Paul Kelver

PAUL KELVER

practical, they know only one kind of love. It is business-like, rich – how puts it your poet? ‘rich in saving common sense.’ But there are many kinds, you understand that, my friend. You are wise, do not confuse them. She was a child of the mountains. I used to walk three leagues to Mass each day to worship her. Had I been wise – had I so left it, the memory of her would have coloured all my life with glory. But I was a fool, my friend; I turned her into a woman. Ah!” – he made a gesture of disgust – “such a fat, ugly woman, Paul, I turned her into. I had much difficulty in getting rid of her. We should never touch things in life that are beautiful; we have such clumsy hands, we spoil whatever we touch.”

Hal did not return to England till the end of the year, by which time the Count and Countess Huescar – though I had her permission still to call her Barbara, I never availed myself of it; the “Countess” fitted my mood better – had taken up residence in the grand Paris house old Hasluck had bought for them.

It was the high-water mark of old Hasluck’s career, and, if anything, he was a little disappointed that with the dowry he had promised her Barbara had not done even better for herself.

“Foreign Counts,” he grumbled to me laughingly, one day, “well, I hope they’re worth more in Society than they are in the City. A hundred guineas is their price there, and they’re not worth that. Who was that American girl that married a Russian Prince only last week? A million dollars was all she gave for him, and she a wholesale boot-maker’s daughter into the bargain! Our girls are not half as smart.”

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But that was before he had seen his future son-in-law. After, he was content enough, and up to the day of the wedding, childishly elated. Under the Count’s tuition he studied with reverential awe the Huescar history. Princes, statesmen, warriors, glittered, golden apples, from the spreading branches of its genealogical tree. Why not again! its attenuated blue sap strengthened with the rich, red blood, brewed by toil and effort in the grim laboratories of the under world. In imagination, old Hasluck saw himself the grandfather of Chancellors, the great-grandfather of Kings.

“I have laid the foundation, you shall raise the edifice,” so he told her one evening I was spending with them, caressing her golden hair with his blunt, fat fingers. “I am glad you were not a boy. A boy, in all probability, would have squandered the money, let the name sink back again into the gutter. And even had he been the other sort, he could only have been another business man, keeping where I had left him. You will call your first boy Hasluck, won’t you? It must always be the first-born’s name. It shall be famous in the world yet, and for something else than mere money.”

I began to understand the influences that had gone towards the making – or marring – of Barbara’s character. I had never guessed he had cared for anything beyond money and the making of money.

It was, of course, a wedding as ostentatious as possible. Old Hasluck knew how to advertise, and spared neither expense nor labour, with the result that it was the event of the season, at least according to the Society papers. Mrs. Hasluck was the type of woman to have escaped observation, even had

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the wedding been her own; that she was present at her daughter’s, “becomingly dressed in grey veiling spotted white, with an encrustation of mousseline de soie,” I learnt the next day from the Morning Post. Old Hasluck himself had to be fetched every time he was wanted. At the conclusion of the ceremony, seeking him, I found him sitting on the stairs leading to the crypt.

“Is it over?” he asked. He was mopping his face on a huge handkerchief, and had a small looking-glass in his hand.

“All over,” I answered, “they are waiting for you to start.” “I always perspire so when I’m excited,” he explained. “Keep

me out of it as much as possible.”

But the next time I saw him, which was two or three days later, the reaction had set in. He was sitting in his great library, surrounded by books he would no more have thought of disturbing than he would of strumming on the gorgeous grand piano inlaid with silver that ornamented his drawing-room. A change had passed over him. His swelling rotundity, suggestive generally of a bladder inflated to its extremest limits by excess of self-importance, appeared to be shrinking. I put the idea aside as mere fancy at the time, but it was fact; he became a mere bag of bones before he died. He was wearing an old pair of carpet slippers and smoking a short clay pipe.

“Well,” I said, “everything went off all right.” “Everybody’s gone off all right, so far,” he grunted. He was

crouching over the fire, though the weather was still warm, one hand spread out towards the blaze. “Now I’ve got to go off, that’s the only thing they’re waiting for. Then everything will be in order.”

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“I don’t think they are wanting you to go off,” I answered, with a laugh.

“You mean,” he answered, “I’m the goose that lays the golden eggs. Ah, but you see, so many of the eggs break, and so many of them are bad.”

“Some of them hatch all right,” I replied. The simile was becoming somewhat confused: in conversation similes are apt to.

“If I were to die this week,” he said – he paused, completing mental calculations, “I should be worth, roughly speaking, a couple of million. This time next year I may be owing a million.”

I sat down opposite to him. “Why run risks?” I suggested. “Surely you have enough. Why not give it up – retire?”

He laughed. “Do you think I haven’t said that to myself, lad – sworn I would a dozen times a year? I can’t do it; I’m a gambler. It’s the earliest thing I can recollect doing, gambling with brace buttons. There are men, Paul, now dying in the workhouse – men I once knew well; I think of them sometimes, and wish I didn’t – who any time during half their life might have retired on twenty thousand a year. If I were to go to any one of them, and settle an annuity of a hundred a year upon him, the moment my back was turned he’d sell it out and totter up to Threadneedle Street with the proceeds. It’s in our blood. I shall gamble on my death-bed, die with the tape in my hand.”

He kicked the fire into a blaze. A roaring flame made the room light again.

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“But that won’t be just yet awhile,” he laughed, “and before it does, I’ll be the richest man in Europe. I keep my head cool – that’s the great secret.” Leaning over towards me, he sunk his voice to a whisper, “Drink, Paul – so many of them drink. They get worried; fifty things dancing round and round at the same time in their heads. Fifty questions to be answered in five minutes. Tick, tick, tick, taps the little devil at their elbow. This going down, that going up. Rumor of this, report of that. A fortune to be lost here, a fortune to be snatched there. Everything in a whirl! Tick, tick, tick, like nails into a coffin. God! for five minutes’ peace to think. Shut the door, turn the key. Out comes the bottle. That’s the end. All right so long as you keep away from that. Cool, quick brain, clear judgment – that’s the secret.”

“But is it worth it all?” I suggested. “Surely you have enough?”

“It means power, Paul.” He slapped his trousers pocket, making the handful of gold and silver he always carried there jingle musically. “It is this that rules the world. My children shall be big pots, hobnob with kings and princes, slap them on the back and call them by their Christian names, be kings themselves – why not? It’s happened before. My children, the children of old Noel Hasluck, son of a Whitechapel butcher! Here’s my pedigree!” Again be slapped his tuneful pocket. “It’s an older one than theirs! It’s coming into its own at last! It’s money – we men of money – that are the true kings now. It’s our family that rules the world – the great money family; I mean to be its head.”

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The blaze died out, leaving the room almost in darkness, and for awhile we sat in silence.

“Quiet, isn’t it?” said old Hasluck, raising his head.

The settling of the falling embers was the only sound about us.

“Guess we’ll always be like this, now,” continued old Hasluck. “Old woman goes to bed, you see, immediately after dinner. It used to be different when she was about. Somehow, the house and the lackeys and all the rest of it seemed to be a more natural sort of thing when she was the centre of it. It frightens the old woman now she’s gone. She likes to get away from it. Poor old Susan! A little country inn with herself as landlady and me fussing about behind the bar; that was always her ambition, poor old girl!”

“You will be visiting them,” I suggested, “and they will be coming to stop with you.”

He shook his head. “They won’t want me, and it isn’t my game to hamper them. I never mix out of my class. I’ve always had sense enough for that.”

I laughed, wishing to cheer him, though I knew he was right. “Surely your daughter belongs to your own class,” I replied.

“Do you think so?” he asked, with a grin. “That’s not a pretty compliment to her. She was my child when she used to cling round my neck, while I made the sausages, calling me her dear old pig. It didn’t trouble her then that I dropped my aitches and had a greasy skin. I was a Whitechapel butcher, and she was a Whitechapel brat. I could have kept her if I’d liked, but I was set upon making a lady of her, and I did it. But

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CHAPTER VII

HOW PAUL SET FORTH UPON

A QUEST

Of old Deleglise’s Sunday suppers, which, costumed from head to foot in spotless linen, he cooked himself in his great kitchen, moving with flushed, earnest face about the gleaming stove, while behind him his guests waited, ranged round the massive oaken table glittering with cut glass and silver, among which fluttered the deft hands of Madeline, his ancient whitecapped Bonne, much has been already recorded, and by those possessed of greater knowledge. They who sat there talking in whispers until such time as old Deleglise turned towards them again, radiant with consciousness of success, the savoury triumph steaming between his hands, when, like the sudden swell of the Moonlight Sonata, the talk would rush once more into a roar, were men whose names were then – and some are still – more or less household words throughout the Englishspeaking world. Artists, musicians, actors, writers, scholars, droles, their wit and wisdom, their sayings and their doings must be tolerably familiar to readers of memoir and biography; and if to such their epigrams appear less brilliant, their jests less laughable than to us who heard them spoken, that

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is merely because fashion in humour and in understanding changes as in all else.

You, gentle reader of my book, I shall not trouble with sec- ond-hand record of that which you can read elsewhere. For me it will be but to write briefly of my own brief glimpse into that charmed circle. Concerning this story more are the afternoon At Homes held by Dan and myself upon the second floor of the old Georgian house in pleasant, quiet Queen Square. For cook and house-maid on these days it would be a busy morning. Failing other supervision, Dan and I agreed that to secure success on these important occasions each of us should criticise the work of the other. I passed judgment on Dan’s cooking, he upon my house-work.

“Too much soda,” I would declare, sampling the cake. “You silly Juggins! It’s meant to taste of soda – it’s

a soda cake.”

“I know that. It isn’t meant to taste of nothing but soda. There wants to be some cake about it also. This thing, so far as flavour is concerned, is nothing but a Seidlitz powder. You can’t give people solidified Seidlitz powders for tea!”

Dan would fume, but I would remain firm. The soda cake would be laid aside, and something else attempted. His cookery was the one thing Dan was obstinate about. He would never admit that anything could possibly be wrong with it. His most ghastly failures he would devour himself later on with pretended enjoyment. I have known him finish a sponge cake, the centre of which had to be eaten with a teaspoon, declaring it was delicious; that eating a dry sponge cake was like eating dust; that a sponge cake ought to be a trifle syrupy

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towards the centre. Afterwards he would be strangely silent and drink brandy out of a wine-glass.

“Call these knives clean?” It would be Dan’s turn. “Yes, I do.”

Dan would draw his finger across one, producing chiarooscuro.

“Not if you go fingering them. Why don’t you leave them alone and go on with your own work?”

“You’ve just wiped them, that’s all.” “Well, there isn’t any knife-powder.” “Yes, there is.”

“Besides, it ruins knives, over-cleaning them – takes all the edge off. We shall want them pretty sharp to cut those lemon buns of yours.”

“Over-cleaning them! You don’t take any pride in the place.”

“Good Lord! Don’t I work from morning to night?” “You lazy young devil!”

“Makes one lazy, your cooking. How can a man work when he is suffering all day long from indigestion?”

But Dan would not be content until I had found the board and cleaned the knives to his complete satisfaction. Perhaps it was as well that in this way all things once a week were set in order. After lunch house-maid and cook would vanish, two carefully dressed gentlemen being left alone to receive their guests.

These would be gathered generally from among Dan’s journalistic acquaintances and my companions of the theatre. Occasionally, Minikin and Jarman would be of the number,

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