People of Position

by Stanley Portal Hyatt

Jimmy did not come down till the dinner gong went; consequently, after he had shaken hands with Henry Marlow, they went straight into the dining-room, and May lost her chance of saying anything.

Marlow himself was hungry and ate heartily, and the guest was distinctly tired, thanks to Douglas Kelly; as a result, there was little said during the first three courses, except by Mrs. Marlow, who gave her husband a full account of all her own and the children's doings for that day, and the names of the people on whom she had called, and of other visitors whom she had met at their houses. Once or twice she tried to include Jimmy in the conversation, by asking if he did not remember this one or that, friends she had known before she was married; but, in every case, they were merely names to him; they had all been grown up when he was still at school, and now, after having forgotten their very existence for ten years, he could not feel the slightest interest in them.

After a while, Marlow, having taken the edge off his appetite, asked him a few questions about his wanderings, but paid little heed to his answers. Even when Jimmy told, in his essentially picturesque way, the story of John Locke's death, his brother-in-law merely remarked that such things were never allowed to occur in the British Empire, though, doubtless, they were to be expected under governments which had injured the market so greatly in the past by repudiating their bargains. Their debased silver currency and their worthless paper money were an absolute scandal, he added.

May, on her part, gave a little gasp when told of the end of Locke's slayer; then, looking up, and seeing the parlour-maid standing open-mouthed, with a sauce-boat balanced on a tray at a most dangerous angle, she felt it was time to intervene.

"Please don't give us any more horrors, Jimmy. We are not used to them here. Mary," severely, to the parlour-maid, "the master's plate."

Jimmy flushed and said no more; and, apparently, they were perfectly content that it should be so, for the subject of his travels dropped, and was not resumed, either then or afterwards. He saw that they were not interested, even though they were his own people; and he listened in silence when his sister went back to the apparently inexhaustible subject of their friends. Certainly, whilst they sat smoking after dinner, Henry Marlow did ask his guest some more questions, a great many more in fact, and listened with considerable attention to the replies; but, as Jimmy noted with a kind of grim amusement, they were all of an impersonal nature, having reference solely to mining conditions in South American states. Jimmy's own experiences at the hands of Dago patriots left his brother-in-law unmoved, being things which belonged rather to books, and certainly had no part in the lives of people of position; but the effect of those same patriots' doings on the development of the country, and, consequently, on the profits of British Enterprise, aroused his bitterest wrath. Once, some years before, he had lost over a thousand pounds through a new president revoking a lead-mining concession which his predecessor had granted; and, that predecessor having been sent where neither letters nor writs could reach him, none of the purchase money had been recovered despite the efforts of the Foreign Office. Mr. Marlow, himself, had never forgiven either the Dagos or the diplomatists, especially as the concession had eventually gone to a German firm, which had made a clear half-million out of it; and he argued, not without reason, that the most effective form of negotiation would have been a whiff of grapeshot, or its modern equivalent, from the guns of a British cruiser.

Jimmy listened patiently to the grievance, which took some time in the telling, involving, as it did, full details of the careers and financial standing of the directors of the ill-fated company, men of position and weight in the City, who deserved very different treatment.

"Disgraceful business, disgraceful," Henry added. "To think that the British Government should allow us to be robbed by a snuff-coloured rascal like that. Did you ever come across him?"

"Who? President Montez?" Jimmy laughed apologetically. "I'm very sorry; but I helped him with that revolution. I was pretty hard up at the time, and I knew something about field guns, so they gave me a job."