Fox’s eyes remained upon my face.
“Do you good, eh?” he dimly interpreted my thoughts. “A run over. I thought you’d like it and, look here, Polehampton’s taken over the Bi-Monthly; wants to get new blood into it, see? He’d take something. I’ve been talking to him—a short series. … ‘Aspects.’ That sort of thing.” I tried to work myself into some sort of enthusiasm of gratitude. I knew that Fox had spoken well of me to Polehampton—as a sort of set off.
“You go and see Mr. P.,” he confirmed; “it’s really all arranged. And then get off to Paris as fast as you can and have a good time.”
“Have I been unusually cranky lately?” I asked.
“Oh, you’ve been a little off the hooks, I thought, for the last week or so.”
He took up a large bottle of white mucilage, and I accepted it as a sign of dismissal. I was touched by his solicitude for my health. It always did touch me, and I found myself unusually broad-minded in thought as I went down the terra-cotta front steps into the streets. For all his frank vulgarity, for all his shirtsleeves—I somehow regarded that habit of his as the final mark of the Beast—and the Louis Quinze accessories, I felt a warm good-feeling for the little man.
I made haste to see Polehampton, to beard him in a sort of den that contained a number of shelves of books selected for their glittering back decoration. They gave the impression that Mr. Polehampton wished to suggest to his visitors the fitness and propriety of clothing their walls with the same gilt cloth. They gave that idea, but I think that, actually, Mr. Polehampton took an aesthetic delight in the gilding. He was not a publisher by nature. He had drifted into the trade and success, but beneath a polish of acquaintance retained a fine awe for a book as such. In early life he had had such shining things on a shiny table in a parlour. He had a similar awe for his daughter, who had been born after his entry into the trade, and who had the literary flavour—a flavour so pronounced that he dragged her by the heels into any conversation with us who hewed his raw material, expecting, I suppose, to cow us. For the greater good of this young lady he had bought the Bi-Monthly—one of the portentous political organs. He had, they said, ideas of forcing a seat out of the party as a recompense.
It didn’t matter much what was the nature of my series of articles. I was to get the atmosphere of cities as I had got those of the various individuals. I seemed to pay on those lines, and Miss Polehampton commended me.
“My daughter likes … eh … your touch, you know, and. …” His terms were decent—for the man, and were offered with a flourish that indicated special benevolence and a reference to the hundred pounds. I was at a loss to account for his manner until he began to stammer out an indication. Its lines were that I knew Fox, and I knew Churchill and the Duc de Mersch, and the Hour. “And those financial articles … in the Hour … were they now? … Were they … was the Trans-Greenland railway actually … did I think it would be worth one’s while … in fact. …” and so on.
I never was any good in a situation of that sort, never any good at all. I ought to have assumed blank ignorance, but the man’s eyes pleaded; it seemed a tremendous matter to him. I tried to be noncommittal, and said: “Of course I haven’t any right.” But I had a vague, stupid sense that loyalty to Churchill demanded that I should back up a man he was backing. As a matter of fact, nothing so direct was a-gate, it couldn’t have been. It was something about shares in one of de Mersch’s other enterprises. Polehampton was going to pick them up for nothing, and they were going to rise when the boom in de Mersch’s began—something of the sort. And the boom would begin as soon as the news of the agreement about the railway got abroad.
I let him get it out of me in a way that makes the thought of that bare place with its gilt book-backs and its three uncomfortable office-chairs and the ground-glass windows through which one read the inversion of the legend “Polehampton,” all its gloom and its rigid lines and its pallid light, a memory of confusion. And Polehampton was properly grateful, and invited me to dine with him and his phantasmal daughter—who wanted to make my acquaintance. It was like a command to a state banquet given by a palace official, and Lea would be invited to meet me. Miss Polehampton did not like Lea, but he had to be asked once a year—to encourage good feeling, I suppose. The interview dribbled out on those lines. I asked if it was one of Lea’s days at the office. It was not. I tried to put in a good word for Lea, but it was not very effective. Polehampton was too subject to his assistant’s thorns to be responsive to praise of him.
So I hurried out of the place. I wanted to be out of this medium in which my ineffectiveness threatened to proclaim itself to me. It was not a very difficult matter. I had, in those days, rooms in one of the political journalists’ clubs—a vast mausoleum of white tiles. But a man used to pack my portmanteau very efficiently and at short notice. At the station one of those coincidences that are not coincidences made me run against the great Callan. He was rather unhappy—found it impossible to make an already distracted porter listen to the end of one of his sentences with two-second waits between each word. For that reason he
