Nobody's Man Part 18

he observed, a little restlessly.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Miller is a limpet," she said. "He has posed as a man of brains for half a generation. His only real cleverness is an unerring but selfish capacity for attaching himself to the right cause. We can't ignore him.

He has a following. On the other hand, he does not represent our principles any more than Pitt would if he were still alive."

"What will be your position really as regards the two main sections of the Labour Party?" he asked. "We are absorbing the best of them, day by day," she answered quickly. "What is left of either will be merely the sc.u.m. The people will come to us. Their discarded leaders can crawl back to obscurity. The people may follow false G.o.ds for a very long time, but they have the knack of recognising the truth when it is shown them."

"You have the gift of conviction," he said thoughtfully.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Our cause speaks, not I," she declared. "Every word I utter is a waste of breath, a task of supererogation. You can't a.s.sociate with Stephen Dartrey for a month without realising for yourself what our party means and stands for. So--enough. I didn't ask you here to undertake any missionary work. I asked you, as a matter of fact, for my own pleasure.

Take another cigarette and pa.s.s me one, please. And here's another cushion," she added, throwing it to him. "You look as though you needed it." He settled down more comfortably. He had the pleasant feeling of being completely at his ease.

"So far as entertaining you is concerned," he confessed, "I fear I am likely to be a failure. I am beginning to feel like a constant note of interrogation. There is so much I want to know."

"Proceed, then. I am resigned," she said with a smile. "About yourself. I just knew of you as the writer of one or two articles in the reviews. Why have I never heard more of you?"

"One reason," she confided, "is because I am so painfully young. I haven't had time yet to become a wonderful woman. You see, I have the tremendous advantage of not having known the world except from underneath a pigtail, while the war was on. I was able to bring to these new conditions an absolutely unbia.s.sed understanding."

"But what was your upbringing?" he asked. "Your father, for instance?"

"Is this going to be a pill for you?" she enquired, with slightly wrinkled forehead. "He was professor of English at Dresden University.

We were all living there when the war broke out, but he was such a favourite that they let us go to Paris. He died there, the week after peace was declared. My mother still lives at Versailles. She was governess to Lady Clanarton's grandchildren, hence my presence yesterday in those aristocratic circles."

"And you live here alone?"

"With my secretary--the fuzzyhaired young person who was just getting rid of Mr. Miller for me when you arrived. We are a terribly advanced couple, in our ideas, but we lead a thoroughly reputable life. I sometimes think," she went on, with a sigh, "that all one's tendencies towards the unusual can be got rid of in opinions. Susan, for instance--that is my secretary's name--p.r.o.nounces herself unblushingly in favour of free love, but I don't think she has ever allowed a man to kiss her in her life."

"Your own opinions?" he asked curiously. "I suppose they, too, are a little revolutionary, so far as regards our social laws?"

"I dare not even define them," she acknowledged, "they are so entirely negative. Somehow or other, I can't help thinking that the present system will die out through the sheer absurdity of it. We really shan't need a crusade against the marriage laws. The whole system is committing suicide as fast as it can."

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Twenty-four," she answered promptly.

"And supposing you fell in love--taking it for granted that you have not done so already--should you marry?"

Her eyes rested upon his, a little narrowed, curiously and pleasantly reflective. All the time the corners of her sensitive mouth twitched a little.

"To tell you the truth," she confided, with a somewhat evasive air, "I have been so busy thinking out life for other people that I have never stopped to apply its general principles to myself."

"You are a sophist," he declared.

"I have not your remarkable insight," she laughed mockingly.

CHAPTER XIII

"How this came about I don't even quite know," Tallente remarked, an hour or so later, as he laid down the menu and smiled across the corner table in the little Soho restaurant at his two companions.

"I can tell you exactly," Nora declared. "You are in town for a few days only, and I want to see as much of you as I can; Susan here is deserting me at nine o'clock to go to a musical comedy; I particularly wanted a sole Georges, and I knew, if Susan and I came here alone, a person whom we neither of us like would come and share our table.

Therefore, I made artless enquiries as to your engagements for the evening. When I found that you proposed to dine alone in some hidden place rather than run the risk of meeting any of your political acquaintances at the club, I went in for a little mental suggestion."

"I see," he murmured. "Then my invitation wasn't a spontaneous one?"

"Not at all," she agreed. "I put the idea into your head."

"And now that we are here, are you going to stretch me on the rack and delve for my opinions on all sorts of subjects? is Miss Susan there going to take them down in shorthand on her cuff and you make a report to Dartrey when he comes back to-morrow?"

She laughed at him from underneath her close-fitting, becoming little hat. She was biting an olive with firm white teeth.

"After hours," she rea.s.sured him. "Susan and I are going to talk a little nonsense after the day's work. You may join in if you can unbend so far. We shall probably eat more than is good for us--I had a cup of coffee for lunch--and if you decide to be magnificent and offer us wine, we shall drink it and talk more nonsense than ever."

He called for the wine list.

"I thought we were going to discuss the effect of Grecian philosophy upon the Roman system of government."

She shook her head.

"You're a long way out," she declared, "Our conversation will skirt the edges of many subjects. We shall speak of the Russian Ballet, Susan and I will exchange a few whispered confidences about our admirers, we shall discuss even one who comes in and goes out, with subtle references to their clothes and morals, and when you and I are left alone we may even indulge in the wholesome, sentimental exercise of a little flirtation."

"There you have me," he confessed. "I know a little about everything else you have mentioned."

"A very good opening." she approved. "Keep it till Susan has gone and then propose yourself as a disciple. There is only one drawback about this place," she went on, nodding curtly across the room to Miller. "So many of our own people come here. Mr. Miller must be pleased to see us together."

"Why?" Tallente asked. "Is he an admirer?"

Nora's face was almost ludicrously expressive.

"He would like to he," she admitted, "but, thick-skinned though he is, I have managed to make him understand pretty well how I feel about him.

You'll find him a thorn in your side," she went on reflectively.

"You see, if our party has a fault, it is in a certain lack of system.

We have only a t.i.tular chief and no real leader. Miller thinks that post is his by predestination. Your coming is beginning to worry him already. It was entirely on your account he paid me that visit this afternoon."

"To be perfectly frank with you," Tallente sighed, "I should find Miller a loathsome coadjutor."

"There are drawbacks to everything in life," Nora replied. "Long before Miller has become anything except a nuisance to you, you will have realised that the only political party worth considering, during the next fifty years, at any rate, will be the Democrats. After that, I shouldn't be at all surprised if the aristocrats didn't engineer a revolution, especially if we disenfranchise them.--Susan, you have a new hat on. Tell me at once with whom you are going to Daly's?"

"No one who counts," the girl declared, with a little grimace. "I am going with my brother and a very sober married friend of his."

"After working hours," Nora confessed, glancing critically at the sole which had just been tendered for Tallente's examination, "the chief interest of Susan and myself, as you may have observed, lies in food and in your s.e.x. I think we must have what some nasty German woman once called the man-hunger."

"It sounds cannibalistic," Tallente rejoined. "Have I any cause for alarm?"