The Regent Part 54

This place belongs to you. It's yours. Whatever you do, we've got people here who'll straighten up after you.... D'you know why I've made money? I've made money so that I can take _you_ this afternoon, and tell a two-hundred-dollar client to go to the deuce. That's why I've made money. Put your back against the chair, like an Englishwoman. That's it. No, don't _talk_, I tell you. Now look joyful, hang it! Look joyful.... No, no! Joy isn't a contortion. It's something right deep down. There, there!"

The lubricant voice rolled on while Rentoul Smiles manipulated the camera. He clasped the bulb again and again threw it dramatically away.

"I'm through!" he said. "Don't expect anything very grand, Miss Isabel. What I've been trying to do this afternoon is my interpretation of you as I've studied your personality in your speeches. If I believed wholly in your cause, or if I wholly disbelieved in it, my work would not have been good. Any value that it has will be due to the sympathetic impartiality of my spiritual att.i.tude. Although"--he menaced her with the licensed familiarity of a philosopher--"although, lady, I must say that I felt you were working against me all the time.... This way!"

(Edward Henry, recalling the comparative simplicity of the London photographer at Wilkins's, thought: "How profoundly they understand photography in America!")

Isabel Joy rose and glanced at the watch in her bracelet, then followed the direction of the male hand and vanished.

Rentoul Smiles turned instantly to the other doorway.

"How do, Rent?" said Seven Sachs, coming forward.

"How do, Seven?" Mr. Rentoul Smiles winked.

"This is my good friend, Alderman Machin, the theatre-manager from London."

"Glad to meet you, sir."

"She's not gone, has she?" asked Sachs, hurriedly.

"No, my housekeeper wanted to talk to her. Come along."

And in the waiting-room, full of permanent examples of the results of Mr. Rentoul Smiles's spiritual att.i.tude towards his fellow-men, Edward Henry was presented to Isabel Joy. The next instant the two men and the housekeeper had un.o.btrusively retired, and he was alone with his objective. In truth, Seven Sachs was a notable organizer.

III

She was sitting down in a cosy-corner, her feet on a footstool, and she seemed a negligible physical quant.i.ty as he stood in front of her.

This was she who had worsted the entire judicial and police system of Chicago, who spoke pentecostal tongues, who had circled the globe, and held enthralled--so journalists computed--more than a quarter of a million of the inhabitants of Ma.r.s.eilles, Athens, Port Said, Candy, Calcutta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Hawaii, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago, and lastly, New York! This was she!

"I understand we're going home on the same ship!" he was saying.

She looked up at him, almost appealingly.

"You won't see anything of me, though," she said.

"Why not?"

"Tell me," said she, not answering his question, "what do they say of me, really, in England? I don't mean the newspapers. For instance, well--the Azure Society. Do you know it?"

He nodded.

"Tell me," she repeated.

He related the episode of the telegram at the private first performance of "The Orient Pearl."

She burst out in a torrent of irrelevant protest:

"The New York police have not treated me right. It would have cost them nothing to arrest me and let me go. But they wouldn't. Every man in the force--you hear me, every man--has had strict orders to leave me unmolested. It seems they resent my dealings with the police in Chicago, where I brought about the dismissal of four officers, so they say. And so I'm to be boycotted in this manner! Is that argument, Mr.

Machin? Tell me. You're a man, but honestly, is it argument? Why, it's just as mean and despicable as brute force."

"I agree with you," said Edward Henry, softly.

"Do they really think it will harm the militant cause? Do they _really_ think so? No, it will only harm me. I made a mistake in tactics. I trusted--fool!--to the chivalry of the United States. I might have been arrested in a dozen cities, but I on purpose reserved my last two arrests for Chicago and New York, for the sake of the superior advertis.e.m.e.nt, you see! I never dreamt--! Now it's too late.

I am defeated! I shall just arrive in London on the hundredth day. I shall have made speeches at all the meetings. But I shall be short of one arrest. And the ten thousand pounds will be lost to the cause. The militants here--such as they are--are as disgusted as I am. But they scorn me. And are they not right? Are they not right? There should be no quarter for the vanquished."

"Miss Joy," said Edward Henry, "I've come over from London specially to see you. I want to make up the loss of that ten thousand pounds as far as I can. I'll explain at once. I'm running a poetical play of the highest merit, called 'The Orient Pearl,' at my new theatre in Piccadilly Circus. If you will undertake a small part in it--a part of three words only--I'll pay you a record salary, sixty-six pounds thirteen and four-pence a word--two hundred pounds a week!"

Isabel Joy jumped up.

"Are you another of them, then?" she muttered. "I did think from the look of you that you would know a gentlewoman when you met one!

Did you imagine for the thousandth part of one second that I would stoop--"

"Stoop!" exclaimed Edward Henry. "My theatre is not a music-hall--"

"You want to make it into one!" she stopped him.

"Good day to you," she said. "I must face those journalists again, I suppose. Well, even they--! I came alone in order to avoid them. But it was hopeless. Besides, is it my duty to avoid them--after all?"

It was while pa.s.sing through the door that she uttered the last words.

"Where is she?" Seven Sachs inquired, entering.

"Fled!" said Edward Henry.

"Everything all right?"

"Quite!"

Mr. Rentoul Smiles came in.

"Mr. Smiles," said Edward Henry, "did you ever photograph Sir John Pilgrim?"

"I did, on his last visit to New York. Here you are!"

He pointed to his rendering of Sir John.

"What did you think of him?"

"A great actor, but a mountebank, sir."

During the remainder of the afternoon Edward Henry saw the whole of New York, with bits of the Bronx and Yonkers in the distance, from Seven Sachs's second automobile. In his third automobile he went to the theatre and saw Seven Sachs act to a house of over two thousand dollars. And lastly he attended a supper and made a speech. But he insisted upon pa.s.sing the remainder of the night on the _Lithuania_.

In the morning Isabel Joy came on board early and irrevocably disappeared into her berth. And from that moment Edward Henry spent the whole secret force of his individuality in fervently desiring the _Lithuania_ to start. At two o'clock, two hours late, she did start.

Edward Henry's farewells to the admirable and hospitable Mr. Sachs were somewhat absent-minded, for already his heart was in London. But he had sufficient presence of mind to make certain final arrangements.

"Keep him at least a week," said Edward Henry to Seven Sachs, "and I shall be your debtor for ever and ever."