Chapter FOUR

The majestic poise of the Nordic blood is nowhere seen in greater perfection than in that crown of our civilization, a modest English Country House. Here is there no class consciousness, here is there no class war. Each is in his or her own place, and there is peace through order.

To consider only the servile portion of the establishment: the Butler has his own dignity, and the various other males--upon whose titles I am a little shaky--have theirs. So the Females of the species: the Cook cooks; the Kitchen Attendants attend the kitchen; the Nurse nurses. So with the external squad: the Groom grooms; the Gardener and all his Assistants garden. With regularity and zeal the Footmen footle. The mere Maids go maidenly about their tasks. Below these specialised functionaries, for which Our Race is famous, comes one who may be regarded indifferently as the foundation of the fabric or the last rung of the ladder, and who is known as the Boy. On him the petty, unorganised, lesser work devolves, for which his Superiors are indeed responsible, but the mere brute labour of which is his alone.

Thus it is the Boy who blacks the boots, fills all the coal scuttles and carries them about, lays the fires and lights them, polishes the knives, the silver plate--the silver itself, when there is any--and the antique pewter; washes up the dishes of the supper below stairs, cleans the door knobs and bell handles; pulls up the blinds; pulls back the curtains of the ground floor. Notably it is he also who conveys to the Upper Servants--who then shall have risen from slumber--the numbers of the bells that have sounded. It is he who opens the windows when they should be shut, and shuts them when they should be open--so far at least as the early hours are concerned, for when the Great are about this function is performed by a young man in uniform. It is the Boy who lays out the morning post, sets the newspapers in order--therein discovering the odds--lets out the little dog--or dogs--and after some few other trifling tasks accomplished, brushes and carefully folds the clothes of the male guests and lays them out where stronger and older men shall carry them up, each parcel to its room, and for that service receive an ultimate reward. It is the Boy who carries up the boots themselves--for these are defiling to the fingers!--and it is the Boy--mark you: this is essential to the tale, you must not miss it--_it is the Boy who picks up the rugs and shakes them_, room after room, a ritual preparatory to the settling of great clouds of dust, which, shortly after, not the Boy but a Maid brings down to the rugs again with feathery instruments and devastating cloths.

Hence it was that the Boy--Ethelbert by his full baptismal name, but in the daily, Bert--before yet the wintry dawn was more than grey on that Saturday in January, whistling gaily at his task, was holding the polar bear up by its _forepaws_ and shaking it, as in duty bound.

His heart was gay, for he was redeemed.

Not so long since, this same Ethelbert had (alas!) in company with youths of his own age and a little more, not yet free from the trammels of elementary education, purloined from a shop certain fruits: two bananas.

The Deed might have appeared upon his record at Scotland Yard and dogged him through life, for he was already eight years of age and knew full well the wickedness of his act. He had been spared by the noble elasticity of the English Common Law. His sobbing widowed mother had seen, indeed, the shadow of the police across her threshold, and Ethelbert had stood in the Felons' Dock before the dud parliamentary lawyer who had got the local stipendiary job. But our Magistracy--especially that of the Stipendiary Sort--is famous throughout the whole world for its merciful wisdom. Young Bert had escaped imprisonment, as having been led away by his senior Charlie Gasket, who was nearly ten.

He had, I say, been saved; but the memory of the peril had burnt into his soul. And now, though he was nearly fifteen years of age, the incident still stood out the sharpest of his memories. It was known to his lord the Butler--perhaps to his Master--but to no others. He had been taken into the Great House in spite of it all, because his father had worked upon the estate. Therefore, I say, did Ethelbert feel himself redeemed. But he trembled still at the apparatus of National Justice.

In the innocence of youth he whistled gently to himself. His other work was done; this performed, he had but now to settle the last rug, the Polar Bear, and then to rouse his superiors in the hierarchy below stairs, to lay their breakfast out and to attend thereon as minister. So shook he perfunctorily the Arctic Ursine Fleece, the Hyperborean Candour, when he heard something fall sharply at his feet. He even caught a flash of it as it fell. He saw it issuing from that ear of Thule which would hear no more; he saw it sliding down the whiteness of the hair and gleaming dully in the candlelight upon the polished wood of the flooring.

There was no mistake. It was _IT_. It was that pledge of respect and esteem which the ever-memorable Catherine, Empress of All the Russias, had bestowed three lives ago upon the stalwart Bones. It was the heirloom of that noble House of de Bohun which Ethelbert served. It was the Stone on which he had heard all the domestics of the house inflamed in the last hours of the previous evening.

There is an instinct planted in man by Mr. Darwin, which impels him to pick up a thing, anything dropped. That instinct Ethelbert obeyed. The act was half unconscious, immediate; he had slipped the Emerald into his pocket and was already off with a candle in one hand and the other in a side pocket, fondling the stone. He was off down the long stone corridor which led along the north of the house towards the offices; and as he went his mind was full of some vague intention to hand over the treasure-trove to those in authority--in good time.

But even as he thus went up by the dim candlelight in the cold dawn, along that prison-like perspective of iron-barred windows and whitewash, with stone flags ringing to his feet, a vision of judgment arose within him. His teeth chattered at the memory of the police.

Ethelbert, that product of no more than an elementary education, had received some general outline of the world from cinemas and from police reports, which that same education enabled him to read in the more widely circulated Sunday papers.

He could not have told you that society was organized to the advantage of circles to which he did not belong, and to the disadvantage of his own; but he did know that this piece of green glass in its leaden-coloured setting of hideous lines would sell for a sum that would free him from servitude for ever. He also knew that to be found possessed of it would involve a far worse servitude; a servitude not to the Gentry but to the Force, and lasting, one way or another, the whole of his life. He knew that such servitude was torture. The people of his world knew all those things. Therefore did not the emerald represent to Ethelbert immediate wealth so much as a vision of confinement alone in a small mechanical cell; upon release, a life-long chain binding him as an informer and spy over whom further imprisonment should hang at will; a crushing and overwhelming tyranny; and perhaps at last a secret and abominable death. Of all these things had young Bert's mind been full from very early years, for all these things still haunt the distorted fancy of the poor.

He saw himself presenting with trembling hand this Thing of Power, this Emerald, to his Emperor the Butler; he imagined a first awful and immediate trial at the hands of that Justiciar, and later an overwhelming sentence from the Master himself. He heard the key turning in the door of his room; he saw himself a gibbering prisoner therein; he heard the voices of the Inspector and his accompanying Sergeant; he felt the gyves upon his wrist.

All this in the few seconds between the West Room of Paulings and the offices built out of the extreme east.

So was Ethelbert's mind made up. For his good angel, failing to penetrate the first thick skin of stupidity and to suggest the simple delivery of the gem to his superiors, at any rate got through the second skin and suggested a second best.

He had the brushing of the clothes. He would put it into the pocket of some one of the guests, and then he could breathe freely.

Which guest should it be? No one was yet astir; he was free to choose. There was a minute or two before the clock would strike the half hour and bid him summon the earliest riser--after himself--the kitchen-maid. Her name, Kathleen Parkinson, I take the liberty of giving you, although she will appear no more in these pages.

There lay the three little piles of clothes, to be carefully brushed and folded up by himself, within the next half hour, and among them how could a youth of romantic genius hesitate? Did not every novelette, every Sunday paper, every cinema, point with unerring finger to the lord? Are not lords and jewels made one for the other, like love and laughter, or politics and stocks and shares? The lord could not but be the recipient of the emerald, and when he should have received it, who fitter than he to deal with such trifles? Bert could see him in his mind's eye, and hear him in his mind's ear, strolling up to the Master of the House and saying, in that airy accent which had always so astonished him in the wealthy:

"Oh, I say, Humph, I found the bloody thing this morning and picked it up--what?"

Now into which pocket of Lord Galton's quiet blue suit should it go? Into the right-hand trousers pocket; for therein, as Bert knew by fruitful search, his lordship carried loose change. From the waistcoat it might fall out. In the coat pockets it might lurk for long without being found; in Lord Galton's right-hand trousers pocket, therefore, did the emerald go, to the full depth thereof. The garment was folded again very neatly. And all was well.

* * * * * * *

In the fulness of time, the sun being already risen--yes, for an hour or more--one of those older young domestics of whom I have spoken bore up a parcel of clothes and a can of hot water to Lord Galton's door. All the ritual of these palaces was gone through. The socks were turned inside out, the shirt laid out like a corpse in its shroud, the pile of brushed and folded clothes set upon a chair, the fire lit--as though the room were not already stifling with a hot-air machine; the window opened wider, as though the piercing air had not already started a draught which had fought with the hot air all night long. The under-upper servant glided away, and Lord Galton got out of bed and shaved and washed and dressed; considering in his mind what all others woke to consider in that same house on that same morning, but especially the Fated Three: the Emerald.

He looked at his watch; it was a quarter past nine. He stood gazing out of the window at the frosty mist on the damp gaunt trees of the park, and tried to estimate how he really stood in the minds of those about him.

Who would believe that he knew nothing of the stone? Which of them had heard--several of them, he knew--which of them _believed_ that story about Attaboy? Certainly his host, almost certainly Vic--she knew everything. He was not quite certain that she had not meant to rag him about it in something she had said during the day before. She would not misunderstand, but she knew about it.

Did that damned greasy fellow the journalist know? He doubted it; they never did know the things that counted. And as for the Don, he might as well have suspected the first imbecile in the County Asylum.

Marjorie did not know; he was pretty sure of that by her way to him. But still ... it was known enough; it was known to two.... After all, what was pulling a horse, and what had it to do with pinching emeralds, anyhow? ... Yet ... yet ... he could not leave Paulings till it was cleared up.... If the damned thing turned up in town in some receiver's shop they might connect it with him.... He was glad he hadn't brought a man.... No, he must stay till it was cleared up. It was a damned nuisance. They were getting up a party on Sunday night at the Posts. There was to be a rich young fool from Ireland whom they would all play with. Those occasions were not so common nowadays. But he must sacrifice it. He must stay on.

He made his decision; he slowly picked up the small change off his dressing table and shuffled it into his trousers pocket. Then he mechanically followed it with his hand, and found something that was not a coin....

At first he had the grotesque idea that he was handling a pebble, though how it could have got there he could not conceive. Then a matchbox, for it was smooth and cold.... When he pulled it out and saw what it was, his whole mind went through a violent shock of revulsion.

He was so sickened, strong as he was, that he had to sit down and recover himself. And as he so sat, he fixed the dreadful thing with his eye, holding it there between the fingers of his right hand, unmoving.

Now indeed was a resolution to be taken!

At first his mind would not work. A man possessed of a thing, no matter what he does with it, carries his communications about with him, leaves traces about of his possession. If he threw it out of the window, it would be found within the radius of such a throw. There was nowhere in the room where he would dare to hide it. If he dropped it as he went downstairs, a servant might pass and find it within a minute, connecting him with what was so found.

Give it back himself he dared not. That would mean, "Poor Tommy! He gave way, but he did the honest thing in the end." He would be branded for life. Attaboy was enough, without that.

At first the easiest course lured him; to say nothing; to keep it upon his person until everything had blown over; then to take it up with him to town.... Then? ... He could not help remembering how Alfred had told him about his uncle and the cutting establishment in Amsterdam. It was all mixed up with the committee for inquiring into the Meldon business when there was that trouble in Parliament a few years before.... It seemed that one could have a stone cut and get it back unrecognisable.... Then he thrust the thought out of his mind and shuddered a little at the danger.

But if he kept it, where should he put it? Where could he put it so as to be certain during the night--to be _absolutely_ certain--that no one could find it with him or near him? What if he should fall faint or ill? What if ... No, there was only one thing to be done. He must pass it on. No matter what tale he told--even if he told the truth--to appear with it in his possession and to make an explanation was to damn himself finally, and that just at the moment his half-damnation on the turf was beginning to be forgotten.... He must pass it on.... He must pass it on.

There was one obvious repository; an aged fool of that profession whose incompetence is stamped upon them; a native dupe. It should go into the pocket of his distinguished cousin, the Professor; it should pass into the unwitting possession of the expert on dodekahedral crystals. His mind thus decided, he was half at peace.

Lord Galton went down to breakfast. He found his host already at the table. The others came in gradually, and no one talked of the stone; nor upon anything else to speak of--for of the stone everyone was thinking.

It was, naturally, the learned cousin, the Professor, who first put in the word that should not have been spoken. He did it somewhere about the jam, and when the Home Secretary was already feeling the need for a pipe. Perhaps food had strengthened him. He piped up in his quavering voice:

"Ah! Any news about the emerald, Humphrey? Any news this morning about the emerald? About the emerald? ... the emerald? ... the emerald?"

There is a natural sequence in fools, as in all others of God's creatures. Aunt Amelia came in a good second.

"Oh, yes, Humphrey," she bleated, in that woolly-mutton voice which fitted her as does sodden mist a marshy formless hill. "Is there any news about the emerald?"

"There is hardly likely to be, Amelia," said her brother, as tartly as he could be got to say anything, for long years of suave politician's make-believe had untartled his tongue.

"I thought," said Aunt Amelia in self-defense, "that some servant might have found it and told you."

"Well, they have not," said her brother, shortly; and there was silence.

The journalist opened his mouth--which he should not have done--and began rather too loudly, and in too high a pitch:

"What I think, you know ..." and then stopped suddenly--which put him in no better case.

What Victoria Mosel would have said nobody knew, for she took her breakfast in bed--always. But Marjorie had come down in the midst of this, and spoke sharply. She had slept little and her temper was on edge.

"Oh, that's enough about the emerald!" she said. "What's the good of talking of it _now_?" Then she gave one sweeping look around, like a searchlight trying to spot a boat, and betook herself to the jam.

The one who said nothing was the young racing man with the emerald in his trousers pocket. He was not sure of it--he touched its pin point two or three times furtively to make certain the gem had not dropped out; and then he began, by way of clearing the air, to talk to the learned Professor about indifferent things.

But these indifferent things had a purport in them. For first he talked of the University, then of that degraded College, St. Filbert's, and so worked things round to the infamous B. Leader, and that fairly started his companion off--as Lord Galton had intended he should be started.

The old Don was still at it when they got up from the breakfast table. He was shepherded--though he did not know that he was being shepherded--by the younger man, out into the hall, helped into his rusty overcoat, led out through the glass doors into the park, and there did Lord Galton patiently listen to his academic victim for something over a quarter of an hour, as they walked side by side up the swept gravel to the very far end of the avenue, and then turned back again towards the house.

Long before they thus faced about, the learned cousin's mind was a thousand miles away from reality. The harangue which poured forth against the infamous B. Leader needed but little sympathetic jogging--a word here and there--from his companion. His soul was not in his body. You might have stuck a pin into him, and he would not have felt it; and Lord Galton, who knew men nearly as well as he knew horses--at least on the side of their weaknesses--felt secure that the moment had come. And as he leaned forward, sympathetically close to the left side of his companion, he gently dropped into the loose, wrinkled side pocket of the rusty overcoat that perilous gem, and felt as though he had cast off a garment of lead.

The expert in dodekahedral crystals still poured out unceasingly and shrilly his grievance, with many a "Would you believe it?" and "If you please!" and "Then he actually wrote to the Society at Berne," and so on; and Lord Galton, almost grateful in the new lightness of his heart, applauded heartily and loudly marvelled that the Society at Berne did not drum Leader out of their ranks with every mark of infamy.

"So," he thought, as they came into the house again--the quavering voice of the Crystallographer still more emphatic within four walls--"salvation comes with a little intelligence, a little decision, and a little opportunity."

He helped the old fool out of his overcoat; hung it up for him on a peg, and saw its owner go shambling off to his books.

Lord Galton was pleased with himself; he saw his way fairly straight before him, but he would do nothing hastily ... which might flurry the head of the house.... It would be a wise and a small risk, to bide his time. He would bide it till the noon post had come in, until his host had looked at his letters. Then only would he take the next step in his programme. He sauntered out again into the Park, where he would feel the strain of waiting less, with a walk to occupy him. He looked back over his shoulder when he had got round towards the lodge, and saw for one moment through the window of the library his aged relative pottering among the shelves. He was safe till lunch. And Lord Galton, though all alone, smiled.

* * * * * * *

The young man walked briskly for a couple of miles, thinking clearly and concisely. He came back to Paulings through the mill gate, up by the stables, walking strongly and well. He knew exactly what he had to do.

He met one of the servants, and asked where Mr. de Bohun might be, and was told he was in the garage; sought him there, and found him giving orders about a repair, and trying--unsuccessfully--to understand whether the proud chauffeur were lying or no.

He went straight up to his cousin, who turned round at hearing his step, and said in a very low voice, and quickly:

"Let me see you in your study alone for a moment. It is urgent!"

And the Home Secretary, glancing up hurriedly with a half-frightened look, said, "Yes? Certainly! Come."