A Case in Camera
"Pure sport and adventure, of course," he replied promptly. "Oh yes, I
know somebody put up the money for a lot of instruments, and they took
all sorts of observations and kept journals and all the rest of it. I
know all that. Quite useful too in its way. But when you get right down
to brass tacks those fellows did it because they jolly well wanted to
and for no other reason on earth. What's better? Chuck in your science
and 'contributions to the sum of human knowledge' as a make-weight if
you like, but they weren't just out for that in cold blood. No, nor
science books nor lecture-tours either. It was just an epic lark. After
all, a fellow's got to have a go at something."
There was a general laugh. It was so very like Mowbray himself. Both in
his boxing and his sculpture he was in the habit of "having a go." And
that was the end of that rambling conversation as far as I was
concerned. One of the waiters approached and bent over my shoulder.
"Lord Glenfield would like to speak to you at the telephone, sir," he
said.
IV
Besides being Ringmaster-in-Chief of the _Daily Circus_ and of a good
many other journals, Lord Glenfield is a very good friend of mine; but
he had never rung me up at my Club before. He was speaking from his
house in Portman Square, and he wanted to know whether I was leaving the
Club immediately, and if not whether he might come round. I was a little
surprised, but told him to come by all means; and he said he would be
along in twenty minutes.
Now Glenfield is a very much feared man, and with reason; but I speak of
him as I have always found him. Before I knew him better I had the
vanity to think that he had offered me my comfortably-paid job for the
sake (such as it was) of my literary name; but I was soon undeceived. It
appeared he was so good as to like me. Certainly he has always shown me
the greatest consideration, and I am going to ask you to notice how he
added to it that night.
His car glided up to the club door in exactly the twenty minutes he had
mentioned, and we sought a padded alcove at the head of the stairs. He
is a big and handsome man, hardly yet gray, and had I needed a leg-up in
my own Club it was certainly a distinction to be seen with him. I drew a
heavy curtain for the sake of privacy, and then asked him to have coffee
and a liqueur.
"I will. In fact, that's why I rang you up instead of sending for you,"
he said with a certain pleasant grimness. "Understand?"
"Not quite."
"Well, if you're to be had up on the carpet I prefer that it should be
your own carpet."
I saw, and I hope you too see the kindliness and delicacy of his action.
Apparently I was in for a wigging, which was to be, not less, but still
more of a wigging that I, his subordinate, was permitted to act as his
host. As he said, he could have summoned me to his office or house,
dressed me down, and dismissed me again; but Glenfield knows men and how
to bind them to him by accepting things at their hands. It is so easy
for Glenfield to give.
"Well, can you guess?" he said, nodding to me over his liqueur.
"Perhaps I can," I answered.
"Then what about it? Are you getting tired of the job?"
"Not," I answered slowly, "of the job. But I'm tired--very tired."
He diagnosed me with a swift look.
"South of France any good to you? Or Norway? Or anywhere else? I suppose
young what's-his-name--Willett--could carry on?"
"Oh, of course he's been running the whole show for weeks," I admitted.
Then, "Look here, Glenfield; I'd better resign."
"Don't be an ass," he replied promptly. "If I'd meant you to resign do
you suppose I should have come here to-night? I sack men in my office,
not while I'm drinking their liqueurs. Now tell me what's wrong. You
haven't been yourself for some time."
I frowned, hardly knowing what to reply.
"This is most awfully good of you, but I hardly think it's a case for a
holiday," I said at last with some embarrassment.
"Well, tell me about it. Is it working double tides, or just post-war
slump? We've all got that more or less."
I mused and shook my head. "I wish you'd let me resign," I said again.
He has an imperious eye, and I did not attempt to meet it. "Why?" he
demanded....
I did not answer. Willett had loyally covered my too frequent absence
and neglect, but I knew and Glenfield knew that I had let my paper down.
The Circus was slipping backward. Possibly there was something in
Glenfield's suggestion about post-war slump. Now, when all the world
should have been working as it had never worked before, so little work
seemed worth the doing. The _Circus_, which after all is a vastly
important instrument of democratic government, seemed to me a thing of
stunts and japes and cynical mockery of the recent stupendous years; my
own work, once so much to me that I had sacrificed to it the joy and
ease of half a life, seemed a thing that the world could do perfectly
well without. I missed my timber and gun-cotton and cordage and
corrugated iron. My real books were my stores-ledgers "A" and "B," the
Regulations for Engineer Services my only Muse. I feared--nay, I almost
hoped--that I should write no more novels. My bolt seemed shot. It is a
depressing thing to have been a younger novelist and to have wasted your
life.
But I could not honestly take the way out that Glenfield suggested. Over
and above the burden that I shared with everybody else, I _had_ let my
private affairs come between me and the work Glenfield paid me to do.
The infernal Case had cramped itself on my shoulders and was making a
slacker and a fraud of me. I wished that Glenfield had taken any way but
this kindly one. There was only one answer to make to him.
"Well?" he said at last.
"Oh--let me send in my resignation," I growled. "I've let you down and
will take the consequences."
"Consequences my eye," he replied bluntly. "The drop's nothing--a
thousand or two--we can pick that up in no time. It's you I'm worrying
about, not the paper. You've something on your mind. What is it? I've a
bit of a pull here and there, you know, and I may be able to help."
To hear Lord Glenfield describe his appalling power as "a bit of a pull
here and there" was almost comic; nobody living knows where his power
ends. I consider it the most singular phenomenon of a democratic age
that it gives to a few men such power as no ancient emperor ever dreamed
of. Indeed, if one's conception of democracy is that it is the age's
ailment, it seems to carry within itself hope of its own cure. Few men
have been so bitterly attacked as Glenfield, but in my opinion he is the
natural corrective to our new disease of numbers, our malady of
stultifying votes.
"Of course, I'm assuming it's a purely private affair," he went on.
"Oh, it's public enough--or looks like being--that's part of the
trouble----"
"Yes?" he said invitingly....
V
Let me see, how many does that make--I mean when, half an hour later, I
had given him as much as I then knew of the outline of this story? How
many people were parties in greater or less degree to the highly
important public matter that we were struggling to keep from the light
of day?
There were the five men at our breakfast-party: Esdaile, Rooke,
Mackwith, Hubbard and myself. And the three women: Mrs. Esdaile, Mrs.
Cunningham and Joan. Westbury, and an unknown number of his associates;
and Inspector Webster, also an unknown quantity. And of course there was
Charles Valentine Smith himself. I am not including Hanson and old
William Dadley the picture-frame maker. Call it certainly eleven. Lord
Glenfield made the twelfth. We were getting on.
He took my narrative quite lightly. Indeed, parts of it seemed almost to
amuse him. He asked if he might have a second liqueur, and then sat back
in the padded alcove smiling at his glass.
"Well," he said at last, "it would make quite a neat prize competition,
wouldn't it?" Tremendous force as he is, he can never quite shake off
his interest in prize competitions.
I asked him in what way.
"I mean the position of your painter-friend. As you've told the story it
strikes me that he's the key of the whole situation. And I should say
that he intended to remain so."
"What makes you say that?"
"Well, you say he has his talkee-talkee with the flying-fellow, doesn't
give you a single word of explanation, but simply carries him off into
the country. It looks as if he thought he'd already told you too much
and was pulling out again. _I_ don't think he intends to say anything
more. You take a short holiday, go down there, and see if I'm right."
(How far he was right you already know. As I have told you in
anticipation, I did go down, waited for a couple of days, then tackled
Esdaile about it, and found he had taken the very line Glenfield
indicated.)
"So it's really publicity you're all scared of?" he continued presently.
"Well, I told you I had a bit of a pull here and there. Publicity's
rather my line of country, you know."
"Yes, but hardly against the law of the land," I objected. "You can't go
about suborning judges and telling the police their business--even you."
"Good gracious, man!" he cried energetically, staring incredulously at
me. "Don't tell me I've been employing an editor who doesn't know any
more than _that_!"
"Than what?"
"Than clumsy work of _that_ sort! Suborn judges! Meddle with the police!
I've been entrusting the _Circus_ to a man who talks like _that_!...
Hurry up that waiter!"
"But isn't that what it comes to?"
"You haven't got to _let_ it come to that--not within a hundred miles of
it! You shock me! Tell me now what you do when you find yourself all
balled up and unable to meet a Case?"
"That's precisely what I want to know."
"Then I'll tell you. You attack. You manufacture a totally different
Case and then proceed to demolish it. First of all you make hay of
charges that were never made, and then you carry the fight over to the
other fellow. If somebody says this flying-fellow's been getting
gun-work in, you simply sidestep, come back, and want to know what's
wrong that he hasn't been recommended for a K.B.E. _Never_ defend, my
boy. _Always_ go for your man. What is it that Boche philosopher wrote?
'Every attack is a victory.' You've got a beauty of an opening.... You
say this fellow Smith really is the goods--thinker, live wire--genuine
national-importance sort of fellow?" he demanded.
"So his friends seem to think."
"Then what's simpler than for you to take a column in the _Circus_ and
say so? And then take another column and damn the other side? Pack of
shirkers who bolted underground while your friend went up and kept the
Hun off London? The old tricks are always the best--that's why they're
old. Do it on general lines, of course; keep off _sub judice_ cases and
all that. As regards his being over London, you've got to make a
molehill out of that mountain, if it is a mountain. What are the
Regulations exactly?"
I told him what they were, not exactly, but in all their unavoidable
inexactitude. At one of them he suddenly stopped me.
"Ah, there you are. A Secretary of State has power to except him, has
he?"
"Hardly after the fact, I should say."
"Oh, don't be so dashed pedantic about it! Nothing would ever get done
at all if everybody talked like that! I'm not suggesting this as his
_defense_; it's his _attack_, so that he shan't be charged at all, don't
you see? And if you know a better 'ole go to it.... Now you get those
articles written. Write them so that they'll start correspondence. I
don't quite see the _Daily Circus_ being put in the cart by a Chelsea
auctioneer. Then take a month's holiday.... Now tell me how the novel's
going on."