Front matter (continued 3)

So Tuesday ended—and here my duty compels me to introduce the repugnant subject of the Opposition candidate, lest the reader should forget in the fever of enthusiasm which I have described, the very presence of a man who dared to set himself against the expressed opinion of The People.

Lord Henfield was his name. His hairs, which were of the palest yellow and few in number for a man of but thirty years, were parted down the middle with an extraordinary accuracy which was no more disturbed when he appeared in the early morning after rising from repose than when in the last hours of the night he would withdraw from the critical and angry audiences which he too often had to encounter.

His face was not clean-shaven: contrariwise, he wore long and drooping moustaches of the same character and complexion as his hair, and forming a singular contrast with that virile grey crescent upon Mr. Clutterbuck's upper lip, of which the reader has so often heard.

His eyes were of a very watery blue; he lisped a little, and such decision as he may have possessed was only to be discovered in his apparently complete indifference to the judgment of men poorer than himself.

The deference due to his rank and wealth forbade any assault upon his person; all other forms of opposition he met with a slight and rather mournful smile, and with the regret that there should be any differences between himself and those whom he hoped would soon prove to be his constituents.

The weakness of his position was not, it may be admitted, entirely due to his personality nor even to the wild popularity which the cause of Fishmonger and Another had recently acquired. Indeed he was as ardent a champion of the incarcerated Fishmonger as was Mr. Clutterbuck himself, and differed from his opponent only in modifying his language where it might have shocked the English sense of the respect which we all owe to the Bench.

His principal ally in a struggle which seemed to disturb him so little was his wife. Lady Henfield, a woman of the most captivating vitality, called at every house in the constituency, smiled, flattered, and joked into friendship the hearts of all the women, and fearlessly bestowed upon either sex indifferently the marks of a warm appreciation which, from such a woman, are never thrown away. Many a household could tell, long before the contest was engaged, of deeds of kindness which her genuine sympathy with the populace forbade her to noise abroad, and her known influence upon the Board of Pleeson's Charity, a social work of immense importance in the neighbourhood, lent her a high and most legitimate influence in all that she did in Mickleton. She had had the sense to take a house for her husband in the locality, and though they but rarely slept in this distant quarter of the metropolis, the excellent way in which it was served and furnished naturally impressed her neighbours of every degree.

All this counteracted, to no slight extent, Lord Henfield's insufficient performances upon the platform, and no one acquainted with electoral campaigning will deny that the enthusiasm or disapproval of popular audiences counts little as compared with the domestic effect of private visits and of good deeds coming from the heart. To all this was added on the Wednesday, a false step on the part of Mr. Clutterbuck, which for the first time, and that so near the poll, was a serious setback to the tide in his favour. A gentleman of considerable means, a printer and dyer of the name of Stephens, who had frequently appeared upon Mr. Clutterbuck's platform and had seemed, even to the keen eye of Charlie Fitzgerald, to be an inoffensive plutocrat, insisted upon receiving the candidate and his wife as his guests at Bongers End during the last days of the struggle.

"It will save your husband," he said to Mrs. Clutterbuck, "those long night journeys to Croydon which a man at his age cannot afford to despise, and will give Mrs. Stephens and myself and my two sons and my daughter Clara and Miss Curle the very greatest pride and pleasure."

This apparently innocuous proposal, which Mrs. Clutterbuck eagerly accepted for her husband, was a threefold error. A long-standing rivalry, or rather enmity, existed between their new host and a Mr. Clay, whose engineering works were perhaps the most important industry in Mickleton, and who as a Tory Home Ruler of some years' standing, was now naturally the head of the National Party since the establishment of a Parliament in Dublin and the framing of the new tariff had called that party into existence. He bitterly resented the honour shown to his rival, and it needed all the tact of Fitzgerald to prevent his influence being thrown into the wrong scale. But that tact was well exercised. Fitzgerald called upon Mr. Clay late at night, described Mr. Clutterbuck's intense desire to have been the guest of Mr. Clay, his hesitation to invite himself, the brutal forwardness of his rival, while the whole story was cemented by a description of blood relationship between Mrs. Clutterbuck and Mrs. Stephens, which, in later days, Fitzgerald himself did not hesitate to deny.

To lead the close of the campaign from Mr. Stephen's mansion at Bongers End was still more dangerous, from the fact that a quarrel had arisen between that gentleman and one of his workmen, whom indeed he had almost dismissed: had the tragedy actually occurred, the situation would have been not very different from the famous cause of the strike at Podger's Wharf, and the parallel was often drawn between the one case and the other in the humbler homes of Mickleton. Finally, Mr. Clutterbuck had not calculated, when he yielded to the warm pressure of his host, that his famous declaration upon total abstinence would there be taken in its literal sense. The principles of the National Party—which had now for two years advocated voluntary abstinence as an alternative to predatory legislation against the trade—forbade Mr. Clutterbuck to touch wine or spirits when he was actually present in the constituency, and he knew very well that if he were returned to the House of Commons it would be necessary for him to take his meals in the new rooms set apart for those who not only denied themselves the use of such beverages, but had the stalwart manhood to forego so much as the sight of others who were causing Israel to sin. But he would never have been able to support the fatigues of those wild days had he not carried in his pocket a flask of B.Q. cognac, and had he not been able from time to time to escape from a midday meal to his club, or better still, to some restaurant where he was unknown. He had, further, on returning to Surrey every night, freely restored his energies by vigorous draughts of port, a wine to which he had grown accustomed and whose use he could ill spare.

It was, therefore, no small handicap to find continual allusion made under Mr. Stephens's roof to his valiant and thorough-going principles, nor did it help the situation to see round him every member of the household, including Mrs. Clutterbuck and his secretary, served with the most generous vintages, while he was compelled to choose milk (which he had never yet been able to digest), water, against which he had been often warned, or those aerated substitutes which his doctor had repeatedly insisted to be, in his particular case, no better than windy poisons.

His vigour declined; his voice grew worse and worse; he hesitated in the midst of his speeches; he contradicted himself more than once. The first serious opposition, upon the Wednesday night, threw him into a fever of anxiety from which he had not recovered the next day. He appeared unpunctually before an impatient audience and actually forgot to appear at all at a smaller meeting later in the evening: a piece of folly that cost him fifty votes.

Meanwhile the renewed energies of his opponents rendered his position less and less enviable as the day of the poll approached, although the Opposition suffered in this election, as in every other, from the very grave drawback that it had no fixed name.

Since 1910 a heterogeneous body, in which the old theoretical Free-Traders, of whose exalted principle and vivid intellectual power the Spectator was the voice, the wide sporting interests whose principal organ was the Winning Post, the new Socialist group and the remnants of Unionist and Orange following had coalesced; and though no leader of the first rank appeared, an able secretary, Mr. Ephraim, managed to control the old party chest, but upon a name they could not agree, and in almost every separate by-election their candidate appeared under a different label. Their hold upon the electorate depended upon a promise of future reforms which it would take many years to carry out and in which the populace but half believed, coupled with somewhat academic criticism upon the mistakes of the party in office. But this last weapon, the most powerful weapon of any opposition, they could not use with effect against the administration of a young and popular Prime Minister, of little more than forty years of age, whose enormous wealth and well-known delicacy of lung alike endeared him to the reasonable heart of the people.

Moreover, the Opposition lacked an effective party cry: for the editor of the Spectator's admirable epigram, "No fleet, no meat," had offended the powerful vegetarian group, and Mr. Tylee's quatrain in the Banner of Israel was above the heads of the vulgar.

Such was the strength and the weakness of either side when upon Friday, the day before the poll, the last meetings were held, the last placards posted, and the affairs of the opposing parties finally put in order.

To Mr. Clutterbuck's extreme surprise—for the details of our political life were still new to him—a bag of sovereigns was distributed among the stout hearts who had worked so hard in the Cause, and Mr. Stephens, humorously calling himself for the occasion "the Bogey Man"—a pseudonym received with grateful laughter—saw that the hundred good fellows who had toiled from door to door should receive refreshment as well as honest wage. It was distributed in the garage attached to his magnificent villa, and the day wound up finding all, with the exception of the candidate himself, well satisfied.

There was no doubt that Mr. Clutterbuck was pitiably overwrought. Had he dared he would have broken through the convention of so many arduous days and have drunk freely from some revivifying spring. But his conscience and his common sense alike forbade him.

He looked forward in despair to the night as his only chance of solace and relief, and prayed for such repose as might fit him to meet the terrible strain of the morrow; but that night Mr. Clutterbuck, for all his exhaustion, slept ill.

He rose frequently in the small hours to swallow one of the Hornsby lozenges or, when these palled upon him, one of the Glarges. At times he gargled, and at others, filling his chest to the fullest extent and retaining his breath to the utmost of his capacity, he murmured the syllables which he had been assured would strengthen the vocal chords. He could not, in a stranger's house and at such an hour, permit himself the loud roar which the Voice Producer had insisted upon: it would have been discourteous and, what was worse, it might have impaired his now assured reputation for consistency and sober judgment. It was doubtless, however, owing to this unfortunate but necessary omission that he owed, next day, his complete inability to speak above a whisper.

He rose tired out at seven, dressed wearily, and came down upon that fatal day, November 19, 1911. He saw with increased depression that it was raining. He was, I am sorry to say, so distressed during the heartfelt and simple family prayers of the household as to overset the chair at which he knelt; and at breakfast his nervousness was so intense as to be positively painful to his kind host and hostess, who pressed upon him with assiduous hospitality, kidneys, eggs, bacon, haddock seethed in milk, sausages, cold pheasant, Virginia peach-fed ham, and kedgeree. He was indifferent to all these things.

During the few moments after breakfast which our great English merchants devote to glancing at the daily Press, he could not bring himself to look at the papers which lay upon the table. He so dreaded the insults of the one, he dreaded so much more in another the condensed reports of what he might have said, that he found himself longing, in a sort of dazed way, for some news sheet in which the world might be presented to him empty of his own famous name. As it was, I repeat, he dared not open one of them.

Luckily for him his cheery host did not leave him long in this misery. He found him standing listless in the hall, slapped him on the back and said in a loud and hearty voice:

"You've got to come with me! The motor's ready and the Missus'll be coming down at once." Then he whispered as the suggestion required: "Brandy? All's Mum!"

Mr. Clutterbuck refused it, and in a few moments his host had returned with a decanter of the inspiring beverage. Mr. Clutterbuck gulped a great mouthful fearfully, choked, and suffered, but he was grateful, and the more grateful for the rapidity with which Mr. Stephens suddenly rapt the dangerous friend away.

They went out together to the car. Within a quarter of an hour his hostess and Mrs. Clutterbuck had joined them. There was a little byplay as to who should sit in the front seats—a byplay in which Mr. Clutterbuck himself was too dispirited to join—but it was soon decided by the ladies themselves that the hero of the occasion should appear next to the driver, nor did the physical danger to which such a position exposed him enter the minds of these loyal friends.

They proceeded upon the round of the constituency. The streets were empty and the rain continued to fall. At the corner of Mafeking Avenue and Paradise Row, a group of young people upon their way to school cheered loudly upon seeing the National colours, while with childish thoughtlessness some of their number threw petty missiles after the retreating car. As they passed down the smaller streets they were gratified to see Mr. Clutterbuck's portrait, reposing upon a British lion of formidable aspect and draped as to the hinder quarters in a Union Jack, prominent in the windows even of the public-houses.

At the police station Mr. Clutterbuck felt his first movement of emotion at the sight of a policeman who was coming in mackintoshes out of the door, and who saluted with promptitude and respect.

The first polling booth to which they came contained none but the officials, but it was Mr. Clutterbuck's duty to enter, to look cheerful and to shake them by the hand.

"Nothing doing here?" he wheezed with an uneasy smile.

"There've been a few," said the chief with an indifference that did not betray his own politics. "They're not coming very fast. The weather's against 'em."

As he said this, a very short man with a sly, rapid glance and a jerky manner, darted in, carefully huddled himself round his voting paper, dropped it into the ballot box, darted a look of violent animosity at Mr. Clutterbuck, and was out again in a flash.

He was followed by a publican who shook hands heartily with the candidate, said merrily, "Well, which way 'm I going to vote, I wonder?" and disappeared into the hutch puffing and blowing, came out again, shook hands again, renewed his witticism in a somewhat different form: "Well, which way did I vote, I wonder?"—and waddled out.

Mr. Clutterbuck could bear no more. He climbed again into the motor-car after nodding as genially as he could to the officials at the table, and was asked by his host where he should go next.

He suggested Kipling Crescent.

The school in Kipling Crescent, by one of those contrasts which are symbolic of our enduring sense of equality, though standing in the chief residential street of Mickleton, was sure to receive the largest artisan vote, for it was behind the Crescent that the densest and poorest population of the borough lay. Here there was more animation. A steady if thin stream of workmen came in to record their votes. Few of them expressed any strong interest in the presence of their candidate; one or two touched their caps to the man who was to restore to them the rights of human beings; others smiled somewhat foolishly as they passed him: the greater part did not recognise him at all. One man, to whom manual labour had never appealed, and whose pathetic, intelligent eyes betrayed a world of suffering and of want, approached him and murmured a few words. Mr. Clutterbuck caught them indifferently, but they were quite enough. He remembered the fatal half sovereign, and he leapt for the car.

So the morning passed in visiting one booth after another. The rain ceased; there was a trifle more life round certain booths; the coming and going of vehicles bearing the colours of either candidate was continuous. These, as they passed each other, would sometimes indulge in playful sarcasm. Now and then an honest fight arose, but no serious injuries were received, and it was not until the afternoon that the streets began to fill.

Thence onward the scene changed. Many who had come from other parts of London were now free to satisfy their curiosity; the relaxation from labour and the lengthy discussions which already enlivened the public-houses were beginning to bear their fruit. There was a sort of murmur throughout the whole area of the borough, a murmur which in places rose to a roar.

It had been arranged by the agents of the two parties that the car of Mr. Clutterbuck's host should accidentally meet that of Lord Henfield in front of the Cap and Bells. There was some little delay, and it was at first feared that the light would not be strong enough for the photographer who was waiting concealed at an adjoining window. Luckily, before it was too late, and when Mr. Stephens's car had waited less than ten minutes, Lord Henfield's appeared at the opposite end of the street, the two candidates recognised each other after the first moment of surprise, descended and shook hands warmly amid the enthusiastic cheers of the considerable assemblage; it was apparent to all no petty personal quarrel would lessen the majesty of that day's verdict.

As darkness came on the polling began to grow noticeably heavier. Oddly enough the female or lady electors, who had during daylight remained concealed, came out with the fall of evening. The middle classes, to which this class of voter chiefly belongs, have an ample leisure to record their opinion, but even those most thickly veiled preferred a late hour in which to register their votes which, so far as could be judged, were cast mainly in the National interest. In deference to the strong feeling which the sex entertains upon this matter, the returning officer had permitted the presence of pet dogs in the polling booths. It was upon these that the Party favours were most conspicuously displayed, and it must be admitted that in the greater number of cases they were of the popular magenta hue.

Lady Henfield recorded her vote as a lodger in her husband's house a little before seven, and came out full of frisk and smile, having doubtless given her voice in favour of the name she bore.

Mrs. Clutterbuck could claim no such privilege, nor was it the least of Mr. Clutterbuck's many chagrins upon this eventful day to consider the natural mortification which his wife must have suffered, and would very probably express when occasion served, to see Lady Henfield enjoy that Englishwoman's right of which she had herself been deprived.

During the last hour before eight o'clock, there clustered an amazing throng at every booth, and the intoxication produced by the state of public feeling and the domestic habits of the neighbourhood—which were never indulged to a higher degree than upon this occasion—communicated to the best balanced and the most indifferent a certain degree of enthusiasm. Mr. Clutterbuck had snatched a hasty sandwich and a glass of lime juice at the refreshment bar in the Town Hall when the booths were declared closed and he was admitted to the counting-room.

There were few present. He and Lord Henfield were supported by perhaps half a dozen helpers and friends. The Mayor and his young nephew sat in chairs at a table at the end of the long room, to which the bundles of votes were brought as the sorters counted them. They were laid in two long lines, one for each candidate, upon this table, and the lines had all the appearance of two snakes rapidly increasing in length and running a race as to which should be longest when their growth should cease.

During all the early part of the counting the issue seemed doubtful enough. Lord Henfield, spruce, anxious, alert, walked up and down the sorting benches, turned up continually to glance at the increasing pile of votes, and as continually strolled back with an intimate companion to interest himself in the business of the sorting, a sight with which he was unfamiliar.

As for Mr. Clutterbuck, he was numb to every sensation. The day had been too much for him, and he had become quite careless as to whether he lived or died. He stood, well groomed but with leaden eyes, moving very little from his place near the mayor's table, when he chanced to gaze at the two lines of paper bundles and saw that his own was leading. It did not appear to his unpractised eye to be any considerable lead; the one line was now perhaps a yard long, the other possibly forty inches. But to the trained observation of those who had seen half a dozen contests in the borough, it was decisive.

Mr. Maple whispered hoarsely:

"You're in!"

And Mr. Clutterbuck answered without a voice:

"Am I?"

There were but few more bundles to come. The most of them perhaps were added to Lord Henfield's column, but they did not redress the balance.

Lord Henfield's companion, looking as pleasant as he could, pulled out a £5 note which that nobleman pocketed with evident satisfaction. The mayor jotted down figures upon a bit of paper; when he announced the result, Mr. Clutterbuck was elected by the overwhelming majority of 1028 on the heaviest poll the constituency had known. Something like 92 per cent. had voted upon a register not precisely new, and over 19,000—to be accurate, 19,123—votes had been recorded.

The mayor congratulated Mr. Clutterbuck upon the sweeping success, he shook hands with him and repeated the figures. He congratulated Lord Henfield upon the plucky fight he had made; he congratulated the sorters upon their accuracy, the counters upon their zeal, and the borough upon its self-control at a time when feeling had run high. He congratulated the police upon their conduct throughout a very difficult and trying day; and he was in the act of congratulating the borough council in the same connection, when a wild roar outside the building showed that the result had been betrayed or guessed.

They adjourned hurriedly to the great hall over the portico. The window was open, and so far as the glare from within the room would permit them, they perceived an enormous mob, filling the whole square and stretching far into the streets which converged upon it. The deafening noises which had startled them in the inner recesses of the counting room were as nothing to the hurricane of shouts, cheers, and good-natured blasphemy which swirled about them when they appeared at the balcony. In vain did the mayor, with a pleasant smile upon his face which the darkness alone concealed, raise his hands a dozen times to impose silence. The swaying of the crowd, the cries of those who suffered pressure against the walls upon its exterior parts, nay, the occasional crash of broken glass, seemed only to add to the frenzy.

An individual who, I am glad to say, turned out to be a youth of irresponsible demeanour, caused a moment's panic by firing a pistol. The mayor, with admirable promptitude, took the opportunity of the silence that followed to read out the figures. They were not heeded, but the renewed bellowing which followed their announcement was more eloquent than any mere statement of the majority could have been. The populace were wild with joy at their victory, and that portion of them who as bitterly mourned defeat would have been roughly handled had they not numbered quite half this vast assembly of human beings.

When some measure of silence had been achieved, Mr. Clutterbuck and Lord Henfield shook hands for the second time that day in a public manner, to the supreme delight of both friend and foe.

Mr. Clutterbuck recited in an inaudible croak the few courteous and manly words which he had prepared for the occasion, and Lord Henfield, a little before Mr. Clutterbuck had completed his last sentence, delivered, in much louder but equally inaudible tones, his apology for defeat, and his prophecy that he would be more successful upon the next occasion.

Before Mr. Clutterbuck could be allowed to go back to the hospitable roof at Bongers End, he was required to visit his Committee Rooms and to address the workers. His mind was still a blank, but he bowed to them civilly enough and emitted some few hoarse whispers thanking them for their unfailing courage, tact, loyalty, gentlemanly feeling, tireless industry, exhaustive labours and British pluck. For a moment, and only for a moment, the memory of the bag of sovereigns swept over his mind. He was too tired to heed even that memory, and he almost fell into his chair when he had concluded.

It must be confessed that the workers were a trifle disappointed; their honest faces, upon many of which the growth of a three-days' beard denoted their unremitting attention to the duties before them, looked anxiously above their thick neckcloths as though they had expected something more from the man upon whom the eyes of all England were turned, and whose conspicuous position they had largely helped him to attain. The situation was solved by Mr. Maple, who, in a voice worthy of that occasion or of any other, addressed the workers as his fellows and his equals—for had he not himself begun life as a working man?—and reiterated with manly enthusiasm, not only the legitimate praise accorded them by the exhausted Mr. Clutterbuck, but his own frequently expressed admiration of their self-denial, zeal, sincerity, conviction, spontaneous, unflagging hope and indomitable courage.

"Gentlemen," he concluded, and gentlemen was surely the term for these loyal-hearted men, "we thank you from the bottom of our hearts, not because you have returned Mr. Clutterbuck—don't think that! What is a man in such mighty moments as these? No, but because you have saved the great principle that...."

The remaining three words of his peroration were lost in a frenzy of applause. The platform rose and bowed, and as refreshments could not be given (under the "Corrupt Practices Act") within the precincts of the building, the proceedings terminated with a hearty handshake all round and the immediate dispersion of the audience to another place.

When they reached home, Mr. Clutterbuck's kind host, though himself an abstainer, opened a bottle of champagne, not indeed for Mr. Clutterbuck, whose principles he well knew, but for Mrs. Clutterbuck, his wife, to whom was given the toast of honour, for Mr. Maple, for Mr. Maple's nephew and his two sons, and a Mr. and Mrs. Charles, who between them did honour to the bottle, and very soon despatched it; then, in the midst of hearty thanks and renewed congratulations, each party left for its home.

And that night at last, after so many nights, Mr. Clutterbuck was permitted to sleep, and slept.

He was a Member of Parliament.

CHAPTER VIII

The Mickleton election was a blow that sounded through England. The hardy mountaineers of Wales, to whom our discussions, save where they regard religion, so rarely appeal, knew that the manhood of the slate quarries was free; sailors, newly landed from distant climes, though singularly apathetic as a class to the glories of our party system, found themselves expected to lift one of their many glasses to the Mickleton election; and in the bowels of the earth the brawny miners of Durham alluded to Mr. Clutterbuck and his success in the simplest and most poignant of terms.

The thoughtful who direct the development of English Socialism had seen, long before, the capital nature of the crisis, and naturally deplored an expression of public opinion which by forbidding forced labour set so powerful an obstacle in the path of the ideal state; the strict party organs of the Opposition were also bound to deplore the result, but every sheet of independent position was agreed as to the significance of the election and few judges indeed since Jeffries have incurred the epithets, whether grave or severe, which had so long been withheld, and now, on the morrow of the election, fell from all sides upon the honest but narrow and pointed head of Mr. Justice Hunnybubble—for Welch (concurring) was by now quite ignored, and the stronger man was the target of renown.

The wide field of suburban, colonial, American and Indian thought commanded by the Spectator might indeed have murmured at the new privilege which the working classes threatened to acquire, had not that review with singular manliness and courage stood out at the critical moment with a strong declaration in favour of the spirit which Mickleton had shown.

"England," the editor did not hesitate to pen, "is not tied to a formula or a syllogism, but to freedom slowly broadening down from precedent to precedent,"[5] and he went so far as to contemplate with unflinching courage—nay, to command—the release of Fishmonger and Another, for whom the principal Halls had already begun an active competition.

The very different world which is so largely influenced by the Winning Post was equally sound, and the weekly character, "In a Glass House," of that powerful instrument of national opinion was Mr. Clutterbuck himself, characterised as a sportsman, excused for his personal sobriety, portrayed in a top hat, frock coat, trousers, spats, buttoned boots, and perhaps thirty years less than his actual age.

The Sporting Times had two good jokes heartily sympathetic with the judgment of Mickleton. Punch published upon the great verdict a set of beautiful verses which will long be remembered in our English parsonages; and the Daily Mail headed their leader "The Burial of Harmanism."

England was awake; the great principle of unilateral compulsion had taken firm root, and never more would the detestable miasma of Continental pedantry threaten the free life of our land.

For the Government the position was not easy, though it was evidently one to be faced. No Administration can afford to treat the Bench lightly. Buffle might be in trouble any day. They had, moreover, at least three great measures in hand, commanding no considerable popular support; one which the electorate had not heard of and another quite odious to it. This sudden and spontaneous demonstration by a London borough against a judicial decision which had nothing to do with party or policy was a factor of grave disturbance in that routine of the House of Commons which is as regular in its way as the breathing of a profound sleep. The Cabinet was dispersed in Monte Carlo, Devonshire, Palermo and New York, a decision could not be come to upon so grave a matter for many days to come, and yet an early opening of the session in January was plainly imperative. The intensity of feeling against the judgment which Mr. Clutterbuck's election had condemned, grew with every day, and the young head of the National party, who suffered somewhat from the right lung and filled the Premiership so brilliantly and so well, had indeed a heavy problem to resolve.

The first act of Mr. Clutterbuck when he returned, the morning after his triumph, to his beautiful Surrey home, was to sign a cheque for yet another thousand pounds, and to enclose it with a letter of heartfelt emotion to the funds of the Party. He expressed in this letter his indifference to the particular object for which, in the Party's judgment, it might be used, and assured Mr. Delacourt that it was but a slight acknowledgement on his part of what was the duty of every man in support of those principles which have made England great. Charlie Fitzgerald thoroughly approved of his action, and was free to point out that its spontaneous character would render it of double effect. To this action there succeeded an interval of repose.

For several weeks a round of social recreation dispelled the strain to which Mr. Clutterbuck had been subjected during the course of his campaign; his house was filled with a perpetually changing attendance of friends to enjoy a few days of his company, and to congratulate him upon the honour of which he had proved worthy. Nor did many of them forget to hint—some of them deliberately declared—that it was but the gate to further and greater honours: though it must be admitted that the now ageing politician neither desired nor expected promotion to Cabinet rank.

As the procession of City men, Croydon acquaintances and earlier friends who had now rallied to Mr. Clutterbuck in his declining years filled "the Plâs," Charlie Fitzgerald very honourably took the holiday he had heartily earned. He went down, at Mary Smith's pressing invitation, to her quiet but historic Habberton upon the borders of Exmoor, found there the society of his boyhood, and was the life of that little party, with his amusing imitations of social customs in the suburbs, his frank pleasure in the champagne which he had chosen for his cousin, his madcap bouts upon the little Devon ponies which were incapable of throwing so large a rider, and his jests which never exceeded the limits imposed by the presence of women, several of whom were devout adherents of the Christian faith.

With all this a certain new glory surrounded Charlie, a glory reflected from the result of the Mickleton election. The people among whom he was for the moment a companion at quiet but historic Habberton were not of a kind to exaggerate the influence of a by-election upon the general scheme of English government; but they did appreciate that here was one of themselves who could weigh the temper of a great constituency and could understand very different classes of men; for Charlie was not slow to let them understand the part he had played in the business.

During any mention of that campaign his cousin Nobby looked so thoroughly miserable that it went to Charlie's soft Irish heart.

Nobby had had plenty of money once. He had stood for Parliament when he was barely of age, more as a freak and to please his mother than with serious intentions of political life; but a defeat by over 3000 votes coupled with the gradual dissipation of his fortune had rendered him more sensitive than was perhaps healthy. A place had been found for him in the Heralds' College, but the salary was miserably small, and apart from the prestige of such a position, he would almost have been willing to throw up the perpetual application it demanded and to go and live quietly hunting and shooting at his mother's place in Derbyshire: for though the widow had herself but a small dower, she could afford to receive her spendthrift son.

It was a good thing that he had not yet completed that intention; for Charlie, as he watched him in those days at Habberton, found a piece of work for him which might well lead to greater things. He took his cousin out one morning to see the stags fed in the new Bethlehem, warned Mary Smith that they wanted to be alone, and as they crossed the park he proposed to Nobby a visit to The Plâs.

Nobby could see nothing in it at all; nay, he met the proposition with horror, until it dawned upon him that perhaps some definite and tangible action was in the wind, and he asked in the most natural manner whether he could look forward to any of the Ready?

Charlie was impatient.

"My good Nobby," he said, "don't you know how things are done in this world? They're bound to give him a handle!"

"That," said Nobby in a refined manner, "makes my dream come true, but really, if you think it affects me——"

"Good God!" said Charlie, "don't you see where you come in?"

"I could go and pump him," said Nobby wearily, "but, oh lord, Charlie, if you only knew! I must have pumped fifty of 'em this year. The worst are the Johnnies that want Supporters. We'll give them Mullets and even a Fesse Argent or two, but we're very rigid about Supporters," he said solemnly. "You don't get Supporters over the counter, I can tell you."

"Nobby," said Charlie, waving all this trash aside, "to put it plainly, you got to go and tell the old boy how it's done ... I mean ... you got to let him know how it's done. Don't make a fool of yourself," he added, looking doubtfully at his young cousin, and wondering whether this piece of generosity were wise or not, "I'm not going to be butchered to make a Roman holiday."

"I'll go, Charlie," said Nobby humbly, "I understand. But can't anyone see to something of the Ready? After all, I've got to get there, and I shall have to give something to the servants."

"I'll ask Mary," said Charlie nobly.

"No you don't," shouted Nobby, "she turned me down this morning. Damnably!"

"Oh, but this is work," said Charlie reproachfully.

Nobby looked grim. "It's spondulicks, anyway," he said. And Charlie very reluctantly pulled out four pounds and a few shillings.

Nobby pocketed it without much gratitude.

"You know, Nobby," said Charlie, watching his expression, "if you pull it off sensibly, he won't forget you!"

"Oh, I know all about that," said Nobby wearily. "They're awfully grateful, but one never gets one's fingers on the flimsies. I'll make a last shot, anyhow."

Charlie Fitzgerald did not stand on ceremony; he knew the kind hearts of the Clutterbucks too well; he wrote a longish letter to Mrs. Clutterbuck about his cousin Robert in the Heralds' College, introduced a word or two about his late father and grandfather, the Lord Storrington of the famine, said the lad would be stopping in their neighbourhood and would really like to come over, enclosed a stamped envelope, "The Hon. Robert Parham, Habberton Park, Barnstaple," and within forty-eight hours Nobby, carefully primed as to where he had been stopping in the neighbourhood of Croydon, and whom exactly he would see and meet, was off to pass a week-end at The Plâs.

His ironical temper and obvious poverty seemed at first ill-suited to the merchant's table, but Mrs. Clutterbuck herself forgave him when she discovered, as she immediately did, the warm heart which lay beneath these external disabilities: by the Sunday night his conversation was already absorbing; she begged him to return, and he did.

The second visit was far prolonged. They could not bear to let the merry boy go, and his frank anecdotes upon the leading men of the day, intimate acquaintance with most of whom he could proudly claim, afforded them not only amusement, but the deeper pleasure of a profound interest, and it was in connection with these that he took such frequent occasion to deride the too facile conference of titles which, as he perpetually affirmed, was the jest of the world in which he moved.

He quoted more than one case in which without any subscription to objects of public utility, wealthy men, merely because they were wealthy, had been granted a baronetcy; he joked about his work in the Heralds' College, contrasting such gewgaws as parvenus descend to buy, with the honest old yeoman crest upon the silver of his host, and was especially severe upon the establishment of fixed prices for public honours; a practice which he declared almost worse than the granting of titles to the unworthy.

Of the guests who listened to him with the respect due to an expert, few ventured to contradict or even to criticise, but it must be admitted that Sir Julius Mosher, who had been knighted years ago on the occasion of Cornelius Hertz's reception at the Guildhall, was inclined one evening at Mr. Clutterbuck's table to be a trifle interrogatory.

"I never gave a penny," he said, "and I think I may say that for most men in the City," he added, looking round the table and meeting with a murmur of approval.

"I would never dream of saying such a thing," said Nobby warmly. He blushed a little, but looked at the same time so kindly and so sincere that his embarrassment did but enhance the good opinion all had formed of the young man.

"Thank God there are still some honours left that are honours! Now, I suppose nearly all the new peers ... take the new peers ... nobody minds; and then most baronets ... since this Government came in.... Still they did pay. And I do say what I most hate in the whole affair is regular prices fixed. It isn't cricket."

"But, after all," said a Mr. Hutchinson, a doctor of considerable means, and of a solid, quiet judgment. "What do you mean by 'fixed'?" He put up his hand to dissuade interruption, and to Nobby's horror opened in the intonation of a set speech: "Remember the importance of what you are saying. Chrm! You are in the Heralds' College, and you hear a great many things. Chrm! No one denies for a moment that large subscriptions to some public object are often rewarded by some public honour.... I may be a little easy-going, but I really don't see any harm in it. Everybody knows it is—er—done; the recipients are worthy men and they are just the kind of men who have always been made knights and baronets, and even peers when they were important enough."

The brief discourse was well and clearly delivered; it earned the gratitude of all those older men around the table in whom the art of living had bred common sense and to whom short speeches at dinner were familiar; to do justice to Nobby, he was the first to let his sense of justice return.

"You mustn't take me too seriously," he said in his decent smiling way. "One talks in shorthand. I don't mean a real tariff, nobody could mean that, but I think that in the past, 'specially about ten years ago, turn of the century and with all the fuss of the war on, they did hand things about.... Oh, there were orders as well, you know."

Mrs. Clutterbuck smiled at him from the head of the table. "No one blames you, I'm sure," she said. "But Mr. Parham there was not too much recognition of the people who stood by their country then." She looked meaningly at her husband. "I'm sure if you made a list of those pro-Boers who've been...."

"Half time, Mrs. Clutterbuck, half time," said Sir Julius Mosher kindly. He had been among the most prominent opponents of our Colonial policy at that moment, and he felt bound to protest against the word Pro-Boer, but his protest was singularly sweet and winning and did not for a moment disturb the harmony of the evening.

The ladies retired, not to the Persian room which was rarely inhabited in winter, but to the snuggery. Nobby held the door for them as they went out, and added to his laurels by the perfect apology he made for tearing Lady Mosher's train.

The conversation between the men drifted on to other subjects, foxhunting, lithia water, the Territorial army, and all the rest upon which men of this stamp are particularly engaged; while Dr. Hutchinson, who feared he might have offended the enthusiastic young fellow, took a chair by his side, and upon Nobby's mentioning the name of his grandfather, Lord Storrington, furnished the most interesting and voluminous details upon that nobleman's last illness, operation, and death.

Much later, when all the rest had said good-night, Nobby, who loved a farewell glass, followed his host to the old smoking-room, preserving his balance in the dark corridor by a hand upon either wall. They sat together exchanging the common-places that will pass between newly found friends when they are at last alone, until Mr. Clutterbuck, who had spent a few moments with his wife arranging matters for the following day, turned to a subject he could not wholly ignore, and said with perfect tact:

"I beg your pardon, but now that we're alone, tell me, how much really is there in what you were saying? I know there's more in it than those gentlemen say, and you think there's more in it, don't you?" For Mr. Clutterbuck, like many men newly introduced to the necessary compromises and halftones of our manifold political life, was still ready to receive secrets that seemed to him dramatic and to criticise from close at hand methods which during the most of his life he had only known as vague rumours.

Nobby very thoughtfully chose from the silver box beside him a gigantic cigar, and said, holding the matchbox in his hand ready to strike:

"Tell you the truth, there's precious little," and having said that he laughed with the laugh of a boy, and suddenly subsided into his chair.

"Well, but," said Mr. Clutterbuck, without insistence, "there must be this much in it, that a man who sacrifices more than a certain amount and is known to be a hearty supporter of the tariff, for instance, or of the evacuation of Egypt, or ... or let's say what the Government did last June in Burmah would be noticed, I suppose?"

"Oh yes," said Nobby, speaking as of a common-place. "But that's true of course of anything. If a man's known to 've done something really handsome, silly not to recognise him. 'Sides which, it's done, always done. What I was complainin' of was the people who really haven't got any claim at all. F'r instance," he said, lowering his voice and looking over his shoulder for a moment, "Johnnie Higgins...."

"Sir John Higgins?" said Mr. Clutterbuck, startled at the name of that prominent country gentleman.

"Yes," went on Nobby simply, "Johnnie Higgins wouldn't 've had anything in the course of nature. Of course he wanted it, and he hasn't got a son, an' one way an' another.... But still, there was the regulation price of five thousand."

"Well, five thousand," said Mr. Clutterbuck, his head bent well backwards, his eyes regarding the ceiling, and his tone expressing the enormity of the sum——

"No, but," continued Nobby, up on his feet again,—"I do object, and so would you if you were where I am; five thousand means different things to different men; now just because a man is in parliament and weighs in with five thousand...."

Here he was silent. He had some regard for truth and he felt that his temperament was running away with him. How many men he could call to mind who had given first and last twenty, thirty, forty thousand pounds to some great cause and had remained the plain commoners they were born. It would have been well for him and for his host if he had spoken aloud as the confession passed through his thought, but Nobby was as weak as he was good-natured and that thought remained unexpressed.

Mr. Clutterbuck continued his theme. Financial success had bred in him a dependence upon fact and figure. Five thousand pounds was a very large sum, but it was tangible; it was precise; one could write it down.

"I know men," he said slowly, "to whom that would be a capital: believe me, a considerable capital. Why, there's Doctor Hutchinson," he said, lowering his voice, and bending forward, "if you will believe me" (in still lower tones) "that man hasn't got five thousand now. He's not worth it." He pressed his lips together as men do after a final statement, and said by way of conclusion: "They're all like that, that call themselves 'professional men.' Here to-day and gone to-morrow, except they take out a patent or something, or really go in for business, and precious few can do that."

"You're quite right," said Nobby, who was bored and who had been thinking anxiously about the hour of next morning's breakfast. "I never had any myself," he added genially, and Mr. Clutterbuck smiled at the jest of the grandson of the Earl of the Creation of the year of the Act of the Union of England and of Ireland.

Nobby yawned and sloshed soda water into his glass. "Well, it's a lot of rot, isn't it?" he said, and clinched the conversation down.

They went up to bed that night, Mr. Clutterbuck, after apologising, as husbands will, for the lateness of the hour, turned many of his remarks to his wife upon this corrupt practice, weighing its probabilities and its exaggerations, until that lady first passed judgment and then imposed silence.

Charlie Fitzgerald should have been home upon the Wednesday next. A chance whim had taken him to Monte Carlo, from whence he telegraphed that he could hardly be back before Saturday. In the interval Mr. Clutterbuck, sauntering into town upon one of those clear December days which often prolong autumn into the heart of winter, happened to call at Delacourt's house, but he was at the office at Peter Street. Mr. Clutterbuck immediately sought him in that place and was received with something more cordial than courtesy, and many a merry laugh was exchanged between himself and the young organiser before the chief business of his visit was mentioned.

Even when the time came for that, Mr. Clutterbuck showed unaccountable nervousness, but he had taken full counsel; he knew his wife's opinion; his own mind was made up; he had not even waited for Charlie Fitzgerald. When, therefore, he had said good-bye and was just stepping out of the door he suddenly, as though by an afterthought, pulled an envelope from his pocket and said sunnily:

"Oh, Mr. Delacourt, I'd almost forgotten this. I could have posted it—but it's just as well to give it you now I have it. Read it at your leisure. Read it absolutely at your leisure."

He nodded twice and was gone.

Mr. Delacourt opened the envelope, fully expecting some little protest or other. To his wild astonishment there came out a note of not more than four lines, and a cheque for £3000.

Bozzy Delacourt had seen a good deal of life; he had pawned many articles before his father's death, and had mortgaged not a little land between that event and his marriage. He had seen many cheques signed by many men for many purposes; but the like of this he had never seen.

"What the devil!" he said, looking at the cheque as one would at a strange and unexpected beast. "What the devil——" He went over to the window, leant against it and murmured to himself: "If he's mad something ought to be done. He might make a scene in the House. By God!" he added to himself with a sudden change of expression, "it would be Maraschino and Ice to see him passing the stuff on to one of those journalists during a division, or endowing the p'licemen, or something.... Wish I'd known men like that in '92! I'd have pulled old Sam Lewis's leg." The thought set his eyes adream and afire. "I'd have played him," he added with sudden vicious earnestness, "I'd have played him like a bloody fish!"

And having thus relieved his mind, he prepared the cheque for passing it in, then thought he'd better show it to his chiefs, locked it into a particular drawer, and went out.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IX

The sacred season of Christmas was approaching and Charlie Fitzgerald had returned.

He had not been lucky at Monte Carlo. I do not only mean in the favourite amusement of that place, which he had indulged in for no more than the first day of his visit, for his means were restricted, but also in the weather and the company he found. For the anniversary of the Birth of Christ had drawn from the Riviera to their respective homes many in that cultured cosmopolitan world which held the most intimate of his friends.

He returned, therefore, to The Plâs not in ill humour—that he could never show—but a little sobered and now and then a little sad. When Mr. Clutterbuck exposed to him in full the action he had seen fit to take, no one could have been more sympathetic than he.

"It was a large thing to do, Clutterbuck," he said as they strolled round the garden arm in arm, "but I think it was a wise one."

The afternoon was mild, it had not rained for several hours, and the paths were dry. Charlie Fitzgerald, thinking of what to say next, threw a pebble or two into the lake, and then went on:

"Abroad, of course, they don't understand this Fishmonger business; but they do understand that there's a change in English politics ... we've come to a sort of turning-point," he said thoughtfully, somewhat in the same tone as men talked of the Labour Party years before. "The old party divisions have changed; I don't know whether you like it or whether you don't; I've never made up my mind; but you're on the crest of the wave of the change, and you can't help it."

Mr. Clutterbuck surveyed the breadth of the English dale, the woods of Surrey and his own great house; he felt the responsibility and the burden of the high function which England had thrust upon him.

"I shall try to do my duty," he said humbly.

And the two types—the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt—were constrained to a common silence for some moments. Then Mr. Clutterbuck said again: "I shall try to do my duty."

Charlie Fitzgerald was really moved. "You couldn't have done better," he said. "In politics it is absolutely necessary to be hall-marked in some way; and men like you, who can't stoop to eccentricity, are much better when they are hall-marked by a simple honour. I know, and I dare say you know, that they'd have given it to you long ago, but you never wanted it, you never asked for it—and I don't mind telling you they think the better of you."

Mr. Clutterbuck was deeply touched; men of his sort do not always understand how much they gain or lose by their simplicity, and it is pleasant to know that such a quality in one's soul has made one beloved.

"They'd have given it you on the King's birthday last year," said Fitzgerald with quiet emphasis, "and they'd have given it just before I came here: Bozzy talked of it openly. Since I've been here they haven't said anything."

"They haven't had occasion to, Mr. Fitzgerald," said Mr. Clutterbuck.

"No," answered Fitzgerald, "and it doesn't do to rush things. Besides which, the obvious thing is the New Year."

"I suppose," said Mr. Clutterbuck, "that one knows more or less—I mean—there's some sort of warning given one, because after all there's a kind of ceremony—in some cases, I mean," he added hurriedly.

"Oh yes," said Fitzgerald airily. "They let you know all right: five or six days beforehand; but it's quite informal. I remember my sister's great friend, that Egyptologist fellow"—he sought for the name—"well, anyhow, the man who wrote that account of Milner in Egypt and signed it Mayfield—can't remember his name, but I remember his just being told—Meyer! that's it—Ernest Meyer!—I remember his being told casually through somebody else. Sometimes they don't do it. Teeling didn't know about his baronetcy till he landed, and that was ten days afterwards."

The conversation frittered away, but Fitzgerald knew what to do. Next day he forced himself upon Delacourt, dined with him: and took occasion to ask his cousin how things stood, and he learned, to his no small embarrassment, that headquarters thought his employer had been precipitate.

"Well, but look here, Bozzy," he said, as they went across Westminster Bridge together to the Canterbury to see the Philadelphians. "It's not much of a business: if a man's got the big election of one's time, and all the Press behind him, and everybody waiting for the new session, and then shells out—I don't care how—really! It ought to be like taking it off a shelf."

"Well, but it isn't," said Bozzy, as they took their tickets.

All through the evening at intervals between the turns they pursued the matter jerkily, and Charlie Fitzgerald was curious to note his cousin's singular obstinacy. Bozzy was quite fixed about it. Headquarters were annoyed.

"It isn't so simple. To begin with, it'll look like being frightened of Mickleton; and then Billingshurst and Dangerfield are dead against this stinking Fishmonger agitation anyhow. Dangerfield is Hunnybubble's brother-in-law, for what that's worth, and altogether it's not the time. Number one certainly won't do it yet: not a measly V.O. Told me so himself."

Charlie Fitzgerald had a very simple reply. "If it isn't in the New Year list," he said, "he'll make trouble, and I don't blame him."

"How can he make trouble?" said Bozzy uneasily.

At this point a very large man in uniform interfered, and they were compelled to listen to a ventriloquist who imitated with astounding fidelity the barking of a little dog, enclosed by accident in an ottoman.

As they went out and recrossed the bridge, Charlie would not release his cousin; he dragged him towards the station and plied him still.

"It really is a big thing," he pleaded.

"Good God!" said Bozzy, losing his temper at or about that point in Victoria Street where the proud embassy of Cape Colony lifts its flag in the heart of the Empire. "Don't pester me, I'm not the Prime Minister!"

"Very well," said Charlie quietly, "I'll go and see him."

"Oh, do that by all means," said Bozzy, enormously relieved, "but don't get to Downing Street before three; he refuses everything steadily from after lunch till three o'clock. Then he takes that stuff Helmsley ordered him, and a few minutes afterwards he does everything for everybody; at least that's the only way I account for the two last appointments."

It was a cynical and a stupid thing to say of a man as hardworking and as capable as the young Prime Minister of England, who had led the National Party to success less than two years before; and who, moreover, was known to be suffering from an affection of the left lung; but there was this much truth in it, that all men have their hours: no more.

Charlie Fitzgerald brought home news that evening which lifted Mr. Clutterbuck's heart. He would not commit himself, but he told him very plainly that he had seen his cousin, that his cousin could not speak for the Government (and, after all, that was common-sense!), but that he, Charlie, was to see the Prime Minister the next day.

The truth looks very different to different men, and all external verities must, alas, be stated in mere human terms; this plain and just and honest phrase "and I'm to see the Prime Minister to-morrow," sank into Mr. Clutterbuck's mind with a very different effect from that which it could produce upon the experienced and travelled intellect of the man who spoke it.

His secretary was to see the Prime Minister the next day! It seemed more to Mr. Clutterbuck than it does to the delicately nurtured youth of England when they hear in the morning of their lives that they are to see the elephant at the Zoo. It had a thousand ritual connotations: it was the power, the kingdom and the glory. He felt it odd to be in the same room with his secretary.

How could that secretary, who had called the present Prime Minister "Uncle Dunk" since he could first lisp a word, know of what it was that passed in the new member's heart?

At dinner Mr. Clutterbuck very properly forebore to allude to such matters in the remotest manner before the very large and varied assembly of guests. Nor were he and his secretary alone together during any part of the remainder of the evening.

Next morning with the reticence that sits so well upon our wealthier men, he did no more than accompany Fitzgerald from the luncheon-room to the motor, help him in, and shake him warmly by the hand as he went off.

Fitzgerald, wisely remembering his cousin's somewhat petulant advice, sent no warning before him, but turned up at Downing Street a little before four. His reception was very cordial. They had known each other from the time when Charlie was in petticoats, a baby, in and out of Mary Smith's house in the height of its splendour, and the Prime Minister a young man, almost a boy himself, fresh from his victory in the Isle of Dogs and the idol of that Free Trade Unionist section which he had since triumphantly transformed into the National Party after his acceptance of the Round Table Tariff in 1909.

Charlie did not waste five minutes in coming to the point, and he put it with a simplicity that did him honour. He let the head of the Government talk upon the bigness of the Mickleton election and upon the way in which it had caught the Press, and when it was his turn to speak he quietly took it for granted that Mr. Clutterbuck's name would appear among the New Year's honours.

But there was a great deal more in the Prime Minister than met the naked eye; he shook his head with a determination of which the ballast was his big bulging forehead with its rare wisp of hair, and he said:

"All that's been thought about, Charlie."

Fitzgerald got quite red. He saw danger and was annoyed.

"You are making a fuss," he said.

"No, I'm not," said the Prime Minister kindly.

"You don't mean to say you're not going to do it?" said Fitzgerald.

"Of course we are, but not before the House meets. It would bind us. It can't be done," he said.

"You mean 't'd look like reversing the judgment by statute?"

"Charlie," said the other, somewhat gravely, "you're too old to ask 'why.'" He smiled at him a little quizzically.

"Then when you mean to do it?" said Fitzgerald.

"Oh, I really don't know."

The Prime Minister had occasion to go out, and they went out together, but Charlie, when he left him a few moments later, was feeling a good many things. He was feeling that he had weakened his own position in one house at least, and that he had done it for nothing; and he determined that a lowering of position like that could not be tolerated. He easily saw the way to repair it. He would begin to put on the screw.

To Mr. Clutterbuck that evening he simply said the Prime Minister had been most delightful and had met him halfway, and had taken the whole thing for granted, but said of course there must be a little delay.

"Of course," said Mr. Clutterbuck, "of course." In this intimacy he talked about the matter quite frankly. "I quite understand; there's a whole fortnight."

"Yes," said Charlie Fitzgerald.

It was the 15th of December.

It is not the custom in this country for men whom the Sovereign is pleased to honour to make a vulgar boast of their advancement; but it is inevitable that an approaching accession of social rank should be expected by the immediate circle of the recipient.

It was impossible that Mr. Clutterbuck's wife should not know; her brother also knew, of course, though perhaps he did wrong to write a long letter of congratulation: he had a claim to be told. And the Rev. Isaac Fowle as the spiritual, Dr. Hutchinson as the medical, adviser of the merchant, were naturally soon informed. Mr. Clutterbuck and his wife were far too well-bred to speak of the honour which was advancing upon them with every day that slipped from the old year; they mentioned it to none but the nearest of their friends. But a wide outer ring could not but hear the news, and a still more extended radius received it with some little exaggeration. In Oxted, Limpsfield, and Red Hill it was a peerage; and in the remoter villages where Mr. Clutterbuck's motor-cars were familiar, it was a place in the Cabinet as well; but to all, and to no one more than the Clutterbucks, there was one thing certain, that the date was the New Year.

The Press alone—and that was a large exception—had kept silent upon the rumour.

From one day to another Charlie Fitzgerald laid siege, but Bozzy was first obdurate, then tired, then angry, and the Prime Minister he could not see again. Whether Fitzgerald were right or not in what he next did it is for posterity to judge; his first duty, he thought, was to the man whose bread and salt he ate, and three days before Christmas he got the paragraph about Mr. Clutterbuck into half the daily papers of London; every one was away from Peter Street, and the usual contradiction did not follow by return.

On Christmas Eve, during the delightful old-world party which Mrs. Clutterbuck gave to the children of the neighbourhood, their parents very openly congratulated her husband. Upon Boxing Day the savour of his triumph remained in his mouth. It was not until Wednesday the 27th that the official protest came from the office of the patronage secretary.

It would have been better for every one concerned had that protest been plain. "It is better to use the surgeon's knife than to let the cancer grow."[6] But Mr. Clutterbuck had been most generous. To be too harsh would be, perhaps, to close the door upon future action, and all that appeared was a line or two in very small type, to the effect that the representative of the paper (and every paper in London had it) had called at the head office in Peter Street with regard to the rumour recently published, and

"had official authority to say that the officials were prepared to say officially that little more could for the moment at least be said upon the matter."

The lines were few, I say, the print was small and the prose bad, but such as they were they did but confirm the rumour which meant so much to two simple hearts, and might have meant more to the public as an indication of the coming policy of the Government in the matter of Fishmonger and Another.

Charlie Fitzgerald sat tight, and the old year waned.

A gathering, even larger than those which Mr. Clutterbuck had summoned during the sacred season just passed, gladly and happily drank out the old year. They sang Auld Lang Syne with hands across, and many another dear old song of friendship and remembrance, and not a few at the close of the evening departed with a vague conception that religion had presided at their feast.

So ended that year 1911 in a night glorious with keen and flashing stars. It was a year which had done many great and perilous things for England, but it was one of which every one could say in his heart, with the Prophet Ozee,[7] "It was good!"

The first of January 1912 was, as many of my readers will know, a Monday. The happy new week and the happy new year opened together with a radiant frost upon the beautiful Vale of Caterham. The ice on the artificial lake supported with ease the Japanese ducks, its inhabitants, and Mr. Clutterbuck rose from bed, a man advanced in the Commonwealth and younger by ten years.

He was in no haste to read the great news, but he was down before his secretary or his wife. He could not forbear to glance casually at the Times, which lay unopened on the breakfast table. He scanned the honours list in a casual fashion and made sure that he had missed his name. He went out and spoke to the stable-boy in a very happy voice, as of one who can easily arrange and uplift the lives of others; but the stable-boy was strangely silent, as he thought, and he was annoyed to see Astor lunge out a vicious kick. He came back into the house and picked up the Times again. He was astonished to note that the list was alphabetical; at least it was alphabetical for the baronets. There were a great number of C's, but there was no Clutterbuck. Sir Percy—Percy was the name he had chosen—Sir Percy Clutterbuck; it was not there!

Mr. Clutterbuck was a business man. He was not one of those who pin themselves to the mechanical accuracy of mechanical things. He did not, as women do, glance at a clock and take its dial to mark the exact hour; still less did he glance at the quotations of prices in the Times and believe, as the widows and the orphans do, that one may buy and sell indifferently, at the precise figures mentioned. He looked at the knights, but in the knights there was not even a C, unless I mention Sir Sebastian Cohen, who had acquired the dignity in the Barbadoes.

His mind would have suffered the mortal chill had not Hope remained in the box; and Hope, which never quite leaves men, does something more, for it often suggests the truth at last. He remembered the orders. The Bath he could neglect; but he remembered the Victorian Order, and others. It would be a strange way of doing things, but who could tell? He glanced down a complicated list, and St. Michael was there, and St. George, and the late Queen also, Victoria.... But there was no Clutterbuck.

Before he had finished the list, bending over it almost double on the low table, he was unpleasantly aware that his wife and his secretary were in the room. He bolted upright, left the paper, and said there was no news from the Congo.

Mr. Clutterbuck very properly prided himself upon a power of self-control; his wife did not open the paper in his presence. He took his secretary after breakfast out into the bright frosty air near the plantation. He told Fitzgerald all, and then said simply:

"Mr. Fitzgerald, will you do something for me?"

Fitzgerald was very willing.

"Will you go up to London in the Renault," (the Limousine was under repair) "and find out about this?"

Charlie Fitzgerald was in the Renault within an hour.

At lunch Mrs. Clutterbuck did not like to ask her husband any questions, but she wrote to the guests that there was illness in the house; she put them off with a heavy heart, for one never knows when one's expected guests may be one's guests again.

Charlie Fitzgerald was back before dinner. He said that Bozzy was out of town, but that a clerk had heard there was a mistake and that it would be rectified in a few days.

Therefore Wednesday passed, but Thursday was very ominous, and again Charlie Fitzgerald was unconvinced. He knew too much of men to wait for any questions. He was on the telephone long before breakfast, and when Mr. Clutterbuck came down he saw his secretary, dressed ready for driving into London.

"If Bozzy isn't in," said he, "I'll get out into Essex and see Morris. He's perfectly certain to know. But," he added, "I may be out all night."

Mr. Clutterbuck gloomily assented and the lonely house was deprived for thirty-six hours of the Irish grace and light which radiated from that young soul.

On the Friday afternoon, in a storm of rain, Charlie Fitzgerald returned. The panting of the car was still heard as he broke into the smoking-room dripping wet and took his employer, at once by the arm, into the gallery.

"It's a mistake in one way," he said, "but Bozzy says it isn't a real mistake. Your name was down but they didn't sign."

"Mr. Fitzgerald," said Mr. Clutterbuck, almost in tears, "I'm going in to London." And next day into London he went.

Bozzy was out, but at the central office they greeted him with enthusiasm, and spoke to him of current affairs, of his great victory at Mickleton, of the wonderful enthusiasm of the Press, but all he said upon the honours list and upon the recognition of others was met with nothing more substantial than rapid affirmatives and very hearty smiles.

He went back in bitterness of spirit towards Victoria and on the way he met William Bailey sailing down Bird Cage Walk like a great wingless, long-legged bird, empty of everything for the moment but an infantile joy. He was right upon him before William Bailey recognised him, but when that eccentric did so he seized him by both hands and hearing of his destination, marched him westward.

"We never finished that conversation, did we, Clutterbuck?" he said.

Mr. Clutterbuck vaguely remembered the evening at Mrs. Smith's, or rather he vaguely remembered the word or two that William Bailey had spoken.

"Peabody Yid, eh?" said William Bailey in a somewhat vulgar manner, catching him in the ribs with his elbow. "Have you learned anything more about the Peabody Yid? You City men are as thick as thieves!" And he laughed in a lower key.

"I don't understand you," said Mr. Clutterbuck in real perturbation and suffering. "I don't understand you. Can't you speak like everybody else? I'm tired of the lot!"

It was a genuine little cry of pain and William Bailey, being a fanatic, was sentimental and was saddened.

"What's up?" he said.

Mr. Clutterbuck told him. First briefly, then at length, then with passion he poured out his great wrong. The money paid, accepted—all his friends told—and then the humiliation of New Year's day.

William Bailey walked him back and forth before the Palace, then he said:

"We'll get in a cab, I shall have less time to speak in that way," and after that last paradox he talked sense; but it was very brief sense.

He simply told Mr. Clutterbuck in the short two hundred yards which led them to the station, that if he really wanted help, the unhappy William Bailey was there, and having said that, when Mr. Clutterbuck had taken his ticket and was off to the wicket, he looked for half a second into the merchant's eyes with that strange and dangerous power which the demagogue has commanded in all ages: to the untutored mind of Mr. Clutterbuck it was a glance of singular fascination. So they parted.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER X

William Bailey was at this time nearer fifty than forty years of age. Those who saw him for the first time would have imagined him to be an exceptionally vigorous and well-preserved man of maturer years, for while his eyes were energetic and lively the skin of his face had been hardened and lined by travel in very different climates. Moreover, his hair, though not scanty, had turned that peculiar steely grey which men so often preserve well on into old age.

His stature, which was considerable, he owed to a pair of very long thin legs, which looked the longer from the invariably ill-fitting loose trousers that he wore; his boots were of enormous size. These, again, were exaggerated to the ordinary beholder from his habit of purchasing pairs far too large for him; and these, I regret to say, were ready made, with square toes, very flat heels, and those offensive deep creases across the instep which betray the slovenly man.

His face, which was long and good-humoured, was framed by two vast whiskers which seemed to belong to an earlier age. And in general his appearance, while certainly denoting ability, might have led one to expect a sort of reticent good-nature. The impression was heightened by his habit of leaning good-humouredly forward with his hands in his pockets, and a genial half-smile, to listen attentively to whatever words were addressed to him, especially if those words proceeded from an unknown man or from one who seemed proud of his acquaintance.

There were none that met him casually in the world, but expected from him the most kindly judgments and the most reasonable if independent views. They were invariably deceived.

The man had acquired peculiarities of outlook which in any society less tolerant than our own would have doomed him to isolation. As it was, the most part of his equals treated him as a joke they could afford to laugh at; but some few out of the many to whom he had given legitimate offence found themselves unable to forgive, and these were filled in his presence with an ill ease which he, of all men, had the least right to impose: among these—I bitterly regret—was even to be found that gracious, kind old man, the Duke of Battersea, who in all his long and useful life had hardly spoken harshly of a single foe.

In politics none could say whether William Bailey were National or Opposition; his religion it was impossible to discover; even those philosophies which attract in their turn most men of intelligence appeared to leave him indifferent; he was ignorant of Hegel of Nietzsche and of Oppenheim, but his opinions were none the less expressed with a violence and a tenacity which sometimes produced the illusion of a general system, though a collection of his real or affected prejudices would have proved many of them contradictory one of the other. He would rail, for instance, against the practice of drinking champagne with meat, and he would denounce it with the same fervour as he would use against things so remote from him as the Senate of Finland or the Republican party in the United States.

His dislike, or his assumed dislike, of certain English writers, notably the poet Hibbles, on which he might at least be allowed an opinion or even a prejudice (for he was admittedly a good judge of verse), was not so strong as his detestation of Tolstoi (not one word of whose works he could read in the original or had even read in translations!), or his contempt for Harnack, the very A B C of whose science he ignored. He denied with equal decision the theory of natural selection and the hypothesis of a recent glacial epoch, and had more than once committed himself to print in points of etymology on which he knew nothing, and his excursion into which had only rendered him ridiculous.

It would be too easy to explain the man as a mere mass of opposition, though it is certain that the greater part of his enthusiasms, if enthusiasms they were, were aroused by the spectacle of some universally received opinion. It would be truer to say that he was ever ready to use his quick and not untrained intelligence in defence of chance likes and dislikes which, when he had so defended them for a sufficient time, took on in his mind a curious and unnatural hardness that sometimes approached and sometimes passed the line of complete conviction. On some points, indeed, he had been compelled to retreat. His theory that the English Press was not the property of its ostensible owners but was subsidised by a mysterious gang of foreign financiers, he discreetly dropped on finding it untenable, though for years he had startled his new acquaintances and wearied his relatives by various aspects of that particular piece of nonsense; and his repeated assertion that Japanese torpedo boats had really been present on the Dogger Bank during the deplorable incident of 1904, he had been singularly silent about after the delivery of the Paris award: but the most part of his follies survived.

He did at least pick up a new mania from time to time, which relieved the tedium of his repeated dogmatisings; but his friends looked forward with horror to that inevitable phase which he must meet with advancing years, when the elasticity of his fanaticism should fail him, and they should be compelled to listen to an unvarying tale throughout his old age.

He was, as I have said, not fifty, but that phase seemed already arrived in one particular. He had gone mad upon the Hebrew race.

He saw Jews everywhere: he not only saw them everywhere, but he saw them all in conspiracy. He would not perhaps have told you that the conspiracy was conscious, but its effects he would have discovered all the same.

According to him Lombroso was a Jew, Mr. Roosevelt's friends and supporters the Belmonts were Jews, half the moneyed backers of Roosevelt were Jews, the famous critic Brandes was a Jew, Zola was a Jew, Nordau was a Jew, Witte was a Jew—or in some mysterious way connected with Jews; Naquet was a Jew; the great and suffering Hertz was a Jew. All actors and actresses en bloc, and all the foreign correspondents he could lay hands on were Jews; the late and highly respected M. de Blowitz (a fervent Catholic!) he nicknamed "Opper," and having found that a member of the very excellent West Country family of Wilbraham had ardently supported the Russian revolutionists in the columns of the Times, he must say, forsooth, that a certain "Brahms" (who rapidly developed into "Abrahams") was the inspirer of the premier journal; and this mythical character so wrought upon his imagination that in a little while the manager of the paper itself, and heaven knows who else, were attached to the Synagogue.

In his eyes the governors of colonies, the wives of Viceroys, the holders of Egyptian bonds, the mortgagees of Irish lands, half the Russian patriots, and all the brave spokesmen of Hungary, were swept into the universal net of his mania.

It got worse with every passing year: there were Jews at Oxford, and at Cambridge, and at Trinity College, Dublin; the Jews overran India; they controlled the Neue Frie Presse of Vienna, the Tribuna of Rome, the Matin of Paris, and for all I know, the Freeman's Journal in Dublin.

The disease advanced with his advancing age; soon all the great family of Arnold were Jews; half the English aristocracy had Jewish blood; for a little he would have accused the Pope of Rome or the Royal Family itself; and I need hardly say that every widespread influence, from Freemasonry to the international finance of Europe, was Israelite in his eyes; while our Colonial policy, and especially the gigantic and successful struggle in South Africa, he twisted into a sort of petty huckstering, dependent upon Petticoat Lane.

Mary Smith loved her brother. She did all she could to dispel these mists and to bring out that decent side of him which had made him years ago as popular a young man as any in London—but he was past praying for. A private income, large, like all the Bailey incomes, of over £4000 a year, permitted him a dangerous independence; and in his freehold house in Bruton Street he lived his own life altogether, attached to his servants, whom he never changed, subscribing to absurd foreign papers that dripped with anti-Semitic virus, and depending upon the perpetual attention of his manservant Zachary, an honest fellow enough, but one who, from perpetual association with his master, seemed to have imbibed something of that master's eccentricities. He was as dandy as the gentleman who employed him was slovenly, and all Bruton Street noted with a smile the extraordinary figure the fellow made when he went out on his rare holidays, in a tight frock-coat, a hat like polished ebony, and gloves that were always new.

To individuals, as is so often the case with men of this temper and of good birth, William Bailey was often kind and sometimes positively generous. The personal enmities he bore to men whom he had actually known, were very rare, and such as they were they would take the form rather of abstaining from their society than of intriguing against them. Indeed, characters of this sort are not usually possessed of that tenacity in action which intrigue requires. His name was mentioned with no woman's; he had never married. In early youth he was supposed to have felt some attraction to a lady considerably older than himself, who subsequently became the wife of another yet older than herself, an Anglo-Indian official of high standing. But the passion could hardly have been deep or lasting, for he preserved no relic of her in any form; he had no picture of her, he never mentioned her name, and when she returned to England from time to time, he made no effort to renew her acquaintance and seemed even to avoid her presence.

Some have attempted to attribute his violent eccentricities of judgment to disappointed ambition. His career would hardly lead one to such a conclusion. As a boy he determined upon the Army, and had greatly annoyed his family, who would have preferred the Guards, by joining the Engineers. He had not been four years a sapper when he as suddenly abandoned that honourable and useful corps, and compelled his father to use influence for his appointment as an attaché—of all places in the world—to Pekin. Transferred from that distant capital to Paris, he begged for Constantinople, was granted it, and within two years abandoned the career of diplomacy as light-heartedly as he had abandoned that of arms. His father's death at this moment added to his already sufficient private means, and it was thought by such relatives as still took some interest in his talents that commercial activity would bring him into harness. A stall was purchased for him at Lloyds, and for three months he appeared to devote himself steadily to speculation. But the wisest of his relatives, especially his Aunt Winifred, still had their misgivings; they were amply justified.

In the election of 1892 which shortly followed his introduction to the City, he was asked by the family to make a third candidate in East Rutland in order to split, what was then called, the 'Liberal' vote against his brother James, who had presented himself in what was then called the 'Conservative' interest. William Bailey, naturally good-natured and thinking to enjoy the mild excitement of a short campaign, was delighted to present himself as an Independent Liberal, and until within a few days of the poll, conducted himself as the situation required, taking care to draw upon himself such votes—and no more—as might secure his brother's election. Unhappily the twisted spirit of the man got the better of him in the last week before the poll, and he fell into a deplorable breach of good taste and family feeling; he suddenly began deliberately to attract the attention and win the support of every sort of elector. To his own considerable surprise (but it must be admitted to his secret gratification) he was returned—with what consequent and final effect upon his family relations need not be told!

During the short life of that parliament he made himself conspicuous by abstaining from the narrow and perilous divisions to which his party was subjected, by asking the most offensive personal questions of responsible Ministers, by shouting interjections which repeatedly called upon him the severe reprimand of the highly distinguished man who then occupied the Chair, and by moving, when the luck of the ballot fell his way, a motion so offensive to every loyal and generous feeling, that even the Opposition found themselves compelled to support the Government in an early adjournment to prevent its discussion.

In the early summer of 1895 he appeared to suffer a sudden conversion, spoke frequently in the most decent and weighty of parliamentary manners, was present at every division, supported his colleagues in the country and then—utterly without warning—betrayed one of the safest seats in England by refusing at the General Election to present himself again as a candidate.

A man who acts thus in our public life bars every serious career against himself. Whether Mr. Bailey had foreseen this or no, he was at any rate content henceforward to live as a private gentleman in his little house in Bruton Street. But his restless temper still led him from one set to another, mingling with every one and seen everywhere. He wrote, he occasionally spoke, and above all it was his delight, by insinuation or by direct disclosure, to embarrass and expose his fellow-beings; a man dangerous in the extreme, and, I repeat, one whom no society less tolerant than ours would have endured for a year.

Such was the rock on which the proud ship of Mr. Clutterbuck's good fortune struck.

In a mood less irritable and less inflamed he would have been safe; but doubtful, suspicious, angered as he was he fell an easy—alas! too easy a prey—to the inconsequent and empty enthusiast; and it was his ruin.

Mr. Clutterbuck was back at The Plâs, and the thorn in his soul struck sore. Too many words were enigmas. He suffered too much silence. He would speak.

They were together in the Art Gallery of The Plâs, Mr. Clutterbuck and Charlie, the Master and the Man.

Mr. Clutterbuck was sitting at a desk where he often did his work, under the inspiration of the big Manet which Charlie had purchased that summer of Raphael and Heinz. Fitzgerald was smoking a cigarette lazily at the end of the long room, and reading one of those articles in the Spectator which have so profound an influence week by week upon the political situation.

Mr. Clutterbuck suddenly looked up from his writing, turned round to him and said:

"Mr. Fitzgerald, what is a Peabody Yid?"

Charlie Fitzgerald was so startled that he let the premier review of the Anglo-Saxon Race fall to the floor; but a glance at Mr. Clutterbuck's honest though troubled profile reassured him.

"Oh, a Yid," he said laughing, "I suppose a Yid's a name for a German, or something of that sort. Then Peabody—oh, the Peabody Buildings!"

"Is it a kind of man, then?" said Mr. Clutterbuck, solemnly.

"Why," said Fitzgerald, thoughtfully, "I suppose it is."

"I thought it was one man," said Mr. Clutterbuck, still in doubt, and in a tone which made Charlie Fitzgerald look at him again, but again feel reassured.

"It would be one fellow, of course," said Fitzgerald manfully, "if you were only speaking of one: if you said 'a Peabody Yid,' for instance.... But if you were talking of several," he mused, "why you'd say 'Peabody Yids,' I s'pose. What?"

Mr. Clutterbuck was lost in thought. "But Yid means a Jew surely, doesn't it, Mr. Fitzgerald?" said the older man. "It's a vulgar name for a Jew, isn't it?"

"Why-y, yes," answered the other with nonchalance. "A German, or a Jew, or something of that sort. Then Peabody was a sort of philanthropical fellow: architect, I think."

Mr. Clutterbuck having got so far, said: "Oh!" He said no more; he went on writing; but, like the man in the Saga, his heart was ill at ease. For the first time in many months he was as sore and as anxious as ever he had been in the old days before good fortune came to him.

The seventh day of the New Year broke brightly, but never a word from Peter Street. Mr. Clutterbuck went so far as to speak first to his secretary, before his secretary had spoken to him, and to ask him, but with all the courtesy imaginable, whether something could not be done to reassure him?

Charlie Fitzgerald more than hinted that it was all nervousness. "Things aren't done in that way," he said worriedly. "They won't give me anything in writing, of course."

Mr. Clutterbuck foresaw yet another futile verbal message and he came as near to anger as such a man can come at all. He was quite evidently put out and annoyed. He went so far as to say:

"Mr. Fitzgerald, I did hope you would have done something for me."

And Charlie, who had a fine sense which told him when he had gone too far, got up and put a gentle hand on his employer's arm.

"I'm afraid, Mr. Clutterbuck," he said in a tone of low and grave sincerity, "I'm afraid you misunderstood me. I can't do more than find out, but I'll find out in more detail, and you must give me two days."

"Of course," said Mr. Clutterbuck, "of course; you know what you have to do, Mr. Fitzgerald, I won't expect you back until I hear." But he added in a sort of appealing voice: "But do do something! You see ... it touches a man's pride, and ... to be perfectly frank ... Mrs. Clutterbuck doesn't like it. One feels odd when one's friends come."

The poor old gentleman was perfectly straightforward and it went to Charlie Fitzgerald's heart. Nevertheless a telegram which came for him a few hours later, after he had sent a telephone message to London, detained him yet another day. He fully explained to Mr. Clutterbuck the nature of the delay: the person whom he had expected to meet in town would not be back till the evening of the 9th; but Mr. Clutterbuck was only partially relieved and he announced his intention of seeing to some business in the City. The business—alas! that I should have to admit duplicity in such a character—was an interview with Mr. William Bailey.

That eccentric had at least opened him one door of sympathy, and in Mr. Clutterbuck's distress the business man's natural mistrust of uncertain and fantastic characters was forgotten.

He found Mr. Bailey occupying his worse than useless leisure in drawing up an enormous list of names, and by the side of each, in a second column, a second name was appended. He was so engrossed upon this task, in the prosecution of which he was surrounded by twenty or a dozen books of reference, collections of newspaper cuttings and memoranda of every sort, that he did not so much as look up when Zachary announced Mr. Clutterbuck, but went on murmuring:

"Beaufort—— Rosenberg, date uncertain;

"Belvedere—— Cohen, 1873;

"Belmont—— Schoenberg, 1882 (probably)...."

He had go so far when he jumped up, remembered his manners, and begged Mr. Clutterbuck to excuse his absorption.

"I was making out a list of people," he said, "a sort of dictionary."