JOHN FIELDS RETURN
JOHN FIELD'S father had been a man of considerable business acumen, a forceful, wide-grasping figure, one of the most noticeable of his time in Capel Court. It will be admitted, I suppose, that luck is a foremost factor in the success of a stockbroker; but why do some men habitually command it and others fail to? Putting aside the Buddhistic theory of pre-existence, with its demised rewards and atonements, it would seem as if luck were no other than the definite sum in certain human entities of a multitude of inherited qualities. One is not lucky because one is virtuous, or has been virtuous in a former life, but because there happens to have come together in one a cluster of ancestral propensities, each congenial to each, and all together forming the character most apt to command luck.
It is not for me or for anyone to analyse these constituents; yet somehow, I think, we are instinctively conscious of the lucky man when we meet him. Maybe it is that same instinctive recognition which partly makes for the lucky man's luck, inasmuch as we are naturally inclined to invest our trust in such a child of Fortune; so that after all, perhaps, it is not so much his definite qualities that we are to search for the reason of his success as our own confident sympathies towards that in him which virtually ensures success.
Anyhow, John Field the elder did possess the indefinable something, and he prospered greatly on the strength of it. He was physically big and strong enough to have illustrated the Spanish proverb that 'Good luck gets on by elbowing'; but indeed, though a certain genial arrogance characterised his operations, his effective strength lay much more in an infinite foresight and grasp of opportunity.
He lived well and long and died without fuss, leaving his fortune and his business to his only son and partner, John Field the younger.
Now this John was a man of a very different constitution. With no congenital equipment like his father's, he was yet not so much a fool as a failure. While existing and surviving within that protective shadow, he had had no particular reason to suspect the fact; it was only when he succeeded to his inheritance that certain doubts in him grew gradually from misgiving to conviction.
He was already a man of forty-seven when left alone in the world, by temperament a sybarite and a confirmed bachelor. He was rather a retiring soul, home-loving, and inclined to the solitary discussion of costly wines and meats. Gastronomy, indeed, may have been called his favourite study, though he indulged it with the secrecy of a shy man. So long as his father lived he had accepted unquestioningly, or without apparent criticism, the provisions of an abounding table; when committed to his own resources, he began to experiment, tentatively and timidly at first, on the fruits of his private observation. He had unobtrusively accumulated in his time quite a little Epicurean library, from The Cook's Oracle of Dr. Kitchener to the Please'm the Butcher of our own day, and this he now disinterred from its omnigenous lurking-holes, and allotted the dusk end of a shelf in the dining-room bookcase. With some nervous diffidence, also, he effected a reform in his menage, and substituted for the capable cook of his father's reign a veritable chef de cuisine—an artist trained in the dietetic studios, so to speak, of Voisin's and the Bœuf à la Mode. These temples of gastronomy, with others of their distinguished kind, had always been among John junior's most quietly favoured resorts during his rare trips abroad.
John Field had been well educated. Perhaps, after all, since some sort of mental employment is almost imposed upon one who has been, he simply developed, in cultivating the art of the palate, along his line of least resistance. Education makes us aspire, but it fails in teaching us to what. That, in order to the satisfaction of a vague intellectual hunger, we must find out for ourselves. Some resolve the problem through the eyes, and collect pictures; some through the ears, and study Wagner; others through the nose, and grow carnations. There is food for taste in each of these, and surely there is also food for taste in a taste for food. Indeed, epicurism may be said to command all tastes, since a good dinner enhances the aesthetic values of all art, whether musical, spectacular, or literary. In the respect of his hobby, therefore, John Field might have claimed distinction as a virtuoso. He had as fine a collection of cooking recipes as anyone in the kingdom.
In person, Mr. Field was a short meagre man, one of those starveling figures whose dimensions of capacity seem hopelessly inadequate to the strain put upon them, and who yet can absorb a Gargantuan repast without a sign, moral or physical, of inconvenience. Such paradoxes, however, have their exact antitheses in the minute appetites that amass flesh; and both, I suppose, turn upon constitution. It takes more dressing to recruit a poor soil than a rich one. In any case, there is nothing more certain than that a glutton is not to be known by his waist.
Small side-whiskers, large blind-looking blue eyes, an habitual smile, more wistful in suggestion than humorous, a shrinking manner—such in John Field comprised the negative features of an uneventful personality. He could not look people in the face, he seemed nervous, timid, and as if always groping among problems whose solution eluded him. Yet, underneath all the shy commonplace and reserve there was something—some little blot on the man's soul, a rather appalling little thing it was—of whose existence no one even guessed.
John Field was forty-seven, I say, when he succeeded to his father's coffers and business; and, despite the fact that he had been for long years a partner in the firm, the latter statement is made advisedly. He had been a partner, indeed; but for all practical purposes no more than a sleeping one. Within the protecting shadow of that vast personality he had played at speculation, rather, in truth, as children used to play at the game with cards and counters. But, during the whole period of the association, he had never once originated, or dreamed of originating, or been invited to originate a move of his own. He had been just the passive instrument in a despotic hand.
He had been hardly aware, even, of his subservience. Those who are bred in the shadow of power assume, naturally, something of its hue. It was only when stripped of his borrowed covering that he realised his own anæmic nakedness. That he himself, and no other, was John Field and Son came upon him with something the shock of a sleep-walker's sudden awakening to a consciousness of his own lost isolation.
A friend once told me of an experience he had had. It was on the roof of a crawling omnibus, and the night was dense with fog. Suddenly there was a swerve, a crash, a desperate reining-in. The driver, utterly bemused, had taken the footpath for the road, and had pulled up only timely against a wall of shadowy brick. My friend, thinking it his best policy to alight, descended, and stood a moment to consider his way in the obscurity. During that moment, the driver, recovering his course, drove off, leaving my friend stranded at what, it occurred to him, was a curious elevation. And then he discovered the reason. He was standing on the parapet of a bridge which crossed some railway at a giddy height. A single step backwards, and he had gone crashing into eternity.
Now something of the shock and horror of that experience was John Field's, when the jog of his life's easy routine was exchanged in a moment for a consciousness of terrific poising on the verge of an unguessed-at abyss. He got off the parapet, so to speak; but his wits from that hour were never perhaps wholly at his command. A constitutional inability in him to think things out increased, until, from dread of itself, it became quite morbid in its character. This, however, was only the case as regarded his official responsibilities. Privately, he remained quite rational in the pursuit of his hobby.
Unfortunately the two could not be entirely dissociated, since the official had to supply the substance of the domestic. The firm of John Field and Son had never identified itself with the gilt-edged method of business. It took huge risks and built on huge profits. Wars, loans, taxes, monetary abundance or monetary scarcity, the fluctuations occurring in all human affairs from the fall of a ministry to the rise of a Mahdi—where safer firms cautiously exploited the legitimate accidents of such, Fields plunged and won through, as through the waters of Pactolus, breathless but dripping with gold. It was just a question of the Head's genius—or of his constitutional luck. He had an inspired way with him which carried daring to a triumphant finish. The thing was personal and not transmissible; that was its fatal flaw. Its genius once departed, the House remained committed to a policy of brilliancy which it had no exceptional light left to supply; and in consequence it fell, and swiftly, upon dark times. By quick and quicker process the luck that had habitually characterised its ventures under the old regime came to be not so much diluted, or even ended, as reversed. The fortunes of Fields began steadily to decline, to roll down—presently to the accompaniment of a heavy crash or two. And, suddenly, John Field the younger found himself staring aghast at the prospect of ruin. He only, perhaps, began fully to realise his own inadequacy when he realised that amazing fact. He had had so little need hitherto to think for himself that he had failed utterly to grasp his incapacity for effective thought of any sort.
One morning he sat at his office table, his right hand supporting his chin, his left toying with a pen, his round eyes vaguely contemplating a vision of the things he ought to have done to have reversed the disastrous order of a late settlement. Already he saw himself in imagination "posted" in the great hall, a "lame duck." And then his mind wandered away to a recipe he had just secured for the Docce Piccante of Florence—a peculiarly delectable dish which he had long coveted. Had he any right at last to indulge himself in these ruinous extravagances? The thought was prostration. He had no more power to forgo his hobby than a drunkard his whisky, a millionaire his free libraries, a magistrate his joke, though he had to pawn his hat to achieve his desire. As he sat, he spoke wistfully, without raising his eyes, to Harding, his chief clerk, who stood near by silently regarding him.
"This is very bad, Harding. Everything seems to go wrong with us since my father's death. And yet the character of the business remains unaltered."
The clerk uttered a sound that might have signified protest or assent. In point of fact he could have qualified the statement by a reminder that, though the business remained the same, the Head was different. A fleeting impulse, also, to cite an instance, from Æsop's Fables, of the injury that might be caused to certain members through a disagreement with their principal, he abandoned as too suggestively personal. And yet it would have been a telling illustration. They, the establishment to wit, were being threatened with a loss of livelihood through the gastronomic obsessions of this—well, one of the many names that Prince Hal called Falstaff.
Harding, a man of mature age and solid conservative principles, had risen to his position more through worth than brilliancy. John Field senior had not desired brilliancy in his employés; he had provided that in himself; it was the solid reliable qualities he had sought. This chief clerk was, as regarded speculative business, almost as incompetent as his present master himself to take the initiative—only with a difference. He could not advise where to venture; but he could tell where not to. That, however, was only a negative instinct, and little in request. While being as much in the confidence of John Field as was possible with so shy a man, he neither imposed nor was asked his opinion on momentous matters. But he saw, had for long seen, how things were going, and, in anticipation of the end, he was putting out cautious feelers towards problematic berths. He did this, to give him his just dues, with no unkind motive. He had a liking for his thewless employer—even a respect, though tempered with the business man's contempt for a visionary; but he felt no conscious capacity in himself for setting the wrong right, and he had the interests of a growing family to consult. There was never any invitation to human sympathy, moreover, on the part of this dull reserve. It was impossible to fathom it, whether for depth or shallowness.
"Does it not?" continued John Field, "or does anything strike you as different?"
"Only the driving force behind the machinery, sir," said Harding impulsively. The words were out before he could temper them.
John Field glanced up and down—an instant of startled intelligence; then resumed, more busily than ever, that idle scratching with his pen.
"O!" he murmured; "yes. I think I know what you mean. And yet the rules of heredity, Harding. It ought to be in me somewhere."
The clerk was silent, and the restless fingers scratched on, 'blind tooling' with an inkless pen on blotting-paper, the empty hieroglyphics of an expressionless soul. Presently he began to murmur again, as if in self-communion:
"Perhaps I have been trying—all this time—to keep something from myself—the fact that others guessed the secret which I trusted to luck to hold inviolate. But where is luck—what has become of it?—that is just the question. I know it at home—sometimes—but not here. Not mental incompetency, but mental limitations—yes, that is it, mental limitations. And why?" His head bowed lower, as if in conscious incoherence, and his lips whispered on: "I don't understand; yet I foresee; I follow; but always on the threshold the footsteps die away. You don't guess what it is to hunt eternal chimeras, and then to find something tangible, gross, on which one's intellect can fasten tooth and nail—a certainty—yes, literally, tooth and nail."
He ceased, and not knowing where else to look, the clerk's eyes sought the floor. He was taken completely by surprise in the shock of this unwonted, this unexpected self-revelation. There was something wrong here, he thought; some congenital aberration hitherto unsuspected by him, and which might account for much.
And, as he stood, he heard a sudden violent sound, and started to the vision of his employer transformed, translated—a little suffering agitated figure, sprung upon its feet and apostrophising Destiny in a torrent of emotion:
"Why is it not in me, my father's genius? But I say it is, it is, only plugged in—stifled behind some monstrous obstruction. I feel it struggling for vent—bursting to rend the darkness; only the barrier is too dense. If I could once force it, once tear a way, my mind would be free to follow its own clues to ends as triumphant as his. They are there, those clues—I see them, touch them—and they lead me always, always up to the impenetrable wall and there stop. Why will it refuse to be pierced—why will it not let me through to the things I follow—Harding, why will it not? It keeps my intellect a prisoner, and doomed eternally to feed on the husks it can gather for its hunger? Harding!"
His vacant eyes were alight, his lean chest heaved, his voice was broken with emotion. It was like the bursting of some immured mental reservoir, never suspected until overflowing. Greatly shocked and concerned, the chief clerk took a step towards him.
"There, Mr. Field, sir," he said. "Come, come. You are overwrought; you imagine things; we shall see our way to an improvement by and by. We have a great deal of prestige to build upon, and we will be more circumspect in the future. Try to command yourself, sir."
His words, a long habit of self-obliteration, wrought their effect upon the sufferer. Gradually his voluble distress subsided, and he came to speak in a calmer tone.
"Yes, yes, Harding. I think I am unduly upset, perhaps. Only I understand what no one else does. It is here, all the time" (he put a hand to his forehead); "but something intervenes and closes the outlet. If I could only break a way through; if I could only gather how to do it"
The other interrupted him: "What you want, sir, is a complete rest for your brain. It is bad for that to force conclusions. Let it vegetate, and they will come of themselves. The green shoot, you know, if watered and not disturbed, will make its way up through the hardest ground."
"That is very true, Harding—very comfortingly put. What shall I do?"
"If you take my advice, sir, you will cut the office for a week or two. We can manage without you. Go away to some quiet restorative place, and leave no address with anyone. No correspondence, no worry of any sort."
"I think I will do as you say. If I do not turn up to-morrow, you will understand I have taken your advice. God bless you, Harding."
The clerk, leaving the room, shut himself into his own, sat down, and shook his head. "Mad," he thought. "Not totally unexpected, either; but its suddenness took me off my feet. I must accept this breathing-space to look round me. I'm sorry; but, whatever the block in his brain, it's likely to stick there. We shall go from bad to worse If I had dared to let him know, there's another crash imminent—those B Annuities—smoke and ashes. He'll be best away from it all." He hummed awhile, softly tapping his fingers on the table as he pondered. "What can be the psychologic explanation? That starting on a clue—to nothing; and yet the feeling of a goal? I wonder if it's true; I wonder if he really inherits so much of his father as to get on the track of great things that he's unable to develop? And then his mental refuge—if I read him right—the intellectual occupation of the table, good Lord! To 'epicurise' oneself into oblivion of one's abortive aspirations! It seems an odd way; but every man knows his own resources best, I suppose."
It will be observed that, for all his retiring disposition, John Field had not succeeded in hiding his foible from the world. But Harding was really distressed and perplexed. He foresaw fresh disaster, without having a conception of any means possible to avert it; and he prayed only that his employer, did he decide to take his advice and a holiday, would read of his loss in the papers, and so spare him, Harding, the pain of having to announce it to him.
Well, at least, it appeared, John Field had adopted his recommendation and withdrawn into some pastoral obscurity; for, for the next week, his place at the office did not know him, nor did he vouchsafe any message or communication whatsoever to give a clue to his whereabouts. And then came the expected débâcle. A mortgage bank, largely propped by speculative financiers, stopped payment, and the house of Field was shaken to its foundations.
Harding steered through the mad waters as well as he was able, but he knew it was only a temporary escape, and that they must end on the rocks. He felt exhausted, hopeless, and he longed for some strong capable hand to take the tiller and the responsibility out of his own. On the morning of the ninth day of his chief's absence, on going into the latter's room for some papers, he saw John Field sitting in his accustomed chair.
To say that he was startled would express indifferently the shock that this unexpected apparition gave him. He had heard nothing of his employer's arrival; had neither expected him nor been warned by him of his intended return. And then the thought of the inevitable discussion between them made his heart turn suddenly sick.
"God bless me, sir!" he exclaimed, falling back a step. "This is a surprise—they never told me. Are you better—recovered?"
"Yes—well."
There was a tone in the voice which answered that Harding had never heard before. It suggested somehow the clearer cleaner enunciation which an operation for adenoids might have induced. And then suddenly John Field turned round in his chair, with a gesture as quick and peremptory as it was unusual. He looked pale; but the habitual vagueness of his blue eyes was replaced by an odd alertness, which seemed positively to scintillate as if in the glow of some inner fire.
"Shut the door," he said; "shut the door, and lock it."
Harding obeyed mechanically. He felt himself somehow on the threshold of a stupendous revelation.
"Something has happened," said John Field, as the chief clerk turned to face him again. "I am through, Harding—I am through with it."
"Through, sir?"
"The obstruction—you know what—it is gone."
"Gone? But how"
"It was organic, as I always supposed it to be. Never mind the process—more successful than I ever dared to hope. The question now is one of time. We must hurry, hurry, Harding."
"Demented, at last and completely," thought the clerk. "I understand." Then he pressed out with his hand the trembling of his lips. "Mr. Field," he said, "I must say it, I am afraid. No hurry will ever overtake what is gone beyond redemption. Have you not heard?"
"Yes, of course, I saw it in the papers. But you talk foolishly when you speak of 'beyond redemption.' Nature, Harding, abhors a vacuum. We cannot lose but she compensates—often with disproportionate riches. Cut out the killing canker, and earn life of her tenfold renewed. I have been with her and studied her methods. Let the bank go with the rest. They were the buds sacrificed to divert all growth into the perfect blossom. I have a hundred schemes, understood at last, to bring us gold. Only the time is short—or may be. We must hurry if we want to reap the harvest. There are plans to formulate—arrears of long months to make up. Come here to me."
All amazed, yet conscious of some compelling force, or atmosphere, the chief clerk obeyed. He still believed his master mad, yet he had no power to resist his will. As he approached, John Field, already bent over his desk, looked up.
"They never told you," he said, "that I had returned. I wished to enter unobserved. I desire the knowledge of my presence to be withheld from all but yourself. These enterprises I have in view—they are vast and absorbing, and they need the utmost concentration of my mind upon them. I appoint you my instrument and mouthpiece in them all. Say nothing of my initiative; say nothing of my return; but be secret and trustworthy. When you seek me I shall be here—locked in and alone. Wait upon me quietly, and never concern yourself as to my coming and going. Ruin will ensue upon any failure of yours to respect my confidence. Be faithful, and golden days are in store for us all."
Harding, scarcely able to articulate, murmured his assent to the compact. His brain felt giddy. Surely, if here was a confirmation of his suspicion, madness expressed itself in a lucidity, a force of decision, which had never characterised the normal being. Moreover, being but human, that confident promise of wealth rang in his head like a golden clarion. How could he believe it other than a sane promise? So are we constituted. In the light of potential gain, all extravagance becomes reason to us. Like one in a dream, he bent above the sitting figure.
An hour later he issued from the room, closed the door softly, gave a little stagger, and made crookedly on tiptoe for his own sanctum, into which he shut and locked himself. He then deposited a sheaf of papers he carried upon his desk, and sank giddily into a chair.
"Who could have believed it possible?"—so his thoughts careered. "It has happened—it has actually happened—and here is the genius of the old man returned upon the house. What did it: what brought it about—the bursting of some mental ligature; some internal explosion, like the purging of a foul tobacco-pipe with fusees; or some operation was it? Will he ever tell me; shall I ever know? Only it has come to pass—that is the astounding thing. These schemes"—he put a hand, fondly, tremulously, upon the papers—"there is wealth in every one of them—foresight, certain calculation, brilliancy. They restore the odour of the past; they are the John Field and Son of my first knowledge."
Presently he rose and went about his business. For a week he went about it, and always like a man in a dream. In the markets, while the schemes matured, he trod, confident and victorious, the pavements of a golden past; back in the office he was like one entering the portals of some hushed terrific temple. It felt so to him, he could not have explained why. There seemed always a tremendous atmosphere brooding within the familiar place—an atmosphere which transformed all things into unreality, and weighed upon the spirits of the most flippant clerks. And during the whole time John Field remained shut up in his room, accessible to him alone, going and coming—if, indeed, he ever went—unguessed at and unobserved, directing operations, and planning out the harvest for his reaping.
One day—it was the day of all others to witness the first garnering of the ripened crop—Harding, coming out from a whispered consultation with his chief, and hearing the door, as usual, locked softly behind him, was aware, as he stood with his fingers yet on the handle, of a clerk advancing hastily towards him down the corridor with a newspaper in his hand. There was a look of terror in the boy's eyes, a scared pallor on his face that arrested the other instantly.
"What is it, Jessel?" he said, as the intruder came near. "Good God! why do you look like that?"
"Read, Mr. Harding. See, there, sir."
He held out the paper, an early evening edition; his voice shook; he cleared his throat nervously. Harding, conscious of a vague panic at his heart, took the paper from his hand, glanced at the heading signified, and stood suddenly rigid.
"Half-way down the last column, sir," whispered the boy; and Harding, clinching himself to the effort, read:
"Tragic end of a well-known stockbroker. Early this morning a gamekeeper, while making his round of Lord Pamplin's Stanbury estate, discovered the body of a well-dressed man lying in a copse within a few hundred yards of the main road. A revolver was grasped in the deceased's right hand, and every evidence pointed to its being a case of suicide. The body had evidently lain where it was found a considerable time, probably a week or longer. At present it remains unidentified.
"Later: The body has been identified, from papers discovered upon it, as that of a Mr. John Field, a well-known stockbroker in the City. Mr. Field had latterly been staying at the Clayton Arms in Stanbury, from which hostelry he disappeared, without giving notice, some eight or nine days ago. It is believed that financial difficulties were responsible for the unfortunate gentleman's rash act, to which he was driven on the receipt of newspaper information as to the failure of certain gigantic operations on the Stock Exchange. Mr. Field is supposed to have gone straight from the inn to the spot where the corpse was discovered, and there to have shot himself through the head. Jewellery and money were found intact upon the body, which, according to medical testimony, must have lain undisturbed where it had fallen for at least a week. The inquest is fixed for to-morrow."
The paper rustled and fell from Harding's hand.
"That's non," he said thickly; "lookle, you Jes—loo" like a man with incipient lockjaw. And then, clutching first at his throat, he threw himself on the door with a thin scream.
"Mr. Harding," cried the boy aghast. "What are you doing? It's fastened. He can't be in there."
Harding snarled round.
"Did I say he was, you fool? What—have you felt it too? Are you suggesting? What if I heard something. I must get in here—Jessel, I must. Come and put your shoulder to it."
Scared, the youngster obeyed. But first he turned the handle.
"Why, it's not locked!" he gasped, and opened the door.
Harding staggered, and came erect. He looked round the room. His face was like chalk, his eyes like grey flints in it.
"No, it's empty," he said, in a crowing whisper. "Of course it is. It was jus' my fancy—jus'—my fance"