Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (422 page)

CHAPTER II.

Two months later Sir William Sorrell was sitting at his large desk in the great room looking into Covent Garden. The desk was covered with an entanglement of letters and agreements. A thin young man with a blue-shaven face, lantern jaws, large hollow eyes, and carefully oiled, dark hair, was gathering up the letters into parcels.

“It’s a comfort to have you back, sir,” he was saying. “These past four months have been a responsibility — a heavy responsibility!”

Sir William seemed to have grown heavier, older, and — so his subordinate thought — slower and more morose. There were such heavy creases under his eyes! Two clerks came in bearing a number of books — the heavy ledgers of the firm of William Sorrell and Son. Sir William looked down one column of figures after the other, “Where are the figures of Claflin’s voyage round the Equator?” he asked.

“They’re of course not all made up, sir,” the other answered. He stood behind his master, rigid, like a thin soldier at attention.

“What’s about the figure?” Sir William asked.

The subordinate looked at a slip of paper in his thin fingers.

“I thought you would be interested in that, sir,” he said. “We’ve done — ah — eleven thousand sets in parts, and there are several re-orders to-day.”

Sir William said “Ah!” bitterly.

“It’s not so bad, sir,” the younger man deprecated. “It’s better than we’ve ever sold a thing in parts. It gives us back all the capital plus 40 per cent, and the book orders are fairly heavy. We publish next week.”

“And the other things?” Sir William said.

The younger man indicated the books with his thin finger.

“We’ve done pretty well, sir,” he said, “better than in any year before at this season.”

Again Sir William uttered his “Ah!” of a deep bitterness. The young man paled and winced. In that office Sir William was a very dreaded figure. Suddenly the telephone bell rang violently in the silence. Sir William started and clutched at the receiver so hurriedly that it rocked on its weighted base. “Yes, yes, what is it?” he called out.

A nasal and a drawling voice said from the recesses of the instrument, in tones of intolerable slowness:

“Who
hev
I the honour of talking
toh?”

Sir William answered peremptorily:

“We are Sorrell and Son. Who are you?”

The voice answered with the same intolerable drawl:

“I am Nathan P. Cole, of the Waterbury Book Company. I am at the Savoy.”

Sir William answered:

“Don’t know the name of the firm. What do you want?”

“To who em I speaking
naowe?”
the voice asked.

“I am Sir William Sorrell,” Sir William answered, and he cursed beneath his breath.

I thought
you we
re
dead,”
the voice said; “the New York papers said you were killed in a railroad smash.” Sir William said patiently:

“No, it was my uncle who died, William Sorrell senior. But I am very busy. Perhaps you will tell me what you want.”

“I
hev heerd
your uncle was a fine old English gentleman,” the voice drawled. “I am real
surry
to
heer
of his death. A fine old English gentleman. I did not
hev
the pleasure of his acquaintance.”

Sir William said:

“Yes, yes, but what do you want?”

“I
hev heerd
say he was like a knight of old,” the voice drawled on. “Might’a been out of the thirteenth century. Or which do you call it when it has thirteen before it?”

Sir William said:

“Oh, damnation! Here, McCrackan, take this blasted thing and find out what the man wants.”

And lunging up from his desk he began to pace up and down agonisedly, with his nerves all tortured, whilst McCrackan stood with the telephone to his ear, attentive, like a sentry with a cunning face.

“What is all this?” Sir William was muttering between his teeth. “What is the good of all this? Any fool could do it. What does it all amount to? It’s all rot. It’s all weariness.”

The ground-glass door opened, and there came in young Lee-Egerton, with his honest eyes and his weak mouth. He had a book under his arm.

“I got the Lee-Egerton MSS. Report,” he said; “they had it at the London Library. It says that the Greek slave disappeared clean, and the Knight of Egerton too. Nothing more ever heard of them or words to that effect.”

Sir William said:

“Ah!”

“This Yankee johnnie wants to know,” McCrackan said from the telephone, “whether we’ll do any exchanges from our Commercial Enterprise Magazine with the Waterbury Eagle. He says he hears that our C.E.M. is vurry good, and he thinks he could do a trade.”

Sir William said:

“Oh, tell him to go to hell; tell him we could never touch American stuff; tell him it’s written so badly that no English cow could read it. Tell him it’s old-fashioned, and that no American ever had an original idea since a hundred years before Columbus committed his crime.”

And having so uttered his exasperation, Sir William looked at young Lee-Egerton. The boy continued: “There appears to have been some sort of lawsui: between a Lady Dionissia de Morant and a person calling herself Gertrude de Egerton. But after a number of years the son of the Lady Dionissia was declared the heir to all the lands.”

Sir William said:

“My God! Then she had a son!”

“According to Burke,” the young man continued, “this son was the founder of all the families of Egerton, of whose chief branch, the last descendant is Charles Lee-Egerton, Esq.” And the young man added, “That’s me!”

Again Sir William said:

“My God!”

Along the whole front of the room beneath the three tall windows that gave a dim and drizzling view of Covent Garden, with yellow cabbage leaves everywhere stamped into the wet and greasy cobble stones, there ran a long leather-covered and deep divan. Into this Sir William sank. His eyes wandered round the large room. All the walls were covered with tall, glass-fronted book cases of yellow oak, containing works published by the house of Sorrell and Son. On the floor was a great Persian carpet with a very thick pile all in blues and reds, and in the centre of the great carpet was the great desk beside which McCrackan still stood, holding the telephone to his ear, smiling slightly and looking half starved. And it seemed odd to Sir William to remember that once he had thought of this great room as something rather august, rather like a temple, in which he had considered himself to sit like a high priest, or at any rate the prime minister of a kingdom. Now that his uncle was dead — the old man had died from shock on hearing of the accident to his nephew on the day after the King had conferred upon him the baronetcy that Sir William had so immediately inherited — the old man being dead, he sat there and owned the whole thing, and he did not want to; he had not any use for it. His eyes looked musingly at the young man. He was tall, slight, fair — very much like what Sir William remembered himself to have been at that age, except for the boy’s chin, which was no good. It was the chin that undoubtedly accounted for the scrape he had got into at Cambridge. It wasn’t a morally very bad thing; it was a weakness, though the offence had an ugly name. The young man wanted propping up; he wanted regular work, and Sir William was glad that he had promised to take young Lee-Egerton into the business. He looked at McCrackan too. This hard-bitten, industrious Scotsman was just the stuff to give moral support to a boy with a weak chin. If he set them both there at that desk, it would be the very way to keep the young man out of mischief. McCrackan said from the telephone:

“This joker wants a set of the C.E.M. sent to the Savoy. He keeps on wanting to do a trade with us.”

“Oh, send him three sets — send him twenty,” Sir William answered. “The man is no good. Cut him off.”

He had recovered a measure of good humour. And then again the door opened, and there came in a small, sallow man of perhaps fifty, with dyspeptic eyes, a stiff brown moustache, and long, thin fingers. This was Mr. Bunter, an author who wrote, twice a year, a volume of salacious memoirs for Sir William’s firm. He said:

“Hallo!” in a voice so savage and sharp that he appeared to be snapping at something. “You’re back! Nearly got you, though, didn’t it?”

Then he sank down into the divan near Sir William, and looked with a sardonic gloom at the carpet. He appeared to have nothing more to say. The young Lee-Egerton said:

“It’s odd what strikes people. This chaplain johnnie who wrote the Chronicle of Tamworth — what struck him most about the miracles that the Greek slave did was that he cured the chickens of some old abbess.”

“Well, you see,” Sir William said, “he considered that miracles are worked by God, and he would consider it odd that God should take the trouble to perform miracles for fowls which have not got souls.”

Mr. Bunter gave a curious sideways glance at
Sit
William, whom he considered a sort of imbecile. “And of course,” Sir William continued, “the miracle of the chickens wasn’t a miracle at all. I don’t say anything about the other cures. They may have been faith-healing, or they may have been the grace of God. But the chicken business was just common sense.”

Mr. Bunter said disagreeably:

“You can’t cure chickens with common sense.”

“Can’t you?” Sir William said. “I’ll tell you how it was done. The chickens were on the north side of the south wall of the convent, shut up in a little pen. About forty of them, all in a filthy condition, and never getting a glimpse of sunlight. So he—”

“Who?” Mr. Bunter asked.

“The pilgrim,” Sir William answered.

“I thought it was a slave,” young Lee-Egerton’ said.

“Nobody knew what he was,” Sir William answered “but at any rate he made the Abbess of St. Radigund make a hole in the wall, so that the chickens could get out into the sunlight and have some green grass to eat Of course, they picked up in a day.”

“What’s all this?” Mr. Bunter said, as if someone had insulted him. “What are you all talking about?” Sir William looked at McCrackan, who was standing patiently by the desk.

“What screw do you get?” he asked.

McCrackan slowly rubbed the palm of his hand on his well-oiled hair.

“Three pounds fifteen a week, Sir William,” he said.

“And you will run this whole show for four month for £3 15s. a week?” Sir William asked. “What do you suppose I draw?”

McCrackan smiled modestly.

“About six thousand a year, Sir William.”

“And you’ve run it so as to show a bigger profit than ever I did,” Sir William said.

McCrackan answered:

“Oh, well, Sir William!”

“What then?” Sir William asked.

McCrackan only grinned painfully.

“It means,” Mr. Bunter said with a sourer joy, “that any fool could run this show.”

Sir William continued his catechism of McCrackan.

“Ever read any books?”

“I never have the time, sir,” McCrackan answered.

“Neither have I,” Sir William answered; “so there we are!”

McCrackan continued to grin as if he were an idiot. Sir William had such a bitter manner — or else McCrackan would have supposed that he was going at least to make him a partner. On the other hand, he might be so jealous as to throw him out of the firm altogether. Such things had been known to happen in the City.