"Come, you don't think the Bolshies are as strong as all that, do you?"
Mr. Waddington brought his fist down on the arm of his chair. "Iknowthey are," he said. "And look here—if they get the upper hand, it's the great capitalists, the great property holders, the great _land_owners like you and me, Corbett, who'll be the first to suffer…. Why, we're suffering as it is, here in Wyck, with just the little that fellow Grainger can do. The time'll come, mark my words, when we shan't be able to get a single labourer to work for us for a fair wage. They'll bleed us white, Corbett, before they've done with us, if we don't make a stand, and make it now.
"That's what the League's for, to set up a standard, something we can point to and say: These are the principles we stand for. Something you can rally the whole country round. We shall want your support—"
"I shall be very glad—anything I can do—"
Mr. Waddington was a little disturbed by this ready acquiescence.
"Mind you, it isn't going to end here, in Wyck. I shall start it in Wyck first; then I shall take it straight to the big towns, Gloucester, Cheltenham, Cirencester, Nailsworth, Stroud. We'll set 'em going till we've got a branch in every town and every village in the county."
He thought: "That ought to settle him." He had created a vision of intolerable activity.
"Bless me," said Sir John, "you've got your work cut out for you."
"Of course I shall have to get a local committee first. I can't take a step like that without consulting you."
Sir John muttered something that sounded like "Very good of you, I'm sure."
"No more than my duty to the League. Now, the point is, Sir Maurice was anxious thatIshould be president of this local branch. It needs somebody with energy and determination—the president's work, certainly, will be cut out for him—and I feel very strongly, and I think that my Committee will feel thatyou, Corbett, are the proper person."
"H'm—m."
"I didn't think I should be justified in going further without first obtaining your consent."
"We-ell—"
Mr. Waddington's anxiety was almost unbearable. The programme had evidently appealed to Sir John. Supposing, after all, he accepted?
"I wouldn't ask you to undertake anything so—so arduous, but that it'll strengthen my hands with my Committee; in fact, I may get a much stronger and more influential Committee if I can come to them, and tell them beforehand that you have consented to be president."
"I don't mind being president," said Sir John, "if I haven't got to do anything."
"I'm afraid—I'mafraidwe couldn't allow you to be a mere figurehead."
"But presidents always are figureheads, aren't they?"
There was a bantering gleam in Sir John's eyes that irritated Mr. Waddington. That was the worst of Corbett; you couldn't get him to take a serious thing seriously.
"'T any rate," Sir John went on, "there's always some secretary johnnie who runs round and does the work."
So that was Corbett's idea: to sit in his armchair and bag all the prestige, while he, Waddington of Wyck, ran round and did the work.
"Not in this case. In these small local affairs you can't delegate business. Everything depends on the personal activity of the president."
"The deuce it does. How do you mean?"
"I mean this. If Sir John Corbett asks for a subscription he gets it. We've got to round up the whole county and all the townspeople and villagers. It's no use shooting pamphlets at 'em from a motor-car. They like being personally interviewed. If Sir John Corbett comes and talk to them and tells them they must join, ten to one they will join.
"And there isn't any time to be lost if we want to get in first before other places take it up. It'll mean pretty sharp work, day in and day out, rounding them all up."
"Oh, Lord, Waddington,don't. I'm tired already with the bare idea of it."
"Come, we can't have you tired, Corbett. Why, it won't be worse, it won't be half as bad as a season's hunting. You're just the man for it. Fit as fit."
"Not half as fit as I look, Waddington."
"There's another thing—the meetings. If the posters say Sir John Corbett will address the meeting people'll come. If Sir John Corbett speaks they'll listen."
"My dear fellow, that settles it. I can't speak for nuts. YouknowI can't. I can introduce a speaker and move a vote of thanks, and that's about all Icando. It's your show, not mine.Youought to be president, Waddington. You'll enjoy it and I shan't."
"I don't know at all about enjoying it. It'll be infernally hard work."
"Precisely."
"You don't mean, Corbett, that you won't come in with us? That you won't come on the Committee?"
"I'll come on all right if I haven't got to speak, and if I haven't got to do anything. I shan't be much good, but I could at least propose you as president. You couldn't very well propose yourself."
"It's very good of you."
Mr. Waddington made his voice sound casual and indifferent, so that he might appear to be entertaining the suggestion provisionally and under protest. "There'll have to be one big meeting before the Committee's formed or anything. If I let you off the presidency," he said playfully, "will you take the chair?"
"For that one evening?"
"That one evening only."
"You'll do all the talking?"
"I shall have to."
"All right, my dear fellow. I daresay I can get my wife to come on your committee, too. That'll help you to rope in the townspeople…. And now, supposing we drop it and have a quiet smoke."
He roused himself to one more effort. "Of course, we'll send you a subscription, both of us."
Mr. Waddington drove off from Underwoods in a state of pleasurable elation. He had got what he wanted without appearing—without appearing at all to be playing for it. Corbett had never spotted him.
There he was wrong. At that very moment Sir John was relating the incident to Lady Corbett.
"And you could see all the time the fellow wanted it himself. I put him in an awful funk, pretending I was going to take it."
All the same, he admitted very handsomely that the idea of the League was "topping," and that Waddington was the man for it. And the subscription that he and Lady Corbett sent was very handsome, too. Unfortunately it obliged Mr. Waddington to contribute a slightly larger sum, by way of maintaining his ascendancy.
4
On his way home he called at the Old Dower House in the Square to see his mother. He had arranged to meet Fanny and Barbara Madden there and drive them home.
The old lady was sitting in her chair, handsome, with dark eyes still brilliant in her white Roman face, a small imperious face, yet soft, soft in its network of fine grooves and pittings. An exquisite old lady in a black satin gown and white embroidered shawl, with a white Chantilly scarf binding rolled masses of white hair. She had been a Miss Postlethwaite, of Medlicott.
"My dear boy—so you've got back?"
She turned to her son with a soft moan of joy, lifting up her hands to hold his face as he stooped to kiss her.
"How well you look," she said. "Is that London or coming back to Fanny?"
"It's coming back to you."
"Ah, she hasn't spoilt you. You know how to say nice things to your old mother."
She looked up at him, at his solemn face that simmered with excited egoism. Barbara could see that he was playing—playing in his ponderous, fatuous way, at being her young, her not more than twenty-five years old son. He turned with a sudden, sportive, caracoling movement, to find a chair for himself. He was sitting on it now, close beside his mother, and she was holding one of his big, fleshy hands in her fragile bird claws and patting it.
From her study of the ancestral portraits in the Manor dining-room Barbara gathered that he owed to his mother the handsome Roman structure that held up his face, after all, so proudly through its layers of Waddington flesh. He had the Postlethwaite nose. The old lady looked at her, gratified by the grave attention of her eyes.
"Miss Madden can't believe that a little woman like me could have such a great big son," she said. "But, you see, he isn't big to me. He'll never be any older than thirteen."
You could see it. If he wasn't really thirteen to her he wasn't a day older than twenty-five; he was her young grown-up son whose caresses flattered her.
"She spoils me, Miss Madden."
You could see that it pleased him to sit close to her knees, to have his hand patted and be spoilt.
"Nonsense. Now tell me what happened at Underwoods. Is it to be JohnCorbett or you?"
"Corbett says it's to be me."
"I'm glad he's had that much sense. Well—and now tell me all about thisLeague of yours."
He told her all about it, and she sat very quietly, listening, nodding her proud old head in approval. He talked about it till it was time to go. Then the old lady became agitated.
"My dear boy, you mustn't let Kimber drive you too fast down that hill.Fanny, will you tell Kimber to be careful?"
Her face trembled with anxiety as she held it to him to be kissed. At that moment he was her child, escaping from her, going out rashly into the dangerous world.
"I like going to see Granny," said Fanny as Kimber tucked them up together in the car. "She makes me feel young."
"You may very well feel it," said Mr. Waddington. "It's only my mother's white hair, Miss Madden, that makes her look old."
"I thought," said Barbara, "she looked ever so much younger"—she was going to say, "than she is"—"than most people's mothers."
"You will have noticed," Fanny said, "that my husband is younger than most people."
Barbara noticed that he had drawn himself up with an offended air, unnaturally straight. He didn't like it, this discussion about ages.
They were running out of the Square when Fanny remembered and cried out, "Oh, stop him, Horatio. We must go back and see if Ralph's coming to dinner."
But at the White Hart they were told that Mr. Bevan had "gone to Oxford on his motor-bike" and was not expected to return before ten o'clock.
"Sorry, Barbara."
"I don't see why you should apologize to Miss Madden, my dear. I've no doubt she can get on very well without him."
"She may want something rather more exciting than you and me, sometimes."
"I'm quite happy," Barbara said.
"Of course you're happy. It isn't everybody who enjoys Ralph Bevan's society. I daresay you're like me; you find him a great hindrance to serious conversation."
"That's whyIenjoy him," Fanny said. "We'll ask him for to-morrow night."
Barbara tucked her chin into the collar of her coat. The car was running down Sheep Street into Lower Wyck. She stared out abstractedly at the eastern valley, the delicate green cornfields and pink fallows, the muffling of dim trees, all washed in the pale eastern blue, rolling out and up to the blue ridge.
It made her happy to look at it. It made her happy to think of Ralph Bevan coming to-morrow. If it had been to-night it would have been all over in three hours. And something—she was not sure what, but felt that it might be Mr. Waddington—something would have cut in to spoil the happiness of it. But now she had it to think about, and her thoughts were safe. "What are you thinking about, Barbara?"
"The view," said Barbara. "I want to sketch it."
1
Mr. Waddington was in his library, drawing up his prospectus while Fanny and Barbara Madden looked on. At Fanny's suggestion (he owned magnanimously that it was a good one) he had decided to "sail in," as she called it, with the prospectus first, not only before he formed his Committee, but before he held his big meeting. (They had fixed the date of it for that day month, Saturday, June the twenty-first.)
"You come before them from the beginning," she said, "with something fixed and definite that they can't go back on." And by signing the prospectus, Horatio Bysshe Waddington, he identified it beyond all contention with himself.
It was at this point that Barbara had blundered.
"Why," she had said, "should we go to all that bother and expense? Why can't we send out the original prospectus?"
"My dear Barbara, the original prospectus isn't any good."
"Why isn't it?"
"Because it isn't Horatio's prospectus."
Barbara looked down and away from the dangerous light in Fanny's eyes.
"But it expresses his views, doesn't it?"
"That's no good when he wants to express them himself."
And so far from being any good, the original prospectus was a positive hindrance to Mr. Waddington. It took all the wind out of his sails; it took, as he justly complained, the very words out of his mouth and the ideas out of his head; it got in his way and upset him at every turn. Somehow or other he had got to stamp his personality upon this thing. "It's no good," he said; "if they can't recognize it as a personal appeal from ME." And here it was, stamped all over, and indelibly, with the personalities of Sir Maurice Gedge and his London Committee. And he couldn't depart radically from the lines they had laid down; there were just so many things to be said, and Sir Maurice and his Committee had contrived to say them all.
But, though the matter was given him, Mr. Waddington, before he actually tackled his prospectus, had conceived himself as supplying his own fresh and inimitable manner; the happy touch, the sudden, arresting turn. But somehow it wasn't working out that way. Try as he would, he couldn't get away from the turns and touches supplied by Sir Maurice Gedge.
"It would have been easy enough," he said, "to draw up the original prospectus. I'd a thousand times rather do that than write one on the top of it."
Fanny agreed. "It's got tolookdifferent," she said, "withoutbeingdifferent."
"Couldn't we," said Barbara, "turn it upside down?"
"Upside down?" He stared at her with great owl's eyes, offended, suspecting her this time of an outrageous levity.
"Yes. Really upside down. You see, the heads go in this order—Defence of Private Property; Defence of Capital; Defence of Liberty; Defence of Government; Defence of the Empire; Danger of Revolution, Communism and Bolshevism; Every Man's Duty. Why not reverse them? Every Man's Duty; Danger of Bolshevism, Communism and Revolution; Defence of the Empire; Defence of Government; Defence of Liberty; Defence of Capital; Defence of Private Property."
"That's an idea," said Fanny.
"Not at all a bad idea," said Mr. Waddington. "You might take down the heads in that order."
Barbara took them down, and it was agreed that they presented a very original appearance thus reversed; and, as Barbara pointed out, the one order was every bit as logical as the other; and though Mr. Waddington objected that he would have preferred to close on the note of Government and Empire, he was open to the suggestion that, while this might appeal more to the county, with the farmers and townspeople, capital and private property would strike further home. And by the time he had changed "combat the forces of disorder" to "take a stand against anarchy and disruption," and "spirit of freedom in this country" to "British genius for liberty," and "darkest hour in England's history" to "blackest period in the history of England," he was persuaded that the prospectus was now entirely and absolutely his own.
"But I think we must sound the note of hope to end up with. My own message. How about 'We must remember that the darkest hour comes before dawn'?"
"My dear Horatio, if you inflate yourself so over your prospectus, you'll have no wind left when you come to speak. Be as wildly original as you please, butdon'tbe wasteful and extravagant."
"All right, Fanny. I will reserve the dawn. Please make a note of that, Miss Madden. Speech. 'Blackest'—or did I say 'darkest'?—'hour before dawn.'"
"You'd better reserve all you can," said Fanny.
When Barbara had typed the prospectus, Mr. Waddington insisted on taking it to Pyecraft himself. He wanted to insure its being printed without delay, and to arrange for the posters and handbills; he also wanted to see the impression it would make on Pyecraft and on the young lady in Pyecraft's shop. He liked to think of the stir in the composing room when it was handed in, and of the importance he was conferring on Pyecraft.
"You haven't said what you think of the prospectus," said Fanny, as they watched him go.
"I haven't said what I think of the League of Liberty."
"Whatdoyou think of it?"
"I think it looks as if somebody was in an awful funk; and I don't see that there's going to be much liberty about it."
"That," said Fanny, "is how it struck me. But it'll keep Horatio quiet for the next six months."
"Quiet? And afterwards?"
"Oh, afterwards there'll be his book."
"I'd forgotten his book."
"That'll keep him quieter than anything else; if you can get him to settle down to it."
2
That evening Barbara witnessed the reconciliation of Mr. Waddington and Ralph Bevan. Mr. Waddington made a spectacle of it, standing, majestic and immovable, by his hearth and holding out his hand long before Ralph had got near enough to take it.
"Good evening, Ralph. Glad to see you here again."
"Good of you to ask me, sir."
Barbara thought he winced a little at the "sir." He had a distaste for those forms of deference which implied his seniority. You could see he didn't like Ralph. His voice was genial, but there was no light in his bulging stare; the heavy lines of his face never lifted. She wondered: Was it Ralph's brilliant youth that had offended him, reminding him, even when he refused to recognize his fascination? For you could see that he did refuse, that he regarded Ralph Bevan as an inferior, insignificant personality. Barbara had to revise her theory. He wasn't jealous of him. It would never occur to him that Fanny, or Barbara for that matter, could find Ralph interesting. Nothing could disturb for a moment his immense satisfaction with himself. He conducted dinner with a superb detachment, confining his attention to Fanny and Barbara, as if he were pretending that Ralph wasn't there, until suddenly he heard Fanny asking him if he knew anything about the National League of Liberty and what he thought of it.
"Mr. Waddington doesn't want to know what I think of it."
"No, but we want to."
"My dear Fanny, any opinion, any honest opinion—"
"Oh, Ralph's opinion will be honest enough."
"Honest, I daresay," said Mr. Waddington.
"Well, if you really want to know, I think it's a pathological symptom."
"A what?" said Mr. Waddington, startled into a show of interest.
"Pathological symptom. It's all funk. Blue funk. True blue funk."
"That's what Barbara says."
The young man looked at Barbara as much as to say, "I knew I could trust you to take the only intelligent view."
"It's run," he said, "by a few imbeciles, like Sir Maurice Gedge.They're scared out of their lives of Bolshevism."
"Do you mean to say that Bolshevism isn't dangerous?"
"Not in this country."
"Perhaps, then, you'd like to see a Soviet Government in this country?"
"I didn't say so."
"But I understand that you uphold Bolshevism?"
"I don't uphold funk. But," said Ralph, "there's rather more in it than that. It's being engineered. It's a deliberate, dishonest, and malicious attempt to discredit Labour."
"Absurd," said Mr. Waddington. "You show that you are ignorant of the very principles of the League."
If he recognized Ralph's youth, it was only to despise it as crude and uninformed.
"It is—the—National—League—of Liberty."
"Well, that's about all the liberty there is in it—liberty to suppress liberty."
"You may not know that I'm starting a branch of the League in Wyck."
"I'm sorry, sir. I did not know. Fanny, why did you lay that trap for me?"
"Because I wanted your real opinion."
"Before you set up an opinion, you had better come to my meeting on the twenty-first. Then perhaps you'll learn something about it."
Fanny changed the subject to Sir John Corbett's laziness.
"A man," said Mr. Waddington, "without any seriousness, any sense of responsibility."
After coffee Mr. Waddington removed Fanny to the library to consult with him about the formation of his Committee, leaving Barbara and Ralph Bevan alone. Fanny waved her hand to them from the doorway, signalling her blessing on their unrestrained communion.
"It's deplorable," said Ralph, "to see a woman of Fanny's intelligence mixing herself up with a rotten scheme like that."
"Poor darling, she only does it to keep him quiet."
"Oh, yes, I admit there's every excuse for her."
They looked at each other and smiled. A smile of delicious and secret understanding.
"Isn't he wonderful?" she said.
"I thought you'd like him…. I say, you know, Imustcome to his meeting. He'll be more wonderful than ever there. Can't you see him?"
"I can. It's almosttoomuch—to think that I should be allowed to know him, to live in the same house with him, to have him turning himself on by the hour together. What have I done to deserve it?"
"I see," he said, "youhavegot it."
"Got what?"
"The taste for him. The genuine passion. I had it when I was here. I couldn't have stood it if I hadn't."
"I know. You must have had it. You've got it now."
"And I don't suppose I've seen him anything like at his best. You'll get more out of him than I did."
"Oh, do you think I shall?"
"Yes. He may rise to greater heights."
"You mean he may go to greater lengths?"
"Perhaps. I don't know. You'd have, of course, to stop his lengths, which would he a pity. I think of him mostly in heights. There's no reason why you shouldn't let him soar…. But I mustn't discuss him. I've just eaten his dinner."
"No, we mustn't," Barbara agreed. "That's the worst of dinners."
"I say, though, can't we meet somewhere?"
"Where wecan?"
"Yes. Where we can let ourselves rip? Couldn't we go for more walks together?"
"I'm afraid there won't be time."
"There'll be loads of time. When he's off in his car 'rounding up the county.'"
"When he's 'off,' I'm 'on' as Mrs. Waddington's companion."
"Fanny won't mind. She'll let you do anything you like. At any rate, she'll letmedo anythingIlike."
"Will you ask her?"
"Of course I shall."
So they settled it.
3
When Barbara said to herself that Mr. Waddington would spoil her evening with Ralph Bevan, she had judged by the change that had come over the house since the return of its master. You felt it first in the depressed faces of the servants, of Partridge and Annie Trinder. A thoughtful gloom had settled even on Kimber. Worse than all, Fanny Waddington had left off humming. Barbara missed that spontaneous expression of her happiness.
She thought: "What is it he does to them?" And yet it was clear that he didn't do anything. They were simply crushed by the sheer mass and weight of his egoism. He imposed on them somehow his incredible consciousness of himself. He left an atmosphere of uneasiness. You felt it when he wasn't there; even when Fanny had settled down in the drawing-room with "Tono-Bungay" you felt her fear that at any minute the door would open and Horatio would come in.
But Barbara wasn't depressed. She enjoyed the perpetual spectacle he made. She enjoyed his very indifference to Ralph, his refusal to see that he could command attention, his conviction of his own superior fascination. She knew now what Ralph meant when he said it would be unkind to spoil him for her. He was to burst on her without preparation or description. She was to discover him first of all herself. First of all. But she could see the time coming when her chief joy would be their making him out, bit by bit, together. She even discerned a merry devil in Fanny that amused itself at Horatio's expense; that was aware of Barbara's amusement and condoned it. There were ultimate decencies that prevented any open communion with Fanny. But beyond that refusal to smile at Horatio after eating his dinner, she could see no decencies restraining Ralph. She could count on him when her private delight became intolerable and must be shared.
But there were obstacles to their intercourse. Mr. Waddington couldn't very well start on what he called his "campaign" until he was armed with his prospectus, and Pyecraft took more than a week to print it. And while she sat idle, thinking of her salary, the fiend of conscience prompted Barbara to ask him for work. Wasn't there his book?
"My book? My Cotswold book?" He pretended he had forgotten all about it. He waved it away. "The book is only a recreation, an amusement. Plenty of time for that when I've got my League going. Still, I shall be glad when I can settle down to it, again."…. He was considering it now with reminiscent affection…. "If it would amuse you to look at it—"
He began a fussy search in his bureau.
"Ah, here we are!"
He unearthed two piles of manuscript, one typed, the other written, both scored with erasures, with almost illegible corrections and insertions.
"It's in a terrible mess," he said.
She saw what her work would be: to cut a way through the jungle, to make clearings.
"If I were to type it all over again, you'd have a clean copy to work on when you were ready."
"If youwouldbe so good. It's that young rascal Ralph. He'd no business to leave it in that state."
Her scruple came again to Barbara.
"Mr. Waddington, you'd take him on again for your secretary if he'd come back?"
"He'd come back all right. Trust him."
"And you'd take him?"
"My dear young lady, why should I? I don't wanthim; I wantyou."
"AndIdon't want to stand in his way."
"You needn't worry about that."
"I can't help worrying about it. You'd take him back if I wasn't here."
"Youarehere."
"But if I weren't?"
"Come, come. You mustn't talk to me like that."
She went away and talked to Fanny.
"I can't bear doing him out of his job. If he'll come back—"
"My dear, you don't know Ralph. He'd die rather than come back. They've made it impossible between them."
"Mr. Waddington says he'd take him back if I wasn't here."
"He wouldn't. He only thinks he would, because it makes him feel magnanimous. He offered Ralph half a year's salary if he'd go at once. And Ralph went at once and wouldn't touch the salary. That made him come out top dog, and Horatio didn't like it. Not that he supposed he could score off Ralph with money. He isn't vulgar."
No. He wasn't vulgar. But she wondered how he would camouflage it to himself—that insult to his pride. And there was Ralph's pride that was so fiery and so clean. Yet—
"Yet Mr. Bevan comes and dines," she said.
"Yes, he comes and dines. He'll always be my cousin, though he won't be Horatio's secretary. He's got a very sweet nature and he keeps the issues clear."
"But what will hedo? He can't live on his sweet nature."
"Oh, he's got enough to live on, though not enough to—to do what he wants on. But he'll get a job all right. You needn't bother your dear little head about Ralph."
Fanny said to herself: "I'll tell him, then he'll adore her more than ever. If only he adores herenoughhe'll buck up and get something to do."
1
Mr. Waddington did not approve of Mrs. Levitt's intimacy with her sister, Bertha Rickards.
He would have approved of it still less if he had heard the conversation which Mrs. Trinder heard and reported to Miss Gregg, the governess at the rectory, who told the Rector's wife, who told the Rector, who told Colonel Grainger, who told Ralph Sevan, who kept it to himself.
"What did you say to the old boy, Elise?"
"Don't ask me what Isaid!"
"Well—have you got the cottage?"
"Of course I've got it, silly cuckoo. I can get anything out of him I like. He wasn't going to turn those Ballingers out, but I made him."
"Did he say when Mrs. Waddington was going to call?"
Bertha couldn't resist the temptation of pinching where she knew the flesh was tender.
"I didn't ask him."
"She can't very well be off it, now he's your landlord."
That was what Mrs. Levitt thought. And if Mrs. Waddington called, Lady Corbett couldn't very well be off it either. They were the only ones in Wyck who had not called; but it would be futile to pretend that they didn't matter, that they were not the ones who mattered more than anybody.
The net she had drawn round Mr. Waddington was tightening, though he was as yet unaware of his entanglement. First of all, the Lower Wyck cottage was put into thorough repair; and if the plaster was not quite dry when the Ballingers moved into it, that was not Mr. Waddington's concern. He had provided them with a house, which was all that the law could reasonably require him to do. Clearly it was Hitchin, the builder, who should be held responsible for the plaster, not he. As for the rheumatism Mrs. Ballinger got, supposing it could be put down to the damp plaster and not to some inherent defect in Mrs. Ballinger's constitution, clearly that was not Mr. Waddington's concern either. If anybody was responsible for Mrs. Ballinger's rheumatism, it was Hitchin.
Mr. Waddington did not approve of Hitchin. Hitchin was a Socialist who followed Colonel Grainger's lead in overpaying his workmen, with disastrous consequences to other people; for over and above the general upsetting caused by this gratuitous interference with the prevailing economic system, Mr. Hitchin was in the habit of recouping himself by monstrous overcharges. And Mr. Hitchin was not only the best builder in the neighbourhood, but the only builder and stonemason in Wyck-on-the-Hill, so that he had you practically at his mercy.
And operations at the Sheep Street cottage were suspended while Mr. Waddington disputed Mr. Hitchin's estimate bit by bit, from the total cost of building the new rooms down to the last pot of enamel paint and his charge per foot for lead piping. June was slipping away while they contended, and there seemed little chance of Mrs. Levitt's getting into her house before Michaelmas, if then.
So that on the morning of the nineteenth, two days before the meeting, Mr. Waddington found another letter waiting for him on the breakfast-table.
Fanny was looking at him, and he sought protection in an affectation of annoyance.
"Now what can Mrs. Levitt find to write to me about?"
"I wouldn't set any limits to her invention," Fanny said.
"And what do you know about Mrs. Levitt?"
"Nothing. I only gather from what you say yourself that she is—fertile in resource."
"Resource?"
"Well, in creating opportunities."
"Opportunities, now, for what?"
"For you to exercise your Christian charity, my dear. When are you going to let me call on her?"
"I am not going to let you call on her at all."
"Is that Christian charity?"
"It's anything you please." He was absorbed in his letter. Mrs. Levitt had been obliged to move from Mrs. Trinder's in the Square to inferior rooms in Sheep Street, and she was sorry for herself.
"But surely, when you're always calling on her yourself—"
"I am not always calling on her. And if I were, there are some things which are perfectly proper for me to do which would not be proper for you."
"It sounds as if Mrs. Levitt wasn't."
He looked up as sharply as his facial curves permitted. "Nothing of the sort. She's simply not the sort of person youdocall on; and I don't mean you to begin."
"Why not?"
"Because you're my wife and you have a certain position in the county.That's why."
"Rather a snobby reason, isn't it? You said I might call on anybody I liked."
"So you may, in reason, provided you don't begin with Mrs. Levitt."
"I may have to end with her," said Fanny.
Mr. Waddington had many reasons for not wishing Fanny to call on Mrs. Levitt. He wanted to keep his wife, because she was his wife, in a place apart from Mrs. Levitt and above her, to mark the distance and distinction that there was between them. He wanted to keep himself, as Fanny's husband, apart and distant, by way of enhancing his male attraction. And he wanted to keep Mrs. Levitt apart, to keep her to himself, as the hidden woman of passionate adventure. Hitherto their intercourse had had the charm, the unique, irreplaceable charm of things unacknowledged and clandestine. Mrs. Levitt was unique; irreplaceable. He couldn't think of any other woman who would be a suitable substitute. There was little Barbara Madden; she had been afraid of him; but his passions were still too young to be stirred by the crudity of a girl's fright; if it came to that, he preferred the reassuring ease of Mrs. Levitt.
And he didn't mean it to come to that.
But though Mr. Waddington did not actually look forward to a time when he would be Mrs. Levitt's lover, he had visions of the pure fancy in which he saw himself standing on Mrs. Levitt's doorstep after dark; say, once a fortnight, on her servant's night out; he would sound a muffled signal on the knocker and the door would he half-opened by Elise. Elise! He would slip through in a slender and mysterious manner; he would go on tip-toe up and down her stairs, recapturing a youthful thrill out of the very risks they ran, yet managing the affair with a consummate delicacy and discretion.
At this point Mr. Waddington's fancy heard another door open down the street; somebody came out and saw him in the light of the passage; somebody went by with a lantern; somebody timed his comings and goings. He felt the palpitation, the cold nausea of detection. No. You couldn't do these things in a little place like Wyck-on-the-Hill, where everybody knew everybody else's business. And there was Toby, too.
Sometimes, perhaps, on a Sunday afternoon, when Toby and the servant would be out. Yes. Sunday afternoon between tea-time and church-time.
Or he could meet her in Oxford or Cheltenham or in London. Wiser. Week-ends. More satisfactory. Risk of being seen there too, but you must take some risks. Surprising how these thingswerekept secret.
Birmingham now. Birmingham would be safer because more unlikely. He didn't know anybody in Birmingham. But the very thought of Mrs. Levitt calling at the Manor on the same commonplace footing, say, as Mrs. Grainger, was destruction to all this romantic secrecy.
Also he was afraid that if Mrs. Levitt were really that sort of woman, Fanny's admirable instinct would find her out and scent the imminent affair. Or if Fanny remained unsuspicious and showed plainly her sense of security, Elise might become possessive and from sheer jealousy give herself away. Mr. Waddington said to himself that he knew women, and that if he were a wise man, and hewasa wise man, he would arrange matters so that the two should never meet. Fanny was docile, and if he said flatly that she was not to call on Mrs. Levitt, she wouldn't.
2
There was another thing that Mr. Waddington dreaded even more than that dangerous encounter: Fanny's knowing that he had turned the Ballingers out. As he would have been very unwilling to admit that Mrs. Levitt had forced his hand there, he took the whole of the responsibility for that action. But, inevitable and justifiable as it was, he couldn't hope to carry it off triumphantly with Fanny. It was just, but it was not magnanimous. Therefore, without making any positively untruthful statement, he had let her think that Ballinger had given notice of his own accord. The chances, he thought, were all against Fanny ever hearing the truth of the matter.
If only the rascal hadn't had a wife and children, and if only his wife—but, unfortunately for Mr. Waddington, his wife was Susan Trinder, Mrs. Trinder's husband's niece, and Susan Trinder had been Horace's nurse; and though they all considered that she had done for herself when she married that pig-headed Ballinger, Fanny and Horace still called her Susan-Nanna. And Susan-Nanna's niece, Annie Trinder, was parlourmaid at the Manor. So Mr. Waddington had a nasty qualm when Annie, clearing away breakfast, asked if she might have a day off to look after her aunt, Mrs. Ballinger, who was in bed with the rheumatics.
To his horror he heard Fanny saying: "She wouldn't have had the rheumatics if they'd stayed in Sheep Street."
"No, ma'am."
Annie's eyes were clear and mendacious.
"He never ought to have left it," said Fanny.
"No, ma'am. No more he oughtn't."
"Isn't she very sorry about it?"
(Why couldn't Fanny leave it alone?)
"Yes, m'm. She's frettin' something awful. You see, 'tesn't so much the house, though 'tes a better one than the one they're in, 'tes the garden. All that fruit and vegetable what uncle he put in himself, and them lavender bushes. Aunt, she's so fond of a bit of lavender. I dunnow I'm sure how she'll get along."
Annie knew. He could tell by her eyes that she knew. There was nothing but Annie's loyalty between him and that exposure that he dreaded. He heard Fanny say that she would go and see Susan to-morrow. There would be nothing but Susan's loyalty and Ballinger's magnanimity. It would amount to that if they spared him for Fanny's sake. He had been absolutely right, and Ballinger had brought the whole trouble on himself; but you could never make Fanny see that. And Ballinger contrived to put him still further in the wrong. The next day when Fanny called at the cottage she found it empty. Ballinger had removed himself and his wife and family to Susan's father's farm at Medlicott, a good two and a half miles from his work on Colonel Grainger's land, thus providing himself with a genuine grievance.
And Fanny would keep on talking about it at dinner.
"Those poor Ballingers! It's an awful pity he gave up the Sheep Street cottage. Didn't you tell him he was a fool, Horatio?"
Mercifully Annie Trinder had left the room. But there was Partridge by the sideboard, listening.
"I'm not responsible for Ballinger's folly. If he finds himself inconvenienced by it, that's no concern of mine."
"Well, Ballinger's folly has been very convenient for Mrs. Levitt."
Mr. Waddington tried to look as if Mrs. Levitt's convenience were no concern of his either.
1
The handbills and posters had been out for the last week. Their headlines were very delightful to the eye with their enormous capitals staring at you in Pyecraft's royal blue print.
* * * * *
A MEETINGIN AID OF THE ABOVE LEAGUEWILL BE HELD IN THETOWN HALL, WYCK-ON-THE-HILL,Saturday, June 21st, 8 p.m.
* * * * *
Chairman: SIR JOHN CORBETT,OFUNDERWOODS, WYCK-ON-THE-HILL.Speaker:HORATIO BYSSHE WADDINGTON, ESQ.,OF THEMANOR HOUSE, LOWER WYCK.
* * * * *
* * * * *
Only one thing threatened Mr. Waddington's intense enjoyment of his meeting: his son Horace would be there. Young Horace had insisted on coming over from Cheltenham College for the night, expressly to attend the meeting. And though Mr. Waddington had pointed out that the meeting could very well take place without him, Fanny appeared to be backing young Horace up in his impudent opinion that it couldn't. This he found excessively annoying; for, though for worlds he wouldn't have owned it, Mr. Waddington was afraid of his son. He was never the same man when he was about. The presence of young Horace—tall for sixteen and developing rapidly—was fatal to the illusion of his youth. And Horace had a way of commenting disadvantageously on everything his father said or did; he had a perfect genius for humorous depreciation. At any rate, he and his mother behaved as if they thought it was humorous, and many of his remarks seemed to strike other people—Sir John and Lady Corbett, for example, and Ralph Bevan—in the same light. Over and over again young Horace would keep the whole table listening to him with unreasoning and unreasonable delight, while his father's efforts to converse received only a polite and perfunctory attention. And the prospect of having young Horace's humour let loose on his meeting and on his speech at the meeting was distinctly disagreeable. Fanny oughtn't to have allowed it to happen. He oughtn't to have allowed it himself. But short of writing to his Head Master to forbid it, they couldn't stop young Horace coming. He had only to get on his motor-bicycle and come.
Barbara came on him in the drawing-room before dinner, sitting in an easy chair and giggling over the prospectus.
He jumped up and stood by the hearth, smiling at her.
"I say, did my guv'nor really write this himself?"
"More or less. Did you really come over for the meeting?"
"Rather."
His smile was wilful and engaging.
"Youareenthusiastic about the League."
"Enthusiastic? We-ell, I can't say I know much about it. Of course, I know the sort of putrid tosh he'll sling at them, but what I want is toseehim doing it."
He had got it too, that passion of interest and amusement, hers and Ralph's. Only it wasn't decent of him to show it; she mustn't let him see she had it. She answered soberly:
"Yes, he's awfully keen."
"Ishe? I've never seen him really excited, worked up, except once or twice during the war."
As he stood there, looking down, smiling pensively, he seemed to brood over it, to anticipate the joy of the spectacle.
He had an impudent, happy face, turned and coloured like his mother's; he had Fanny's blue eyes and brown hair. All that the Waddingtons and Postlethwaites had done to him was to raise the bridge of his nose, and to thicken his lips slightly without altering their wide, vivacious twirl. He considered Barbara.
"You're going to help him to write his book, aren't you?"
"I hope so," said Barbara.
"You've got a nerve. He pretty well did for Ralph Bevan. He's worse than shell-shock when he once gets going."
"I expect I can stand him. He can't be worse than the War Office."
"Oh, isn't he? You wait."
At that moment his father came in, late, and betraying the first symptoms of excitement. Barbara saw that the boy's eyes took them in. As they sat down to dinner Mr. Waddington pretended to ignore Horace. But Horace wouldn't be ignored. He drew attention instantly to himself.
"Don't you think it's jolly decent of me, pater, to come over for your meeting?"
"I shouldn't have thought," said Mr. Waddington, "that politics were much in your line. Not worth spoiling a half-holiday for."
"I don't suppose I shall care two fags about your old League. What I've come for is to see you, pater, getting up on your hind legs and giving it them. I wouldn't miss that for a million half-holidays."
"If that's all you've come for you might have saved yourself the trouble."
"Trouble? My dear father, I'd have takenanytrouble."
You could see he was laughing at him. And he was talking at Barbara, attracting her attention the whole time; with every phrase he shot a look at her across the table. Evidently he was afraid she might think he didn't know how funny his father was, and he had to show her. It wasn't decent of him. Barbara didn't approve of young Horace; yet she couldn't resist him; his eyes and mouth were full, like Ralph's, of such intelligent yet irresponsible joy. He wanted her to share it. He was an egoist like his father; but he had something of his mother's charm, something of Ralph Bevan's.
"Nothing," he was saying, "nothing would have kept me away."
"You're very good, sir." Horace could appreciate that biting sarcasm.
"Not at all. I say, I wish you'd let me come on the platform."
"What for? You don't propose yourself as a speaker, do you?"
"Rather not. I simply want to be somewhere where I can see your face and old Grainger's at the same time, and Hitchin's, when you're going for their Socialism."
"You shall certainly not come on the platform. And wherever you sit I must request you to behave yourself—if you can. You may not realize it, but this is going to be a serious meeting."
"I knowthat. It's just the—the seriousness that gets me." He giggled.
Mr. Waddington shrugged his shoulders. "Of course, if you've no sense of responsibility—if you choose to go on like an ill-bred schoolboy—but don't be surprised if you're reprimanded from the chair."
"What? Old Corbett? I should like to see him…. Don't you worry, pater, I'll behave a jolly sight better than anybody else will. You see if I don't."
"How did you suppose he'd behave, Horatio?" said Fanny. "When he's come all that way and given up a picnic to hear you."
"Pater'll be a picnic, if you like," said Horace.
Mr. Waddington waved him away with a gesture as if he flicked a teasing fly, and went out to collect his papers.
Fanny turned to her son. "Horry dear, you mustn't rag your father like that. You mustn't laugh at him. He doesn't like it."
"I can't help it," Horry said. "He's so furiously funny. Hemakesme giggle."
"Well, whatever you do, don't giggle at the meeting, or you'll give him away."
"I won't, mater. Honour bright, I won't. I'll hold myself in like—like anything. Only you mustn't mind if I burst."
2
Mr. Waddington had spoken for half an hour, expounding, with some necessary repetitions, the principles and objects of the League.
He was supported on the platform by his Chairman, Sir John Corbett, and by the other members of his projected Committee: by Lady Corbett, by Fanny, by the Rector, by Mr. Thurston of the Elms, Wyck-on-the-Hill; by Mr. Bostock of Parson's Bank; Mr. Jackson, of Messrs. Jackson, Cleaver and Co., solicitors; Major Markham of Wyck Wold, Mr. Temple of Norton-in-Mark, and Mr. Hawtrey of Medlicott; and by his secretary, Miss Barbara Madden. The body of the hall was packed. Beneath him, in the front row, he had the wives and daughters of his committeemen; in its centre, right under his nose, he was painfully aware of the presence of young Horace and Ralph Bevan. Colonel Grainger sat behind them, conspicuous and, Mr. Waddington fancied, a little truculent, with his great square face and square-clipped red moustache, and on each side of Colonel Grainger and behind him were the neighbouring gentry and the townspeople of Wyck, the two grocers, the two butchers, the drapers and hotel keeper, and behind them again the servants of the Manor and a crowd of shop assistants; and further and further back, farm labourers and artisans; among these he recognized Ballinger with several of Colonel Grainger's and Hitchin's men. A pretty compact group they made, and Mr. Waddington was gratified by their appearance there.
And well in the centre of the hall, above the women's hats, he could see Mr. Hitchin's bush of hair, his shrewd, round, clean-shaven and rosy face, his grey check shoulders and red tie. Mr. Hitchin had the air of being supported by the entire body of his workmen. Mr. Waddington was gratified by Mr. Hitchin's appearance, too, and he thought he would insert some expression of that feeling in his peroration.
He was also profoundly aware of Mrs. Levitt sitting all by herself in an empty space about the middle of the third row.
From time to time Ralph Bevan and young Horace fixed on Fanny Waddington and Barbara delighted eyes in faces of a supernatural gravity. Young Horace was looking odd and unlike himself, with his jaws clamped together in his prodigious effort not to giggle. Whenever Barbara's eyes met his and Ralph's, a faint smile quivered on her face and flickered and went out.
Once Horace whispered to Ralph Bevan: "Isn't he going it?" And Ralph whispered back: "He's immense."
He was. He felt immense. He felt that he was carrying his audience with him. The sound of his own voice excited him and whipped him on. It was a sort of intoxication. He was soaring now, up and up, into his peroration.
"It is a gratification to me to see so many working men and women here to-night. They are specially welcome. We want to have them with us. Do not distrust the working man. The working man is sound at heart. Sound at head too, when he is let alone and not carried away by the treacherous arguments of ignorant agitators. We—myself and the founders of this League—have not that bad opinion of the working man which his leaders—his misleaders, I may call them—appear to have. We believe in him, we know that, if he were only let alone, there is no section of the community that would stand more solid for order and good government than he."
"Hear! Hear!" from Colonel Grainger. Ralph whispered, "Camouflage!" toHorace, who nodded.
"There is nothing in the aims of this League contrary to the interests of Labour. On the contrary"—he heard, as if somebody else had perpetrated it, the horrible repetition—"I mean to say—" His brain fought for another phrase madly and in vain. "On the contrary, it exists in order to safeguard the true interests, the best interests, of every working man and woman in the country."
"Hear! Hear!" from Sir John Corbett. Mr. Waddington smiled.
"President Wilson"—he became agitated and drank water—"President Wilson talked about making the world safe for democracy. Well, if we, you and I, all of us, don't take care, the world won't be safe for anything else. It certainly won't be safe for the middle classes, for the great business and professional classes, for the class to which I, for one, belong: the class of English gentlemen. It won't be safe forus.
"Not that I propose to make a class question of it. To make a class question of it would be more than wrong. It would be foolish. It would be a challenge to revolution, the first step towards letting loose, unchaining against us, those forces of disorder and destruction which we are seeking to keep down. I am not here to insist on class differences, to foment class hatred. Those differences exist, they always will exist; but they are immaterial to our big purpose. This is a question of principle, the great principle of British liberty. Are we going to submit to the tyranny of one class over all other classes, of one interest over all other interests in the country? Are we going to knock under, I say, to a minority, whether it is a Labour minority or any other?
"Are—we—going—to tolerate Bolshevism and a Soviet Government here? If there are any persons present who think that that is our attitude and our intention, I tell them now plainly—it isnot. In their own language, in our good old county proverb: 'As sure as God's in Gloucester,' it is not and never will be. The sooner they understand that the better. I do not say that there are any persons present who would be guilty of so gross an error. I do not believe there are. I do not believe that there is any intelligent person in this room who will not agree with me when I say that, though it is just and right that Labour should have a voice in the government, it is not just and it is not right that it should be the only voice.
"It has been the only voice heard in Russia for two years, and what is the consequence? Bloodshed. Anarchy and bloodshed. I don'tsaythat we should have anarchy and bloodshed here; England, thank God, is not Russia. But I do not say that we shallnothave them. And Idosay that it rests with us, with you and me, ladies and gentlemen, to decide whether we shall or shall not have them. It depends on the action we take to-night with regard to this National League of Liberty, on the action taken on—on other nights at similar meetings, all over this England of ours; it depends, in two words, on ourunited action, whether we shall have anarchy or stable government, whether this England of ours shall or shall not continue to be a free country.
"Remember two things: the League is National, and it is a League ofLiberty. It would not be one if it were not the other.
"You will say, perhaps many of youaresaying: 'This League is all very well, but what canIdo?' Perhaps you will even say: 'What can Wyck do? After all, Wyck is a small place. It isn't the capital of the county.'"
"Well, I can tell you what Wyck can do. It can be—itisthe first town in Gloucestershire, the first provincial town in England to start a National League of Liberty. They've got a League in London, the parent League; they may have another branch League anywhere any day, but I hope that—thanks to the very noble efforts of those ladies and gentlemen who have kindly consented to serve on my Committee—I hope that before long we shall have started Leagues in Gloucester, Cheltenham, Cirencester, Nailsworth and Stroud; in every town, village and hamlet in the county. I hope, thanks to your decision to-night, ladies and gentlemen, to be able to say that Wyck—little Wyck—has got in first. All round us, for fifteen—twenty miles round, there are hamlets, villages and towns that haven't got a League, that know nothing about the League. Wyck-on-the-Hill will be the centre of the League for this part of the Cotswolds.
"It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the principle at stake. Impossible, therefore, to exaggerate the importance of this League, therefore impossible to exaggerate the importance of this meeting, of every man and woman who has come here to-night. And when you rise from your seats and step up to this platform to enroll your names as members of the National League of Liberty, I want you to feel, every one of you, that you will be doing an important thing, a thing necessary to the nation, a thing in its way every bit as necessary and important as the thing the soldier does when he rises up out of his trench and goes over the top."
It was then, and then only, that young Horace giggled. But he covered his collapse with a shout of "Hear! Hear!" that caused Fanny and Barbara to blow their noses simultaneously. As for Ralph, he hid his face in his hands.
"Like him," said Mr. Waddington, "you will be helping to save England.And what can any of us do more?"
He sat down suddenly in a perfect uproar of applause, and drank water. In spite of the applause he was haunted by a sense of incompleteness. There was something he had left out of his speech, something he had particularly wanted to say. It seemed to him more vital, more important, than anything hehadsaid.
A solitary pair of hands, Mrs. Levitt's hands, conspicuously lifted, were still clapping when Mr. Hitchin's face rose like a red moon behind and a little to the left of her; followed by the grey check shoulders and red tie. He threw back his head, stuck a thumb in each armhole of his waistcoat, and spoke. "Ladies and gentlemen. The speaker has quoted President Wilson about the world being made safe for democracy. He seems to be concerned about the future, to be, if I may say so, in a bit of a funk about the future. But has he paid any attention to the past? Has he considered the position of the working man in the past? Has he even considered the condition of many working men at the present time, for instance, of the farm labourer now in this country? If he had, if he knew the facts, if he cared about the facts, he might admit that, whether he's going to like it or not, it's the working man's turn. Just about his turn.
"I needn't ask Mr. Waddington if he knows the parable of Dives and Lazarus. But I should like to say to him what Abraham said to the rich man: 'Remember that thou in thy life-time receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted and thou art tormented.'
"I don't want Mr. Waddington to be tormented. To be tormented too much. Not more than is reasonable. A little torment—say, his finger scorched for the fraction of a second in that hot, unpleasant place—would be good for him if it made him think. I say I don't want to torment him, but I'll just ask him one question: Does he think that a world where it's possible for a working man, just because heisa working man and not an English gentleman, a world where it's still possible for him, and his wife and his children, to be turned out of house and home to suit the whim of an English gentleman; does he think that a world where things like that can happen is a safe place for anybody?
"I can tell him it isn't safe. It isn't safe for you and me. And if it isn't safe for you and me, it isn't safe for the people who make these things happen; and it isn't any safer for the people who stand by and let them happen.
"And if the Socialist—if the Bolshevist is the man who's going to see to it that they don't happen, if a Soviet Government is the only Government that'll see to that, then the Socialist, or the Bolshevist, is the man for my money, and a Soviet Government is the Government for my vote. I don't say, mind you, that itisthe only Government—I say, if it were.
"Mr. Waddington doesn't like Bolshevism. None of us like it. He doesn't like Socialism. I think he's got some wrong ideas about that. But he's dead right when he tells you, if you're afraid of Bolshevism and a Soviet Government, that the remedy lies in your own hands. If there ever is a day of reckoning, what Mr. Waddington would call a revolution in this country, you, we, ay, everyone of us sitting here, will be done with according as we do."
He sat down, and Mr. Waddington rose again on his platform, solemn and a little pale. He looked round the hall, to show that there was no person there whom he was afraid to face. It might have been the look of some bold and successful statesman turning on a turbulent House, confident in his power to hold it.
"Unless I have misheard him, what Mr. Hitchin has just said, ladies and gentlemen, sounded very like a threat. If that is so, we may congratulate Mr. Hitchin on providing an unanswerable proof of the need for a National League of Liberty."
There were cries of "Hear! Hear!" from Sir John Corbett and from Mr.Hawtrey of Medlicott.
Then a horrible thing happened. Slight and rustling at first, then gathering volume, there came a hissing from the back rows packed with Colonel Grainger's and Mr. Hitchin's men. Then a booing. Then a booing and hissing together.
Sir John scrabbled on to his little legs and cried: "Ordah, there! Ordah!" Mr. Waddington maintained an indomitably supercilious air while Sir John brought his fist down on the table (probably the most energetic thing he had ever done in his life), with a loud shout of "Ordah!" Colonel Grainger and Mr. Hitchin were seen to turn round in their places and make a sign to their men, and the demonstration ceased.
Mr. Waddington then rose as if nothing at all had happened and said, "Any ladies and gentlemen wishing to join the League will please come up to the platform and give their names to Miss Madden. Any persons wishing to subscribe at once, may pay their subscriptions to Miss Madden.
"I will now call your attention to the last item on the programme, and ask you all to join with me very heartily in singing 'God Save the King.'"
Everybody, except Colonel Grainger and Mr. Hitchin, rose, and everybody, except the extremists of the opposition, sang. One voice—it was Mrs. Levitt's voice—was lifted arrogantly high and clear above the rest.
"Send—him—vic-torious,Hap-py—and—glorious.Long—to-oo rei-eign overiousGaw-aw-awd—Save—ther King."
Mr. Waddington waited beside Barbara Madden at the table; he waited in a superb confidence. After all, the demonstration engineered by Colonel Grainger had had no effect. The front and middle rows had risen to their feet and a very considerable procession was beginning to file towards the platform.
Mr. Waddington was so intent on this procession, Barbara was so busy taking down names and entering subscriptions and making out receipts, Sir John and Lady Corbett and the rest of the proposed Committee were talking to each other so loud and fast, Ralph and Horace were so absorbed in looking at Barbara that none of them saw what was happening in the body of the hall. Only Fanny caught the signals that passed between Colonel Grainger and Mr. Hitchin, and between Mr. Hitchin and his men.