Success
had reacted again and again, so that, without volition but with an
indescribable plainness, he had lived it in railway trains, on station
platforms, in London streets, a hundred times and then a hundred more.
It grew dim and blurred; from being beyond control it grew beyond
distinctness, it merged in the brown twilight of a quiet room; it grew
dark. Darkness spread over the brain, the blank darkness of utter
exhaustion, but repose.
CHAPTER IV
Robert Barmister was in one of the large upper rooms examining
chairs. To him, busy with a beautiful specimen of eighteenth-century
craftsmanship, came Nan.
He looked round as she entered, and asked her if it was the only one of
that particular pattern they had at present.
She nodded, and then inquired if he had been asked to make yesterday’s
journey merely to see and match such a chair.
“No,” he answered, “I also saw a fool—a fool with a 1760 chair,
patched by a mid-Victorian hand, and who must have another precisely
like it, patch and all. She is sure there must have been more than
one originally made to the design. So’m I; but I’m not so sure the
Victorian nincompoop had the mauling of more than one, and I’m very
sure there is no human chance of coming on it if he did. But since
she does not admit the patching—persists in thinking it part of the
original design—she doesn’t admit that difficulty either.”
Nan laughed. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Patch her one, to be sure.”
“Patch such a chair!”
“No, stupid, have one made patched, of course; what do you suppose?”
One supposes, since the master craftsman responsible for the original
chair had been dead these many years, some modern was to copy his
design (with the mid-Victorian addition), and Robert Barmister was to
receive the price a rich amateur must expect to pay for a rare antique
which has needed much finding.
Nan knew this, having lived with the trade. She accepted the first
part as entirely justifiable; to alter a perfect article, or to patch
a master’s design to anyone’s orders, seemed to her a sacrilege most
unjustifiable. Personally, she would not have sold the copy as anything
but a copy, and at a good copy’s price; but then money and money-making
had small attraction for her: she did not think of calling her father
into judgment for it, if they had for him.
She began to speak of the matter which had really brought her to him
that morning. “Michael Annarly is here,” she said; “did Josiah tell
you?”
He had not, he had something else to do, Barmister said; then asked
what Annarly was doing, and why he was there.
“I met him yesterday,” Nan answered, “when I was coming back from Miss
Janet’s, and I asked him to come.”
Barmister frowned. “What for?” he said. “The Annarlys don’t put
themselves out of the way to be civil to you; you don’t go there twice
a year, and you don’t like it when you do: why should you ask one of
them here?”
“I don’t exactly know why I did it,” she said doubtfully; “it just came
to me that I would when I saw him yesterday, so I did.”
Her father grunted. “And it just came to him, I suppose, that he would
come to see what sort of a place it was.”
“I don’t think that was the reason why he came.”
“Well, I don’t see what else it was,” Barmister said; “the whole family
think they do a considerable kindness if they step out of the way to
come here and see you; at least, they would if they did it, which
they don’t—thank goodness! He must feel very patronising, I should
think, since he’s their best piece. By the way, I thought he was away
somewhere usually, in the North or the Midlands making a name and a
fortune. What’s he in town for?”
“I believe he came to see people on business; he is in some sort of
trouble, I think.”
“Under a cloud?” Barmister asked, though without the slight instinctive
withdrawing of the majority of men from one so labelled. “Is it that,
hey?”
“I should not say so,” Nan answered. She would not; the words were so
totally, so almost grotesquely, inadequate. “Should you mind if he
stayed here a day or two?”
Barmister turned round at that, his keen eyes on her: the discussed
guest was a man, a young one, who might, perhaps, show attractions for
an utterly inexperienced girl, without himself so much as giving a
condescending thought to her. “Are you going to fall in love with him?”
he demanded.
“In love!” The idea was ludicrous, almost pathetically ludicrous. “No,”
Nan said, “not that; it isn’t that way I’d think of him. All the same,
I’d like him to stop a few days, if you don’t mind.”
“H’m,” her father said doubtfully, but afterwards consented. If Nan
wanted to have the man for a day or two, let her; there was no reason
why she should not, she was not a fool; and if he wanted to stop for
a day or two, why, let him. Of course, he must have some reason; one
which did not appear on the surface, but which could be found out,
Barmister had no doubt of himself there; and no doubt but that he would
send the guest packing if he did not approve the reason.
But he did not find it out, although he was soon persuaded that his
first suspicion was correct: Michael was in a difficulty of some
kind. Its nature he did not discover; but he guessed it to take its
rise from ambition rather than any of the more venial (and to him
less forgivable) sins of youth, and with that he was content. Of the
extent, he had no idea; after a night’s rest Michael was sufficiently
controlled to appear normal to one who knew nothing of him, more
especially when there was Nan, who understood, to come between.
On the first day, the day when the directors of Galhardy’s were to
meet, Nan suggested he should draw up a memorial of all that had
happened: the accusation and defence, his real offence, and what
justification he had to offer for it.
“What is the use?” he said apathetically. “They will decide to-day
before ever they can get it.”
“But they could redecide after, I suppose?” she urged. “And even if
they did not, if it made no difference, it surely would be worth
doing: if they decide in your favour they would be glad to be able to
see plainly that they were right, and if they decide otherwise—it is
certainly as well to raise a protest.”
“I don’t think it is worth while,” he said. “I did all I could in the
last two days, trying to get at various of the directors, and it came
to nothing. When I saw Harte yesterday I could see it had come to
nothing.”
Nevertheless, when she again urged it, he consented; to begin to write
were a less effort than to withstand her.
“I will copy it when it is done,” she said; “there is an old typewriter
downstairs which is seldom wanted, I will bring it up. I don’t do it
very well, but I can manage if I go slowly.”
She fetched the machine, and early perceived that it would be necessary
to make several drafts before the final copy, for he was one of those
who reconstruct and rearrange every argument a dozen times before
passing it on paper; and to whom every written word, and the placing
of every one, are important. Characteristics which overwork, and the
ample assistance he had been granted in clerical matters, had increased
of late. Before long, the habit asserted itself, and he was writing
and rewriting, constructing and reconstructing, elaborating arguments,
cutting down phrases, and explaining facts with an extraordinary
regard for detail and accuracy of expression which not only brought
self-conviction by its logic, but also temporarily diverted the mind
from its one idea and the stupor following upon it. It also used much
paper—sheets begun and cast aside, sheets on which side issues were
worked out, or solitary notes or paragraphs to be reduced to single
sentences jotted down; a scatter of very indecipherable papers all
about. There are minds to whom papers are as clothes, and as the
very expression of themselves almost; their thoughts cannot become
articulate, or even concrete, without paper, they must be written
down (or expressed in curves or diagrams) before they are really
thoughts. Take such visible expressions of himself; such visualised
thoughts—notably when they are of abstruse and very-well loved
matters—from a man, and you have taken much. Strip them all away,
when from overwork and nervous strain he is least fit for the shock,
and you leave him an inarticulate, shivering thing, naked, dumb, and
confounded. Michael had been bereft of every visible expression of
himself: all his papers, diagrams, and notes on everything that really
mattered to him were in the hands of the directors. He had not so much
as a pencilling in a pocketbook left when Nan induced him to begin a
statement of what had happened, and to express outside himself that
which had ground round and round in his head these last days.
The greater part of the day they worked at the memorial; she, in the
copying and recopying, becoming much more fully acquainted with the
facts. Towards dusk they were more or less finished; that is, copies of
the statement in the last and most satisfactory form were completed and
posted separately to the directors. Michael was not really contented
with it; he never had been for long with anything he had written, nor
with anything he had decided, always, sooner or later, seeing some
possibility beyond: but the exigencies of posting had compelled the
passing of this at last. For a little after it was done he went over
what had been written, discovering where it might have been improved,
and debating whether the small variations of phrasing which had been
made in each copy were the ones best suited to each recipient; entirely
forgetting that he had said, and thought the whole useless. But after
a while he seemed to remember that, and with a collapse of interest
collected the loose sheets and came to the fire in silence.
Nan was silent too; but she was thinking of the matter itself, not
the statement of it. At length she spoke, and she did not attempt to
speak of anything else: there are times when to attempt what is called
“diverting the mind” is an imbecility bordering on an insult.
“They absolutely promised you these foreign rights?” she asked. “I mean
the rights in these inventions of yours which they were not going to
use?”
He told her “yes” briefly, and lapsed into silence again. But in a
little while something roused him to speak of the matter and the
struggle which had gone before.
“I had a fight for them,” he said. “I have been months getting the
concession, but I did get it in the end—subject to the consent of Sir
Joseph Harte. Afterwards—almost immediately afterwards—I got that,
verbally first and very fully, later a letter confirming it.”
“But not the second letter cancelling it?”
“That letter was never sent.”
He spoke with unshakable conviction, though he had no evidence—there
can be little of a negative.
Nan saw that plainly, though she did not say so; she turned it in her
mind a while, but when she did speak it was to ask another question.
“What is it that they actually bring against you? Is it that they say
you acted on this permission, and began to negotiate about the rights
before you ought?”
He nodded, and she asked, “Did you?”
Again he nodded, and again after a pause was moved to speak. “Yes, I
did, but there was no harm in it; I committed myself to nothing and
told nothing. Technically, of course, I was wrong; I had no business to
answer the inquiries made by the French people, as I did; but actually
it was the natural way to do it. Anyone would have done the same, half
of them gone much further if they had had the chance.”
“I suppose,” she said, “it would not have mattered, if the permission
had not been withdrawn?”
“No, though I should still, technically, have exceeded my powers.”
“As it is?”