Anthony Hope - Lucinda

HIS “Business Ambassador” was the title which my old chief, Ezekiel Coldston, used to give me. I daresay that it served as well as any other to describe with a pleasant mixture of dignity and playfulness, the sort of glorified bag-man or drummer that I was. It was my job to go into all quarters of the earth where the old man had scented a concession or a contract – and what a nose he had for them! – and make it appear to powerful persons that the Coldston firm would pay more for the concession (more in the long run, at all events) or ask less for the contract (less in the first instance, at all events) than any other responsible firm, company, or corporation in the world. Sir Ezekiel (as in due course he became) took me from a very low rung of the regular diplomatic ladder into his service on the recommendation of my uncle, Sir Paget Rillington, who was then at the top of that same ladder. My employer was good enough to tell me more than once that I had justified the recommendation.

“You’ve excellent manners, Julius,” he told me. “Indeed, quite engaging. Plenty of tact! You work – fairly hard; your gift for languages is of a great value, and, if you have no absolute genius for business – well, I’m at the other end of the cable. I’ve no cause to be dissatisfied.”

“As much as you could expect of the public school and varsity brand, sir?” I suggested.

“More,” said Ezekiel decisively.

I liked the job. I was very well paid. I saw the world; I met all sorts of people; and I was always royally treated, since, if I was always trying to get on the right side of my business or political friends, they were equally anxious to get on the right side of me – which meant, in their sanguine imaginations, the right side of Sir Ezekiel; a position which I believe to correspond rather to an abstract mathematical conception than to anything actually realizable in experience.

However, I do not want to talk about all that. I mention the few foregoing circumstances only to account for the fact that I found myself in town in the summer of 1914, back from a long and distant excursion, temporary occupant of a furnished flat (I was a homeless creature) in Buckingham Gate, enjoying the prospect of a few months’ holiday, and desirous of picking up the thread of my family and social connections – perhaps with an eye to country house visits and a bit of shooting or fishing by and by. First of all, though, after a short spell of London, I was due at Cragsfoot, to see Sir Paget, tell him about my last trip, and console him for the loss of Waldo’s society.

Not that anything tragic had happened to Waldo. On the contrary, he was going to be married. I had heard of the engagement a month before I sailed from Buenos Aires, and the news had sent my thoughts back to an autumn stay at Cragsfoot two years before, with Sir Paget and old Miss Fleming (we were great friends, she and I); the two boys, Waldo and Arsenio, just down from Oxford; respectable Mrs. Knyvett – oh, most indubitably respectable Mrs. Knyvett; – myself, older than the boys, younger than the seniors, and so with an agreeable alternation of atmosphere offered to me – and Lucinda! True that Nina Frost was a good deal there too, coming over from that atrocious big villa along the coast – Briarmount they called it – still, she was not of the house party; there was always a last talk, or frolic, after Nina had gone home, and after Mrs. Knyvett had gone to bed. Miss Fleming, “Aunt Bertha,” liked talks and frolics; and Sir Paget was popularly believed not to go to bed at all; he used to say that he had got out of the habit in Russia. So it was a merry time – a merry, thoughtless – !

Why, no, not the least thoughtless. I had nearly fallen into a cliché , a spurious commonplace. Youth may not count and calculate. It thinks like the deuce – and is not ashamed to talk its thoughts right out. You remember the Oxford talk, any of you who have been there, not (with submission to critics) all about football and the Gaiety, but through half the night about the Trinity, or the Nature of the Absolute, or Community of Goods, or why in Tennyson (this is my date rather than Waldo’s) Arthur had no children by Guinevere, or whether the working classes ought to limit – well, and so on. The boys brought us all that atmosphere, if not precisely those topics, and mighty were the discussions, – with Sir Paget to whet the blades, if ever they grew blunt, with one of his aphorisms, and Aunt Bertha to round up a discussion with an anecdote.

And now Lucinda had accepted Waldo! They were to be married now – directly. She had settled in practice the problem we had once debated through a moonlight evening on the terrace that looked out to sea. At what age should man and woman marry? He at thirty, she at twenty-five, said one side – in the interest of individual happiness. He at twenty-one, she at eighteen, said the other, in the interest of social wellbeing. (Mrs. Knyvett had gone to bed.) Lucinda was now twenty-one and Waldo twenty-six. It was a compromise – though, when I come to think of it, she had taken no part in discussing the problem. “I should do as I felt,” had been her one and only contribution; and she also went to bed in the early stages of the wordy battle. Incidentally I may observe that Lucinda’s exits were among the best things that she did – yes, even in those early days, when they were all instinct and no art. From Sir Paget downwards we men felt that, had the problem been set for present solution, we should all have felt poignantly interested in what Lucinda felt that she would do. No man of sensibility – as they used to say before we learnt really colloquial English – could have felt otherwise.

I will not run on with these recollections just now, but I was chuckling over them on the morning of Waldo’s and Lucinda’s wedding day – a very fine day in July, on which, after late and leisurely breakfast, I looked across the road on the easy and scattered activity of the barracks’ yard. That scene was soon to change – but the future wore its veil. With a mind vacant of foreboding, I was planning only how to spend the time till half-past two. I decided to dress myself, go to the club, read the papers, lunch, and so on to St. George’s. For, of course, St. George’s it was to be. Mrs. Knyvett had a temporary flat in Mount Street; Sir Paget had no town house, but put up at Claridge’s; he and Waldo – and Aunt Bertha – had been due to arrive there from Cragsfoot yesterday. Perhaps it was a little curious that Waldo had not been in town for the last week; but he had not, and I had seen none of the Cragsfoot folk since I got home. I had left a card on Mrs. Knyvett, but – well, I suppose that she and her daughter were much too busy to take any notice. I am afraid that I was rather glad of it; apprehensive visions of a partie carrée – the lovers mutually absorbed, and myself left to engross Mrs. Knyvett – faded harmlessly into the might-have-beens.

I walked along the Mall, making for my club in St. James’s Street. At the corner by Marlborough House I had to wait before crossing the road; a succession of motors and taxis held me up. I was still thinking of Lucinda; at least I told myself a moment later that I must have been still thinking of Lucinda, because only in that way could I account, on rational lines, for what happened to me. It was one o’clock – the Palace clock had just struck. The wedding was at half-past two, and the bride was, beyond reasonable doubt, now being decked out for it, or, perchance, taking necessary sustenance. But not driving straight away from the scene of operations, not looking out of the window of that last taxi which had just whisked by me! Yet the face at the taxi window – I could have sworn it was Lucinda’s. It wore her smile – and not many faces did that. Stranger still, it dazzled with that vivid flush which she herself – the real Lucinda – exhibited only on the rarest occasions, the moments of high feeling. It had come on the evening when Waldo and Arsenio Valdez quarreled at Cragsfoot.