But the inn at the little place, when he reached it, comforted him. Surely in that past he had been of the English country and not of the town, still less of any foreign outlandish place, America or another. The simplicity and the goodness of the people wrapped him round like a blanket against the cold of the abominable world. Here, he thought, he could rest. And rest he did, sleeping deeply, exhausted, and woke to the new day less troubled, and, to the next, reposed.
CHAPTER III
John k. petre was buying Touaregs.
The news had penetrated to a little room, paneled in the dark oak of Shakespeare’s day; for the paneling had come from Arden out of old Kirlby Hall when they pulled it down. It was half lit by four soft candles standing on a glorious table of two hundred years. They shone on silver as old; on quills ranged in order by a royal inkstand. Over the door hung a deep curtain of tapestry which clothed the place with silence. All the air of that room was an air of lineage and endurance and repose.
Yet it was but a backwater in the noisy, the sordid, the very modern iron and concrete offices of the Messenger, the offices of that great newspaper which was the Duke’s instrument of power.
The Duke himself sat there at that table, which in his heart he felt to be a desk. A very large cigar was cocked up at an angle in the far corner of his considerable mouth, his flabby-fleshed, artificially determined face was bent over the proofs of an article which a secretary had written but himself had signed—for he could read better than he could write—and he was puzzling as to what he could print above his name and what he could not. He puzzled long; for he had got the problem wrong before now and had paid dear for the blunder.
People said that the Duke deserved his position; and when for the first time in so many years Mrs. Fossilton (whom he had made Prime Minister) had advised the King to give him that supreme title, and to honor Commerce with it, men, though they thought the thing revolutionary—in our time every new step looks revolutionary—at least admitted that the man had made himself, and rightly revered his ruthless expression, his flair for any weakness in others, and his rapid clutch at money.
He had begun life at what is called “the bottom of the ladder”—selling matches as a lad in Melbourne, and an orphan at that, under the plain name of Higgs.
Between those early years and his appearance as an agent, humble enough, put on to bully the smaller fry and to watch the larger fry at Marogavatcho’s place in Cairo, there is a gap. It is presumed that even as a boy his strength of will, his grasp of opportunity, had served him. He had perhaps made a beginning by some rapid piece of minor acquisition—we have no particulars—that had set him upon the status of possible clothes and possible grooming; from that, no doubt, he had gone on. At any rate, he had got somehow to know William Carter when William Carter meant so much in Australia, and yet William Carter wished him away. It was William Carter who had casually dropped his name as a pushing, energetic young fellow for whom some little job might be found, and from the Australian Branch they had sent him to Cairo; again because William Carter said he would do as well as another. It was in Cairo that he worked what is still known there as “Higgs’ Great Double Cross,” the details of which he never himself explained. I have had them given me by those who understood them (and they were usually given with a good deal of chuckling admiration not unmixed with fear) but they were quite beyond my comprehension.
At any rate, it was a quick rise, and he was in London with a fortune before three more years were out—in 1936; he was then thirty-five years old. This idea of buying the Messenger came to him late. He had gone through the usual mill, first in Parliament, then a baronetcy, keeping himself to himself, never speaking, but doing many a generous deed of which the public heard nothing, especially among the politicians of his own group. He had even (it was said) paid a regular subsidy to one of the most worthy and the most needy of them. His first peerage was startling; but it would not have been if his private activities had been more publicly known. He had preferred to avoid publicity.