The Disentanglers

‘Jolly difficult for those that are mixed up with the press to keep an oath of secrecy!’ Logan spoke as a press man.

‘We shall only have to do with gentlemen and ladies. The oath is not going to sanction itself with religious terrors. Good form – we shall appeal to a “sense of form” – now so widely diffused by University Extension Lectures on the Beautiful, the Fitting, the – ’

‘Oh shut up!’ cried Logan. ‘You always haver after midnight. For, look here, here is an objection; this precious plan of yours, parents and others could work it for themselves. I dare say they do. When they see the affections of a son, or a daughter, or a bereaved father beginning to stray towards A., they probably invite B. to come and stay and act as a lightning conductor. They don’t need us.’

‘Oh, don’t they? They seldom have an eligible and satisfactory lightning conductor at hand, somebody to whom they can trust their dear one. Or, if they have, the dear one has already been bored with the intended lightning conductor (who is old, or plain, or stupid, or familiar, at best), and they won’t look at him or her. Now our Disentanglers are not going to be plain, or dull, or old, or stale, or commonplace – we’ll take care of that. My dear fellow, don’t you know how dismal the parti selected for a man or girl invariably is? Now we provide a different and superior article, a fresh article too, not a familiar bore or a neighbour.’

‘Well, there is a good deal in that, as you say,’ Logan admitted. ‘But decent people will think the whole speculation shady. How are you to get round that? There is something you have forgotten.’

‘What?’ Merton asked.

‘Why it stares you in the face. References. Unexceptionable references; people will expect them all round.’

‘Please don’t say “unexceptionable”; say “references beyond the reach of cavil.”’ Merton was a purist. ‘It costs more in advertisements, but my phrase at once enlists the sympathy of every liberal and elegant mind. But as to references (and I am glad that you have some common sense, Logan), there is, let me see, there is the Dowager.’

‘The divine Althæa – Marchioness of Bowton?’

‘The same,’ said Merton. ‘The oldest woman, and the most recklessly up-to-date in London. She has seen bien d’autres, and wants to see more.’

‘She will do; and my aunt,’ Logan said.

‘Not, oh, of course not, the one who left her money to the Armenians?’ Merton asked.

‘No, another. And there’s old Lochmaben’s young wife, my cousin, widely removed, by marriage. She is American, you know, and perhaps you know her book, Social Experiments?’

‘Yes, it is not half bad,’ Merton conceded, ‘and her heart will be in what I fear she will call “the new departure.” And she is pretty, and highly respected in the parish.’

‘And there’s my aunt I spoke of, or great aunt, Miss Nicky Maxwell. The best old thing: a beautiful monument of old gentility, and she would give her left hand to help any one of the clan.’

‘She will do. And there’s Mrs. Brown-Smith, Lord Yarrow’s daughter, who married the patent soap man. Elle est capable de tout. A real good woman, but full of her fun.’

‘That will do for the lady patronesses. We must secure them at once.’

‘But won’t the clients blab?’ Logan suggested.

‘They can’t,’ Merton said. ‘They would be laughed at consumedly. It will be their interest to hold their tongues.’

‘Well, let us hope that they will see it in that light.’ Logan was not too sanguine.

Merton had a better opinion of his enterprise.

‘People, if they come to us at all for assistance in these very delicate and intimate affairs, will have too much to lose by talking about them. They may not come, we can only try, but if they come they will be silent as the grave usually is.’

‘Well, it is late, and the whisky is low,’ said Logan in mournful tones. ‘May the morrow’s reflections justify the inspiration of – the whisky. Good night!’

‘Good night,’ said Merton absently.

He sat down when Logan had gone, and wrote a few notes on large sheets of paper. He was elaborating the scheme. ‘If collaboration consists in making objections, as the French novelist said, Logan is a rare collaborator,’ Merton muttered as he turned out the pallid lamp and went to bed.

Next morning, before dressing, he revolved the scheme. It bore the change of light and survived the inspiration of alcohol. Logan looked in after breakfast. He had no new objections. They proceeded to action.

II. FROM THE HIGHWAYS AND HEDGES

The first step towards Merton’s scheme was taken at once. The lady patronesses were approached. The divine Althæa instantly came in. She had enjoyed few things more since the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on the eve of Waterloo. Miss Nicky Maxwell at first professed a desire to open her coffers, ‘only anticipating,’ she said, ‘an event’ – which Logan declined in any sense to anticipate. Lady Lochmaben said that they would have a lovely time as experimental students of society. Mrs. Brown-Smith instantly offered her own services as a Disentangler, her lord being then absent in America studying the negro market for detergents.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘he expects Brown-Smith’s brand to make an Ethiopian change his skin, and then means to exhibit him as an advertisement.’

‘And settle the negro question by making them all white men,’ said Logan, as he gracefully declined the generous but compromising proposal of the lady. ‘Yet, after all,’ thought he, ‘is she not right? The prophylactic precautions would certainly be increased, morally speaking, if the Disentanglers were married.’ But while he pigeon-holed this idea for future reference, at the moment he could not see his way to accepting Mrs. Brown-Smith’s spirited idea. She reluctantly acquiesced in his view of the case, but, like the other dames, promised to guarantee, if applied to, the absolute respectability of the enterprise. The usual vows of secrecy were made, and (what borders on the supernatural) they were kept.

Merton’s first editions went to Sotheby’s, ‘Property of a gentleman who is changing his objects of collection.’ A Russian archduke bought Logan’s unique set of golf clubs by Philp. Funds accrued from other sources. Logan had a friend, dearer friend had no man, one Trevor, a pleasant bachelor whose sister kept house for him. His purse, or rather his cheque book, gaped with desire to be at Logan’s service, but had gaped in vain. Finding Logan grinning one day over the advertisement columns of a paper at the club, his prophetic soul discerned a good thing, and he wormed it out ‘in dern privacy.’ He slapped his manly thigh and insisted on being in it – as a capitalist. The other stoutly resisted, but was overcome.

‘You need an office, you need retaining fees, you need outfits for the accomplices, and it is a legitimate investment. I’ll take interest and risks,’ said Trevor.

So the money was found.

The inaugural dinner, for the engaging of accomplices, was given in a private room of a restaurant in Pall Mall.

The dinner was gay, but a little pathetic. Neatness, rather than the gloss of novelty (though other gloss there was), characterised the garments of the men. The toilettes of the women were modest; that amount of praise (and it is a good deal) they deserved. A young lady, Miss Maskelyne, an amber-hued beauty, who practically lived as a female jester at the houses of the great, shone resplendent, indeed, but magnificence of apparel was demanded by her profession.

‘I am so tired of it,’ she said to Merton. ‘Fancy being more and more anxious for country house invitations. Fancy an artist’s feelings, when she knows she has not been a success. And then when the woman of the house detests you! She often does. And when they ask you to give your imitation of So-and-so, and forget that his niece is in the room! Do you know what they would have called people like me a hundred years ago? Toad-eaters! There is one of us in an old novel I read a bit of once. She goes about, an old maid, to houses. Once she arrived in a snow storm and a hearse. Am I to come to that? I keep learning new drawing-room tricks. And when you fall ill, as I did at Eckford, and you can’t leave, and you think they are tired to death of you! Oh, it is I who am tired, and time passes, and one grows old. I am a hag!’

Merton said ‘what he ought to have said,’ and what, indeed, was true. He was afraid she would tell him what she owed her dress-makers. Therefore he steered the talk round to sport, then to the Highlands, then to Knoydart, then to Alastair Macdonald of Craigiecorrichan, and then Merton knew, by a tone in the voice, a drop of the eyelashes, that Miss Maskelyne was – vaccinated. Prophylactic measures had been taken: this agent ran no risk of infection. There was Alastair.

Merton turned to Miss Willoughby, on his left. She was tall, dark, handsome, but a little faded, and not plump: few of the faces round the table were plump and well liking. Miss Willoughby, in fact, dwelt in one room, in Bloomsbury, and dined on cocoa and bread and butter. These were for her the rewards of the Higher Education. She lived by copying crabbed manuscripts.

‘Do you ever go up to Oxford now?’ said Merton.

‘Not often. Sometimes a St. Ursula girl gets a room in the town for me. I have coached two or three of them at little reading parties. It gets one out of town in autumn: Bloomsbury in August is not very fresh. And at Oxford one can “tout,” or “cadge,” for a little work. But there are so many of us.’

‘What are you busy with just now?’

‘Vatican transcripts at the Record Office.’

‘Any exciting secrets?’

‘Oh no, only how much the priests here paid to Rome for their promotions. Secrets then perhaps: not thrilling now.’

‘No schemes to poison people?’

‘Not yet: no plots for novels, and oh, such long-winded pontifical Latin, and such awful crabbed hands.’

‘It does not seem to lead to much?’

‘To nothing, in no way. But one is glad to get anything.’

‘Jephson, of Lincoln, whom I used to know, is doing a book on the Knights of St. John in their Relations to the Empire,’ said Merton.

‘Is he?’ said Miss Willoughby, after a scarcely distinguishable but embarrassed pause, and she turned from Merton to exhibit an interest in the very original scheme of mural decoration behind her.