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    The Marsden Case by Ford Madox Ford - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)
    The Marsden Case by Ford Madox Ford - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)
    The Marsden Case by Ford Madox Ford - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)
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    The Marsden Case by Ford Madox Ford - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)

    By Ford Madox Ford

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    This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘The Marsden Case by Ford Madox Ford - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford’.

    Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Ford includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

    eBook features:
    * The complete unabridged text of ‘The Marsden Case by Ford Madox Ford - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’
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    * Excellent formatting of the textPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPublishdrive
    Release dateJul 17, 2017
    ISBN9781788777742
    The Marsden Case by Ford Madox Ford - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)
    Author

    Ford Madox Ford

    Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, and editor. Born in Wimbledon, Ford was the son of Pre-Raphaelite artist Catherine Madox Brown and music critic Francis Hueffer. In 1894, he eloped with his girlfriend Elsie Martindale and eventually settled in Winchelsea, where they lived near Henry James and H. G. Wells. Ford left his wife and two daughters in 1909 for writer Isobel Violet Hunt, with whom he launched The English Review, an influential magazine that published such writers as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. As Ford Madox Hueffer, he established himself with such novels as The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), cowritten with Joseph Conrad, and The Fifth Queen (1906-1907), a trilogy of historical novels. During the Great War, however, he began using the penname Ford Madox Ford to avoid anti-German sentiment. The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many to be Ford’s masterpiece, earned him a reputation as a leading novelist of his generation and continues to be named among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Recognized as a pioneering modernist for his poem “Antwerp” (1915) and his tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-1928), Ford was a friend of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Despite his reputation and influence as an artist and publisher who promoted the early work of some of the greatest English and American writers of his time, Ford has been largely overshadowed by his contemporaries, some of whom took to disparaging him as their own reputations took flight.

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      The Marsden Case by Ford Madox Ford - Delphi Classics (Illustrated) - Ford Madox Ford

      1923.

      PART I

      CHAPTER I

      I FIRST saw George Heimann on the 13th of July, 1914, just three weeks before the outbreak of the war with Germany, in a place that is usually veiled from the public eye — I mean a publisher’s office. Not in the publisher’s inner chamber from which I had just emerged, but in a slip of an ante-room, walled-in completely with books that all wore their paper wrappers.

      In such a place books are at their most sinister and their most forlorn. They await sales, and are I suppose more new than they will be if ever they reach the booksellers’ shelves; but they appear wearisomely old, with the oldness of a last week’s daily paper. Upon them there will be always a film of dust, and they fit too rigidly into the white deal shelves. A limbo of books! A place where the Unborn float pallidly in dimnesses!

      It was in such a limbo that I first saw George Heimann, three weeks before the war with Germany. Yet few young men were more unliterary. And, indeed, though he had come to make a scene, few young men were ever less inclined to make scenes. A regular false position! for, in that dim, unreal place, I was to witness one of the most repulsive rows I have ever known. One of the nastiest! It was as if fishes in a tank had suddenly determined to fling at each other the most obscene epithets of which they could think.

      The publisher — I did not like him! — had just made to me an offer that had not at all appealed to me. He had wanted my name to give respectability to his list of books, which was not a very attractive one, and he had wanted to get it so cheaply that if the offer was not an insult it was a piece of sharp practice. I had at that date published ten or eleven rather lazy volumes. I had not made much money by them; my circumstances had rendered that unnecessary. But I knew enough about books and the money there was in them to be aware that his offer was sheer insolence. Perhaps he had expected me to bargain with him: I don’t know.

      There are of course perfectly decent publishers: actually, most of them are men and brothers, much like other men and brothers. But Mr. Podd was not of this description; indeed, he was less of a publisher than a glorified dealer in old furniture, having another business under some such name as Short and Robinson, by which he was said to have amassed a considerable fortune. So that he could give himself comfortable airs of being a benevolent patron of the needy littérateur. He wasn’t.

      Beneath a blue-white beard he had a face like a tomato: its colouration was, I think, caused by some sort of disease of the skin, over the nose and upper cheeks. It was he that had the tremendous law-suit with an American senator about spurious Chippendale chairs. A nasty tempered man: honeyed when he desired to swindle you, but extremely unpleasant when you showed that you recognised him as, let us say, no philanthropist.

      I had not, however, uttered any opinion about his offer, and, coming out of his inner office — his sanctum, a holy place, he called it! — he remained honied but patronising. His waistcoat protruded rather over his trousers. I wish I knew what the stuff was called that he wore. At any rate it was a smooth, blue-grey cloth — rather festal. He had been expatiating on the delight I should feel at seeing my books enshrined in what he called his format, rhyming the word to doormat; and, as we went along the corridor, he showing me out, haughtily, yet with deference, he detained me for a moment outside the door of the store-room that I have described. He wished me to see how he got his books up.

      The store-room was very dim. A man in silhouette like a chimpanzee was crouched in a bent-wood chair over a deal table. Mr. Podd, intent on finding some book and browsing at once along the shelves, did not notice him at all. I suppose he took him for his chief assistant, who must really have gone to lunch. Mr. Podd muttered:

      "The Palace of Peace! Where’s The Palace of Peace? It ought to be here!"

      Suddenly he switched on an electric light in a shadeless bulb, and the place grew brilliantly sordid.

      Having found his book and taken down a copy, Mr. Podd was turning on his heel. He moved in a sort of rhythm with the figure at the table. I mean that they turned as if they had been interlocked cog-wheels, so that their faces came the one opposite the other at the same moment.

      In spite of profuse, blue-black growths of hair and beard, that chimpanzee’s profile revealed itself as that of quite a young man with a face, by contrast, alabaster white and aquiline; intent under a slouch hat. Mr. Podd started back against his shelves. His face contrasted very violently with the other’s, exhibiting at first a sudden panic and then slowly assuming a sort of uneasy arrogance. The other remained gazing at him with fixed and good-humoured irony. At last Mr. Podd exclaimed:

      You! I gave orders that I was not to see you! Never! I have an unusually good memory for speeches, and I recall these with some exactness.

      It’s a duty, the young man said; a police duty, to see people of your kidney, Mr. Podd.

      I gave orders.... Mr. Podd repeated. The boy looked suddenly concerned.

      Don’t you, he exclaimed, victimise the wretched little boy in your outer office for letting me in. I walked past. I knew the way. We have been here too often, my sister and I. He added:

      I do not want to talk to you before this gentleman. I don’t want to talk to you at all. It is my sister who forces me into this false position. And if I let you escape now you’ll bolt off and lock your door. Ask this gentleman to go! Mr. Podd’s uneasy eyes rolled towards me; then he said:

      No! Don’t go, Mr. Jessop! I have no secrets. From my clients. Besides... Undoubtedly he felt unsure of his ground. He stammered. You perhaps are aware.... There has been of course talk... These young lunatics have been roping in the German Emperor — of all people in the world! By ambassadors, you know! To remonstrate with me because I can’t sell their absurd translations from the German. Don’t go! Do me the favour!"

      I fancy that, if Mr. Podd had known what was coming, he would have let me go. The boy said regretfully:

      "If you wish Mr. Jessop to hear you, as it were, horsewhipped — He waved his hand over the deal table.

      The young man’s accent was faultless, his voice a noticeable, deep organ. I gathered that the foreignness of his aspect, his high-crowned hat, his coat, black and buttoned-up round his neck, like a uniform — always a startling effect, his immense black Inverness cloak, his young beard and his long black hair drooping over his ears, all these things were the products of a sojourn in Bohemia, not of foreign birth. It was a costume common enough to spirited and nonsensical youth all over the world in the days just before the war.

      Mr. Podd suddenly stuttered out the word:

      Horsewhipped! He compressed his stomach and flattened himself still more against his shelves.

      The young man remained impassive, as if he were rather depressed. Mr. Podd edged towards the door and, when he was able to imagine himself beyond the reach of the young man’s hands, he swelled a little. It was then that he made me irrevocably that young man’s supporter.

      With an odious patting motion on my shoulder, as soon as he was past the doorway, and with a sort of patronising note that no doubt he meant for the young man, but that I took to myself, he said:

      Look here, Jessop! (I fancy it was sheer physical funk that made him drop the Mr.) Take this young madman: Herr Georg Heimann, translator of that long German poem I published. Give him a good lunch — at my expense, of course! — and explain to him that in this country we cannot sell foreign epics as we do shilling shockers.

      To be fair to him I ought to have said: Curse your familiarity. But the young man flew through that door into the passage, and Mr. Podd, being pressed thus against me, I could not have spoken to him if I had wished.

      I knew by then more or less what the trouble was; London of those days was a beehive of gossip. In the clubs it had been said that Professor Edouard Curtius, a preposterously important German poet, had been getting dreadful things done to some publisher. A Foreign Office patron of poets had let it be known that German Augustness had instructed its Ambassador to help the author of The Titanic: an Epic in some affair of accounts. It was vague, like that; but it sounded amusing, and possible! There were, in those days, these tremendous German poets, terrible fellows with world-wide haloes; and statesmen, Chancelleries and Augustnesses were glad to be able to serve them. —

      This young fellow could hardly be the Poet; he must therefore be the translator. I felt vaguely rather sorry; for The Titanic: an Epic, was not a very good poem, and beautiful young men ought not to waste their time over translating dubious poetry and then quarrelling over the results. And certainly, in spite of his hair, this was a beautiful young man, with the agility of a music-hall gymnast. He showed that by the way he intercepted the retreat of Mr. Podd. It was done with one bound from the chair on which he sat, out through the doorway, into the passage. He achieved that feat of diagonal flight without hurtling against the doorpost, without touching me, and even without brushing against Mr. Podd. It made me have a warm feeling towards him, for it was like politeness. And it was astonishing — as if a black peacock had flown through dusk to alight consummately. In passing, he said between his teeth:

      No, you don’t!

      That made me certain that he was as English as could be. He stood there with one finger on the top button of Mr. Podd’s waistcoat, and said with perfectly controlled breathing:

      I am going — because I promised my sister — firstly, to give you the details of your small sneak-thieving that my sister has collected against you; then I shall repeat to you the comments of my sister, of Miss Jeaffreson, and Professor Curtius. Then I shall go away.

      Mr. Podd said, astonishingly, but in a sort of mumble: A pretty fellow! With your origins, to pose as a protector of young women!

      The boy’s features tightened a little; but he continued good-humouredly:

      You have got to go through with it, Mr. Podd. You have set that child’s teeth on edge. Now you must consume the sour grapes — the very sour grapes I

      It struck me, even then, that that boy must have had a good training as a political debater. He might have been a practised member of the House of Peers, speaking easily, collectedly, lightly, with good humour and above all with complete control of his hands and feet.

      He said:

      You are a thoroughly dishonest person, Mr. Podd. I regret to say it, but you are. In these transactions you have been dishonest over and over again. It has not been chance swindling: it has been a system in action. I do not say it is your usual system; but, seeing what a child my sister was, in this matter of the translation of the Professor’s epic, you have not been able to resist going to almost impossible lengths. You have swindled the Professor out of small sums in royalties and, as he is a foreigner, that is very mean. To my sister you have behaved like a bad horse-coper. All horse-copers swindle, but you have swindled a child beyond imaginable bounds. You have robbed her fantastically.

      Mr. Podd at that point smiled at me — uneasily, but recognisably, and the boy addressed himself to me. He said:

      My sister, for reasons of a foolishly chivalrous but not discreditable kind, wished Professor Curtius’ book to appear with great luxury. Professor Curtius is a good fellow; though his poem is tripe. We are under obligations to him. So my sister made over some of her possessions in the way of old furniture to Mr. Podd — to pay him for issuing a specially well-printed and well-bound volume. Mr. Podd undertook to do this. He has issued a book that looks like a cheap railway guide. That is a breach of agreement. But, what’s morally worse, is this: Mr. Podd assured my sister that her possessions — we’re always short of ready cash; who isn’t? — her possessions were just worthless junk....

      Mr. Podd said:

      "The fellow’s a blackmailer. That’s what he is, a blackmailer...

      Heimann answered:

      "Oh no, he isn’t. He has not asked you for a penny of money. Only for this pound of flesh! If you offered us all the money in the world, not one of us would touch it. Not I: not Marie Elizabeth; not Professor Curtius...

      Mr. Podd mumbled:

      This fellow... coming from nowhere... with his two girls...

      The boy said:

      What’s that you say? Speak up!

      I said — for that passage began to feel as if it were humming with disagreeable currents:

      For goodness’ sake hold your tongue. That young fellow could kill you. I’m going, I don’t want to see you killed!

      Mr. Podd clung to my coat sleeve. It was as if he collapsed in upon himself, like a straw dummy. I don’t know how he managed it. He was pretty stout.

      I said to the boy:

      Couldn’t you cut some of this out?

      He answered me calmly:

      "I am afraid I can’t. I promised my sister. She wants him to hear the figures she has unearthed. They are not all the figures, but they are enough. Listen! My sister has discovered that for one single piece of old German furniture that Mr. Podd declared to be worthless or merely amusing, Mr. Podd has received two hundred pounds from the United States senator, Pappenheim. She has in addition got estimates — she is very energetic! — from printers and binders for the production of exactly such a book as this English edition of The Titanic!"

      I lost ninety pounds on the book! Mr. Podd exclaimed. " Do you think I can maintain offices, staffs, warehouses — and advertising — for nothing?"

      The highest estimate, George addressed me, that my sister had for producing the book amounted to fifty-six pounds, and there were many lower. And Mr. Podd’s accounts are not even decently honest. He has had twelve hundred and twenty copies from his printer, and has accounted to the Professor for only one thousand. That is called a trade custom....

      At that Mr. Podd made an incomprehensible noise that threw the young fellow out of his stride. After that he interrupted George Heimann pretty continuously with threats of proceedings of which the boy took no notice, merely waiting politely for Mr. Podd to finish a sentence or an objurgation and then proceeding, addressing himself mostly to me.

      I am informed, at least, that there is a trade custom to the effect that a publisher may receive odd numbers of copies of a book from a printer as against so much paper, and then account to an author only for round thousands. Honest publishers do not avail themselves of it, it being considered not criminal but just tricky. My friends consider it particularly shabby to take advantage of it as against a foreigner, who cannot be expected to know of such a custom. A shabby trick!

      Mr. Podd shouted out a filthy word. His condition began to appear to me rather dreadful.

      I may as well say here that, at the subsequent trial, that boy’s accusations were fully proved. Mr. Podd must have made in all over four hundred pounds out of the old furniture; he had printed the book very meanly, and he had availed himself rather to excess of that trade custom — if it were a trade custom. I suppose he might really have regarded all that as legitimate trade. Why he didn’t, I do not know with exactitude.

      I was cross-examined rather severely at the trial as to the exact words that then passed. I have said that I am good at remembering conversations, but that cross-examination has rather blurred my memory of exact phrases. I was then an officer of His Majesty’s Army, and it was a painful occasion. Mr. Podd’s counsel kept on saying to me: Will you swear that prosecutor did not say this? or, On your oath, Lieutenant Jessop, did prisoner not then say so and so? And the affair had by then assumed a very disagreeable aspect. The conversation — that caterwauling, for that was what it became! — took place on the 13th of July, 1914, and the trial not till May or June, 1915; and since the subject under discussion was the work of a German poet, protected by the German Emperor and defrauded by an English publisher, May or June, 1915, was not a very propitious date.

      At any rate, the mental processes through which Mr. Podd appeared to go in that corridor of his do not remain very clearly in my mind. However, I do know definitely that Mr. Podd, who was something of a Don Juan, had looked with eyes of licentious favour on a Miss Jeaffreson, the intimate companion of that boy’s sister. That George Heimann naturally did not know.

      At the beginning the boy had simply erected himself in the passage — all black with one hand raised above his head. The cape of his Inverness was draped down from his wrist and, blocking out the light, he appeared sinister, like Mephistopheles. It was quite proper for Mr. Podd to be frightened.

      In obtaining the warrant against the boy, an hour later, he certainly perjured himself. He had to allege that he had felt a burning desire to fly at the boy’s throat — the action being for criminal, not civil, libel. But, though I do not mean to say that Mr. Podd ought not to have felt a burning desire to assault Heimann, I confidently assert that he didn’t: his heels came too heavily on my toes as he tried to push back. The boy retained one finger on the publisher’s blue grey waistcoat and poured out very distinctly in his resonant voice what remained of his sister’s indictment.

      Mr. Podd had been merely disdainfully abusive for as long as the boy had talked about the shabby get-up of The Titanic: an Epic, and the old furniture deals. But I knew, as soon as George brought in that trade custom that something was going to happen. Something electric took place in Mr. Podd. Perhaps he had really comforted himself with alleging that he had made a loss of ninety pounds on the book. If he reckoned without what he got for Miss Heimann’s old furniture, he may really have lost something.

      But this was different, and almost as soon as George Heimann began upon it, Mr. Podd exclaimed to me in a sort of husky cry:

      "You hear this fellow accuse me of stealing, Jessop!

      .... By God, I shall now send for a policeman." He began to shout:

      Absalom! Oneday! Byles! Miss Ketch!

      He fell dead silent: perhaps he was choking!

      George Heimann finished his sentence and looked at me. You see! he said. It’s a pretty strong indictment. He smiled rather wanly: I daresay he was tired. He must have been speaking for twenty minutes against interruptions. I said:

      Well, that’s enough. I’d go away now!

      He answered:

      Am I not bound to see if Mr. Podd has any explanations to offer my sister?

      He stood still for a moment in the silence, looking very handsome and drooping.

      A fellow, he said, is bound to be given a chance of uttering his explanations.

      He went on waiting for Mr. Podd to give some answer. And that silence was like the interval in a church, at the end of a service, when the parson has said: The peace of God that passeth all understanding.... I felt certain that in a moment his feet would be making a little sound on the board floor and that we should be going out. The face of Mr. Podd had gone powder-purple. I suppose the blood had died away from beneath his affliction. The stillness went on.

      Suddenly Mr. Podd shouted:

      You bl — y bastard!

      I think those words detonated more than any sound I have ever heard. It may have been because the passage was narrow and enclosed; but that effect of outcry and panic was no doubt also mental. It was the obvious culmination to all the hints that Mr. Podd had been muttering between his teeth — to the effect that Heimann was a man without origins, without a name, with a bad past. I had been frightened during the whole of that interview. You know I had been afraid that Mr. Podd was going to get killed. For I hadn’t the least doubt, by then, that that boy was someone’s illegitimate son. I made a half movement to get between them. But the boy had moved backwards a step — and Mr. Podd advanced slightly.

      The young man said:

      That’s weak, Mr. Podd, as an exculpation. Street boys say that! His voice was still gay, but it had in it an assured note of pain. One day, afterwards, I heard a man, half of whose chest had just been blown away, say: "‘Ere’s another bloomin’ casualty! — and the effect was much the same.

      Mr. Podd cleared his husky throat. I knew that he was banking on the conviction that that boy would never strike him.

      But I mean it, his voice came, tremulous, but gaining control of his vocal muscles. You and your sister are a pair of bastards. With an escaped criminal for a father. Your mother was no better than she should be. I have heard your record!

      George Heimann caught that man by the throat; but quite gently, both hands encircling the miserable fellow’s collar. It may sound feminine — but I could have screamed. I was more afraid than I can tell you. I could see long white fingers on the back of that man’s neck, and I imagined Mr. Podd’s obscene blue eyes being pushed by strangulation out of their sockets.

      The boy’s white hands dropped gently to his sides. In an ecstasy of recovered confidence Mr. Podd began to howl out to his oddly named and invisible myrmidons. His voice had such a variety of notes and the space was so confined that it gave the effect of half a dozen men all caterwauling together —

      The world, I think, was mad then. I don’t know if you remember the season of 1914, in London and the world over. It comes back to me as a period of outcries, smashings, the noises of broken glass falling to the ground and physical violences. An accursed year! The whole tone of personal contacts was strained, tense — mad! I don’t believe George Heimann would have been, even vicariously, a champion of his womenfolk in that particular scene in any other year. I don’t even believe that Mr. Podd would. But for the mad contagion of that time he must have seen that he could not walk roughshod over even the dictates of elementary prudence without coming to very disagreeable grief. For he hadn’t even taken the infinitesimal trouble of blaming the faults of that wretched book on his wretched printer and binder!

      The point that I want to make, however, is that the young man’s heart had been so little in the row even after that accusation of bastardy, that his catching Mr. Podd by the throat had been no more than a reflex action. I don’t know if you know what I mean by a reflex action, and I don’t know if I can explain it shortly enough — but these are actions to which we are all more or less subject. Suppose you shudder at the sound of a slate pencil that squeaks on a slate: well, your physical shuddering is a reflex action. Or, still more, suppose that going along a street and seeing a man with a bulbous nose, you should feel a sudden unreasonable desire to tweak that conspicuous organ. If you did tweak it, I should call that a reflex action. You would probably control the impulse.

      But the effect of the sudden accusation of bastardy on George Heimann was such that he could not control his arms and hands until they were actually on that fellow’s throat. It was as if the slate pencil had squeaked and he had shuddered. I did not need to have him tell me that to know it: it was in the queer jerky motions of his hands that had been so swift.

      Mr. Podd was continuing his extraordinary row, going on howling out those rather singular names — and, later; there were probably answering shouts from assistants who were in no great hurry to come to him. I, too, was calling to the boy:

      You’d better clear out! For God’s sake get out of this!

      I had to do something to relieve my mind; for I was feeling rather sick. The look of pain on that boy’s face had been too much for me.

      At last doors began to burst open, though no one came visibly in entirety into the passage except some woman who, I daresay, did not expect to be assaulted. Lilliput, Oneday, Absalom, and little boys in aprons just showed themselves. As if they had been used to these scenes, all these assistants of Mr. Podd leaned their bodies half out of the doorways without coming further. The lady, whom I took to be Miss Ketch, had a note book and held a pencil to her teeth. George Heimann held his ground, but he had said nothing more.

      Mr. Podd was certainly something of a psychologist. He had calculated correctly that George Heimann would do him no physical violence of any serious nature. Now he must have guessed that I did not love him enough to make a good legal witness against the boy. He was of course out of breath, but, distinctly, in spite of his husky throat, and with a sneering intonation, he invited George Heimann to repeat his accusations. I cried out sharply:

      Whatever you do, don’t do anything of the sort! But the boy waved one hand towards me.

      Of course one must be prepared to stick to his words, he said. And then, addressing Mr. Podd, he repeated with extreme formality the substance of his accusations. He said that Mr. Podd had contracted with his sister, Miss Mary Elizabeth Heimann, to produce an especially luxurious edition of The Titanic: an Epic. In consideration of that Miss Heimann had given to Mr. Podd six pieces of old furniture. Mr. Podd had sold one alone of these pieces to a Senator Pappenheim for a thousand dollars, in spite of the fact that, being himself an expert, he had assured that inexperienced girl that her furniture was without value. And, in spite of his contract to produce a luxurious edition, Mr. Podd could not have spent more than £65, all told, on the production of that translation. He went on to talk of the secret trade custom by means of which his sister alleged that Mr. Podd had robbed Professor Curtius of a pound or two, Professor Curtius being a defenceless foreigner.....He repeated all this rather monotonously and without spirit; his tones had no resonance, as if he were voluntarily not availing himself of a training in voice production, but his words were absolutely distinct. He omitted, too, all his former epithets and denunciations. I was glad, for it allowed me to gather with much more clearness what it was of which Mr. Podd was being accused. I was glad, too, because it made me respect that boy much more. It was at least a feat of self-control.

      When he mentioned the figure of £90 which Mr. Podd had repeatedly given as the amount of his loss over the book, a dirty-faced man leaning out of a door beside me gave a sort of yelp — just like a dog’s — and then covered his mouth with his green baize apron.

      It was obvious that Mr. Podd was much disappointed at the boy’s tone. He began to fidget towards the end, and called out:

      You’re watering it down, my fine fellow. This isn’t the way you talked before Mr. Jessop!

      The young man finished his sentence.

      Then he continued:

      "I have said categorically that you have robbed Professor Curtius and swindled my sister. That should be sufficient for any litigation you want to initiate. One doesn’t —

      I — couldn’t — call any man names before his own servants. It isn’t done. Mr. Jessop is different."

      He smiled suddenly towards me.

      If Mr. Podd, he said, "doesn’t want to repeat his slanders, we might go to lunch."

      Mr. Podd said nothing. I fancy that, now that he was up against the absolute necessity of a prosecution, that story, told just baldly, had frightened him a good deal more than when it had been decorated with picturesque comment. He appeared to dwindle; perhaps really he stepped backwards into his book room, the electric light of which still burned. We passed between the two rows of his retainers, whose round eyes were like those of bemused sentries, out into the open air.

      CHAPTER II

      TALKING to Miss Jeaffreson — who really was the villainess of this particular stage of George Heimann’s trials — was like an interlude of Cambridge after a knockabout farce.

      And it is talking to Miss Jeaffreson, after lunching with George Heimann and his sister, that always comes back to me as the next strong point of the affairs of that harassed boy. During that talk I had a real revelation of the predicament in which the victim of Mr. Podd found himself. If Mr. Podd had not called him that brutal name I daresay I might never have seen him again. I didn’t want to lunch with him and his sister, but once in the street I hadn’t found it in me to refuse his invitation. I should have been afraid of the hurt look that I was convinced would have come into his eyes. He was in too much pain already.

      So, even in the midst of the rapidities of the London season of 1914, this turned out to be a rather busy day. I had my own preoccupations: the affairs of George Heimann were not by any means my only affairs, and I was younger in those days, so that things bore more heavily on me — .....A woman was treating me rather cruelly; I was spending more than I ought to spend; the man who valeted me at my chambers was unsatisfactory, and I had before me the disagreeable job of getting rid of him and finding someone else; I had not settled where I was going at the end of the season, and it was already late; I had to speak that afternoon at a Ladies’ Club — to oppose or propose some such motion as: That the Irish are a Race of Poets — and I had another silly affair at yet another club — the Night

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