II
A week later the Poet walked up Park Lane, followed by an elderly man trundling two compressed cane trunks on a barrow with a loose wheel. It was a radiant summer afternoon, and taxis stood idle in long ranks, when they were not drawing in to the curb with winning gestures. The Poet, however, wished to make his arrival dramatic, and it was dramatic enough to make the Millionaire's butler direct him to the tradesman's entrance, while the Millionaire, remembering little but suspecting all, hurried away by a side door, leaving a message that he was out of England for the duration of the war. The lot fell on the Millionaire's wife to invent such excuses as would rid the house of the Poet's presence before dinner. The Millionaire's instincts were entirely hospitable, but that night's party had been arranged for the entertainment and subsequent destruction of four men with money to invest and, like the Poet, "no knowledge of business, investments, all that sort of thing."
"No, we have not met before," explained the Poet coldly and uncompromisingly, abandoning the rather gentle voice and caressing manners which caused women to invite him to dinner when they could think of no one else. "Your husband and one or two of our common friends have kindly undertaken to find me new quarters, and I have been invited to stay here until something suitable has been found."
There was silence for a few moments, and the Millionaire's wife looked apprehensively at the clock, while the Poet laid the foundations of a malignantly substantial tea.
"H-how far have you got at present?" she asked with an embarrassed laugh.
"Your husband told me to leave it to him," answered the Poet, "and I've left it to him. There was a general feeling that I didn't know what I wanted—house or flat, north or south of the Park, all the rest of it—; they said there would be a scandal if I employed a young maid, I couldn't afford two, and an old one would pawn my clothes to buy gin. I am quoting your husband now; I know nothing of business. Every one agreed, too, that I must have a drain of some kind. Would you say it took long to find a bed-sitting room with use of bath?"
The Millionaire's wife hurriedly pushed back her chair?
"My husband's going abroad for the duration of the war," she said in loyal explanation, "but it's just possible that he hasn't started yet."
The Millionaire, returning on tip-toe from the loft over the garage, had sought asylum in the library, where he was smoking a cigar and reading the evening paper. As his wife entered he looked up with welcoming expectancy.
"How did you get rid of him?" he asked.
The Millionaire's wife pressed her hands to her temples.
"My dear! What HAVE you been promising him?" she cried.
The Millionaire swore softly, as the truth sank into his brain.
"Have another place laid for dinner," he ordered; "book two seats for a music-hall and take him out to supper afterwards. I can't afford to be disturbed to-night. To-morrow I must get in touch with the Iron King…. I don't see what more there is to be said."
Four weeks later the Poet drove in a six-cylinder car from Park Lane to Eaton Square on an indeterminate visit to the Iron King. He was looking better for the month's good wine and food, in which the Millionaire's house abounded; but now the Millionaire, who based his fortune on knowing the right people in every walk of life, was arranging to have his house taken over by the Red Cross authorities. In a week's time the house was to be found unsuitable and restored to him, but henceforth the Iron King was to have the honor of entertaining the Poet.
"How you ever came to make such a promise!" wailed the Millionaire's wife for the twentieth time, as they drove to Claridge's. "London's so full that you might have known it's impossible to get ANYthing."
"I feel that we have exhausted this subject," answered the Millionaire with the bruskness of a man whose nerves have worn thin; with the menace, too, of one who, having divorced his first wife, would divorce the second on small provocation.
The Iron King was not at home when the Poet arrived in Eaton Squire, but a pretty, young secretary, cultured to the point of transforming all her final "g's" into "k's" received him with every mark of welcome. She admired the Iron King romantically and was in the habit of writing his surname after her own Christian name to see how the combination looked; and, when he had departed each morning to contest his latest assessment for excess profits, she would wander through the house, planning little changes in the arrangement of the furniture and generally deploring the sober, colorless taste of the first Iron Queen. So far her employer returned none of her admiration. He addressed her loosely as "Miss—er" and forgot her name; he never noticed what clothes she was wearing or the pretty dimples that she made by holding down the inside flesh of her cheeks between her eye-teeth; further, he criticized her spelling spitefully and, on the occasion of the Millionaire's second marriage, had dictated a savage half sheet beginning, "A young man may marry once, as he may get drunk once, without the world thinking much the worse of him; habitual intemperance is, on first principles, to be deplored…."
The pretty young secretary knew from fiction and the drama that the Iron King would never appreciate her until he stood in danger of losing her. She welcomed the Poet as a foil and misquoted his poetry twice before tea was over; then she invited him to accompany her to a picture palace, but the Poet, once inside the citadel, was reluctant to leave it until his position was more firmly established.
Scarcely entrenched at Claridge's, the Millionaire telephoned derisively to the city, so that the Iron King returned home half an hour before his usual time, prepared to deal with the Poet as he dealt with querulous or inquisitive shareholders at General Meetings. The Poet, however, was long and painfully accustomed to combat with enraged editors and lost no time in assuming the offensive, demanding indignantly in a high head-voice, before the Iron King had crossed his own threshold, why no quarters had been found for him and how much longer any one imagined that he would put up with the indignity of being bandied from one wretched house to another.
The flushed cheeks and hysterical manner put the Iron King temporarily out of countenance.
"My dear fellow!" he interrupted ingratiatingly.
"I'm not a business man," continued the Poet hotly. "You all of you told me that, and I'm disposed to say: 'Thank God, I'm not.'"
The Iron King put his hat carefully out of reach and forced a smile.
"You mustn't take it like that, old chap," he said soothingly. "I—we—all of us are doing our best. Now we won't bother about dressing; let's go straight in and thrash the thing out over a bottle of wine."
Instructing his butler very audibly to open a bottle of the 1906 Lanson, he slipped his arm through the Poet's and led him, sullenly murmuring, into the dining-room. With the second bottle of champagne, his guest ceased to be aggrieved and became quarrelsome; when the port wine appeared, he had the Iron King cowed and broken in moral.
"If you find fault with everything, why do you come here, why stay here?" complained the Iron King with a last flickering effort to recover his independence.
"Why don't you find me some other place to go to, as you promised?" the Poet retorted, as he made his way to the morning-room and sat down to order a month's supply of underclothes from his hosier.