‘Yes, sir,’ said the valet, and disappeared.
The man sank languidly on to the sofa, and began, with the efficiency of a highly-practised reader, to skim the papers one after the other. He led off with the Financial, proceeded to the Times, and took the rest anyhow. When he had finished, the papers lay in a tangled heap on the thick carpet. This man was pre-eminently tidy and orderly, yet few things delighted him more than, at intervals, to achieve a gigantic disorder. It was a little affectation which he permitted himself. Another little affectation was his manner of appearing always to be busy from the hour of opening his eyes to the hour of closing them. He was, in truth, a very busy man indeed; but it pleased him to seem more deeply employed than he actually was. He had a telephone affixed to his bed-head, by means of which he could communicate with his private secretary’s bedroom in the house, and also with his office in Cannon Street. This telephone tickled his fancy. He used it for the sake of using it; he enjoyed using it in the middle of the night. He went to it now, and rang imperiously. He did everything imperiously. There was a tinkling reply on the bell.
‘Are you up, Oakley? Well, get up then. Go to Cannon Street, and bring the important letters. And tell——’ He went off into a series of detailed instructions. ‘And be back here at half-past eight.’
The clock struck half-past seven. The valet entered as silently as a nun, and the modern Napoleon passed into his marble bath-room. By this time everyone in the household—that household which revolved round the autocrat as the solar system revolves round the sun—knew that the master had awakened in a somewhat dangerous mood, and that squally weather might be expected. And they all, from the page-boy to the great Mr. Oakley, the private secretary, accepted this fact as further evidence that the master’s career of prosperity had received a check.
At eight o’clock precisely the master took breakfast—an English breakfast: bacon, eggs, toast, coffee, marmalade—in the breakfast-room, a room of medium size opening off the library. He took it in solitude, for he could not tolerate the presence of servants so early in the morning, and he had neither wife nor family. He poured out his own coffee like one of his own clerks, and read his private letters propped up one by one against the coffee-pot, also like one of his own clerks. He looked at his watch as he drank the last drop of coffee. It was thirty-one minutes past eight. He walked quickly into the library. If Oakley had not been there Oakley would have caught it; but Oakley happened to be there, calmly opening envelopes with a small ivory paper-cutter. It was mainly in virtue of his faculty of always ‘being there’ that Oakley received a salary of six hundred a year.
‘Shall you go to Cannon Street this morning, sir?’ asked Oakley, a middle-aged man with the featureless face of a waiter in a large restaurant.
‘Why?’
‘Sir Arthur Custer has telegraphed to know.’
‘No.’
‘I thought not, and have told him.’