People of position

Prologue

GRIERSON refilled the magazine of his rifle carefully — when you are dealing with South American patriots it is better to take no chances, even though the enemy has retreated — then he wiped a couple of half-dried blood spots off his cheek, and, after that, went over to where lay the body of the man from whom that same blood had spurted.

For a full minute he stood very still, gazing with sombre eyes at the kindly face which seemed to be smiling back at him even in death; then he knelt down, and, with infinite gentleness, smoothed the ruffled hair, arranged the collar so as to hide the bullet hole in the bronzed throat, and crossed the hands on the breast. When he got up again his face was twitching strangely, seeing which, the American officer, who had come up behind him, suddenly became busy with his men.

It was one of those stories which seldom get into the newspapers, possibly because they are so utterly unimportant in themselves — a ragged band of half-breeds robbing and murdering in the name of liberty; a landing party of marines from the

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nearest warship, which happened to be American ; and a futile little fight ending, as usual, in the defeat of the brigands. Only this time, an Englishman, who had gone out with the marines, had been killed; and now Grierson, his friend, was trying to realise the fact.

" He was awfully good to me, the whitest man that ever stepped. I met him down the coast a year ago — my luck was right out — and he brought me along with him. I hadn't had a proper meal for days, much less a smoke, and he'd only my word for who I was. Yet he risked it, and I've been here ever since." Grierson, who had been walking in silence beside the marine officer, spoke suddenly.

The^ American nodded sympathetically. " It was hard luck to be killed by a rotten Dago outfit like that. Whenever you get a coloured man talking about liberty you know he's just prospecting round for a chance to break the Eighth Commandment."

Grierson muttered a curse; then, as if he wanted to confide in someone, possibly as a relief to his own feelings, " His partner will be here in a week's time; he was on his way already. When he comes I shall clear out and go home."

Captain Harben nodded again. " Meaning England?" he asked.

PROLOGUE vii

" Yes, England — London. I've had ten years knocking about the world— China, India, Australia, and all round this forsaken continent; and the sum total of what I've got to show for it is the fever and a couple of knife scars in my back — patriots again, one Hindu, one Peruvian. So I think I had better go home and begin afresh — if I can." And he gave a bitter little laugh.

The American glanced sharply at the tall, thin figure and haggard face. When they had started out that morning to drive the saviours of their country out of the spirit stores they were looting, Grierson had struck him as a keen youngster with a rather infectious laugh, and his appreciation had been increased by the way in which the other had dropped a running insurgent at four hundred yards' range; now, however, the captain found himself wondering whether, after all, it was not too late for his companion to talk of beginning life afresh.

At dinner that night he expressed his doubts to the Consul, who shook his head. " Locke, the man they killed to-day, told me young Grierson had been through a pretty rough time, touched rock bottom. He was going into the British Army, but had to throw it up, and went out to the Orient for some Company which failed soon after, leaving him stranded. Since then everyviii PROLOGUE

thing he had been in has turned out wrong; and now this has gone. . . . Queer how some men do get the cards dealt them that way. . . . He's clever, writes very well, and might have done something at it. Locke's death will be an ugly blow to him." Being a kindly man and none too successful himself, he sighed in sympathy, then mixed another whisky and soda, and passed on to official matters.

A little later Captain Harben harked back to the former question. " He's got plenty of pluck. He was all there when it came to a fight. I like him."

"So do I," the other answered, ''only I guess pluck of that sort won't help him much in England, and you know, or at least I know, that a fellow who's knocked about a lot doesn't suit civilisation, or civilisation doesn't suit him — put it which way you like, the result is the same. His nerves go under, somehow, and it ends so," nodding towards the whisky bottle.

Meanwhile Grierson was sitting on the verandah of his dead employer's house staring out into the night, and trying to make plans for the future.

"Whatever happens, I don't mean to starve again," he muttered.

Chapter I

T\TRS. MARLOW flicked a crumb off her dress •*-*-*• with rather unnecessary care. " I've had a most annoying letter from Jimmy to-day. It came by the second post, after Henry had gone to the City, and quite upset me. His employer, Mr. Locke, has been killed in some disgraceful riot, and now Jimmy himself is coming home. Of course, in a way, I shall be glad to see him, and so will the rest of the family; but I know he's got no money, and no profession to fall back upon, and I cannot see what he is going to do for a living. If I asked him to do so, I have no doubt Henry would make a place for him in the office; but I am not going to have my husband burdened with my brother. Henry is too generous as it is; and the Stock Exchange is in such a fearful state now that it is difficult to make a bare living." She sighed heavily, and glanced round the expensively furnished drawing-room, as if wondering whether that abominable tendency towards suspicion on the part of the public, which was causing it to eschew all sorts of speculation, might not result in her losing the few luxuries she did possess.

Her visitor, Mrs. Grimmer, wife of the junior partner in the well-known City firm of Hornaday, Grimes, and Grimmer, dried fruit brokers, nodded with an affectation of sympathy which she did not feel — the Marlows had a touring car and a motor-brougham, whilst she had only a one-horse carriage — and held out her cup to be refilled. She had known her hostess for a good many years, over thirty in fact, ever since she and May Marlow, who was then May Grierson and had thick flaxen plaits tied with blue ribbon, had met at their first children's party. Walter Grierson, the eldest of the family, now a City solicitor, had been eleven at that time, whilst May had been seven and Ida five; but Jimmy had not arrived until three summers later.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Grierson belonged to eminently solid families, whose forebears for generations had looked to the City for their living. To them, the Square Mile stood for Respectability, just as the West End typified Laxity and Luxury; whilst outside these limits there was nothing but the Lower Classes. They ignored the Underworld, possibly because they knew nothing of it, more likely because it had no place in their Scheme of Things, the two main articles of their creed being that every man must choose an occupation early and abide by his choice, and that every good woman must stay at home. The logical result of these Grierson ancestors and their kind was the Victorian age, the exaltation of the Supremely Bad in Art and the Supremely Proper in mankind. Mrs. Grierson had been Victorian in the fullest sense of the word, and she had lived and died with all her principles intact, believing in the Evangelical Church, the respectability of wealth, and the evil tendencies of modern thought. On the other hand, some alien strain had crept into Mr. Grierson, and he had not accepted the family traditions in their entirety; in fact, both his own relatives and those of his wife had found much to criticise in his ideas. Had he been able to shake himself free of the family, he would have liked nothing better than to possess a ranch in America or a sheep station in New South Wales. All his life, he longed, in secret, for open air, and freedom, and the society of men whose interests did not stop at Temple Bar; but, in the end, Fate, in the form of a business bequeathed him by his father, sent him to the City, and he resolutely put his dreams on one side.

The inevitable happened. He was essentially an honourable man, and, not understanding the meaning of Commercial Morality, he imagined that other men in the City were the same; consequently, he met the fate of he who of old went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, though there was no Samaritan to sympathise; rather otherwise, in fact, for his fellows shook their heads scornfully over his failure, whilst admiring the business capacity of those into whose hands his capital had passed. The process of Mr. Grierson's ruin had been a comparatively slow one, the law requiring certain decencies to be observed in these matters; and his wife was dead, and his three elder children grown up and married, before the day when he discovered his own ruin, and took the quickest way out of the troubles of this world. He was mad, of course; everyone agreed on that point: not the least of the proofs being the fact that the only message he left was a letter for Jimmy, who was then at Sandhurst. The coroner had read the letter, and handed it back with a remark that it had no bearing whatsoever on the case; but no one else had seen it, nor had Jimmy given a hint of its contents to any of the family. It concerned him alone, he said. He would have to leave Sandhurst now and wanted to go abroad, and the others let him go, if not gladly, at least without any great regrets. They were all provided for Walter was partner in a growing firm of solicitors; May had married Henry Marlow, a stockbroker; whilst Ida's husband was, if not actually in the City, at least very respectable, being a Northampton boot factor. They were very fond of Jimmy, genuinely fond of him, both from the purely correct point of view, as being their brother, and for his own happy disposition; but, none the less, there had always been a certain jealousy of their father's evident preference for him, a jealousy mingled with surprise, or even resentment, Jimmy being essentially unpractical, and almost unconventional. Moreover, they had never liked the idea of his going to Sandhurst. None of the family had been in the Service before; and it was a matter of common knowledge that no man could make financial headway in the Army. So, when, through Mr. Marlow's influence, the boy obtained a billet in China, the family heaved sighs of relief, and though, throughout the next ten years, his sisters kept up as regular a correspondence as his wanderings allowed, their home concerns and increasing families inevitably weakened their interest in him. They had their own circles, in which he had no part, though, on the other hand, when he did think of England, which was often during those years of hardship and disappointment, Jimmy always looked on them as essentially his own people, to whom, one day, he would return, having no one else. . . .

Mrs. Grimmer sipped her tea slowly, and asked for further particulars concerning the absent wanderer.

" Does he say what he proposes to do? "

Mrs. Marlow shook her head. " No, only that he's sick of knocking about, and thinks he will try his luck at home. It's very selfish of him, because he has never been a credit to us; and, of course, naturally, everyone will know he's our brother."

" What has he done that wasn't — wasn't quite the thing? " the visitor asked.

Mrs. Marlow looked a little puzzled. " Well, I don't know that there's anything, exactly — at least that way. Only, Luke Chapman and her husband met him in Calcutta three years ago — Mr. Chapman has a branch there, you know — and Luke told me that he was doing nothing, and living at a queer sort of hotel, where ships' officers and those sort of people stay, not at all the thing. Then, you see, he's done no good. He's just as poor as when he went out ten years ago."

" So he's done no harm and no good. Then you can keep an open mind about him, May. Meanwhile, if I were you, I should try and find him a wife with money. He's sure to be interesting, you know. Men who travel usually are. Let me know when he comes back, as I should like to meet him again. Well, good-bye, dear, and don't worry too much about your black sheep. The colour may come off, or you may be able to get him whitewashed."

" Edith Grimmer was very flippant about it," Mrs. Marlow complained to her husband that evening, after she had shown him Jimmy's letter and had heard his remarks thereon. " I didn't like her tone at all. She has grown rather coarse lately, since they have got into that new set. They dine in town a good deal now, and I'm sure they can't afford it. She's taken to smoking cigarettes, too."

Her husband, a small man with a waxed moustache and the most perfect fitting clothes, frowned heavily. There had been girls, in fact there were still some, who might blow whole clouds of cigarette smoke in his face and only evoke a laugh from him ; but they had nothing to do with his home life. Where the latter was concerned, he was very careful; and he fully agreed with May's prejudices. Such things injured one's position in the neighbourhood. " Edith is a very foolish woman," he said severely. "And Grimmer is little more sensible. He was talking a great deal of nonsense about South African mines when we were coming down in the train this evening.

Crossley and Merchant were in the carriage, and I am sure they were pleased when I took him up sharply. I do not know whether he is aware that I was interested in the promotion of the Umchabeze Gold Dredging Syndicate; if so, his remarks were positively insulting. It seems he lost money over it. So did other people; but I can't help that." He threw his cigar end into the fire with a rather vicious gesture.

His wife came across to his chair, put her hands on his shoulders, and kissed him gently on the forehead. " Never mind, dear. You mustn't let these silly people annoy you. I'm sorry now I worried you to-night about my brother, Jimmy. I might have left it until the morning, when you weren't tired."

He drew her face down to his and returned her kiss. She was perfectly content for him to be away all day, even for several days when he went golfing, and he was content to go; yet, in a sense, they were lovers still, after the fashion of those whose way through life Has been easy.

"You were quite right to mention it, dear," he said. " Of course we must do what we can for him, have him to stay here when he lands, and so on. I daresay he will be quite presentable, after all. Why, a man I know at the club, Heydon, Amos Heydon, was in the East for twelve years, in a bank I think, and you would never imagine he had been out of the City. He's got all our ways."

Mrs. Marlow sighed. " I hope you're right, Henry. You usually are, and you've had so much experience. But I wish we knew what he intended to do for a living. He is thirty now, or nearly that, and ought to be in a better position. The whole thing is most annoying. I must take care he does not tell the children stories which will make them dream at nights — Harold is sure to ask him for some, and you know what a memory the boy has. Then, too, we don't want Jimmy proposing to any of the nice girls we know, like Laura Stephens or May Cutler; for then we should have to confess that he had no means of any sort, and it would be horribly humiliating. See how well those young Cutlers have got on in their father's office. Of course, Edith Grimmer knows that Jimmy is a failure; but she won't talk about it."

Yet, at that very moment, Mrs. Grimmer was retailing the story of May's troubles to her husband and a couple of guests who had been dining with them.

' Jimmy always was a nice boy, not a bit of a prig. But he's not what you can call a success; and I fancy the Marlows won't want to exhibit io PEOPLE OF POSITION

him. Still, I shall have him to dinner and get some nice girls to meet him."

Grimmer laughed. He had not forgotten what had passed between Marlow and himself in the train, and he was far from forgiving his loss over the gold dredging syndicate. " Have him by all means, Edith, if you think it will annoy those people. Besides, a Grierson who was interesting would be quite a show animal."

Chapter II

JIMMY GRIERSON landed in England a broken man. What was almost worse, he was aware of the fact, and, whilst he resented the way in which Fate had dealt with him, he had no great hopes of altering things. He had drifted so long that, somehow, he supposed he must go on drifting. John Locke had stopped the process for a time, and given him something to stick to, something worth doing; but a bullet from an old Remington in the hands of a ragged Dago, a bullet probably aimed at someone else, had sent him adrift again. True, that same Dago had gone, a few seconds later, to whatever place there is reserved for his kind; but that did not alter matters; it avenged, perhaps, but it could not bring back, the one man besides his father for whom Jimmy had ever cared, who had ever understood him, and, therefore, been able to keep him from drifting.

His decision to return to England had been taken on the spur of the moment, without reflection; but he held to it, because no other course seemed to offer any better prospects. He knew,

ii perfectly well, that Locke's partner would not want to keep him on, and he shrank from the ordeal of searching for employment again. He had been through it so often before; and he had learnt, long since, that the man on the spot only gets the temporary billets; the permanent staff is always recruited at home. Moreover, he had the fevers of half a dozen different countries in his system, and the shock of Locke's death brought at least one of them to the surface. Two Dagos helped him on board ship, a wreck, and though, physically, he was much stronger at the end of the voyage, his nerves were far from being right.

London extended its welcome to him in the form of a drenching rain, and he shivered a little under the thin, ready-made overcoat he had bought from a German store on the Coast.

He had hoped that one of the family would have met the boat train, and carried him off to a real home; but, though there had been a welcoming hand for most of his fellow passengers, he, himself, scanned the crowd in vain for a familiar face. Even those who had come across the ocean with him seemed to forget him the moment they got out on to the platform. He became the stranger at once; so he stood to one side until they had all departed, feeling horribly alone. Still, he was home at last, in his own country, and he tried to work up a proper sense of elation as he waited in the station entrance, watching a porter hoisting his battered trunks on to a cab.

It was already evening, and the stream of people was flowing inwards through the gates of the terminus, London's workers returning to those dreary rows of villas in the suburbs, which, probably, seemed delightfully peaceful, almost rural, by comparison with the noise and grime of the City. Some were closing dripping umbrellas; others, having no umbrellas, shook the rain out of the brims of their hats, and turned down their soaking coat-collars as they came under shelter. All looked more or less draggled and weary; yet you could see that they were on their way to their own houses, where there would be someone to welcome them, someone who had been waiting for them. Suddenly all Jimmy's sense of loneliness came back, and he shivered again as the cab splashed out of the muddy station yard, towards the hotel to which he had told his people to address their letters.

There was a letter from each of his sisters awaiting him, and he tore them open more eagerly than was his wont. Ida, writing from her home in Northampton, invited him to come down for a week at some vague future date; one of the children was unwell, and until it recovered it was impossible to fix a day. Still, they would be delighted to see him again. Her letters always had a note of stiffness in them, which was purely unintentional, or1 rather, purely natural, reflecting the one salient point in her character.

May's letter began with an apology. They were so sorry they could not ask him down that night; but they had a large dinner party on, and he would have made an odd man. Doubtless, too, he would be tired after his journey and disinclined for such a function. The following day, however, they would be glad to have him. It was forty minutes' run from Victoria Station, and she would send the car to meet him at the other end.

Jimmy thrust the letters into his pocket, and followed his luggage up to his room, which was a perfect example of its kind, containing the irreducible minimum of furniture an hotel guest could require, and having, as its sole wall decoration, a notice imploring you to switch out the electric light when you did not actually require it. He was disappointed, though not annoyed. The excuses appeared genuine, if rather inadequate, and he never suspected that May had spent the afternoon in a distressing state of anxiety lest he should change his mind, and, instead of going to the hotel, come straight down in time for dinner.

" There is no telling what he may be like," she said to her sister-in-law, who was staying in the house. " We must see him first before we introduce him to people here. Why, he may not even possess a dress suit."

Jimmy dined in the hotel. The dining-room was very empty, and he had a corner of it all to himself, a miserable contrast to the cheerful, crowded saloon of the mail steamer he had quitted that morning. He ate very little, and would not wait for coffee. He felt he must get outside that gloomy barn of a hostelry, must go where there was life and movement, and, if he could find it, society.

The rain had ceased, and, as he came out of the dull side street into the Strand, he experienced for the first time that strange thrill, excitement, anticipation, almost exhilaration, which only the returned wanderer who comes back to the Greatest of Cities after years of absence, can know. When he had driven up to the hotel, the day population had been hurrying home through the downpour; now, though the street and the pavements were still glistening with the wet, and there was another deluge to come, London, the night side of London, was out as if there was no such things as rain and mud and sodden footwear.

Jimmy stood a couple of minutes, watching it, taking it all in, as though he had never seen it before. A policeman on point duty eyed him curiously, yet with no hint of suspicion. Most men, and practically every woman, remembered Jimmy's face when they met him a second time. He was not handsome, far from it; but, in some indefinable way, his grey eyes suggested sympathy, whilst the poise of his head spoke of determination verging on obstinacy.

He was looking at the scene as a whole, rather than at individuals, and the policeman remarked, with a kind of grim satisfaction, that he let the women pass him unnoticed. Even when one turned back at the next corner and repassed him slowly, he seemed not to see her. Just as he was turning away, however, a girl's face did catch his eye, and, unconsciously, he stopped again. She was coming out of a restaurant a few yards away, accompanied by a man in evening dress, though she herself was in an ordinary walking costume. Tall and very graceful, with dark eyes and a perfect profile, she formed a curious contrast to her short and rather stout companion. It was only a question of a minute before they had got into a waiting hansom and driven away; but, somehow, the incident worried Jimmy. He wondered who she was, what she was, and was so preoccupied with her that as he walked on eastwards, he hardly noticed that he left the Strand, with its life and hurry, for the comparative quietude of Fleet Street by night. He had come out of the hotel intending to have a drink at the first likely-looking bar he came to; but he was half-way between the Griffin and Ludgate Circus before he remembered he was thirsty.

" Hullo, Grierson, my best of piracy experts. So you've come to Fleet Street at last, as I always said you would. Sneddon, let me introduce Mr. Grierson, an old colleague of mine on a short-lived paper in Shanghai. He knows more Chinese pirates than any man I ever met, not to mention gunrunners and opium smugglers; and he's perfectly invaluable to fill a column when the news has run short." The speaker, a man of about Jimmy's own age, with a keen, smooth-shaven face and restless eyes, shook hands heartily, and ordered another round of drinks.

At the sound of his voice, Jimmy's face lit up with genuine pleasure. He had known Douglas Kelly well on the China Coast, when the other was editing a local paper for a starvation wage, and, as Kelly said, he had written him many a column to fill up space with when both copy and advertisements were short. The British and American community, being absorbed in trade, and knowing nothing of literature, and often very little of the English language, as is the way of its kind, had failed to see the genius under the wild and not too temperate exterior, and had frowned on the young editor as a rather scandalous person entirely devoid of commercial instincts; but Jimmy had always stood by him, and when a sudden access of wealth, in the form of a draft for sixty pounds for a series of short stories in an American magazine, had enabled Kelly to say good-bye both to the China Coast and to his creditors, Grierson has regretted him as much, or even more, than had the latter.

" So you've come to Fleet Street, at last," Kelly repeated. " I knew you would. And I suppose you are going to enter into competition with me. I believe you are the one man of whom I am really afraid."

Jimmy laughed. " I only landed to-day, and I wandered down here by chance. As for writing, I have done very little since I saw you off on that tramp steamer. There were two or three acquaintances of yours watching the mail boat next day on the chance of finding you."

" Herbst, I suppose, and the other squarehead from the hotel — what was his name? — oh, Heine, and that uncleanly Greek tailor. They were a dull lot, and I've forgotten them long ago. Tell me about yourself. Where have you been?"

" India, Australia, and the Dago Republics, where I saw the beginning and the end of various presidents. I made a couple of trips on a blockade runner, and went on a hidden treasure hunt. It sounds all right, thrilling and exciting, yet, when I size it up in my own mind, it comes down to a record of fever and disappointment; with a few purple patches which were so good that, somehow, they seem to have come out of another man's book, instead of being my own experiences."

Kelly stared into his glass. " I know," he said very quietly. " I know the game, though I got out of it sooner than you did, being wiser, as I always told you I was. I suppose you know I'm famous? "