Mr. Petre

by Hilaire Belloc

In that same great Rotor boat which had brought the new millionaire and his fortune to Plymouth upon that April day, these five months agone, was borne to the shores of Europe a real old millionaire, a matured one.

Mr. Batterby had been perfectly right. That real old millionaire, that matured one, had indeed taken the same boat; and his name was quite certainly and without ambiguity, and without problem, and without mystery or miracle, John Kosciusko Petre. But with a charming modesty he had taken his ticket and registered under the name of Carroll. It secured him isolation; a thing he prized. For John Kosciusko Petre (who never wasted a moment of his waking hours—they were eighteen, for he only slept six) knew himself to be the target of innumerable arrows, the desired prey of a million ravenous appetites, the flesh at which a host of claws throughout the world were clutching, and he built round himself a wall of secrecy. It had been his rule for years. When he was off and away no man should know where he might be; save when, at rare intervals, he cabled a code word during his travels, awaited the reply, and then moved off again. In these annual bouts of leisure John Kosciusko Petre improved his mind, and he read, and read, and read, and read, and read. He had already read in this vacation all George Eliot, all Dickens, all Hardy, all Meredith, and a literal translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, and he was now halfway through the works of William Shakespeare. He had begun with the poems, and he was rapidly nearing the end of Henry V. Tennyson was yet to come—oddly enough.

John Kosciusko Petre was a man nearly seventy years of age, and looked fifty or ninety as you felt inclined. His skin was of fine vellum, drawn strongly over strong bones, with not much in between. And he had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes, which was an economy. His eyes gave nothing away, and in this they were unlike his hands, which, for thirty years past, had been giving away wholesale and in the oddest fashion—public baths, and food in famine areas, and funds for the observation of seismological phenomena—earthquakes, that was—and splendid collections to museums, and one model University, complete in every detail, and even including a Papist among its professors: the professor of Mismatices. It was the first University of that Mountain State, and large enough to train all its youth of all its sexes, in all the higher departments of learning. He was tall, bald, as strong and energetic as any man twenty years his junior. He was silent, and prided himself on being silent; and he prided himself also on this, that he never had a suit of clothes built for him in his life, but had always bought what was necessary from the hook.

As for his blood, it was very good. He knew his ancestry right away back a good deal longer than most people do who boast of blood in Europe. And it was good blood, for those who prefer the blood of New England. Nor was there poverty in his lineage, nor, until his own opportunities had come, great wealth; but whether he was of the English Petres or not he could not have told you, for he did not pretend to go back beyond the mid-seventeenth century. But he was as old as that.

As for his names, he had been called John after his grandfather, who had farmed in New Hampshire, and was a very honest man; and Kosciusko from a hero of that grandfather, of whom that grandfather had read in a book of excerpts (called A Thousand Gems of Poetry) that Freedom had shrieked when Kosciusko had had the misfortune to fall. Nor was his grandfather aware what horrid superstitions that hero had followed in religion, or he perhaps would have been less devoted. At any rate, Kosciusko had the baby been called, nearly seventy years ago, for his middle name. Hence the K.

Mr. John Kosciusko Petre—John K. as he was affectionately known—traveled with no valet; and therein he was wise. Where he was wiser still was that he traveled with a man who did his work for him, and whom he paid a very high salary indeed. You may call him a Private Secretary, or a Confidential Secretary if you will, but John Kosciusko did not give him these titles, he called him simply “My Clurk,” and this attendant was devoted and efficient in such a degree, that you would not believe it if you saw it in a book.

It was his business never to approach John Kosciusko until he was summoned; he traveled second in boat and train in Europe when John Kosciusko traveled first; in the States he went Pullman as his master did, but not in the same drawing-room reservation. He kept all letters, papers, figures—everything—orderly in his mind; with a free hand to organize what sized office he willed, and what bureaucracy he chose for the maintenance of all this; and to spend at large for keeping in touch, and having everything in order.

So did John Kosciusko arrange his life. And the Dæmon had even arranged that John Kosciusko should come on deck well muffled up, and gaze without too much interest upon the town of Plymouth while that other gentleman stepped ashore towards his fate. For John Kosciusko was bound for Cherbourg and would land among the French, whose civilization he affected more than he did that of the English, though blaming the Gauls in certain points, and particularly in their plumbing, their religion, and their lack of their religion; all which three things he disapproved. Of all the Gauls he chiefly relaxed in the district of Touraine, and on the Coast of Azure. Upon this last, indeed, he had a set of rooms kept for him permanently, though he visited them but once in two years at the oftenest.

So in that happy springtime John Kosciusko wandered. A contract motor of sufficient size met him at Cherbourg. Once more did he survey the castles of the Loire, once more the conservatories of the Riviera.

It was his glory that in these vacations (though he lost not a moment and continued to read; Shakespeare was finished long before he had gutted Chinon and Tennyson was polished off and Thackeray was passing along the belt to the Receiver) he put business on one side. The clurk saw to that. But my Dæmon, having need of him, quite instantly jerked him out of his repose.