The Leithen Stories (62 page)

‘I see,' Leithen spoke at last. ‘You want a combination of detective, psychologist and sportsman.'

‘Yep.' Blenkiron beamed. ‘You've hit it. And there's just the one man I know that fills the bill. I've had a talk with Lord Clanroyden and he agrees. If you had been going on at the Bar we would have offered you the biggest fee that any brief ever carried, for there's money to burn in this business – though I don't reckon the fee would have weighed much with you. But you tell me you are shaking loose. Well, here's a job for your
leisure and, if I judge you right, it's the sort of job you won't turn down without a thought or two.'

Leithen raised his sick eyes to the eager face before him, a face whose abounding vitality sharpened the sense of his own weakness.

‘You've come a little late,' he said slowly. ‘I'm going to tell you something which Lord Clanroyden and the others don't know, and will never know – which nobody knows except myself and my doctor – and I want you to promise to keep it secret … I'm a dying man. I've only about a year to live.'

He was not certain what he expected, but he was certain it would be something which would wind up this business for good. He had longed to have one confidant, only one, and Blenkiron was safe enough. The sound of his voice speaking these grim words somehow chilled him, and he awaited dismally the conventional sympathy. After that Blenkiron would depart and he would see him no more.

But Blenkiron did not behave conventionally. He flushed deeply and sprang to his feet, upsetting his chair.

‘My God!' he cried. ‘If I ain't the blightedest, God-darned blundering fool! I might have guessed by your looks you were a sick man, and now I've hurt you in the raw with my cursed egotistical worries … I'm off, Sir Edward. Forget you ever saw me. God forgive me, for I won't soon forgive myself.'

‘Don't go,' said Leithen. ‘Sit down and talk to me. You may be the very man I want.'

HIS hostess noticed his slow appraising look round the table, which took each of the guests in turn.

‘You were here last in '29,' she said. ‘Do you think we have changed?'

Leithen turned his eyes to the tall woman at his left hand. Mrs Simon Ravelston had a beautiful figure, ill-chosen clothes, and the weather-beaten face of an English master of foxhounds. She was magnificently in place on horseback, or sailing a boat, or running with her beagles, but no indoor setting could fit her. Sprung from ancient New England stock, she showed her breeding in a wonderful detachment from the hubbub of life. At her own table she would drift into moods of reverie and stare into vacancy, oblivious of the conversation, and then when she woke up would turn such kind eyes upon
her puzzled interlocutor that all offences were forgiven. When her husband had been Ambassador at the Court of St James's she had been widely popular, a magnet for the most sophisticated young men; but of this she had been wholly unconscious. She was deeply interested in life and very little interested in herself.

Leithen answered, ‘Yes, I think you all look a little more fine-drawn and harder trained. The men, that is. The women could never change.'

Mrs Ravelston laughed. ‘I hope that you're right. Before the depression we were getting rather gross. The old Uncle Sam that we took as our national figure was lean like a Red Indian, but in late years our ordinary type had become round-faced, and puffy, and pallid, like a Latin John Bull. Now we are recovering Uncle Sam, though we have shaved him and polished him up.' Her eyes ran round the table and stopped at a youngish man with strong rugged features and shaggy eyebrows who was listening with a smile to the talk of a very pretty girl.

‘George Lethaby, for example. Thank goodness he is a career diplomat and can show himself about the world. I should like people to take him as a typical American.' She lowered her voice, for she was speaking now of her left-hand neighbour, ‘Or Bronson, here. You know him, don't you? Bronson Jane.'

Leithen glanced beyond his hostess to where a man just passing into middle life was peering at an illegible menu card. This was the bright particular star of the younger America, and he regarded him with more than curiosity, for he counted upon him for help. On paper Bronson Jane was almost too good to be true. He had been a noted sportsman and was still a fine polo player; his name was a household word in Europe for his work in international finance; he was the Admirable Crichton of his day and it was rumoured that in the same week he had been offered the Secretaryship of State, the Presidency of an ancient University, and the control of a great industrial corporation. He had chosen the third, but seemed to have a foot also in every other world. He had a plain sagacious face, a friendly mouth, and deep-set eyes, luminous and masterful.

Leithen glanced round the table again. The dining-room of the Ravelston house was a homely place; it had no tapestries or panelling, and its pictures were family portraits of small artistic
merit. In each corner there were marble busts of departed Ravelstons. It was like the rest of the house, and, like their country homes in the Catskills and on the Blue Ridge, a dwelling which bore the mark of successive generations who had all been acutely conscious of the past. Leithen felt that he might have been in a poor man's dwelling, but for the magnificence of the table flowers and silver and the gold soup plates which had once belonged to a King of France. He let his gaze rest on each of the men.

‘Yes,' he told his hostess, ‘you are getting the kind of face I like.'

‘But not the right colour perhaps,' she laughed. ‘Is that worry or too much iced water, I wonder?' She broke off suddenly, remembering her neighbour's grey visage.

‘Tell me who the people are,' he said to cover her embarrassment. ‘I have met Mr Jane and Mr Lethaby and Mr Ravelston.'

‘I want you to know my Simon better,' she said. ‘I know why you have come here – Mr Blenkiron told me. Nobody knows about it except in the family. The story is that Mr Galliard has gone to Peru to look into some pitchblende propositions. Simon is terribly distressed and he feels so helpless. You see, we only came back to America from England four months ago, and we have kind of lost touch.'

Simon Ravelston was a big man with a head like Jove, and a noble silvered beard. He was president of one of the chief private banking houses in the world, which under his great-grandfather had financed the first railways beyond the Appalachians, under his grandfather had salved the wreckage of the Civil War, and under his father had steadied America's wild gallop to wealth. He had a dozen partners, most of whom understood the technique of finance far better than himself, but on all major questions he spoke the last word, for he had the great general's gift of reducing complexities to a simple syllogism. In an over-worked world he seemed always to have ample leisure, for he insisted on making time to think. When others of his calling were spending twelve hectic hours daily in their offices, Simon would calmly go fishing. No man ever saw him rattled or hustled, and this Olympian detachment gave him a prestige in two continents against which he himself used to protest vigorously.

‘They think I'm wise only because I don't talk when I've
nothing to say,' he used to tell his friends. ‘Any fool these days can get a reputation if he keeps his mouth shut.'

He was happy because his mind was filled with happy interests; he had no itching ambitions, he did his jobs as they came along with a sincere delight in doing them well, and a no less sincere delight in seeing the end of them. He was the extreme opposite of the man whose nerves demand a constant busyness because, like a bicyclist, he will fall down if he stays still.

Leithen's gaze passed to a young man who had Simon's shape of head but was built on a smaller and more elegant scale. His hostess followed his eyes.

‘That's our boy, Eric, and that's his wife Delia, across the table. Pretty, isn't she? She has the southern complexion, the real thing, which isn't indigestion from too much hot bread at breakfast. What's he doing? He's on the Johns Hopkins staff and is making a big name for himself in lung surgery. Ever since a little boy he's been set on doctoring and nothing would change him. He had a pretty good training – Harvard – two years at Oxford – a year in Paris – a long spell in a Montreal hospital. That's a new thing about our boys, Sir Edward. They're not so set nowadays on big business. They want to do things and make things, and they consider that there are better tools than dollars. George Lethaby is an example. He's a poor man and always will be, for a diplomat can't be a money-maker. But he's a happier man than Harold Downes, though he doesn't look it.'

Mr Lethaby's rugged face happened at the moment to be twisted into an expression of pain out of sympathy with some tale of the woman to whom he was talking, while his
vis-à-vis
, Mr Downes, was laughing merrily at a remark of his neighbour.

‘Harold has a hard life,' said Mrs Ravelston. ‘He's head of the Fremont Banking Corporation and a St Sebastian for everyone to shoot arrows at. Any more to be catalogued? Why, yes, there are the two biggest exhibits of all.'

She directed Leithen's eyes to two men separated by a handsome old woman whose hair was dressed in the fashion of forty years ago.

‘You see the man on the far side of Ella Purchass, the plump little man with the eagle beak who looks like he's enjoying his food. What would you set him down as?'

‘Banker? Newspaper proprietor?'

‘Wrong. That's Walter Derwent. You've heard of him? His father left him all kinds of wealth, but Walter wasted no time in getting out of oil into icebergs. He has flown and mushed and tramped over most of the Arctic, and there are heaps of mountains and wild beasts named after him. And you'd never think he'd moved further than Long Island. Now place the man on this side of Ella.'

Leithen saw a typical English hunting man – lean brown face with the skin stretched tight over the cheek bones, pale, deep-set eyes, a small clipped moustache, shoulders a little stooped from being much on horse-back.

‘Virginian squire,' he hazarded. ‘Warrenton at a guess.'

‘Wrong,' she laughed. ‘He wouldn't be happy at Warrenton, and I'm certain he wouldn't be happy on a horse. His line is deep learning. He's about our foremost pundit – professor at Yale – dug up cities in Asia Minor – edited Greek books. Writes very nice little stories, too. That's Clifford Savory.'

Leithen looked with interest at the pleasant vital face. He knew all about Clifford Savory. There were few men alive who were his equals in classical scholarship, and he had published one or two novels, delicate historical reconstructions, which were masterpieces in their way.

His gaze circled round the table again, noting the friendliness of the men's eyes, the atmosphere of breeding and simplicity and stability. He turned to his hostess—

‘You've got together a wonderful party for me,' he said. ‘I feel what I always feel when I come here – that you are the friendliest people on earth. But I believe, too, that you are harder to get to know than our awkward, difficult, tongue-tied folk at home. To get to know really well, I mean – inside your plate-armour of general benevolence.'

Mrs Ravelston laughed. ‘There may be something in that. It's a new idea to me.'

‘I think you are sure of yourselves, too. There is no one at this table who hasn't steady nerves and a vast deal of common sense. You call it poise, don't you?'

‘Maybe, but this is a picked party, remember.'

‘Because of its poise?'

‘No. Because every man here is a friend of Francis Galliard.'

‘Friend? Do you mean acquaintance or intimate?'

The lady pursed her lips.

‘I'm not sure. I think you are right and that we are not an easy people to be intimate with unless we have been brought up with the same background. Francis, too, is scarcely cut out for intimacy. Did you ever meet him?'

‘No. I heard his name for the first time a few weeks ago. Which of you knows him best? Mr Ravelston?'

‘Certainly not Simon, though he's his business partner. Francis has a good many sides, and most people know only one of them. Bronson could tell you most about his work. He likes my Eric, but hasn't seen much of him in recent years. I know he used to go duck-shooting in Minnesota with George Lethaby, and he's a trustee of Walter Derwent's Polar Institute. I fancy Clifford Savory is nearer to him than most people. And yet … I don't know. Maybe nobody has got to know the real Francis. He has that frank, forthcoming manner which conceals a man, and he's mighty busy too, too busy for intimacies. I used to see him once or twice a week, but I couldn't tell you anything about him that everybody doesn't know. It won't be easy, Sir Edward, to get a proper notion of him from second-hand evidence. Felicity's your best chance. You haven't met Felicity yet?'

‘I'm leaving her to the last. What's she like? I know her sister well.'

‘She's a whole lot different from Babs. I can tell you she's quite a person.'

Leithen felt that if his hostess had belonged to a different social grade she would have called her a ‘lovely woman.' Her meaning was clear. Mrs Galliard was someone who mattered.

He was beginning to feel very weary, and, knowing that he must ration his strength, he made his excuses and did not join the women after dinner. But he spent a few minutes in the library, to which the men retired for coffee and cigars. He had one word with Clifford Savory.

‘I heard you five years ago at the Bar Association,' Savory said. ‘You spoke on John Marshall. I hope you're going to give me an evening on this visit.'

Bronson Jane accompanied him to the door.

‘You're taking it easy, I understand, Sir Edward, and going slow with dinners. What about the Florian tomorrow at half past five? In these hot days that's a good time for a talk.'