A Servant of the Public

CHAPTER I

MUDDOCK AND MEAD

The social birth of a family, united by a chain of parallel events with the commercial development of a business, is a spectacle strange to no country but most common among the nation of shopkeepers; it presents, however, interesting points and is likely to produce a group of persons rather diverse in character. Some of the family breathe the new air readily enough; with some the straw of the omnibus (there was straw in omnibuses during the formative period) follows on silken skirts into the landau. It takes, they say, three generations to make a gentleman; the schools ticket them – National or Board, Commercial or Grammar, Eton or Harrow. Three generations, not perhaps of human flesh, but of mercantile growth, it takes to make a great Concern. The humble parent-tree in the Commercial Road puts forth branches in Brixton, Camberwell, Stoke Newington, wherever buyers are many and "turnover" quick: here is the second period, when the business is already large and lucrative, but not yet imposing. Then a new ambition stirs and works in the creator's mind; there is still a world to conquer. Appearance is added to reality, show to substance. A splendid block rises somewhere within the ken of fashion; it is red, with white facings, a tower or two, perhaps a clock. First and last, a good deal is said about it in talk and in print. Possibly a luncheon is given. Now there are points of policy to be practised, not directly productive of hard money, but powerful in the long run. For example, the young ladies and gentlemen who serve the counters should be well treated, and carefully looked after in regard to their morals. And if this be done, there is no reason against having the fact stated with the utmost available publicity. For this service, sections of an all-embracing Press are ready and willing. In the eye of the polite world this big block is now the business: the branches are still profitable, but the ledgers alone sing their virtues; men cease to judge the position or the purse of the family by their humble fronts. For the family too has been on the move; it has passed, in orderly progression, in an ascent of gentility, from Putney to Maida Vale, from Maida Vale to Paddington, from Paddington to Kensington Palace Gardens. At each stopping-place it may acquire members, at some it will lose them; the graves where those lie who have dropped from the ranks are themselves milestones on the march. The survivors have each some scent, some trace, of their place of origin. To the architect of fortune the Commercial Road is native and familiar; he lost his first love there and buried her down East. His second wife dates from the latter end of the Maida Vale time and is in all essentials of the Middle, or Paddington, Period. The children recollect Paddington as childhood's home, have extorted information about Maida Vale, talk of Putney with a laugh, and seem almost of true Kensington Palace Gardens' blood. Yet even in them there is an element which they are hardly conscious of, an element not to be refined away till the third generation of human flesh has run. Then comes the perfect product; a baronetcy is often supposed to mark, but sometimes may be considered to precede, its appearance. Indeed – for it is time to descend to the particular – Sir James Muddock was hardly the perfect product; nay, he still strove valiantly to plume himself on not being such. But with a wife and children it is hard to go on exulting in a lowly origin. It is also rather selfish, and was certainly so in Sir James' case, since Lady Muddock was very sensitive on the subject. It would seem that being of the Middle Period is apt to produce a sensitiveness of this sort; the pride of achievement is not there, the pride of position is still new and uneasy.

Somewhat in this vein, but with a more malicious and humorous turn of speech, Ashley Mead ran through the history of the firm of Muddock and Mead for Lady Kilnorton's pleasure and information. She was interested in them as phenomena and as neighbours; they were hardly more than across the road from her house in Queen's Gate. Ashley spoke with full knowledge; both business and family were familiar to him; he himself represented an episode in the career of the concern which survived only in its name. He used to say that he had just missed being a fit figure for romance; his father had not been a scatter-brained genius bought out of a splendid certainty of wealth for fifty pounds, but a lazy man who very contentedly and with open eyes accepted fifteen thousand pounds and leisure in preference to hard work and an off-chance of riches. This elder Mead had come into the business with three thousand pounds when capital was wanted for the Stoke Newington branch, and had gone out when ambition began to whisper the name of Buckingham Palace Road. He had not felt aggrieved at losing opulence, but had lived on his spoil – after all, a good return for his investment – and died with it in cheerfulness. But then he had not been born a trader. He came of the professions; money-making was not in his blood nor bone of his bone, as it must be in the frame of one who is to grow gradually by his own labour to the status of a millionaire. The instinct of gain was not in his son either; Ashley laughed with unreserved good-nature as he said:

"If my father hadn't gone out, I should have had half the business, I suppose, instead of starving along on four hundred a year."

"You've your profession," observed Lady Kilnorton, hardly seriously. "The Bar, you know."

"My profession?" he laughed, as he leant against the mantel-piece and looked down at her. "I'm one of five thousand names on five hundred doors, if that's a profession!"

"You might make it one," she suggested, but not as though the subject interested her or were likely to interest him. The little rebuke had all the perfunctoriness of duty and convention.

"The funny thing is," he went on, "that old Sir James would like to get me back now; he's always hinting about it. Shall I go and sell the ribbons?"

"Why can't Mr. Robert sell the ribbons?"

"Well, in the family we don't think Bob very bright, you see."

"Oh! Alice is bright, though; at least she's very clear-headed."

"More brains than any of them. And what did you think of My lady?"

"Of My lady?" Irene Kilnorton laughed a little, raised her brows a little, and paused before she said: "Well, her hair's too fluffy, isn't it? They don't beat her, do they? She looks rather like it."

"No, they don't beat her; but she's not quite sure that she's got the grand manner."

"Isn't she?" said Lady Kilnorton, laughing again.

"And then Sir James insists on referring to Putney, especially by way of acknowledging the goodness of God in family prayers. The servants are there, of course, and – you understand?"

"Perfectly, Mr. Mead. In such a case I shouldn't like it myself."

"Lady Muddock has no objection to being thankful privately, but she doesn't like it talked about."

"You go there a great deal?" she asked, with a glance at him.

"Yes, a good deal."

"And the girl – Alice – is very fond of you?"

"Not the least, I believe."

"Oh, you're bound to say that! Would she go with – with selling the ribbons?" But she went on without waiting for an answer, perhaps because she had risked a snub. "I was received with immense empressement."

"You're a bit of a swell, aren't you?"

"A poverty-stricken Irish widow! No, but I took some swells with me."

"Lord Bowdon, for instance?"

"Yes, Lord Bowdon. And a greater swell still – Miss Ora Pinsent."

A pause followed. Ashley looked over his hostess' head out of the window. Then Lady Kilnorton added, "Lord Bowdon drove Miss Pinsent to her house afterwards."

Another pause followed; each was wondering what the other's point of view might be.

"Fancy Ora Pinsent at the Muddocks'!" reflected Ashley presently. "She went to please you?"

"How do I know why she went? I don't suppose she knew herself."

"You're great friends, though?"

"I admire and despise, love and most bitterly hate, Ora Pinsent," said Lady Kilnorton.

"All at once?" asked Ashley with a smile, and brows raised in protest.

"Yes, all at once, and successively, and alternately, and in all sorts of various combinations."

"And Lord Bowdon drove her home?" His tone begged for a comment from his companion.

"I told you so," she answered with a touch of irritation, which was as significant as any comment.

The servant came in, bringing tea; they were silent while the preparations were made. Ashley, however, covertly regarded his friend's trim figure and pretty, small features. He often felt rather surprised that he had no inclination to fall in love with, or even to make love to, Irene Kilnorton. Many men had such an inclination, he knew; among them he ranked this same Lord Bowdon who had driven Miss Pinsent to her house. Lady Kilnorton was young, she was pretty, she had, if not wit, at least the readiness of reply which is the common substitute provided by the habit of conversing with wideawake people. It was, though, very pleasant to have so charming a friend and to be in no danger of transforming her into the doubtful and dangerous character of a woman he loved; so he told himself, having no disposition to love her.

"She's got a husband, hasn't she?" he asked, as the door closed behind the footman.

"Ora? Oh, yes, somewhere. He's a scamp, I think. He's called – oh, I forget! But his name doesn't matter."

"They've always got a husband, he's always a scamp, and his name never matters," remarked Ashley between mouthfuls of toast.

"Fenning! That's it! Fenning."

"Just as you like, Lady Kilnorton. It's the fact, not what you call it, that's the thing, you know."

As he spoke the door was opened again and Lord Bowdon was announced. He came in almost eagerly, like a man who has something to say, shook hands hastily, and, the instant that he dropped into a chair, exclaimed, "What a glorious creature!"

"I knew exactly what you were going to say before you opened your lips," remarked Lady Kilnorton. "You haven't been long, though." There was a touch of malice in her tone.

"It wasn't left to me to fix the length of the interview. And she said she liked driving fast. Well, Ashley, my boy, how are you?"

"I'm all right, Lord Bowdon."

"I've got a job for you. I'll write to you about it presently. It's a Commission they've put me on, and I thought you might like to be secretary."

"Anything with a stipend," agreed Ashley cheerfully.

"What a lot men think of money!" said Lady Kilnorton.

"I don't think I ever met a more fascinating creature," Lord Bowdon mused.

"It's awfully good of you," continued Ashley. "I'm uncommonly hard-up just now."

"Do you know her?" asked Bowdon.

"Met her once or twice," Ashley answered very carelessly. Bowdon seemed to fall into a reverie, as he gently stirred his tea round and round. Lady Kilnorton leant back and looked at the mantel-piece. But presently he glanced at her, smiled pleasantly, and began to discuss the Muddocks. Ashley left them thus engaged when he took his leave ten minutes later.

Lord Bowdon had lived a full and active life which now stretched over forty-three years. In spite of much sport and amusement he had found time for some soldiering, for the duties of his station, and for proving himself an unexpectedly useful and sensible Member of Parliament. But he had not found time to be married; that event he used to think of in his earlier days as somehow connected with his father's death; when he became Earl of Daresbury, he would marry. However, about a year back, he had made Lady Kilnorton's acquaintance, had liked her, and had begun to draw lazy and leisurely plans about her. He had not fallen in love with her, any more than Ashley Mead had, but he had drifted into a considerable affection for her. His father had lived to be old; he himself had already grown more middle-aged than was desirable in a bridegroom. During the last few weeks he had considered the project seriously; and that he had assumed this attitude of mind could hardly have escaped the lady's notice. He had detected, with some pleasure, her hidden consciousness of his purpose and commended her for a gracefully easy treatment of the position. She did not make at him, nor yet run away from him, she neither hurried nor repulsed him. Thus by degrees the thing had become very pleasant and satisfactory in imagination. It was not quite what in by-gone years he had meant by being in love – he thanked heaven for that, after reflection – but it was pleasant and satisfactory. "Let it go on to the end," he would have said, with a contentment hardly conscious of an element of resignation.

To-day there was a check, a set-back in his thoughts, and he was uncomfortable lest it might shew in his manner. He talked too long about the Muddocks, then too long about Ashley Mead, then about something quite uninteresting. There was an unexplained check; it vexed and puzzled him. Lady Kilnorton, with her usual directness, told him what it was before they parted.

"You've been thinking about Ora Pinsent all the time," she said. "It would have been better to have the courage of your ingratitude and go on talking about her." The gay, good-humoured words were accompanied by a rather nervous little smile.

"Who is she?" asked Bowdon bluntly and with undisguised curiosity.

"She's Mrs. Jack Fenning. I don't know and I don't care who Jack Fenning is, only – "

"Only what?"

"Only he's not dead. I know you think that's the one thing he ought to be."

"I'm not sure about that," he answered, looking in her face. The face had suddenly become charming to him in its now apparent mixture of annoyance and merriment. "Well, I must be going," he added with a sigh. Then he laughed; Lady Kilnorton, after an instant's hesitation, joined in his laugh.

"She liked me to drive as fast as I could, and straight home!" said he. "Good-bye, Lady Kilnorton."

"Good-bye. I wonder you aren't a little more sensible at your age."

"She carries you off your feet, somehow," he murmured apologetically, as he made for the door. He was feeling both rude and foolish, confessing thereby the special relation towards his hostess which he had come to occupy.

Left alone, Irene Kilnorton sat down and attempted a dispassionate appraisement of herself. She was twenty-nine, a widow of four years' standing. The world, which had seemed ended when her young husband died, had revived for her; such is the world's persistent way. She was pretty, not beautiful, bright, not brilliant, pleasant, but hardly fascinating. She was pleased with the impartiality which conducted her so far. But at this point the judgment of herself began to drift into a judgment of Ora Pinsent, who seemed to be all that she herself had just missed being; in assessing Ora the negatives fell out and the limitations had to be discarded. Yet her mood was not one of envy for Ora Pinsent. She would not be Ora Pinsent. Among those various feelings which she had for Ora, there was one which she had described by saying "I despise her." The mood, in truth, hung doubtful between pity and contempt; but it was enough to save her from wishing to be Ora Pinsent. She would sooner put up with the negatives and the limitations. But she might wish, and did wish, that other people could take her own discerning view of her friend. She did not call herself a jealous woman; but after all Lord Bowdon had become in a rather special sense her property; now he was, as he put it graphically enough, carried off his feet. That condition would not last; he would find his feet and his feet would find the ground again soon. Meanwhile, however, she could hardly be expected exactly to like it. Men did such strange things – or so she had been told – just in those brief spaces of time when the feet were off the ground; perhaps women too did things rather strange in a similar case.

"And poor Ora's feet," she said to herself, "are never really on the ground."

She was vaguely conscious that her mingled admiration and contempt reflected in a rather commonplace fashion the habitual attitude of good-sense towards genius. Not being in love with commonplace good-sense as an intellectual ideal, she grew impatient with her thoughts, flung the window open, and sought distraction in the sight of the people who passed up and down the hill through the cool kindliness of the June evening. The wayfarers caught her idle interest, and she had almost lost herself in wondering whether the boy and girl at the corner would kiss before they parted when she was recalled to her own sphere by seeing two people whom she knew breasting the slope on bicycles. A dark young man inclining to stoutness, very elaborately arrayed for the exercise on which he was engaged, rode side by side with a dark young woman inclining to leanness, plainly clad, with a face that a man might learn to think attractive by much looking, but would not give a second thought to in a London drawing-room. "The young Muddocks," said Irene, drawing back and peering at them from behind her curtains. "Recovering themselves after the party, I suppose."

She watched them till they were out of sight; why, she did not ask herself. Of course there was the interest of wealth, perhaps a vulgar, but seemingly an unavoidable, sensation which pounds much multiplied enable their possessors to create. There was more; the Muddocks had come somehow into her orbit. They were in the orbit of her friend Ashley Mead; the girl might become the most important satellite there. Irene's own act had perhaps brought them into Ora Pinsent's orbit – where storms were apt to rage. Curiosity mingled with an absurd sense of responsibility in her. "It's such a risk introducing Ora to anybody," she murmured, and with this her thoughts flew back to Bowdon and the condition of men who are carried off their feet.

"It's simply that I'm jealous," she declared petulantly, as she shut the window. But she was not yet to escape from Ora Pinsent. There on the mantel-piece was a full-length photograph, representing Ora in her latest part and signed with her autograph, a big O followed by a short sprawl of letters, and a big P followed by a longer sprawl. Though not a professed believer in the revelation of character by handwriting, Irene found something significant in this signature, in the impulse which seemed to die away to a fatigued perfunctory ending, in the bold beginning that lagged on to a conclusion already wearisome. Her eyes rose to the face of the portrait. It shewed a woman in a mood of audacity, still merry and triumphant, but distantly apprehensive of some new and yet unrealised danger. Exultation, barely yet most surely touched with fear, filled the eyes and shaped the smile. It seemed to Irene Kilnorton that, if Ora knew herself and her own temper, such reasonably might be her disposition towards the world and her own life as well as her pose in the play to which she now drew all the town; for her power of enjoying greatly in all likelihood carried with it its old companion, the power greatly to suffer. Yet to Irene a sort of triviality affected both capacities, as though neither could be exactly taken seriously, as though the enjoyment would always be childish, the suffering none too genuine. Good-sense judged genius again; and again the possessor of good-sense turned impatiently away, not knowing whether her contempt should be for herself or for her friend.

Then she began to laugh, suddenly but heartily, at the recollection of Lady Muddock. When Ora had passed on after the introduction, and Irene was lingering in talk with her hostess, Lady Muddock had raised her timid pale-blue eyes, nervously fingered that growth of hair which was too fluffy for her years, and asked whether Miss Pinsent were "nice." This adjective, maid-of-all-work on women's lips, had come with such ludicrous inadequacy and pitiful inappropriateness that even at the moment Irene had smiled. Now she laughed. Yet she was aware that Lady Muddock had no more than this one epithet with which to achieve a classification of humanity. You were nice or you were not nice; it was simple dichotomy; there was the beginning, there the end of the matter. So viewed, the question lost its artlessness and became a singularly difficult and searching interrogation. For if the little adjective were given its rich fulness of meaning, its widely representative character (it had to sum up half a world!), if it were asked whether, on the whole, Ora Pinsent were likely to be a good element in the world, or (if it might be so put) a profitable speculation on the part of Nature, Irene Kilnorton would have been quite at a loss to answer. In fact – she asked, with a laugh still but now a puzzled laugh – was she nice or wasn't she? The mixture of feelings which she had described to Ashley Mead forbade any clear and definite response on her own behalf. On Lady Muddock's, however, she owned that the verdict must be in the negative. By the Muddock standards, nice Ora was not.

And what was this absent Jack Fenning like? There seemed no materials for a judgment, except that he had married Ora Pinsent and was no longer with Ora Pinsent. Here was a combination of facts about him remarkable enough to invest him with a certain interest. The rest was blank ignorance.

"And," said Irene with another slight laugh, "I suppose I'm the only person who ever took the trouble to think about him. I'm sure Ora never does!"

CHAPTER II

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

It was an indication of the changed character of the business that the big block in Buckingham Palace Road closed early on Saturdays, surrendering the hours in which the branches continued to do their most roaring trade. The day after the party was a Saturday; Sir James and his son were making their way back through the Park, timed to arrive at home for a two o'clock luncheon. The custom was that Lady Muddock and Alice should meet them at or about the entrance of Kensington Gardens, and the four walk together to the house. There existed in the family close union, modified by special adorations. Sir James walked with his daughter, Bob with his stepmother; this order never varied, being the natural outcome of the old man's clinging to Alice, and of Lady Muddock's pathetic fidelity to Bob. She had no child of her own; she looked up to Alice, but was conscious of an almost cruel clear-sightedness in her which made demonstrations of affection seem like the proffer of excuses. There are people so sensible that one caresses them with an apology. Bob, on the other hand, was easy to please; you had to look after his tastes, admire his wardrobe, and not bother about the business out of hours; he asked no more, his stepmother did no less. Thus while they crossed the Gardens Lady Muddock talked of yesterday's party, while Sir James consulted his daughter as to the affairs of the firm. Alice detected here and there in what he said an undercurrent of discontent with Bob, on the score of a lack not of diligence but of power, not of the willingness to buckle to, but of that instinct for the true game – the right move, the best purchase, the moment to stand for your price, the moment to throw all on the market – whence spring riches. Sir James expressed his meaning clumsily, but he ended clearly enough by wishing that there were another head in the business; for he grew old, and, although he was now relieved from Parliament, found the work heavy on him. Nothing of all this was new to the listener; the tale was an old one and led always to the same climax, the desire to get Ashley Mead back into the business. If Alice objected that he was ignorant and untrained in commercial pursuits, Sir James pushed the difficulty aside. "He's got the stuff in him," he would persist, and then look at his daughter in a questioning way. With this look also she was familiar; the question which the glance put was whether she would be willing to do what Lady Kilnorton called "going with selling the ribbons."

Such was the suggestion; Alice's mood (she treated herself with the candour which she bestowed on others) towards it was that she would be willing to go – to go to Ashley Mead, but not to go with selling the ribbons. The point was not one of pride; it was partly that she seemed to herself to be weary of the ribbons, not ashamed (she was free from that little weakness, which beset Bob and made him sensitive to jokes about his waistcoats being acquired at cost price), but secretly and rather urgently desirous of a new setting and background for her life, and of an escape from surroundings grown too habitual. But it was more perhaps that she did not wish Ashley to sell ribbons or to make money. She was touched with a culture of which Sir James did not dream; the culture was in danger of producing fastidiousness. Ashley was precious in her life because he did not sell ribbons, because he thought nothing or too little of money, because he was poor. The children of the amassers are often squanderers. Alice was no squanderer, but she felt that enough money had been made, enough ribbons sold. With a new aim and a new outlook life would turn sweet again. And she hated the thought that to Ashley she meant ribbons. She did not fear that he would make love to her merely for her money's sake; but the money would chink in her pocket and the ribbons festoon about her gown; if she went to him, she would like to leave all that behind and start a new existence. Yet the instinct in her made the business sacred; a reverence of habit hung about it, causing these dreams to seem unholy rebels which must not shew their heads, and certainly could not be mentioned in answer to her father's look. Moreover she wished Ashley to shew himself a man who, if he took to ribbon-selling, would sell ribbons well; the qualities remained great in her eyes though the pursuit had lost its charms.