van; he pressed the accelerator and darted forward with a swerve to the right and another, past the nose of the old and patiently trotting horse, to the left again. “Or else we don’t see one another again.” It was to be an ultimatum. Brutal. But Everard hated situations that were neither one thing nor the other. He preferred definite knowledge, however unpleasant, to even the most hopefully blissful of uncertainties. And in this case the uncertainty wasn’t at all blissful. At the entry to Oxford Circus a policeman lifted his hand. It was seven minutes to six. She was too squeamish, he thought, looking round, too sensitive about these new buildings. Everard found nothing displeasing in the massively florid baroque of modern commerce. It was vigorous and dramatic; it was large, it was expensive, it symbolized progress. “But it’s so revoltingly vulgar!” she had protested. “But it’s difficult,” he had answered, “not to be vulgar, when one isn’t dead. You object to these people doing things. And I agree: doing things is rather vulgar.” She had the typical consumer’s point of view, not the producer’s. The policeman dropped
