This proposal was even less to the temper of the meeting than the former one had been, and the latter half of it was scarcely heard among the fusillade of hostile cries. No one laughed when a hot-headed comrade stood upon a chair and howled "Traitor!"
Tirrel looked round on the assembly. Practically every man who had a tacit right to join in the deliberative Council had arrived, and the room was full; but there was not a single member among them willing to face the necessity for strong and immediate action, and they were hostile to the man who just touched the secret depths of their unconfessed and innermost misgivings. Mr Tubes felt that he had done his duty, and need not invite reference to his delicate position by further emphasising unpalatable truths; he had presented the spectacle of a weak man startled into boldness, now he was sufficiently himself again to go with the majority. The more responsible members of the Government distrusted Tirrel in every phase; the smaller fry relied on the wisdom of orthodoxy, and agreed that the man who could blow the hotness of extirpation and the coldness of conciliation with the same breath must prove an unworthy guide; and on every hand there was the tendency of settled authority to deprecate novel and unmatured proceedings.
Tirrel had become the Hampden of an earlier decade among his party.
"You call me 'Traitor,'" he said, turning to the man who had done so. "Write down the word, comrade, and then, if you will bring it to me without a blush six months hence, I will wear it round my neck in penance."
He bowed to the Premier and withdrew, not in anger or with a mean sense of injustice, but because he felt that it would be sheer mockery to share the deliberations of a Council when their respective views, on a matter which he believed to be the very crux of their existence, were antagonistic in their essences.
After his departure the progress was amazing. His ill-considered proposals had cleared the air. Every one knew exactly what he did not want, and that was a material step towards arriving at the opposite goal.
At the end of a few hours a very effective and comprehensive scheme for quietly and systematically doing nothing had been almost unanimously arrived at. Several quires of paper had been covered with suggestions, some of them being accepted as they stood, some recommended for elaboration, some passed for future consideration, some thrown out. The ambassador in Paris was to retire (on the ground of ill-health) if he could not satisfactorily explain the position. A special mission was to be sent to Berlin to get really at the bottom of things, and, if possible, have the tax either not put on or taken off, according to the situation when they arrived there. A legal commission was to rout out every precedent to see if the Unity League was not doing something outside the powers of a trade union (a very forlorn hope); and all over the country enquiries were to be made and assurances given, all very discreetly and without the least suggestion of panic.
The only doubtful point was whether every one else would play the game with the same delicate regard for Ministerial susceptibilities, or whether some might not have the deplorable taste to create scenes, send deputations, demand work with menace, claim the literal fulfilment of specific pledges, incite to riot and violence, stampede the whole community, and otherwise act inconsiderately towards the Government, when they discovered the very awkward circumstances in which their leaders had involved them.
The first indication of a jarring note fell to the lot of the President of the Board of Trade in the shape of a telegram which reached him early on the following morning. This was its form:
"From the Council of the Amalgamated Union of Chimney Sweepers and Federated Carpet Beaters. (Membership, 11,372).—Seventeen million estimated chimneys stop smoking. No soot, precious little dust. Where the Hell do we come in?"Blankintosh,Secretary."
"From the Council of the Amalgamated Union of Chimney Sweepers and Federated Carpet Beaters. (Membership, 11,372).—Seventeen million estimated chimneys stop smoking. No soot, precious little dust. Where the Hell do we come in?
"Blankintosh,Secretary."
A few years before, it had been officially discovered that there were four or five curiously adaptable words, without which the working man was quite unable to express himself in the shortest sentence. When on very ceremonious occasions he was debarred their use, he at once fell into a pitiable condition of aphasia. Keenly alive to the class-imposed disadvantages under which these men existed, the Government of that day declared that it was a glaring anomaly that the poor fellows should not be allowed to use a few words that were so essential to their expression of every emotion, while the rich, with more time on their hands, could learn a thousand synonyms. The law imposing a shilling fine for each offence (five shillings in the case of "a gentleman," for even then there was one law for the rich and another for the poor) was therefore repealed, and the working man was free to swear as much as he liked anywhere, which, to do him justice, he had done all along.
It was for this reason that Mr Blankintosh's pointed little message was accepted for transmission; but there was evidently a limit, for, when the President of the Board of Trade, an irascible gentleman who had, in the colloquial phrase, "got out of bed on the wrong side" that morning, dashed off a short reply, it was brought back to him by a dispirited messenger two hours later with the initials of seventeen postmasters and the seventeen times repeated phrase, "Refused. Language inadmissible."
The Government allowed the 22nd day of July to pass without a sign. They were, as their supporters convincingly explained to anxious enquirers, treating the Unity League and all its works with silent contempt. They were "doing nothing" strategically, they wished it to be understood; a very different thing from "doing nothing" through apathy, indecision, or bewilderment, but very often undistinguishable the one from the other in the result.
On the 22nd day of July seventeen million "estimated chimneys" ceased to pollute the air. The League was not concerned with the exact number, and they accepted the chimney sweepers' figures. It was more to the purpose that the order was being loyally and cheerfully obeyed. The idea of fighting the Government with the Government's own chosen people, appealed to the lighter side of a not unhumorous nation.
Ever since the institution of a Socialistic press, and from even remoter times than the saplinghood of the "Reformer's Tree," Fleet Street party hacks and Hyde Park demagogues had been sharpening their wit upon the "black-coated" brigade, the contemptiblebourgeoisieof "Linton Villas," "Claremonts," and "Holly Lodges," taunting them with self-complacency, political apathy, and social parasitism. The proportion of moral degradation conferred by a coat intentionally black, in comparison with one that is merely approaching that condition through the personal predilections of its owner, has never yet been defined, and the relative æsthetic values of the architectural pretensions of villadom, compared with the unswerving realism of the "Gas Works Views," "Railway Approach Cottages," and "Cement Terraces," of the back streets, may be left to the matured judgment of an unprejudiced posterity. The great middle class in all its branches had never hitherto made any reply at all. Now that it had begun to retort in its own effective way, the Government agreed that the best counterblast would be—to wait until it all blew over.
There were naturally defections from the first. A friendly spy in Mr Tubes's secret service managed to secure the information without much trouble that within seven days of the publication of the order no less than 4372 notices of resignation had been received at headquarters. He was hastening away with this evidence of the early dissolution of the League when his grinning informant called him back to whisper in his ear that during the same period there had been 17,430 new members enrolled, and that while the resignations seemed to have practically ceased the enrolments were growing in volume. In addition to these there were battalions who joined in the policy of the League through sympathy with its object without formally binding themselves as members.
In some of its aspects the success of the movement erred in excess. There were men, manufacturers, who in their faith and enthusiasm wished to close their works at once, and, regardless of their own loss, throw their workmen and their unburnt coal into the balance. It was not required; it was not even desirable then. The League's object was to disorganise commerce as little as possible beyond the immediate boundaries of the coal trade. They were not engaged in an internecine war, and every one of their own people deprived of employment was a loss. Cases of hardship there would be; they are common to both sides in every phase of stubborn and prolonged civil strife, but from the "class" point of view coal had the pre-eminent advantage that its weight and bulk gave employment to a hundred of the "masses" to every one of themselves. There were also two circumstances that discounted any sense of injustice on this head. Firstly, there was a spirit of sacrifice and heroism in the air, born of the time and the situation; and secondly, it soon became plain that the League was engaged in vast commercial undertakings and was absorbing all the men of its own party who were robbed of their occupation by the development of the war.
A firm starting business with an unencumbered capital of ten million sterling, enjoying a "private income" of five millions a year, and not troubled with the necessity of earning any dividend at all, could afford to be a generous employer.
From the first moment it was obvious that oil must take the place of coal. That was the essence of the strife.The Tocsinset to work in frantic haste to prove that it was impossible; to show that all the authorities of the past and present had agreed that no real substitute for coal existed. It was quite true, and it was quite false. It was not a world struggle. Abroad, foreign coal was being substituted for English coal. At home only half a million tons a week were in issue at the first. Afterwards, as coal stagnation fed coal stagnation, the tonnage rose steadily, but the calorific ratio of coal and oil, the basis of all comparison, simply did not exist, except on paper, for the two fuels in domestic use.
The Tocsin'ssecond article convinced its readers that all the lamp companies in the world could not keep up with the abnormal demand for lamps, stoves, and oil-cookers, that the ridiculous proposal of the League would involve, if it were not providentially ordained that it was foredoomed to grotesque failure by the dead weight of its own fatuous ineptitude.
In practice the two single firms of Ripplestone of Birmingham, and Schuyler of Cleveland, U.S.A., at once put on the market a varied stock that filled every requirement. There was no waiting. AsThe Tocsinbitterly remarked, it soon became apparent that the demand had been foreseen and "treacherously provided against during the past two years."
The thirdTocsinarticle on the situation dealt statistically with the oil trade of the world. It necessarily fell rather flat, becauseThe TocsinSpecial Commissioner entered upon the task with the joyous conviction that the world's output would not be sufficient for the demand, the world's oil ships not numerous enough to transport it. As he dipped into the figures, however, he made the humiliating discovery that the increased demand would do little more than ruffle the surface of the oil market. The Baku oil fields could supply it without inconvenience; the United States could do it by contract at a ten per cent. advance; the newly-discovered wells of Nova Scotia alone would be equal to the demand if they diverted all their produce across the Atlantic.
He threw down his pen in despair, and then picked it up again to substitute invective for statistics. Before his eyes the motor-tanks of the Anglo-Pennsylvanian Oil Company, of London and Philadelphia, and the Anglo-Caucasian Oil Company, of London and Baku, were going on their daily rounds. It was still a matter for wonder how well equipped the sudden call had found those two great controlling oil companies. It was yet to be learned that for their elaborate designations there might be substituted the simple name "Unity League."
It was submittingThe Tocsinyoung man to rather a cruel handicap to send him to the British Museum Reading Room for a few hours with instructions to prove impossible what Salt and Hampden had been straining every nerve for two years to make inevitable.
Three articles exhausted his proof that a successful coal boycott under modern conditions was utterly impossible.
He went out into the city and the suburbs, interviewing coal merchants and coal agents with the object of drawing a harrowing picture of the gloom and depression that had fallen upon these unfortunate creatures at the hands of their own class League.
He found them all bearing up well under the prospect, but much too busy to give him more than a few minutes of their time. Every one of them had been appointed an oil agent to the League firms, and League members were ordering their oil through them, just as heretofore they had ordered coal. It was very easy, profitable work for them; they had nothing to do but to transmit the orders to the League firms and the fast business-like motor-tanks distributed the oil. But half of the coal carters were now under notice to leave, and there were indications that work was very scarce. Each motor-tank displaced twenty men and twenty horses. Already, it was said, thousands of horses had been sent out to grass from London alone.
Externally, as far as the Capital was concerned at all events, things were going on very much the same as before, when the struggle was a fortnight old. Elsewhere signs were not lacking. The Government had received disquieting reports from its agents here and there, but so far it was meeting the situation by refusing to acknowledge that it existed. A march of the Staffordshire miners had been averted by the men's leaders being privately assured that it would embarrass the Government's plans. The march had been deferred under protest; so far the organisation answered to the wheel. But the Midlands were clamorously demanding exceptional relief for the exceptional conditions. Monmouth had seen a little rioting, and in Glamorgan the bands of incendiaries called "Beaconmen," who set fire to the accumulations of coal stacked at the collieries, had already begun their work. Cardiff was feeling the effect of having a third of its export trade in coal suddenly lopped off, and Newport, Swansea, Kirkcaldy, Blyth, Hull, Sunderland, Glasgow, and the Tyne ports were all in the same position. Most of the railways had found it necessary to dispense with their entire supernumerary staff, and most of the railway workshops had been put on short time. In London alone, between four and five thousand out-of-work gas employés were drawing Government pay.
About the third week in August the Premier, Mr Tubes, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer had a long private conference. As a result Mr Strummery called an Emergency Council. It was a thin, acrimonious gathering. Some one brought the tidings that seven more companies in South London were substituting Diesel oil engines for steam. He had all the dreary developments statistically worked out on paper. Nobody wanted to hear them, but he poured them out into the unwilling ears, down to the climax that it represented two hundred and forty-seven fewer men required at the pits.
It served as a text, however, for Mr Chadwing to hang his proposal on. After a month of inaction, the Government was at length prepared to go to the length of admitting that abnormal conditions prevailed. Oil had thrown a quarter of a million of their people out of employment. Let oil keep them. He proposed to retaliate with a 50 per cent. tax on imported oil, to come into operation under Emergency Procedure on the 1st of September.
There were men present to whom the suggestion of taxing a raw article, necessary to a great proportion of the poor, was frankly odious. They were prepared to attack the proposal as a breach of faith. A few words from Mr Strummery, scarcely more than whispered, explained the necessity for the tax and the menace of the situation.
Those who had not been following events closely, paled to learn the truth.
The Treasury was living from hand to mouth, for the City had ceased to take up its Bills. Unless "something happened" before the New Year dawned, it would have to admit its inability to continue the Unemployed Grant. Already a quarter of a million men and their dependents, in addition to the normal average upon which the estimates were based, had been suddenly thrown upon the resources of the Department. If Mr Tubes's forecast proved correct, double that number would be on their hands within another month. The development of half a million starving men who had been taught to look to the Government for everything, looking and finding nothing, could be left to each individual imagination.
The Oil Tax came into operation on the 1st of September. Under the plea of becoming more "business-like," a great many of the Parliamentary safeguards had been swept away, and such procedure was easy. All grades of petroleum had already advanced a few pence the gallon under the increased demand, and the poorer users had expressed their indignation. When they found, one day, that the price had suddenly leapt to half as much again, their wrath was unbounded. It was in vain for Ministers to explain that the measure was directed against their enemies. They knew that it fell onthem, and demanded in varying degrees of politeness to be told why some luxury of the pampered, leisured classes had not been chosen instead. The reason was plain to those who studied Blue Books. So highly taxed was every luxury now that the least fraction added to its burden resulted in an actually decreased revenue from that source.
But if the mere tax and increase had impressed the poor unfavourably, a circumstance soon came to light that enraged them.
In spite of the tax the members of the Unity League were still being supplied with oil at the old prices, and they were assured that they would continue to be supplied without advance, even if the tax were doubled!
The poor, ever suspicious of the doings of those of their own class when set high in authority, at once leapt to the conclusion that they were being made the victims of a double game. It was nothing to them that the Anglo-Pennsylvanian and the Anglo-Caucasian companies were now trading at a loss; it was common knowledge that their richer League neighbours had not had the price of their oil increased, and they knew all too well that they themselves had. With the lack of balanced reasoning that had formerly been one of the Government's best weapons, they at once concluded that they alone were paying the tax, and the unparalleled injustice of it sowed a crop of bitterness in their hearts.
If that was the net result at home, the foreign effect of the policy was not a whit more satisfactory. Studland, the Consul-General at Odessa, one of the most capable men in the Service, cabled a despatch full of temperate and solemn warning the moment he heard of the step. It was too late then, if, indeed, his words would have been regarded. Russia replied by promptly trebling her existing tax on imported coal, and at the same time gave Germany rebate terms that practically made it a tax onEnglishcoal. It was said that Russia had only been waiting for a favourable opportunity, and was more anxious to develop her own new coal fields in the Donetz basin than to import at all. As far as the Treasury was concerned, the oil tax yielded little more than was absorbed by the thirty thousand extra men thrown out of work by Russia's action. The Government had given a rook for a bishop.
A little time ago the Cabinet had been prepared to greet winter as a friend. Without quite possessing the ingenuousness of their amiable Comrade Bilch, they had thought cynically of the pampered aristocrats shivering in Mayfair drawing-rooms, of the comfort-loving middle classes sitting before their desolate suburban hearths, of blue-faced men setting out breakfastless for freezing offices, and of pallid women weeping as they tried to warm the hands of little children, as they put them in their icy beds.
And now? All their cynical sympathy had apparently been in vain. There were not going to be any cold breakfasts, freezing offices, or shivering women and children. Warming stoves and radiators raised the temperature of a room much quicker than a fire did, and kept it equable without any attention. Oil cookers took the place of the too often erratic kitchen range. Mrs Strummery innocently threw the Premier into a frenzy one morning by dilating on the advantages of a "Britonette" stove which she had been shown by a Tottenham Court Road ironmonger. The despised, helpless "classes" were going on very comfortably. They were going on even gaily; "Oil Scrambles" constituted a new and popular form of entertainment for long evenings; from Wimbledon came the information that "Candle Cinderellas" would have a tremendous rage during the approaching season; and in Cheapside and the Strand the penny hawkers were minting money with the novel and diverting "Coal Sack Puzzle."
But the winter was approaching, though no longer as a friend. If England should say to-morrow what Lancashire was saying that day, there were portents of stirring times in the air. Already Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire were muttering in their various uncouth dialects, and Lanark was subscribing to disquieting sentiments in its own barbarous tongue. Derbyshire was becoming uneasy, Staffordshire was scarcely answering to the wheel, and Nottingham was in revolt against what it considered to be the too compliant attitude of the Representation Committee. The rioting in Monmouth was only restrained from becoming serious in its proportions by the repeated assurances from Westminster that the end was in sight; and the "Beaconmen" of Glamorgan were openly boasting that before long they would "light such a candle" that the ashes would fall upon London like a Vesuvian cloud.
Still nearer home was the disturbing spectacle of the railway-men thrown out of work, the coal carters, the stablemen, the gasworkers, the canal boatmen, the general labourers, the tool-makers, the wheel-wrights, the chimney sweepers, the brushmakers. The sequence of dependence could be traced, detail by detail, through every page of the trade directory.
They had all been taught to clamour to the Government in every emergency, and this administration they regarded as peculiarly their own. It was not a case of Frankenstein's Monster getting out of hand; this Monster had created its Frankenstein, and could dissolve him if he proved obstinate. All that Frankenstein had ventured to do so far had been to reduce the Unemployed Grant to three quarters of its normal rate "in view of the unprecedented conditions of labour," and where two or more unemployed were members of one family, to make a further small deduction. The action had not been well received. "In view of the unprecedented conditions of labour" the unemployed had looked for more rather than for less. When the rate was fixed they had been given to understand that it represented the minimum on which an out-of-work man could be decently asked to live. Why, then, had their own party reduced it? Funds? Tax some luxury!
Even the Government assurance, an ingenious adaptation of truth by the light of Mr Chadwing's figures, that they "did not anticipate having to impose the reduced grant for many more weeks, but at the same time counselled economy in every working-class home," did not restore mutual good feeling. The general rejoinder was that the Government had "better not," and the reference to economy was stigmatised as gratuitously inept.
In the meantime the situation was reacting unfavourably upon Mr Strummery and the chief officers of State, not only in Parliament but even in the Cabinet itself. Consultations between the Premier and half a dozen of his most trusted Ministers were of daily occurrence. One day, towards the end of September, Mr Strummery privately intimated to all the "safe" members of the Council that it was necessary to meet to consider what further steps to take.
The meeting was a "packed" one in that the Tirrels, the Browns, and the Bilches of the party were not invited and knew nothing of it. There was no reason why Mr Strummery should not call together a section of his followers if he wished, and discuss policy with them, but at the moment it was dangerous, because the conclave was just strong enough to be able to impose its will upon Parliament, and yet individually it was composed of weak men. It was dangerous because half a dozen weak men, rendered desperate by the situation into which they were being inevitably driven, had resolved to act upon heroic lines. As Balzac had remarked, "There is nothing more horrible than the rebellion of a sheep," but the horrible consequences generally fall upon its own head in the end.
Mr Chadwing's statement informed the despondent gathering that on the existing lines it would be necessary to suspend the wholesale operation of the relief fund about the middle of December. By reducing the grant in varying degrees it would be possible to carry on for perhaps three months beyond that date, but to reach the furthest limit the individual relief would have become so insignificant that it would only result in an actual crisis being precipitated earlier than would be the case if they went on as they were doing.
That was all that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had to say. The uninitiated men looked at one another in mute enquiry. There was something in the air. What was coming?
The Premier rose to explain. He admitted that they had underrated the danger of the situation at first. Measures that might have sufficed then were useless now. Oil was the pivot of the whole question. The oil tax had not realised expectations. To raise the tax would only alienate the affections of their own people without reaching the heart of the matter. They had already taken one bite at a cherry.
He paused and looked round, an indifferent swimmer forced by giant circumstance to face his Niagara.
He proposed as a measure of national emergency to prohibit the importation of oil altogether.
There was a gasp of surprise; a moment of stupefaction. Strange things were again being done in the name of Liberty.
Mr Tubes's voice, enumerating the results and advantages of the step, recalled their wandering thoughts. There was little need for the recital; the effect of so unexpected acoupleapt to the mind at once.
The Leaguers must either burn coal or starve. The home oil deposits had long ceased to be worked. Wood under modern conditions was impracticable; peat was equally debarred, and neither could meet a sudden emergency in sufficient quantity; electricity meant coal, and was far from universal. The League movement must collapse within a week.
There were other points, all in favour of the course. Although it might slightly inconvenience many working-class homes it would not take their money as a heavier tax would, and it must convince all that the end was well in sight. It would induce the poor to use more coal, more gas, in itself a step towards that desired end. It would teach Russia a sharp lesson, and Russia's sins were the freshest in their minds.
All were convinced, and all against their will. There was something sinister in the proposal; the thought of it fell like a shadow across the room.
"It is not a course I would recommend or even assent to as a general thing," said Mr Strummery. "But we are fighting for the existence of our party, for the lives of thousands of our people. It is no exaggeration. Think of the awful misery that must sweep the country in the coming winter if the League holds out. If we do not break the wicked power of those two men, there is no picture of national calamity to be found in the past that can realise the worst."
"It is their game," said Mr Tubes bitterly. "The cowards are striking at the women and children through the men."
He ignored the fact that his party had struck the first blow, and had had the word "War!" figuratively nailed to the staff of their red banner for years. In war one usually strikes some one, and on the whole it is perhaps less reprehensible to strike women and children through men thanvice versa. But it was an acceptable sentiment on the face of it, and it sounded all right at the moment.
"Moreover," added the Premier, "there will be this danger in the situation: that blinded by passions and desperate through misery, the people may fail to realise who are the real causes of their plight."
Yes, there was that possibility to be faced by thoughtful Socialistic Ministers. The people are not very subtle in their reasoning. The most pressing fact of their existence would be that the Government, which had promised to keep them from starvation in return for their votes, had had their votes and was allowing them to starve.
"I think that we must all agree to the necessity of the step," said one of the minor men, "though our feelings are all against it."
"Quite so," admitted Mr Strummery. "Let us hope that being a sharp remedy it will only need to be a short one."
Surprise was the essence of thecoup, and the "business-like" procedure of Parliament permitted this when the Government was backed by a large automatic majority. The expeditious passing of the measure was a foregone conclusion, yet a few shrewd warning voices were raised against it even among the stalwarts. The regular opposition voted against it as a matter of course. The most moderate section of the Labour Party and the extreme Socialists, who both elected to sit on the opposition side of the House, refrained from voting, and a few Ministers, who were distracted between their private opinions and their party duty, were diplomatically engaged elsewhere.
The Bill first received the attention of the House on the 25th of September, the day after the Premier had called his informal meeting. It became law on the 28th, and three days later, the 1st of October, Great Britain was absolutely "closed" against the introduction of mineral burning oils on any terms.
The country received the measure with mixed feelings, but on the whole with the admission that it would be effective and with an expression of dislike. The coal mining districts hailed it with enthusiasm, and the same reception was accorded it among the affected industries, but outside these it was nowhere popular, and in certain working-class quarters it evoked the bitterest hostility. It was felt even by those who stood to gain much by the overthrow of the League that their instincts rebelled against the means; possibly the underlying feeling was distrust of the exercise of power so despotic. It was admitted that the League's action with respect to coal stood on a different plane. Any member could at once resign; it was questionable if one could not use coal and still remain a member. Certainly no coercion was used. But in the matter of oil a necessary commodity was absolutely ruled out, and, whether he wished or nor, every one must obey. By the 8th of October the retail price of petroleum of an average quality was 2s. 9d. the gallon, and the price was rising as the end of the stock came in sight.
One curious circumstance excited remark. The Unity League members were still being supplied at the original price. The League was keeping its word gallantly to the end. The Government had calculated that the two interested companies might have a reserve that would last a week. The average stock which the consumer might be supposed to have in hand would carry them on for a further five days, and the economy which they would doubtless practise might hold off the climax for five more. The 17th of October came to be confidently mentioned in Government circles as the date of the Unity League's surrender.
It might have been merely coincidence, but on the 17th of October Mr Strummery chose to entertain a few of his colleagues to dinner in the House.
In spite of the host's inevitable jug of boiling water, an air of genial humour, almost of gaiety, pervaded the board. Mr Tubes was entertainingly reminiscent; Chadwing succeeded in throwing off the weight of the Treasury; Comrade Stubb, fresh from the soil, proved to have a dry humour of his own; and Cecil Brown, who was always socially welcome, made a joke which almost surprised the Premier into a smile.
Mr Tubes was in the middle of a sentence when Cecil Brown, with his face turned towards the door, laid his hand upon the speaker's arm.
"A minute, Tubes," he said. "There is something unusual going on out there."
"Perhaps it is——" began Chadwing, and stopped. The same thought had occurred to at least three of them. Perhaps they were coming to tell them that Hampden had accepted his defeat. Whatever it might be, a dozen members who had entered the room in a confused medley were making their way towards the Premier's table. A man who seemed to concentrate their attention was in their midst; some were apparently trying to hold him back, while others urged him on. While yet some distance off he broke away from them all, and running forward, reached the table first.
It was Comrade Bilch, so dishevelled, red, and heated, that it did not occur to any one to doubt that he was drunk. For a second he stood looking at them stupidly, and then he suddenly opened his mouth and poured out so appalling a string of vile and nauseating abuse that men who were near drew aside.
"Why, in Heaven's name, don't you take him away?" exclaimed Cecil Brown, appealing to those who formed the group beyond the table.
They would have done so, but Comrade Bilch raised his hand as though to enjoin attention for a moment. A change seemed to have come over him even in that brief passage of time. He walked up to the table and leaned heavily upon it with both fists, while his breath came in throbs, and the colour played about his face like the reflection of a raging fire. When he spoke it was without a single oath; all his uncleanness had dropped away from him as though he recognised its threadbare poverty in the face of the colossal news he brought.
"Gentlemen," he said, leaning forward and breathing very hard, "you would have it, and you have got your way. You've made oil contraband, and not a drop can be landed in Great Britain now. It can't be brought, but it can be used when it is here, and the Unity League that you have done it all to starve has got two hundred million gallons safely stowed away at Hanwood! Yes, while our people will have to grope and freeze through the winter,theyare quite comfortably provided for, and you, whether you leave the bar on or whether you take it off, you have made us the laughing-stock of Europe!"
An awed silence fell on the group. Not the most shadowy suspicion of such a miscarriage had ever stirred the most cautious. All their qualms had been in the direction of swallowing the unpalatable measure, not of doubting its efficacy. They seemed to be the puny antagonists of some almost superhuman power that not only brushed their most elaborate plans aside, but actually led them on to pave the way to their own undoing.
Mr Tubes was the first to speak. "It can't be true," he whispered. "It is impossible."
"Oh, everything's impossible with you, especially when it's happened," retorted Mr Bilch contemptuously. "Pity you didn't live when there were real miracles about."
"But the time?" protested some one. "How could they do it in the time?"
"Time!" said Mr Bilch, "what more do you want? They've had two years, and they've used two years. If those——" He stopped suddenly, jerked his head twice with a curious motion, and fell to the ground in a fit.
There were plenty of good friends to look after him without troubling the Ministerial group. The dinner-party broke up in the face of so inauspicious a series of events, and before another hour had passed the story of the gigantic fiasco had reached every club in London, and was being cabled to every capital in Christendom.
The autumn of 1918 had proved unusually mild. It was said that many of the migratory birds delayed their exodus for weeks beyond their normal times, and in sheltered gardens and hedgerows in the south of England flowers and fruit were making an untimely show; but about midday on the 24th of November it began to grow dark, and, without any indication of fog, it grew darker, until the greater part of England and Wales was plunged into a nocturnal gloom. As there was a marked fall in the temperature, men looked up to the clouds and predicted snow, but they were wrong. Had it snowed it might have been the White Winter of 1918, for that night the frost began, and the 24th of November had already become an ill-omened date to usher in a frost. It did not belie its character. The next day broke clear but bitter, and those who read newspapers learned with curious interest that during the night the seven-tailed comet of 1744 had been observed by several astronomers, to the great confusion of their science, for its appearance was premature by a round hundred thousand years. The phenomenon afterwards grew into a portent to the vulgar mind, for that was the beginning of the great frost that lasted seven weeks without an intermission.
Outside certain limits, life was proceeding very much as before. The condition of the upper classes was not materially different from what it had been before the policy of retaliation had been declared. The Personal Property Tax had not been proceeded with, and the Minimum Wage Bill had been dropped for the time. There were diplomatic explanations; the real reason was that the Cabinet was too sharply divided over the expediency of anything in those days to make the passing of important measures practicable. While none had the courage to go to an extreme either in aggression or in conciliation, there was a multitude of counsel vehemently wrangling over the wisdom of little concessions and little aggressions.
In London the great increase in the number of unemployed began to be observable in the early autumn. The obsolete "marches of unemployed" were revived, but, as might have been foreseen, except among the poor themselves, they met with no financial encouragement. Even the poor were becoming careful of their pence. They saw what the winter must mean, for every one knew of a score of deserving cases around his own door, and it was commonly reported that the Government contemplated reducing the Unemployed Grant to two-thirds its normal basis before the year was out. That was the Cabinet's idea for "breaking it gently." So, meeting with no response in the suburbs, the City, or the West End, the processions groaned occasionally, broke a few windows, enhanced the bitter feeling existing against their class by frightening more than a few ladies, and were finally kept in check by the special constabulary raised in the suburbs, the City, and the West End. Finding so little profit for their exertions, they abandoned their indiscriminate peregrinations, and took to demonstrating before St Stephen's and to hooting outside the houses of Cabinet Ministers until the processions and meetings were disallowed.
There was no public charity that winter, either organised or spontaneous, for the benefit of the working-class poor. The conditions of labour would have warranted a Mansion House Fund being opened in September, but no one suggested it, and no one would have contributed to it. Abroad it was generally recognised that England was involved in civil war to which it behoved them to act as neutrals. The Socialists in Belgium collected and despatched the sum of £327, 14s. 6d. for the relief of their "persecuted confraternity in England," but as the pomp and circumstances attending the inauguration of the Fund had led their persecuted confraternity in England to expect at least a quarter of a million sterling, some intemperate remarks greeted the consummation of the effort, and it was not repeated.
To those who did not look very deeply into the situation it appeared that a long, hard winter must operate against the interests of the League. Their opponents would burn more coal. The Government, indeed, issued an appeal asking them to do so, and thus to relieve the tension in the provinces. The response was not promising. The Government was, in effect, told to mind its own business, and particularly that detail of its business which consisted in the guarantee of a full and undocked living wage to every worker in or out of work. The contention so far had been that with the surfeit, coal would be so cheap that even the poorest could burn it unstintingly. But soon a new and rather terrible development grew out of the complex situation. Coal became dear, not only dear in the ordinary sense of the word—winter prices—but very, very dear. The simple truth was that a disorganised industry always moves on abnormal lines, and coal was a routed, a shattered, industry.
There was no oil to be had by any but members of the League; in some places there was no gas to be had, for many of the small gas companies, and some of the large ones, had found it impossible to continue amidst the dislocation of their trade, and the cheapest coal was being retailed in the streets of London at two shillings the hundred-weight. The Government had left oil contraband after the discovery of the League's secret store down the quiet country lane, for they recognised that to remove the embargo immediately would kill them with ridicule. They promised themselves that the freedom of commerce should be restored at the first convenient opportunity. In the meanwhile they decided to do as they had done in other matters: they bravely ignored the fact that the League members were any better off than any one else, and declined to believe the evidence that any store existed.
That was the state of affairs before the winter set in, and in London alone. The Capital was feeling some of the remoter effects of the blow, but from the provinces, from the actual battle-fields, there came grim stories. Northumberland, which had been loth to accept the Eight Hours Bill, now traced the whole of the trouble to that head, and declared that the only hope was for the Government to make a complete surrender to the Unity League, on the one condition that it restored a normal demand for coal both at home and abroad. Durham, on the contrary, held that it was necessary for the Government to crush or wear out the League. In both counties there had been fierce conflict between the rival factions, and blood had been freely shed. After a single day's rioting at Newcastle and Gateshead seventeen dead bodies had been collected by the ambulances.
The "Beaconmen" in Glamorgan were setting fire to the pits themselves in a spirit of fanaticism. In one instance a fire had spread beyond the intended limits, and an explosion, in which three score of their unfortunate fellow-workmen perished, had been the net result. The Midlands were the least disturbed, and even there Walsall had seen a mass meeting at which thirty thousand colliers and other affected workmen had called insistently with threats upon the Government, in pathetic ignorance of the Treasury's plight, to purchase the nation's coal pits at once, and resume full time at all of them, as the only means of averting a national calamity.
And all this had been taking place in the mild autumn, while the Government was still paying out sufficient relief funds to ensure that actual starvation should not touch any one, long before it had been driven to take the country into its confidence. The spectre of cold and hunger had not yet been raised to goad the men to madness; so far they regarded existence at least as assured, and the question that was stirring them to rebellion was not the fundamental one of the "right to live," but the almost academic issue of the right to live apart from the natural vicissitudes of life.
The Government had other troubles on hand. The two principal causes for anxiety among these, if not actually of their own hatching, had certainly sprung from a common stock.
The Parliament sitting at College Green deemed the moment opportune for issuing a Declaration of Independence and proclaiming a republic. Three years before, all Irishmen had been withdrawn from the British army and navy on the receipt of Dublin's firmly-worded note to the effect that since the granting of extended Home Rule, Irishmen came within the sphere of the Foreign Enlistment Act. These men formed the nucleus of a very useful army with which Ireland thought it would be practicable to hold out in the interior until foreign intervention came to its aid. Possibly England thought so too, for Mr Strummery's Ministry contented itself with issuing what its members described as a firm and dignified protest. Closely examined, it was discoverable that the dignified portion was a lengthy recapitulation of ancient history; the firm portion a record of Dublin's demands since Home Rule had been conceded, while the essential part of the communication informed the new republic that its actions were not what his Majesty's Ministers had expected of it, and that they would certainly reserve the right of taking the matter in hand at some future time more suitable to themselves.
The other harassment was that Leicester lay at the mercy of an epidemic of small-pox which threatened to become historic in the annals of the scourge. In the second month the average daily number of deaths had risen to 120, and there was no sign of a decrease. In the autumn it was hoped that the winter would kill the disease; in the winter it was anticipated that it would die out naturally under the influence of the spring sunshine. The situation affected Mr Chadwing more closely than any of his colleagues, for Leicester had the honour of returning the Chancellor of the Exchequer as one of its members. Under normal conditions Mr Chadwing made a practice of visiting his constituency and addressing a meeting every few weeks, but during the six months that the epidemic raged he found himself unable to leave London. His attitude was perfectly consistent, in spite of the hard things that some of his supporters said of him in his absence: like the majority of his constituents, he had a Conscientious Objection to vaccination, but he also had an even stronger conscientious objection to encountering small-pox infection.
The 24th of November ushered in a new phase of the strife. It marked the beginning of the Dark Winter. Early in December the newspapers began to draw comparisons between the weather then prevailing and the hard winters on record. At that date it was noticeable how many rustic-looking vagrants were to be seen walking aimlessly about the streets of London. The unemployed from the country were beginning to flock in for the mere sense of warmth. The British Museum, St. Paul's Cathedral, the free libraries, and other places where it was possible to escape from the dreadful rigour of the streets, were crowded by day. At night longqueuesof miserable creatures haunted the grids of restaurants, the sheltered sides of theatres, the windows of printing houses, and any spot where a little warmth exhaled. On the nights of the 4th, the 5th, and the 6th of December the thermometer on Primrose Hill registered 3° below zero. On the 7th pheasants were observed feeding among the pigeons in the main street of Highgate, and from that time onwards wild birds of the rarer kinds were no unusual sight in the London parks and about the public buildings. In the country it was remarked that the small birds had begun to disappear, and the curious might read any morning of frozen goldfinches being picked up in Camberwell, larks about Victoria Park, and starlings, robins, blackbirds, and such like fry everywhere. By this time dairymen had discovered that it was impossible to deliver milk unless they carried a brazier of live charcoal on their cart or hand-truck. Local correspondents in the provinces had ceased to report ordinary cases of death from cold and exposure; there were cases in the streets of London every night.
Early in December Sir John Hampden was approached unofficially by a few members of Parliament, including one or two of minor official rank, to learn his "terms." The suggestions were tentative on both sides, and nothing was stated definitely. But out of the circumlocution it might be inferred that he expressed his willingness to rescind the boycott, and to devote five million pounds to public relief at once, in return for certain modifications of the franchise and an immediate dissolution. Nothing came of the movement, and during the first week of December the Government sent round to the post-offices and to all the Crown tax collectors notices that the licences ordinarily falling due on the 1st of January must be taken out on or before the 15th of the current month, and the King's Taxes similarly collected in advance. The League did not make any open comment on this departure, but every member merely ignored it, and when the 16th of December was reached, it devolved upon the officers of the Crown to enforce the payment by legal process. In the language of another age, the Government was faced by five million "Passive Resisters." It soon became apparent that instead of getting in the taxes a fortnight before their time, the greater part of the revenue from that source would be delayed at least a month later than usual.
On the 20th of December one million and three-quarters State-supported unemployed of various grades presented themselves at the appointed trades unions committee rooms, workhouse offices, employment bureaux, Treasury depôts, from which the Fund was administered, to receive their weekly "wage." As they passed in they were confronted by a formal notice to the effect that the disbursement was then reduced to half its usual amount. As they passed out they came upon another formal notice to the effect that after the following week the Grant would be "temporarily suspended." Possibly that also embodied an idea of "breaking it gently."
The cry of surprise, rage, and terrified foreboding that rose from every town and village of the land when the direful news was at length understood, can never be described. Its echoes were destined to roll through the pages of English history for many a generation. The immediate result was that rioting broke out in practically all parts of the country except the purely agricultural. The people who had been promised a perpetual life of milk and honey had "murmured" when they were offered bread and water. Now there seemed every prospect of the water reaching them as ice, and the bread-board being empty, and their "murmuring" took a sharper edge. In some places there were absolute stampedes of reason. In justice it has to be remembered that by this time the most pitiless winter of modern times had been heaping misery on misery for a month, that the chance of finding work or relief was recognised to be the forlornest hope, and that very, very few had a reserve of any kind.
The indiscriminate disturbances of the 20th of December were easily suppressed. A people that has been free for generations loses the gift for successful rioting in the face of armed discipline, even of the most inadequate strength. But for constitutional purposes the body of one dragooned rioter in England was worth more than a whole "Vladimir's battue" east of the Baltic.
On the 27th of December the certified unemployed drew their diminished pittance for the last time. They left the buildings in many places with the significant threat that they would return that day week, and if there was nothing for them would "warm their hands" there at the least. There was renewed rioting that day also. The forces of law and order had been strengthened; the rioters appeared to have been better organised. In one or two towns the rioting began to approach the Continental level. Bolton was said to have proved itself far from amateurish, and Nuneaton was spoken of as being distinctly promising. At the end of that day public buildings had to be requisitioned in several places to lay out the spoils of victory and defeat.
Two days later every newspaper contained an "open letter" from Sir John Hampden to the Government, in which he unconditionally offered them, on behalf of the Unity League and in the name of humanity, sufficient funds to pay the half grant for four weeks longer. It was a humane offer, but its proper name was strategy. It embarrassed the Government to decide whether to accept or decline. It embarrassed them if they accepted, and if they declined it embarrassed them most of all. They declined; or, to be precise, they ignored the offer.
By this time England might be said to be under famine. London, in its ice-bound straits, began curiously to assume the appearance of a mediæval city. By night one might meet grotesquely clad bands of revellers returning from some ice carnival (for the Thames had long been frozen from the Tower to Gravesend) by the light of lanterns and torches which they carried. None but those who had nothing to lose ventured out into the streets at night except by companies. Thieves and bludgeoners lurked in every archway, and arrests were seldom made; beggars importuned with every wile and in every tone, and new fantastic creeds and extravagant new parties sent out their perfervid disciples to proclaim Utopias at every corner.
To add to the terror of the night there suddenly sprang into prominence the bands of "Running Madmen" who swept through the streets like fallen leaves in an autumn gale. Barefooted, gaunt, and wildly dressed in rags, they broke upon the astonished wayfarer's sight, and passed out again into the gloom before he could ask himself what strange manner of men they were. Never alone, seldom exceeding a score in any band, they ran keenly as though with some purposeful end in view, for the most part silently, but now and then startling the quiet night with an inarticulate wail or a cry of woe or lamentation, but they turned from street to street in aimless intricacy, and sought no definite goal. They were never seen by day, and whence they came or where they had their homes none could say, but the steady increase in the number of their bands showed that they were undoubtedly the victims of a contagious mania such as those that have appeared in the past from time to time.
Almost as ragged and unkempt was the army that by day marched under the standard of Brother Ambrose towards the sinless New Jerusalem. Reading the abundant signs all round with an inspired and fatalistic eye, Ambrose uncompromisingly announced that all the portents of the Millennium were now fulfilled, and that the reign of temporal power on earth was at an end. Each day his eloquence mounted to a wilder flight, each day he dreamed new dreams and saw fresh visions, and promised to his followers more definitely the spoil of victory, and parcelled out the smiling, fruitful land. Drawn by every human passion, recruits poured into his ranks, and when he marched in tattered state to mark the boundaries of the impending Golden City, the Legions of the Chosen rolled not in their thousands, but in their tens of thousands, singing hymns and interspersing ribaldry.
A very different spectacle was afforded by the bands of the Gilded Youth which by day patrolled the approaches to houses of the better class, wherever smoke had been seen issuing from the chimneys, and by night with equal order and thoroughness turned out the public gas lamps in the streets, until many of the authorities at last gave up the lighting of the lamps as a useless formality.
It was impossible for the occupants of a house that had incurred their enmity to have them removed by force, or to maintain an attitude of unconcern in the face of their demonstration, yet everything they did came under the term of "Peaceful Picketing" within the provisions of the Act, and an attempt to fix responsibility upon the Unity League for the high-handed action of its agents in a few cases where the Gilded Youth had gone beyond their powers, failed ignominiously through the precedent afforded by the final settlement of the celebrated Tawe Valley Case.
In the provinces the rioters were burning coal, burning coal-pits, smashing machinery and destroying property indiscriminately, blind to the fact that some of the immediate effects were falling on their fellow-workmen, and that most of the ultimate effects would fall upon themselves. In London and elsewhere the bands of the Gilded Youth were going quietly and systematically about their daily work, "peacefully" terrorising house-holders into submission, and carefully turning out the public lamps at night as soon as they were lit. To the reflective mind it was rather a dreadful power that the time had called into being: an educated mob that "rioted peacefully" and did nothing at all that was detrimental to its own interest.
Each morning people assured one another that so unparalleled a frost could last no longer, but each night the air seemed to be whetted to a keener edge, and each day there came fresh evidences of its power. Early in January it was computed that all the small birds that had not taken refuge in towns were dead, partly through the cold itself, but equally by starvation, for the ground yielded them nothing, and the trees and shrubs upon which they had been able to rely for food in former winters had long since perished. There were none but insignificant hollies to be seen in English gardens for the next generation, and in exposed situations forest trees and even oaks were split down to the ground.
All this time there was very little destructive rioting going on in London on any organised scale, but every night breadths of wood pavement were torn up by the homeless vagrants, who were now allowed to herd where they could, and great fires set burning at which the police warmed themselves and mingled supinely with the crowd. By day the police went in pairs, by night they patrolled in companies of five. For the emergency of serious rioting the military were always kept in readiness; against the more ordinary depredations on private property the owners were practically left to defend themselves. In those dark weeks watch duty became one of the regular occupations among the staff of every London business, and short shrift was given to intruders. Inquests went like marriages in busy churches at Easter-tide—in batches, and the morning cart that picked up the frozen dead had only one compartment.
The time was past when the effects of the vast disorganisation could be localised. Every trade and profession, every trivial and obscure calling, and every insignificant little offshoot of that great trunk called Commerce was involved in depression; it was not too much to say that every individual in the land was feeling some ill effect. Frantic legislation had begun it ten years before; the coal war had brought it to a climax, and the grip of the long, hard winter had pressed like a hostile hand upon the land.
It had resolved itself into a war of endurance. Coal was no longer the pivot; it was money, immediate money with which to buy bread at the bakers' shops, where they carried on their trade with the shutters up and loaded weapons laid out in the upper rooms.
Not the least curious feature of the struggle was the marked disinclination of the starving populace to pillage or bloodshed. Doubtless they saw that whatever they might individually profit by a reign of terror, their cause and party had nothing to gain from it. Such an outburst must inevitably react unfavourably upon the Government of the day, and it wastheirparty then in power. But they had not the mob instinct in them; they were not composed of the ordinary mob element. In the bulk they were neither criminals nor hooligans, but matter-of-fact, disillusionised working men, and the instincts of their class have ever been steady and law-abiding. In Cheapside a gang of professional thieves blew out the iron shutter of a jeweller's shop with dynamite, and securing a valuable haul of jewellery in the momentary confusion, sought to hide themselves among the mob. Far from entering into their aspirations, the mob promptly conveyed them to the nearest police station, and returned to the owner the valuable articles that had been scattered about the street. The climax of the incident was reached by half a dozen of the most stalwart unemployed gladly accepting a few shillings each to guard the broken window until the shutter was repaired.
At the collieries, the mills, the workshops, and the seats of labour there were outrages against property, but away from the immediate centres there was neither cupidity nor resentment. Whenever disturbances of the kind took place they were invariably in pursuit of food or warmth. The men were dispirited, and by this time they regarded their cause as lost. Their leaders, in and out of Parliament, were classed either as incompetent generals in a war, or as traitors who had misled the people. The people only asked them now to make the terms of surrender so that they might live; and they did not hesitate to declare roundly that the old times when they had had to look after themselves more, and had not been body and soul at the disposal of semi-political Unions, were preferable on the whole.
The position of the Cabinet was daily growing more critical. Its chiefs were execrated and insulted whenever they were seen. All the approaches to the House were held by military guards, and the members reached its gates singly, and almost by stealth. Every day placards, written and printed, were found displayed in public places, calling on the Government that had no money to let in one that had. "You thought more of your position than of our needs when Hampden offered us help," ran one that Mr Strummery found nailed to his front door. "You have always thought more of your positions than of our needs. You have used our needs to raise yourselves to those positions. Now, since you no longer represent the wishes of the People, give way to others."
The delay of the Government in throwing up an utterly untenable position was inexplicable to most people. Many said that the reason was that Hampden refused to take office under the existing franchise, and no one but Hampden could form an administration in that crisis that could hope to live for a day. Whatever the reason might be, it was obvious that the Government was drifting towards a national tragedy that would be stupendous, for in less than a month's time, it was agreed on all hands, the daily tale of starved and famished dead would have reached its thousands.
Still the Government hung on, backed in sullen submission by its automatic majority. Changes in the Cabinet were of almost daily record, but the half dozen men of prominence remained. Cecil Brown was the last of the old minor men to be dropped. A dog trainer, who had taken up politics, succeeded him. "It is too late now," Cecil Brown was reported to have said when he learned who was to be his successor. "They want bread, not circuses!"
"I do not altogether like it," said A.
"Do you prefer to leave things as they are, then?" demanded B.
A. went over and stood by the window, looking moodily out.
"It is merely a necessity," said C.
"The necessity of a necessity," suggested D. happily.
"Perhaps you are not aware," said B., addressing himself to the man standing at the window, "that the suggestion of arresting Salt did not come from us in the first case."
"Is that so?" replied A., coming back into the room. "I certainly assumed that it did."
"On the contrary," explained B., "it was Inspector Moeletter who reported to his superiors that he had succeeded in identifying the mysterious man who was seen with Leslie Garnet, the artist, about the time of his death. He would have got his warrant in the ordinary way, only in view of the remarkable position that Salt occupies just now, Stafford very naturally communicated with us."
"The only point that troubles us," remarked C. reflectively, "is that none of us can persuade himself in the remotest degree that Salt killed Garnet."
"I certainty require to have the evidence before I can subscribe to that," said B. "The man who is daily killing hundreds——"
"Ah, that is the difference," commented D.
"Where are the Monmouth colliers now?" asked C., after a pause.
"Newbury, this morning," replied D. "Reading, to-night."
"And the Midland lot?"
"Towcester, I think."
"If Hampden formally asks for protection for the oil store at Hanwood, after the miners' threat to burn it, what are you going to do?" asked A.
"I should suggest telling him to go and boil himself in it, since he has got it there," replied C.
"There will be no need to tell him anything but the bare fact, and that is that with twenty-five thousand turbulent colliers pouring into London and adding to the disaffected element already here, we cannot spare a single man," replied B.
"I quite agree with that," remarked D., drawing attention to his freshly-scarred cheek. "I had a tribute of the mob's affection as I came in this morning."
"That's your popularity," said C. "Your photograph is so much about that no one has any difficulty in recognising you. How do you get on in that way, B.?"
"I?" exclaimed B. with a startled look. "Oh, I always drive with the blinds down now."
"Are any extra military coming in before Friday?" asked A.
"Yes, the Lancers from Hounslow. They come into the empty Albany Street Barracks to-night. Then I think that there are to be some extra infantry in Whitehall, from Aldershot. Cadman is seeing to all that."
"But you know that the Lancers are being drawn from Hounslow?" asked C. with a meaning laugh.
"Yes, I know that," admitted B. "Why do you laugh, C.?"
C.'s only reply was to laugh again.
"I will tell you why he laughs," volunteered D. "He laughs, B., because the Lancers withdrawn from Hounslow to Regent's Park, Salt under arrest at Stafford, and the Monmouth colliers coming along the Bath road and passing within a mile or two of Hanwood, represent the three angles of a very acute triangle."
"There is still Hampden," muttered B.
"Yes; what is going to happen to Hampden?" asked C., with a trace of his mordant amusement.
A., who was walking about the room aimlessly, stopped and faced the others.
"I'll tell you what," he exclaimed emphatically. "I said just now that I didn't like the idea of smuggling Salt away like this, and, although it may be advisable, I don't. But I wish to God that we had openly arrested the pair of them as traitors, and burned their diabolical store before every one's eyes three months ago."
"Ah," said D. thoughtfully, "it was too early then. Now it's too late."
"It may be too late to have its full effect," flashed out B., "but it won't be too late to make them suffer a bit along with our own people."
"Provided that the oil is burned," said D.
"Provided that no protection can be sent," remarked C.
"Provided that Salt is arrested," added A.
There was a knock at the door. It explained the attitude of the four men in the room and their scattered conversation. They had been awaiting some one.
He came into the room and saluted, a powerfully-built man with "uniform" branded on every limb, although he wore plain clothes then.
"Detective-Inspector Moeletter?" said B.
"Yes, sir," said the inspector, and stood at attention.
"You have the warrant?" continued B.
Moeletter produced it, and passed it in for inspection. It was made out on the preceding day, signed by the Stipendiary Magistrate of Stafford, and it connected George Salt with Leslie Garnet by the link of Murder.
"When you applied for this warrant," said B., looking hard at the inspector, "you considered that you had sufficient evidence to support it?"
Moeletter looked puzzled for a moment, as though the question was one that he did not quite follow in that form. For a moment he seemed to be on the verge of making an explanation; then he thought better of it, and simply replied: "Yes, sir."
"At all events," continued B. hastily, "you have enough evidence to justify a remand? What are the points?"
"We have abundant evidence that Salt was in the neighbourhood about the time of the tragedy; that fact can scarcely be contested. Coming nearer, an old man, who had been hedging until the storm drove him under a high bank, saw a gentleman enter Garnet's cottage about half-past five. Without any leading he described this man accurately as Salt, and picked out his photograph from among a dozen others. About an hour later, two boys, who were bird-nesting near Stourton Hill church, heard a shot. They looked through the hedge into the graveyard and saw one man lying apparently dead on the ground, and another bending over him as though he might be going through his pockets. Being frightened, they ran away and told no one of it for some time, as boys would. Of course, sir, that's more than six months ago now, but the description they give tallies, and I think that we may claim a strong presumption of identity taking into consideration the established time of Salt's arrival at Thornley."
"That is all?" said B.
"As regards identity," replied the inspector. "On general grounds we shall show that for some time before his death Garnet had been selling shares and securities which he held, and that although he lived frugally no money was found in the remains of his house or on his person, and no trace of a banking account or other investment can be discovered. Then we allege that 'George Salt' is not the man's right name, although we have not been able to follow that up yet. He is generally understood to have been a sailor recently, and the revolver found beside the body was of a naval pattern. I should add that the medical evidence at the inquest was to the effect that the wound might have been self-inflicted, but that the angle was unusual."
B. returned the warrant to the inspector.
"That will at least ensure a remand for a week for you to continue your investigations?"
"I think so, sir."
"Without bail?"
"If it is opposed."
"We oppose it, then. Did you bring any one down with you?"
Inspector Moeletter had not done so. He had not been able to anticipate what amended instructions he might receive in London, so he had thought it as well to come alone.
"For political reasons it is desirable that nothing should be known publicly of the arrest until you have your prisoner safely at Stafford," said B. "At present he is motoring in the southern counties. I have information that he will leave Farnham this afternoon between three and half-past and proceed direct to Guildford. Is there any reason why you should not arrest him between the two places?"
Inspector Moeletter knew of none.
"It will be preferable to doing so in either town from our point of view," continued B., "and it is not known whether he intends leaving Guildford to-night."
The inspector took out an innocent-looking pocket-book, whose elastic band was a veritable hangman's noose, and noted the facts.
"Is a description of the motor-car available?" he enquired.
B. picked up a sheet of paper. "It is a large car, a 30 H.P. Daimler, with a covered body, and painted in two shades of green," he read from the paper. "The number is L.N. 7246."
"I would suggest bringing him straight on in the car," said Moeletter. "It would obviate the publicity of railway travelling."
B. nodded. "There is another thing," he said. "It is absolutely necessary to avoid the London termini. They are all watched systematically by agents of the League—spies who call themselves patriots. You will take the 7.30 train with your prisoner, but you will join it at Willesden. I will have it stopped for you."
"I shall need a man who can drive the motor to go down with me," the detective reminded him.
B. struck a bell. "Send Sergeant Tolkeith in," he said to the attendant.
Sergeant Tolkeith was apparently being kept ready in the next room, to be slipped at the fall of the flag, so to speak. He came in very smartly.
"You will remain with Inspector Moeletter while he is in London, and make all the necessary arrangements for him," instructed B. "I suppose that there are men at Scotland Yard available now who can drive every kind of motor?"