Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (462 page)

“They must be rather a nasty kind of a people,” Mr. Salt said.

“That makes it all the more beautiful,” Macdonald said.

“I don’t understand,” Mr. Salt answered.

“Why, it’s as plain as the nose on your face,” Macdonald exclaimed gaily. “You see, the Galizians are thoroughly sick of the republican government. They thought they were going to have some fun, but they find they’re being governed by twelve people, each one as solemn and dull as a Methodist minister.”

“I am the son of a Methodist minister myself,” Mr. Salt said gloomily.

“Precisely,” Macdonald encountered him. “So you know how dull it is to be governed by one of them. Think of your Sundays at home, and then think of being governed by twelve at once.”

“Well, I give you the Sundays at home,” Mr. Salt conceded.

“The point is,” Macdonald said, “that it’s all a matter of roads, really. The Galizians will take their king back with the actresses and motor car because of his dashing record! He won’t really be dashing, but he’ll start out to make roads. He’ll pretend that the roads are meant for exceeding the speed limit on, and help them to get more quickly to the bull-fights and the cock-fights and the dagger- fights and all the other jolly rows. But all the time insidiously the roads will be spreading the... the blessings of civilisation. Why, in twenty years’ time the whole Galizian nation will be a population of skilled mechanics. I should not wonder,” Macdonald concluded, “if they didn’t ask you to become their prime minister.”

“It sounds rather sensible,” Mr. Salt said. “But you don’t seriously mean to say that revolutions turn upon such little things as that?”

“Oh, come, come,” Macdonald said, “you’re much too experienced a man not to know what it is that wins the great heart of the people. The heart of another is a dark forest, it’s true; but the heart of a people is a child’s plaything. You can turn it right or left with any catchword. Why, if Mr. Spenlow could win the Derby, or kill a bull in the bull-ring, his descendants would be safe upon the throne of Galizia for the next thousand years!”

“Mr. Spenlow couldn’t do either,” the chauffeur said decidedly.

“Of course he couldn’t,” Macdonald answered. “So we have got to do the next best thing for him. Just be off now, while I dress, and tell Mr. Spenlow that I will be with him and Miss Coward at nine o’clock in the Long Room at the Ritz, and I’ll do my best to bring a lady with me.”

Mr. Salt, relapsing into the efficient chauffeur, said: “Yes, Your Excellency,” and opened the door.

“Oh, and Salt,” Macdonald added, “in the mean time, just think of a nice artistic accident that will make a maximum of smash with a minimum of danger to Mr. Spenlow and myself and two ladies.”

Again Mr. Salt said: “Yes, Your Excellency, I’ll do my best.”

CHAPTER I
V

IN the cellar-like room Macdonald set about dressing himself for dinner. But before he did so he took a look round the mews into which his door opened.

It was full of hansom cabs getting ready for night work, and it communicated with Regent Street by a narrow passage running under a tall shop. Upon the whole, the premises were exactly what Macdonald needed. He wished, upon the one hand, to present to the world the aspect of a needy and debauched adventurer who had got hold of a young and very wealthy exiled sovereign and was driving him very speedily to the dogs. On the other hand, he wished to be able to hold interviews with a large number- of wealthy and influential people in such a manner as in no way to attract the suspicions of the Galizian Government.

The Resiliens Motor Cars Company, of which he had got himself named general manager, was a perfectly genuine affair, of which the largest shareholder was Mr. Edward U. Dexter, who had promised to find half the money for the Galizian counter-revolution. Mr. Dexter was an American financier whose home was in Vienna, where Sergius Mihailovitch had met him at a ball of the American Embassy. Mr. Dexter himself was rich, but not fabulously rich. He had made a good deal of money by cornering such little considered drugs as turmeric, which is a principal ingredient of curry powder, or such little considered articles as soda- water syphons. By the latter exploit — he had bought up the world supply for a year, and had raised the price of each syphon by one-half a cent or one farthing or two centimes or three pfennigs, as the case might be — he had made just a quarter of a million sterling.

It was in this modest and unobtrusive way that Mr. Dexter made his bread. It was never his ambition to be the king of anything — neither a steel nor a pork king, nor yet even a tobacco king. But his secret ambition certainly was to marry his daughter to an English peer. He had, however, found English peers rather difficult to get hold of in Vienna or New York. Austrian and German nobles did not appeal to him. Though an American, he was sufficiently Anglo-Saxon to see that it is only the gold of British coronets that is really genuine twenty-four carat metal, though he was beginning to think that he might have to content himself with a French marquis. At the present moment, the comer in syphons having come to its end, Mr. Dexter had a good deal of loose capital in hand, and he had come to London to see whether it would not be possible to purchase for his daughter at least an English viscount. It was none of his money that he intended to put into Macdonald’s scheme, but he was the European agent for at least two United States monarchs who had their eye on the copper that was to be found in the centre of the republic of Galizia, and if Mr. Dexter gave it as his opinion that this was a good gamble, the insignificant sum of eight million sterling would be found at once. He would be able to draw a cheque for it and be perfectly certain that the two American magnates would meet it when it came home. But as against this sum Macdonald had to raise a certain amount of money on his side in order to prove his bona fides. The actual amount did not very much matter. The present speculation was that Sergius Mihailovitch should raise eight million sterling against Mr. Dexter’s forty million dollars. But Mr. Dexter was not going to be exacting in this matter. There was plenty of money available, and Mr. Dexter was going to be quite contented with the actual sight of twelve and a half million dollars in the hands of Macdonald and the Queen-Mother.

Sergius Mihailovitch, however, didn’t know that he hadn’t got to raise the larger sum, and, whilst in his brilliantly lit cellar he got himself into his dress clothes, he laughed brilliantly to himself at the thought of that immoderate sum of money. It was like a colossal joke. By taking a good deal of trouble he might be able to raise £500 of his own, and he couldn’t at that moment see where to go to put his hands upon another half-crown. He hadn’t so far got any associates. He himself was almost the entire conspiracy, with the exception of a Galizian marquis called Da Pinta, who was grand chamberlain to the exiled king, and who had had all his Galizian estates confiscated at the revolution. The Queen-Mother allowed him £120 a year as a salary.

The Queen-Mother herself, formerly the Duchess Eulalia de Bourbon, was certainly not going to put a penny into the enterprise, and she was not going to allow her son to put a halfpenny. She was quite comfortable where she was, with a large town house in Lowndes Square and Breston Castle in Buckinghamshire, as well as £150,000 a year safely invested all in British consols. She had never known anything like such a feeling of peace and security in Galizia. And she was not going to sacrifice a penny of it in order to return to that dismal country. Macdonald and his plans she regarded with a benevolent neutrality. If Sergius Mihailovitch could put the king back on the throne, she would be remarkably pleased, for it would mean a certain increase of income, and even if they were forced once more to flee in an omnibus from the dirty little palace of Flores, the capital of Galizia, she would probably have contrived even before that time to have added something considerable to their capital. But the royal lady was perfectly determined to retain intact No 72, Lowndes Square, Breston Castle, and the comfortable sum of money in consols. Besides, the Queen-Mother was a thorough Londoner. Until her marriage with the late king she had always lived with her father, the Duc de Bourbon, in Port- man Square; and for years after her accession to the throne of Galizia, she had not been able to sleep for want of the sound of the buses running down Baker Street. She didn’t want anything better, really, than to go to mass every morning in the Jesuits’ Church at Spanish Place, and to spend every afternoon in her drawing-room with three old French ladies and a couple of young English priests. So Macdonald, fastening his tie, laughed to think how he was setting out upon a high adventure.

It had begun three months before, when he had gone to Vienna to conduct the gipsy girl to the Grand Duke, who had been at that time in Moscow. Macdonald had spent two successive evenings in the Café Regentz because it had not been the season in Vienna, and he had not been able to find a soul that he knew in the city. On the first evening he had made the acquaintance of the Marquis da Pinta, who had sat at the table opposite him, feeling ill and solitary. The Marquis da Pinta had been sent to Vienna to take out of pawn a number of the Galizian crown jewels that the Queen-Mother had pledged as soon as the revolution seemed probable.

On the second evening Macdonald had got into conversation with Dexter, whom he knew slightly, and who was detained in that city by the winding-up of the affairs of his soda-water syphon corner. The Marquis da Pinta had put the idea of the counter-revolution into Macdonald’s head, and Macdonald in turn had passed it on to Mr. Dexter.

Probably nothing would have come of it had Mr. Dexter not read in the
New York Herald
that a brilliant dinner had been given in Nauheim by the Russian Grand Duke, upon whom he had remembered to have heard Macdonald say that he was an attendant. At this dinner the
Herald
had reported that there were present the Duke of Kintyre, Lord Bilsington, Viscount Kingston, the Hon. Cecil Buller, and Macdonald himself. Mr. Dexter had immediately made his wife and daughter pack their trunks, and by the next morning they were in Wiesbaden.

The Grand Duke had good-naturedly received Mr. Dexter with much cordiality because he passed as a friend of Macdonald’s, and this had given Mr. Dexter great satisfaction. Moreover, Macdonald had been able to introduce him to Viscount Kingston and Mr. Buller. He had not been able to bring him in contact with either the Duke or Lord Bilsington, for at that time Sergius Mihailovitch had not known either of these gentlemen. The
Herald’s
reporter had been mistaken in saying that Macdonald was present at the Grand Duke’s dinner. At the last moment he had been detained because of an attack of nerves on the part of the Countess his wife.

Thus Sergius Mihailovitch laughed over his evening tie at the thought of his gallant little band of adventurers. There were exactly three of them by now — himself, the Marquis da Pinta, a little, miserable, yellow Galizian who suffered all the time from fits of malaria, and shivered perpetually until his teeth ached. And there was also by now Mr. Salt, the King’s chauffeur. Those three were going to set a king on his throne, and at the thought it seemed to Sergius Mihailovitch that that was the happiest moment of his life. He wondered what other ragged companions he was going to pick up for this journey, and he was thoroughly glad that his bed that night was going to be some straw in the corner of the room. It added to the gay irresponsibility of the expedition.

It wanted twenty minutes of nine, and Macdonald put on his coat and waistcoat, took a black cape from a nail, clapped open his opera-hat, and let himself out into the mews. The cabs had all driven off. In the dark passage leading to Regent Street he made out an expensively dressed woman standing doing something to her hair beneath her hat. As Macdonald passed her, her parasol, which had been leaning against the wall, slipped to the ground with a rattle that re-echoed in the dark vaulting of the passage. She made a quick instinctive movement to stop its fall, and so, at the same moment, her reticule of gilded links fell on to the pavement and a large coil of hair on to her shoulder. Macdonald recovered both the umbrella and the reticule, and held them out amiably towards her.

“Oh, do hold them for a minute!” she said in a childish voice. “I have been trying to do up my hair for the last five minutes, and those things are always falling down.” She spoke German with a strong Viennese accent.

Macdonald remained balancing the things upon his hands for a full five minutes, whilst industriously she stuck hairpins into her hair. She appeared to be young, ample, and with a certain bravura in her gestures and in the tilt of her large hat. And her hair was extraordinary in amount. If Macdonald suspected that its brilliance might be due to some such agent as that called Peroxide he couldn’t doubt, on account of its obvious weight and vividness, that it was really attached to her person. She appeared to pay him no particular attention, and at last he said amiably:

“I’ve got to get, you know, to dinner some time to-night.”

“You can always take a taxi,” she answered pleasantly. “You gentlemen are never really in a hurry. I could tell you were a gentleman from the way you sauntered along.” From her voice she appeared to be a mere child, and Macdonald answered jokingly:

“You ought to have said that you could tell I was a gentleman from the kind way I picked up your parasol.”

“A waiter would have done that just as well,” she answered; “that is what waiters are made for. I am always dropping my things, and waiters are always picking them up.”

They walked together along the dark passage and into the glare of Regent Street. The girl was humming:

“Mein Herz das ist ein Biencnhaus...”

In Regent Street she said, “Gute Nacht,” and turned, rather lingeringly, to walk along the pavement.

“Wait a minute,” Macdonald said.

In the full glare of the London night her appearance was perfectly satisfactory. There could be no doubt as to her youth and little as to her irresponsibility.

“Do you think,” Macdonald asked, “that you could throw a peach at a head waiter? You appear to know a great deal about waiters.”

“I could throw anything at anybody,” she said, “but I should not like to hurt a head waiter’s feelings. My father was a head waiter in Vienna.”

“Oh, of course it will be made worth the head waiter’s while,” Macdonald said.

“Then he will probably like it,” she answered gravely.

“I am sure he’ll like it,” Macdonald corroborated; and he added, “And could you pour a glass of champagne over the head of a gentleman who will be at dinner?”

“I have never done it, but I have seen it done,” she answered.

There couldn’t, at that moment, be any doubt that she was a personage of extreme beauty. She was very fair, very large, and she had obviously any amount of spirit if she appeared to have no sense of humour.

‘‘This is very fortunate,” Macdonald said to himself. “I accept it as an omen.”

“It isn’t very difficult,” she was continuing....

“To accept it as an omen?” Macdonald asked.

“No! To pour a glass of champagne over a gentleman’s head,” she answered.

“Then you’d better,’’ Macdonald continued,” come and have dinner with me at the Ritz with Miss Flossie Coward.”

“At the Ritz!” she exclaimed; “and with Miss Flossie Coward! Oh, my God!”

And then Macdonald saw that her eyes positively filled with tears.