I
SAID Mr. Fall to Lord Tarlyon on the telephone, one day in July:
“Pleased if you’d dine with me to-night.”
“Sorry,” said Lord Tarlyon; and he was sorry, for he liked Mr. Fall very well. “Promised to dine with a man.”
“Pleased if you’d bring him along,” said Mr. Fall.
Mr. Fall lived in Lord Brazie’s house in Grosvenor Square. (Lord Brazie, of course, lived somewhere else, but he wouldn’t have been able to live at all if Mr. Fall had not taken his house.) As George Tarlyon and I walked thither through the quietening streets and the dainty noises of the Town in the evening, we spoke of Cyrus Fall; and then a silence fell upon us, for we were meditating on millionaires of the Canadian sort. In the last decade of the last century millionaires were always American: in the first decade of this century an Australian mode set in, and many a young lady of birth was married to a fruit-farm, and many a chorus-girl decorated the bush: but fashion, as The Tatler has brilliantly put it, is proverbially fickle, and with the war all millionaires who were not Canadian fell into great discredit, so that many women exchanged theirs for the Canadian model on the first opportunity. Now of these, the greatest was Cyrus Fall....
The history of Mr. Fall and his millions is simple. Like all Canadian millionaires he was born near Limerick and emigrated, with his parents, to Canada at the age of three. For a time he was dancing-master and chucker-out in a cabaret in Toronto; but, deciding that that was a discreditable profession, bought some newspapers and edited them in such an original way that he very soon became a Force. Throughout this time he never failed to consult his mother at every turn, and though in doing so he sometimes made mistakes, he never missed an opportunity of saying that a man’s best friend is his mother; and when, at the age of thirty, having been a Force in Canada for some years, he came to England, he wrote to his mother, who of course lived in Winnipeg, every day, saying that a man should be grateful to the woman who gave him birth. In England Mr. Fall went on being a millionaire until the war broke out, when he at once became a multi-millionaire. He was offered a knighthood for his services on the field of finance, but humbly refused the honour in a letter which, his newspapers said, was that of a simple, sincere and great-hearted man and should be a historic model for all letters refusing knighthoods. Later on he refused a baronetcy in the same simple and sincere way, excusing himself to his friends on the grounds that his mother wouldn’t like him making a guy of himself; and when some one said that Canadians can’t be choosers Mr. Fall biffed him one. About the time when George Tarlyon and I were going to dine with him he was said to be about to accept a barony, excusing himself on the ground that he was getting too old for letter-writing. Mr. Fall had not married.