Tale-Piece
It was the custom of our grandfathers and grandmothers—when they had any of them been fool enough to write a novel—to wind it up with a description of what the various characters in the beastly thing were doing at the moment when the book appeared—that is, supposedly, in a future some little while after the closing of the tale.
Those of you who still read the novels of my own youth—and I for one read no others—will remember that they are invariably concerned with a well-to-do young woman of exquisite beauty who marries a manly young fellow of her own status, after various ups and downs. Then the book goes on to tell you that they have twenty-six boys and girls with long curly hair, all gold. And then the band plays.
It is not easy for me to give you an appendix of this kind, because I have always thought it prudent to throw my own novels into the future, lest I should be sent to gaol for insulting the rich. Moreover, even if I did describe the final fate of my characters, I cannot make it a very pleasant one without treason to the realities of human life and the flattering of fools: and rather than flatter fools let me be torn to pieces by wild horses after the fashion of the Merovingian queens.
However, I propose to give you some idea of how the various people you have come across in these pages continued their not too significant lives.
When Marjorie had divorced Galton—having got married to him by way of preliminary—she was herself divorced by Pemberton—who had no further use for Lady Meinz—and then married—only last year—an extraordinarily fleshy man called (at the moment) Henry Munster. They are still happy—at least, she is. The child of the first union—if I may so describe it—is a girl; so that’s the end of the Galton peerage.
Aunt Amelia is dead: and high time.
Her brother, the former Home Secretary, has in the interval developed astonishing talents which have fitted him for the Colonial Office, the India Office, and the Treasury, in rapid succession—and would doubtless have fitted him for the Foreign Office but for the determined opposition of the permanent officials. During the four years in which it had been arranged to let the other batch of professional politicians have a suck at the salaries, he acted as President (at £2,500) of the Commission for the Second Reduction of Wages, wrote a book of reminiscences (£3,000 Gubbins & Gubbins 42s.). He was badly stoned during the progress of the fifth General Strike—some call it the seventh, but I follow the usual numeration. He had been taken by the mob for Henry Gaston, a man nearly forty years younger and twenty times as able—which only shows how important it is to educate the poor, and also, by the way, how important it is not to print in the papers pictures of people taken hundreds of years before the date of their appearance.
William de Bohun is still Professor of Crystallography in the University, where he has still further attained a European reputation. He is now mentioned not only in Swiss papers, but occasionally in German ones. He is not more than seventy-nine, and there is every chance of his retaining the position for a few more years. He has not made it up with the reader in Crystallogy, Mr. Bertran Leader.
I am sorry to say that these two distinguished men actually had a fight in the main street of their academic town, their weapons being umbrellas. Nor would the victory of the younger champion, Mr. B. Leader, have been for a moment doubtful had it not been that the umbrella of the elder, Professor de Bohun, was suddenly blown open by a gust of wind, affording him a sure and certain shield against the frenzied blows of his opponent.
McTaggart has gone under for good. It seems shameful, considering the excellent position on the British Intelligence into which he had been put on a weekly contract at fifteen pounds by the influence of the Home Secretary, who thought some reparation due to him, and still more by the influence of Victoria Mosel, who had squeezed Lord Bernstein’s hand. On the other hand it hurts nobody but himself. He is still unmarried.
George Whaley, with his accumulated savings, purchased immediately upon his leaving the service of Humphrey de Bohun, the good will of the Bohun Arms, which I need hardly tell you does not belong to the family, but to a limited company. The pub stands at the gate of the park. Therein he regales the countryside with comic stories of his former employers; the rich middle-class motorists with scandal of the Great; the upper classes who deign to halt there on their way north in their superb cars with obsequience and silence, at a profit of about 30s. the bunch. He has done very well indeed, because it is a convenient lunching place for people motoring out from London to the north. His son is in this year’s Oxford eight, but his daughter, I very much regret to say, has published, a book of verse—in Chelsea!
Ethelbert, a bright lad of nineteen, ordered by his master into the special constabulary during the third General Strike—I use the conventional numeration—was so unfortunate as to crack smartly upon the head a high dignitary of the Church of England, and was thereupon put in prison at the instance of Lady Sophia—the eminent cleric’s wife—who would take no denial. Upon release, the General Strike being still in progress—it was the first of the really long General Strikes, as you will remember, he joined the regular police force, which is ever ready to welcome men of varied experience and initiative. But he never developed the intelligence required for the agent provocateur, in which capacity such members of the service as have had personal experience of the cells are commonly employed. He is now past thirty and doing clerical work in the Lost Property Department.
What else remains? The horse, Attaboy, is dead, worn out in faithful labours at the stud. He was the sire of Get-On out of Get-Out. Get-Out, I need hardly tell you, was the sire of Success by Morning Star. Success was the sire of Repetition by Raseuse; and that is how Tabouche won the Oaks. I always did say the little filly would do well, for I have followed the strain—as, long ago, the form—of Attaboy, who now sleeps with his fathers—I means, sires, let alone dams.
As for the parrot, whom I may call the second Attaboy, he is still the cherished, the beloved, of that constant heart, Marjorie; Mrs. Munster, née de Bohun, sometime Lady Galton, as also Mrs. Pemberton—yes, Pemberton. So far as I can remember, she is nothing else—so far. Such a charming woman! Touching upon the lovely confines of middle age with large bulges under rather weary eyes. But her father provides handsomely.
As for that father, the head of the family, Humphrey de Bohun—pronounced Deboon—he looks no older. It would be odd if he could. He feels no older—that would be impossible. But he is inclined to colds in the head. He now tells the same story over and over again, the story of the Emerald. And it always ends, “Now guess who it was?” They do not murder him, they give it up; and he dodders out, “Why! It was a jackdaw!”
Victoria Mosel has, since the date of the great discovery of the Emerald, spent week-ends at Basingthorpe, Prawley, Hammerton, Gainger, Bifford, then again at Hammerton, then again at Gainger, after that at Little Wackham. Then at Bifford again, then at Gainger, and, of course, at Prawley. She also stayed at the Breitzes’ place in Silesia for three months, where she shot the bailiff’s dog—by accident. May I tell you that she has spent six weeks in every year on the Riviera? Can I deny that, at this very moment of writing, she is stopping at Hammerton, having passed the last week-end at Gainger and purposing to go on to Bifford?
The years leave no mark upon her temporal frame, for the skin was ever tight upon her bones. But she knows that she is getting on—and not in the City sense of that term either. She already envisages the tomb. I am fond of her. I think she will save her soul.
One great asset which endears her to the rich of her circle. Sir William Collop is always ready and even eager to come at her bidding to any country house, and there she puts him through his paces, to the enormous joy of the assembled hosts and guests. But she is a good girl—I use the word of a woman now nearing sixty—and she does him no harm. Only, she does make him dance. And why not?
After dinner, in the palaces of the rich, Sir William Collop is compelled to tell quaint stories of the other rich over whom his position in Scotland Yard gives him insight. Nor is he unwilling. They all call him a good fellow, by which they mean that his accent is as thick as cheese. He will be Collop till he dies. His original name is drowned ten fathoms deep; he is just coming into his pension, and he is an O. B. E. of the third crop.
And the emerald? Ah, my friends! My brothers! I will tell you what happened to the emerald!
When Mrs. Pemberton, formerly Lady Galton, then Mrs. Munster1 née de Bohun, was making the straddle between the Pemberton and the Munster connections—what we call joining the slats—she needed five hundred pounds. It sounds ridiculous. But she did. One often does. She had outrun the constable. She did not want to bother her father, and for the very good reason that he had just got damnably knocked in the Hungarian Phosphates on the erroneous advice of that silly man Mowlem. Well, she had taken the emerald to the man who, Vic had told her, was the best expert in London—Mr. Marlovitch, Junior—and (behold!) he had proved to her by infallible tests that it was paste. What is more, he had given her proof out of learned books that no emerald of such size ever had existed, or could exist.
The Bohuns had patriotism in their blood. Marjorie gave the famous trinket to the State—let me say to England!—under very easy conditions which earned her, I am glad to say, the entry of her daughter into Parliament. These conditions were modest: the emerald was to be permanently exhibited, in a very large case all by itself, in the British Museum, with a tablet engraved at the expense of England—I mean the State—describing it as the largest Emerald in the world—which it would have been if it had been an emerald—and assuring the honest public that it had been given by Catherine the Great to that member of the ancient family of de Bohuns who had served the interests of the State—or rather, let me say, of England—at the Court of All the Russias, in those days when the Semiramis of the North was the admiration of Europe.
“What!” you’ll exclaim (it’s just like you!), “would that regal woman, that generous if somewhat demanding lady, that broad German strong in her nobility, that Monarch of the Snows, Empress of all the Russias, have fallen to deceiving handsome Bill Bones with a piece of paste?”
Not a bit of it. You little understood the nature of those who serve power. She had given her emerald—and an emerald it was—to a man in whom she had the fullest confidence; she had given it him with the order to bestow it at once upon the English captain. But her messenger had preferred his own interest and had substituted that larger and false one round which all this dance has been led.
And, as the Prime Minister said of his colleague on the front bench who got into trouble over the insurance shares, who shall blame him?
Not I.
1Oh! Yes! I know all about it. She would have gone on calling herself Lady Galton from husband (save the mark!) to husband. No, child! It’s already getting doubtful. In the future time of which I write it was unknown.
The End