CHAPTER .2

About a fortnight had passed since Mr. de Bohun had given his daughter Marjorie the family mascot. It was Friday, the 30th of January, 1930: the weather unpleasantly cold, overcast, with a threat of snow, and the dark already set in.

After the heavy strain of an English working week, especially in Parliament, complete relaxation is necessary from Friday after lunch to the Monday's return to town by the afternoon. Nor was any mansion more fitted to recuperate the exhausted energies of statesman or politician than Paulings.

It had been built in the classical manner some twenty years before the decline of the Parrall fortunes, which got their worst blow after the year 1745. It was classical and highly symmetric; its fine great doors had been designed to stand slightly above the level of the drive and looked upon a shallow sweep of stone stairway. Upon either side of them, windows in the Palladian fashion, with a pediment above each, announced the wealth within; a hanging wreath of flowers and fruit in stone went the length of the great wall, and against the sky was a balustrade.

That was all very well for the eighteenth century; but the nineteenth and the new wealth of the de Bohuns put on useful excrescences. There was a bulb to the east, and yet another bulb at the end of that, where new stables, now a garage, were added to new offices, and on the west there had been built, a little after the Crimean War, something like half as much again of house room, in a manner pleasingly different from all the rest. Here a new and more convenient door gave into a large hall, not without suits of armour purchased at considerable expense, and giving by various doors into the larger, older, and grander rooms of the house, into a panelled dining-room, a large drawing-room, too often changing in style, and on the extreme west a room very rarely used save for the reception of whatever was not wanted about the living parts of the house, or—in theory at least—for the complete seclusion of its master, when—in theory—his heavy responsibilities demanded heavy concentration.

This room we must know, for it was here that blind Fate, an all-seeing Providence, or—more probably—a lively and mischievous sprite had laid the scene of the loss of the Emerald.

The room was not large; it was in good proportions, for it dated from a time when we were still civilized. It was strangely apparelled. There was a large, rather shabby desk, at which the Home Secretary was supposed to write and where he did at least leave accumulated a few old letters and kept them down with a paper-weight of Chinese crystal, carefully chiselled into the form of a little god who smiled.

There were five deep chairs of the sort called lounge, upholstered in a leather almost black. There were as many more comfortable common chairs. There was a really good fireplace brought over from one of the old houses in Dublin, of marble with a Bacchic frieze. There was in front of that really good fireplace a rug made of the skin of a polar bear, singularly fierce in its open red mouth of ferocious grin, its gleaming teeth and staring eyes—the room was so deserted that no one had knocked that head to pieces with his feet. It seemed almost new, fresh from the Arctic.

There were six windows looking to the west, south, and north, and coming down close to the floor with deep sills forming seats after the fashion of our fathers. For the room projected out into the park upon three sides and the western one faced a long grass path between an avenue of trees. There were one or two tables which did nothing, after the fashion of most tables—outside dining-rooms, and even there they do no work which I can recommend. There was above the mantelpiece one of those looking-glasses of the First French Empire, round, lens-like, and diminishing the picture of all the room. It had a round, broad, gilded rim and upon its summit an eagle of the sort that flew from the Pyramids to Cadiz, from Cadiz to Paris, from Paris to Moscow, and from Moscow back again.

The floor was of the sort called, I believe, in the trade, antique Austrian parquet. That is, it consisted of some half dozen slabs of cheap pine firmly bolted together, on the top of it a veneer of herring-bone Baltic oak, chemically treated to simulate the age and dignity of Schönbrunn. The thing was designed for rapid laying down and lifting and fitted together simply upon joists with what are—again technically—called invisible screws, but at the corners of the room the contraption was held by certain clamps which wanted a hell of a lot of hammering down when it was fixed. On the surface of this dignified flooring lay, carelessly chucked about, a few Oriental rugs from Brighton and one charming little Chinese mat from London, damnably out of place and swearing with the rest of the room like a cat run up a tree from a dog.

What else was there in the room? Ah, yes, there was a parrot cage, and if you are wise, unfortunate reader, you will pay particular attention to that parrot cage, for later on it has a speaking part.

It hung by a chain from the ceiling against the west window looking out on the long avenue, and within it lived—not melancholy, for he was too stupid, but in a mixture of stolid age, indifference, and nothingness—the parrot Attaboy. Nor must I omit either the appearance of the parrot Attaboy, but only later can I tell you how the parrot Attaboy came by his name.

Of his lineage I know nothing, nor even of his age. He might well have been one hundred. Certainly there was nothing young about his eyes or gestures, and I have always heard that parrots, like family servants and others whom the gods hate, live to a great age.

Aunt Amelia had made a pompous present of him three years before to her beloved niece Marjorie after her beloved Marjorie had reached her fifteenth birthday; she bestowed not only the parrot but the cage, and simultaneously a kiss upon her niece's forehead. At first the recipient of the fowl did not appreciate the gift. But love will grow. The thing—by which I mean the cage and the parrot and all—was hung by a hook—at Aunt Amelia's expense—to the roof of this room simply because it was so little used.

It happened precisely at the opening of the flat racing season, three years before the opening of the story which you now have the ecstatic pleasure of reading, that young Lord Galton, Marjorie's cousin—recently acceded to the title by the sudden and unexpected death of his father from I know not what forms of excess—had pulled a horse.

He was one of our modern youths, loving the risks of life and living dangerously. Therefore had he pulled a horse and the horse he had pulled—his very own—he had named Attaboy.

It was never brought home to him, as the phrase goes; that is, everybody knew that it was true. Attaboy was famous at Paulings—a sort of family crime to be proud of—a word used as often as any other for the moment at Paulings; and the poor old parrot—we have no initiative in age—picked it up and refused to learn anything else.

In a way it was awkward. Tommy Galton would come to his uncle's house from time to time, and when he came it was rather important to keep him out of the West Room during daylight. For the parrot had a way of croaking quite suddenly, in the strong colonial accent of his tribe, "Attaboy!" at the most unexpected moments. However, the parrot Attaboy possessed a cover of black felt carefully put over his cage at night, and whenever it found itself in darkness it was habitually silent after the honourable fashion of parrots—and, after all, the room was not commonly used. There was little risk of Lord Galton's being in it save after the black cover was over the detestable bird.

Of Attaboy the parrot—Attaboy the horse had already gone to stud—Marjorie grew fond. For one thing, she was not unattracted by her cousin Tom, and Attaboy made a sort of bond between them. For another, she was at the age when women can be fond of anything, even Tommy Galton, let alone a parrot.

So much for Attaboy and the deserted room.

It has been remarked—without payment—by more than one philosopher that the great events of this world arrive through the action of agents who did not intend them. And this you will find to be true of Attaboy, of the Polar Bear, and the deserted West Room.

I think it only fair to add, since I am writing a detective story, that when Aunt Amelia visited her brother the Home Secretary, which was, all totted up, for something like a third of the year, she was given the principal guest room, known in the family as Bannockburn, which lay immediately above.

So much for Paulings and its now famous, then deserted, West Room; its Parrot, its Polar Bear.

I return to that winter week-end, that cold January Friday and the few gathered in the great drawing-room of Paulings round its tea table.

It was not a party: it was a family meeting of a very few people.

Old Lady Bolter, a much elder sister of the Home Secretary, known among the Great as "Aunt Amelia," we have seen was half a permanency. She had already given them three weeks of herself a month before; and she had now settled down to another bout. They suffered her in this fashion often enough; but as for her, she knitted. I have read in one of those books which are published anonymously upon the people of that world, that she had been famous in King Edward's day for her wit. Maybe. She would hardly be famous for it now. However, she was not nearly so blind nor so deaf as she pretended to be. She had met most people up to the Great War and resembled a sheep.

Victoria Mosel was there, Marjorie's friend of another generation, still sinuously moving round and round from house to house forever. There were two men, close relatives, cousins: an elder and a younger.

The first was the hippo-phile, the expert in things of the Turf whom you have just heard of, young Lord Galton, the son of the Home Secretary's first cousin, Cecily, who had brought to Algernon, first—and very nearly last—Lord Galton, a sufficient dowry, drawn from the then ample funds of the de Bohuns, for her father had been the younger brother of the Home Secretary. But this first—and very nearly last—Lord Galton indeed was dead, and so was Lady Galton his wife, and the young man, now his own father, found his inheritance less than he might have desired. The Galtons, wisely taking their title from their name, had not done well since they had left Liverpool; they had left that town too early. So here he was, a tall, dark young man, a little too solid and certain of himself, and—unhappily—attached to racing, a pastime for which his fortune might have been sufficient fifty years ago, but was not at all sufficient to-day.

It was not every house in England in which Lord Galton would have been welcomed; but family counts, and he was here, with his rather sullen face, strong chin and fixed mouth, and sub-challenging eyes. They were sub-challenging because of Attaboy the horse. He had not suffered as he might have done; he went a good deal less to one or two of his better clubs than he had done before the rumour spread, but he was still a constant member of the Posts and gambled there assiduously and with some success. Yet was he always embarrassed, and his embarrassment did not help his reputation.

He sat at the tea table that afternoon, fighting the boredom of Aunt Amelia with what was toleration if it was not courtesy, and looking at Marjorie without admiration but perhaps with intention. Now and then he cast a furtive sharp look, when he thought it was safe, at Victoria Mosel. She always knew too much, and as she stood there in front of the fire, with a sham vacant look on her shrewd face, and the eternal cigarette hanging from her lip, he wished her farther.

The second guest at that table, next to the Home Secretary himself, was yet another cousin, but a whole first cousin this time—the only son of the youngest uncle of all, who had married very young and very imprudently. Wherefore was the said cousin, William by name, unable to go into the City, and, compelled to become a Don, had become by profession a professor. For a first cousin he was rather absurdly older than the head of the family. The Home Secretary, who had himself married late, was not more than fifty-five; but the Don, William de Bohun, Fellow of Burford and holding the Chair of Crystallography, was quite ten years older—perhaps a little more. He had a simple pride in the excellence of his birth, a distracted manner due to his immense learning—not indeed in the general field of the Humanities or the Arts, but upon the particular point of dodekahedral crystals—and even of octohedrals he had a smattering. Such was his fame that he had been mentioned more than once in the proceedings of learned societies abroad and had been elected Corresponding Member to the Crystallographic Society of Berne.

Unmarried, with a small private income, the poor nest egg of his improvident father, amply endowed, with no pupils to speak of, and the dodekahedral hobby, he would have been as happy as it is possible for an atheist approaching death to be, had it not been for the existence of that infamous charlatan, Bertram Leader, not even a Fellow of St. Filbert's, and mere Reader to the University in Amorphic Crystallogy.

I need not insist on the gulf that separates crystallography, a true science, from crystallogy, its base mercantile application. To the one, as was but right, a chair was attached; a chair founded by Z. Leizler the philanthropist, before his flight, and now occupied by the aged figure of the de Bohun. The other was thought hardly worth a Readership at £600 a year, and only under secret threats had that wealthy college, St. Filbert's, been persuaded by certain City men whom B. Leader in his turn had threatened, to cough up. It took its revenge by admitting B. Leader to its high table, and refusing to elect him a Fellow.

He it was who, waging secret war upon university caste, dug his revengeful fangs into the Professor's naked soul. He it was who spotted with relentless eye all the misprints in the Professor's papers, and denounced them as enormities of ignorance in the British Crystallographic Review, with which is combined the Crystal Gazetteer and Bulletin. He it was who exploded de Bohun's ancient German doctrines with the recent research of horrid Dagoes, and exposed it to derision whenever he lectured to a class of more than a dozen; for his department being mixed up with commerce, there was money in it, and a few undergraduates on the scent of the same; not so the Professor's department. Now two, now one student, sought the well of learning, and sometimes none.

On the other hand, Professor de Bohun could—and did—nourish a burning happiness in his heart to remember that the infamous B. Leader was of no lineage and had no private income at all. Nay, worse; an accent—almost a twang.

But alas! for the alloyed happiness of risen man, in whom the highest have something in them of the ape, (Poggles General View, Vol. II, Ch. XXII, p. 222). B. Leader himself nourished a secret burning joy in his heart; for he had found out—what the great thought was peculiar to their own circle—the dreadful story of William de Bohun and the Mullingar Diamond.

Because he loved crystals—not because he loved wealth: because the Mullingar Diamond was the largest of its yellow kind in the world, and had a flaw which was confidently reported to be due—incredible!—to a bubble, William de Bohun had, eight years before, while stopping at the Abbey as an honoured guest, pinched the Mullingar Diamond—not for a permanency, but to make a close examination of the incredible bubble. He had returned it, but already his action had got known, and some people were cold to him. The less instructed among the great whispered that he had been a famous thief in youth; the more instructed believed that his profound science had produced a momentary lapse. The Family knew, but had long forgiven him; indeed, there was nothing to forgive—they said.

Let it be added that Professor de Bohun had acquired, from so much concentrated study upon dodekahedral crystals—with fatiguing excursions among the octohedrals—a pleasing habit of repeating a word, never less than three times, and sometimes six or eight.

In dress the old gentleman was careless, and, though perpetually washing, never apparently clean. However, he did shave—save for the whiskers which were the badge of his attainments in the learned world.

There was expected a third man, as young as, or younger than, Lord Galton, and of a very different and meaner kind, a certain Hamish McTaggart, who had become suddenly famous within the narrow circle of the people in the know, because the Prime Minister, upon reading an article of his upon Protection had said—in the full hearing of the very narrow circle—"This is the only man on Protection whom I really understand." The article had appeared by the order of McTaggart's master in The Howl, whence it may be rightly assumed that McTaggart knew no more of economics than would a warthog of Botticelli. Hence the lucid style which the Prime Minister had saluted with such discovering joy.

His argument had been very simple. If you prevent things coming in to the sacred Island, Albion, the Albionese will have to make these things for themselves, and that means more employment, doesn't it? The truth had struck the Prime Minister with far more effect thus set down in clean print, than when he had heard it, as he had heard it a thousand times, from the proprietor of The Howl, whom he had himself so rightly ennobled.

Therefore was Hamish McTaggart now glowing with a vivid, though, alas! restricted fame.

He himself was getting heartily tired of it. It had halved his income—that is, it had brought it down below five hundred pounds a year. No one would print him except upon the subject of Protection, and he had to write in the way that was really understood. And he was allowed to write only in those papers peculiar to the little inner circle with the little inner circulation corresponding—and there's no money in that! When he wanted to write about tigers, and get his expenses paid free to the East and a lump sum—a job he would have got for the asking two years before, when he wrote by the thousand words, to order, just after leaving the University—he was asked what on earth he knew about it? Tigers! And was bundled back to Protection.

Therefore was his future black; but in the little circle he was a sort of lion. Victoria Mosel was always talking of him; Marjorie was eager to see him once and then to discard his company for ever; Lady Bolter, full of the intellectual Victorian time, wanted to be able to say that she had been in the same room with a man of whom the Prime Minister himself had said that he was the only man whose writing he really understood. The Home Secretary had met him once or twice in other people's houses; Marjorie herself and her aunt were the only two for whom he was still quite a stranger.

"What train is he coming by?" said Tommy Galton, sunk into a deep chair.

The Home Secretary looked at his watch, then at the clock, noted they did not correspond, frowned, and said he'd be here any time.

"I'll give you evens," said Victoria Mosel, "that he calls you Dee Boe Hunn."

"Done!" said Tommy Galton, putting up a finger.

"Bradburys?" said Vic, sucking a pencil. "Gimme a bit o' paper."

Tommy Galton wrote on his cuff. "That'll do," he said.

"I often wish," bleated Aunt Amelia, "that you young people could have met John Bright. I was only in the schoolroom, of course, but my dear father had no scruples in——"

She was not allowed to go on.

"We can't all sit here kicking our heels till he's kind enough to parade," said Marjorie, with girlish simplicity.

"No one wants you to," said Vic, delicately tearing off the last cigarette like a plaster, and sticking in another one. "I'm clamped down. Me for Hamish!"

The Professor suddenly gave tongue. His exceedingly pale old eyes were wide open, and his foolish mouth almost as wide.

"Oh, I think it'll be exceedingly interesting—exceedingly interesting," he quavered. "Exceedingly interesting to meet one of the new generation of ... shall we say, ah! journalists? Yes, journalists.... Journalists."

"Yes, Bill," replied young Galton. "We'll say journalists." Marjorie yawned and stretched.

"Well, I'm not going to wait any longer," she said, when the buzz of a motor was heard on the gravel outside, the approach of middle-class feet, the door solemnly thrown open as for a dancing bear, and the unfortunate McTaggart appeared, his name preceding him.

The Home Secretary, who had preserved some of the traditions, unfolded himself painfully from his chair and stood up, greeting McTaggart with the wan smile of the public man.

"Good evening, Mr. de Bohun." And behold! he pronounced it Deboon. With the business-like rapidity that became her so well, Victoria Mosel handed a crushed ball of three one-pound notes undemonstratively to Tom Galton, who stretched forward to take it and elaborately crossed out the note on his cuff.

Young McTaggart stood there a moment, not daring to sit down, suffering great torture. Nor did any of the company relieve it, though Aunt Amelia, to do her justice, did tell him how glad they all were to see him, much as a spokesman for the Divinities might welcome any clod.

The poor devil was out of place. He did not know why he had come; he had come because he was pressed, because he had nothing else to do, because he was lonely, because he had heard of Paulings and wanted to see it, because he thought such a visit to such a house might improve his prospects; and now that he was here, he wished it had never been built.

He was never at his ease with his social superiors. His father and grandfather had been mere soldiers; his great-grandfather one of Nelson's captains; his father again a very small laird in Ayrshire—but one had to go back as far as that to get to gentility. He dressed awkwardly, and he knew it. He never seemed to know quite where to put the hands and feet at the extremities of his uncouth frame. He also had a rather irritating trick of never looking anybody in the face. It was nervousness, and came of writing too much. He was, I regret to say, terrified of women, but especially of Ladies; and he had already spent the first hours of his exile in wondering why on earth he had allowed himself to be over-persuaded and had come.

So much for the tea table and those that sat round it. The Home Secretary, damnably full of courtesy but rather silent, sat helpless; Victoria Mosel still stood by the fire surveying them all—and particularly McTaggart—not unsaturnine for the others, but with a singular touch of kindness in her slits of eyes for the embarrassed boy. Then she recovered the firm pressure of her lips, emphasised by the drooping cigarette, and the others looked on inanely or surlily, according as God had made them.

If you think I am going to describe to you in any detail how they passed their time between tea and dinner, you are mistaken. Some books are written like that, and there is an art of making them readable. I have it not.To action, therefore—to the Emerald!