The Fortunate Youth Part 26

The argument outside the door having ended in a victory for the host, he entered the room, pushing Barney Bill gently in front of him. For the first time Paul saw him in the full light. He beheld a man sharply featured, with hair and beard, once raven-black, irregularly streaked with white--there seemed to be no intermediary shades of grey--and deep melancholy eyes. There hung about him the atmosphere of infinite, sorrowful patience that might mark a Polish patriot. As the runner of a successful fried fish concern he was an incongruity. As well, thought Paul, picture the late Cardinal Newman sharpening knife on steel outside a butcher's shop, and crying, "buy, buy," in l.u.s.ty invitation.

Then Paul noticed that he was oddly apparelled. He wore the black frock-coat suit of a Methodist preacher at the same time as the rainbow tie, diamond tie-pin, heavy gold watch-chain, diamond ring and natty spats of a professional bookmaker. The latter oddities, however, did not detract from the quiet, mournful dignity of his face and manner.

Paul felt himself in the presence of an original personality.

The maid came in and laid a fourth place. Mr. Finn waved Paul to a seat on his right, Barney Bill to one next Paul; Jane sat on his left.

"I will ask a blessing," said Mr. Finn.

He asked one for two minutes in the old-fashioned Evangelical way, bringing his guest into his address to the Almighty with an almost pathetic courtesy. "I am afraid, Mr. Savelli," said he, when he sat down and began to carve the beef, "I have neither wine nor spirits to offer you. I am a strict teetotaller; and so is Miss Seddon. But as I knew my old friend Simmons would be unhappy without his accustomed gla.s.s of beer--"

"That's me," said Barney Bill, nudging Paul with his elbow. "Simmons.

You never knowed that afore, did yer? Beg pardon, guv'nor, for interrupting."

"Well, there's a jug of beer--and that is all at this hour, except water, that I can put before you."

Paul declared that beer was delicious and peculiarly acceptable after public speaking, and demonstrated his appreciation by draining the gla.s.s which the maid poured out.

"You wanted that badly, sonny," said Barney Bill. "The next thing to drinking oneself is to see another chap what enjoys swallering it."

"Bill!" said Jane reprovingly.

Barney Bill c.o.c.ked his white poll across the table with the perkiness of a quaint bird--Paul saw that the years had brought a striation of tiny red filaments to his weather-beaten face--and fixed her with his little glittering eyes. "Bill what? You think I'm 'urting his feelings?" He jerked a thumb towards his host. "I ain't. He thinks good drink's bad because bad has come of it to him--not that he ever took a drop too much, mind yer--but bad has come of it to him, and I think good drink's good because nothing but good has come of it to me. And we've agreed to differ. Ain't we, Silas?"

"If every man were as moderate as you, and I am sure as Mr. Savelli, I should have nothing to say against it. Why should I? But the working man, unhappily, is not moderate."

"I see," said Paul. "You preach, or advocate--I think you preach--total abstinence, and so feel it your duty to abstain yourself."

"That is so," said Mr. Finn, helping himself to mustard. "I don't wish to bore you with my concerns; but I'm a fairly large employer of labour. Now I have found that by employing only pledged abstainers I get extraordinary results. I exact a very high rate of insurance, towards a fund--I need not go into details--to which I myself contribute a percentage--a far higher rate than would be possible if they spent their earnings on drink. I invest the whole lot in my business--their stoppages from wages and my contributions. I guarantee them 3 per cent.; I give them, actually, the dividends that accrue to the holders of ordinary stock in my company. They also have the general advantages of insurance--sickness, burial, maternity, and so forth--that they would get from an ordinary benefit society."

"But that's enormous," cried Paul, with keen interest. "On the face of it, it seems impossible. It seems entirely uneconomic. Co-operative trading is one thing; private insurance another. But how can you combine the two?"

"The whole secret lies in the marvellously increased efficiency of the employee." He developed his point.

Paul listened attentively. "But," said he, when his host concluded, "isn't it rather risky? Supposing, for the sake of argument, your business failed."

Mr. Finn held up the lean, brown hand on which the diamond sparkled.

"My business cannot fail."

Paul started. The a.s.sertion had a strange solemnity. "Without impertinence," said he, "why can't it fail?"

"Because G.o.d is guiding it," said Silas Finn.

The fanatic spoke. Paul regarded him with renewed interest. The black hair streaked with white, banging over the temples on the side away from the parting, the queerly streaked beard, the clear-cut ascetic features, the deep, mournful eyes in whose depths glowed a soul on fire, gave him the appearance of a mad but sanctified apostle. Barney Bill, who profoundly distrusted all professional drinkers of water, such as Mr. Finn's employees, ate his cold beef silently, in the happy surmise that no one was paying the least attention to his misperformances with knife, fork and fingers. Jane looked steadily from Paul to Silas and from Silas to Paul.

Paul said: "How do you know G.o.d is guiding it?"

At the back of his mind was an impulse of mirth--there was a touch of humorous blasphemy in the conception of the Almighty as managing director of "Fish Palaces, Limited"--but the nominal earthly managing director saw not the slightest humour in the proposition.

"Who is guiding you in your brilliant career?" he asked.

Paul threw out his hands, in the once practised and now natural foreign gesture. "I'm not an atheist. Of course I believe in G.o.d, and I thank Him for all His mercies--"

"Yes, yes," said his host. "That I shouldn't question. But a successful man's thanks to G.o.d are most often merely conventional. Don't think I wish to be offensive. I only want to get at the root of things. You are a young man, eight-and-twenty--"

"How do you know that?" laughed Paul.

"Oh, your friends have told me. You are young. You have a brilliant position. You have a brilliant future. Were you born to it?"

There was Jane on the opposite side of the table, entirely uninterested in her food, looking at him in her calm, clear way. She was so wholesome, so sane, in her young yet mature English lower-cla.s.s beauty.

She had broad brows. Her ma.s.s of dark brown hair was rather too flawlessly arranged. He felt a second's irritation at not catching any playfully straying strand. She was still the Jane of his boyhood, but a Jane developed, a Jane from whom no secrets were hid, a searching, questioning and quietly disturbing Jane.

"A man is born to his destiny, whatever destiny may be," said Paul.

"That is Mohammedan fatalism," said Mr. Finn, "unless one means by destiny the guiding hand of the Almighty. Do you believe that you're under the peculiar care of G.o.d?"

"Do you, Mr. Finn?"

"I have said so. I ask you. Do you?"

"In a general way, yes," said Paul. "In your particular sense, no. You question me frankly and I answer frankly. You would not like me to answer otherwise."

"Certainly not," said his host.

"Then," Paul continued, with a smile, "I must say that from my childhood I have been fired with a curious certainty that I would succeed in life. Chance has helped me. How far a divine hand has been specially responsible, it isn't for me to conjecture. But I know that if I hadn't believed in myself I shouldn't have had my small measure of success."

"You believe in yourself?"

"Yes. And I believe in making others believe in me."

"That is strange--very strange." Mr. Finn fixed him with his deep, sorrowful eyes. "You believe that you're predestined to a great position. You believe that you have in you all that is needful to attain it. That has carried you through. Strange!" He put his hand to his temple, elbow on table, and still regarded Paul. "But there's G.o.d behind it all. Mr. Savelli," he said earnestly, after a slight pause, "you are twenty-eight; I am fifty-eight; so I'm more than old enough to be your father. You'll forgive my taking up the att.i.tude of the older man. I have lived a life such as your friends on the platform to-night--honorable, clean, sweet people--I've nothing to say against them--have no conception. I am English, of course--London born. My father was an Englishman; but my mother was a Sicilian. She used to go about with a barrel-organ--my father ran away with her. I have that violent South in my blood, and I've lived nearly all my days in London.

I've had to pay dearly for my blood. The only compensation it has given me is a pa.s.sion for art"--he waved his lean, bediamonded hand towards the horrific walls. "That is external--in a way--mere money has enabled me to gratify my tastes; but, as I was saying, I have lived a life of strange struggle, material, physical, and"--he brought down his free hand with a bang on the table--"it is only by the grace of G.o.d and the never-ceasing presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ by my side, that--that I am able to offer you my modest hospitality this evening."

Paul felt greatly drawn to the man. He was beyond doubt sincere. He wore the air of one who had lived fiercely, who had suffered, who had conquered; but the air of one whose victory was barren, who was looking into the void for the things unconquerable yet essential to salvation.

Paul made a little gesture of attention. He could find no words to reply. A man's deep profession of faith is unanswerable.

"Ah," said Barney Bill, "you ought to have come along o' me, Silas, years ago in the old 'bus. You mightn't have got all these bright pictures, but you wouldn't have had these 'ere gloomy ideas. I don't say as how I don't hold with Gawd," he explained, with uplifted forefinger and c.o.c.ked head; "but if ever I thinks of Him, I like to feel that He's in the wind or in the crickle-crackle of the earth, just near and friendly like, but not a-worrying of a chap, listening for every cuss-word as he uses to his old horse, and measuring every half-pint he pours down his dusty throat. No. That ain't my idea of Gawd. But then I ain't got religion."

"Still the same old pagan," laughed Paul.

"No, not the same, sonny," said Barney Bill, holding up his knife, which supported a morsel of cheese. "Old. Rheumaticky. Got to live in a 'ouse when it rains--me who never keered whether I was baked to a cinder or wet through! I ain't a pagan no more. I'm a crock."

Jane smiled affectionately at the old man, and her face was lit with rare sweetness when she smiled. "He really is just the same," she said.

"He hasn't changed much in forty years," said Mr. Finn.

"I was a good Conservative then, as I am now," said Bill. "That's one thing, anyhow. So was you, Silas. But you had Radical leanings."

Barney Bill's remark set the talk on political lines. Paul learned that his host had sat for a year or more as a Progressive on the Hickney Heath Borough Council and aspired to a seat in Parliament.

"The Kingdom of Heaven," said he, not unctuously or hypocritically, but in his grave tone of conviction, "is not adequately represented in the House."