Jaffery Part 23

"I will," said I.

I don't think I have ever loathed a thing so wholly as that confounded ghost of a book. Naturally it was the dominant thought in the poor child's mind. She had already worried Barbara about it. It formed the subject of nearly her first question to me. I foresaw trouble. I could not plead bland ignorance forever; though for the present I did not know the nature of Jaffery's scheme. Anyhow I redeemed my promise and gave him Doria's message. He received it with a grumpy nod and said nothing.

He had become somewhat grumpy of late, even when I did not broach the disastrous topic, and made excuses for not coming down to Northlands.

I attributed the unusual moroseness to London in vile weather. At the best of times Jaffery grew impatient of the narrow conditions of town; yet there he was week after week, staying in a poky set of furnished chambers in Victoria Street, and doing nothing in particular, as far as I could make out, save riding on the tops of motor-omnibuses without an overcoat.

After his silent acknowledgment of the message, he stuffed his pipe thoughtfully--we were in the smoking-room of a club (not the Athenaeum) to which we both belonged--and then he roared out:

"Do you think she could bear the sight of me?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well"--he grinned a little--"I'm not exactly a kind of sick-room flower."

"I think you ought to see her--you're as much trustee and executor as I am. You might also save Barbara and myself from nerve-racking questions."

"All right, I'll go," he said.

The interview was only fairly successful. He told her that the book would be published as soon as possible.

"When will that be?" she asked.

Jaffery seemed to be as vague as myself.

"Is it in the printer's hands?"

"Not yet."

"Why?"

He explained that Adrian had practically finished the novel; but here and there it needed the little tr.i.m.m.i.n.g and tacking together, which Adrian would have done had he lived to revise the ma.n.u.script. He himself was engaged on this necessary though purely mechanical task of revision.

"I quite agree," said Doria to this, "that Adrian's work could not be given out in an imperfect state. But there can't be very much to do, so why are you taking all this time over it?"

"I'm afraid I've been rather busy," said he.

Which tactless, though I admit unavoidable, reply did not greatly please Doria. When she saw Barbara, to whom she related this conversation, she complained of Jaffery's unfeeling conduct. He had no right to hang up Adrian's great novel on account of his own wretched business. Letting the latter slide would have been a tribute to his dead friend. Barbara did her best to soothe her; but we agreed that Jaffery had made a bad start.

A short while afterwards I was in the club again and there I came across Arbuthnot, the manager of Jaffery's newspaper, whom I had known for some years--originally I think through Jaffery. I accepted the offer of a seat at his luncheon table, and, as men will, we began to discuss our common friend.

"I wonder what has come over him lately," said he after a while.

"Have you noticed any difference?" I was startled.

"Yes. Can't make him out."

"Poor Adrian Boldero's death was a great shock."

"Quite so," Arbuthnot a.s.sented. "But Jaff Chayne, when he gets a shock, is the sort of fellow that goes into the middle of a wilderness and roars. Yet here he is in London and won't be persuaded to leave it."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"We wanted to send him out to Persia, and he refused to go. We had to send young Brodie instead, who won't do the work half as well."

"All this is news to me," said I.

"And it was a first-cla.s.s business with armed escorts, caravans, wild tribes--a matter of great danger and subtle politics--railways, finance--the whole hang of the international situation and internal conditions--a big scoop--everything that usually is b.u.t.ter and honey to Jaff Chayne--an ideal job for him in every way. But no. He was fed up with scalliwagging all over the place. He wanted a season in town!"

At the idea of Jaffery yearning to play the Society b.u.t.terfly I could not help laughing. Jaffery lounging down Bond Street in immaculate vesture! Jaffery sipping tea at afternoon At Homes! Jaffery dancing till three o'clock in the morning! It was all very comic, and Arbuthnot seeing the matter in that aspect laughed too. But, on the other hand, it was all very incomprehensible. To Jaffery a job was a sacred affair, the meaning of his existence. He was a Mercury who took himself seriously.

The more remote and rough and uncomfortable and dangerous his mission, the more he liked it. He had never spared himself. He had been a model special correspondent ever ready at a moment's notice to set off to the ends of the earth. And now, all of a sudden, behold him declining a task after his own heart, and, as I gathered from Arbuthnot, of the greatest political significance, and thereby endangering his peculiar and honourable position on the paper.

"If it had been any other man alive who had turned us down like that,"

said Arbuthnot, "we would have chucked him altogether. In fact we didn't tell him that we wouldn't."

It was very mysterious; all the more so because Jaffery had never been a man of mystery, like Adrian. I went away wondering. If it had occurred to me at the time that I was destined to play Boswell to Jaffery's Johnson, perhaps I might have gone straight to him and demanded a solution of my difficulties. As it was, in my unawakened condition, I did nothing of the kind. I spent an hour or two looking up something in the British Museum, stopped at the bootmaker's to give an order concerning Susan's riding-boots (_vide_ diary) and drove home to dinner, to a comfortable chat with Barbara, during which I gave her an account of the day's doings, and eventually to the peaceful slumber of the contented and inoffensive man.

A fortnight or so pa.s.sed before I saw Jaffery again. Happening to be in Westminster in the forenoon--I had come up to town on business--I mounted to his cheerless eyrie in Victoria Street, and rang the bell. A dingy servitor in a dress suit, on transient duty, admitted me, and I found Jaffery collarless and minus jacket and waistcoat, smoking a pipe in front of the fire. It wasn't even a good coal fire. Some austere former tenant had installed an electric radiator in the once comfort-giving grate. But Jaffery did not seem to mind. The remains of breakfast were on the table which the dingy servitor began to clear.

Jaffery rose from the depths of his easy chair like an agile mammoth.

"Hullo, hullo, hullo!"

His usual greeting. We shook hands and commended the weather. When the alien attendant had departed, he began to curse London. It was a hole for sick dogs, not for sound men. He loathed its abominable suffocation.

"Then why the deuce do you stay in it?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I can't do anything else."

This gave me an opening to satisfy my curiosity.

"I understood you could have gone to Persia."

He frowned and tugged his red beard. "How did you know that?"

"Arbuthnot--" I began.

"Arbuthnot?" he boomed angrily. "What the blazes does he mean by telling you about my affairs? I'll punch his d.a.m.ned head!"

"Don't," said I. "Your hands are so big and he's so small. You might hurt him."

"I'd like to hurt him. Why can't he keep his infernal tongue quiet?"

He proceeded to wither up the soul of Arbuthnot with awful anathema.

Then in his infantile way he shouted: "I didn't want any of you to know anything about it."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I didn't."