your father’s worried about. He thinks we can’t hang on, and I tell him we can. I tell him we’ve damn well got to! So you get at him, Peter, and tell him so, too.’ He turned to his son. ‘Tony!’
‘Sergeant?’
‘Paris for you, my lad. I want you to go and see Menier. If we don’t recall that Valenciennes loan within the next six months we ought to be shot. I’d like it within a month. Just see what you can do, will you?’
Tony drew patterns upon the cloth with the haft of his fork. ‘Right! Yes, I know Menier pretty well. We’re rather pally, as a matter of fact. When do you want me to go?’
‘Better take the five o’clock air mail. That gets you there in time for a full day tomorrow and Saturday and as much of Sunday as you’d like. Come back Monday morning …’ F. X. looked at his son for a long moment. ‘Stick at it, Tony. And by the way …’
Tony cocked an unobtrusive ear. He knew F. X.’s ‘by-the-ways.’ They generally concealed a major point.
‘By the way,’ said F. X., ‘while you’re with Menier, you might sound him. That Caporal group of his might put up fifty thousand. You could tell him six months and ten per cent, if you like. Anyway, try.’
Tony nodded. And at that moment the faces of father and son were so alike in every line that they might have been, not elder and younger brothers, but twins.
Peter looked at the watch upon her wrist. ‘My dears,’ she said, ‘I must go. What about you? Or don’t RYNOX do any work in the afternoon?’
F. X. stood up. ‘They do. We’ve been chewing the rag here a bit too long as it is. Come on.’
They went on. Outside, father and son put Peter into a taxi; watched while the taxi purred out of Alsace Court and into the Strand.
F. X. turned to his son. ‘Going back to the office, boy?’
Tony nodded. ‘And you?’
F. X. shook his head. ‘Not this afternoon. I’m going away to think.’
Tony waved a stick—they were half-way up the court by this time—at a taxi with its flag up. ‘You have this?’ he said. ‘Or me?’
‘You,’ said F. X. ‘I’m walking.’
The taxi came to a standstill abreast of them. Tony put a foot upon its running board and fingers to the handle of its door. ‘RYNOX House,’ he said to the driver.
His father looked at him.
Tony opened the taxi door. He said over his shoulder:
‘See you on Monday then.’ He made to enter the cab.
‘Tony!’ said his father.
‘Hullo!’ Tony turned round; saw his father’s outstretched hand; raised his eyebrows. ‘Good Lord!’ he said, but he took the hand. They shook; a firm grip, each as strong as the other.
‘Do your best,’ said his father, ‘with Menier.’
Tony nodded and leapt into the cab and slammed the door. The engine churned. Tony looked out of the window. ‘So long, F. X.,’ he said.
‘Good-bye!’ said F. X., and raised his hand in salute.
COMMENT THE SECOND
ALL is not well with RYNOX. F. X. is probably not so confident even as his most pessimistic words to his son.
RYNOX is at that point where one injudicious move; one failure of judgment; one coincidental piece of bad luck, will wreck it. And it ought not—thinks F. X.—to be wrecked. For if it can struggle on for another six or seven months all his speculation, all his endeavour, will meet with incalculable success.
Friday, 29th March 193— 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
F.X. sat at breakfast. Through the big French windows of his dining-room in William Pitt Street, the spring sun blazed, turning the comfortable but rather sombre room into a chamber of temporary glory. F.X., so to speak, read The Morning Mercury with one hand and with the other conversed with his man, Prout.
Prout was a short, stiff little man. There was a legend about Prout—started probably by F. X. himself—to the effect that he had nineteen hairs and that twelve of these were upon the right side of his parting and seven upon the other. He was clean-shaven—very shaven and very, very clean. He was also very quiet. There was another legend—this one having its birth with Tony—to the effect that Prout really was a ‘foreigner,’ only knowing three words of English: ‘Very good, sir.’ Prout, who had been with F. X. now for seven years—ever since RYNOX had been founded—adored F. X. In a lesser, quieter way he was fond of Tony. For Peter, he would have gone through nearly as much, if not quite, as for F. X. himself.
‘If you, Prout,’ said F. X., ‘were Lord Otterburn and owned the daily paper with the largest net sale (don’t forget net, Prout, there’s always a lot of holes in a net) what would you do?’
Prout put a cover upon the dish of kidneys. ‘Nothing, sir,’ said Prout.
F. X. looked at him. ‘And a very good answer too. Don’t know what it is about you, Prout, but you always say the right thing with the most delightfully innocent air of not knowing you’ve said it.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Prout. ‘Excuse me, sir, but Mrs Fairburn wanted me to ask you whether you could see her for a moment before you leave for the office.’
F. X. nodded. ‘Certainly, certainly.’ He looked at his watch. ‘You’d better tell her to come in now, hadn’t you? I shall be off in a few minutes.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said Prout, and left the room so silently, so unobtrusively that the moment he was gone F. X. wondered, as he always wondered on these occasions, whether Prout had really ever been with him at all.
The door opened again. Mrs Fairburn came in. Mrs Fairburn was F. X.’s housekeeper. She, too, had been with F. X. for seven years. She, too, strictly within her very strict notions of right and wrong, would have done anything for F. X. She was, as Tony frequently said, almost too good to be true. Her hair, quite black despite her fifty-four years, was scraped from her forehead and piled high upon the back of her head. She wore black satin always. Sometimes there were bugles upon the black satin, but at other times the black satin was plain. Always when she walked the black satin rustled. About her severely corsetted waist was a belt and inevitably there dangled from this belt a bunch of keys. No one in the house had ever discovered—since nothing in this house ever was locked—what these keys were for. But always they were there, swinging and dangling and jangling. They told you, in fact, where Mrs Fairburn, moving about her duties in the tall, narrow house, could be found. You had only to stand still and listen. Presently you would hear them and then you could track Mrs Fairburn.
‘Good-morning!’ said F. X. ‘Lovely morning, Mrs Fairburn.’
‘Gord-mooning, Mr Baynedik. Truly a delaiteful day. It makes one feel really as if spring were drawing on.’
F. X. nodded. ‘Yes, doesn’t it? Well, what’s the trouble, Mrs Fairburn?’
The thin lips of Mrs Fairburn writhed themselves into one of their sudden smiles. ‘No trouble, Mr Baynedik. Nothing of the sort. Only rather an extraordinary thing has happened.’ She produced, from some recess in the black-clad angularity of her presence, an envelope; advanced, bearing this rather like a lictor his symbolic bundle, towards the table. ‘Mr Baynedik,’ she said, ‘this letter came by a district maysenger boy last night when you were out. It is, as you see, addressed to the housekeeper and staff. Seeing this address, Mr Baynedik, Ay opened the letter and inside Ay found three orchestra fauteuils for the Royal Theatre for tonight’s performance. It is a piece which