The ambassador was out of town, as luck would have it; he might have been diffident, especially as one of us was an Australian. But there was a secretary there, whose aunt or somebody came from Miss Eliot’s home-town, and what with the girl’s influence, and Jeremy’s chuckles, we had him convinced before the military telephoned. They had drawn the British Embassy blank by that time as well as all the leading hotels, and were growing furious.
I don’t know the full extent of the lies that that good secretary told, and I certainly won’t tell his name, for he did his duty and deserves a curtain. But I heard him say over the phone that we were all three intimate friends of Colonel Roosevelt; and when a red-necked colonel without corsets came to demand our surrender on about a hundred criminal counts, the secretary received him alone in a small room and contrived to satisfy him somehow. The long and the short of it was that Miss Eliot was permitted to continue her journey to Switzerland, which she subsequently did, leaving Jeremy disconsolate for fifteen minutes and the story to progress without her. I have never seen her since, although I have been told that she described me when she got home as a “great, dark lunatic, who might have got her into jail if it hadn’t been for the handsome Mr. Jeremy Ross.” But she never saw him again either, so no harm was done.
Jeremy and I were ordered to leave Germany that night, under embassy escort as far as the frontier—for which we had to pay. We didn’t mind that much, since business with the von’s and zu’s looked stagnant. We were also forbidden to return for twelve months, and forbidden even after that lapse of time without a special police permit. But as neither of us ever wanted to go back, that hardly mattered.
We had supper at the embassy, and Jeremy passed the time with conjuring tricks and ventriloquism, giving a performance with hardly any paraphernalia that would have passed muster on any stage in the world. He could do stunts with billiard balls, and make a Japanese mask talk in a way that brought to mind those ever-green romances about Indian fakirs. In fact, I don’t think it would have surprized anybody much when it was time for us to start for the train, if he had performed the fabled trick of throwing up a rope into the air, climbing up it out of sight, and pulling the rope after him.
The only thing that could surprize you about Jeremy Ross after you had known him for an hour or two would be to see him gloomy or depressed, or at a loss for some unusual way of passing time.
All the way to the Dutch frontier he kept the embassy escort and the train crew amused with sleight-of-hand tricks, banter, and ventriloquism. Perhaps his best stunt was making a fat man, who had a corner seat in our compartment say outrageous things about the Kaiser in his sleep. When he tired of that he spilled a flow of reminiscences that could not have been lies, because no man could have invented all that much.
He seemed to have worked at every trade there is, and to have forgotten nothing. Youngest son of a well-to-do ranch-owner, he had rebelled at the station routine and set out to make his own fortune at the age of fourteen. When I met him in Berlin he was twenty-three or four, and though the fortune hadn’t taken shape yet he seemed to have enough to get along with and was certainly well equipped with experience.
* * * * *
When we left the train in Holland the conductor, the ticketman and several passengers, including the fat one who had been made to say things in his sleep, insisted on shaking hands. It was a miserable little junction station, but that did not disturb Jeremy; as soon as the farewells were over and we had seen the embassy fellow into the return train for Berlin he took my arm and proposed that we should set out at once to explore Holland. But I demurred. I couldn’t afford in those days to wander at large—or thought I couldn’t, which comes to about the same thing.
“Something’ll turn up. It always does,” he prophesied. “Dutch money’s all right; you can spend it. It’s round and it rolls. Let’s get some.”
But I hadn’t yet learned the difference between being timorous and being cautious. I quoted the old jingle that has somehow lasted down the years as a label for the Meinheers—
“In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch
Lies in giving too little and asking too much.”
“All right,” he answered. “Come with me to Australia. Let’s try West Aus. Get some camels and find gold in the desert. Great game. Make a pile quick and settle down to a life of roving. Come on!”
I wonder what it is that makes a man deliberately decide against his inclination. There wasn’t really any reason why I shouldn’t go with Jeremy. A merrier companion couldn’t be, or a braver. He would get into trouble, of course, but chuckle his way out of it; and you don’t mind sharing any sort of difficulty with a mate who is game to lift his end of it. His optimism and my comparative caution might have made us good partners. But I had London in mind and a brace of millionaires whose profitable passion is to finance such folk as me, and Jeremy wouldn’t try London on any terms.
“Dukes, knights, lords, earls—afternoon tea in the office—wipe your feet on the mat, please—one of the Empire’s splendid sons when dividends ain’t rolling in and the bankers want a war—blooming Botany Bay Colonial when the fighting’s over! No, I’ve seen London. The king may have it! I wouldn’t fight for the Empire again, not if they offered to give me the whole damn thing for my trouble!”
He spent the best part of two days trying to lure me to Australia, recounting the delights of “humping bluey,” the romantic possibilities of pearling on shares, the carefree existence that a man might live trading cattle on the long drive down from the northern territories, and the fortunes to be made by “paddocking” in West Aus.
But that something—maybe intuition—that so many people offer to explain and no man understands, urged me elsewhere. I offered to share up with Jeremy whatever arrangement I could contrive with the men in London; but the notion seemed to be fixed in his head that making profits for anyone outside Australia was treason. I don’t say he wasn’t right. Nobody ever made it clear to me why international financiers should be allowed to weave empires on a basis of percentages for the fellows who do the work. But Jeremy couldn’t, or wouldn’t see a difference that looks clear to me between grub-staking a man on shares and criminal plutocracy. He said there was no such thing as fair play in financial circles outside Australia, and not even too much of it there. Not that he was a socialist, or a communist, or any other kind of reformer. He could sum up his philosophy and politics in about ten words: “If there’s gold in a stream, and I can pan it, what in Hell do I need a financier for? I’m the young feller that’s going to finance any operations I’m engaged in.”
I asked him what he proposed to do when he had made the pile he talked of hopefully; how would he invest it?
“I won’t,” he said, “I’ll spend it. You wait and see!”
I don’t carry my craving for independence all that far. I’ve made my little pile, and used the money of more than one financier to do it. The dollars are salted down in United States Government securities, and I figure now that the world will have to go to pieces before any man can crowd me to the wall. I’ll tell you what happened to Jeremy presently; and although my method has worked so well for me, I’m still not sure that his hasn’t suited him equally well. It’s a matter of individuality, each man to his own affairs, of which there is a lot too little nowadays.
I said good-by to Jeremy in Rotterdam, where he took passage for Australia, glorying rebelliously in the steamer’s foreign registry. He swore over the taffrail—I was going to say solemnly, but he never did anything that way—at the top of his lungs, at all events, that he would never sail again under the British flag, salute another British officer, set foot in England, or pay taxes. He also gave me a specific message to deliver to the king, wished me well rid