‘He won’t be happy till he gets it,’ said Michael at last: ‘The only thing is, you see, he doesn’t know what it is.’
THE SILVER SPOON
Contents
PART ONE
1 A Stranger
2 Change
3 Michael Takes ‘A Lunar’
4 Mere Conversation
5 Side-slips
6 Soames Keeps His Eyes Open
7 Sounds in the Night
8 Round and About
9 Poultry and Cats
10 Francis Wilmot Reverses
11 Soames Visits the Press
12 Michael Muses
13 Inception of the Case
14 Further Consideration
PART TWO
1 Michael Makes His Speech
2 Results
3 Marjorie Ferrar at Home
4 ‘Fons et Origo’
5 Progress of the Case
6 Michael Visits Bethnal Green
7 Contrasts
8 Collecting Evidence
9 ‘Volte Face’
10 Photography
11 Shadows
12 Deepening
PART THREE
1 ‘Circuses’
2 ‘Not Going to Have It’
3 Soames Drives Home
4 Catechism
5 The Day
6 In the Box
7 ‘Fed Up’
8 Fantoches
9 Rout at Mrs Magussie’s
10 The New Leaf
11 Over the Windmill
12 Envoi
TO
John Fortescue
‘But O, the thorns we stand upon!’
The Winter’s Tale.
PART ONE
Chapter One
A STRANGER
THE young man who, at the end of September, 1924, dismounted from a taxicab in South Square, Westminster, was so unobtrusively American that his driver had some hesitation in asking for double his fare. The young man had no hesitation in refusing it.
‘Are you unable to read?’ he said softly. ‘Here’s four shillings.’
With that he turned his back and looked at the house before which he had descended. This, the first private English house he had ever proposed to enter inspired him with a certain uneasiness, as of a man who expects to part with a family ghost. Comparing a letter with the number chased in pale brass on the door, he murmured: ‘It surely is,’ and rang the bell.
While waiting for the door to be opened, he was conscious of extreme quietude, broken by a clock chiming four as if with the voice of Time itself. When the last boom died, the door yawned inwards, and a man, almost hairless, said:
‘Yes, sir?’
The young man removed a soft hat from a dark head.
‘This is Mrs Michael Mont’s house?’
‘Correct, sir.’
‘Will you give her my card, and this letter?’
‘ “Mr Francis Wilmot, Naseby, S.C.” Will you wait in here, sir?’
Ushered through the doorway of a room on the right, Francis Wilmot was conscious of a commotion close to the ground, and some teeth grazing the calf of his leg.
‘Dandie!’ said the voice of the hairless man, ‘you little devil! That dog is a proper little brute with strangers, sir. Stand still! I’ve known him bite clean through a lady’s stockings.’
Francis Wilmot saw with interest a silver-grey dog nine inches high and nearly as broad, looking up at him with lustrous eyes above teeth of extreme beauty.
‘It’s the baby, sir,’ said the hairless man, pointing to a sort of nest on the floor before the fireless hearth; ‘he will go for people when he’s with the baby. But once he gets to smelling your trousers, he’s all right. Better not touch the baby, though. Mrs Mont was here a minute ago; I’ll take your card up to her.’
Francis Wilmot sat down on a settee in the middle of the room; and the dog lay between him and the baby.
And while the young man sat he gazed around him. The room was painted in panels of a sub-golden hue, with a silver-coloured ceiling. A clavichord, little golden ghost of a piano, stood at one end. Glass lustres, pictures of flowers and of a silvery-necked lady swinging a skirt and her golden slippers, adorned the walls. The curtains were of gold and silver. The silver-coloured carpet felt wonderfully soft beneath his feet, the furniture was of a golden wood.
The young man felt suddenly quite home-sick. He was back in the living-room of an old ‘Colonial house’ in the bend of a lonely South Carolina river, reddish in hue. He was staring at the effigy of his high-collared, red-coated great-grandfather, Francis Wilmot, Royalist major in the War of Independence. They always said it was like the effigy he saw when shaving every morning; the smooth dark hair drooping across his right temple, the narrow nose and lips, the narrow dark hand on the sword-hilt or the razor, the slits of dark eyes gazing steadily out. Young Francis was seeing the darkies working in the cottonfields under a sun that he did not seem to have seen since he came over here; he was walking with his setter along the swamp edge, where Florida moss festooned the tall dolorous trees; he was thinking of the Wilmot inheritance, ruined in the Civil War, still decayed yet precious, and whether to struggle on with it, or to sell it to the Yank who wanted a week-end run-to from his Charleston dock job, and would improve it out of recognition. It would be lonely there, now that Anne had married that young Britisher, Jon Forsyte, and gone away north, to Southern Pines. And he thought of his sister, thus lost to him, dark, pale, vivid, ‘full of sand’. Yes! this room made him home-sick, with its perfection, such as he had never beheld, where the only object out of keeping was that dog, lying on its side now, and so thick through that all its little legs were in the air. Softly he said: