"Yes, I know," nodded Freddy sagely; "they do. Hockey girl, I should imagine. Face of the pomegranate type, carved by amateur whose hand slipped when he was doing the mouth. Prefer the pink and pneumatic style myself. Matter taste."
Salt made no reply. The only possible reply was the one he denied himself. He occupied the time by burning a scrap of paper with a single row of figures.
"I say, Salt. I was really coming about something, but I've forgotten what," announced the honourable youth after a vacuous pause. "Oh, I remember. That elusive old cheesecake of a hunk of mine. Do you happen to know where the volatile Sir John is to be unearthed?"
"I imagine that your uncle is in Paris at this moment," replied Salt. "He is expected back to-morrow."
"Paris!" exclaimed Freddy with some interest. "Good luck at the Pink Windmill, old boy! Anything in the air, Salt? Projected French landing at Brighton pier next week? Seriously, don't you think League bit of gilded fizzle? Expected something with coloured lights long ago."
"I think that we have every reason to be satisfied with the progress," replied Salt. "The weight of a great organisation must exercise some influence in the end."
"Oh yes," retorted Mr Tantroy with a cunning look. "That's the other face of double-headed Johnny they have stuffed in museums. Well, all in good time, little Freddy, if you sit quiet." He carried out this condition literally for a couple of minutes, gazing pensively at a slender ring he wore. Then: "I'll tell you what, Salt," he continued. "I wish you'd use benign influence with Sir John. Tired of apeing the golden ass, and I am thinking of settling down. Want an office here and absolutely grinding hard work ten to four, and couple of thousand a year or so until I'm worth more. Fact is, met girl I could absolutely exist for ever with in gilded bird-cage. Been Vivarium lately?"
"No," replied Salt.
"Oh, well, no good trying my rotten powers description. Must go with me some night and see. She hangs by her toes to a slack wire eighty-five feet above the stage and sings:
'Things are strangely upside down, dear boys.Nowadays.'
'Things are strangely upside down, dear boys.Nowadays.'
No getting away from it, she is positively the most crystallised damson that ever stepped out of lace-edged box. No fear monotony in home with girl like that. The very thought of it——! Well, come out and have drink, Salt?"
"Thanks, no," replied Salt. "I've quite got out of the habit."
"Great Scott!" exclaimed Freddy, aghast. "You better try some of those newspaper things that Johnnies with funny addresses and members of the Greek Royal Family write up to say have done them no end. I say, Salt, I suppose there is spare office in this palatial suite that I could have if I grappled with the gilded effort?"
"I really don't know that there is." He had not the most shadowy faith in the Honourable Freddy's perseverance, even in intention, for a week. To expect any real work from him was out of the question. "We are rather overcrowded here as it is."
"If I were you, Salt, I should insist upon the old man removing better premises somewhere. Place seems absolutely congealed with underlings. Just listen to that in next room: it's like hive of gilded bees. What is it?"
"Simply routine work going on," said Salt half-impatiently. "Sorry I can't spare the time to come out with you."
"Oh, that's all right-angled," said Freddy, taking the hint and rising. "Sorry. Pramp, pramp. You think I shall find Sir John here Friday if I look in?"
"Yes, here; but desperately busy."
"Er, thanks," drawled Freddy, with just a suggestion of vice. "Perhaps my uncle will be able to spare me five minutes when he has done with you."
He drifted languidly through the door and sauntered down the passage. At the door of the room where the monotonous voice rose and fell in the ceaseless repetition of short sentences, he paused to light a cigarette. For perhaps a full minute he remained quite motionless, the cigarette between his lips, the match pressed ready against the corrugations of the jewelled box he held.
"Listretton, Fergus, 572 Upper Holloway Road, N.
"Listwell-Phelps, J. Walter, F.R.S., Department of Ethopian Antiquities, British Museum, W.C.
"Litchit, Miss, Dressmaker, 15 The Grove, Westpoint-on-Sea.
"Little, Rev. H. K., The Vicarage, Lower Skerrington, Dorset.
"Little, Lieutenant-General Sir Alfred Vernon, C.B., V.C., 14a Eaton Square, S.W.
"Littlejohn, John George, Byryxia, Cole Park, Twickenham."
Freddy Tantroy lit his cigarette and passed on. The prosaic list of new members dictated to an entering clerk did not interest him. Five names a minute, three hundred an hour, three thousand a day; an ordinary day, weeks after any special meeting, and in the flat season of the year. But it did not interest Mr Tantroy. Immersed in a scheme for taxing baths, soda-water syphons, and asparagus beds, and further occupied with the unexpectedly delicate details of withdrawing from India, it did not interest the Government.
It was only the ordinary routine work of the Unity League.
On the following day Sir John Hampden returned from Paris. A week later and he had again left London. At the office of the League it was impossible to learn where he had gone; perhaps fishing, it was suggested. In any case he was taking a well-earned holiday and did not want to be troubled with business, so that nothing was being forwarded. A little later any one might know for the asking that he was in Berlin—and returning the next day. There was never any secret made of Sir John's movements if the office knew them, only he occasionally liked to cut himself completely off from communication in order to ensure a perfect rest. As soon as the office knew where he was, every one else could know too; only it invariably happened that he was on his way back by that time. The incident was repeated. Callers at Trafalgar Chambers found all the heads communicative and very leisured. It came out that nothing much was being done just then; it was not the time of the year for politics. For all the good they were doing three-quarters of the offices might be closed for the next few months and three-quarters of the staff take a holiday. In fact, that was what they were doing to a large extent. It was Mr Salt's turn as soon as Sir John got back.
That time it was St. Petersburg.
For a man who had been a sailor George Salt displayed a curious taste when he came to take his holiday. The sea had no call for him, nor the coast-line any charm. The inland resorts, the golf centres, moors, lakes, mountains and rivers, all were passed by. It was not even to an "undiscovered" village or some secluded country house that he turned his footsteps in hope of perfect change. On the contrary, where the ceaseless din of industry made rest impossible; where the puny but irresistible hands of generations of mankind had scarred the face of earth like a corroding growth, where the sky was shut out by smoke, vegetation stifled beneath a cloak of grime, day and night turned into one lurid vulcanian twilight, in which by bands and companies, by trains and outposts, dwarfish men toiled in the unlovely rhythm of hopeless, endless labour: the lupus-spots of nature; there Salt spent his holiday. Coal was the loadstone that drew him on, and in a vast contour his journey through that month defined the limits of the coal-fields of the land.
In the subsequent histories of this period no mention of Salt's significant appearance in the provinces finds a place. Yet in presenting a dispassionate review of the succeeding events it is impossible to ignore its influence; although, to adopt a just proportion, it is not necessary to deal with it at length. It was not a vital detail of the scheme on which the League had staked its cause; it was less momentous than any of Hampden's three Continental missions; but by disarming opposition in certain influential quarters when the crisis came, it removed a possible cause of dissension from the first. That is its place.
It was an indication of the extreme care with which the operations had been developed, that even at this point there were still only two men who had any real knowledge of what the plan of campaign would be. There were those who did not hesitate to declare that a hostile demonstration was being arranged by a foreign power with whom Hampden had come to an understanding. At a favourable moment a pretext for a quarrel would be found, relations would be broken off immediately, ambassadors recalled, and within three days England would be threatened with war. If necessary, an actual invasion would take place, and in view of the sweeping reductions in the army and navy no one thought it worth while to express a doubt that an actual invasion could take place. After arranging for a suitable indemnity the invaders would withdraw, leaving a provisional government in power, with Hampden at its head. This was the extremists' view, and the majority, feeling at heart that however England might be internally riven and their liberties assailed, nothing could ever justify so unpatriotic a course, held that Hampden was incapable of the step. Others suggested civil war; passive resistance to the payment of rates and taxes on so organised a scale as to embarrass the Government for supplies; an alliance, on a basis not readily discernible, with the rank and file of the Socialist party; the secret importation of a sufficient number of aliens to turn an election; and a variety of other ingenious devices, easy to suggest but difficult to maintain. Those who, like Miss Lisle, observed the most, talked the least.
Among the working men of the country—the class that the League had come into being to control—it had passed into the category of a second Buttercup League and was ignored. A few, better informed, accepted the conclusions that Mr Hammet and his associates had arrived at, and laughed quietly in their sleeves at the thought of the coming humiliation of the confiding members. Last of all there remained a scattered few here and there, who, through natural suspicion or a shrewder wisdom than their fellows, had of late begun to detect in the existence of the League a real menace to themselves, and to urge the powers, and Mr Tubes in particular, to counteract its aims. It might have been a race, a desperate race, but for one simple thing. Hampden had asked for three years in which to complete his plans, and both friends and foes, deducing from every experience of the past, ranging from the opening of an exhibition to the closing of a war, had conceded that this meant four at least. But Hampden and the man who had been a sailor had no intention of being embarrassed by a race. Not three years meaning four, but three years meaning two, had underlain the boast, and at the end of two years, although there was still much to be gained by time and an unfettered choice of the moment of attack, there was no probability of being forestalled on any important point.
Such was the position when Salt set out on his provincial holiday.
He had nothing to learn; elementary detail of that kind belonged to another journey, when, more than two years ago, he had made the self-same tour. He did not go to offer peace or war; that die had been cast blindly—who shall say how many years before?—in Northampton boot factories, Lancashire mills, Durham coal-pits, in Radical clubs and Labour cabinets. But in war, and in civil war most of all, every blow aimed at the foe must spend its expiring force upon a friend—and therefore Salt went to the coal-fields.
At each centre he was met by a high official of the League who had local knowledge. The man made his report; it concerned a list he brought, a list of names. Sometimes it contained only three or four names, sometimes as many dozens. If to each name there stood the word "Content," Salt passed on to his next centre. If some were reported to be holding out or dissatisfied, Salt remained. When he resumed his methodical way the word "Content" had been added to every name.
Only once did failure threaten to mar his record. A Lancashire colliery proprietor, a man who had risen from the lowest grade of labour, as men more often did in the hard, healthy days of emulous rivalry than in the later piping times of union-imposed collective indolence, did not wish to listen. Positive, narrow, over-bearing, he was permeated with the dogmatic egotism of his successful life. He had never asked another man's advice; he had never made a mistake. As hard as the ground out of which he had carved his fortune, he hated and despised his men; they knew it, and hated and respected him in return. His own brother worked as a miner in his "1500 deep" and received a miner's wage. He hated his master with the rest. Lomas was the "closest" employer in the north central coal-field, and the richest. But there were fewer widows and orphans in Halghcroft than in any other pit village of its size, and Lomas spent nothing in insurance. Under his immediate eye cage cables did not snap, tram shackles part, nor did unexpected falls of shoring occur. His men did not smoke at their work, and no mysterious explosion had ever engaged the attention of a Board of Trade enquiry.
Salt found him sitting in his shirt sleeves in a noble room, furnished in the taste and profusion of a crowded pantechnicon with the most costly specimens of seventeen periods of decorative art. He received him with his usual manner, and that was the manner of a bellicose curmudgeon towards an unwelcome deputation of suppliants. For emphasis, between the frank didactic aphorisms which formed his arguments and his rules of life, he banged with his fist alapis lazulitable, and lowered his voice in a confidential aside to inform his visitor that three thousand pounds was the figure that the little piece of furniture had cost him, and that in matters of taste he stuck at nothing—an unnecessary piece of information after one had cast an astonished glance around that bizarre room.
In Lomas's future there loomed a knighthood—the consummation in his mind of all earthly ambition and the possible fruit of a lavish charity of the kind that is scarcely the greatest of the three, and his policy was wholly dictated by a fear of endangering his chances. He would have resented the suggestion, in the face of several munificent donations that he had recently made to certain funds, and a gracious acknowledgment which he had received, that the King was not following his career with a personal interest. What, then, was the King's attitude towards the Unity League and its plan of campaign? Had Salt anything to show? It was useless to protest the inviolability of royal neutrality; Lomas only banged thelapis lazuli. That was good enough for outsiders, he retorted: now, between themselves? The strong man who was restrained by diplomatic conventions could make no headway with the strong man who was frankly primitive in his selfishness, and Salt withdrew, baffled, but unperturbed. But the sequel was that before he left his hotel the following day Lomas had waited upon him with full acquiescence to the terms, and the central coal-field was "Content."
The inference might be that at last the intentions of the League must have been disclosed. The reality was nothing of the kind. What had been revealed to these men, then—the largest employers of labour of any class throughout the country—to which they had signified their consent? it may be asked. And the truth was that nothing had been revealed; that even the officers of the League who sounded them were in the dark. In the past, industrial struggles had always been between capital and labour. That vaster encounter, upon which the League was now concentrating its energies, was not to be on such clearly defined lines, and in the strife capital might suffer side by side with labour. Against that contingency the coal influence had now been indemnified in the name of the Unity League and the future Government, and the guarantee had been accepted. It was a far-reaching precaution in the end; it narrowed the issue, and it secured more than neutrality in a quarter where open hostility might have otherwise been proclaimed. It just tended to realise that perfection of detail and completeness of preparation that mark the successful campaign.
But if there was nothing more to learn in the sense that the data upon which the League had based its plans had long since been complete, it was impossible for a thoughtful observer to pass through the land without learning much. Even two years of increasing privilege had left a deeper mark. A lavish policy of "Bread and Circuses" was again depleting the countryside, choking the towns, and destroying the instinct of citizenship, just as it had speeded the decline of another world-power two thousand years before. While wages had remained practically stationary, the leisure of the working man had been appreciably increased, and it was now being discovered that the working man had no way of passing his leisure except in spending money. Betting and drunkenness had increased in direct ratio to the lengthened hours of enforced idleness, and other disquieting indications of how the time was being spent, were brought home to those who moved among the poor. Where the money came from, the books of the great thrift societies at once revealed. There was no longer any necessity for the working man to save; his wages were guaranteed, his risks of sickness and every other adversity were insured against, his old age was pensioned, his children were, if necessary, State-adopted.
Even the Trades Unions had abolished their subscriptions and dissipated their reserves. There was no need of thrift now, for the Government was the working man's savings bank, and had cut out the debit pages of his pass-book. It was almost the Millennium. The only drawback was that, with all this affluence around, the working man found himself very much in the condition of a financial Ancient Mariner. There was a great deal of money being spent on him, and for him, and by him, but he never had any in his pocket. And the working man's wife was even worse off.
Other classes there were which found themselves in the same position, but not by the same process. The rich were taxed up to the eyes, but the rich had obvious means of retrenchment. But the great mass of the middle class had no elastic extravagances upon which they could economise. Even under favourable conditions they were for the most part fulfilling Disraeli's pessimistic dictum: to the generality, manhood had been a struggle. It had passed into a failure. It stood face to face with the certainty of becoming a disaster. Inevitably there were tragedies.... So it happened that the one vivid haunting picture that George Salt carried down into later years from this period was not a lurid impression of some blackened earth-gnarled scene of Dantesque desolation, not even a memory of any of the incidents of his own personal triumph, but the sharp details of an episode that lay quite off the high-road of his work.
He was walking along a pretty country lane one evening (for it is a characteristic of many of these unhappy regions that almost to the edge of man's squalid usurpation Nature spreads her most gracious charms) when a sudden thunderstorm drove him to seek the hospitality of a labourer's cottage.
The man who opened the door was not a labourer, although he was shabbily dressed. He looked sombrely at his visitor. "What is it?" he asked, standing in the doorway with no sign of invitation.
"It is raining very heavily," replied Salt. "I should like to shelter, if you will permit me."
The man seemed to notice the downpour, which had now become a continuous stream, for the first time. "I'm very busy," he said churlishly.
"If I might stand just inside your doorway?" suggested Salt.
"No, come in," said the host with an air of sudden resolution. "After all——" He led the way out of the tiny entrance-hall into a room. Salt could not refrain from noticing that although the furniture was meagre, the walls were covered with paintings.
"I am an artist," said the brusque tenant of the cottage, noticing the involuntary glance around. "Come—in return for shelter you shall tell me what you think of these things."
"I am not a critic," replied Salt, stepping from picture to picture, "and it would be presumptuous, therefore, for me to give an opinion on works that I do not understand, although I can recognise them as striking and unconventional."
"Ah," commented the artist. "And that?"
He indicated a portrait with a nod. It was in an earlier, a smoother, and less characteristic style. To the man who was no artist it was a very beautiful painting of a very beautiful girl.
"My dead wife," said the artist, as Salt stood in silent admiration. "I have buried her this afternoon."
The man who had never known or even seen her felt a stab as he looked up at the lovely, smiling face.
"Well," said the painter roughly, "why don't you say how sorry you are, or some platitude of that sort?"
Salt turned away, to leave the other alone meeting the sweet eyes. "Because I cannot say how sorry I am," he replied with gentle pity.
"Oh, my beloved!" he heard the whisper. "Not long, not long."
"You are packing," Salt continued a minute later. "Let me help you—with some."
A heap of straw and shavings littered the floor; boxes and cases stood ready at hand.
"No," replied the man, looking moodily at his preparations. "I have changed my mind. I have to go on a journey to-night, but I shall leave this place as it is and secure the doors and windows instead."
He brought tools, and together they nailed across the cottage windows the stout old-fashioned shutters that secured them. Neither spoke much.
"Come," said the artist, when the melancholy work was complete; "the storm is over. Our roads lie together for a little way." He locked the outer door, and stood lingering reluctantly with his hand upon the key. "A moment," he said, unlocking the door again, and entering. "Only a moment. Wait for me at the gate."
Salt waited as he was directed beside a dripping linden. The storm had indeed passed over, but the sky was low and grey. Little rivulets meandered in changing currents down the garden path; from beneath the narrow lane came the continuous sobbing rush of some unseen swollen water-course. The hand of despair lay heavy across the scene; it seemed as though Nature had wept herself out, but was uncomforted. Salt pictured the lonely man standing before the soulless, smiling creation of his own hand.
The door opened, the lock again creaked mournfully as its rusty bolt was driven home, and without a backward glance the artist came slowly down the walk, twisting the clumsy key aimlessly upon his finger. He stopped at a tangled patch where the anemone struggled vainly among the choking bindweed, and the hyacinths and lupines had been beaten down to earth.
"Her garden!" he said aloud, and a spasm crossed his face. "But now how overgrown." On a thought he dropped the key gently among the luxuriant growth and turned away.
"I will tell you why my wife died," said the artist suddenly, after they had passed round a bend of the road that hid the cottage from their sight. "It should point a moral, and it will not take long."
"It may plead a cause," replied Salt.
"Ah!" exclaimed his companion, looking at him sharply. "Who are you, then?"
"You do not know me, but you may know my business. I am Salt of the Unity League."
"Strange," murmured the other. "Well, then, Mr Salt, my name is Leslie Garnet, and, as I have told you, I am an artist. Ten years ago, at the age of thirty, I came into a small legacy—three hundred pounds a year, to be precise. Up to that time I had been making a somewhat precarious living by illustration; on the strength of my fortune—which, of course, to a successful man in any walk of life would be the merest pittance—I rearranged my plans.
"Black and white work was drudgery to me, and it would never be anything else, because it was not my medium, but it was the only form of pictorial art that earned a livelihood. Pictures had ceased to sell. At the same time I had encouragement for thinking that I could do something worthy of existence in the higher branch of art.
"I don't want to trouble you with views. I made my choice. I determined to live frugally on my income, give up hack work, to the incidental advantage of some other poor struggler, and devote myself wholly to pictures which might possibly bring me some recognition at the end of a lifetime—more probably not—but pictures which would certainly never enrich me. I do not think that the choice was an ignoble one—but, of course, it was purely a personal matter.
"It was very soon afterwards that I got married. Had I thought of that step earlier I might have acted differently. As it was, Hilda would not hear of it. There seemed no need; we were very comfortable on our small income in a tiny way.
"Nine years ago that. You know the course of events. My income was derived from a prudently invested capital, so disposed as to give the highest safe return. Not many years had passed before the Government then in power fixed seven per cent. as the highest rate of interest compatible with commercial morality, and confiscated all above. My fixed system of living was embarrassed by a deduction of fifty pounds a year. The next year an open-minded Chancellor, in need of a few millions to spend on free amusements for the working class, was converted to the principle that two per cent. of immorality still remained, so five was made the maximum, and my small income was thus permanently reduced to two hundred pounds.
"We received this second blow rather blankly, but Hilda would not hear of surrender. As a matter of fact, I soon found out that there was practically no chance of it, and that in throwing up all connections when I did, I had burned my boats. Artists of every kind were turning to illustration work, but half of the magazines were dead. We gave up the flat that had been made pretty and home-like with inexpensive taste, and moved into three dreary rooms.
"You know what the next development would be, perhaps? Yes, the Unearned Incomes Act. And you will understand how it affected me.
"I was assessed in the same class as the Duke of Belgravia and Mr Dives-Keeps, the millionaire, as a gentleman of private income, capable of earning a living, but electing to live in idleness on invested capital not of my own creating. I was married, could not plead 'encumbrances' in any form, well-educated, strong and healthy, and in the prime of life. So I came under 'Schedule B,' and must pay a tax of ten shillings and sixpence in the pound. It was nothing that I might actually work twelve hours every day. Officially I must be living in voluptuous idleness, because the work of my hands did not bring me in an income bearing any appreciable proportion to my private means. The Government that denounced Riches in every form and had come in on the mandate of the poor and needy, recognised no other standard of attainment but Money. Therefore 'Schedule B.'
"Of course the effect of that was overwhelming. I could not afford a studio, I could not afford a model. I could scarcely afford materials. My wife, who had long been delicate, was now really ill, between anxiety and the unaccustomed daily work to which she bound herself. One of the companies from which I derived a portion of my income failed at this time: ruined by foreign competition and home restrictions. In a panic I endeavoured to get work of any kind. I had not the experience necessary for the lowest rungs of commerce; I was unknown in art. Who would employ a broken-down man beginning life at thirty-eight? I was too old.
"I was warned that appeal was useless, but I did appeal before the Commission. It was useless. I learned that mine was a thoroughly bad case from every official point of view, with no redeeming feature: that I was, in fact, a parasite upon the social system; and I narrowly escaped having the assessment raised.
"It was then that we left London and came to this cottage. My wife's health was permanently undermined, and change of air was necessary even to prolong her life. Her native county was recommended; that is why we chose this spot. When I reviewed affairs I found that I had a clear fifty pounds a year. And there, a few miles to the west, where you see that tracery of wheels and scaffolding against the sun, and there, a few miles to the north, where you see that pall of smoke upon the air, there lie hundreds and hundreds of cottages where gross luxury is rampant, where beneath one roof family incomes of ten times mine are free from any tax at all.
"That is enough for you to fill in the detail," continued Garnet bitterly, as he revived the memory of the closing scenes. "Doctors, things that had to be bought, bare existence. What remained of the investments sold for what a forced sale would bring—you know what that means to-day. The end you have seen. And there, Mr Salt, is the story to your hand. Here is the churchyard.... Killed, to make a Labour holiday!"
He opened the rustic gate of the hillside churchyard and led the way to a newly-turned mound, where the perfume hung stagnantly from the rain-lashed petals of a great sheaf of Bermuda lilies.
"I remain here," he said quietly, after a few minutes' silence by the grave-side. "Your road lies straight on, along the field path. You can even see the smoke of Thornley from here, lying to your right."
Salt did not reply. Looking intently in the opposite direction, he was locating with a seaman's eye another cloud of smoke that rose above the tree-tops in the valley they had left.
"Your house!" he exclaimed, pointing. "Man!" he cried suddenly, with a flash of intuition, "what are you doing? You fired the straw before we left!"
A sharp report was the only answer. Salt turned too late to arrest his arm, only in time to catch him as he fell. He lowered him—there was nothing else to do—lowered him on to the wet sods that flanked the mound, and knelt by his side so that he might support him somewhat. To one who had been on battle-fields there was no need to wonder what to do. It was a matter not of minutes but of seconds. The mute eyes met his dimly; he heard the single whisper, "Hilda," and then, without a tremor, Garnet, self-murdered, pressed a little more heavily against his arm and lay across the yet unfinished grave of his State-murdered wife.
"I think," observed Salt reflectively, soon after his return, "that you had better take a short holiday now, Miss Lisle."
Miss Lisle looked up from her work—she was not addressing circulars, it may be stated—with an expression not quite devoid of suspicion.
"I will, if you wish me to do so, sir," she replied meekly. "But, personally, I do not require one."
"You have been of great use to us while I was away," he explained kindly, but with official precision, "and now that I am back again you have the opportunity."
Miss Lisle coloured rather rapturously at the formal praise, but the astute young woman did not allow her exaltation to beguile her senses.
"A week's holiday?" she asked.
"I would suggest a fortnight," he replied.
"That would be until the end of June?"
Salt agreed.
"Then nothing is likely to happen before the end of June?"
He laughed frankly. There was no trace of the mystery and restraint, of the electric tension in the air, that forerun portentous events, as we are told, to be noticed about the office of the League.
"A great deal may happen before that time, but nothing, I think I can assure you, that comes within your meaning."
"Is there any particular place that you would like me to go to?"
"Oh, not at all. Forget Trafalgar Chambers and business entirely for the time."
Possibly Miss Lisle had looked for some hidden meaning behind the simple suggestion of a holiday: had anticipated "another secret process down another little lane." At any rate, she did not rejoice at the prospect; on the contrary, she declined it.
"Thank you, sir," she replied, "but unless it is for your convenience, I should prefer to go on addressing circulars."
Salt frowned slightly and smiled slightly, and inwardly admitted to himself that he had probably expected worse things when he had first accepted Miss Lisle's services.
"I am a very plain, straightforward person in all my dealings," he remarked, "and you, outside the strict line of work here, have an oblique vein that taxes the imagination. Further, it carries the sting that with all you generally arrive at the same conclusion as I do, only a little earlier."
"I have a loathsome, repulsive nature, I know," admitted Irene cheerfully. "Trivial, ill-mannered, suspicious. I require strict discipline. That is why I am better here."
"So far I have not been inconvenienced by the two first characteristics. It is a mistake, perhaps, to be over-suspicious."
"Yes," agreed the lady with a level glance. "It only ends in you finding people out, when otherwise you might have gone on believing in them to the last."
Salt had only known Miss Lisle for a few months, and for a third of the period he had not seen her. But he knew that when she showed a disposition to take up his time something more than the amenities of conversation lay behind her words. He remembered that level glance. It foreshadowed another "long pointless tale."
"For instance?" he suggested encouragingly.
"If I left this office locked when I went out to lunch, for instance, and found it still locked but the papers slightly disarranged on my return," she replied.
"Anything more?"
"It is very unpleasant to set traps, of course, but if I put a little dab of typewriter ink on the inner handle of the door when I next went out, and subsequently found a slight stain of a similar colour on my white glove after shaking hands with some one, the suspicion would be deepened."
"I think that the matter is of sufficient importance for you to tell me all you know," he said gravely. "If you hesitate to be definite for fear of making a mistake, I will take pains to verify your suspicions and I will accept all responsibility."
"Then I accuse Mr Tantroy of being a paid spy in the service of the Government."
"Tantroy!" exclaimed Salt with a momentary feeling of incredulity. "Tantroy! It seems impossible, but, after all, it is possible enough. You know, of course, that he has a room here now, and might even think in his inexperience that he was at liberty to come into this office at any time."
"But not to take impressions of my keys and have duplicates made; nor to copy extracts in my absence; nor to open and examine the cipher typewriter."
"Has that been left unlocked?" he demanded sharply.
"No," she replied. "You have the only key that I know of. But ithasbeen unlocked, and I infer that the code has been copied."
For quite three minutes there was silence. Salt was thinking, not idly, but estimating exactly the effect of what had happened. Miss Lisle was waiting, with somewhat rare perception, until he was ready to continue.
"Sooner or later something of the sort was bound to come," he summed up quietly, without a trace of discomfiture. "It is only the personality that is surprising. His interests are identical with ours; he has everything to gain by our success. Why; why on earth?"
"I think that I can explain that in three words," suggested Miss Lisle. "Velma St Saint."
Salt looked enquiringly. He had forgotten the Hon. Freddy's deity for the moment.
"Of the Vivarium," added Irene.
"Oh, the lady who hangs by her toes," he remarked with enlightenment.
"'The World's Greatest Inverted Cantatrice'!" quoted Miss Lisle. "That is her celebrated 'Upside Down' song that the organ is playing in the street below. A few years ago she got a week's engagement at the Elysium at a salary of eighty pounds. She calculated from that that she could afford to spend four thousand a year, and although all theatrical incomes have steadily declined ever since until she only gets ten pounds a week now, she has never been able to make any difference in her style of living.... Of course there is a deficit to be made up."
"It is just as well. If it had not been Tantroy it would have been some one abler. Now what has he done, what has he learned?"
"Duplicate keys of this door and of my desk have been made. The lock of the cipher typewriter case is not of an elaborate pattern, and any one bringing a quantity of keys of the right size would probably find one to answer. I don't think that either your desk or the safe has been opened; certainly not since I began to notice. The papers to which he would have access are consequently not highly important."
"Letters?" suggested Salt. "For instance, my letters lying here until you forwarded them. There is a post in at eight o'clock in the morning; others after you have left up to ten at night. There would be every opportunity for abstracting some, opening them at leisure, and then dropping them into the letter-box again a little later."
"No," said Miss Lisle. "I took precautions against that."
"How?" he demanded, and waited very keenly for her answer.
"Simply by arriving here before eight and remaining until ten."
"Thank you." It was all he said, but it did not leave Miss Lisle with the empty feeling that virtue had merely been its own reward.
"Perhaps I ought to add that Mr Tantroy tried to get information from me," she remarked distantly. "He—he came here frequently and wished me to accept presents; boxes of chocolate at first, I think, and jewellery afterwards. It was a mistake he made."
"Yes," assented Salt thoughtfully, "I think it was. There is one other thing, Miss Lisle. You could scarcely know with whom he was negotiating on the other side?"
"No," she admitted regretfully; "I had not sufficient time. That was why I did not wish to go away just now."
"I do not think that you need hesitate to leave it now. I am not taking it out of your hands, only carrying on another phase that you have made possible. It will simplify matters if I have the office to myself. Could you find an opportunity for telling Tantroy casually that you are taking a fortnight's holiday?"
Her answer hung just a moment. Had he known Tantroy better he might have guessed. "Yes, certainly," she replied hastily, with a little stumble in her speech.
Perhaps he guessed. "No," he corrected himself. "On second thoughts, it does not matter."
"I do not mind," she protested loyally.
"If it were necessary I should not hesitate to ask you," he replied half brusquely. "It is not."
"Very well. I will go to-morrow."
That evening, when he was alone. Salt unlocked the typewriter case to which Miss Lisle had alluded, took out the machine, and seating himself before it proceeded to compose a letter upon which he seemed to spend much consideration. As his fingers struck the keys, upon the sheet of paper in the carrier there appeared the following mystifying composition:
kbeljslwopmjvsjxkivslilscalkwespljkjscwecsspsspfxfejsloxmjcneoeqjdncs——
kbeljsl
wopmjvsjxkivslilscalkwespljkjscwecsspsspfxfejsloxmjcneoeqjdncs——
It was, in fact, as Miss Lisle had said, a code typewriter. The letters which appeared on the paper did not correspond with the letters on the keys. According to the keyboard the writing should have been:
mydrstrnwhvsltscmpltrprtbfrmndthrsmstbndbtthtthprpslhvfrmltdsfsblndth——
mydrstr
nwhvsltscmpltrprtbfrmndthrsmstbndbtthtthprpslhvfrmltdsfsblndth——
and signified, to resolve it into its ultimate form:
My Dear Estair,—I now have Salt's complete report before me, and there seems to be no doubt that the proposal I have formulated is feasible, and the——
My Dear Estair,—I now have Salt's complete report before me, and there seems to be no doubt that the proposal I have formulated is feasible, and the——
Written without vowels, stops, capitals, or spaces, this gave a very serviceable cryptograph, but there was an added safeguard. After completing the first line the writer moved a shift-key and brought another set of symbols into play—or, rather, the same symbols under a different arrangement. The process was repeated for the third line, and then the fourth line returned to the system of the first. Thus three codes were really in operation, and the danger of the key being found by the frequent recurrence of certain symbols (the most fruitful cause of detection) was almost overcome. Six identical machines were in existence. One has been accounted for; Sir John Hampden had another; and a third was in the possession of Robert Estair, the venerable titular head of the combined Imperial party. A sociable young publican, who had a very snug house in the neighbourhood of Westminster Abbey, could have put his hand upon the fourth; the fifth was in the office of a super-phosphate company carrying on an unostentatious business down a quiet little lane about ten or a dozen miles out of London; and the sixth had fallen to the lot of a busy journalist, who seemed to have the happy knack of getting political articles and paragraphs accepted without demur by all the leading newspapers by the simple expedient of scribbling "Urgent" and some one else's initials across the envelopes he sent them in. Communications of the highest importance never reached the stage of ink and paper, but the six machines were in frequent use. Inbonâ fidecommunications the customary phraseology with which letters begin and end was not used, it is perhaps unnecessary to say. So obvious a clue as the short line "kbeljsl" at the head of a letter addressed to Estair would be as fatal to the secrecy of any code as the cartouched "Cleopatra" and "Ptolemy" were to the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics. That Salt wrote it may be taken as an indication that he had another end in view; and it is sometimes a mistake to overrate the intelligence of your opponents. When the letter was finished he put it away in his pocket-book, arranged the fastenings of both safe and desk so that he could tell if they had been disturbed, and then went home.
The next morning his preparations advanced another step. He brought with him a new letter copying-book, a silver cigarette-case with a plain polished surface, and a small jar of some oily preparation. With a little of the substance from the jar he smeared the cigarette-case all over, wiped away the greater part again until nothing but an almost imperceptible trace remained, and then placed it carefully within his desk. The next detail was to write a dozen letters with dates extending over the last few days. All were short; all were quite unimportant; they were chiefly concerned with appointments, references to future League meetings, and the like. Some few were written in cipher, but the majority were plain reading, and Salt signed them all in Sir John's name, appending his own initials. To sign the long letter which he had already written he cut off from a note in the baronet's own handwriting the signature "John Hampden," fastened it lightly at the foot of the typewritten sheet, and then proceeded to copy all the letters into the new book. The effect was patent: one letter and one alone stood out among the rest as of pre-eminent importance. The completion was reached by gumming upon the back of the book a label inscribed "Hampden. Private," treating the leather binding with a coating of the preparation from the jar, and finally substituting it in the safe in place of the genuine volume. Then he burned his originals of all the fictitious letters and turned to other matters.
It was not until two days later that Mr Tantroy paid Salt a passing visit. He dropped in in a friendly way with the plea that the burden of his own society in his own room, where he apparently spent two hours daily in thinking deeply, had grown intolerable.
"You are always such a jolly busy, energetic chap, Salt, that it quite bucks me up to watch you," he explained.
Salt, however, was not busy that afternoon. He only excused himself to ring for a note, which was lying before him already addressed, to be taken out, and then gave his visitor an undivided attention. He was positively entertaining over his recent journeyings. Freddy Tantroy had never thought that the chap had so much in him before.
"Jolly quaint set of beggars you must have had to do with," he remarked. "Thought that you were having gilded flutter Monte Carlo, or Margate, or some of those places where crowds people go."
Salt looked across at him with a smile. "I think that there was an impression of that sort given out," he replied. "But, between ourselves, it was strictly on a matter of business."
"We League Johnnies do get most frightfully rushed," said Freddy sympathetically. "Bring it off?"
"Better than I had expected. I don't think it will be long before we begin to move now. You would be surprised if I could tell you of the unexpected form it will take."
"Don't see why you shouldn't," dropped Tantroy negligently.
Salt allowed the moment to pass on a note of indecision.
"Perhaps I am speaking prematurely," he qualified. "Things are only evolving at the moment, and I don't suppose that there will be anything at all doing during the next few weeks. I have even sent Miss Lisle off on a holiday."
"Noticed the fair Irene's empty chair," said Freddy. "For long?"
"I told her to take a fortnight. She can have longer if she wants."
"Wish Sir John could spare me; but simply won't hear of it. Don't fancy you find girl much good, though."
"Oh, she is painstaking," put in her employer tolerantly.
"No initiative," declared Tantroy solemnly. "No idea of rising to the occasion or of making use of her opportunities."
"You noticed that?" To Freddy's imagination it seemed as though Salt was regarding him with open admiration.
He wagged his head judicially. "I knew you'd like me to keep eye on things while you were away," he said, "so I looked in here occasionally as I passed. Don't believe she had any idea what to do. Invariably found her sitting here in gilded idleness at every hour of the day. If I were you, should sack her while she is away."
Salt thought it as well to change the subject.
"By the way," he remarked, "I came across what seemed to me a rather good thing in cigarettes at Cardiff, and I wanted to ask your opinion about them. It's a new leaf—Bolivian with a Virginian blend, not on the market yet. I wish you'd try one now."
There was nothing Freddy Tantroy liked better than being asked to give his opinion on tobacco from the standpoint of an expert. He took the case held out to him, selected a cigarette with grave deliberation, and leaned back in his chair with a critical air, preparing to deliver judgment. Salt returned the case to its compartment in the desk.
"It has a very distinctive aroma," announced Freddy sagely, after he had drawn a few whiffs, held the cigarette under his nose, waved it slowly in the air before him, and resorted to several other devices of connoisseurship.
"I thought so too," agreed Salt. He had bought a suitable packet of some obscure brand in a side street, as he walked to the office two days before.
"Cardiff," mused Tantroy. "Variety grotesque holes you seem to have explored, Salt."
"Oh, I had to see a lot of men all over the place. I got a few packets of these from a docker who had them from a South American merchant in a roundabout way. Smuggled, of course." All along, his conversation had touched upon labourers, mill-hands, miners, and other sons of toil. Apparently, as Tantroy noted, he had scarcely associated with any other class. He was lying deliberately, and in a manner calculated to alienate the sympathy of many excellent people; for there is a worthy and not inconsiderable class with an ineradicable conviction that although in a just cause the sixth commandment may be suspended, as it were by Act of Parliament, and the killing of your enemy become an active virtue, yet in no case is it permissible to tell him a falsehood. If it is necessary to deceive him the end must be gained by leading him to it by inference. But Salt belonged to a hard-grained school which believed in doing things thoroughly, and when on active service he swept the sophistries away. He had to mislead a man whose very existence he believed to be steeped in treachery and falsehood, and, as the most effectual way, he lied deliberately to him.
"Frantic adventure," drawled Tantroy. "Didn't know League dealt in people that kind."
"Of course, I saw all sorts," corrected Salt hastily, as though he feared that he had indicated too closely the trend of his business; "only it happened that those were the most amusing," and to emphasise the fact he launched into another anecdote. At an out-of-the-way village there was neither hotel nor inn. His business was unfinished, and it was desirable that he should stay the night there. At last he heard of a small farm-house where apartments were occasionally let, and, making his way there, he asked if he could have a room. The woman seemed doubtful. "Of course, as I am a stranger, I should wish to pay you in advance," said Salt. "It isn't that, sir," replied the hostess, "but I like to be sure of making people comfortable." "I don't think that we shall disagree about that," he urged. "Perhaps not," she admitted, "but the last gentleman was very hard to please. Everything I got him he'd had better somewhere else till he was sick of it. But," she added in a burst of confidence, "look what a swellhewas! I knew that nothing would satisfy him when I saw him come in a motor-car puffed out with rheumatic tyres, and wearing a pair of themblasékid boots."
Tantroy contributed an appreciative cackle, and Salt, leaning back in his chair, pressed against a pile of books standing on his desk so that they fell to the ground with a crash.
By the time he had picked them up again a telegram was waiting at his elbow. He took it, opened it with a word of apology, and with a sharp exclamation pulled out his watch. Before Tantroy could realise what was happening, Salt had caught up his hat and gloves, slammed down his self-locking desk, and, after a single hasty glance round the room, was standing at the door.
"Excuse me, won't you?" he called back. "Most important. Can just catch a train. Pull my door to after you, please," and the next minute he was gone.
Left to himself, Tantroy's first action was not an unnatural one in the circumstance. He picked up the telegram which Salt had left in his wild hurry and read it. "Come at once, if you wish to see Vernon alive," was the imperative message, and it appeared to have been handed in at Croydon half an hour before. He stepped to the window, and from behind the curtains he saw Salt run down the steps into the road, call a hansom from the rank near at hand, and disappear in the direction of Victoria at a gallop.
Mr Tantroy sat down again, and his eyes ran over the various objects in the room in quick succession. The code typewriter. He had all he wanted from that. Salt's desk. Locked, of course. The girl's desk. Locked, and, as he knew, not worth the trouble of unlocking with his duplicate key. The safe——His heart gave a bound, his eyes stood wide in incredulous surprise, and he sprang to his feet and stealthily crossed the room to make sure of his astounding luck. The safe was unlocked! The door stood just an inch or so ajar, and Salt, having failed to notice it in his hurried glance, was on his way to Croydon!
Living in a pretentious, breathless age, drawn into a social circle beside whose feverish artificiality thenaturalartificiality inseparable from any phase of civilisation stood comparable to a sturdy, healthy tree, badly brought up, neglected, petted, the Honourable Frederick Tantroy had grown to the form of the vacuous pose which he had adopted. Beneath it lay his real character. A moderately honest man would not have played his part, but an utterly weak one could not have played it. It demanded certain qualities not contemptible. There were risks to be taken, and he was prepared to take them, and in their presence his face took on a stronger, even better, look. He bolted the door on the inside, picked up a few sheets of paper from the desk-top, and without any sign of nervousness or haste began to do his work.
It was fully three hours later when Salt returned; for with that extreme passion for covering every possible contingency that marked his career, he had been to Croydon. Many a better scheme has failed through the neglect of a smaller detail. The room, when he entered it and secured the door, looked exactly as when he left, three hours before. For all the disarrangement he had caused, Tantroy might have melted out of it.
On the top of his desk, at the side nearest to the safe, lay a packet of octavo scribbling paper. He took out the sheets and twice counted them. Thirty-one, and he had left thirty-four. His face betrayed no emotion. Satisfaction at having outwitted a spy was merged in regret that there must need be one, and pain on Hampden's account that his nephew should be the traitor. He unlocked his desk and carefully lifted out the cigarette-case, pulled open the safe door, and took up the fictitious letter-book. To the naked eye the finger-prints on each were scarcely discernible, but under the magnifying lenses of the superimposing glass all doubt was finally dispelled. They were there, they corresponded, they were identical. Thumb to thumb, finger to finger, and line to line they fitted over one another without a blur or fault. It was, as it often proved to be in those days, hanging evidence.
Salt relocked the safe, tore out the used pages of the letter-book, and reduced them to ashes on the spot. The less important remains of the book he took with him to his chambers, and there burned them from cover to cover before he went to bed.
It had served its purpose, and not a legitimate trace remained. Around the stolen copy the policy of the coming strife might crystallise, and towards any issue it might raise Salt could look with confidence. Finally, if the unforeseen arose, the way was clear for Sir John to denounce a shameless forgery, and who could contradict his indignant word?
Under succeeding administrations, each pledged to a larger policy to themselves and a smaller one towards every one else, most of the traditional outward forms of government had continued to be observed. Thus there was a Minister for the Colonies, though the Colonies themselves had shamefacedly one by one dropped off into the troubled waters of weak independence, or else clung on with pathetic loyalty in spite of rebuff after rebuff, and the disintegration of all mutual interests, until nothing but the most shadowy bond remained. There was a Secretary of State for War in spite of the fact that the flag which the Government nailed to the mast when it entered into negotiations with an aggrieved and aggressive Power, bore the legend, "Peace at any Price. None but a Coward Strikes the Weak." There had been more than one First Lord of the Admiralty whose maritime experience had begun and ended on the familiar deck of theKoh-I-Noor. There were practically all the usual officers of ministerial rank—and the recipients of ministerial salaries.
Apart from the enjoyment of the title and the salary, however, there were a few members of the Cabinet who exercised no real authority. Lord Henry Stokes had been the last of upper class politicians of standing to accept office under the newrégime. Largely in sympathy with the democratic tendency of the age, optimistic as to the growth of moderation and restraint in the ranks of the mushroom party, and actuated by the most sterling patriotism, Lord Henry had essayed the superhuman task of premiership. Superhuman it was, because no mortal could have combined the qualities necessary for success in the face of the fierce distrust and jealousy which his rank and social position excited in the minds of the rawer recruits of his own party; superhuman, because no man possessing his convictions could have long reconciled with them the growing and not diminishing illiberality of those whom he was to lead. There were dissensions, suspicions, and recriminations from the first. The end came in a tragic scene, unparalleled among the many historic spectacles which the House has witnessed. A trivial point in the naval estimates was under discussion, and Lord Henry, totally out of sympathy with the bulk of his nominal following, had risen to patch up the situation on the best terms he could. At the end of a studiously moderate speech, which had provoked cheers from the opposition and murmurs of dissent from his own party throughout, he had wound up his plea for unity, toleration, and patriotism, with the following words: "It is true that here no Government measure is at stake, no crisis is involved, and honourable members on this side of the House are free of party trammels and at liberty to vote as seems best to each. But if the motion should be persisted in, an inevitable conclusion must be faced, an irretrievable step will have been taken, and of the moral outcome of that act who dare trace the end?"
There was just a perceptible pause of sullen silence, then from among the compact mass that sat behind their leader rose a coarse voice, charged with a squiggling laugh.
"We give it up, 'Enry. If it's a riddle about morals, suppose you ask little Flo?"
It was an aside—it was afterwards claimed that it was a drunken whisper—but it was heard, as it was meant to be heard, throughout the crowded Chamber. From the opposition ranks there was torn a cry, almost of horror, at the enormity of the insult, at the direful profanation of the House. Responsible members of the Government turned angrily, imploringly, frantically upon their followers. At least half of these, sitting pained and scandalised, needed no restraint, but from the malcontents and extreme wings came shriek upon shriek of boisterous mirth, as they rocked with laughter about their seats. As for Lord Henry, sitting immobile as he scanned a paper in his hand, he did not appear to have heard at first, nor even to have noticed that anything unusual was taking place. But the next minute he turned deadly pale, began to tremble violently, and with a low and hurried, "Your help, Meadowsweet!" he stumbled from the Hall.
For twenty years he had been a member of the House, years of full-blooded politics when party strife ran strong, but never before had the vaguest innuendo from that deep-seared, unforgotten past dropped from an opponent's lips. It had been reserved for his own party to achieve that distinction and to exact the crowning phase of penance in nature's inexorable cycle.
Apologists afterwards claimed that too much had been made of the incident—that much worse things were often said, and passed, at the meetings of Boards of Guardians and Borough Councils. It was as true as it was biting: worse things were said at Borough Councils, and the Mother of Parliaments had sunk to the rhetorical level of a Borough Council.
Stokes never took his seat again, and with him there passed out of that arena the last of a hopeful patriotic group, whose only failure was that they tried to reconcile two irreconcilable forces of their times.
It did not result, however, that no men of social position were to be found among the Labour benches. There was a demand, and there followed the supply. Rank, mediocrity, and moral obsequiousness were the essentials for their posts. There were no more Stokeses to be had, so obliging creatures were obtained who were willing for a consideration to be paraded as the successors to his patriotic mantle. They were plainly made to understand their position, and if they ventured to show individuality they soon resigned. Nominally occupying high offices, they had neither influence, power, nor respect; like Marlborough in compliance they had "to do it for their bread." They were ruled by their junior lords, assistants, and underlings in various degrees. Many of these men, too strong to be ignored, were frankly recognised to be impossible in the chief offices of State. As a consequence the Cabinet soon became an empty form. Its councils were still held, but the proceedings were cut and dried in advance. The real assembly that dictated the policy of the Government was the Expediency Council, held informally as the necessity arose.
The gathering which was taking place at the Premier's house on this occasion had been convened for the purpose of clearing the air with regard to the policy to be pursued at home. The Government had come into power with very liberal ideas on the question of what ought to be done for the working classes. They had made good their promises, and still that free and enlightened body, having found by experience that they only had to ask often enough and loudly enough to be met in their demands, were already clamouring for more. The most moderate section of the Government was of opinion that the limit had been reached; others thought that the limit lay yet a little further on; the irresponsibles denied that any limit could be fixed at all. That had been the experience of every administration for a long time past, and each one in turn had been succeeded by its malcontents.
Mr Strummery, the Premier, did not occupy the official residence provided for him. Mrs Strummery, an excellent lady who had once been heard to remark that she could never understand why her husband was calledPrime Ministerwhen he was not aministerat all, flatly declared that the work of cleaning the windows alone of the house in Downing Street put it out of the question. Even Mr Strummery, who, among his political associates, was reported to have rather exalted ideas of the dignity of his position, came to the conclusion, after fully considering the residence from every standpoint, that he might not feel really at home there. It was therefore let, furnished, to an American lady who engineered wealthydébutantesfrom her native land into "the best" English society, and the Strummerys found more congenial surroundings in Brandenburg Place. There, within a convenient distance of the Hampstead Road and other choice shopping centres, Mrs Strummery, like the wife of another eminent statesman whose statue stood almost within sight of her bedroom windows, was able to indulge in her amiable foible for cheap marketing. And if the two ladies had this in common, the points of resemblance between their respective lords (the moral side excluded) might be multiplied many-fold, for no phrase put into Mr Strummery's mouth could epigrammatise his point of view more concisely than Fox's inopportune toast, "Our Sovereign: the People." History's dispassionate comment was that the sentiment which lost the abler man his Privy Councillorship in his day, gained for the other a Premiership a century later.
"One thing that gets me is why no one ever seems to take any notice of us when we have a Council on," remarked the President of the Board of Education with an involuntary plaint in his voice. He was standing on the balcony outside the large front room on Mr Strummery's first floor—a room which boasted the noble proportions of asalon, and possibly served as one in Georgian days. Certainly Brandenburg Place did not present a spectacle of fluttering animation at the prospect of seeing the great ones of the land assembling within its bounds. At one end of the thoroughfare a milkman was going from area to area with a prolonged melancholy cry more suggestive of Stoke Poges churchyard than of any other spot on earth; at the opposite end a grocer's errand boy, with basket resourcefully inverted upon his head, had sunk down by the railings to sip the nectar from a few more pages of "Iroquois Ike's Last Hope; or, The Phantom Cow-Puncher's Bride." Midway between the two a cat, in the act of crossing the road, had stopped to twitch a forepaw with that air of imperturbable deliberateness in its movements that no other created thing can ever succeed in attaining. In a house opposite some one was rattling off the exhilarating strains of "Humming Ephraim," but even when a hansom cab and two four-wheelers drove up in quick succession to the Premier's door, no one betrayed curiosity to the extent of looking out of the window. The Minister of Education noted these things as he stood on the balcony, and possibly he felt another phase of the gratitude of men that often left Mr Wordsworth mourning. "I can remember the time when crowds used to wait hours in the rain along Downing Street—our people, too—to catch a sight of Estair or Nettlebury. I won't exactly say that it annoys me, because I've seen too much of the hollowness of things for that, but it certainly is rummy why it should be so."
"A very good thing, too," commented the Premier briskly from the room. "I don't know that we could have a greater compliment. The people know that we are plain, straightforward men like themselves, and they know that we are doing our work without having to come and see us at it. They don't regard us almost as little deities—interesting to see, but quite different and above themselves. That's why."
Every one in the room said "Hear! Hear!" as though that exactly defined his own sentiments; and every one in the room looked rather sad, as though at the back of their collective minds there lurked a doubt whether it might not be more pleasant to be regarded almost as little deities.
"You needn't go as far back as Estair and Nettlebury," put in Vossit of the Treasury. "See how they fairly 'um round Hampden whenever he's about."
"Not us," interposed another man emphatically. "Let them go on their own messin' way; it'll do us no harm. You never saw a working man at any of their high and mighty meetings."
"So much the worse, for they didn't want them. But there ought to have been working men there, from the very first meeting until now." The speaker was one of the most recent additions to the potent circle of the Brandenburg Place councils, and the freedom of criticism which he allowed himself had already been the subject of pained comment on the part of a section of his seniors.
"Well," suggested some one, with politely-pointed meaning, "I don't know what's to prevent one individual from attending a meeting if he so wants. He'd probably find one going on somewhere at this minute if he looked round hard. Doesn't seem to me that any one's holding him back."
"Now, now," reproved Mr Guppling, the Postmaster-General, "let the man speak if he has anything on his mind. Come now, comrade, what do you mean?"
"I don't know what I mean," replied the comrade, at which there was a general shout of laughter. "I don't know what I mean," he continued, having secured general attention by this simple device of oratory, "because I am told in those Government quarters where I ought to be able to find information, that no information has been collected, no systematic enquiries made, nothing is known, in fact. Therefore, I do not know what I mean because I do not know—none of us know—what the Unity League means. But I know this: that a hostile organisation of over a million and a half strong——"
Dissent came forcibly from every quarter of the room. "Not half!" was the milder form it took.
"——of over a million and a half strong," continued the speaker grimly—"perhaps more, in fact, than all our Trades Unions put together—with an income very little less than what all the Trades Unions put together used to have, and funds in hand probably more, is a living menace in our midst, and ought to have been closely watched."
"It keeps 'em quiet," urged the Foreign Under-Secretary.
"Too quiet. I don't like my enemy to be quiet. I prefer him to be talking large and telling us exactly what he's going to do."
"They're going to chuck us out, Tirrel; that's what they're going to do," said a sarcastic comrade playfully. "So was the Buttercup League, so was the Liberal-Conservative alliance. Lo, history repeats itself!"
"I see a long line of strong men fallen in the past—premiers, popes, kings, generals, ambassadors," replied Tirrel. "They all took it for granted that when they had got their positions they could keep them without troubling about their enemies any more. That's generally the repeating point in history."
Mr Strummery felt that the instances were perhaps getting too near home. "Come, come, chaps, and Comrade Tirrel in particular," he said mildly, "don't imagine that nothing is being done in the proper quarter because you mayn't hear much talk about it. Our Executives work and don't talk. I think that you may trust our good comrade Tubes to keep an eye on the Unity League."
"Wish he'd keep an eye on the clock," murmured a captious member. "Not once," he added conclusively, "but three times out of four."
There was a vigorous knock at the front door, and the hurried footsteps of some one ascending the stairs with the consciousness that he was late.
"Talk of Tubes and you'll have a puncture," confided a comrade of humorous bent to his neighbour, and on the words the Home Secretary, certainly with very little breath left in him, entered the room and made his apologies.
The special business for which the Council had been called together was to consider a series of reports from the constituencies, and to decide how to be influenced by their tenor. The Government had no desire to wait for a general election in order to find out the views of the electors of the country; given a close summary of those sentiments, it might be possible to fall in with their wishes, and thereby to be spared the anxiety of an election until their septennial existence had run its course; or, if forced by the action of their own malcontents to take that unwelcome step, at least to cut the ground from beneath their opponents' feet in advance.
If there was not complete unanimity among those present, there was no distinct line of variance. Men of the extremest views had naturally not been included, and although the prevailing opinion was that the conditions of labour had been put upon a fair and equitable basis during their tenure of office—or as far in that direction as it was possible to go without utterly stampeding capitalists and ratepayers from the country—there were many who were prepared to go yet a little further if it seemed desirable.
Judging from the summarised reports, it did seem desirable. From the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, the coal-pits of the north and west, the iron fields of the Midlands, the quarries of Derbyshire, the boot factories of Northampton and the lace factories of Nottingham, from every swarming port around the coast, and from that vast cosmopolitan clearing house, the Capital itself, came the same tale. The people did not find themselves so well off as they wished to be; they were, in fact, rather poorer than before. There was nothing local about it. The Thurso flag-stone hewer shared the symptoms with his Celtic brother, digging out tin and copper from beneath the Atlantic waters beyond Pendeen; the Pembroke dock-hand and the Ipswich mechanic were in just the same position. When industries collapsed, as industries had an unhappy character for doing about the period, no one had any reserves. It was possible to live by provision of the Government, but the working man had been educated up to requiring a great deal more than bare living. When wages went down in spite of all artificial inflation, or short time was declared, a great many working-class houses, financed from week to week but up to the hilt in debt, went down too. The agricultural labourer was the least disturbed; he had had the least done for him, and he had never known a "boom." The paradox remained that with more money the majority of the poor were poorer than before, and they were worse than poor, for they were dissatisfied. The remedy, of course, was for some one to give them still more money, not for them to spend less. The shortest way to that remedy, as they had been well taught by their agitators in the past, was to clamour for the Government to do something else for them, and therefore they were clamouring now.