“Mr. Fox is out,” said the commissionaire.
I explained that the matter was urgent. More call-boys disappeared through the folding doors. Unenticing personages passed the glass box, casting hostile glances askance at me on my high stool. A message came back.
“If it’s Mr. Etchingham Granger, he’s to follow Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly’s at once.”
I followed Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly’s—to a little flat in a neighbourhood that I need not specify. The eminent journalist was lunching with the eminent actress. A husband was in attendance—a nonentity with a heavy yellow moustache, who hummed and hawed over his watch.
Mr. Fox was full-faced, with a persuasive, peremptory manner. Mrs. Hartly was—well, she was just Mrs. Hartly. You remember how we all fell in love with her figure and her manner, and her voice, and the way she used her hands. She broke her bread with those very hands; spoke to her husband with that very voice, and rose from table with that same graceful management of her limp skirts. She made eyes at me; at her husband; at little Fox, at the man who handed the asparagus—great round grey eyes. She was just the same. The curtain never fell on that eternal dress rehearsal. I don’t wonder the husband was forever looking at his watch.
Mr. Fox was a friend of the house. He dispensed with ceremony, read my manuscript over his Roquefort, and seemed to find it add to the savour.
“You are going to do me for Mr. Fox,” Mrs. Hartly said, turning her large grey eyes upon me. They were very soft. They seemed to send out waves of intense sympatheticism. I thought of those others that had shot out a razor-edged ray.
“Why,” I answered, “there was some talk of my doing somebody for the Hour.”
Fox put my manuscript under his empty tumbler.
“Yes,” he said, sharply. “He will do, I think. H’m, yes. Why, yes.”
“You’re a friend of Mr. Callan’s, aren’t you?” Mrs. Hartly asked, “What a dear, nice man he is! You should see him at rehearsals. You know I’m doing his Boldero; he’s given me a perfectly lovely part—perfectly lovely. And the trouble he takes. He tries every chair on the stage.”
“H’m; yes,” Fox interjected, “he likes to have his own way.”
“We all like that,” the great actress said. She was quoting from her first great part. I thought—but, perhaps, I was mistaken—that all her utterances were quotations from her first great part. Her husband looked at his watch.
“Are you coming to this confounded flower show?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, turning her mysterious eyes upon him, “I’ll go and get ready.”
She disappeared through an inner door. I expected to hear the pistol-shot and the heavy fall from the next room. I forgot that it was not the end of the fifth act.
Fox put my manuscript into his breast pocket.
“Come along, Granger,” he said to me, “I want to speak to you. You’ll have plenty of opportunity for seeing Mrs. Hartly, I expect. She’s tenth on your list. Good day, Hartly.”
Hartly’s hand was wavering between his moustache and his watch pocket.
“Good day,” he said sulkily.
“You must come and see me again, Mr. Granger,” Mrs. Hartly said from the door. “Come to the Buckingham and see how we’re getting on with your friend’s play. We must have a good long talk if you’re to get my local colour, as Mr. Fox calls it.”
“To gild refined gold; to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet—”
I quoted banally.
“That’s it,” she said, with a tender smile. She was fastening a button in her glove. I doubt her recognition of the quotation.
When we were in our hansom, Fox began:
“I’m relieved by what I’ve seen of your copy. One didn’t expect this sort of thing from you. You think it a bit below you, don’t you? Oh, I know, I know. You literary people are usually so impracticable; you know what I mean. Callan said you were the man. Callan has his uses; but one has something else to do with one’s paper. I’ve got interests of my own. But you’ll do; it’s all right. You don’t mind my being candid, do you, now?” I muttered that I rather liked it.
“Well then,” he went on, “now I see my way.”
“I’m glad you do,” I murmured. “I wish I did.”
“Oh, that will be all right,” Fox comforted. “I dare say Callan has rather sickened you of the job; particularly if you ain’t used to it. But you won’t find the others as trying. There’s Churchill now, he’s your next. You’ll have to mind him. You’ll find him a decent chap. Not a bit of side on him.”
“What Churchill?” I asked.
“The Foreign Minister.”
“The devil,” I said.
“Oh, you’ll find him all right,” Fox reassured; “you’re to go down to his place tomorrow. It’s all arranged. Here we are. Hop out.” He suited his own action to his words and ran nimbly up the new terra-cotta steps of the Hour’s home. He left me to pay the cabman.
When I rejoined him he was giving directions to an invisible somebody through folding doors.
“Come along,” he said, breathlessly. “Can’t see him,” he added to a little boy, who held a card in his hands. “Tell him to go to Mr. Evans. One’s life isn’t one’s own here,” he went on, when he had reached his own room.
It was a palatial apartment furnished in white and gold—Louis Quinze, or something of the sort—with very new decorations after Watteau covering the walls. The process of disfiguration, however, had already begun. A roll desk of the least possible Louis Quinze order stood in one of the tall windows; the carpet was marked by muddy footprints, and a matchboard screen had been run across one end of the room.
“Hullo,
