VII
At that moment George Lytham drove his car through the gates of Chilton Park and up to the old house. He asked for Mr. Fallaray, was shown into the library and paced up and down the room with his hands deep in his pockets, but with his chin high, his eyes gleaming and a curious smile about his mouth.
The moment had come for which he had been waiting since the Armistice, for which he had been working with all his energy since he had got back into civilian clothes. He had left London and driven down to Whitecross on a wave of exhilaration. There had been a meeting at his office at which all the men of his party had been present,—young men, ex-soldiers and sailors temporarily commissioned, who had come out of the great catastrophe to look things straight in the face. “Fallaray is our man,” they had all said unanimously. “Where is he?” And Lytham, who was his friend, had been sent to fetch him and bring him back to London that night. The time was ripe for action.
But when the door opened and Fallaray strolled in—he had never seen him stroll before—George drew up short, amazed.—But this was not Fallaray. This was not the man he had seen the previous Friday with rounded shoulders, haggard face and eyes in the back of his head. Here was one who looked like a younger brother of Fallaray, a care-free younger brother, sun-tanned, irresponsible, playing with life.
“My dear Fallaray,” he said, hardly knowing what to say, “what have you done to yourself?”
And Fallaray sent out a ringing laugh and clapped young Lochinvar on the shoulder. “You notice the change, eh? It’s wonderful, wonderful. I say to myself all day long how wonderful it is.” And he flung his hands up and laughed again and threw himself into a chair and stuck his long legs out. “But what the devil do you want?” he asked lightly, enjoying the opportunity of showing the serious man who came out of a future that he himself had forgotten that he was beginning to revel in his past. “I said that some one would jolly soon see the wreckage on the shore of my Eden and send out a rescue party, and here you are.”
Lytham didn’t understand. The words were Greek to him and the attitude so surprising that it awakened in him a sort of irritation. Good God, hadn’t this man, who meant so much to them, read the papers? Wasn’t he aware of the fact that the time had arrived in the history of politics when a strong concerted effort might put a new face upon everything? “Look here, Fallaray,” he said, “let’s talk sense.”
“My dear chap,” said Fallaray, “you’ve come to the wrong man for that. I know nothing about sense, and what’s more, I don’t want to. Talk romance to me, quote poetry, tell me your dreams, turn somersaults, but don’t come here and expect any sense from me. I’ve given it up.”
But Lytham was not to be put off. He said to himself, “The air of this place has gone to Fallaray’s head. He needed a holiday. The reaction has played a trick upon him. He’s pulling my leg.” He drew up a chair and leaned forward eagerly and put his hand on Fallaray’s knee. “All right, old boy,” he said. “Have your joke, but come down from the ether in which you’re floating and listen to facts. The wily little P. M. who’s been between the devil and the deep sea for a couple of years is getting rattled. With the capitalists pushing him one way and the labor leaders shouldering him the other, he’s losing his feet. The by-elections show the way the wind’s blowing in the country and they’ve made a draught in Downing Street. Trust a Celt as a political barometer.”
“There’s been no wind here, George,” said Fallaray, putting his hands behind his head. “Golden days, my dear fellow, golden days, with the gentlest of breezes.”
But Lytham ignored the interruption. In five minutes, if he knew his man, he would have Fallaray sitting up straight. “Our anti-waste men are winning every seat they stand for,” he went on, “and this means the nucleus of a new party, our party. The country is behind us, Fallaray, and if we keep our heads and get down to work, the next general election will not be a walk-over for the labor men but for us. Lloyd George is on his last legs, in spite of his newspapers, and with him the Coalitionists disappear to a man. As for Trades-Unionism, the coal strike has proved that it oscillates between communism and socialism, the nationalizing of everything—mines, railways, land, capital—and the country doesn’t like it and isn’t ready for it. The way, therefore, is easy if we organize at once under a leader who has won the reputation for honesty, and that leader is yourself. But there is not a moment to waste. My car is outside. Drive up with me now and meet us to-morrow morning. Unanimously we look to you.” He sprang to his feet and made a gesture towards the door.
But Fallaray settled more comfortably into his chair and crossed one long leg over the other. “Do you know your Hood?” he asked.
“Hood?—Why?”
“Listen to this:
“‘Peace and rest at length have come,
All the day’s long toil is past,
And each heart is whispering Home,
Home at last.’”
“But what has that got to do with it?”
“That’s my answer to you, George.” And Fallaray waved his hand, as though the question was settled.
If Lytham had been older or younger, and if his admiration and esteem for Fallaray had not become so deep-rooted, he must have broken out into a torrent of incredulity and impatience. What he did, instead, persuading himself, easily enough, that his friend had not recovered from his recent disappointments, although he had obviously benefited in health, was to go over the whole ground again, more quietly and in greater detail, and to wind up with the assertion that Fallaray was essential to the cause.
To all of which Fallaray listened with a sort of respectful interest but without the slightest enthusiasm, and remained lolling in his chair. He might have been a Buckinghamshire Squire who knew no language but his own, hearing a Frenchman holding forth for no apparent reason on Napoleon. He watched his friend’s mouth, appraised his occasional gestures, ran his eyes with liking over his well-knit body and found his voice pleasant to the ear. Beyond that, nothing.
Lytham began to feel like a man who throws stones into a lake. All his points seemed to disappear into an unruffled and indifferent surface of water. It was incomprehensible. It was also indescribably baffling. What on earth had come over this man who, until a few days before, had been burning with a desire to reconstruct and working himself into a condition of nervous exhaustion in an endeavor to pull his country out of chaos?
“Well,” he said, after an extraordinary pause, during which everything seemed to have fallen flat. “What are you going to do?”
“But I’ve told you, my dear George,” said Fallaray, with a long sigh of happiness. “I have found a home, at last.”
“You mean that you are going to let us down?”
“I mean that I am going to live my own life.”
“That you’re out of politics?”
“Yes. My resignation goes in to-morrow.”
“My God! Why?”
Fallaray got up and went to the window. He stood for a moment looking out at a corner of the terrace where several steps led down to a fountain in which, out of an urn held in the hands of a weather-worn boy, water was flowing, colored like a rainbow by the evening sun.
And Lytham followed him, wondering whether he had gone off his head, become feeble-minded as the result of overstrain. And then he saw Lola sitting on the edge of the fountain, with her face tilted up, her hands clasped round one of her knees and her golden hair gleaming.
And there both men remained, gazing,—Fallaray with a smile of possession, of infinite pride and pleasure; Lytham with an expression of profound amazement and quick understanding.
“So it’s a woman,” he thought. And as he continued to look, another picture of that girl came back into his mind. He had seen her before. He had turned as she had passed him somewhere and caught his breath. He remembered to have said to himself as she had walked away, “Eve, come to life! Some poor devil of an Adam will go to hell for her.”—The Carlton—Chalfont—the foyer with its little cases of glittering jewels, the long strip of carpet leading to the stairs of the dining room—the palms—the orchestra. It all came back.—Well, this might be a form of madness in a man of Fallaray’s age and womanless life, but, thank God, it was one with which he could deal. It was physical, not mental, as he had feared. Fallaray might very well play Adam without going into hell.
“Can’t you combine the two,” he said. “Politics and that girl? It’s been done before. It’s being done every day. The one is helped by the other.”
But Fallaray shook his head. “I am not going to do it,” he said. “I have had a surfeit of one and nothing of the other. Take it from me finally, George,—I am out of the political game. I think I should have been out of it in any case, because I came here acknowledging failure, fed up, nauseated. I am not the man to juggle with intrigues, to say one thing to placate the capitalists to-day and another to fool labor to-morrow. It isn’t my way and I shall not be missed. On the contrary, my resignation will be accepted with eagerness. I am going to begin all over again, free, perfectly firm in my belief that there are better men to do my job. I was a bull in a china shop, and it will remain a china shop, whether it’s run by one party or another. It’s the system. Nothing can alter it. I couldn’t, you and your party won’t be able to. It’s gone too far. It’s a cancer. It will kill the country. And so I’m out. I consider that I have earned the right to love and make a home. Row off from my Eden, my dear fellow, and leave me in peace. I am not going to be rescued.”
“We’ll see about that,” thought Lytham. “This is not Fallaray who speaks. It’s the man of forty suddenly hit by passion. I’ll fight that girl to the last gasp. We must have this man, we must.”
He turned away, deeply disappointed at the queer tangent at which his chief had gone off, bitterly annoyed to find that here was a fight within a fight at a time when unity was vital. He was himself a perfectly normal creature who regarded the rustle of silk as one of the necessities, like golf and tobacco, but to sacrifice a career or let down a cause for the sake of a woman was to him an act of unimaginable weakness and folly. If only Fallaray had been younger or older, or, better still, had been contentedly married to Feo! Cursed bad luck that he had been caught at forty.—But, struck with an idea in which he could see immediate possibilities, he stopped on his way to the door and went back to Fallaray. To work it out in his usual energetic way he must use strategy and appear to accept his friend’s decision as irreparable. “All right,” he said. “You know best. I’ll argue no more. But as there’s no need now for me to dash back to town, mayn’t I linger with you in Arcadia for a couple of hours?”
Fallaray was delighted. Lola was to dine at Lady Cheyne’s, and he would be alone. It would be very jolly to have George to dinner, especially as he saw the futility of argument and recognized an ultimatum. “Stay and have some food,” he said. “I’ve much to tell you. But will you let me leave you for ten minutes?”
That was precisely what young Lochinvar intended to do before he drove away,—speak to that woman.
He watched Fallaray join Lola at the fountain, give her his hand and wander off among the rose trees, wearing what he called the fatuous smile of the middle-aged man in love. And then, so that he might obtain a point or two for future use, he rang the bell for Elmer. The butler and he had known each other for years. He would answer a few nonchalant questions without reserve. “Good afternoon, Elmer,” he said, when the old man came in.
“Good afternoon to you, Sir.” He might have been an actor who in palmy days had played Hamlet at Bristol.
“I’m staying to an early dinner with Mr. Fallaray. A whiskey and soda would go down rather well in the meantime.”
“Certainly, Sir.”
“Oh, and Elmer.”
“Sir?” His turn and the respectful familiar angle of his head were only possible to actors of the good old school.
“The name of the charming lady who has so kindly helped to brighten up Mr. Fallaray’s week-end.”
“Madame de Brézé, Sir.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” He had never heard it before. Married then, or a widow. French. ’Um. “And she is staying with——”
“Lady Cheyne, Sir.”
“Oh, yes,—that house——”
“A stone’s throw from the gate in the wall, Sir. You can see the roof from this window.”
“Thanks very much, Elmer. How’s your son getting on now?”
“Very well indeed, Sir, thank you, owing to your kindness.”
“A very good fellow,—a first-rate soldier. One of our best junior officers. Not too much soda, then.”
“No, Sir.” He left the room like an elderly sun-beam.
“Good!” said George Lytham. “Get off early, hang about by the gate, intercept this young woman on her way back to Fallaray and see what her game is. That’s the idea.”
And he sat down, lit a cigarette and picked up a copy of Hood that lay open on the table. His eyes fell on some marked lines.
“Peace and rest at length have come,
All the day’s long toil is past,
And each heart is whispering Home,
Home at last.”
And he thought of Feo whom he had seen several nights running with Arrowsmith and before that, for a series of years, with Dick, Tom and Harry. Never with Fallaray.
“Poor devil,” he thought. “He’s been too long without it. It won’t be easy to rescue him now.”