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Title: The Secret of the League
       The Story of a Social War

Author: Ernest Bramah

Release Date: November 30, 2010 [EBook #34522]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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                      THE SECRET OF THE LEAGUE

                      The Story of a Social War

                          By ERNEST BRAMAH


    THOMAS NELSON
    AND SONS




[Illustration: She began to unbuckle the frozen straps of his gear.]




CONTENTS.


I. IRENE

II. THE PERIOD, AND THE COMING OF WINGS

III. THE MILLION TO ONE CHANCE

IV. THE COMPACT

V. THE DOWNTRODDEN

VI. MISS LISLE TELLS A LONG POINTLESS STORY

VII. "SCHEDULE B"

VIII. TANTROY EARNS HIS WAGE

IX. SECRET HISTORY

X. THE ORDER OF ST. MARTIN OF TOURS

XI. MAN BETWEEN TWO MASTERS

XII. BY TELESCRIBE

XIII. THE EFFECT OF THE BOMB

XIV. THE LAST CHANCE AND THE COUNSEL OF EXPEDIENCE

XV. THE GREAT FIASCO

XVI. THE DARK WINTER

XVII. THE INCIDENT OF THE 13TH OF JANUARY

XVIII. THE MUSIC AND THE DANCE

XIX. THE "FINIS" MESSAGE

XX. STOBALT OF SALAVEIRA

XXI. THE BARGAIN OF FAMINE

XXII. "POOR ENGLAND"




THE SECRET OF THE LEAGUE.




CHAPTER I

IRENE


"I suppose I am old-fashioned"--there was a murmur of polite dissent
from all the ladies present, except the one addressed--"Oh, I take it as
a compliment nowadays, I assure you; but when I was a girl a young lady
would have no more thought of flying than of"--she paused almost on a
note of pained surprise at finding the familiar comparison of a lifetime
cut off--"well, of standing on her head."

"No," replied the young lady in point, with the unfeeling candour that
marked the youthful spirit of the age, "because it wasn't invented. But
you went bicycling, and your mothers were very shocked at first."

"I hardly think that you can say that, Miss Lisle," remarked another of
the matrons, "because I can remember that more than twenty years ago one
used to see quite elderly ladies bicycling."

"After the others had lived all the ridicule down," retorted Miss Lisle
scornfully. "Oh yes; I quite expect that in a few more years you will
see quite elderly ladies flying."

The little party of matrons seated on the Hastings promenade regarded
each other surreptitiously, and one or two smiled slightly, while one or
two shuddered slightly. "Flying is very different, dear," said Mrs Lisle
reprovingly. "I often think of what your dear grandfather used to say.
He said"--impressively--"that if the Almighty had intended that we
should fly, He would have sent us into the world with wings upon our
backs."

There was a murmur of approval from all--all except Miss Lisle, that is.

"But do you ever think of what Geoffrey replied to dear grandpapa when
he heard him say that once, mother?" said the unimpressed daughter. "He
said: 'And don't you think, sir, that if the Almighty had intended us to
use railways, He would have sent us into the world with wheels upon our
feet?'"

"I do not see any connection at all between the two things," replied her
mother distantly. "And such a remark seems to me to be simply
irreverent. Birds are born with wings, and insects, and so on, but
nothing, as far as I am aware, is born with wheels. Your grandfather
used to travel by the South Eastern regularly every day, or how could he
have reached his office? and he never saw anything wrong in using
trains, I am sure. In fact, when you think of it you will see that what
Geoffrey said, instead of being any argument, was supremely silly."

"Perhaps he intended it to be," replied Miss Lisle with suspicious
meekness. "You never know, mother."

Such a remark merited no serious attention. Why should any one, least of
all a really clever young man like Geoffrey, deliberately _intend_ to be
silly? There was too often, her mother had observed, an utter lack of
relevance in Irene's remarks.

"I think that it is a great mistake to have white flying costumes as so
many do," observed another lady. "They look--but perhaps they wish to."

"Certainly when they use lace as well it really seems as though they do.
Oh!"

There was a passing shadow across the group and a slight rustle in the
air. Scarcely a dozen yards above the promenade a young lady was flying
strongly down the wind with the languid motion of the "swan stroke." She
wore white--and lace trimming. Mrs Lisle gazed fixedly out to sea. Even
Irene felt that the vision was inopportune.

"There are always some who overdo a thing," she remarked. "There always
have been. That was only Velma St Saint of the New Gaiety; she flies
about the front every day for the advertisement of the thing: I wonder
that she doesn't drop handbills as she goes. There's plenty of room up
on the Castle Hill--in fact, you aren't supposed to fly west of the
Breakwater--but there will always be some----" A vague resentment closed
the period.

"Are you staying at the Palatial this time?" asked the lady who had
mentioned lace, feeling it tactful to change the subject. "I think that
you used to."

"Oh, haven't you seen?" was the reply. "The Palatial has been closed for
the last six months."

"Yes, it's a great pity," remarked another. "It looks so depressing too,
right on the front. But they simply could not go on. I suppose that the
rates here are something frightful now."

"Oh, enormous, my dear; but it was not that alone. The Palatial has
always aimed at being a 'popular' hotel, and so few of the upper middle
class can afford hotels now. Then the new tax on every servant above
one--calculated as fifty per cent. of their wages, I think, but there
are so many new taxes to remember--proved the last straw."

"Yes, it is fifty per cent. I remember because I had to give up my
between-maid to pay the cook's tax. But I thought that hotels were to be
exempt?"

"Not in the end. It was argued that hotels existed for the convenience
of the monied classes, and that they ought to pay for it. So a large
number of hotels are closed altogether; others work with a reduced
staff, and a great many servants have been thrown out of employment."

Miss Lisle laughed unpleasantly. "A good thing, too," she remarked. "I
hate hotel servants. So does everybody. It is the only good thing I have
heard of the Labour Government doing."

"I am sure I don't hate them," said Mrs Lisle, looking round with
pathetic resignation, "although they certainly had become rather
grasping and over-bearing of late. But it was quite an unforeseen
development of the scheme that so many should lose their places. Indeed
the special object of the tax was to create a fund--'earmarked' I think
they call it--out of which to meet the growing pension claim, now that
so few of the servant class think it worth while to save."

Miss Lisle laughed again, this time with a note of genuine amusement.

("A most unpleasant girl, I fear," murmured the lady who had raised the
white costume question, to her neighbour in a whisper: "so odd.")

"It made a great difference at the registry offices. There are a dozen
maids to be had any day where there were really none before. Only one
cannot afford to keep them now."

There was a word, a sigh, and an "Ah!" to mark this point of agreement
among the four ladies.

"I am afraid that the Government confiscation of all dividends above
five per cent. bears very heavily on some," remarked one after a pause.
"I know a poor soul of over sixty-five, nearly blind too, whose husband
had invested all his savings in the company he had worked for because he
knew that it was safe, and, having a good reserve, intended to pay ten
per cent. for a long time. When he died it brought her in fifty pounds a
year. Now----"

There were little signs of sympathy and commiseration from the group.
The sex was beginning to take an unwonted interest in terms
financial--per centage, surrender value, trustee stock, unearned
increment, and so on. They had reason to do so, for revolutionary
finance was very much in the air, or, rather, had come tangibly down to
earth at length: not the placid city echoes that were wont to ripple
gently across the breakfast-table a few years earlier without leaving
any one much better or much worse off, but the galvanic adjustment that
by a stroke made the rich well-to-do, the well-to-do just so-so, the
struggling poor, and left the poor where they were before. The frenzied
effort that in a session strove to tear up the trees of the forest and
leave the plants beneath untouched; to pull to pieces the intertwined
fabric of a thousand years' growth and to create from it a bundle of
straight and equal twigs; in a word, to administer justice on the
principle of knocking out one eye in all the sound because a number of
people were unfortunately born or fallen blind.

"Five and twenty," mused Mrs Lisle. "I suppose it is just possible."

"It is really less than that," explained the other. "You may have
noticed that as it is now no good making more than five per cent., most
companies pay even less. There is no incentive to do well."

"One hears of even worse cases on every hand," said another of the
ladies. "I am trying to interest people in a poor deformed creature
whose father left her an annuity derived from ground rents in the
City.... As it has been worked out I think that she owes the Incomes
Adjustment Department lawyers something a year now. But private charity
seems almost to have ceased altogether. Have you heard that 'Jim's' is
closed?"

It was true. St James's Hospital, whose unvarnished record was, "Three
hundred of the very poor treated freely each day," was a thing of the
past, and across its portal, where ten years before a couple of stalwart
gentlemen wearing red ties had rested for a moment, while they lit their
pipes, a banner with the strange device, "Curse your Charity!" now ran
the legend, "Closed for want of Funds."

"I wonder sometimes," mused the last speaker, "why some one doesn't do
something."

"But," objected another, "what is there to do? What is there?"

They all agreed that there was nothing--absolutely nothing. Every one
else was tacitly making the same admission; that was the fatal symptom.

Miss Lisle jumped up and began to move away unceremoniously.

"Where are you going, dear?" asked her mother in mild reproof.

"Oh, anywhere," replied Irene restlessly.

"But what for?" persisted Mrs Lisle.

"Oh, anything."

"That is 'nothing,' Miss Lisle," smiled the tactful lady of the party,
anxious to smooth over the awkwardness of the moment.

"No, it is at least something," flung back the girl brusquely; and with
swinging strides she set off at a furious pace towards the open country.

"Irene is a little impulsive at times," apologized her mother, sitting
back with placidly folded hands.




CHAPTER II

THE PERIOD, AND THE COMING OF WINGS


An intelligent South Sea Islander, who had been imported into this
country to stimulate missionary enterprise, on his return had said that
the most marked characteristic of the English of the period was what
they called "snap."

The nearest equivalent in his own language signifying literally "quick
hot words," he had some difficulty in conveying the impression he
desired, and his circle had to rest content that "snap" permeated the
journalism, commerce, politics, drama, and social life of the English,
had assailed their literature, and was beginning to influence religion,
art, and science. It may be admitted that the foreign gentleman's visit
had coincided with a period of national stress, for the week in question
had embraced the more entertaining half of a general election, seen the
advent of two new farthing daily papers, and been marked by the Rev.
Sebastian Tauthaul's striking series of addresses from the pulpit of the
City Sanctum, entitled "If Christ put up for Battersea." It had also
included the launching of a new cocoa, a new soap, and a new
concentrated food.

The new food was called "Chip-Chunks." "A name which I venture to think
spells success of itself," complacently remarked its inventor. "A very
good name indeed," admitted his advertising manager. "It has the great
desideratum that it might be anything, and, on the other hand, it might
equally well be nothing." "Just so," said the inventor with weighty
approval; "just so." A "snap-line" was required that would ineradicably
fix Chip-Chunks in the public mind, and "Bow-wow! Feel chippy? Then
champ Chip-Chunks" was found in an inspired moment. It was, of course,
fully cooked and already quite digested. It was described as the delight
of the unweaned infant, the mainstay of the toothless nonagenarian, and
so simple and wholesome that it could be safely taken and at once
assimilated by the invalid who had undergone the operation of having his
principal organ of digestion removed. So little, indeed, remained for
nature and the human parts to do in the matter of Chip-Chunks as to
raise the doubt whether it might not be simpler and scarcely less
nutritive to open the tin and pour the contents down the drain
forthwith.

As Chip-Chunks was designed for those who were disinclined to exercise
the functions of digestion, so Isabella soap made an appeal to those who
disliked work and had something of an antipathy to soap at all. One did
not wash with Isabella, it was assured: one sat down and watched it. It
had its "snap-lines," too:

"You write it 'wash,' but you call it 'wosh.'

"What is the difference?

"There is 'a' difference.

"There is also 'a' difference between Isabella soap and all other soaps:

"All the difference.

"That's our point. Put it in your washtub and watch it."

       *       *       *       *       *

Cocoa was approached in a more sober spirit. Soap may blow bubbles of
light and airy fancy, pills _ricochet_ from one gay conceit to another,
meat extracts gambol with the irresponsible exuberance of bulls in china
cups, but cocoa relied upon sincerity and statistics. Kingcup cocoa was
the last word of the expert. It won its way into the great heart of the
people by driving home the significant fact that it contained .00001 per
cent. more phosphorus, and .000002 per cent. less of something fatty,
than any other cocoa in existence. When the newspaper reader of the
period had been confronted by this assertion, in various guises,
seventeen thousand times, he had reached a state of mind in which .00001
per cent. more phosphorus and .000002 per cent. less fat represented the
difference between vigorous manhood and drivelling imbecility.

The Rev. Sebastian was all "snap." His topical midday
addresses--described by himself as "Seven minutes
sandwich-sermonettes"--have already been referred to. Young men who were
pressed for time were bidden to bring their bath buns or buttered scones
and eat openly and unashamed. Workmen with bread and cheese and pots of
beer were welcomed with effusion. This particular series extended over
the working days of a week, and was subdivided thus:

    _Monday._--The Issues before the Constituency.

    _Tuesday._--His Address to the Electors.

    _Wednesday._--The Day of the Contest.

    _Thursday._--Which Way are you Voting?

    _Friday._--Spoiled Papers.

    _Saturday._--At the Top of the Poll and the Leader of
    our Party.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of the new papers, of their sprightliness, their enterprise, their
general all-roundness, their almost wicked experience of the ways of the
world, from a quite up-to-date fund of junior office witticism to a
knowledge of the existence of actresses who do not act, outwardly
respectable circles of society who play cards for money on Sunday, and
(exclusively for the benefit of their readers) places where quite
high-class provisions (only nominally damaged) could be bought cheap on
Saturday nights, it is unnecessary to say much. Of their irresponsible
cock-sureness, their bristling combativeness, their amazing powers of
prophetic penetration, and, it must be confessed, their ineradicable air
of somewhat second-rate infant phenomenonship, their crumbling yellow
files still bear witness. As a halfpenny is half a penny, so a farthing
is half a halfpenny, and the mind that is not too appalled by the
possibilities of the development can people for itself this journalistic
Eden.

_The Whip_ described its programme as "Vervy and nervy; brainy and
champagny." _The Broom_ relied more on solider attractions of the "News
of the World in Pin Point Pars" and "Knowledge in Nodules" order. Both
claimed to be written exclusively by "brainy" people, and both might
have added, with equal truth, read exclusively by brainless. Avowedly
appealing "to the great intellect of the nation," neither fell into the
easy mistake of aiming too high, and the humblest son of toil might take
them up with the fullest confidence of finding nothing from beginning to
end that was beyond his simple comprehension.

But the most cursory review of national "snappishness" would be
incomplete if it omitted the field of politics, especially when the
period in question contained so concentrated an accumulation of "snap"
as a general election. Contests had long ceased to be decided on the
merits of individuals or of parties, still less to be the occasions for
deliberate consideration of policy. Each group had its label and its
"snap-cries." The outcome as a whole--the decision of each division with
few exceptions--lay in the hands of a class which, while educated to the
extent of a little reading and a little writing, was practically
illiterate in thought, in experience, and in discrimination. To them a
"snap-cry" was eminently suited, as representing a concrete idea and
being in fact the next best argument to a decayed egg. That national
disaster had never so far been evolved out of this rough-and-ready
method could be traced to a variety of saving clauses. At such a time
the strict veracity of the cries raised was not to be too closely
examined; indeed, there was not the time for contradiction, and therein
lay the essence of some of the most successful "snaps."

Misrepresentation, if on a sufficiently large scale, was permissible,
but it was advisable to make it wholesale, lurid, and applied not to an
individual but to a party--emphasising, of course, the fact that your
opponent was irretrievably pledged to that party through thick and thin.

In other words, it was quite legitimate for A to declare that the policy
of the party to which his opponent B belonged was a policy of murder,
rapine, piracy, black-mail, highway robbery, extermination, and
indiscriminate bloodshed; that they had swum to office on a sea of tears
racked from the broken hearts of an outraged peasantry, risen to power
on the apex of a smoking hecatomb of women and children, and kept their
position by methods of ruthless barbarism; that assassination, polygamy,
thuggeeism, simony, bureaucracy, and perhaps even an additional penny on
the poor man's tea, would very likely be found included in their
official programme; that they were definitely pledged to introduce
Kalmucks and Ostyaks into the Government Dock-yards, who would work in
chained gangs, be content with three farthings for a fourteen hours'
day, and live exclusively on engine waste and barley-water.

This and much more was held to be fair political warfare which should
not offend the keenest patriot. But if A so far descended to vulgar
personalities as to accuse B himself of employing an urchin to scare
crows at eightpence a day when the trade union rate for crow-scaring was
ninepence, he stood a fair chance of having an action for libel or
defamation of character on his hands in addition to an election.

Under such a system the least snappy went to the wall. Happy was the man
who was armed not necessarily with a just cause, but with a name that
lent itself to topical alliteration. Who could resist the appeal to

    Vote for Frank          Blarney.
             Fresh          Brooms in Parliament.
             Fewer          Bungles during the next five years.
             Financial      Betterment at home.
             Free           Breakfast-tables for the People.
             Flourishing    Businesses all round.

--especially when it was coupled with the reminder that

Every vote given to A. J. Wallflower is a slice of bread filched from
your innocent children's hard-earned loaf.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of course the schools could not escape the atmosphere. The State-taught
children were wonderfully snappy--for the time being. Afterwards, it
might be noticed, that when the props were pulled away they were
generally either annoyingly dull or objectionably pert, or, perhaps,
offensively dully-pert, according to whether their nature was backward
or forward, or a mixture of both. The squad-drilled units could remember
wonderfully well--for the time; they could apply the rules they learned
in just the way they were taught to apply them--for the time. But they
could not remember what they had not been drilled to remember; they
could not apply the rules in any other way; they could not apply the
principles at all; and they could not think.

High and low, children were not allowed to think; with ninety-nine
mothers out of a hundred its proper name was "idleness." "I do not like
to see you sitting down doing nothing, dear," said every mother to every
daughter plaintively. "Is there no sewing you might do?" So the would-be
thoughtful child was harried into working, or playing, or eating, or
sleeping, as though a mind contentedly occupied with itself was an
unworthy or a morbid thing.

Yet it was a too close adherence to the national character that proved
to be the undoing of Wynchley Slocombe, who is now generally admitted to
have been the father of the form of aerial propulsion so widely enjoyed
to-day. Like everybody else, he had read the offer of the Traffic and
Locomotion Department of a substantial reward for a satisfactory
flying-machine, embracing "any contrivance ... that would by
demonstration enable one or more persons, freed from all earth-support
or connection (_a_) to remain stationary at will, at any height between
50 and 1500 feet; (_b_) at that height to travel between two points one
mile apart within a time limit of seven minutes and without deviating
more than fifty yards from a straight line connecting the two points;
(_c_) to travel in a circle of not less than three miles in
circumference within a time limit of fifteen minutes." Wynchley took an
ordinary intelligent interest in the subject, but he had no thought of
competing.

It was not until the last day of the period allowed for submitting plans
that Wynchley's great idea occurred to him. There was then no time for
elaborating the germ or for preparing the requisite specifications, even
if he had any ability to do so, which he had not, being, in fact, quite
ignorant of the subject. But he remembered hearing in his youth that
when a former Government of its day had offered a premium for a
convenient method of dividing postage stamps (until that time sold in
unperforated sheets and cut up as required by the users), the successful
competitor had simply tendered the advice, "Punch rows of little holes
between them." In the same spirit Wynchley Slocombe took half a sheet of
silurian notepaper (now become famous, and preserved in the South
Kensington Museum) and wrote on it, "Fasten on a pair of wings, and
practise! practise!! practise!!!" It was to be the aerial counterpart of
"Gunnery! Gunnery!! Gunnery!!!"

Unfortunately, the departmental offices were the only places in England
where "snap" was not recognised. Wynchley was regarded as a suicidal
lunatic--a familiar enough figure in flying-machine circles--and his
suggestion was duly pigeon-holed without consideration.

The subsequent career of the unhappy man may be briefly stated.
Disappointed in his hopes of an early recognition, and not having
sufficient money at his disposal to demonstrate the practicability of
his idea, he took to writing letters to the President of the Board, and
subsequently to waylaying high officials and demanding interviews with
them. Dismissed from his situation for systematic neglect of duty, he
became a "poor litigant with a grievance" at the Law Courts, and
periodically applied for summonses against the Prime Minister, the Lord
Mayor of London, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Still later his name
became a by-word as that of a confirmed window-breaker at the Government
offices. A few years afterwards, a brief paragraph in one or two papers
announced that Wynchley Slocombe, "who, some time ago, gained an
unenviable notoriety on account of his hallucinations," had committed
suicide in a Deptford model lodging-house.

In the meanwhile two plans for flying-machines had been selected as
displaying the most merit, and their inventors were encouraged to press
on with the construction under a monetary grant. Both were finished
during the same week, and for the sake of comparison they were submitted
to trial on the same day upon Shorncliffe plain. _Vimbonne VI._, which
resembled a much-distended spider with outspread legs, made the first
ascent. According to instructions, it was to demonstrate its ability to
go in a straight line by descending in a field near the Military Canal,
beyond Seabrook, but from the moment of its release it continued to
describe short circles with a velocity hitherto unattained in any
air-ship, until its frantic constructor was too dizzy to struggle with
its mechanism any longer. The _Moloch_ was then unmoored, and took up
its position stationary at a height of 1000 feet with absolute
precision. It was built on the lines of a gigantic centipede, with two
rows of clubby oars beneath, and ranked as the popular favourite. Being
instructed, for the sake of variety, to begin with the three mile
circle, the _Moloch_ started out to sea on the flash of the gun, the
sinuous motion that rippled down its long vertebrate body producing an
effect, accidental but so very life-like, that many of the vast
concourse assembled on the ground turned pale and could not follow it
unmoved....

There have been many plausible theories put forward by experts to
account for the subsequent disaster, but for obvious reasons the real
explanation can never progress beyond the realms of conjecture, for the
_Moloch_, instead of bending to the east, encircling Folkestone and its
suburbs, and descending again in the middle of Shorncliffe Camp,
continued its unswerving line towards the coast of France, and never
held communication with civilised man again.

So exact was its course, however, that it was easy to trace its passage
across Europe. It reached Boulogne about four o'clock in the afternoon,
and was cheered vociferously under the pathetic impression that
everything was going well. Amiens saw it a little to the east in the
fading light of evening, and a few early citizens of Dijon marked it
soon after dawn. Its passage over the Alps was accurately timed and
noted at several points, and the Italian frontier had a glimpse of it,
very high up, it was recorded, at nightfall. A gentleman of Ajaccio,
travelling in the interior of the island, thought that he had seen it
some time during the next day; and several Tripoli Greeks swore that it
had passed a few yards above their heads a week later; but the testimony
of the Corsican was deemed the more reliable of the two. A relief
expedition was subsequently sent out and traversed a great part of
Africa, but although the natives in the district around the Albert
Nyanza repeatedly prostrated themselves and smacked their thighs
vigorously--the tribal signs of fear and recognition--when shown a small
working model of the _Moloch_, no further trace was ever obtained of it.

The accident had a curious sequel in the House of Commons, which
significantly illustrates how unexpected may be the ultimate
developments of a chain of circumstance. It so happened that in addition
to its complement of hands, the _Moloch_ carried an assistant
under-secretary to the Board of Agriculture. This gentleman, who had
made entomology a lifelong study, was invaluable to his office, and the
lamentable consequence of his absence was that when the President of the
Board rose the following night to answer a question respecting the
importation of lady-birds to arrest an aphis plague then devastating the
orchards of the country, he ingenuously displayed so striking an
unfamiliarity with the subject that his resignation was demanded, the
Government discredited, and a dissolution forced. In particular, the
hon. gentleman convulsed the House by referring throughout to lady-birds
as "the female members of the various feathered tribes," and warmly
defending their importation as the only satisfactory expedient in the
circumstances.

Wynchley's suggestion remained on file for the next few years, and would
doubtless have crumbled to dust unfruitfully had it not been for a
trivial incident. A junior staff clerk, finding himself to be without
matches one morning, and hesitating to mutilate the copy of--let us say,
the official Pink Paper which he was reading at the moment,
absent-mindedly tore a sheet haphazard from a bundle close at hand. As
he lit his cigarette, the name of Wynchley Slocombe caught his eye and
stirred a half-forgotten memory, for the unfortunate Wynchley had been a
stock jest in the past.

Herbert Baedeker Phipps now becomes a force in the history of aerial
conquest. He smoothed out the paper from which he had only torn off a
fragment, read the stirring "Practise! Practise!! Practise!!!" (at least
it has since been recognised to be stirring--stirring, inspired, and
pulsating with the impassioned ardour of neglected genius), and pondered
deeply to the accompaniment of three more cigarettes. Was there anything
in it? Why could not people fly by means of artificial wings? There had
been attempts; how did the enthusiasts begin? Usually by precipitating
themselves out of an upper window in the first flush of their
self-confidence. They were killed, and wings fell into disfavour; but
the same result would attend the unsophisticated novice who made his
first essay in swimming by diving off a cliff into ten fathoms deep of
water. Here, even in a denser medium, was the admitted necessity for
laborious practice before security was assured.

Phipps looked a step further. By nature man is ill-equipped for flying,
whereas he possesses in himself all the requisites for successful
propulsion through the water. Yet he needs practice in water; more
practice therefore in air. For thousands of years mankind has been
swimming and thereby lightening the task for his descendants, to such an
extent that in certain islands the children swim almost naturally, even
before they walk; whereas, with the solitary exception of a certain
fabled gentleman who made the attempt so successfully and attained such
a height that the sun melted the wax with which he had affixed his wings
(Styckiton in convenient tubes not being then procurable), no man has
ever flown. More, more practice. The very birds themselves, Phipps
remembered, first require parental coaching in the art, while aquatic
creatures and even the amphibia take to that element with developed
faculties from their birth. Still more need of practice for ungainly
man. Here, he was convinced, lay the whole secret of failure and
possible success. "Practise! Practise!! Practise!!!" The last word was
with Wynchley Slocombe.




CHAPTER III

THE MILLION TO ONE CHANCE


So wings came--to stay, every one admitted, although most people
complained that after all flying was not so wonderful when one could do
it as they thought it would have been. For at the first glance the
popular fancy had inclined towards pinning on a pair of gauzy appendages
and soaring at once into empyrean heights with the spontaneity of a
lark, or of lightly fluttering from point to point with the ease and
grace of a butterfly. They found that a pair of wings cost rather more
than a high-grade bicycle, and that the novice who could struggle from
the stage into a net placed twenty yards away, after a month's course of
daily practices, was held to be very promising. There was no more talk
of England lying at the mercy of any and every invader; for one man, and
one only, had so far succeeded in crossing even the Channel, and that at
its narrowest limit. For at least three years after the conversion of
Phipps the generality of people gleaned their knowledge of the progress
of flying from the pages of the comic papers. To the comic papers wings
had been sent as an undiluted blessing.

But if alatics, in their infancy, did not come up to the wider
expectation, there were many who found in it a novel and exhilarating
sport. There were also those who, discovering something congenial in the
new force, set quietly and resolutely to work to develop its
possibilities and to raise it above the level of a mere fashionable
novelty. There have always been some, a few, not infrequently
Englishmen, who have unostentatiously become pre-eminent in every
development of science with a fixity of purpose. Their names rarely
appear in the pages of history, but they largely write it.

Hastings permitted mixed flying. It was a question that had embittered
many a town council. To one section it seemed intolerable that a father,
a husband, or a brother should be torn for twenty minutes from the side
of his female relatives; to the opposing section it seemed horrible that
coatless men should be allowed to spread their wings within a hundred
and fifty yards of shoeless women.

"I have no particular convictions," one prominent citizen remarked, "but
in view of the existing railway facilities it is worth while considering
whether we shall have any visitors at all this season if we stand in the
way of families flying down together." The humour of the age was flowing
mordaciously, even as the wit of France had done little more than a
century before. The readiest jests carried a tang, whether turning upon
personal poverty, municipal extravagance, or national incapacity.
Opinion being evenly divided, the local rate of seventeen shillings in
the pound influenced the casting vote in favour of mixed flying. There
were necessary preparations, including a captive balloon in which an
ancient mariner, decked out with a pair of wings like a superannuated
Cupid, was posted to render assistance to the faltering. The rates at
once rose to seventeen shillings and sixpence, but the principle of the
enterprise was admitted to be sound.

So on this pleasant summer afternoon--an ideal day for a fly, said every
one--the heights above the old town were echoing to the ceaseless gaiety
of the watching crowd, for alatics had not yet ceased to be a novelty,
while the air above was cleft by a hundred pairs of beating wings.

"A remarkable sight," said an old man who had opened conversation with
the sociable craving of the aged; "ten years ago we little expected
this."

"Why, no," replied his chance acquaintance on the seat; "if I remember
rightly, the tendency was all towards a combination either of a balloon
and a motor-car or of a submarine and a band-box."

"You don't fly yourself?"

The young man--and he was a stalwart enough youth--looked at himself
critically as if mentally picturing the effect of a pair of wings upon
his person. "Well, no," he replied; "one doesn't get the time for
practice. Then consider the price of the things. And the annual
licence--oh, they won't let you forget _that_, I assure you. Well, is it
worth it?"

The old man shook his head in harmonious agreement; decidedly for him it
was not worth it. "Perhaps you are in Somerset House?" he remarked
tentatively. It is not the young who are curious; they have the
fascinating study of themselves.

"Not exactly," replied the other, veiling by this diplomatic ambiguity
an eminent firm of West End drapers; "but I happen to have rather
exceptional chances of knowing what is going on behind the scenes in
London. I can assure you, sir, that in spite of the last sixpence on the
income-tax and the hen-roost tax, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has
sent out stringent orders to whip up every penny in the hope of
lessening a serious deficit."

"There may possibly be a deficit," admitted the old man with bland
assurance; "but what do a few millions, either one way or the other,
matter to a country with our inexhaustible resources? We are certainly
passing through a period of financial depression, but the unfailing
lesson of the past has been that a cycle of bad years is inevitably
followed by a cycle of good years, and in the competition with foreign
countries our advantage of free trade ensures our pre-eminence." For it
is a mistake now to ascribe optimism to youth. Those youths have by this
time grown up into old men. Age is the optimist because it has seen so
many things "come right," so many difficulties "muddled through." Also
because they who would have been pessimistic old men have worried
themselves into early graves. Your unquenchable optimist needs no pill
to aid digestion. "Then," he concluded, "why trouble yourself
unnecessarily on a beautiful day like this!"

"Oh, it doesn't trouble me," laughed the other man; "at least the
deficit doesn't; nor the income-tax, I regret to say. But I rather kick
at ten per cent. on my season ticket and a few other trifles when I
consider that there used to be better national value without them. And I
rather think that most others have had about enough of it."

"Patience, patience; you are a young man yet. Look round. I don't think
I ever saw the grass greener for the time of the year, and in my front
garden I noticed only to-day that the syringa is out a full week earlier
than I can remember.... Eh! What is it? Which way? Where?"

The clerk was on his feet suddenly, and standing on the seat. Every one
was standing up, and all in a common impulse were pointing to the sky.
Some--women--screamed as they stood and watched, but after a gasp of
horrified surprise, like a cry of warning cut short because too late,
the mingling noises of the crowd seemed to shrink away in a breath.
Every one had read of the sickening tragedies of broken cross-rods or of
sudden loss of wing-power--ærolanguisis it was called--and one was
taking place before their eyes. High up, very high at first, and a
little to the east, a female figure was cleaving headlong through the
air, and beyond all human power to save.

So one would have said; so every one indeed assumed; and when a second
later another figure crossed their range it only heralded a double
tragedy. It drew a gasp ... a gasp that lingered, spun out long and
turned to one loud, tumultuous shout. The next minute men were shouting
incoherently, dancing wildly, shaking hands with all and any, and
expressing frantic relief in a hundred frantic ways.

Thus makes his timely entry into this chronicle Gatacre Stobalt, and
reviewing the progress of flying as it then immaturely stood, it is not
too much to say that no other man could have turned that tragedy. With
an instinctive judgment of time, distance, angle, and his own powers,
Stobalt, from a hundred feet above, had leapt as a diver often leaps as
he leaves the plank, and with rigid outstretched wings was dropping
earthward on all but a plummet line. It was the famous "razor-edge"
stroke at its narrowest angle, the delight of strong and daring fliers,
the terror of those who watched beneath. It may be realised by ascending
to the highest point of St Paul's and contemplating a dive into the
flooded churchyard.

The moment was a classic one in the history of the wing. The air had
claimed its victims as the waters have; and there was a legitimate
pride, since the enterprise was no longer foolhardy, that they had never
been withheld. But never before had a rescue been effected beyond the
limits of the nets; it was not then deemed practicable and the axiom of
the sport "A broken wing is a broken neck," so far held good. Yet here
was a man, no novice in the art, deliberately pointing sheer to earth on
a line that must bring him, if unswervingly maintained, into contact
with the falling girl beneath. Up to that point the attempt would have
been easy if daring, beyond it nothing but the readiest self-possession
and the most consummate skill could avert an irretrievable disaster to
himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

"You have not even had the curiosity to ask if I am hurt yet." Her voice
certainly was.

"X = - 4 {C^2} {x^3}," murmured Stobalt abstractedly. "I assure you," he
explained, leaving the higher mathematics at her reproach, "that I had
quite satisfied myself that you were not.... It all turns on the extra
tension thrown on the crank by the additional three feathers. I am
convinced that English makers have gone as far as they safely can in
that direction." He glanced at her wings as he mused. They were of the
familiar detached feather--or "venetian blind," as it was commonly
called--pattern, and wonderfully graceful in their long sweep and
elegant poise. Made of the purest white celluloid, just tinted with a
delicate and deepening pink at the base, they harmonised with her
sea-green costume as faultlessly as the lily with the leaves it springs
from. Stobalt himself used the more difficult but much more powerful
"bat" shape, built up of gold-beaters' skin; he had already folded them
in rest, but in those early days the prudish conventions of the air
debarred the girl from seeking a like repose.

"I should certainly discard the three outside feathers," he summed up.

"I shall certainly discard the whole thing," she replied. "I do not know
which felt the worse--being killed or being saved."

He made a gesture that would seem to say that the personal details of
the adventure were better dismissed. He was plainly a man of few words,
but the mechanical defect still held his interest.

"One understands that a brave man always dislikes being thanked," she
continued a little nervously; "and, indeed, what can I say to thank you?
You have saved my life, and I know that it must have been at a
tremendous risk to yourself."

"I think," he said, "that the sooner you forget the incident.... That
and the removal of those three feathers." His gestures were deliberate
and the reverse of vivacious, but when he glanced up and moved a hand,
it at once conveyed to the girl that in his opinion nothing else need
stand in the way of her recovered powers and confidence.

"And there is," she said timidly, "nothing?" Precisely what there might
be had not occurred to her satisfactorily.

"Nothing," he said, without the air of being heroic in his generosity.
"Unless," he added, "you care to promise that you will not let----" He
stopped with easy self-possession and turned enquiringly to a man in
some official dress who had suddenly appeared in the glade.

"Have you a licence?" demanded the official, ignoring Stobalt and
addressing himself in a style that at one time would have been deemed
objectionably abrupt, to the lady. He was in point of fact a policeman,
and from a thong on his wrist swung a truncheon, while the butt of a
revolver showed at his belt. He wore no number or identifying mark, for
it had long since been agreed that it must be objectionable to their
finer feelings to treat policemen as though they were--one cannot say
convicts, for a sympathetic Home Secretary had already discontinued the
numbering of convicts on the ground that it created a state of things
"undistinguishable from slavery," though not really slavery--but as
though they were railway bridges or district council lamp-posts. "Treat
a man as a dog, and he becomes a dog," had been the invincible argument
of the band of humanitarians who had introduced what was known as the
"Get-up-when-you-like-and-have-what-you-want" system of prison
discipline, and "Treat a man as a lamp-post, and he becomes a
lamp-post," had been the logical standpoint of the Amalgamated Union of
Policemen and Plain Clothes Detectives.

"Yes," replied the girl, and her voice had not quite that agreeable
intonation that members of the force usually hear from the lips of fair
young ladies nowadays. "Do you wish to see it?"

"What else should I ask you if you had one for?" he demanded with the
innate boorishness of the heavy-witted man. "Of course I want to see
it."

She opened the little bag that hung from her girdle and handed him a
paper without a word.

"Muriel Ursula Percy Sleigh Hampden?" It would be idle to pretend that
the names pleased him, or that he tried to veil his contempt.

"Yes," she replied.

He indicated his private disbelief--or possibly merely took a ready
means of exercising his authority in a way that he knew to be
offensive--by producing a small tin box from one of his pockets and
passing it to her without any explanation. The requirement was so
universal in practice, however, that no explanation was necessary, for
the signature, as the chief mark of identification, had long been
superseded by the simpler and more effective thumb-sign. Miss Hampden
made a slight grimace when she saw the condition of the soft wax which
the box contained, but she obediently pressed it with her thumb and
passed it back again. As her licence bore another thumb-sign, stamped in
pigment, it was only necessary for the constable to compare the two (a
process simplified by the superimposing glass, a contrivance not unlike
a small opera-glass with converging tubes) in order to satisfy himself
at once whether the marks were the impress of the same thumb. Apparently
they were, for with a careless "Right-O," he proceeded on his way,
swinging his truncheon with an easy grace, and occasionally striking off
the end of an overhanging branch.

"I wonder," said Stobalt, when at length the zealous officer had quite
disappeared in search of other fields for tactful activity, "I wonder if
you are a daughter of Sir John Hampden?"

"Yes," she replied, looking at him with renewed interest. "His only
daughter. Do you know my father?"

He shook his head. "I have been away, but we see the papers sometimes,"
he said. "The Sir John I mean," he explained, as though the point were a
matter of some moment, "was a few years ago regarded as the one man who
might unite our parties and save the position."

"There is only one Sir John Hampden," she replied. "But it was too
late."

"Oh yes," he admitted vaguely, dismissing the subject.

Both were silent for a few minutes; it might be noticed that people
often became thoughtful when they spoke of the past in those years.
Indeed, an optimist might almost have had some ground for believing that
a thinking era had begun.

When he spoke again it was with something of an air of constraint. "You
asked me just now if there was--anything. Well, I have since
thought----"

"Yes?" she said encouragingly.

"I have thought that I should like to meet your father. I hear
everywhere that he is the most inaccessible man in London; but perhaps
if you could favour me with a line of introduction----"

"Oh yes," she exclaimed gladly. "I am sure that he would wish to thank
you. I will write to-morrow."

"I have paper and a pencil here," he suggested. "I have been a sailor,"
he added, as though that simple statement explained an omnipercipient
resourcefulness; as perhaps it did.

"If you prefer it," she said, accepting the proffered stationery. It did
not make the least difference, she told herself, but this business-like
expedition chilled her generous instincts.

"I leave for town to-night," was all he vouchsafed.

For a few minutes she wrote in silence, while he looked fixedly out to
sea. "What name am I to write, please?" she asked presently.

"Oh, Salt--George Salt," he replied in a matter-of-fact voice, and
without turning his head.

"Is it 'Mr Salt,' or 'Captain,' or----?"

"Just 'Mr,' please. And"--his voice fell a little flat in spite of
himself, but he did not meet her eyes--"and would it be too much if I
asked you to mention the circumstances under which we met?"

She bent a little lower over the paper in a shame she could not then
define. "I will not fail to let my father know how heroic you have been,
and to what an extent we are indebted to you," she replied
dispassionately.

"Thank you." Suddenly he turned with an arresting gesture, and impulsive
speech trembled on his tongue. But the sophistries of explanation,
apology, self-extenuation, were foreign to the nature of this strong
keen-featured man, whose grey and not unkindly eyes had gained their
tranquil depth from long intercourse with sea and sky--those two masters
who teach the larger things of life. The words were never spoken, his
arm fell down again, and the moment passed.

"I have never," he was known to say with quiet emphasis in later years,
"regretted silence. I have never given way to an impulse and spoken
hastily without regretting speech."

The London evening papers were being cried in the streets of the old
Cinque Port as "George Salt" walked to the station a few hours later. A
general election was drawing to its desultory close, but the results
seemed to excite curiously little interest among the well-dressed,
leisured class that filled the promenades. It was a longer sweep of the
pendulum than had ever been anticipated in the days when politics were
more or less the pastime of the rich, and the working classes neither
understood nor cared to understand them--only understood that whatever
else happened nothing ever came their way.

The man who had been a sailor bought two papers of very different views,
the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the orthodox labour organ called _The
Masses_. Neither rejoiced, but to despair _The Masses_ added a note of
ingenuous surprise as it summarised the contest as a whole. This was how
the matter stood:

    POSITION OF PARTIES AT THE DISSOLUTION
    Labour Members     300
    Socialists         140
    Liberals           112
    Unionists           40

    PARTY GAINS
    Socialist Gains        204
    Moderate Labour Gains    5
    Imperial Party Gains     0

    POSITION OF PARTIES IN THE NEW PARLIAMENT
    Socialists                           344
    Moderate Labour Party (all groups)   179
    Combined Imperial Party (Liberals and
    Unionists)                            68

(The above returns do not include the Orkney and Shetland Islands.)

    Socialist majority over all possible combinations   97

There is no need to trace the development of political events leading up
to this position. It lends itself to summary. The Labour party had come
into power by pointing out to voters of the working classes that its
members were their brothers, and promising them a great deal of property
belonging to other people and a good many privileges which they
vehemently denounced in every other class. When in power they had thrown
open the doors of election to one and all. The Socialist party had come
into power by pointing out to voters of the working classes that its
members were even more their brothers, and promising them a still larger
share of other people's property (some, indeed, belonging to the more
prosperous of the Labour representatives then in office) and still
greater privileges. Yet the editor of _The Masses_ was both pained and
surprised at the result.




CHAPTER IV

THE COMPACT


A strong man and a prominent politician, Sir John Hampden had occupied
the unfamiliar position in Parliament of belonging to no party. To no
party, that is, as the term had then been current in English politics;
for, more discerning than most of his contemporaries, he had foreseen
the obliteration of the existing boundaries and the phenomenal growth of
purely class politics even in the old century. It was, he recognised, to
be that development of the franchise with which the world was later to
become tolerably familiar: civil war on constitutional lines. His
warnings fell on very stony ground. The powers that had never yet
prepared for war abroad until the enemy had comfortably occupied all the
strategic points, lest they should wound some wily protesting old
gentleman's susceptibilities, were scarcely likely to take time by the
forelock--or even by a hind fetlock, to enlarge the comparison--at home.
While the Labour party was bringing pressure upon the Government of the
day to grant an extension of suffrage that made Labour the master of
eight out of every ten constituencies, the two great classical parties
were quarrelling vehemently whether £5000 should be spent upon a
sanatorium at Hai Yang and £5,000,000 upon a dockyard at Pittiescottie,
or £5,000,000 upon a dockyard at Hai Yang and £5000 upon a sanatorium at
Pittiescottie. When it is added that the Labour party was definitely
pledged to the inauguration of universal peace by declining to go to war
on any provocation, and looked towards wholesale disarmament as the
first means of economy on attaining office, the cataclysmal humour of
the situation becomes apparent.

They attained office, as it has been seen, thanks largely to the great
Liberal party whom they succeeded. The great Liberal party, like the
editor of _The Masses_ some years later, was pained and surprised at
this ingratitude. The great Liberal party had never contemplated such a
development, and through thick and thin had insisted upon regarding the
Labour party as its ally, notwithstanding the fact that the "ally" had
always laughed uproariously at the "alliance," and had pleasantly
announced its intention of strewing Westminster with the wreckage of all
existing capitalistic parties when once it was strong enough to do so.

Little wonder that that great Liberal Administration was destined to
pass down to future ages as the "House of Pathetic Fools." Posterity
adjudicated that no greater example of servile fatuousness could be
produced. This was unjust, for on 20th June 1792, Louis XVI., certainly,
let it be admitted, harder pressed, had accepted a red "cap of liberty,"
and putting it on in obedience to the command of the "extreme party" of
his time, had bowed right and left with ingratiating friendliness, while
a Labour gentleman, bearing upon a pike a raw cow's heart labelled "The
heart of an aristocrat," roared out, with his twenty thousand friends,
an amused approval.

It was out of the material of the two great traditional parties that Sir
John Hampden tried to create his "class" coalition to meet the new
conditions. The spectacle of working men suddenly dropping party
differences and merging into a solid phalanx of labour was before their
eyes, but the Tories were disintegrated and inert, the Whigs
self-satisfied and cock-sure. The years of grace--just so many years as
Sir John was before his contemporaries--passed. Then came a brief
period, desperate indeed, but not hopeless, while something might yet be
done; but the leaders of the historical parties were waiting for some
happy chance by which they might retract and yet preserve their dignity.
It was during this crisis that the party whose idea of dignity was
symbolised by the escort of a brass band on a green-grocer's cart,
abolished the House of Lords, suspended the naval programme, and
confiscated all ecclesiastical landed property. Panic reigned, but there
could be no appeal, for the party in power had never concealed their
aims and aspirations, and now that they had been returned, they were
only carrying out their promises.

That is putting their position so mildly as to be almost unjust. They
were, indeed, among political parties the only one immaculate and beyond
reproach. All others had trimmed and whittled, promised and recalled,
sworn and forsworn, till political assurances were emptier than
libertines' vows. The Socialists had nailed their manifesto to the mast,
and no man could charge them with duplicity. On every platform from
Caithness to Cornwall they had stood openly and declared: We are the
enemies to Capital; we are at war with Society as it is at present
constituted; we are for the forcible distribution of wealth, however
come by, the abolition of class distinctions, and the levelling of
humanity, with the unskilled labourer as the ideal standard.

"Good fellows all," had, in effect, declared their Liberal "allies,"
"and they do not really mean that--not phraseologically accurately, that
is. We go in for a little, say, serpent-charming ourselves at election
times, and when these excellent men are in Parliament the refining
influence of the surroundings will tone them down wonderfully, and they
will turn out thoroughly moderate and conciliatory members."

"Don't you make any error about that, comrades," the Socialistic-Labour
candidates had replied; and with a candour unparalleled in the history
of electioneering they had not merely hinted this or said it among
themselves, but had freely and honourably proclaimed it to the four
winds. "If you like to help us just now that's your affair, and we are
quite willing to profit by it. But if you knew what you were doing, you
would go home and all have the nightmare."

"So naïve!" smiled the great Liberal party. "Suppose they have to talk
like that at present to please the unemployed."

Then came the deluge. Sir John Hampden could have every section of the
middle and upper class political parties to lead if he so deigned, but
wherever else he might lead them there was no possible hope of it being
to St. Stephen's. It was, as his daughter had said, then too late.
Labour members of one complexion or another had captured three-quarters
of the constituencies, and there was not the slightest chance of ousting
them.

So it came about that in less than a decade from the first alarm, the
extremity of the patriot's hope was that in perhaps twenty years' time,
when the country was reduced to bankruptcy and the position of a third
class power, and when there was no more property to confiscate in the
interest of the working class voter, a popular rising or a foreign
invasion might again place a responsible administration in power. But in
the meantime the organisations of the old parties fell to pieces, the
parties themselves ceased to be powers, their leaders were half
forgotten. Sir John Hampden might still be a rallying point if he raised
a standard in a time of renewed hope, but there was no hope, and Sir
John was reported to have broken his staff, drowned his books, and cut
himself off from politics in the bitterness of his indignation and
impotent despair.

It was in something very like this mood that George Salt found him, and
it was an issue of the mood that would have made him inaccessible to a
less resourceful man. Day after day he had denied himself to his old
associates, and little disappointed hucksters who were anxious to betray
their party for their conscience' sake--provided there was a definite
offer of a more lucrative position in a new party--vainly shadowed his
doorway with ready-made cabals in their pocket-books. But the man who
had been a sailor and spoke few words had an air that carried where
fluency and self-assurance failed. Even then, almost at his first words,
Sir John would have closed the subject, definitely and without
discussion.

"Politics do not concern me, Mr Salt," he said, rising, with an angry
flash in the eyes whose fighting light gave the lie to the story of
abandoned hope. "If that is your business you have reached me by a
subterfuge."

"Having reached you," replied Salt, unmoved, "will you allow me to put
my suggestions before you?"

"I have no doubt that they are interesting," replied the baronet,
falling into smooth indifference, "but, as you may see, I am exclusively
devoted to Euplexoptera now." It might be true, for the table before him
was covered with specimens, scientific instruments and entomological
works, while not even a single newspaper betrayed an interest in the
day; but a world of bitterness smouldered beneath his half-scornful
admission. "If," he continued in the same vein, "you have an idea for an
effective series of magic lantern slides, you will find the offices of
the Union of Imperial Agencies in Whitehall."

The first act to which the new Government was pledged was the evacuation
of Egypt, and the mighty counterblast from the headquarters of the
remnant of the great opposing organisation was, it should be explained,
a travelling magic lantern van, designed to satisfy rural voters as to
the present happy condition of the fellahin!

"Possibly you would hardly complain that I am not prepared to go far
enough," replied the visitor. "But in order to discuss that, I must have
your serious attention."

"I have already expressed myself," replied Sir John formally. "I am not
interested."

"If you will hear me out and then repeat that, I will go," urged Salt
with desperate calmness. "Yet I have thrown up the profession of my life
because I hold that there is a certain remedy. And I have come a hundred
miles to-night to offer it to you: for you are the man. Realise that I
am vitally concerned."

"I am very sorry," replied Sir John courteously, but without the
faintest encouragement, "but the matter is beyond me. Leave me, and try
some younger, less disillusionised man."

"There is no other man who will serve my purpose." Sir John stared hard,
as well he might: others had not been in the habit of appealing to him
to serve their purposes. "You are the natural leader of our classes. You
alone can inspire them; you alone have the authority to call them to any
effort."

"I have been invited to lead a hundred forlorn hopes," replied Sir John.
"A dozen years--nine years--aye, perhaps even six years ago any one of
them might have been sufficient. Now--I have my earwigs. Good night, Mr
Salt."

The dismissal was so unmistakably final that the most stubborn
persistence could scarcely ignore it. Mr Salt rose, but only to approach
the table by which Sir John was standing.

"I wished to have you with me on the bare merits of my plan," he said in
a low voice, "but you would not. But you shall save England in spite of
your dead heart. Read this letter."

For a moment it seemed doubtful how Hampden would take so brusque a
demand. Another second and he might have imperiously ordered Salt to
leave the house, when his eyes fell with a start upon the writing thrust
before him, and taking the letter in his hand he read it through, read
it twice.

"Little fool!" he said, so low that it sounded tenderly; "poor little
fool!" Then aloud: "Am I to understand that you have saved my daughter's
life?"

"Yes," replied George Salt, and even the tropical sunburn could not
cover his hot shame.

"At great personal risk to yourself?"

Again the reply was, "Yes," without an added word.

"Why did you not let me know of this before?"

"Does that matter now?" It had been his master card, but a very
humiliating one to play throughout: to trade upon that moment's
instinctive heroism, to assert his bravery, to apprise it at its worth,
and to claim a fit return.

"No," admitted Sir John with intuition, "I don't suppose it does. The
position then is, that instead of exchanging the usual compliments
applicable to the occasion, I express my gratitude by listening to your
views on the political situation? And further," he continued, with the
same gentle air of irony, accepting Salt's silent acquiescence, "that I
proceed to liquidate my obligation fully by identifying myself with a
scheme which you have in your pocket for averting national disaster?"

"No," replied Salt sharply. "That is for you to accept or reject
unconditionally on your own judgment."

"Very well. I am entirely at your service now."

"In the first place, then, I ask you to admit that a state of civil war
morally exists, and that the only possible hope for our existence lies
in adopting the methods of covert civil war to secure our ends."

"Admit! Good God! I have been shrieking it into deaf ears for half my
life, it seems," cried Sir John, suddenly stirred despite himself. "They
called me the Phantom Storm-petrel--'Wolf-cry' Hampden, Heaven knows
what not--through an entire decade. Admit! Go on, Mr Salt. I accept your
first clause more easily than Lord Stirling swallowed Socialistic
amendments to his own Bills, and that is saying a great deal."

"Then," continued Salt, taking a bundle of papers from an inner pocket
and selecting a docket of half a dozen typewritten sheets from it, "I
propose for your acceptance the following plan of campaign."

He looked round the littered desk for a vacant space on which to lay the
document. With an impetuous movement of his arm Sir John swept books,
trays, and insects into one chaotic heap, and spreading the summary
before him plunged into it forthwith.




CHAPTER V

THE DOWNTRODDEN


"Kumreds," announced Mr Tubes with winning familiarity, "I may say now
and once and for all that you've thoroughly convinced _me_ of the
justice of your claims. But that isn't saying that the thing's as good
as done, so don't go slinging it broadcast in the next pub you come to.
There's our good kumred the Chancellor of the Exchequer to be taken into
account, and while I'm about it let me tell you straight that these
Cabinet jobs, whether at twenty, fifty, or a hundred quid a week, aren't
the softest things going, as some of you chaps seem to imagine."

"Swap you, mate, then," called out a facetious L. & N. W. fireman. "Yus,
and throw the missis and kids into the bargain. Call it a deal?"

In his modest little house the Right Hon. James Tubes, M.P., Secretary
of State for the Home Department, was receiving a deputation. Success,
said his friends, had not spoiled him; others admitted that success had
not changed him. From the time of his first appearance in Parliament he
had been dubbed "Honest Jim" (perhaps a somewhat empty compliment in
view of the fact that every Labour constituency had barbed unconscious
satire at its own expense by distinguishing its representative as
"Honest" Tom, Dick, or Harry), and after his elevation to Cabinet rank
he still remained honest. More to the point, because more apparent, he
remained unpretentious. It is true that he ceased to wear, as a personal
concession to the Prime Minister, by whose side he sat, the grimy coal
miner's suit in which he had first appeared in the House to the
captivating of all hearts; but, more fortunate than Caractacus, he
escaped envy by continuing to occupy his humble villa in Kilburn. The
expenses of a Cabinet Minister, even in a Socialist Government, must
inevitably be heavier than those of a private member, but this admirable
man illustrated the uselessness of riches by continuing to live frugally
but comfortably upon a tenth of his official income. According to
intimate rumour he prudently invested the superfluous nine-tenths
against a rainy day in the gilt-edged securities of countries where
Socialism was least rampant.

Mr Tubes never refused to see a deputation, and when their views had
been laid before him it was rare indeed that he was not able to declare
a warm personal interest in their objects. True, he could not always
undertake to carry their recommendations into effect; as a Minister he
could not always express official approval of them, but they were rarely
sent away without the moral support of that wink which is proverbially
as significant as a more compromising form of agreement. Whether the
particular expression of the great voice of the people was in the
direction of the State adoption of Zulu orphans, or the compulsory
removal of park palings from around private estates, the deputation
could always go away with the inward satisfaction that however his words
might read to outsiders on the morrow, they knew that as a man and a
comrade, he, Jim Tubes, was with them heart and soul. "It costs
nothing," he was wont to remark broad-mindedly to his home
circle--referring, of course, to his own sympathetic attitude; for some
of the ingenuous proposals which he countenanced were found in practice
to prove very costly indeed--"and who knows what may happen next?"

But on this occasion, as far as compliance lay within his power, there
had been no need for mental reservation. The railway-men had been
patient under capitalistic oppression in the past; they were convincing
now in argument; and they were moderate in their demands for the future.
It was no "Væ victis!" that these sturdy wearers of green corduroy
trousers held out to their employers, but a cheery "Come now, mates.
Fair does and we'll mess along somehow till the next strike."

Mr Drugget, M.P., introduced the deputation. It consisted of railway
workers of all the lower grades with the exception of clerks. After many
ineffectual attempts to get clerks to enter the existing Labour ring, it
had been seriously proposed by the Labour wirepullers (who loved them in
spite of their waywardness, and would have saved them, and their votes
and their weekly contribution, from themselves) that they should form a
Union of their own in conjunction with shop assistants and domestic
servants. When the clerks (of whom the majority employed domestic
servants directly or indirectly in their homes or in their lodgings)
laughed slightly at the proposal; when the shop assistants smiled
self-consciously, and when the domestic servants giggled openly, the
promoters of this amusing triple alliance cruelly left them to their
fate thenceforward, pettishly declaring that all three were a set of
snobs--a designation which they impartially applied to every class of
society except their own, and among themselves to every minute
subdivision of Labour except the one which they adorned.

It devolved upon a rising young "greaser" in the service of the Great
Northern to explain, as spokesman, the object of the visit. Under the
existing unfair conditions the directors of the various companies were
elected at large salaries by that unnecessary and parasitic group, the
shareholders, while the workmen--the true creators of every penny of
income--had no direct hand in the management of affairs. When they
wished to approach the chief authorities it was necessary for them to
send delegates from their Union, who were frequently kept waiting ten
minutes in an ante-room; and although of late years their demands were
practically always conceded without demur, the position was anomalous
and humiliating. What seemed only reasonable to them, then, was that
they should have the right to elect an equal number of directors from
among themselves, who should sit on the Board with the other directors,
have equal powers, and receive similar salaries.

"To be, in fact, your permanent deputation to the Board," suggested the
Home Secretary.

"That's it--with powers," replied the G. N. man.

"There'll be some soft jobs going--then," murmured a shunter, who was
getting on in years, reflectively.

"No need for the missis to take in young men lodgers if you get one, eh,
Bill?" said his neighbour jocosely.

Whether it was the extreme unlikelihood of his ever being made a
director, or some other deeper cause, the secret history of the period
does not say, but Bill turned upon his innocent friend in a very
aggressive mood.

"What d'yer mean--young men lodgers?" he demanded warmly. "What call
have you to bring that up? Come now!"

"Why, mate," expostulated the offending one mildly, "no one said
anything to give any offence. What's the 'arm? Your missis does take in
lodgers, same as plenty more, don't she? Well, then!"

"I can take a 'int along the lines as well as any other," replied Bill
darkly. "It's gone far enough between pals. See? I never said anything
about your sister leaving that there laundry, did I? Never, I didn't."

"And what about it if you did?" demanded the neighbour, growing hot in
his turn. "I should think you'd have enough----"

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," expostulated the glib young spokesman, as the
voices rose above the conversational whisper, "let us have absolute
unanimity, if _you_ please--expressed in the usual way, by all saying
nothing together."

"Wha's matter with Bill?" murmured the next delegate with polite
curiosity.

"Seems to me the little man is troubled with his teef," replied the
unfortunate cause of the ill-feeling, with smouldering passion. "Strike
me if he isn't. Ah!" And seeing the impropriety of relieving his
feelings in the usual way in a Cabinet Minister's private study, he
relapsed into bitter silence.

Mr Tubes having expressed his absolute approval of this detail of the
programme, the second point was explained. Why, it was demanded, should
the provisions of the Employers' Liability Act apply only to the hours
during which a man was at work? Furthermore, why should they apply only
to accidents? Supposing, said Mr William Mulch, the spokesman in
question, that a bloke went out in a social way among his friends, as
any bloke might, caught the small-pox, and got laid up for life with
after-effects, or died? Or suppose the bloke, after sweating through a
day's work, went home dog-tired to his miserable hovel, and broke his
leg falling over the carpet, or poisoned his hand opening a tin of
sardines? They looked to the present Government to extend the working of
the Act so as to cover the disablement or death of employés from every
cause whatever, natural death included, and wherever they might be at
the time. Under the present unfair and artificial conditions of labour,
the work-people were nothing but the slaves and chattels of capitalists,
and it was manifestly unfair that the latter should escape their
responsibilities after exploiting a man's labour for their own greedy
ends, simply because he happened to die of hydrophobia or senile decay,
or because the injury that disabled him was received outside the
foetid, insanitary den where in exchange for a bare sordid pittance
his flesh was ground from his bones for eight hours daily.

The Right Hon. gentleman expressed his entire concurrence with this
provision also, and roused considerable enthusiasm by mentioning that
some time ago he had independently arrived at the conclusion that such a
clause was urgently required.

Before the next point was considered, Comrade Tintwistle asked
permission to say a few words. He explained that he had no intention of
introducing a discordant note. On the contrary, he heartily supported
the proposal as far as it went, but--and here he wished to say that
though he only voiced the demands of a minority, it was a large, a
growing, and a noisy minority--it did not go far enough. The contention
of those he represented was that the responsibility of employers ought
to extend to the wives and families of their work-people. Many a poor
comrade was sadly harassed by having to keep a crippled child who would
never be a bread-winner, or an ailing wife who was incapable of looking
after his home comfort properly. They were fighting over again the
battle that they had won in the matter of free meals for school
children. It had taken years to convince people that it was equally
necessary that children who did not happen to be attending school should
have meals provided for them, and even more necessary to see that their
mothers should be well nourished; it had taken even longer to arrive at
the logical conclusion that if free meals were requisite, free clothes
were not a whit less necessary. No one nowadays doubted the soundness of
that policy, yet here they were again timorously contemplating
half-measures, while the insatiable birds of prey who sucked their blood
laughed in their sleeve at the spectacle of the British working men
hiding their heads ostrich-like in the shifting quicksand of a fool's
paradise.

The signs of approval that greeted this proposal showed clearly enough
that other members of the deputation had sympathetic leanings towards
the larger policy of the minority. Mr Tubes himself more than hinted at
the possibility of a personal conversion in the near future. "In the
meantime," he remarked, "everything is on your side. Your position is
logical, moderate, and just. All can admit that, although we may not all
exactly agree as to whether the time is ripe for the measure. With every
temptation to wipe off some of the arrears of injustice of the past, we
must not go so far as to kill the goose that lays the golden egg."

"How do you make that out?" demanded an unsophisticated young signalman.
"It's the work of the people that produces every penny that circulates."

"Oh, just so," replied Tubes readily. "That is the real point of the
story. It was the grains of corn that made the eggs, and the goose did
nothing but sit and lay them. We must always have our geese." He turned
to the subject in hand again with a laugh, and approved a few more
modest suggestions for abolishing "privileges."

"The last point," continued the spokesman, "is one that closely concerns
the principles that we all profess. I refer to the obsolete and
humiliating anachronism that with a Government pledged to the
maintenance of social equality in office, at any hour of the day, at
practically every railway station throughout the land you will still see
trains subdivided as regards designation and accommodation into first,
second, and third classes. It is a distinction which to us, as the
representatives of the so-called third class, is nothing more or less
than insulting. Why should me and my missis when we travel be compelled
to sit where the accidents generally happen and have to put up with
eighteen in a compartment, when smug clerks and saucy ladies' maids, who
are no better than us, enjoy the comparative luxury of only fifteen in a
compartment away from the collisions, and snide financiers and
questionable duchesses, who are certainly a good deal worse, sit in
padded rooms, well protected front and rear, and never know what it is
to be packed more than six a-side? If that isn't class distinction I
should like to know what is. It isn't--Gawd help us!--that we wish to
mix with these people, or that we envy their position or covet their
wealth. Such motives have never entered into the calculations of those
who have been foremost in Socialistic propaganda. But as thoughtful and
self-respecting units of an integral community we object to being
segregated by the imposition of obsolete and arbitrary barriers, we do
resent the artificial creation of social grades, and we regard with
antagonism and distrust the unjust accumulation of labour-created wealth
in the hands of the idle and incapable few.

"But if this is the standpoint of the great mass of the democracy, to us
of the Amalgamated Unions of Railway Workers and Permanent Way Staffs
the invidious distinction has a closer significance. As ordinary
citizens our sense of equality is outraged by the demarcations I have
referred to; but as our work often places us in a temporary
subordination to the occupants of these so-called first and second
classes, whom we despise intellectually and resent economically, we
incur the additional stigma of having to render them an external
deference which we recognise to be obsolete and servile. The Arden and
Avon Valley case, which earned the martyrdom of dismissal for William
Jukson and ultimately involved forty thousand of us in a now historic
strike, simply because that heroic man categorically refused to the
doddering Duke of Pentarlington any other title than the honourable
appellation of 'Comrade,' is doubtless still fresh within your minds. We
lost on that occasion through insufficiency of funds, but the ducal
portmanteau over which William Jukson took his memorable stand, will yet
serve as a rallying point to a more successful issue."

Mr Mulch paused for approbation, which was not stinted, but before he
could resume, a passionate little man who had been rising to a more
exalted state of fervour with every demand, suddenly hurled himself like
a human wedge into the forefront of the proceedings.

"Kumrids!" he exclaimed, breathless from the first, "with your kind
permission I would say a few words embodying a suggestion which, though
not actually included in the agenda, is quite in 'armony with the
subject before us."

"Won't it keep?" suggested a tired delegate hopefully.

"The suggestion is briefly this," continued the little man, far too
enthusiastic to notice any interruption, "that as a tribute to William
Jukson's sterling determination and as a perpetual reminder of the
issues raised, we forthwith add to the banners of the Amalgamated Unions
one bearing an allegorical design consisting of two emblematic figures
struggling for the possession of a leather portmanteau with the words
'No Surrender!' beneath. The whole might be made obvious to a person of
the meanest intelligence by the inscription 'A. and A. V. Ry. Test Case.
W. J. upholds the Principles of Social Democracy and Vindicates the
People's Rights,' running round."

"Why should he be running round?" asked a slow-witted member of the
deputation.

"Who running round?" demanded the last speaker, amenable to outside
influence now that he had said his say.

"William Jukson. Didn't you say he was to be on this banner vindicating
the people's rights running round? He stood there on the platform, man
to man, so I've always heard."

The redoubtable Jukson's champion cast a look of ineffable contempt upon
his simple brother and made a gesture expressive of despair. "That's
all," he said, and sat down.

Mr Mulch resumed his interrupted innings. "The suggestion will doubtless
receive attention if submitted through the proper channels," he remarked
a little coldly. It was one thing to take the indomitable Jukson under
his own ægis; quite another to countenance his canonisation at a period
when strenuous candidates were more numerous than remunerative niches.
"But to revert to the subject in hand from which we have strayed
somewhat. It only remains for me to say that all artificial distinctions
between class and class are distasteful to the people at large,
detestable to the powerful Unions on whose behalf we are here to-day,
and antagonistic to the interests of the community. We confidently look,
therefore, to the present Government to put an end to a state of things
that is inconsistent with the maintenance of practical Socialism."

Towards this proposal, also, Mr Tubes turned a friendly ear, but he
admitted that in practice his sympathies must be purely platonic, for
the time at least. In truth, the revenue yielded by the taxation of
first and second class tickets was so considerable that it could not be
ignored. Many people adopted the third class rather than suffer the
exaction, and the receipts of all the railway companies in the kingdom
fell considerably--to the great delight of that large section of the
Socialistic party that had not yet begun to think. But the majority of
the wealthy still paid the price, and not a few among the weak, aged,
and timorous, among children, old men, and ladies, were driven to the
superior classes which they could ill afford by the increased difficulty
of finding a seat elsewhere, and by the growing truculence of the
workmen who were thrust upon them in the thirds. For more than a decade
it had been observed that when a seat in tram or train was at stake the
age of courtesy was past, but a new Burke, listening to the conversation
of those around, might too frequently have cause to think that the age
of decency had faded also. Another development, contributing to the
maintenance of the higher classes, was the fact that one was as heavily
mulcted if he turned to any of the other forms of more exclusive
travelling. Private carriages of all kinds were the butt of each
succeeding Budget, even bicycles (unless owned by workmen) were not
exempt; and so heavily was the Chancellor's hand laid upon motor cars
(except such as were the property of Members of Parliament) that even
the Marquis of Kingsbery was satisfied, and withdrew his threat to haunt
the Portsmouth Road with an elephant gun.

And yet, despite the persistence of a Stuart in imposing taxation and
the instincts of a Vespasian in making it peculiarly offensive, the
Treasury was always in desperate straits. The reason was not far to
seek. In the old days Liberal governments had at times proved
extravagant; Tory governments had perhaps oftener proved even more
extravagant; but in each case it was the tempered profusion of those who
through position and education were too careless to count their pence
and too unconcerned to be dazzled by their pounds. The Labour and the
Socialist administrations proved superlatively extravagant: and there is
nothing more irredeemable than the spendthrift recklessness of your
navvy who has unexpectedly "come into money." The beggar was truly on
horseback, or, to travel with the times, he had set off in his motor
car, and he was now bowling along the great high-road towards the
cliff-bound sea of national perdition, a very absent-minded beggar
indeed, with a merry hand upon the high speed gear.

"I am with you heart and soul," therefore declared Mr Tubes as a man,
and as a member of the Cabinet added--"in principle. But the
contemplated Act for providing State maintenance of strikers, in strikes
approved of by the Board of Trade, makes it extremely undesirable to
abolish any of the existing sources of revenue, at least until we see
what the measure will involve."

"Save on the Navy, then," growled a malcontent in the rear rank.

"We have already reduced the Navy to the fullest extent that we consider
it desirable to go at present; that is to say, to the common-sense
limit--equality with any one of the other leading powers."

"The Army, then."

"We have already reduced the Army very considerably, but with a navy on
the lines which I have indicated and an army traditionally weaker at the
best than those of the great military powers, which are also naval
powers, is it prudent?" The gesture that closed the sentence clearly
expressed Mr Tubes's own misgivings on the subject. He had always been
regarded as a moderate though a vacillating man among his party, and the
"reduce everything and chance it" policy of a powerful section of the
Cabinet disturbed his rest at times.

"Why halt ye between two opinions?" exclaimed a clear and singularly
sweet voice from the doorway. "Temporise not with the powers of darkness
when the day of opportunity is now at hand. Sweep away arms and armies,
engines of war and navies, in one vast and irresistible wave of
Universal Brotherhood. Beat the swords into ploughshares, cast your guns
into instruments of music, let all strife cease. Extend the hand of
friendship and equality not only man to man and class to class, but
nation to nation and race to race. Make a great feast, and in love and
fellowship compel them to come in: so shall you inaugurate the reign of
Christ anew on earth."

Every one looked at the speaker and then glanced at his neighbour with
amusement, contempt, enquiry, here and there something of approval, in
his eye. "The Mad Parson," "Brother Ambrose," "The Ragged Priest," "St
Ambrose of Shadwell," ran from lip to lip as a few recognised the
tonsured barefoot figure standing in his shabby cassock by the door. Mr
Tubes alone, seated out of the range of whispers and a victim to the
defective sight that is the coal-pit heritage throughout the world,
received no inkling of his identity, and, assuming that he was a late
arrival of the deputation, sought to extend a gentle conciliation.

"The goal of complete disarmament is one that we never fail to strive
for," he accordingly replied, "but our impulsive comrade must admit that
the present is hardly the moment for us to make the experiment entirely
on our own. Prudence----"

"Prudence!" exclaimed the ragged priest with flashing vehemence. "There
is no more cowardly word in the history of that Black Art which you call
Statecraft. All your wars, all your laws, all tyranny, injustice,
inhumanity, all have their origin in a fancied prudence. It marks the
downward path in whitened milestones more surely than good intentions
pave that same decline. Dare! dare! dare! man. Dare to love your
brother. Herod was prudent when he sought to destroy all the children of
Bethlehem; it was prudence that led Pilate to deliver up our Master to
the Jews. The deadly _ignis fatuus_ of prudence marched and
counter-marched destroying armies from the East and from the West
through every age, formed vast coalitions and dissolved them
treacherously, made dynasties and flung them from the throne. It led
pagan Rome, it illumined the birth of a faith now choked in official
bonds, it danced before stricken Europe, lit the martyrs' fires, lured
the cold greed of commerce, and now hangs a sickly beacon over
Westminster. But prudence never raised the fallen Magdalene nor forgave
the dying thief. Christ was not _prudent_."

"Christ, who's 'e?" said a man who had a reputation for facetiousness to
maintain. "Oh! I remember. _He's_ been dead a long time."

Ambrose turned on him the face that led men and the eye that quelled.
"My brother," he almost whispered across the room, "if you die with that
in your heart it were better for you that He had never lived."

There was something in the voice, the look, the presence, that checked
the ready methods by which a hostile intruder was wont to be expelled.
All recognised a blind inspired devotion beside which their own party
enthusiasm was at the best pale and thin. Even to men who were wholly
indifferent to the forms of religion, Ambrose's self-denying life, his
ascetic discipline, his fanatical whole-heartedness, his noble--almost
royal--family, and the magnetic influence which he exercised over masses
of the most wretched of the poor and degraded gave pause for thought,
and often extorted a grudging regard. Not a few among those who had
dispassionately watched the rise and fall of parties held the opinion
that the man might yet play a wildly prominent part in the nation's
destinies and involve a tragedy that could only yet be dimly guessed:
for most men deemed him mad.

"Whatever you may wish to say this is neither the time nor the place,"
said Mr Drugget mildly. "We are not taking part in a public meeting
which invites discussion, but are here in a semi-private capacity to
confer with the Home Secretary."

"There is no time or place unseasonable to me, who come with Supreme
authority," replied Ambrose. "Nor, if the man is worthy of his office,
can the Home Secretary close his ears to the representative of the
people."

"The people!" exclaimed a startled member of the Amalgamated Unions.
"What d'yer mean by the 'representative of the people'? _We_ are the
representatives of the people. We _are_ the people!"

"You?" replied Ambrose scornfully, sweeping the assembly with his eye
and returning finally with a disconcerting gaze to the man who spoke,
"you smug, easy, well-fed, well-clad, well-to-do in your little way,
self-satisfied band of Pharisees, _you_ the people of the earth! Are you
the poor, are you the meek, the hungry, the persecuted? You are the
comfortable, complacent _bourgeoisie_ of labourdom. You can never
inherit the Kingdom of Christ on earth. Outside your gates, despised of
all, stand His chosen people."

There was a low, rolling murmur of approval, growing in volume before it
died away, but it rose not within the chamber but from the road outside.

"Mr Tubes," whispered the introducer of the deputation uneasily, "give
the word, sir. Shall we have this man put out?"

"No, no," muttered Tubes, with his eyes fixed on the window and turning
slightly pale; "wait a minute. Who are those outside?"

The Member of Parliament looked out; others were looking too, and for a
moment not only their own business was forgotten, but the indomitable
priest's outspoken challenge passed unheeded in a curious contemplation
of his following. At that period the sight was a new one in the streets
of London, though afterwards it became familiar enough, not only in the
Capital, but to the inhabitants of every large town and city throughout
the land.

Ambrose had been called "The Ragged Priest," and it was a very ragged
regiment that formed his bodyguard; he was "The Mad Parson," and an
ethereal mania shone in the faces of many of his followers, though as
many sufficiently betrayed the slum-bred cunning, the inborn brutishness
of the unchanged criminal and the hooligan, thinly cloaked beneath a
shifty mask of assumed humility. As became "St Ambrose," the banners
which here and there stood out above the ranks--mere sackcloth standards
lashed to the roughest poles--nearly all bore religious references in
their crude emblems and sprawling inscriptions. The gibes at charity,
the demands for work of an earlier decade had given place to another
phase. "Christ is mocked," was one; "Having all things in common," ran
another; while "As it was in the beginning," "Equality, in Christ," "Thy
Kingdom come," might frequently be seen. But a more significant note was
struck by an occasional threat veiled beneath a text, as "The sun shall
be turned into darkness, the moon into blood," though their leader
himself never hinted violence in his most impassioned flights. Among the
upturned faces a leisurely observer might have detected a few that were
still conspicuous in refinement despite their sordid settings--women
chiefly, and for the most part fanatical converts who had been swept off
their feet by Ambrose's eloquence in the more orthodox days when he had
thrilled fashionable congregations from the pulpit of a Mayfair church.
Other women there were in plenty; men, old and young; even a few
children; dirty, diseased, criminal, brutalised, vicious, crippled, the
unemployed, the unemployable. Beggars from the streets, begging on a
better lay; thieves hopeful of a larger booty; malcontents of every
phase; enemies of society reckoning on a day of reckoning; the
unfortunate and the unfortunates swayed by vague yearnings after
righteousness; schemers striving for their private ends; with a salting
of the simple-hearted; all held together so far by the vehement
personality of one fanatic, and glancing down the ranks one could
prophesy what manner of monster out of the depths this might prove when
it had reached rampant maturity. Poverty, abject poverty, was the
dominant note; for all who marched beneath the ragged banner must go in
rags.

Mr Drugget was the first to recover himself. "Look here," he said,
turning to Ambrose aggressively, "I don't quite catch on to your game,
but that's neither here nor there. If you want to know what I call it, I
call it a bit of blasted impertinence to bring a mob like that to a
man's private house, no matter who he may be. What's more, this is an
unlawful gathering according to Act of Parliament."

"That which breaks no divine commandment cannot be unlawful," replied
Ambrose, unmoved. "I recognise no other law. And you, who call
yourselves Socialists and claim equality, what are your laws but the old
privileges which you denounced in others extended to include yourselves,
what your equality but the spoliation of those above you?"

"We are practical Socialists," exclaimed one or two members with
dignity. "As reasonable men we recognise that there must be a limit
somewhere."

"Practical is the last thing you can claim to be. You are impractical
visionaries; for it would be as easy for a diver to pause in mid-air as
for mankind to remain at a half-way house to Equality. All! All! Every
man-made distinction must be swept away. Neither proprietor nor
property, paid leader nor gain, task-work nor pride of place; nothing
between God and man's heart. That is the only practical Socialism, and
it is at hand."

"Not while we're in office," said the Home Secretary shortly.

"Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin," cast back Ambrose. "Where is now the
great Unionist party? In a single season the sturdy Liberal stronghold
crumbled into dust. You deposed a Labour government that was deemed
invulnerable in its time. Beware, the hand is already on the wall. Those
forces which you so blindly ignore will yet combine and crush you."

It was not unlikely. In former times it would have required barricades
and some personal bravery. But with universal suffrage the power of the
pauper criminal was no less than that of the ducal millionaire, and the
alcohol lunatic, presenting himself at the poll between the spasms of
_delirium tremens_, was as potent a force as the philosopher. A party
composed of paupers, aliens, chronic unemployed, criminals, lunatics,
unfortunates, the hysterical and degenerate of every kind, together with
so many of the working classes as might be attracted by the glamour of a
final and universal spoliation, led by a sincere and impassioned
firebrand, might yet have to be reckoned with.

"And you, comrade?" said a railway-man with pardonable curiosity. "When
you've had your little fling, who's going to turn _you_ out and come
in?"

"We!" exclaimed Ambrose with a touch of genuine surprise; "how can you
be so blind! We represent the ultimate destiny of mankind."

In another age and another place a form of government called the States
General, and largely composed of amiable clerics, had been called up to
redress existing grievances. Being found too slow, it gave place to the
National Assembly, and, to go yet a little faster, became the
Legislative Assembly. This in turn was left behind by the more
expeditious Girondins, but as even they lagged according to the bustling
times, the Jacobins came into favour. The ultimate development of
quick-change Equality was reached in the Hébertists. From one to another
had been but a step, and they were all "The People"; but while the
States General had looked for the millennium by the abolition of a
grievance here and there, and the lightening of a chafing collar in the
mass, the followers of Hébert found so little left for them to abolish
that they abolished God. The experiment convinced the sagest of the
leaders that human equality is only to be found in death, and, true to
their principles, they "equalised" a million of their fellow-countrymen
through the instrumentality of the guillotine, and other forms of moral
suasion. Grown more tender-hearted, "The People" no longer thirsted for
another section of "The People's" blood--only for their money; and in
place of Fouquier-Tinville and the Gentleman with the Wooden Frame,
their instruments of justice were represented by a Chancellor of the
Exchequer, and an individual delivering blue papers.

"We represent the ultimate destiny of mankind: absolute equality,"
announced Ambrose. "Any other condition is inconsistent with the
professions to which your party has repeatedly pledged itself. Will you,
my brother," he continued, addressing himself to the Home Secretary,
"receive a deputation?"

The deputation was already waiting at the outer door, three men and
three women. It included a countess, a converted house-breaker, and an
anarchist who had become embittered with life since the premature
explosion of one of his bombs had blown off both his arms and driven him
to subsist on the charitable. The other three were uninteresting
nonentities, but all were equal in their passion for equality.

"We are all pledged to the principle of social equality, and every step
in that direction that comes within the range of practical politics must
have our sympathy," replied Mr Tubes. "Further than that I am not
prepared to commit myself at present. That being the case, there would
be no object in receiving a deputation." To this had Mr Tubes come at
last.

"The unending formula," said Brother Ambrose with weary bitterness. "...
Bread, and you give them stones ... Man," he cried with sudden energy,
"almost within your grasp lies the foundation of New Jerusalem,
tranquil, smiling, sinless. What stands in your way? Nothing, nothing!
truly nothing but the heavy shadow of the old and cruel past. Throw it
off; is it not worth doing? No more spiritual death, no more sorrow of
the things of this world, nor crying, 'Neither shall there be any more
pain: for the former things are passed away.'"

"I have nothing more to say," responded the Home Secretary coldly,
bending over his desk to write.

"Then I have much more to do," retorted Ambrose impetuously, "and that
shall be with the sword of my mouth." He strode from the room with an
air that no amount of legislative equality could ever confer upon any of
those he left behind, and a moment later his ragged escort was in motion
homeward--slumward.

"Kumreds," said Mr Tubes, looking up, "the harmony of the occasion has
been somewhat impaired by an untoward incident, but on the whole I think
that you may rest well satisfied with the result of your
representations. Having another appointment I must now leave you, but I
have given instructions for some beer and sandwidges to be brought in,
and I trust that in my enforced absence you will all make yourselves
quite at home." He shook hands with each man present and withdrew.

"Beer and sandwidges!" muttered Comrade Tintwistle, with no affectation
of delight, to a chosen spirit. "And this is the man we pay fifty quid a
week to!"

"Ah!" assented the friend, following Mr Tubes's hospitable directions by
strolling round the room and fingering the ornaments. "Well, when it
comes to a general share-out I don't know but what I should mind having
this here little round barometer for my parlour."

"Neat little thing," assented Tintwistle with friendly interest. "What
does it say?"

"Seems to be dropping from 'Change' to 'Stormy,'" read the friend.




CHAPTER VI

MISS LISLE TELLS A LONG POINTLESS STORY


Sir John Hampden lived within a stone-throw of the Marble Arch; George
Salt had established himself in Westminster; and about midway between
the two, in the neighbourhood of Pall Mall, a convenient but quite
unostentatious suite of offices had been taken and registered as the
headquarters of the Unity League.

The Unity League was a modern organisation that had come into existence
suddenly, and with no great parade, within a week of that day when
George Salt had forced Hampden to hear what he wished to say, a day now
nearly two years ago. The name was simple and commonplace, and therefore
it aroused neither curiosity nor suspicion; it was explained by the fact
that it had only one object: "By constitutional means to obtain an
adequate representation of the middle and upper classes in Parliament,"
a phrase rendered by the lighter-hearted members colloquially as "To
kick out the Socialists." The Government, quite content to govern
constitutionally (in the wider sense) and to be attacked
constitutionally (in the narrower sense), treated the existence of the
Unity League as a playful ebullition on the part of the milch sections
of society, and raised the minimum income-tax to four and threepence as
a sedative.

At first the existence of the League met with very little response and
no enthusiasm among those for whom it was intended. It had become an
article of faith with the oppressed classes that no propagandism could
ever restore an equitable balance of taxation. Every change must
inevitably tend to be worse than the state before. To ask the working
classes (the phrase lingered; by the demarcation of taxation it meant
just what it conventionally means to-day, and, similarly, it excluded
clerical workers of all grades)--to ask this privileged class which
dominated practically every constituency to throw out their own people
and put in a party whose avowed policy would be to repeal the Employers'
Liability Act (Extended), the Strikes Act, the Unemployed Act, the
Amended Companies Act, the Ecclesiastical Property Act, the infamous
Necessity Act, and a score of other preposterous Acts of Injustice
before they even gave their attention to anything else, had long been
recognised to be grotesque. A League, therefore, which spoke of working
towards freedom on constitutional lines fell flat. The newspapers
noticed it in their various individual fashions, and all but the
Government organs extended to it a welcome of cold despair. The general
reader gathered the impression that he might look for its early demise.

The first revulsion of opinion came when it was understood that Sir John
Hampden had returned to public life as the President of the League. What
his name meant to his contemporaries, how much the League gained from
his association, may be scarcely realised in an age existing under
different and more conflicting conditions. Briefly, his personality
lifted the effort into the plane--not of a national movement, for with
the nation so sharply riven by two irreconcilable interests that was
impossible, but certainly beyond all cavil as to motives and methods.
When it was further known that he was not lending his name
half-heartedly as to a forlorn hope, or returning reluctantly as from a
tardy sense of duty, men began to wonder what might lie behind.

The first public meeting of the newly formed League deepened the
impression. Men and women of the middle and upper classes were invited
to become members. The annual subscription being a guinea, none but
adults were expected. Those of the working class were not invited. If
the subscription seemed large, the audience was asked to remember what
lay at stake, and to compare with it the case of the artisan cheerfully
contributing his sixpence a week to the strike fund of his class. "As a
result there is a Strikes Act now in force," the President reminded
them, "and the artisan no longer pays the cost----"

"No, we do," interjected a listener.

"I ask you to pay it for three years longer; no more, perhaps less,"
replied Hampden with a reassuring smile, and his audience stared.

If the subscription seemed large for an organisation of the kind the
audience was assured that it was by no means all, or even the most, that
would be expected of them. They must be prepared to make some sacrifice
when called upon; the nature he could not indicate at that early stage.
No balance sheet would be published; no detailed reports would be
issued. There would be no dances, no garden-parties, no club houses, no
pretty badges. The President warned them that membership offered no
facilities for gaining a precarious footing in desirable society,
through the medium of tea on the Vicarage lawn, or croquet in the Home
Park. "We are not playing at tin politics nowadays," he caustically
remarked.

That closed the exordium. In a different vein Hampden turned to review
the past, and with the chartered freedom of the man who had prophesied
it all, he traced in broad lines and with masterly force the course of
Conservative ineptitude, Radical pusillanimity, Labour selfishness, and
Socialistic tyranny. What would be the crowning phase of grab
government? History foreshadowed it; common-sense certified it. Before
the dark curtain of that last stupendous act the wealth and wisdom, the
dignity and responsibility of the nation, stood in paralysed expectancy.

There was a telling pause; a dramatic poignant silence hung over the
massed crowd that listened to the one man who could still inspire a
kindling spark of hope. Then, just at the opportune moment, a friendly
challenge gave the effective lead:

"And what does Sir John Hampden offer now?"

"Absolute victory," replied the speaker, with the thrilling energy of
quiet but assured conviction, "and with it the ending of this nightmare
dream of life in which we are living now, when every man in his
half-guilty helplessness shuns his own thoughts, and all are filled with
a new unnatural pain: the shame of being Englishmen. Blink the fact or
not, it is civil war upon which we are now engaged. Votes are the
weapons, and England and her destiny, nothing more or less, are the
stakes. It has frequently been one of the curious features even of the
most desperate civil struggles of the past, that while battles were
raging all around, towns besieged, and thrones falling, commerce was at
the same time being carried on as usual, wordy controversies on trivial
alien subjects were being hotly discussed by opposing sections, as
though their pedantic differences were the most serious matters in the
world, and the ordinary details of everyday life were proceeding as
before. So it is to-day, but civil, social, war is in our midst,
and--again blink it or not--we are losing, and wage it as it is being
waged we shall continue to lose. I am not here to-day to urge the
justice of our cause, to palliate unwise things done, to indulge in
regrets for wise things left undone. One does not discuss diplomacy in
the middle of a battle. I am here to hold out a new hope for the triumph
of our cause, for the revival of an era of justice, for the recovered
respect of nations. I have never been accused of undue optimism, yet
fully weighing my words, I stand on this platform to-night to share with
you my conviction that it is within our power, in three years' time, to
send an overwhelming majority of our reconstructed party into power, to
reduce the income-tax to a sane and normal level, and to recommence the
building up of a treasonably neglected navy."

Another man--perhaps any other man--would have been met by ridicule, but
Hampden's reputation was unique. The one point of emphasis that could
not fail to impress itself upon every listener was that there _was_
something behind all this. It was a point that did not convey itself
half so forcefully in the newspaper reports, so that, as Socialists and
their friends did not attend the meetings (even as members of the
wealthier classes had ignored Socialistic "vapourings" in days gone by),
any menace to the Government that the League might contain was lost on
them for the present. It was the moral of an old fable: the Dog in
Luxury grown slothful and unready.

The subscription deterred few. It was an epoch when everything was,
apparently, being given away for nothing; though never had the
grandfatherly maxim that in business nothing ever is offered without its
price, been so keenly observed. But superficially, to ride in a penny
'bus entitled one to a probable pension for life; to buy a pound of tea
was only the preliminary to being presented with a motor-car or a grand
piano. Fortunes lurked in cigarette boxes, whole libraries sprang
gratuitously from the columns of the daily papers; not only oxen, but
silver spoons inexhaustible were compressed within the covers of each
jar of meat extract, and buried treasure, "Mysterious Millionaires," and
"Have-you-that-ten-pound-note?" men littered the countryside. To be
asked to subscribe a guinea for nothing definite in return, was
therefore a pleasing novelty which took amazingly. So, too, the idea of
participating in some sort of legal revolution which would entail
sacrifices and result in unexpected developments, was found to be
delightfully invigorating. How the movement spread is a matter of
history. Incomes had been reduced wholesale, yet, so great was the
confidence in Hampden's name, that many members sent their subscription
ten times told. When he asked, as he frequently did at the close of a
meeting, for recruits who were willing to devote their whole time unpaid
to the work in various departments, more than could be accepted were
invariably forthcoming. All members proselytised on their own
initiative, but within these there were thousands of quiet and devoted
workers who were in close touch with the office of the League. They
acted on detailed instructions in their methods, and submitted regular
reports of progress and of the state of public feeling in every part of
the kingdom and among every class of the community. To what length the
roll of membership had now extended only two men knew, even
approximately. All that could be used as a guide was the fact that it
was the exception rather than the rule anywhere to find a family among
the classes aimed at, that did not contain at least one member; while
London, within the same indicated limits, had practically gone solid for
membership.

And George Salt? The public knew nothing of him; his name did not appear
in connection with the League, nor did he ever take a place among the
notables upon the platform at its meetings. But the thousands of the
inner ring knew him very well, and few whose business led them to the
offices missed encountering him. He was officially supposed to be a
League secretary to Sir John Hampden, endowed with large discretionary
powers.

At the moment when this chapter opens he was receiving in his office a
representative of the leading Government organ: a daily paper which
purveyed a mixture of fervent demagogism and child-like inconsistency,
for the modest sum of one halfpenny. _The Tocsin_, as it was called, was
widely read by a public who believed every word it contained, with that
simple credulity in what is printed which is one of the most pathetic
features of the semi-illiterate.

Mr Hammet, the representative of _The Tocsin_, had come to find out what
was really behind the remarkable spread of the Unity League. Possibly
members of the Government were beginning to fidget. Salt had seen him
for the purpose of telling him everything else that he cared to know. To
enquirers, the officials of the League were always candid and open, and
laughingly disclaimed any idea of a mysterious secret society. So Salt
admitted that they really hoped for a change of public opinion shortly;
that they based their calculation on the inevitable swing of the
pendulum, and so forth. He allowed it to be drawn easily from him that
they had great faith in party organisation, and that perhaps--between
themselves and not for publication--the Government would be surprised by
a substantial lowering of their majority at the next election, as a
result of quiet, unostentatious "spade work." "As a party we are not
satisfied with the state of things," he said. "We cannot be expected to
be satisfied with it, and we are certainly relying on a stronger
representation in opposition to make our views felt."

"Quite right," said Mr Hammet sympathetically. He closed the note-book
in which he had made a few entries and put it away, to indicate that his
visit was officially at an end, and whatever passed between them now was
simply one private gentleman talking to another, and might be regarded
as sacredly confidential. Salt also relaxed the secretarial manner which
he had taken the pains to acquire, and seemed as though he would be glad
of a little human conversation with a man who knew life and Fleet
Street: which meant, of course, that both were prepared to be
particularly alert.

"I was at one of your meetings the other night--the Albert Hall one,"
remarked the newspaper man casually. "Your Chief fairly took the crowd
with him. No being satisfied with a strong opposition for him! Why, he
went bald-headed for sweeping the country and going in with a couple of
hundred majority or so."

Salt laughed appreciatively. "No good being down-hearted," he replied.
"That was the end of all the old organisations. 'We see no hope for the
future, so you all may as well mark time,' was their attitude, and they
dropped out. 'When anything turns up we intend being ready for it, so
come in now,' we say."

"Seems to take all right too," admitted Mr Hammet. "I was offered a
level dollar by a friend of mine the other day that you had over half a
million members. I took it in a sporting spirit, because I know that
half a million needs a lot of raking in, and I put it at rather less
myself--but, of course, as you are close about it we can never settle
up." Half a million, it may be observed, was everybody's property, as an
estimate on "excellent authority."

"We don't publish figures, as a matter of fact," admitted Salt
half-reluctantly, "but I don't know why there should be any very
particular secret about it----"

"Oh, every office has its cupboards and its skeletons," said Mr Hammet
generously. "But if one could see inside," he added with a knowing look,
"I think that I should win."

"No," exclaimed Salt suddenly. "I don't mind telling you in confidence.
We have passed the half million: passed it last--well, some time ago."

"Lucky for me that it is in confidence," remarked the pressman with a
grimace, "or I should have to pay up. What is the exact figure, then?"
he ventured carelessly.

"No one could quite tell you that," replied Salt, equally off-hand.

"Six hundred thousand?" suggested Mr Hammet.

"Oh, that is a considerable advance,--a hundred thousand," admitted Salt
with transparent disappointment. It is not pleasant when you have
impressed your man to have him expecting too much the next minute.

"I was thinking of the old Buttercup League," said Mr Hammet. "You took
the remains over, lock, stock, and barrel, I believe?"

"Yes, all that would come. Half belonged to your party really, and half
of the remainder were children. What an organisation that was in its
time! A million and a half!" The smart young newspaper man noted Mr
Salt's open admiration for these figures. It convinced him that the
newer League was not yet within measurable distance of half that total.

"And in the end it did--what?" he remarked.

Salt was bound to apologise. "What is there to do, after all?" he
admitted. "What can you do but keep your people together, show them
where their interest lies, and wait?"

"And rake in the shekels?" suggested Mr Hammet airily.

"Oh, that!" agreed Salt a little uneasily. "Of course one has to look
after the finances."

"Ra-ther," agreed Mr Hammet. "Wish I had the job. Do you smoke here as a
general thing?"

"Oh yes," replied Salt, who never did. "Try one of these."

"Fairish cigars. Better than you'd find in the old man's private box up
at our show," was the verdict. "But then we haven't a revenue of half a
million."

"Of course I rely on you not to say anything about our numbers," said
the secretary anxiously.

The visitor made a reassuring gesture, expressive of inviolable secrecy.
"Though I suppose you have to make a return for income-tax purposes," he
mused. "My aunt! what an item you must have!"

"No," replied Salt. "We do not pay anything."

Mr Hammet stared in incredulous surprise. "How do you manage to work
it?" he demanded familiarly. "You don't mean that they have forgotten
you?"

"No; it's quite simple," explained Salt. "Your friends made the funds
and incomes of Trades Unions sacred against claims and taxes of every
kind a few years ago, and we rank as a Trade Union."

"Don't call them my friends, please God," exclaimed Mr Hammet with
ingratiating disloyalty. "I work as in a house of bondage. You don't
publish any balance-sheet, by the way, do you?"

"No, we don't see why we should let every one know how the money is
being spent. No matter how economically things are carried on there are
always some who want to interfere."

"Especially if they sampled your weeds," suggested the visitor
pleasantly. "Pretty snug cribs you must have, but that's not my
business. Between ourselves, what does Sir John draw a year?"

"Nothing," protested Salt eagerly, too eagerly. "As President of the
League he does not receive a penny."

Sharp Mr Hammet, who prided himself upon being a terror for exposures
and on having a record of seven flagrant cases of contempt of court,
read the secretary's eagerness like an open book. "But then there are
Committees, Sub-committees, Executives, Emergency Funds, and what not,"
he pointed out, "and our unpaid League President may be Chairman of one,
and Secretary of another, and Grand Master of a third with a royal
salary from each, eh? Can you assure me----"

"Oh, well; of course," admitted Salt, cornered beyond prevarication,
"that is a private matter that has to do with the officials of the
League alone. But you may take it from me that every one in these
offices earns his salary whatever it may be."

Mr Hammet smiled his polite acquiescence broadly.

"Same here, changing the scene of action to Stonecutter Street," he
commented. "Do you happen to know how Sir John came to start this
affair? Well, Tagg M.P. met Miss Hampden once and wanted to marry her.
He called on Sir John, who received him about as warmly as a shoulder of
Canterbury lamb even before he knew what his business was. When he did
know, he gave such an exhibition of sheet lightning that Tagg, who is
really a very level-headed young fellow in general, completely lost his
nerve and tried to dazzle him into consenting, by offering him a safe
seat in the Huddersfield division and a small place in the Government if
he'd consent to put up as a bracketted Imperialist hyphened Socialist.
Then the old man kicked Tagg out of the house, and swore to do the same
with his Government within three years. At least that's what I heard
about the time, but very likely there isn't a word of truth in it;" a
tolerably safe inference on Mr Hammet's part, as, in point of fact, he
had concocted Mr Tagg's romance on the spur of the moment.

"No," volunteered Salt. "I don't think that that is the true story, or I
should have heard something about it. It's rather curious that you
should have mentioned it. I believe----But it's scarcely worth taking
up your time with."

"Not at all: I mean that I am quite interested," protested Mr Hammet.

"Well--of course it sounds rather absurd in the broad light of day, but
I believe, as a matter of fact, that he was led into founding the League
simply as the result of a dream."

"A dream!" exclaimed Mr Hammet, deeply surprised. "What sort of a
dream?"

"Well, it naturally must have been a rather extraordinary dream to
affect him so strongly. In fact you might perhaps call it a vision."

"A vision!" repeated Mr Hammet, thoroughly absorbed in the mysterious
element thus brought in. "Do I understand that this is Sir John's own
explanation?" Hampden's sudden return to activity had, indeed, from time
to time been a riddle of wide interest.

"Oh no," Salt hastened to correct. "I expect that he would be the last
man to admit it, or to offer any explanation at all. Of course the
history of the world has been changed in every age through dreams and
visions, but that explanation nowadays, in a weighty matter, would run
the risk of being thought trivial and open to ridicule."

"But what do you base your deductions upon, then?" demanded Mr Hammet,
rather fogged by the serious introduction of this new light. "Is Sir
John a believer in clairvoyance?"

"I am afraid that I must not state the real grounds for several reasons,
if you won't think me discourteous," replied Salt firmly. "But this I
may say: that I had occasion to see Sir John late one night, and then he
had not the faintest intention of coming forward. Early the following
morning I saw him again, and by that time the whole affair was cut and
dried. Of course you are at liberty to confirm or contradict the story
just as you like, if you should happen to come across it again."

In a state of conscious bewilderment through which he was powerless to
assert himself, Mr Hammet submitted to polite dismissal. The visible
result of his interview was half a column of peptonised personalities in
_The Tocsin_, rendered still easier of assimilation to the dyspeptic
mind by being well cut up into light paragraphs and garnished with
sub-headings throughout. The unseen result, except to the privileged
eyes of half a dozen people, was a confidential report which found its
way ultimately into the desk of the Home Secretary. The following points
summarised Mr Hammet's deductions.

       *       *       *       *       *

"The Unity League probably has a membership of half a million. It may be
safely assumed that it does not exceed that figure by a hundred thousand
at the most.

"While largely recruiting by the device of holding out a suggestion of
some indefinite and effective political scheme, the policy of the League
will be that of _laisser faire_, and its influence may be safely
ignored. Very little of its vast income is spent in propagandism or
organisation. On the contrary, there is the certainty that considerable
sums are lying at short notice at the banks, and strong evidence that
equally large sums have been sent out of the country through the agency
of foreign houses.

"Many men of so-called 'good position' enjoy obvious sinecure posts
under the League, and all connected with the organisation appear to draw
salaries disproportionate to their positions, and in some cases wildly
disproportionate.

"The plain inference from the bulk of evidence is that the League is,
and was formed to be, the preserve for a number of extravagant and
incapable unemployed of the so-called upper and upper-middle classes,
who have organised this means of increasing their incomes to balance the
diminution which they have of late years experienced through the
equalising legislation of Socialism. The money sent abroad is doubtless
a reserve for a few of the higher officials to fall back on if future
contingencies drive them out of this country.

"This information has been carefully derived from a variety of sources,
including John Hampden's secretary, a man called Salt. Salt appears to
be a simple, unsuspicious sort of fellow, and with careful handling
might be used as a continual means of securing information in the future
should there be any necessity."

       *       *       *       *       *

The simple, unsuspicious secretary had dismissed Mr Hammet with scarcely
another thought as soon as that gentleman had departed. In order to fit
himself for the requirements of his new sphere of action, Salt had,
during the past two years, compelled himself to acquire that art of
ready speech which we are told is the most efficient safeguard of our
thoughts. But he hated it. Most of all he despised the necessity of
engaging in such verbal chicane as Mr Hammet's mission demanded. Of that
mission he had the amplest particulars long before the representative of
_The Tocsin_ had passed his threshold. He knew when he was coming, why
he was coming, and the particular points upon which information was
desired. He could have disconcerted Hammet beyond measure by placing
before him a list of all those persons who had been so delicately
sounded, together with an abstract of the results; and finally, he
received as a matter of ordinary routine a copy of the confidential
report three hours before it reached Mr James Tubes. Armies engaged in
active warfare have their Intelligence Departments, and the Secret
Service of the Unity League was remarkably complete and keen.

"My name is Irene Lisle," said the next caller, and there being nothing
particular to say in reply Salt expressed himself by his favourite
medium--silence; but in such a way that Miss Lisle felt encouraged to
continue.

"I have come to you because I am sick of seeing things go on as they
have been going for years, and no one doing anything. I believe that you
_are_ going to do something."

"Why?" demanded Salt with quiet interest. It mattered--it might matter a
great deal--why this unknown Miss Lisle should have been led to form
that conclusion.

"I have a great many friends--some in London, others all over the
country. I have been making enquiries lately, through them and also by
other means. It is generally understood that your membership is about
half a million, and you tacitly assent to that." She took up a scrap of
waste paper that lay before her, and writing on it, passed it across the
desk. "That, however, is my estimate. If I am right, or anything like
it, you are concealing your strength."

Salt took the paper, glanced at it, smiled and shook his head without
committing himself to any expression. But he carefully burned the
fragment with its single row of figures after Miss Lisle had left.

"I have attended your meetings," continued Miss Lisle composedly, "for,
of course, I am a member in the ordinary way. I came once as a matter of
curiosity, or because one's friends were speaking of it, and I came
again because, even then, I was humbled and dispirited at the shameful
part that our country was being made to play before the world. I caught
something, but I did not grasp all--because I am not a man, I suppose. I
saw meeting after meeting of impassive unemotional, black-coated
gentlemen lifted into the undemonstrative white-heat of purposeful
enthusiasm by the suggestion of that new hope which I failed to
understand. At one of the earliest Queen's Hall meetings I particularly
noticed a young man who sat next to me. He was just an ordinary
keen-faced, gentlemanly, well-dressed, athletic-looking youth, who might
have been anything from an upper clerk to a millionaire. He sat through
the meeting without a word or a sign of applause, but when at the finish
twenty volunteers were asked for, to give their whole time to serving
the object of the League, he was the first to reach the platform, with a
happier look on his face, in the stolid English style, than I should
have ever expected to see there. It was beyond me. Then among the
audiences one frequently heard remarks such as 'I believe there's
something behind it all'; 'I really think Hampden has more than an idea';
'It strikes me that we are going to have something livelier than tea and
tennis,' and suggestions of that kind. Some time ago, after a meeting at
Kensington, I was walking home alone when you overtook me. Immediately in
front were two gentlemen who had evidently been to the meeting also, and
they were discussing it. At that moment one said emphatically to the
other: 'I don't know what it is, but that it _is_ something I'll
swear; and if it is I'd give them my last penny sooner than have things
as they are.' Sir John Hampden, who was with you, looked at you
enquiringly, and you shook your head and said, 'Not one of our men.'
'Then I believe it's beginning to take already,' he replied."

Two things occurred to Salt: that Miss Lisle might be a rather sharp
young lady, and that he and Hampden had been unusually careless.
"Anything else?" was all he said.

"It's rather a long wild tale, and it has no particular point,"
explained the lady.

"If you can spare the time," he urged. The long pointless tale might be
a pointer to others beside Miss Lisle.

"I was cycling a little way out in the country recently," narrated Miss
Lisle, "when I found that I required a spanner, or I could not go on. It
was rather a lonely part for so near London, within ten or twelve miles,
I suppose, and there was not a house to be seen. I wheeled my bicycle
along and soon came to a narrow side lane. It had a notice 'Private
Road' up, and I could not see far down it as it wound about very much,
but it seemed to be well used, so I turned into it hoping to find a
house. There was no house, for after a few turns the lane ended
suddenly. It ended, so to speak, in a pair of large double doors--like
those of a coach-house--for before me was a stream crossed by an iron
bridge; immediately beyond that a high wall and the doors. But do you
care for me to go on?"

"If you please," said Salt, and paid the narrative the compliment of a
close and tranquil attention.

"It was rather a peculiar place to come on unexpectedly," continued Miss
Lisle. "It had originally been a powder works, and the old notices
warning intruders had been left standing; as a matter of fact a stranger
would probably still take it to be a powder mill, but one learned
locally that it was the depot and distributing centre of an artificial
manure company with a valuable secret process. Which, of course, made it
less interesting than explosives."

"And less dangerous," suggested Salt, smiling.

"I don't know," shot back Miss Lisle with a glance. "Mark the
precautions. There was the stream almost enclosing this place--the size,
I suppose, of a considerable farm--and in the powder mill days it had
been completely turned into an island by digging a canal or moat at the
narrowest point of the bend. Immediately on the other side of the water
rose the high brick wall topped with iron spikes. The one bridge was the
only way across the stream, the one set of double doors, as high as the
wall, the only way through beyond. Inside was thickly wooded. I don't
suggest wild animals, you know, but savage dogs would not surprise me.

"As I stood there, concluding that I should have to turn back, I heard a
heavy motor coming down the lane. It came on very quickly as though the
driver knew the twisting road perfectly, shot across the bridge, the big
gates fell open apparently of their own accord, and it passed inside. I
had only time to note that it was a large trade vehicle with a square
van-like body, before the gates had closed again."

Miss Lisle paused for a moment, but she had by no means reached the end
of her pointless adventure.

"I had seen no one but the motor driver, but I was mistaken in thinking
that there was no one else to see, for as I stood there undecided a
small door in the large gate was opened and a man came out. He was
obviously the gate-keeper, and in view of the notices I at once
concluded that he was coming to warn me off, so I anticipated him by
asking him if he could lend me a spanner. He muttered rather surlily
that if I waited there he would see, and went back, closing the little
door behind him. I thought that I heard the click of a self-acting lock.
Presently he came back just as unamiable as before and insisted on
screwing up the bolt himself--to get me away the sooner, I suppose. He
absolutely started when I naturally enough offered him sixpence--I
imagine the poor man doesn't get very good wages--and went quite red as
he took it."

"And all ended happily?" remarked Salt tentatively, as though he had
expected that a possible relevance might have been forthcoming after
all.

"Happily but perplexingly," replied Miss Lisle, looking him full in the
face as she unmasked the point of her long pointless story. "For the
surly workman who was embarrassed by sixpence was my gentlemanly
neighbour of the Queen's Hall meeting, and I was curious to know how he
should be serving the object of the League by acting as a gate-keeper to
the Lacon Equalised Superphosphate Company."

Salt laughed quietly and looked back with unmoved composure. "No doubt
many possible explanations will occur to you," he said with very
plausible candour. "The simplest is the true one. Several undertakings
either belong to the League or are closely connected with it, for
increasing its revenue or for other purposes. The Lacon is one of
these."

"And I don't doubt that even the position of doorkeeper is a responsible
one, requiring the intelligence of an educated gentleman to fill it,"
retorted Miss Lisle. "It must certainly be an exacting one. You know
better than I do how many great motor vans pass down that quiet little
lane every hour. They bear the names of different companies, they are
ingeniously different in appearance, and they pass through London by
various roads and by-roads. But they have one unique resemblance: they
are all driven by mechanics who are astonishingly disconcerted by the
offer of stray sixpences and shillings! It is the same at the little
private wharf on the canal a mile away. It was quite a relief to find
that the bargemen were common human bargees!"

Salt still smiled kindly. The slow, silent habit gives the best mask
after all. "And why have you come to me?" he asked.

"Because I _know_ that you are going to do something, and I want to
help. I loathe the way things are being done down there." The nod meant
the stately Palace of Westminster, though it happened to be really in
the direction of Charing Cross, but it was equally appropriate, for the
monuments of the Government, like those of Wren, lay all around. "Who
can go on playing tennis as usual when an ambassador who learned his
diplomacy in a Slaughter-housemen's Union represents us by acting
alternately as a fool and a cad before an astounded Paris? Or have an
interest in bridge when the Sultan of Turkey is contemptuously ordering
us to keep our fleet out of sight of Mitylene and we apologise and obey?
I will be content to address envelopes all day long if it will be of any
use. Surely there are other secret processes down other little lanes? I
will even be the doorkeeper at another artificial manure works if there
is nothing else!"

Salt sat thinking, but from the first he knew that for good or ill some
degree of their confidence must be extended to a woman. It is the common
experience of every movement when it swells beyond two members: or
conspiracies would be much more dangerous to their foes.

"It may be monotonous, perhaps even purposeless as far as you can see,"
he warned. "I do not know yet, and it will not be for you to say."

Miss Lisle flushed with the pleasurable thrill of blind sacrifice. "I
will not question," she replied. "Only if there should be any need you
might find that an ordinary uninteresting middle-class girl with a
slangy style and a muddy complexion could be as devoted as a Flora
Macdonald or a Charlotte Corday."

Salt made a quiet deprecating gesture. "A girl with a fearless truthful
face can be capable of any heroism," he remarked as he began to write.
"Especially when she combines exceptional intelligence with exceptional
discretion. Only," he added as an afterthought, "it may be uncalled-for,
and might be inconvenient in a law-abiding constitutional age."

"I quite understand that now; the conscientious addressing of circulars
shall bound my horizon. Only, please let me be somewhere in it, when it
_does_ come."

"I say, Salt," drawled an immaculately garbed young man, lounging into
the room, "do you happen----"

Miss Lisle, who had been cut off from the door by a screen, rose to
leave.

"Oh, I say, I beg your pardon," exclaimed the young man. "They told me
that you were alone."

"I shall be disengaged in a moment," replied Salt formally. "At ten
o'clock to-morrow morning then, Miss Lisle, please." She bowed and
withdrew, the Honourable Freddy Tantroy, who had lingered rather
helplessly, holding the door as she went out and favouring her with a
criticising glance.

"Always making rotten ass of myself," murmured that gentleman
plaintively. "General Office fault. Engaging lady clerk? Not bad idea,
but you might have gone in for really superior article while you were
about it. Cheaper in the end. Oh, I don't know, though."

"Miss Lisle came with the best of recommendations," said Salt almost
distantly. One might have judged that he had no desire for Mr Tantroy's
society, but that reasons existed why he should not tell him so.

"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.'

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.




CHAPTER VII

"SCHEDULE B"


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 a _lapis lazuli_ table, 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 the _lapis 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.




CHAPTER VIII

TANTROY EARNS HIS WAGE


"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 it _has_
been 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:

    kbeljsl

    wopmjvsjxkivslilscalkwespljkjscwecsspssp
    fxfejsloxmjcneoeqjdncs----

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:

    mydrstr

    nwhvsltscmpltrprtbfrmndthrsmstbndbtthtth
    prpslhvfrmltdsfsblndth----

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----

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. In
_bonâ fide_ communications 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 swell _he_ was! 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 them _blasé_ kid 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 the _natural_ artificiality
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?




CHAPTER IX

SECRET HISTORY


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 the _Koh-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 new _régime_. 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
called _Prime Minister_ when he was not a _minister_ at 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 wealthy _débutantes_ from 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 a _salon_, 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.

"That is the position," announced Mr Tubes, when he had finished reading
the general summary. "The question it raises may not be exactly urgent,
but it is at least pressing. On the one hand, there is the undoubted
feeling of grievance existing among a large proportion of electors--our
own people. On the other hand, there is the serious question of national
finances not to be overlooked. As the matter is one that must ultimately
concern me more closely than anybody else, I will reserve my own opinion
to the last."

The view taken by those present has already been indicated. Their
platform was that of Moderate Socialism; they wished it always to be
understood that they were practical. They had the interest of their
fellow working men (certainly of no other class of the community) at
heart, but as Practical Socialists they had a suspicion (taking the
condition of the Exchequer into consideration) that for the moment they
had reached the limit of Practical Socialism. There was an undoubted
dilemma. If a mistake of policy on their part let in the impractical
Socialists, the result would be disastrous. Most of them regarded the
danger as infinitesimal; like every other political party during the
last two centuries, they felt that they could rely on the "sound
common-sense of the community." Still, admitting a possibility, even if
it was microscopic, might it not be more--say practically socialistic
(the word "patriotic" had long been expunged from their vocabulary) in
the end to make some slight concessions? If there existed a more
material inducement it was not referred to, and any ingenuous comrade,
using as an argument in favour of compliance a homely proverb anent the
inadvisability of quarrelling with one's bread and butter, would have
been promptly discouraged. Yet, although the actors themselves in this
great morality play apparently overlooked the consideration, it is
impossible for the spectator to ignore the fact. Some few members of the
Cabinet might have provided for a rainy day, but even to many of
official class, and practically to all of the rank and file, a reversal
at the polls must mean that they would have to give up a variety of
highly-esteemed privileges and return to private life in less
interesting capacities, some in very humble ones indeed.

It ended, as it was bound to end, in compromise. They would not play
into the hands of the extreme party and ignore the voice of the
constituencies; they would not be false to their convictions and be
dictated to by the electors. They would decline to bring in the
suggested Minimum Wage Bill, and they would not impose the Personal
Property Tax. They would meet matters by extending the National
Obligations Act, and save money on the Estimates. They would be sound,
if commonplace.

The formal proceedings having been concluded, it was open for any one to
introduce any subject he pleased in terms of censure, enquiry or
discussion. Comrade Tirrel was on his feet at once, and returned to the
subject that lay heavy on his mind.

"Is the Home Secretary in possession of any confidential information
regarding the Unity League?" he demanded; "and can he assure us, in view
of the admittedly hostile object of the organisation, that adequate
means are being taken to neutralise any possible lines of action it may
adopt?"

"The answer to the first part of the question is in the affirmative,"
replied Mr Tubes in his best parliamentary manner. "As regards the
second part, I may state that after considering the reports we have
received it is not anticipated that the League offers any serious menace
to the Government. Should the necessity arise, the Council may rely upon
the Home Office taking the requisite precautions."

"The answer is satisfactory as far as it goes. Being in possession of
special information, will the Home Secretary go a step further and allay
the anxiety that certainly exists in some quarters, by indicating the
real intentions and proposed _modus operandi_ of the League?"

Mr Tubes conferred for a moment with his chief. "I may say that on broad
lines the League has no definite plan for the future, and its
intentions, as represented by the policy of its heads, will simply be to
go on existing so long as the deluded followers will continue their
subscriptions. I may point out that the League has now been in existence
for two years, and during that time it has done nothing at all to
justify its founders' expectations; it has not embarrassed us at any
point nor turned a single by-election. For two years we heard
practically nothing of it, and there has been no fresh development to
justify the present uneasiness which it seems to be causing in the minds
of a few nervous comrades. Its membership is admittedly imposing, but
the bare fact that a million and a half of people are foolish
enough----"

There was a significant exchange of astonished glances among the
occupants of Mr Strummery's council chamber. Murmurs grew, and Mr
Guppling voiced the general feeling by calling the Home Secretary's
attention to the figures he had mentioned "doubtless inadvertently."

"No," admitted Mr Tubes carelessly, "that is our latest estimate. From
recent information we have reason to think that the previous figure we
adopted was too low--or the League may have received large additions
lately through some accidental cause. We are now probably erring as
widely on the other side, but it is the safe side, and I therefore
retain that figure."

Mr Tirrel had not yet finished, but he was listened to with respectful
attention now.

"Is the Home Secretary in a position to tell us who this man Salt is?"
was his next enquiry.

The Home Secretary looked frankly puzzled. "Who _is_ Salt?" he replied,
innocently enough.

"That is the essential point of my enquiry," replied the comrade.
"Salt," he continued, his voice stilling the laughter it had raised, "is
the Man behind the Unity League. You think it is Hampden, but I tell you
that you are mistaken. Hampden is undoubtedly a dangerous power; the
classes will follow him blindly, and he is no mere figure-head, but it
was Salt who stirred Hampden from his apathy, and it is Salt who pulls
the wires."

"And who is Salt?" demanded the Premier, as Mr Tubes offered no comment.

Tirrel shook his head. "I know no more than I have stated," he replied;
"but his secret influence must be tremendous, and all doubt as to the
identity of the man and his past record should be set at rest."

Mr Tubes looked up from the papers he had before him with a gleam of
subdued anger in his eye. "I think that our cock-sure kumred has geete
howd of another mare's neest," he remarked, relapsing unconsciously into
his native dialect as he frequently did when stirred. "I remember
hearin' o' this Saut in one o' th' reports, and here it is. So far from
being a principal, he occupies a very different position--that of
Hampden's private secretary, which would explain how he might have to
come into contact with a great many people without having any real
influence hissel. He is described in my confidential report as a simple,
unsuspicious man, who might be safely made use of, and, in fact, most of
my information is derived from that source."

There was a sharp, smothered exclamation from one or two men, and then a
sudden stillness fell upon the room. Mr Tubes was among the last to
realise the trend of his admission.

"Are we to understand that the greater part--perhaps the whole--of the
information upon which the Home Office has been relying, and of the
assurances of inaction which have lulled our suspicions to rest, have
been blindly accepted from this man Salt, the head and fount of the
League itself?" demanded Tirrel with ominous precision. "If that
indicates the methods of the Department, I think that this Council will
share my view when I suggest that the terms 'simple' and 'unsuspicious'
have been inaccurately allotted--to Salt."

Mr Tubes made no reply. Lying at the bottom of the man's nature
smouldered a volcanic passion that he watched as though it were a
sleeping beast. Twice in his public career it had escaped him, and each
time the result had been a sharp reverse to his ambitions.
Repression--firm, instant, and unconditional--was the only safeguard, so
that now recognising the danger-signal in his breast, he sat without a
word in spite of the Premier's anxious looks, in spite of the concern of
those about him.

"I will not press for a verbal reply," continued Tirrel after a telling
pause; "the inference of silence makes that superfluous. But I will ask
whether the Home Secretary is aware that Salt has been quietly engaged
in canvassing the provinces for a month, and whether he has any
information about his object and results. Yes," he continued vehemently,
turning to those immediately about him, "for a month past this simple,
unsuspecting individual from whom we derive our confidential information
has been passing quietly and unmarked from town to town; and if you were
to hang a map of England on the wall before me, I would undertake to
trace his route across the land by the points of most marked discontent
in the report to which we have just listened."

A knock at the locked door of the room saved the Home Secretary for the
moment from the necessity of replying. It was an unusual incident, and
when the nearest man went and asked what was wanted, some one was
understood to reply that a stranger, who refused to give his name,
wished to see Mr Tubes. Perhaps Mr Tubes personally might have welcomed
a respite, but the master of the house anticipated him.

"Tell him, whoever he may be, that Mr Tubes cannot be disturbed just
now," he declared.

"He says it's important, very important," urged the voice, with a
suggestion of largess received and more to come, in its eagerness.

"Then let him write it down or wait," said Mr Strummery decisively, and
the matter was supposed to have ended.

The momentary interruption had broken the tension and perhaps saved
Tubes from a passionate outburst. He rose to make a reply without any
sign of anger or any fear that he would not be able to smooth away the
awkward impression.

"As far as canvassing in the provinces is concerned," he remarked
plausibly, "it is open for any man, whatever his politics may be, to do
that from morning to night all his life if he likes, so long as it isn't
for an illegal object. As regards Salt having been engaged this way for
the past month, it is quite true that I have had no intimation of the
fact so far. I may explain that as my Department has not yet come to
regard the Unity League as the one object in the world to which it must
devote its whole attention, I am not in the habit of receiving reports
on the subject every day, nor even every week. It may be, however----"

There was another knock upon the door. Mr Tubes stopped, and the Premier
frowned. In the space between the door and the carpet there appeared for
a second a scrap of paper; the next moment it came skimming a few yards
into the room. There was no attempt to hold further communication, and
the footsteps of the silent messenger were heard descending the stairs
again.

Mr Vossit, who sat nearest to the door, picked up the little oblong
card. He saw, as he could scarcely fail to see, that it was an ordinary
visiting-card, and on the upper side, as it lay, there appeared a
roughly-pencilled sign--two lines at right angle drawn through a
semicircle, it appeared superficially to be. As he handed it to Mr Tubes
he reversed the position so that the name should be uppermost, and again
he saw, as he could scarcely fail to see, that the other side was blank.
The roughly-pencilled diagram was all the message it contained.

"It may be, however----" the Home Secretary was repeating
half-mechanically. He took the card and glanced at the symbol it bore.
"It may be, however," he continued, as though there had been no
interruption, "that I shall very soon be in possession of the full facts
to lay before you." Then with a few whispered words to the Premier and a
comprehensive murmur of apology to the rest of the company, he withdrew.

Fully a quarter of an hour passed before there was any sign of the
absent Minister, and then it did not take the form of his return. The
conversation, in his absence, had worked round to the engaging
alternative of whether it was more correct to educate one's son at Eton
or at Margate College, when a message was sent up requesting the
Premier's attendance in another room. After another quarter of an hour
some one was heard to leave the house, but it was ten minutes later
before the two men returned. It was felt in the atmosphere that some new
development was at hand, and they had to run the curious scrutiny of
every eye. Both had an air of constraint, and both were rather pale. The
Premier moved to his seat with brusque indifference, and one who knew
Tubes well passed a whispered warning that Jim had got his storm-cone
fairly hoisted. The door was locked again, chairs were drawn up to the
table, and a hush of marked expectancy settled over the meeting.

The Prime Minister spoke first.

"In the past half-hour a letter has come into our possession that may
cause us to alter our arrangements," he announced baldly. "How it came
into our possession doesn't matter. All that does matter is, that it's
genuine. Tubes will read it to you."

"It is signed 'John Hampden,' addressed to Robert Estair, and dated
three days ago," contributed the Home Secretary just as briefly. "The
original was in cipher. This is the deciphered 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 moment almost ripe. Salt has
     covered all the most important industrial centres, and
     everywhere the reports of our agents are favourable to the
     plan. Not having found universal happiness and a complete
     immunity from the cares incident to humanity in the privileges
     which they so ardently desired and have now obtained, the
     working classes are tending to believe that the panacea must
     lie, not in greater moderation, but in extended privilege.

     "'For the moment the present Government is indisposed to go
     much further, not possessing the funds necessary for enlarged
     concessions and fearing that increased taxation might result in
     a serious stream of emigration among the monied classes. For
     the moment the working men hesitate to throw in their lot with
     the extreme Socialists, distrusting the revolutionary and
     anarchical wing of that party, and instinctively feeling that
     any temporary advantage which they might enjoy would soon be
     swallowed up in the reign of open lawlessness that must
     inevitably arise.

     "'For the moment, therefore, there is a pause, and now occurs
     the opportunity--perhaps the last in history--for us to
     retrieve some of the losses of the past. There are scruples to
     be overcome, but I do not think that an alliance with the
     moderate section of the Labour interest is inconsistent with
     the aims and traditions of the great parties which our League
     represents. It would, of course, be necessary to guarantee to
     our new allies the privileges which they now possess, and even
     to promise more; but I am convinced, not only by past
     experience but also by specific assurances from certain
     quarters, that they would prefer to remain as they are, and
     form an alliance with us rather than grasp at larger gains and
     suffer absorption into another party which they dare not trust.

     "'From the definite nature of this statement you will gather
     that the negotiations are more than in the air. The
     distribution of Cabinet offices will have to be considered at
     once. B---- might be first gained over with the offer of the
     Exchequer. He carries great weight with a considerable section
     of his party, and is dissatisfied with his recognition so far.
     Heape is a representative man who would repay early attention,
     especially as he is, at the moment, envious of R----'s better
     treatment. But these are matters of detail. The great thing is
     to _get back on any terms_. Once in power, by a modification of
     the franchise we might make good our position. I trust that
     this, a desperate remedy in a desperate time, will earn at
     least your tacit acquiescence. Much is irretrievably lost;
     England remains--yet.

     "Yours sincerely,

     "JOHN HAMPDEN.'"

Six men were on their feet before the signature was reached. With an
impatient gesture Strummery waved them collectively aside.

"We all know your opinion on the writer and the letter, and we can all
put it into our own words without wasting time in listening," he said
with suppressed fury. "In five minutes' time I shall entirely reopen the
consideration of the reports which we met this afternoon to discuss."

"Has any effort been made to learn the nature of Estair's reply?"
enquired Tirrel. If he was not the least moved man in the room he was
the least perturbed, and he instinctively picked out the only point of
importance that remained.

"It probably does not exist in writing," replied Mr Tubes, avoiding
Tirrel's steady gaze. "I find that he arrived in town last night. There
would certainly be a meeting."

"Was Bannister summoned to this Council?" demanded another. It was taken
for granted that "B" stood for Bannister.

"Yes," replied the Premier, with one eye on his watch. "He was
indisposed."

"I protest against the reference to myself," said Heape coldly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr Strummery nodded. "Time's up," he announced.

That is the "secret history" of the Government's sudden and inexplicable
conversion to the necessity of the Minimum Wage Bill and to the
propriety of imposing the Personal Property Tax. A fortnight later the
Prime Minister outlined the programme in the course of a speech at
Newcastle. The announcement was received almost with stupefaction. For
the first time in history, property--money, merchandise, personal
belongings--was to be saddled with an annual tax apart from, and in
addition to, the tax it paid on the incomes derived from it. It was an
entire wedge of the extreme policy that must end in Partition. It was
more than the poorer classes had dared to hope; it was more than the
tax-paying classes had dared to fear. It marked a new era of extended
privilege for the one; it marked the final extinction of hope even among
the hopeful for the other.

"It could not have happened more opportunely for us even if we had
arranged it in every detail," declared Hampden, going into Salt's room
with the tidings in huge delight, a fortnight later.

"No," agreed Salt, looking up with his slow, pleasant smile. "Not even
if we had arranged it."




CHAPTER X

THE ORDER OF ST MARTIN OF TOURS


Sir John Hampden paused for a moment with arrested pen. He had been in
the act of crossing off another day on the calendar that hung inside his
desk, the last detail before he pulled the roll-top down for the night,
when the date had caught his eye with a sudden meaning.

"A week to-day, Salt," he remarked, looking up.

"A week to-day," repeated Salt. "That gives us seven more days for
details."

Hampden laughed quietly as he bent forward and continued the red line
through the "14."

"That is one way of looking at it," he said. "Personally, I was rather
wishing that it had been to-day. I confess that I cannot watch the
climax of these two years approaching without feeling keyed up to
concert pitch. I suppose that you never had any nerves?"

"I suppose not. If I had, the Atlantic water soon washed them out."

"But you are superstitious?" he asked curiously. It suddenly occurred to
him how little he really knew of the man with whom he was linked in such
a momentous hazard.

"Oh yes. Blue water inoculates us all with that. Fortunately, mine does
not go beyond trifles, such as touching posts and stepping over paving
stones--a hobby and not a passion, or I should have to curb it."

"Do you really do things like that? Well, I remember Northland, the
great nerve specialist, telling me that most people have something of
the sort--a persistent feeling of impending calamity unless they conform
to some trivial impulse. I am exempt."

"Yes," commented Salt; "or you would hardly be likely to cross off the
date before the day is over."

"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Hampden. "What an age we live in! Is it tannin
or the dregs of paganism? And you think it would be tempting Providence
to do it while there are five more hours to run?"

"I never do it, as a matter of fact," admitted Salt with perfect
seriousness. "Of course, I _know_ that nothing would happen in the five
hours if I did, but, all the same, I rather think that something would."

"I hope that something will," said Hampden cheerfully. "Dinner, for
example. Did I ever strike you as a gourmet, Salt? Well, nevertheless, I
am a terrific believer in regular meals, although I don't care a straw
how simple they are. You may read of some marvellous Trojan working
under heavy pressure for twenty-four hours, and then snatching a hurried
glass of Château d'Yquem and a couple of Abernethy biscuits, and going
on again for another twenty-four. Don't believe it, Salt. If he is not
used to it, his knees go; if he is used to it, they have gone already.
If I were a general I solemnly declare that I would risk more to feed my
men before an engagement, than I would risk to hold the best position
all along the front. Your hungry man may fight well enough for a time,
but the moment he is beaten he knows it. And, strangely enough, we
English have won a good many important battles after we had been
beaten."

He had been locking up the safe and desk as he ran on, and now they
walked together down the corridor. At the door of his own office Salt
excused himself for a moment and went in. When he rejoined the baronet
at the outer door, he held in his hand a little square of thin paper on
which was printed in bold type

     JULY 14.

"You will regret it," said Hampden, not wholly jestingly. He saw at once
that it was the tag for the day, torn from his calendar, that Salt held.

"No," he replied, crumpling up the scrap of paper and throwing it away,
"I may remember, but I shall not regret. When you have to think twice
about doing a thing like that, it is time to do it.... You have no
particular message for Deland?"

"None at all, personally, I think. You will tell him as much as we
decided upon. Let him know that his post will certainly be one of the
most important outside the central office. What time do you go?"

"The 10 train from Marylebone. Deland will be waiting up for me. There
is an early restaurant train in the morning--the 7.20, getting in at
10.40. I shall breakfast _en route_, and come straight on here."

"That's right. Look out for young Hampshire in the train; he will
probably wait on you, but you won't recognise him unless you remember
the Manners-Clinton nose in profile. He regards it as a vast joke, but
he is very keen. And sleep all the time you aren't feeding. Can't do
better. Good night."

Salt laughed as he turned into Pall Mall, speculating for a moment, by
the light of his own knowledge, how little time this strenuous,
simple-living man devoted to the things he advocated. If he had been
able to follow Sir John's electric brougham for the remainder of that
night he would have had still more reason to be sceptical.

When Hampden reached his house and strode up to the door with the
elastic step of a young man, despite his iron-grey hair and burden of
responsibility, instead of the bronze Medusa knocker that had dropped
from the hands of Pietro Sarpi and Donato in its time, his eyes
encountered the smiling face of his daughter as she swung open the door
before him. She had been sitting at an open window of the dull-fronted
house until she saw the Hampden livery in the distance.

"There is some one waiting in the library to see you," she said, as he
kissed her cheek. "He said that he would wait ten minutes; you had
already been seven."

"Who is it?" he asked in quiet expectation. It was not unusual for
Muriel to watch for him from the upper room, and to come down into the
hall to welcome him, but to-night he saw at once that there was a mild
excitement in her manner. "Who is it?" he asked.

She told him in half a dozen whispered words, and then returned to the
drawing-room and the society of a depressing companion, who chanced to
be a poor and distant cousin, while Sir John turned toward the library.

"Tell Styles to remain with the brougham if he is still in front," he
said to a passing footman. The visit might presage anything.

A young man, an inconspicuous young man in a blue serge suit, rose from
the chair of Jacobean oak and Spanish leather where he had been sitting
with a bowler hat between his hands and a cheap umbrella across his
knees, and made a cursory bow as he began to search an inner pocket.

"Sir John Hampden?" he enquired.

"Yes," replied the master of the house, favouring his visitor with a
more curious attention than he received in return. "You are from
Plantagenet House, I believe?"

The young man detached his left hand from the search and turned down the
lapel of his coat in a perfunctory display of his credentials. Pinned
beneath so that it should not obtrude was an insignificant little medal,
so small and trivial that it would require the closest scrutiny to
distinguish its design and lettering.

But Sir John Hampden did not require any assurance upon the point. He
knew by the evidence of just such another medallion which lay in his own
possession that upon one side, around the engraved name of the holder,
ran the inscription, "Every man according as he purposeth in his heart;"
upon the other side a representation of St Martin dividing his cloak
with the beggar. It was the badge of the Order of St Martin of Tours.

The Order of St Martin embodied the last phase of organised benevolence.
In the history of the world there had never been a time when men so
passionately desired to help their fellow men; there had never been a
time when they found it more difficult to do so to their satisfaction.
From the lips of every social reformer, from the reports of the
charitable organisations, from the testimony of the poor themselves the
broad indictment had gone forth that every casual beggar was a rogue and
a vagabond. Promiscuous alms-giving was tabulated among the Seven Curses
of London.

Organised charity was the readiest alternative. Again obliging
counsellors raised their conscientious voices. Organised charity was
wasteful, inelastic, unsympathetic, often superfluous. The preacher
added a warning note: Let none think that the easy donation of a cheque
here and there was charity. It was frequently vanity, it was often a
cowardly compromise with conscience, it was never an absolution from the
individual responsibility.

So brotherly love continued, but often did not fructify, and the man who
felt that he had the true Samaritan instinct, as he passed by on the one
side of the suburban road, looked at his ragged neighbour lying under
the hedge on the other side in a fit which might be epilepsy but might
equally well be soap-suds in the mouth, and assured himself that if only
he could believe the case to be genuine there was nothing on earth he
would not do for the man.

It was a very difficult age, every one admitted: "Society was so
complex."

There was evidence of the generous feeling--ill-balanced and spasmodic,
it is true--on every hand. The poor were bravely, almost blindly, good
to their neighbours in misfortune. The better-off were lavish--or had
been until a few years previously--when they had certified proof that
the cases were deserving. If a magistrate or a police court missionary
gave publicity to a Pathetic Case, the Pathetic Case might be sure of
being able to retire on a comfortable annuity. If only every Pathetic
Case could have been induced to come pathetically into the clutches of a
sympathetic police court cadi, instead of dying quite as pathetically in
a rat-hole, one of the most pressing problems of benevolence might have
been satisfactorily solved.

The Order of St Martin of Tours was one of the attempts to reconcile the
generous yearnings of mankind with modern conditions. Its field of
action had no definable limit, and whatever a man wished to give it was
prepared to utilise. It was not primarily concerned with money, although
judged by the guaranteed resources upon which it could call if
necessary, it would rank as a rich society. It imposed no subscription
and made no outside appeal. Upon its books, against the name of every
member, there was entered what he bound himself to do when it was
required of him. It was a vast and comprehensive list, so varied that
few ever genuinely applied for the services of the Order without their
needs being satisfied. The city man willing to give a foolish and
repentant youth another chance of honest work; the Sussex farmer anxious
to prove what a month of South Down fare and Channel breezes would do
for a small city convalescent; the prim little suburban lady, much too
timid to attempt any personal contact with the unknown depths of sin and
suffering, but eager to send her choicest flowers and most perfect fruit
to any slum sick-room; the good-hearted laundry girl who had been
through the fires herself, offering to "pal up to any other girl what's
having a bit of rough and wants to keep straight without a lot of
jaw,"--all found a deeper use in life beneath the sign of St Martin's
divided cloak. Children, even little children, were not shut out; they
could play with other, lonely, little children, and renounce some toys.

The inconspicuous young man standing in Sir John Hampden's library--he
was in a cheap boot shop, but he gave his early closing day to serve the
Order as a messenger, and there were millionaires who gave less--found
the thing he searched for, and handed to Sir John an unsealed envelope.

"I accept," said the baronet, after glancing at the slip it contained.
This was what he accepted:

    ORDER OF ST. MARTIN OF TOURS.

    _Case_. . . John Flak, 45 Paradise Buildings,
                     Paradise Street, Drury Lane, W.C.

    _Cause_ . . Street Accident.

    _Requirement_ Service through the night.

    _Recommender_ L. K. Stone, M.D., 172 Great Queen
                       Street, W.C.

    WALTHAM, MASTER.

He could have declined; and his membership would have been at an end.
But in a mission of personal service he could not accept and appoint a
substitute. The Order was modern, business-like, reasonable,
unemotional, and quite prepared to take humanity as it was. It did not
seek to impose the ideal Christian standard, logically recognising that
if a man gave _all_ he possessed, a system of Christian laws (a Cæsar
whom he was likewise bidden to obey) would at once incarcerate him in a
prison for having no visible means of subsistence, and, if he persisted
in his unnatural Christian conduct, in a lunatic asylum, where in its
appointed season he would have the story of the Rich Ruler read for his
edification.

The Order was practical and "very nice to do with;" but it had a
standard, and as a protest against that widespread reliance in the
omnipotence of gold that marred the age it allowed no delegation of an
office of mercy. On all points it was open; its thin medallion
symbolised no mysteries or secret vows; nor, and on this one point it
was unbending, as far as lay in the power of the Order should any
second-hand virtue find place beneath its saintly ensign.

A few years before, Paradise Street, with that marked inappropriateness
that may be traced in the nomenclature of many London thoroughfares, had
been the foulest, poorest, noisomest, most garbage-strewn and
fly-infested region even in the purlieus of Drury Lane. It was not
markedly criminal, it was merely filthy; and when smell-diseases broke
out in central London it was generally found that they radiated from
Paradise Street like ripples from a dead dog thrown into a pond.
Presently a type foundry in the next street, growing backwards because
it was impossible to expand further in any other direction, pushed down
the flimsy tenements that stood between and reared a high wall, pierced
with windows of prismatic glass, in their place. Soon public
authorities, seeing that the heavens did not fall when a quarter of
Paradise Street did, suddenly and unexpectedly tore down another quarter
as though they had received a maddened impulse and Paradise Street had
been a cardboard model. The phoenix that appeared on this site was a
seven-storied block of workmen's dwellings. It could not be said to have
given universal satisfaction. The municipal authorities who devised it
bickered entertainingly over most of the details that lay between the
foundations and the chimney-pots; the primitive dwellers in Paradise
Street looked askance at it, as they did at most things not in liquid
form; social reformers complained that it drove away the very poor and
brought in a class of only medium poor; and ordinary people noticed that
in place of the nearest approach to artistic dirt to be found in the
metropolis, some one had substituted uninteresting squalor.

Hampden dismissed his carriage in Lincoln's Inn Fields and walked the
remainder of the way. He had changed into a dark lounge suit before he
left, but, in spite of the principle he had so positively laid down, he
had not stayed to dine. The inevitable, morbid little group marked the
entrance to Paradise Buildings, but the incident was already three hours
old, and the larger public interest was being reserved for the
anticipated funeral.

A slipshod, smug-faced woman opened the door of No. 45 in response to
his discreet knock. He stepped into a small hall where coal was stored
in a packing-case, and, on her invitation, through into the front room.
Five more untidy women, who had been drinking from three cups, got up as
he entered, and passed out, eyeing him with respectful curiosity as they
went, and each dropping a word of friendly leavetaking to the slatternly
hostess.

"Don't be down'arted, my dear."

"See you later, Emm."

"Let's know how things are going, won't you?"

"You'll remember about that black alpaker body?"

"Well, so long, Mrs Flak. Gord bless yer."

Sir John waited until the hall door closed behind the last frowsy woman.

"I am here to be of any use I can," he said. "Did Dr Stone mention that
some one would come?"

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," she replied. She stood in the middle of the
room, a picture of domestic incapacity, with a foolish look upon her
rather comely features. The room was not bare of furniture, was not
devoid of working-class comforts, but the dirty dishes, the dirty
clothing, the dirty floor, told the plain tale.

"I do not know any particulars of the case yet." He saw at once that he
would have to take the lead in every detail. "Did the doctor speak of
coming again, or leave any message?"

"Yes, sir," she replied readily. She lifted an ornament on the
mantelpiece and gave him a folded sheet of paper, torn from a note-book,
that had been placed there for safety. He had the clearest impression
that it would never have occurred to the woman to give it to him
unasked.

"To rep of O. St M.," ran the pencilled scrawl. "Shall endeavour to look
in 8-8.30.--L.K.S."

Even as he took out his watch there came a business-like knock at the
door, an active step in the hall, and beneath the conventional greeting,
the two men were weighing one another.

Dr Stone had asked the Order to send a man of common-sense who could
exercise authority if need be, and one who would not be squeamish in his
surroundings. For reasons of his own he had added that if with these
qualifications he combined that of being a Justice of the Peace, so much
the better. Dr Stone judged that he had the man before him. Hampden saw
a brisk, not too well shaven, man in a light suit, with a straw hat and
a serviceable stick in his hands, until he threw them on the table.
There was kindness and decision behind his alert eyes, and his manner
was that of a benevolent despot marshalling his poor patients--and he
had few others--as a regiment before him, marching them right and left
in companies, bringing them sharply to the front, and bidding them to
stand there and do nothing until they were told.

"You haven't been into the other room yet?" he asked. "No, well----"

He stopped with his hand on the door knob, turned back like a pointer on
the suspicion of a trail, and looked keenly at the woman, then around
the bestrewn room. If her eyes had slid the least betraying glance,
Hampden did not observe it, but the doctor, without a word, strode to
the littered couch, put his hand behind a threadbare cushion, and drew
out a half-filled bottle. There was a gluggling ripple for a few
seconds, and the contents had disappeared down the sink, while the
terebinthine odour of cheap gin hung across the room.

"Not here, Mrs Flak," he said sharply; and without changing her
expression of vacuous good-nature, the woman meekly replied, "No, sir."

Dr Stone led the way into the inner room and closed the door behind
them. A man, asleep, insensible, or dead, lay on the bed, his face half
hidden in bandages.

"This is the position," explained the doctor, speaking very rapidly, for
his time was mapped out with as little waste as there is to be found
between the squares on a chess board. "This man went out of here a few
hours ago and walked straight into an empty motor 'bus that was going
round this way. That's how they all put it: he walked right into the
thing. Why? He was a sober enough man, an attendant of some kind at one
of the west end clubs. Because, as I have good reason to suppose, he was
thinking absorbingly of something else.

"Well, they carried him in here; it ought to have been the hospital, of
course, but it was at his own doorstep it took place, you see, and it
doesn't really matter, because to-morrow morning----!"

"He will die then?" asked Hampden in a whisper, interpreting the quick
gesture.

"Oh, he will die as sure as his head is a cracked egg-shell. Between
midnight and dawn, I should say. But before the end I look confidently
for an interval of consciousness, or rather sub-consciousness. If I am
wrong I shall have kept you up all night for nothing; if I am right you
will probably hear something that he wants to say very much."

"Whatever was in his mind when he met with the accident?"

"That is my conviction. There has already been an indication of partial
expression. Curiously enough, I have had two exactly similar cases, and
this is going just the same way. In one it was a sum of money a man had
banked under another name to keep it from his wife and for his children;
in the second it was a blow struck in a scuffle, and an innocent man was
doing penal servitude for it."

"That is what you wished to have some one here for chiefly, then?" asked
Hampden.

"Everything, practically. You see the kind of people around? The wife is
a fool; the neighbours are the class of maddening dolts who leave a
suicide hanging until a policeman comes to cut him down. They would hold
an orgie in the next room. In excitement the women fly to gin as
instinctively as a nun flies to prayer. Order them out if they come, but
I don't think that they will trouble you after I have spoken to the
woman as I go. If there is anything to be caught it will have to be on
the hop, so to speak. It may be a confession, a deposition of legal
value, or only a request; one cannot guess. Questioning, when the
sub-conscious stage is reached, might lead to something. It's largely a
matter of luck, but intelligence may have an innings."

"Is there nothing to be done--in the way of making it easier for him?"

Dr Stone made a face expressive of their helplessness and shrugged his
shoulders; then mentioned a few simple details.

"He will never know," he explained. "Even when he seems conscious he
will feel no pain and remember nothing of the accident. The clock will
be mercifully set back." He smiled whimsically. "Forgive me if it never
strikes." He turned to go. "The nearest call office is the kiosk in
Aldwych," he remarked. "I am 7406 Covent Garden." No paper being visible
he wrote the number on the wall. "After 10.30 as a general thing," he
added.

So the baronet was left alone with the still figure that counterfeited
death so well, the man who would be dead before the dawn. He stepped
quietly to the bed and looked down on him. The lower half of the face
was free from swathing, and the lean throat and grizzled beard struck
Sir John with a momentary surprise. It was the face of an elderly man;
he had expected to find one not more than middle-aged as the companion
of the young woman in the other room.

There was a single chair against the wall, and he sat down. There was
nothing else to do but to sit and wait, to listen to the sounds of
voluminous life that rose from the street beneath, the careful creaking
movements in the room beyond. From the shallow wainscotting near the bed
came at intervals the steady ticking of a death-watch. It was nothing,
as every one knew, but the note of an insect calling for its mate, but
it thrilled and grew large in the stillness of the chamber ominously.

A low tap on the door came as a relief. He found the woman standing
there.

"Is there anything different?" she asked, hanging on to the door. "I
kept on thinking I heard noises."

"No, there is no change," he replied. "Will you come in?"

She shrank back at the suggestion. "Gord 'elp us, no!" she cried. "It's
bad enough out there."

"What are you afraid of?" he asked kindly.

She had no words for it. Self-analysis did not enter into her daily
life. But, sitting there alone among the noises, real and imagined, she
had reached a state of terror.

"There is nothing at all dreadful, nothing that would shock you," he
said, referring to the appearance of the dying man. "You are his wife,
are you not?"

The foolish look, half stubborn, half vacuous, flickered about her face.
"As good as," she replied. "It's like this----"

"I see." He had no desire to hear the recital of the sordid details.

"His wife's in a mad-house. Won't never be anywhere else, and I've been
with him these five years, an honest woman to him all the time," she
said, bridling somewhat at the suggestion of reproach. "No one's got no
better right to the things, I'm sure." Her eloquence was stirred not so
much to defend her reputation as by the fear that some one might step in
to claim "the things."

"There will be plenty of time to talk about that when--when it is
necessary," he said. "Has he no relations about here who ought to be
told?"

"Nah," she said decisively; "no one but me. Why, he didn't even have no
friends--no pals of his own class, as you may say. Very close about
himself he was. All he thought of was them political corkses, as they
call um." She came nearer to the door again, the gossiping passion of
her class stronger than her fear, now that the earlier restraint of his
presence was wearing off. "It's the only thing we ever had a 'arsh word
about. It's all right and well for them that make a living at it, but
many and many a time my 'usband's lost 'alf a day two and three times a
week to sit in the Distingwidged Strangers' Gallery. You mightn't 'ardly
think it, sir, but he was hand and foot with some of the biggest men
there are; he was indeed."

Hampden was looking at her curiously. He read into her "'arsh word" the
ceaseless clatter of her nagging, shameless tongue when the old man
brought home a few shillings less than he was wont; the aftermath of
sullen silence, the unprepared meals and neglected home. He pictured him
a patient, long-suffering old man, and pitied him. And now she took
pride and boasted of the very things that she had upbraided him with.

"Vickers he knew," she continued complacently, "and Drugget. He's shaken
hands with Mr Strummery, the Prime Minister, more than onest. Then
Tubes--you've heard speak of him?--he found Mr Tubes a very pleasant
gentleman. Oh, and a lot more I can't remember."

Hampden disengaged himself from further conversation with a single
formal sentence, and returned to his vigil. There he was secure from her
callous chatter. He saw the renewed look of terror start into her eyes
when a board behind her creaked as the door was closing. He heard the
startled shriek, but her squalid avarice cut off his sympathies. He sat
down again and looked round at the already familiar objects in the room.
The form lying on the bed had not changed a fraction of its rigid
outline; but he missed something somewhere in the room, and for a minute
he could not identify it. Then he remembered the ticking of the
death-watch. It had ceased. He looked at his watch; it was not yet nine
o'clock.

He had not been back more than ten minutes when the subdued tapping--it
was rather a timid scrape, as though she feared that a louder summons
might call another forth--was repeated.

"I don't see that it's no good my staying here," she gasped. "I've been
sitting there till the furniture fair began to move towards me, and
every bloomin' rag about the place had a face in it. It's giving me the
fair horrors."

He could not ignore her half-frenzied state. "What do you want to do?"
he asked.

"I want to go out for a bit," she replied, licking her thin feline lips.
"You don't know what it's like. I want to hear real people talk and not
see things move. I'll come back soon; before Gord, I will."

"Yes, _how_ will you came back?"

"I won't. May it strike me dead if I touch a drop. I'll go straight into
Mrs Rugg's across the street, and she's almost what you might call a
teetotaler."

"The man you call your husband is dying in there, and he may need your
help at any minute," he said sternly. It needed no gift of divination to
prophesy that if the woman once left the place she would be hopelessly
drunk before an hour had passed. "Don't sit down doing nothing but
imagining things," he continued. "Make yourself some tea, and then when
one of your friends comes round to see you, you can let her stay. But
only one, mind."

He saw the more sullen of her looks settle darkly about her face as he
closed the door. He waited to hear the sound of the kettle being moved,
the tea-cup clinking, but they never came. An unnatural, uncreaking
silence reigned instead. He opened the door quietly and looked out. That
room was empty, and, as he stood there, a current of cooler air fell
across his cheek. Half a dozen steps brought him to the entrance to the
little hall--the only other room there was. It also was empty, and the
front door stood widely open. There was only one possible inference:
"Mrs Flak" had fled.

Sir John had confessed to possessing nerves, and to few men the
situation would have been an inviting one. Still, there was only one
possible thing to do, and he closed the door again, noticing, as he did
so, that the action locked it. As he stood there a moment before
returning to the bedroom and its tranquil occupant lying in his rigid,
unbreathing sleep, a slight but continuous sound caught his ear. It was
the most closely comparable (to attempt to define it) with the whirring
of a clock as the flying pinion is released before it strikes. Or it
might be that the doctor's simile prompted the comparison. It was not
loud, but the room beyond seemed very, very still.

It was not a time to temporise with the emotions. Hampden stepped into
the next room and stood listening. He judged--nay, he was sure--that the
sound came from the bedroom, but it was not repeated. Instead, something
very different happened, something that was either terrifying or
natural, according to the conditions that provoked it. Quite without
warning there came a voice from the next room, a full, level, healthy
voice, even strong, and speaking in the ordinary manner of conversation.

"Will you please tell Mr Tubes that I am waiting here to see him?"




CHAPTER XI

MAN BETWEEN TWO MASTERS


There was something in the situation that was more than gruesome,
something that was peculiarly unnerving.

In his anticipation of this moment as he had sat almost by the bedside,
Hampden had conjectured that the dying man would perhaps lift a hand or
move his head uneasily with the first instinct of returning
consciousness. A sigh, a groan, might escape him, incoherent words
follow, then broken but rational expressions of his suffering, and
entreaties that something might be done to ease the pain. Or perhaps,
after realising his position, he would nerve himself to betray no
unmanly weakness, and, in the words of the significant old phrase,
"turning his face to the wall," endure in stoical silence to the end. It
would be painful, perhaps acutely distressing, but it would not be
unnatural.

There had been no groan, no sigh or broken words, no indication of
weakness or suffering behind that half-closed door, nothing but the
curious clock-like sound that had gone before the voice. And that voice!
It was as full and strong, as vibrant and as ordinary as his own could
ever be. Standing in the middle of the living-room Sir John could not
deceive himself. It came from the other room where a minute before he
had left the dying--yes, the almost dead--man lying with stark outline
on the bed. There was no alternative: it was from those pallid lips that
the words had come, it was by that still, inanimate man that they were
spoken.

The suddenness of the whole incident was shocking in itself, but that
was not all; the mere contrast to what he had looked for was
disconcerting, but there was something more; the curious unexpected
nature of the request, if request it was, was not without its element of
mystery, but above and beyond all else was the thought--the thought that
for a dreadful moment held his heart and soul in icy bonds--what sight
when he returned to the inner room, as return at once he must, what
gruesome sight would meet his eyes?

What phantoms his misgivings raised, every man may conjecture for
himself. Follow, then, another step in imagination, and having given a
somewhat free and ghastly fancy rein, push the chamber door cautiously
and inch by inch, or fling it boldly open as you will; then pause upon
the threshold, as Hampden did, in sharp surprise.

Nothing was altered, no single detail had undergone the slightest
change! On the bed, rigid and very sharp beneath the single unclean
sheet, lay the body of the mangled man. Not a fold of his shroud-like
wrapping differed from its former line, it did not seem possible that a
breath had stirred him.

Had the voice been a trick of the imagination? Hampden knew, as far as
mortal man can be sure of any mortal sense, that the voice had been as
real as his life itself. Then----? It occurred to him in a flash: here
was the stage of under-consciousness of which Dr Stone had spoken. Of
his pain, the accident, where he at that moment lay, and all his real
surroundings, the sufferer knew nothing, and never would know. But out
of the shock and shattering, some of the delicate machinery of the brain
still kept its balance, and would continue to exercise its functions to
the end.

It was an ordeal, but it had to be done. It was the purpose for which he
had been summoned. Sir John moved to the bedside, nerved himself to
watch the ashen face, and said slowly and distinctly: "Mr Tubes is not
here. Do you wish to see him?"

There was just a perceptible pause, and then the bloodless lips replied.
But not the faintest tremor of a movement stirred the body otherwise
from head to foot, and in the chilling absence of expression the simile
occurred to Hampden of bubbles rising from some unseen working to the
surface of an inky pool.

"I have come on purpose. Let him be told that it is most important."

Hampden had to feel his way. The woman had mentioned that Flak was at
least on terms of acquaintanceship with Mr Tubes. The doctor had
surmised that the man had something he must say before he died. But was
this the one true line, or a mere vagary of the sub-conscious state--a
twist in the tortuous labyrinth that would lead to nothing?

"He is not here at present," he said. "If you will tell me what you wish
to say I will write it down, so that it cannot fail to reach him."

"No. I cannot tell any one else. I must see him."

"Mr Tubes is a very busy man. You know that he is the Home Secretary. Is
it of sufficient importance to telegraph for him?"

This time the answer followed on his last word with startling rapidity.
Until the last phase that was the only variation in the delivery of the
sentences--that sometimes there was a pause as though the working of the
mind had to make a revolution before it reached the point of the mental
clutch, at others it dropped into its gear at once.

"It is important enough to send a coach and four for him," was the
reply.

Hampden might not be convinced of this but he was satisfied of one
thing: the coherence of idea was being regularly maintained. How long
would it last? It occurred to him to put the question.

"I shall have to go out either to send the telegram myself or to find
some one who will take it," he explained. "Until Mr Tubes comes or sends
his reply will you _remain here_?"

It was rather eerie to be holding conversation with the fragment of a
man's brain with the man himself for all practical purposes eliminated.
But he seemed to have arrived at a practical understanding with the
centre of sub-consciousness.

"I will remain," was the unhesitating reply, and Hampden felt assured
that the line would not be lost.

He had not definitely settled in his mind what to do when he opened the
door leading on to the common stairs. A small child who had been
loitering outside in a crouching position staggered back in momentary
alarm at his sudden appearance. It was a ragged girl, perhaps ten or
twelve years old, with cruelly unwieldy boots upon her stockingless
feet, matted hair, and a precocious face full of unchildish knowledge.
The inference that she had been applying either an eye or an ear to the
keyhole was overwhelming.

Her fear--it was only the slum child's instinct of flight--died out when
she saw the gentleman. Toffs (so ran her experience) do not hit you for
nothing.

"Ee's in there yet, ain't ee?" she whispered, coming back boldly and
looking up confidentially to his face. "I 'eard yer talking, but I
couldn't tell what yer said. 'Ow long d'yer think 'e'll last?"

Sir John looked down at the child, the child who had never been young,
in shuddering pity.

"It was me what picked 'is 'at up, but they wouldn't let me go in," she
continued, as though the fact gave her a standing in the case. "Did yer
see it in there?" She looked proudly at her right hand with horrid
significance.

"Come in here," he said, after considering. "Can you run an errand?"

Her face reflected gloating eagerness as she entered, her attitude had
just a tinge of pleasurable awe. He did not permit her to go further
than the hall.

"Is it to do with 'im?" she asked keenly. "Yehs!"

"It is to go to the post office in Fleet Street," he explained. "You
must go as fast as ever you can."

"I can go anywhere as well as any boy, and as fast if I take my boots
off. When that there Italian knifed her man--him what took up with Shiny
Sal--in the Lane a year ago, it was me what fetched the police."

He left her standing there--her face to the chink of the door before he
had turned away--and went into the next room to write the message. He
desired to make it neither too insistent nor too immaterial. "John Flak,
of 45 Paradise Buildings, Paradise Street, Drury Lane, has met with
fatal accident, and earnestly desires to see you on important business,"
was the form it took. He had sufficient stamps in his pocket for the
payment, and to these he added another for a receipt.

"You can read?" he asked, returning to her.

"Yehs!" she replied with her curious accent of lofty scorn at so
ingenuous a question. "I read all the murders and sewercides to Blind
Mike every Sunday morning."

"Well, go as fast as you can to the post office in Fleet Street, and
give them this paper where you see 'Telegrams' written up. Then wait for
another piece of paper which they will give you, and bring it back to
me. Here is sixpence for you now, and you shall have another shilling
when you come back." He was making it more profitable for her to be
honest than to be dishonest, which is perhaps the safest way in an
emergency.

It was nearly ten o'clock when he looked at his watch on her departure;
it was not ten minutes past when she returned. She was panting but
exultant, and watched his face for commendation as she gave him the
receipt, as a probationary imp might watch the face of the Prince of
Darkness on bringing in his first human soul. One boot she had dropped
in her wild career, but so far from stopping to look for it, she had
thrown away the other then as useless.

Leaving the ghoul-child seated on the coal to thrill delightfully at
every unknown sound, Hampden returned to the bedside. Much of the first,
the absolutely cold horror of the situation, was gone. He judged it
better not to allow too long an interval of silence in which that dim
consciousness might slip back into the outer space of trackless
darkness. Now that he knew what to expect it was not very unlike
speaking to one who slept and held converse in his sleep.

"I have sent for Mr Tubes, but, making due allowance, he can scarcely
get here in less than an hour," he said. "If in the meantime there is
anything that you wish to tell me, to make doubly sure, it will be
received as a most sacred confidence."

There was a longer pause than any before, so long that the watcher by
the bedside was preparing to speak again; then the lips slowly opened,
and the same full, substantial voice made reply.

"I will wait. But he must be quick--quick!"

The words seemed to disclose a fear, but there was no outward sign of
failing power. Hampden ventured on another point.

"Are you in pain?" he asked.

The reply came more quickly this time, and, perhaps because he was
looking for some such indication, the listener fancied that he caught
the faintest stumbling, a little blurring of the outline here and there.

"No, I am in no pain. But I have a terrible anxiety that weighs me
down."

There was nothing to be gained by further questioning. Sir John returned
to the other room. The fire was low and the grate choked with ashes; he
had begun to replenish it when a curious sound startled him. He only
heard it between the raspings of the poker as he raked the ashes out,
but it was not to be mistaken. It was the sharp, dry, clock-like
whirring that had been the first indication of life and speech beyond
the bedroom door more than an hour before.

A board creaked behind him, and he turned with an exclamation to see the
dreadful child standing in the middle of the room. Barefooted, she had
slipped noiselessly in from the hall at the first tremor of that unusual
sound, and now, with her dilated eyes fixed fearfully on the door, her
shrinking form bent forward, she slowly crept nearer step by step. Her
face quivered with terror, her whole body shook, but she went on as
surely as though a magnet drew her.

"What are you doing?" cried Hampden sharply. "Why did you not stay where
I told you?"

She turned her face, but not her eyes, towards him. "Yer heard it,
didn't yer?" she whispered. "Ain't that what they call the death-rattle
what comes?"

He took her by the shoulder and swung her impatiently round. "Go back,
you imp," he commanded. "Back and stay there, or you shall go out."

She crept back, looking fearfully over her shoulder all the way.
Something else was happening to engage Hampden's attention. In the next
room the man was speaking, speaking spontaneously, as he had done once
before, but beyond all doubt the voice was weaker now. The momentary
interruption of the child's presence had drowned the first part of the
sentence, but Hampden caught a word that strung up every faculty he
possessed--"League."

"----League will then suddenly issue a notice to all its members,
putting an embargo--a boycott, if you will--on----"

The voice trailed off, and, although he sprang to the door, Sir John
could not distinguish another word. But that fragment alone was
sufficiently startling. To the President of the Unity League it could
only have one meaning; for it was true! Some--how much?--of their plan
lay open. And to how many was it known? The terrible anxiety of this
poor, battered wreck, unconsciously loyal to his class in death, to give
the warning before he passed away, seemed to indicate that nothing but
the frayed thread of one existence stood in the League's path yet.

Was there anything to be done? That was Hampden's first thought. There
was plainly one thing: to learn, if possible, before Mr Tubes's arrival,
how much was known.

Nothing was changed; only the death-watch ticked again. He leaned over
the bed in his eagerness, and, stilling the throbbing excitement of his
blood, tried to speak in a tone of commonplace indifference.

"Yes, continue."

There was no response.

"Repeat the sentence," he commanded, concentrating his voice in his
desperation, and endeavouring by mere force of will to impose its
authority on the indefinite consciousness.

Just as well might he have commanded the man to get up and walk.

Had that last elusive thread that held him to mortality been broken?
Hampden bent still lower. The pallid face was no more pallid than
before, but before it could scarcely have been more death-like. The
acutest test could not have found a trace of breath. He put together the
gradual failing of the voice that little more than an hour ago had been
as full and vigorous as his own, the unfinished sentence, the
silence----

Suddenly he straightened himself by the bedside with a sense of guilt
that struck him like a blow. What was he thinking--hoping? Who was
he--Sir John Hampden, President of the Unity League? Not in that room!
The man who watched by the bedside stood there even as the humblest
servant of the Order of St. Martin, pledged while in that service to
succour in "trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity."

It did not occur to him to debate the point. His way seemed very
straight and clear. His plain duty to the dying man was to try by every
means in his power to carry out his one overwhelming desire. Its
successful accomplishment might aim a more formidable blow at his own
ambition than almost anything else that could happen. It could not ward
off the attack upon which the League was now concentrating--nothing
could do that--but an intimate knowledge of the details of that scheme
of retaliation might act in a hundred adverse ways. Hampden did not stop
to consider what might happen on the one side and on the other. A
thousand years of argument and sophistries could not alter the one great
fact of his present duty. He had a very simple conscience, and he
followed it.

If he could have speeded Mr Tubes's arrival he would have done so now.
He went into the hall to listen. The street child was still there,
sitting on the coal, as sharp-eyed and wakefully alert as ever. He had
forgotten her.

"Come, little imp," he said kindly, "I ought to have packed you off long
ago." It was, in point of fact, nearly eleven o'clock.

"Ain't doin' no aharm to the coal," she muttered.

"That's not the question. You ought to have been at home and in bed by
this time of night."

She looked up at him sharply with a suspicion that such innocence in a
grown-up man could not be unassumed.

"Ain't got no bed," she said contemptuously. "Ain't got no 'ome."

A sentence rang through his mind: "The birds of the air have nests."

"Where do you sleep?" he asked.

"Anywhere," she replied.

"And how do you live?"

"Anyhow."

The lowest depths of human poverty had not been abolished by Act of
Parliament after all.

A knock at the door interrupted the reflection. The child had already
heard the step and sought to efface herself in the darkest corner.

Hampden had not noticed the significance of the knock. He opened the
door, prepared to admit the Home Secretary. So thoroughly had he
dissociated his own personality from the issue, that he felt the keenest
interest that the man should arrive before it was too late. He opened
the door to admit him, and experienced an actual pang of disappointment
when he saw who stood outside.

He had sent a telegram instead. Whatever the telegram said did not
matter very much. Hampden instinctively guessed that he was not coming
then--was not on his way. Anything less than that would be too late.

He took the orange envelope and opened it beneath the flaring gas that
piped and whistled at the stairhead.

"There is no reply," he said quietly, folding the paper slowly and
putting it away in his pocket-book. Were it not that the gain to Hampden
of the League was so immense one might have thought, to see him at that
moment, that he felt ashamed of something in life.

Members of Parliament had every department of the postal system freely
at their service. The statement may not be out of place, for this was
what the telegram contained:

     "Deeply regret to hear of Comrade Flak's accident, and will
     have it fully enquired into. Was it while he was engaged at
     work? Cannot, however, recall any business upon which he could
     wish to see me. Probably a mental hallucination caused by
     shock. Have been terribly busy all day, and am engaged at this
     moment with important State papers which _must_ be finished
     before I go to bed. If it is thought desirable I will, on
     receiving another wire, come first thing in the morning, but
     before deciding to take this course I beg you to consider
     incessant calls made on my time. Let everything possible be
     done for the poor fellow.

     "JAMES TUBES."

The burden of failure pressed on Hampden as he walked slowly to the
bedroom. In that environment of death his own gain did not touch him at
all, so completely had he succeeded in eliminating for the time every
consideration except an almost fanatical sense of duty to the articles
of the Order. It would be better, he felt, if the shadowy consciousness
that hovered around the bed could have sunk finally into its eternal
sleep, without suffering the pang of being recalled only to hear _this_,
but something in the atmosphere of the room, a brooding tension of
expectancy that seemed to quicken in the silence, warned him that this
was not to be.

"A reply has been received from Mr Tubes in answer to our telegram."

"He is here?" There was no delay this time; there was an intense
eagerness that for a brief minute overcame the growing weakness.

"No. He cannot come. He regrets, but he is engaged on matters of
national importance."

Silence. Painful silence. In it Hampden seemed to share the cruel
frustration of so great a hope deferred.

"There is this," he continued, more for the sake of making any
suggestion than from a belief in its practicability; "I might go and
compel him to come. If he understood the urgency----"

"It is too late.... A little time ago there was a thin white mist; now
it is a solid wall of dense rolling fog. It is nearer--relentless,
unevadable...."

"I can still write down what you have to say. Consider, it is the only
hope."

"I cannot judge.... I had a settled conviction that no other ear....
Stay, quick; there are the notes! Incomplete, but they will put him on
the track.... Swear, swear that you will place them in his hand unread."

"I swear to do as you ask me. Go on quickly."

"To-night, now. Do not ... do not let ... do not wait...."

"Yes, yes. But the notes? Where are they? How am I to know them?" The
voice was growing very thin and faltering, weaker with every word. The
disappointment had sapped all its failing strength at a single blow.

"The notes ... yes. You will explain.... The black wall ... how it
towers!..." He was whispering inaudibly.

Hampden leaned over the dying man in a final effort.

"Flak!" he cried, "the notes on the Unity League! Where are they?
Speak!"

"The envelope"--he caught a breath of sound--"... coat lining.... _I
must go_!"

Twenty minutes later Sir John picked up his motor brougham in New Oxford
Street. He had telephoned immediately on leaving Paradise Buildings for
it to start out at once and wait for him near Mudie's corner. In
Paradise Street he had seen a bacchanalian group surrounding "Mrs Flak,"
high priestess, who chanted a song in praise of home and the domestic
virtues. It was at this point that he missed the ghoul-child from his
side.

A south-east wind was carrying the midnight boom of the great clock at
Westminster as far as Kilburn when he turned out of the High Road, and
the little clocks around had taken up the chorus, like small dogs
envious of the baying of a hound, as he stopped before the Home
Secretary's house.

There was a light still burning in a room on the ground floor, and it
was Mr Tubes himself who came to the door.

"I have to place in your hands an envelope of papers entrusted to me by
a man called Flak who died in Paradise Street an hour ago," said
Hampden, and with the act he brought his night of duty as a faithful
servant of his Order to an end.

"Oh, that's you," said Mr Tubes, peering out into the darkness. "I had a
wire about it. So the poor man is dead?"

"Yes," replied Hampden a shade drily. "The poor man is dead."

Mr Tubes fancied that he saw the lamps of a cab beyond his garden gate,
and he wondered whether he was being expected to offer to pay the fare.

"Well, it's very good of you to take the trouble, though, between
ourselves, I hardly imagine that the papers are likely to be of any
importance," he remarked. "Now may I ask who I am indebted to?"

Hampden had already turned to go. He recognised that in the strife which
he was about to precipitate, the man who stood there would be his
natural antagonist, and he regretted that he could not find it in his
nature to like him any better than he did.

"What I have done, I have done as a servant of the Order of St Martin,"
he replied. "What I am about to do," he added, "I shall do as Sir John
Hampden."

And leaving Mr Tubes standing on the doorstep in vast surprise, the
electric carriage turned its head-lights to the south again.




CHAPTER XII

BY TELESCRIBE


What Sir John Hampden was "about to do" he had decided in the course of
the outward journey.

There was nothing in his actions, past or prospective, that struck him
as illogical. He would have said, indeed, that they were the only
possible outcome of the circumstance.

For the last four hours, as the nameless emissary of the Order to whose
discipline he bound himself, he had merged every other feeling in his
duty to the dying man and in the fulfilment of a death-bed charge.

That was over; now, as the President of the Unity

League, he was on his way to try by every means in his power to minimise
the effect of what he had done; to anticipate and counteract the value
of the warning he had so scrupulously conveyed.

It was a fantastic predicament. He had sat for perhaps half an hour with
the unsealed envelope in his pocket, and no eye had been upon him. He
had declared passionately, year after year, that class and class were
now at war, that the time for courteous retaliation was long since past,
that social martial law had been proclaimed. Yet as he drove back to
Trafalgar Chambers he would have given a considerable sum of money--the
League being not ill provided, say fifty thousand pounds--to know the
extent of those notes.

When he reached the offices it was almost half-past twelve. Salt would
be flying northward as fast as steam could take him, and for the next
two hours at least, cut off from the possibility of any communication.
The burden of decision lay on Hampden alone.

He had already made it. Within an hour he would have pledged the League
to a line of policy from which there was no retreat. Before another day
had passed the Government could recall the little band of secret service
agents and consign their reports to the wastepaper basket. Every one
would know everything. Everything? He smiled until the remembrance of
that cheap frayed envelope in Mr Tubes's possession drove the smile
away.

Next to his own office stood the instrument room. Here, behind double
doors that deadened every sound, were ranged the telephones, the tape
machines, the Fessenden-d'Arco installation, and that most modern
development of wireless telegraphy which had come just in time to save
the over-burdened postal system from chronic congestion, the telescribe.

Hampden had not appeared to move hurriedly, but it was just seventeen
seconds after he had sent his brougham roving eastward that he stood
before the telephone.

"1432 St Paul's, please."

There was a sound as of rushing water and crackling underwood. Then the
wire seemed to clear itself like a swimmer rising from the sea, and a
quiet, far-away voice was whispering in his ear: "Yes, I'm Lidiat."

"I am at Trafalgar Chambers," said Hampden, after giving his name. "I
want you to drop _anything_ you are on and come here. If my motor is not
waiting for you at the corner of Chancery Lane, you will meet it along
the Strand."

At the other end of the wire, Lidiat--the man who possessed the sixth
code typewriter--looked rather blankly at his pipe, at the little silver
carriage clock ticking on the mantelpiece, at the fluted white-ware
coffee set, and at his crowded desk. Then, concluding that if the
President of the Unity League sent a message of that kind after midnight
and immediately rang off again he must have a good reason for it, he
locked up his room as it stood, took up a few articles promiscuously
from the rack in the hall, and walked out under the antique archway into
Fleet Street.

In the meantime the Exchange was being urged to make another attempt to
get on with "2743 Vincent," this time with success.

"Mr Salt is not 'ere, I repeat, sir," an indignant voice was protesting.
"He is out of town."

"Yes, yes, Dobson, I know," replied "St James's." "I am Sir John
Hampden. What train did your master go by?"

"Beg pardon, sir," apologised "Vincent." "Didn't recognise your voice at
first, Sir John. The wires here is 'issing 'orrible to-night. He went by
the 10 o'clock from the Great Central, and told me to meet the 10.40
Midland to-morrow morning."

"He did actually go by the 10 train?"

"I 'anded him the despatch case through the carriage window not five
minutes before the whistle went. He was sitting with his----"

"Thank you, Dobson. That's all I wanted to know. Sorry if you had to get
up. Good night," and Sir John cut off a volume of amiable verbosity as
he heard the bell of his Launceston ring in the street below.

"Fellow watching your place," said Lidiat, jerking his head in the
direction of a doorway nearly opposite, as Hampden admitted him. Had he
himself been the object of the watcher's attention it would have been
less remarkable, for had not the time and the place been London after
midnight, Lidiat's appearance must have been pronounced bizarre.
Reasonable enough on all other points he had a fixed conviction that it
was impossible for him to work after twelve o'clock at night unless he
wore a red silk skull cap, flannels, and yellow Moorish slippers. Into
this æsthetic costume he had changed half an hour before Hampden rang
him up, and in it, with the addition of a very short overcoat and a silk
hat that displayed an inch of red beneath the brim, he now stepped from
the brougham, a large, bovine-looking man, perfectly bald, and still
clinging to his pipe.

Hampden laughed contemptuously as he glanced across the street.

"They have put on half a dozen private enquiry men lately," he
explained. "They are used to divorce, and their sole idea of the case
seems to be summed up in the one stock phrase, 'watching the house.'
Possibly they expect to see us through the windows, making bombs. Why
don't they watch Paris instead? Egyptian Three Per Cents. have gone up
75 francs in the last fortnight, all from there, and for no obvious
reason."

Lidiat nodded weightily. "We stopped too much comment," he said. "Lift
off?"

"There are only two short flights," apologised Hampden. "Yes; I saw that
even the financial papers dismissed it as a 'Pied Piper rise.' Here we
are."

They had not lingered as they talked, although the journalist ranked
physical haste and bodily exertion--as typified by flights of
stairs--among the forbidden things of life.

Hampden had brought him to the instrument room. In view of what he was
asking of Lidiat, some explanation was necessary, but he put it into the
narrowest possible form. It was framed not on persuasiveness but
necessity.

"Salt is away, something has happened, and we have to move a week before
we had calculated."

Lidiat nodded. He accepted the necessity as proved; explanation would
have taken time. His training and occupation made him chary of
encouraging two words when one would do, between midnight and the hour
when the newspapers are "closed up" and the rotaries begin to move.

"I should like," continued Hampden, "in to-day's issue of every morning
paper a leader, two six-inch items of news, one home one foreign, and a
single column six-inch advertisement set in the middle of a full white
page."

Lidiat had taken off his hat and overcoat and placed them neatly on a
chair. It occurred to him as a fair omen that Providence had dealt
kindly with him in not giving him any opportunity of changing his
clothes. He now took out his watch and hung it on a projecting stud of
the telephone box.

"Yes, and the minimum?" He did not think, as a lesser man with equal
knowledge of Fleet Street might have done, that Hampden had gone mad. He
knew that conventionally such a programme was impossible, but he had
known of impossible things being done, and in any case he understood by
the emphasis that this was what Hampden would have done under freer
circumstances.

"That is what I leave to you. The paragraphs and comment at some length
I shall look for. The provinces are out of the question, I suppose? The
eight leading London dailies _must_ be dealt with."

"You give me _carte blanche_, of course--financially?"

"Absolutely, absolutely. Guarantee everything to them. Let them arrange
for special trains at all the termini. Let them take over all the
garages, motor companies, and cab yards in London as going concerns for
twelve hours. They will all be in it except _The Tocsin_ and _The
Masses_. We can deal with the distributing houses later. You see the
three points? It is the patriotic thing to do at any cost; they can have
anything they like to make up time; and it is absolutely essential."

"Yes," said Lidiat; "and the matter?"

Hampden had already taken a pencilled sheet of paper from his pocket. He
had written it on his way up to Kilburn. He now handed it to the
journalist.

"Between four and five o'clock that will be telescribed over the entire
system," he explained. "Those who are not on the call will see it in the
papers or hear from others. Every one will know before to-night."

He watched Lidiat sharply as he read the statement. Apart from the two
principals, he was the first man in England to receive the confidence,
and Sir John had a curiosity, not wholly idle, to see how it would
strike him. But Lidiat was not, to use an obsolete phrase, "the man in
the street." He absorbed the essence of the manifesto with a trained,
practical grasp, and then held out his hand for the other paper, while
his large, glabrous face remained merely vacant in its expression.

The next paper was a foreign telegram in cipher, and as Lidiat read the
decoded version that was pinned to it, the baronet saw, or fancied that
he saw, the flicker of a keener light come into his eyes and such a
transient wave across his face, as might, in a man of impulse, indicate
enthusiasm or appreciation.

"Are there to be any more of these--presently?" was all he said.

"I think that I might authorise you to say that there will be others to
publish, as the moment seems most propitious."

"Very good. I will use the instruments now."

"There is one more point," said Hampden, writing a few short lines on a
slip of paper, "that it might be desirable to make public now."

Lidiat took the paper. This was what he read:

     "_You are at liberty to state definitely that the membership of
     the Unity League now exceeds five million persons._"

There was a plentiful crop of grey hairs sown between Charing Cross and
Ludgate Hill in the early hours of that summer morning. With his mouth
to the telephone, Lidiat stirred up the purlieus of Fleet Street and the
Strand until office after office, composing room after composing room,
and foundry after foundry, all along the line, began to drone and hum
resentfully, like an outraged apiary in the dead of night. When he once
took up the wire he never put it down again until he had swept the
"London Dailies: Morning" section of Sell and Mitchell from beginning to
end. Those who wished to retort and temporise after he had done with
them, had to fall back upon the telescribe--which involved the
disadvantage to Fleet Street of having to write and coldly transmit the
indignant messages that it would fain pour hot and blistering into its
tormentor's ear. For two hours and a half by the watch beneath his eye
he harrowed up all the most cherished journalistic traditions of the
land, and from a small, box-like room a mile away, he controlled the
reins of the Fourth Estate of an Empire--a large, fat, perspiring man of
persuasive authority, and conscious of unlimited capital at his back.

By the end of that time chaos had given place to order. _The Scythe_ had
shown an amenable disposition with a readiness suggesting that it
possibly knew more than it had told in the past. _The Ensign_ was won
over by persuasion and the condition of the Navy, and _The Mailed Fist_
was clubbed and bullied and cajoled with big names until it was dazed.
For seven minutes Lidiat poured patriotism into the ear of _The
Beacon's_ editor, and gold into the coffers of _The Beacon's_ manager,
and then turned aside to win over _The Daily News-Letter_ by telling it
what _The Daily Chronicler_ was doing, and the _Chronicler_ by reporting
the _News-Letter's_ acquiescence. _The Morning Post Card_ remained
obdurate for half an hour, and only capitulated after driving down and
having an interview with Hampden. _The Great Daily_--well, for more than
a year _The Great Daily_ had been the property and organ of the League,
only no one had suspected it. The little _Illustrated Hour_, beset by
the difficulty of half-tone blocks, and frantic at the thought of having
to recast its plates and engage in the mysteries of "making ready" again
after half its edition had been run off, was the last to submit. So long
was it in making up its mind, that at last Lidiat sarcastically proposed
an inset, and, taking the suggestion in all good faith, the _Illustrated
Hour_ startled its sober patrons by bearing on its outside page a gummed
leaflet containing a leaderette and two news paragraphs.

So the list spun out. Lidiat did not touch the provinces, but sixteen
London dailies, including some sporting and financial organs, marked the
thoroughness of his work. At half-past three he finally hung up the
receiver; and taking the brougham, rode like another Wellington over the
field of his still palpitating Waterloo. His appearance, bovine and
imperturbable despite the shameful incongruity of his garb when revealed
in the tremulous and romantic dawn of a day and of an epoch, and further
set off by the unimpeachable correctness of the equipage from which he
alighted, was a thing that rankled in the minds of lingering compositors
and commissionaires until their dying days.

A few minutes after his departure Hampden returned to the telephone and
desired to make the curious connection "1 Telescribe."

"Who is there?" he asked, when "1 Telescribe" responded.

The man at the other end explained that he was a clerk on the main
platform of "1 Telescribe"--name of Firkin, if the fact was of
Metropolitan interest.

"Is Mr Woodbarrow there yet?"

It appeared, with increased respect, that Mr Woodbarrow was in his own
office and could be informed of the gentleman's name.

"Please tell him that Sir John Hampden wishes to speak with him."

In two minutes another voice filtered through the wire, a voice which
Hampden recognised.

"What are you running with now, Mr Woodbarrow?" he asked, when brief
courtesies had been exchanged.

Mr Woodbarrow made an enquiry, and was able to report that a 5 H.P.
Tangye was supplying all the power they needed at that hour. Nothing was
coming through, he explained, except a few press messages from America,
a little business from Australia, and some early morning news from
China.

"I should be obliged if you would put on the two Westinghouses as soon
as you can, and then let me know when you can clear the trunk lines for
a minute. Within the next hour I want to send an 'open board' message."

There was no response to this matter-of-fact request for an appreciable
five seconds, but if ever silence through a telephone receiver conveyed
an impression of blank amazement at the other end, it was achieved at
that moment.

"Do I rightly understand, Sir John," enquired Mr Woodbarrow at the end
of those five seconds, "that you wish to repeat a message over the
entire system?"

"That is quite correct."

"It will constitute a record."

"An interesting occasion, then."

"Have you calculated the fees, Sir John?"

"No, I have not had the time. You will let me know when the power is
up?"

Mr Woodbarrow, only just beginning to realise fully the magnitude of the
occasion and tingling with anticipation, promised to act with all
possible speed, and going to his own room Sir John took up an agate pen
and proceeded to write with special ink on prepared paper this
encyclical despatch.

A library of books had been written on the subject of the telescribe
within two years of its advent, but a general description may be
outlined untechnically in a page or two. It was, for the moment, the
last word of wireless telegraphy. It was efficient, it was speedy, it
was cheap, and it transmitted in facsimile. It had passed the stage of
being wondered at and had reached that of being used. It was universal.
It was universal, that is, not in the sense that tongues are universally
in heads, for instance, but, to search for a parallel, as universal as
letter-boxes are now on doors, book-cases in houses, or cuffs around
men's wrists. There were, in point of number, about three millions on
the index book.

It was speedy because there was no call required, no intervention of a
connecting office to wait for. That was purely automatic. Above the
telescribe box in one's hall, study, or sitting-room, was a wooden panel
studded with eight rows of small brass knobs, sixteen knobs in each row.
These could be depressed or raised after the manner of an electric light
stud, and a similar effect was produced: a connection was thereby made.

All the country--England and Wales--was mapped out into sixteen primary
divisions, oblong districts of equal size. The top row of brass knobs
corresponded with these divisions, and by pulling down any knob the
operator was automatically put into communication with that part of the
system, through the medium of the huge central station that reared its
trellised form, like an Eiffel Tower, above the hill at Harrow, and the
subsidiary stations which stood each in the middle of its division.

The second stage was reached by subdividing each primary division into
sixteen oblong districts, and with these the second row of knobs
corresponded. Six more times the subdividing process was repeated, and
each subdivision had its corresponding row. The final division
represented plots of ground so small that no house or cottage could
escape location.

Pulling down the corresponding studs on the eight rows instantly and
automatically established the connection. The written communication
could then be transmitted, and in the twinkling of an eye it was traced
on a sheet of paper in the receiving box. There was no probability of
the spaces all being occupied with telescribes for some years to come. A
calculation will show that there was provision for a good many thousand
million boxes, but only three million were fixed and attuned at this
period.

That, briefly, was the essential of the telescribe system. It was
invaluable for most purposes, but not for all. Though speedier than the
letter, it lacked its privacy when it reached its destination, and it
also, in the eyes of many, lacked the sentimental touch, as from hand to
hand, which a letter may convey. It carried no enclosures, of course,
and, owing to the difficulties of ink and paper, printed matter could
not be telescribed at all. It cost twice as much as a letter, but as
this was spread in the proportion of three-quarters to the sender and
one quarter to the receiver the additional cost was scarcely felt by
either. Thus it came about that although the telescribe had diminished
the volume of telegrams by ninety per cent., and had made it possible
still to cope with a volume of ordinary postal correspondences which up
to that time had threatened to swamp the department, it had actually
superseded nothing.

At four o'clock Mr Woodbarrow called up Sir John and reported that the
two great engines were running smoothly, and that for three minutes the
entire system would be closed against any message except his. In other
words, while the "in" circuit was open to three million boxes, the "out"
circuit was closed against all except one. It was not an absolutely
necessary precaution, for overlapping telescripts "stored latent" until
the way was clear, but it was not an occasion on which to hesitate about
taking every safeguard.

The momentous order was already written. Hampden opened the lid of a
small flat box supported on the telescribe shelf by four vulcanite feet,
put the paper carefully in, and closed the lid again. He had pulled down
the eight rows of metal studs in anticipation of Woodbarrow's message,
and there was only one more thing to do. A practical, unemotional man,
and not unused, in an earlier decade, to controlling matters of national
importance with energy and decision, he now stood with his hand above
the fatal switch, not in any real doubt about his action, but with a
kind of fascinated time-languor. A minute had already passed. To pull
down the tiny lever and release it would not occupy a second. At what
period of those three minutes should he do it? How long _dare_ he leave
it? He caught himself wondering whether on the last second--and with an
angry exclamation at the folly he pressed the lever home.

There was no convulsion of nature; a little bell a foot away gave a
single stroke, and that was all the indication that the President of the
Unity League had passed the Rubicon and unmasked his battery.

This was what he had written and scattered broadcast over the land:

     "THE UNITY LEAGUE.

     "The time has now arrived when it is necessary for the League
     to take united action in order to safeguard the interests of
     its members.

     "In directing a course which may entail some inconvenience, but
     can hardly, with ordinary foresight, result in real hardship,
     your President reminds you of the oft-repeated warning that
     such a demand would inevitably be made upon your sincerity. The
     opportunity is now at hand for proving that as a class our
     resource and endurance are not less than those of our
     opponents.

     "On or before the 22nd July, members of the League will cease
     until further notice to purchase or to use coal in the form of
     (_a_) Burning Coal (except such as may be already on their
     premises), (_b_) Coke (with the exception as before), (_c_)
     Gas, (_d_) Coal-produced electricity.

     "The rule applies to all private houses, offices, clubs,
     schools, and similar establishments; to all hotels,
     restaurants, boarding-houses and lodging-houses, with the
     exception (for the time) of necessary kitchen fires, which will
     be made the subject of a special communication, to all
     greenhouses and conservatories not used for the purposes of
     trade; and to all shops, workshops, and similar buildings where
     oil or other fuel or illuminant not produced or derived from
     coal can be safely substituted.

     "Members of the League who have no coal in stock, and who do
     not possess facilities for introducing a substitute
     immediately, are at liberty to procure sufficient to last for a
     week. With this exception members are required to cancel all
     orders at present placed for coal. The League will take all
     responsibility and will defend all actions for breach of
     contract.

     "_Members of the League are earnestly requested to co-operate
     in this line of action both as regards the letter and the
     spirit of the rule._

     "MEMBERS ARE EMPHATICALLY ASSURED THAT EVERY POSSIBLE
     DEVELOPMENT OF THE CAMPAIGN HAS BEEN FULLY CONSIDERED DURING
     THE PAST TWO YEARS, AND IT IS ADVANCED WITH ABSOLUTE CONFIDENCE
     THAT NOTHING UNFORESEEN CAN HAPPEN TO MAR ITS SUCCESSFUL
     CONCLUSION.

     "Nothing but the loyal co-operation of members is required to
     ensure the triumph of those Principles of Government which the
     League has always advocated, and a complete attainment of the
     object for which the League came into existence.

     "JOHN HAMPDEN, _President_.

     "TRAFALGAR CHAMBERS,

     "LONDON, 15^{_th_} _July_ 1918."

In the past the world had seen very many strikes on the part of workers,
not selfishly conceived in their essence, but bringing a great deal of
poverty and misery in their train, and declared solely for the purpose
of benefiting the strikers through the necessity of others. In the more
recent past the world had seen employers combine and declare a few
strikes (the word will serve a triple purpose) for just the same end and
accompanied by precisely similar results. It was now the turn of the
consumers to learn the strike lesson, the most powerful class of all,
but the most heterogeneous to weld together. The object was the same but
pursued under greater stress; the weapons would be similar but more
destructive; the track of desolation would be there but wider, and the
end----On that morning of the 15th of July the end lay beyond a very
dim and distant shock of dust and turmoil that the eye of none could
pierce.




CHAPTER XIII

THE EFFECT OF THE BOMB


Mr Strummery having finished his breakfast with the exception of a
second glass of hot water, which constituted the amiable man's only
beverage, took up his copy of _The Scythe_. He had already glanced
through _The Tocsin_, in which he had a small proprietary interest, but
he also subscribed to _The Scythe_, partly because it brought to his
door a library which he found useful when he had to assume an intimate
knowledge of a subject at a day's notice, partly because the crudely
blatant note of _The Tocsin_ occasionally failed to strike a sympathetic
cord.

He had found that morning in his telescribe receiver the Trafalgar
Chambers manifesto which had been flashed to friend and foe alike. He
had read it with a frown; it savoured of impertinence that it should be
sent to him. He finished it with a laugh, half-contemptuous,
half-annoyed. He saw that it was a stupid move unless the League had
abandoned all hope of forming the League-Labour alliance; in any case,
it was a blow that stung but could not wound. All the chances were that
nothing would come of it; _but_, if a million people did give up burning
coal for say a month, if a million people _did_ that--well, it would be
very inconvenient to themselves, but there would certainly be a good
many tens of thousand pounds less wages paid out in districts that
seemed to be far from satisfactory even as it was.

_The Tocsin_ did not refer to the matter at all. Mr Strummery opened
_The Scythe_, and was rather surprised to see, beneath five lines of
heavy heading on the leader page, a full account of Sir John Hampden's
sudden move. Instinctively his eye turned to the leader columns. As he
had half expected there was a leader on the subject, not very long but
wholly benedictory. In rather less measured phrases than the premier
organ usually adopted and with other signs of haste, readers were urged
to enter whole-heartedly into this development of bloodless civil war of
which the impending Personal Property Act had been the first unmasked
blow. He glanced on, not troubling about the views advanced until a
casual statement drew a smothered exclamation from his lips. "An
argument which will be used in a practical form by the five million
adult members now on the books of the League--" ran the
carelessly-dropped information. "It is a lie--a deliberately misleading
lie," muttered the Premier angrily; but it was the truth. He read on.
The article concluded: "In this connection the strong action taken by M.
Gavard, as indicated in the telegrams from Paris which we print
elsewhere, may be purely a coincidence, but it is curiously akin to
those 'mathematical coincidences' that fall into their places in a
well-planned campaign."

Mr Strummery had no difficulty in finding the telegrams alluded to.
Rushed through in frantic haste, the type had stood a hair's breadth
higher than it should, and in the resulting blackness the words of the
headlines leapt to meet his eye.

     THE INDUSTRIAL WAR IN FRANCE

     PROHIBITIVE TAX ON COAL

     _From Our Special Correspondent_

     PARIS _Wednesday Night._

     "It is authoritatively stated that the industrial crisis which
     has been existing in the north, and to some extent in the
     Lyonnais districts, for the past six months is on the eve of a
     settlement. Yesterday M. Gavard returned from S. Etienne, and
     after seeing several of his colleagues and some leading members
     of the Chamber of Commerce, left at once for Lens. Early this
     morning he was met at the Maison du Peuple by deputations from
     the Syndicate of Miners, the 'Broutchouteux,' the Association
     of Mine Owners, the Valenciennes iron masters, and
     representatives of some other industries.

     "The proceedings were conducted in private, but it is
     understood in well-informed circles here that in accordance
     with the plenary powers conferred on him by the Chambers in
     view of the critical situation, M. Gavard proposed to raise the
     small existing tax on imported coal to an _ad valorem_ tax of
     55 p.c. The mine owners on their side will guarantee a minimum
     wage of 8f. 15c., and commence working at once, reinstating all
     men within a week of the imposing of the tax. The amalgamated
     industries acquiesce to a general immediate advance of 1f.
     75_c._ per ton (metric) in the price of coal, and will start
     running as soon as the first portion of their orders can be
     filled.

     "Troops are still being massed in the affected districts, but
     after last Thursday's pitched battle a tone of sullen apathy is
     generally preserved. There was, however, severe rioting at
     Anzin this morning, and about 200 casualties are reported."


     PARIS. _Later._

     "The terms of settlement contained in my earlier message are
     confirmed. They will remain in operation for a year. The tax
     will come into force almost immediately, three days' grace
     being allowed for vessels actually in French ports to unload.
     In view of your Government's subsidy to English coal
     exportation and its disastrous effects on French mining, and,
     subsequently, on other industries, the imposition of the tax
     will be received with approval in most quarters."

As the Prime Minister reached the end of the paragraph he heard a
vehicle stop at his door, followed by an attack on bell and knocker that
caused Mrs Strummery no little indignation. It was Mr Tubes arriving,
after indulging in the unusual luxury of a cab, and the next minute he
was shown into his chief's presence. Both men unconsciously frowned
somewhat as they met, but the ex-collier was infinitely the more
disturbed of the two.

"You got my 'script?" he asked, as they shook hands.

"No; did you write?" replied Mr Strummery. "To tell the truth, this
meddling piece of imbecility on Hampden's part, and his gross
impertinence in sending it to me, put everything else out of my head for
the moment. You have seen it?"

"You wouldn't need to ask that if you'd passed a newspaper shop," said
Mr Tubes grimly. "The newsbills are full of nothing else. 'COAL WAR
PROCLAIMED,' 'HAMPDEN'S REPLY TO THE P.P. TAX,' 'UNITY LEAGUE
MANIFESTO,' and a dozen more. I had private word of it last night, but
too late to do anything. That's why I asked half a dozen of
them--Vossit, Guppling, Chadwing, and one or two more--to meet me here
at half-past nine. Happen a few others will drop in now."

"Well, don't let them see that you think the world is coming to an end,"
said the Premier caustically. "Nothing may come of it yet."

"That's all very well, Strummery," said Mr Tubes, with rising anger.
"All very well for you; you don't come from a Durham division. I shall
have it from both sides. Twenty thousand howling constituents and six
hundred raving members."

"Let them rave. They know better than press it too far. As for the
miners, if they have to lose by it we can easily make grants to put them
right." A sudden thought struck him; he burst out laughing. "Well,
Tubes," he exclaimed boisterously, "I can excuse myself, but I should
have thought that a man who came from a Durham constituency would have
seen _that_ before. Hampden must either be mad, or else he knows that
his precious League won't stand very much. Don't you see? We are in the
middle of summer now, and _for the next three months people will be
burning hardly any coal at all_!"

The Home Secretary jumped up and began to pace the room in seething
impatience, before he could trust himself to speak.

"Don't talk like that before the House with fifty practical men in it,
for God's sake, Strummery," he exclaimed passionately. "Hampden couldn't
well have contrived a more diabolical moment. Do you know what the
conditions are? Well, listen. No one _is_ burning any coal, and so it
will be no hardship for them to do without. But every one is on the
point of filling his cellar at summer prices to last all through the
winter. And Hampden's five million----"

"I don't believe that," interposed the Premier hastily.

"Well, I do--now," retorted his colleague bitterly. "His five million
are the five million biggest users of domestic coal in the country. They
use more than all the rest put together. And they all fill their cellars
in the summer or autumn."

"Then?" suggested Mr Strummery.

"Then they won't now," replied Mr Tubes. "That's all. The next ten weeks
are the busiest in the year, from the deepest working to the suburban
coal-shoot. Go and take a look round if you want to see. Every waggon,
every coal-yard, every railway siding, every pit-bank is chock-full,
ready. Only the cellars are empty. If the cellars are going to remain
empty, what happens?" He threw out his left hand passionately, with a
vigorous gesture. It suggested laden coal carts, crowded yards,
over-burdened railways, all flung a stage back on to the already
congested pit-heads, and banking up coal like the waters of the divided
Red Sea into a scene of indescribable confusion.

The Prime Minister sat thinking moodily, while his visitor paced the
room and bit his lips with unpleasant vehemence. In the blades of
morning sun, as he crossed and recrossed the room, one saw that Mr
Tubes, neither tall nor stout but large, loosely boned, loosely dressed
and loosely groomed, had light blue eyes, strong yellow teeth which came
prominently into view as he talked, and a spotted sallow complexion,
which conveyed the unfortunate, and unjust, impression of being dirty.

"We shall have to do something to carry them on till the winter, that's
all," declared Mr Strummery at length. "There's no doubt that the
Leaguers will have to use coal then."

"It's no good thinking that we can settle it off-hand with a few
thousand pounds of strike pay, Strummery," said the Home Secretary
impatiently, "because we can't. You have to know the conditions to see
how that is. If there's a strike, the article has to be supplied from
somewhere else at more money, and every one except those who _want_ to
strike keep on very much as before. But here, by God, they have us all
along the line! Anything from fifty to a hundred thousand miners less
required at one end, and anything from five to ten thousand coal carters
at the other. And between? And dependent on each lot all through?" His
ever-ready arm emphasised the situation by a comprehensive sweep.
"You've heard say that coal is the life-blood of the country, happen?"
he added. "Well, we're the heart."

"What do you suggest, then?"

"It's all a matter of money. If it can be done we must make up the
difference; buy it, pay for it, and store it. There are the dockyards,
the barracks, and we could open depôts here and in all the big towns. In
that way we could spread it over as long a period as we liked. Then
there's export. I think that has touched its limit for the time, but we
might find it cheaper in the end to stimulate it more."

"Yes; but what about this French business? Are you allowing for that in
your estimate?"

"What French business?"

"The French tax," said the Premier impatiently, pointing to the open
_Scythe_. "You've seen about it, haven't you?"

He had not. He snatched up the paper, muttering as he read the first few
lines that he had glanced through _The Tocsin_ before he came out, and
that had been all. His voice became inaudible as he read on. When he had
finished he was very pale. He flung the paper down and walked to the
window, and stood there looking out without a word. The declaration of
the coal war had filled him with smouldering rage; the Paris telegram
had effectually chilled it. Before, he had felt anger; now he felt
something that, expressed in words, was undistinguishable from fear.

The men whom he had asked to meet him there were beginning to arrive.
They had already heard Vossit and Chadwing pass upstairs talking. There
was a step in the hall outside that could only belong to Tirrel. He had
not been summoned, but, as Mr Tubes had anticipated, a few others were
beginning to drop in. Guppling and two men whom he had met on the
doorstep came in as Mr Tubes was finishing the Paris news.

"It's not much good talking about it now," he said, turning from the
window, "but if I had known of _this_, or even that the other would be
out, I should have come here myself without bringing all these chaps
down too. Not but what they'd have come, though. But when I wrote to
them I'd just got the information, you understand, and it was thought
that Hampden wouldn't be doing anything for a week at least."

"He was too clever for you again?" said Strummery vindictively, as he
rose to go upstairs.

"So it seems," admitted Mr Tubes indifferently.




CHAPTER XIV

THE LAST CHANCE AND THE COUNSEL OF EXPEDIENCE


In the salon, where a month before they had drafted the outline of the
Personal Property Bill, under the impression that government was a
parlour game and Society a heap of spelicans, eight or nine men were
already assembled. One or two sat apart, with ugly looks upon their
faces. Mr Vossit was dividing his time between gazing up to the ceiling
and making notes in a memorandum book as the points occurred to him. Sir
Causter Kerr, Baronet of the United Kingdom, and Chevalier of the Order
of the Golden Eagle, who in return for a thousand pounds a year
permitted himself to be called First Lord of the Admiralty in a
Socialist Government, was standing before a steel engraving with the
title in German, "Defeat of the British at Majuba Hill, 27th February
1881," but, judging from the slight sardonic grin on his thin features,
he was thinking of something else. Sir Causter Kerr had assuredly not
been invited to the meeting. The rest of the company stood together in
one group, where they talked and laughed and looked towards the door
from time to time, in expectation of their host's arrival.

The talk and laughter dropped to a whisper and a smile as Mr Strummery
entered and Mr Tubes followed, and with short greetings passed to their
places at the table. The Prime Minister was popular, or he would not
have held that position, but Mr Tubes was not. He was Home Secretary by
virtue of the voice of the coal interest, so much the largest labour
organisation in the country that if its wishes were ignored it could,
like another body of miners in the past, very effectively demand to
"know the reason why."

"Well, Jim, owd lad," said Cecil Brown hilariously, taking advantage of
the fact that formal proceedings had not yet commenced, "hast geete howd
o' onny more cipher pappers, schuzheou?" Cecil Brown, it may be
explained, held that he had the privilege of saying offensive things to
his friends without being considered offensive, and as no one ever
thought of calling him anything else but "Cecil Brown," he was probably
right. Of the Colonial Office, he was in some elation at the moment that
his usually despised Department was quite out of this imbroglio.

"Ah, that was a very red, red herring, I'm more than thinking now," said
Mr Guppling reflectively.

"Certainly a salt fish, eh, Tirrel?" said Cecil Brown.

Mr Strummery rapped sharply on the table with his knuckles, to indicate
that the proceedings had better begin. A hard-working, conscientious
man, he entirely missed the lighter side of life. He sometimes laughed,
but in conversation his face never lit up with the ready, spontaneous
smile; not because he was sad, but because he failed to see, not only
the utility of a jest, but its point also. That conversational sauce
which among friends who understand one another frequently takes the
outer form of personal abuse, was to him merely flagrant insult.

Mr Tubes leaned across and spoke to his chief; and looking down the
table the Premier allowed his gaze to rest enquiringly on Sir Causter
Kerr.

A man who _had_ been invited jumped up. "I called on Comrade Kerr on my
way here and took the liberty of asking him to come, because I thought
that we might like to know something of the condition of the navy," he
explained.

"For what purpose?" enquired Mr Strummery smoothly.

"Because," he replied, flaring up suddenly with anger, "because I regard
this damned French tax, without a word of notice to us or our
representative, as nothing more or less than a _casus belli_."

The proceedings had begun.

"Case of tinned rabbits!" contemptuously retorted a Mr Bilch, sitting
opposite. "What d'yer think you're going to do if it is? Why, my infant,
the French fleet would knock you and your _belli_ into a packing _casus_
in about ten minutes if you tried it on. You'll have to stomach that
_casus belli_, and as many more as they care to send you."

Mr Bilch was a new man, and was spoken of as a great acquisition to his
party, though confessedly uncertain in his views and frequently
illogical in his ground. His strength lay in the "happy turns" with
which his speech was redolent, and his splendid invulnerability to
argument, reason, or fact. He had formerly been a rag-sorter, and would
doubtless have remained inarticulate and unknown had he not one day
smoothed out a sheet of _The Tocsin_ from the bin before him as he ate
his dinner. A fully reported speech was therein described as perhaps the
greatest oratorical masterpiece ever delivered outside Hyde Park. Mr
Bilch read the speech, and modestly fancied that he could do as well
himself. From that moment he never looked back, and although he was
still a plain member he had forced his way by sheer merit into the
circle of the Council Chamber.

"It is against our principles to consider that contingency," interposed
the Premier; "and in any case it is premature to talk of war when the
courts of arbitration----"

"That's right enough," interrupted the man who had first spoken of war,
"and when it was a matter of fighting to grab someone else's land to
fatten up a gang of Stock Exchange Hebrews, I was with you through thick
and thin, but this is different. The very livelihood of our people is
aimed at. I've nothing to say against the Hague in theory, but when you
remember that we've never had a single decision given in our favour it's
too important to risk to that. But why France should have done this, in
this way and just at this moment, is beyond me."

Yet it was not difficult to imagine. When many English manufactories
were closed down altogether, or removed abroad because the conditions at
home were too exacting for them, less coal was required in England. Less
coal meant fewer colliers employed, and this touched the Government most
keenly. The same amount of coal _must_ be dug, especially as the
operation of the Eight Hours Act had largely increased the number of
those dependent on the mines; therefore more must be exported. The coal
tax had long since gone; a substantial bounty was now offered on every
ton shipped out of the country. It made a brave show. Never were such
piping times known from Kirkcaldy to Cardiff. English coal could be shot
down in Rouen, Nantes, or Bordeaux, even in Lille and Limoges, at a
price that defied home competition. Prices fell; French colliery
proprietors reduced wages; French miners came out on strike--a general
strike--and for the time being French collieries ceased to have any
practical existence. But France was requiring a million tons of coal a
week, and having done the mischief, England could only, at the moment,
let her have a quarter of a million a week, while German and Belgian
coal had been knocked out of the competition and diverted elsewhere. The
great industries had to cease working; chaos, civil war and anarchy
began to reign....

"Why France should have done this is beyond me."

There was another reason, deeper. It was a commonplace that England had
been cordially hated in turn by every nation in and out of Europe, but
with all that there was no responsible nation in or out of Europe that
dare contemplate a weak, a dying, England. France looked at the map of
Europe, and the thought of the German Eagle flying over Dover Castle and
German navies patrolling the seas from Land's End to The Skawe haunted
her dreams. Russia wanted nothing in the world so much as another Thirty
Years' Peace. Spain had more to lose than to gain; Italy had much to
lose and nothing at all to gain. All the little independent states and
nations remembered the Treaties of Vienna and Berlin, and trembled at
the thought of what might happen now. Germany alone might have had
visions, but Germany had a nightmare too, and when the man who ruled her
councils with a strong if tortuous policy saw wave after wave of the
infectious triumph of Socialism reach his own shores, he recognised that
England's weakness was more hostile to his ambitions than England's
strength.

No one wanted two Turkeys in Europe.

"I don't see why we shouldn't make a naval demonstration, at all
events," some one suggested hopefully. "That used to be enough, and the
French Government must have plenty to look after at home."

"Naval demonstration be boiled!" exclaimed Mr Bilch forcibly. "Send your
little Willie to Hamley's for a tin steamer, and let him push it off
Ramsgate sands if you want a naval demonstration, comrade. But don't
show the Union Jack inside the three-mile limit on the other side of the
Channel, or you'll have something so hot drop on your hands that you
won't be able to lick it off fast enough."

"I fail to see that," said Mr Vossit. "Heaven forbid that I should raise
my voice in favour of bloodshed, but if it were necessary for
self-preservation our navy is at least equal to that of any other
power."

"Is it?" retorted Mr Bilch, with so heavily-laden an expression of
contemptuous derision on his face that it seemed as though he might be
able to take it off, like a mask, and hang it on some one else. "Is it?
Oh, it is, is it? Well, ask that man there. Ask him, is all I say.
Simply ask _him_." His contorted face was thrust half-way across the
table towards Mr Vossit, while his rigid arm with extended forefinger
was understood to indicate Sir Causter Kerr.

"As the subject has been raised, perhaps the First Lord of the Admiralty
will reassure us on that point," said the Premier.

"Dear, dear, no," replied Causter Kerr blandly. "We couldn't carry it
through, Premier. You must not think of going to extremes."

There was a moody silence in which men looked angrily at Kerr and at one
another.

"Are we to understand that the navy is _not_ equal to that of any other
power?" demanded Mr Vossit.

"On paper, yes, comrade," replied Kerr, with a pitying little smile,
"but on deep water, where battles are usually fought, no. It is a
curious paradox that in order to be equal to any other single power
England must be really very much stronger. I should also explain that
from motives of economy no battleships have been launched or laid
down during the last three years, and only four cruisers of
questionable armament. Then as regards gunnery. From motives of
economy actual practice is never carried out now, but the championship,
dating from last year, lies at present with the armoured cruiser
_Radium_:--stationary regulation target, 1-1/2 miles distant, speed 4
knots, quarter charges, 3 hits out of 27 shots. As regards effective
range----"

"Tell them this," struck in Mr Bilch, "they'll understand it better.
Tell them that the _Intrepidy_ could sail round and round the Channel
Fleet and bloody well throw her shells over the moon and down on to
their decks without ever once coming into range. Tell them that."

"The picture so graphically drawn by Comrade Bilch is substantially
correct," corroborated Sir Causter Kerr. "The _Intrépide_, together with
three other battleships of her class, has an effective range of between
four and five thousand yards more than that of any English ship.... But
you have been told all this so often, comrades, that I fear it cannot
interest you." Sir Causter was having his revenge for two years of
subservience at a thousand pounds a year.

"Then perhaps you will tell us, as First Lord of the Admiralty--the job
you are paid for doing--what you imagine the navy is kept up for?"
demanded a comrade with fierce resentment.

"As far as I have been encouraged to believe, in that capacity," replied
Kerr with easy insolence, "I imagine that its duties consist nowadays in
patrolling the lobster-pots, and in amusing the visitors on the various
seaside promenades by turning the searchlights on."

"We won't ask you to remain any longer," said the Premier.

Sir Causter Kerr rose leisurely. "Good morning, comrades," he remarked
punctiliously, and going home wrote out his resignation, "from motives
of patriotism," and sent a copy of the letter to all the papers.

A man who had been standing by the door listening to the conversation
now came forward with a copy of an early special edition of the _Pall
Mall Gazette_ in his hand.

"You needn't sweat yourselves about being equal to a single power or
not," he remarked with an unpleasant laugh. "Look at the 'fudge' there."
And he threw the paper on the table, as though he washed his hands of it
and many other things.

Mr Bilch secured it, and turning to the space which is left blank for
the inclusion of news received up to the very moment of going to press,
he read aloud the single item it contained.

     COAL WAR

     BERLIN, _Thursday Morning_.

     "The action which France is reported to have taken had for some
     time been anticipated here. On all sides there is the opinion,
     amounting to conviction, that Germany must at once call into
     operation the power lying dormant in the Penalising Tariff and
     impose a tax on imported coal. It is agreed that otherwise, in
     her frantic endeavours to restore the balance of her export
     trade, England would flood this country with cheap coal and
     precipitate a state of things similar to that from which France
     is just emerging.

     "Emphasis is laid on the fact that such a measure will be
     self-protective and in no way aggressive. It is not anticipated
     that the tax will exceed 2 mks. 50 pf., or at the most 3 mks.
     per ton."

"Export value, eight and elevenpence," murmured a late arrival, one of
the fifty practical men in the House. "Yes, I imagine that two marks
fifty will just about knock the bottom out."

"Is there nothing we can offer them in exchange?" demanded some one.
"Nothing we can hit them back with?"

Cecil Brown, who was suspected of heterodoxy on this one point,
crystallised the tariff question into three words.

"Nothing but tears," he replied.

"If there's one thing that fairly makes me hot it's the way we always
have to wait for some one else to tell us what's going on," said the
comrade who had brought in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, looking across at
the Foreign Office Under-Secretary resentfully. "A fellow in Holborn
here pokes the paper under my nose and asks me what we're going to do
about it, and there I don't even know what is being done at us. What I
want to know is, what our ambassadors and Foreign Office think they're
there for. It's always the same, and then there'll be the questions in
Parliament, and we know nothing. Makes us look like a set of kiddin'
amateurs."

The fact had been noticed. Former governments had not infrequently
earned the title in one or two departments. Later governments had
qualified for it in every department. The reason lay on the surface; the
members of those parliaments and the men who sent them were themselves
bunglers and amateurs in their daily work and life. Except in the
stereotyped product of machinery, accuracy was scarcely known. The man
who had built a house in England at that period, the man who had had a
rabbit-hutch built to order, the man who had stipulated for one article
to be made _exactly_ like a copy, the man who had been so unfortunate as
to require "the plumbers in," the man who had to do with labour in any
shape or form, the man who had been "faithfully" promised delivery or
completion by a certain stated time, the woman who shopped, the person
who merely existed with open eyes, could all testify out of experiences,
some heartrending, some annoying, some simply amusing, that precision
and reliability scarcely existed among the lower grades of industry and
commerce. It was a period of transition. The worker had cast off the
love, the delicacy, the intelligence of the craftsman, and he had not
yet attained to the unvarying skill of the automaton. In another century
one man would only be able to fix throttle valve connections on to
hot-water pipes, but his fixing of throttle valves would be a thing to
dream about, while the initial letter A's of his brother, whose whole
life would be devoted to engraving initial letter A's on brass
dog-collar plates, would be as near unswerving perfection as mundane
initials ever could be.

"Makes us look like a set of tinkerin' amateurs."

"One inference is plain enough," said Mr Guppling, smoothing over the
suggestion. "These three things weren't going to happen all together of
their own accord. There's a deep game somewhere, and seeing what's at
stake our powers ought to be wide enough for us to put our hands on them
and stop it."

There was a murmur of approval. Having been taken by surprise, the idea
of peremptorily "stopping it" was a peculiarly attractive one.

But there were malcontents who were not to be appeased so easily, and a
Comrade Pennefarthing, who had arrived in the meantime, raised an old
cry in a new form.

"I won't exactly say that we've been betrayed," he declared, glancing at
the group of orthodox Ministers who sat together, "but game or no game I
will say that we've been damned badly served with information."

Comrade Tirrel stood up. He had not yet spoken at all, and he was
accorded instant silence, for men were beginning to look to him. "It is
now nearly eleven o'clock," he said in his quick, incisive tone, "and
some of us have been here for upwards of an hour. We met to consider a
situation. That situation still remains. May I ask that the Home
Secretary, who is doubly qualified for the task, should tell us the
extent of the danger and its probable effect?"

If Mr Tubes possessed a double qualification he also laboured under a
corresponding disability. As the representative of a mining
constituency, a practical expert, and a leading member of a Government
which existed by the goodwill of the workers--largely of the miners--it
would be scarcely to his interest to minimise the gathering cloud. As
the Minister for the Home Department, the blacker he made the picture
the greater the volume of obloquy he drew upon his head for not having
foreseen the danger; the more relief he asked for, the fiercer the
opposition he would encounter from hostile sections and from the
perturbed heads of a depleted Treasury.

"We are still very much in the dark as to what has really happened, is
happening, and will happen," he remarked tamely. "An appreciable drop in
the demand for coal, whether for home or export, will certainly have a
disturbing effect on the conditions of labour in many departments. But
the difficulties of estimating the effects are so great----"

There were murmurs. Whatever might be the failings of Socialistic
oratory, flatness and excess of moderation did not lie among them.

"Figures," suggested Tirrel pointedly.

"Perhaps Comrade Tirrel will take the job in hand instead of me," said
Tubes bitterly, but without any show of anger. "Doubtless he'd get a
better hearing."

"No," replied Tirrel gravely, "the moment is too critical for
recrimination. If the Home Secretary lays the position frankly before
us, he will have no cause to complain of an unsympathetic hearing, nor,
as far as I can speak, of a whole-hearted support in taking means to
safeguard it."

It occurred to Mr Tubes then, for the first time in his life--and it was
almost like a shock to feel it--that the man who had always seemed to
throw himself into sharp antagonism to himself might be actuated by
higher motives than personal jealousy after all. He continued his
speech.

"If we accept the figure of five millions as a correct return of the
Unity League membership, and if we assume that they will all obey the
boycott, then we are face to face with the fact that on the basis of a
four ton per person average, twenty million tons of coal must be written
off the home consumption."

"But the four tons per head average includes the entire industrial
consumption of the country," objected Mr Vossit.

"That is so," admitted Mr Tubes, "but it also includes a great many
people whose use of coal is practically _nil_. An alternative basis is
to assume that two millions of the members are house-holders. Then
taking ten tons a year as their average household consumption--and
admitting that all the wealthiest men in the country are included the
average is not too high--we arrive at just the same result.

"The exports, on the other hand, do not depend on estimate: we have the
actual returns. France takes fifteen million tons in round numbers. For
the purpose of facing the worst, we may therefore assume that the work
of digging and handling thirty-five million tons will be suddenly cut
off."

"Germany," some one reminded him.

"Germany is wholly conjectural at present. I have no objection to taking
it into account as well, if it is thought desirable, but I would point
out that we are being influenced by the merest rumour."

"No," objected Tirrel, but without any enmity, "I think that we must
regard Germany as lost. We are just beginning to touch the outskirts of
a vast organisation which has been quietly perfecting its plan of
operation for years. I do not regard a German tax as settled because of
this one rumour, but I do regard it as settled because at this precise
moment the rumour has been allowed to appear."

"Germany ten millions," accepted Mr Tubes. "Total decrease, forty-five
million tons."

"Don't you be too sure of that, comrade," warned Mr Bilch. "Why, it's
not twelve o'clock yet by a long way. There'll be half a dozen editions
out before the 'Three o'clock winners.'" Mr Bilch evidently regarded his
shaft that each fresh edition might contain a new country imposing a tax
humorously, but several comrades looked towards the Home Secretary
enquiringly.

"The other large importers are Italy, Russia, Sweden, Egypt, Spain and
Denmark," said Mr Tubes, who could have talked coal statistics for hours
if necessary. "All these, with the possible exception of Russia, _must_
import. It is unlikely that the estimate I have given will be exceeded
from that cause."

"And the result?"

"Above and below, about a million men are now employed in raising
236,000,000 tons. It is simple arithmetic.... In less than a month about
two hundred thousand more men will be out of work."

Mr Chadwing, Chancellor of the Exchequer, moved uneasily in his chair.

"That is the full extent?" enquired Cecil Brown.

"No," admitted the Home Secretary. "That is the inevitable direct
result. Forty-five million tons less will be carried by rail, or cart,
or ship, or all three. A fair sprinkling of railway-men, carters,
dockers, stokers, sailors, and other fellows will be dropped off too.
There will be fewer railway trucks built this next year, less doing in
the fire-grate trade, several thousand horses not wanted, a slight
falling off in road-mending work. There is not a trade in England, from
steeple-building to hop-picking, that will not be a little worse off
because of those 45,000,000 tons. Then the two hundred thousand
out-of-work miners will burn less coal at home, the ships and the
engines will burn less, and the workshops and the smithies will burn
less, and the whole process will be repeated again and again, for coal
is like a snowball in its cumulative effects, and it cannot stand
still."

If Mr Tubes had come to compromise, he had remained to publish
broadcast.

Perhaps no one quite understood the danger yet, for the mind, used to
everyday effects, does not readily grasp the extent of a calamity, and
six hours before there had not been a cloud even the size of a man's
hand on their horizon. The Premier thought it was impolitic on his
colleague's part; the Treasury officials looked on it as a move to force
their hands; the Foreign Under-Secretary was suspicious that Mr Tubes
was leading away by some mysterious by-path from the unpreparedness of
his own Department to Foreign Office remissness. They all continued to
look silently at the Home Secretary as he continued to stand.

"The indirect effects will involve about two million people to some
extent," he summed up.

"That, at least, is the worst?" said Cecil Brown with an encouraging
smile, for Mr Tubes remained standing.

The Prime Minister made an impatient movement; the Treasury heads looked
at one another and said with their eyes, "He is really overdoing it";
the Foreign Office man scowled unconsciously, and Cecil Brown continued
to smile consciously.

"The worst is this: that a great many pits are working to-day at a bare
profit, partly in the hope of better things, partly because we stimulate
the trade. The crisis we are approaching will hang over the coal fields
like a blight, and one crippled industry will bring down another. _All_
the poorer mines will close down. You need only look back to '93 to see
that. Neither I nor any one else can give you a forecast of what that
will involve, but you may be sure of this: that although '93 with its
17,000,000 tons of a decrease half-ruined the English coal fields for a
decade, '93 was a shrimp to what this is going to be."

"Then let us stimulate the trade more, until the crisis is over,"
suggested Cecil Brown.

Mr Tubes gave a short, dry laugh. "I commend that course to Comrade
Chadwing," he said, as he sat down.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer was busy with his papers.

"Let me dispel any idea of that kind at once," he remarked, without
looking up. "The moment is not only an unfortunate one--it is an utterly
impossible one for making any extra disbursement however desirable."

"Well," said Mr Bilch, looking round on the moody assembly paternally,
"it seems that the situation is like this here, mates: The navy is no
messin' good at all, same as I told you; the army's a bit worse;
Treasury empty, yes; the Home Office don't know what's going on at home,
and the Foreign Office possesses just the same amount of valuable
information as to what is happening abroad. Lively, ain't it? Well, it's
lucky that Bilch is still Bilch."

No one rose to his mordant humour. Even Cecil Brown had forgotten how to
smile.

"If our comrade has any suggestion to make----" said the Premier
discouragingly.

"Yes, sir," replied Mr Bilch. "I have the wisdom of the serpent to rub
into your necks if you'll only listen. We haven't any navy, so we can't
fight if we wanted to; we haven't any money, so we can't pay out. Tubes
here doesn't know what's going to happen at home, and Jevons doesn't
rightly know what has happened abroad. What is to be done? I'll tell
you. Wait. Wait and see. Wait, and let them all simmer down again. Why,"
he cried boisterously, looking round on them in good-humoured, friendly
contempt, "to see your happy, smiling faces one would think that the
canary had died or the lodger gone off without paying his rent. For why?
Because a bloke in a frock-coat and a top hat gets on to a wooden horse
and blows a tin trumpet, and the export trade in a single article of
commerce is temporarily disarranged--perhaps!"

Mr Strummery nodded half absent-mindedly; the Treasury men smiled
together; Mr Chadwing murmured "Very true"; and nearly every one looked
relieved. Comrade Bilch was certainly a rough member, but the man had a
shrewd common-sense, and they began to feel that they had been hasty in
their dismal forebodings.

"Haven't we been threatened with this and that before?" demanded Mr
Bilch dogmatically. "Of course we have, and what came of it? Nothing.
Haven't there been strikes and lock-outs, some big some little, every
year? According to Comrade Tubes, this is going to be the champion. That
remains to be seen. What I say is, don't play into their hands in a
panic. Wait and see what's required. That don't commit us to anything."

"It may be too late then," said Mr Tubes, but he said "may" now and not
"will."

"There may be no need to do anything then," replied Mr Bilch. "And
remember this: that the minute you begin to shout 'Crisis!' you make
one. All round us; all at us. My rag-bags! what a run on the old bank
there would be! But if you go on just as usual, taking no notice of no
one? Why, before long there will come a wet day or a cold night, and
Johnny Hampden's aunt will say to Johnny Hampden's grandmamma: 'My dear,
I feel positively starved. Don't you think that we might have a _little_
fire without Johnny knowing?' And the old lady will say: 'Well, do you
know, my pet, I was just going to say the same thing myself. Suppose you
run out and buy a sack of coal?' And before you can say 'coughdrop'
every blessed aunt and mother and first cousin of the Unicorn League
will be getting in her little stock of coal."

It was what every one wished to believe, and therefore they were easily
persuadable. It was a national characteristic. The country had never
entered into a war during the past fifty years without being assured by
every authority, from the Commander-in-Chief down to the suburban
barber, that as soon as the enemy got a little tap on the head they
would be making for home, howling for peace as they went. All these men
had known strikes; many had been involved in them: some had controlled
their organisation. They had seen the men of their own class loyally and
patiently facing poverty and hardship for the sake of a principle, and
enduring day after day and week after week, and, if necessary, month
after month; they had seen the women of their own class preaching
courage and practising heroism by the side of their men while their
bodies were racked by cold and hunger and their hearts were crushed by
the misery around; they had seen even the children of their class
learning an unnatural fortitude. They accepted it as a commonplace of
life, an asset on which they could rely. _But they did not believe that
any other class could do it._ It did not occur to them to consider
whether the officers of an army are usually behind the rank and file in
valour, sacrifice, or endurance.

Doubtless there were among them some who were not deceived, but they
wilfully subordinated their clearer judgment to the policy of the
moment.

Tirrel was the one exception.

"There can be no more fatal mistake of the dangerous position into which
we have been manoeuvred than to assume that we shall be easily
delivered from it by the weakness of our opponents before we have the
least indication that weakness exists," he declared, as soon as
Mr Bilch had finished, speaking vigorously, but without any of the
assertiveness and personal feeling that had gained him many enemies in
the past. "I agree with every word that Comrade Tubes has spoken. We all
do; we all _must_ admit it or be blind. What on earth, then, have we to
hope for in a policy of drift, of sitting tight and doing nothing in the
hope of things coming round of their own accord? It is madness, my
comrades, sheer madness, I tell you, and a month hence it will be
suicide."

He dropped his voice and swept the circle of faces with a significant
glance.

"It is through such madness on the part of others that we are here
to-day."

Mr Chadwing smiled the thin smile of expediency.

"It is one thing for a comrade with no official responsibility to say
that a certain course does not satisfy him," he said; "it may be quite
another thing for those who have to consider ways and means to do
anything different. Perhaps Comrade Tirrel will kindly enlighten us as
to what in our position he would do?"

"I see two broad courses open," replied Tirrel, without any hesitation
in accepting the challenge. "Both, as you will readily say, have their
disadvantages, but neither is so fatal as inaction. The first is
aggressive. The Unity League has declared war on us. Very well, let it
have war. I would propose to suspend the _habeas corpus_, arrest Hampden
and Salt, declare the object and existence of the Unity League illegal,
close its offices and confiscate its funds. There are between five and
ten million pounds somewhere. Do you reflect what that would do? It
would at least keep two hundred thousand out-of-work miners from actual
starvation for a year. Prompt action would inevitably kill the boycott
movement at home. The foreign taxes, my comrades, you would probably
find to have a very marked, though perhaps undiscoverable, connection
with the home movement, and when the latter was seen to be effectually
dealt with, I venture to predict that the former could be compromised.
If the confiscated funds were not sufficient to meet the distress, I
should not hesitate to requisition for State purposes in a time of
national emergency all incomes above a certain figure in a clean sweep."

A medley of cries met this despotic programme throughout. Even Tirrel's
friends felt that he was throwing away his reputation; and he had more
enemies than friends.

"You'd simply make the situation twice as involved," exclaimed Mr Vossit
as the mouthpiece of the babel. "The liberty of the subject! It would
mean civil war. They'd rise."

"Who would rise?" demanded Tirrel.

"The privileged classes."

"But they _have_ risen," he declared vehemently. "This _is_ civil war.
What more do you want?"

It was a question on which they all had views, and for the next five
minutes the room was full of suggestions, not of what they themselves
wanted, but of what would be the probable action of the classes if
driven to extremities.

"Very well," assented Tirrel at last; "that is what they will do next as
it is, for they consider that they are in extremities."

"Well, comrade," said Mr Bilch broadly, "you don't seem to have put your
money on a winner this event. What's your other tip?"

"Failing that, the other reasonable course is conciliation. I would
suggest approaching Hampden and Salt to find out whether they are open
to consider a compromise. The details would naturally require careful
handling, but if both sides were willing to come to an understanding, a
basis could be found. As things are, I should consider it a gain to drop
the Personal Property Tax, the Minimum Wage Bill, to guarantee the
inviolability of capital against further taxation while we are in
office, and to make generous concessions for the fuller representation
of the monied classes in Parliament, in return for the abandonment of a
coal war, the dispersal in some agreed way of the League reserves, the
reduction of the subscription to a nominal sum, and a frank undertaking
that the League would not adopt a hostile policy while the agreement
remained in force."

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_."

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."




CHAPTER XV

THE GREAT FIASCO


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 contemptible _bourgeoisie_ of "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 Tocsin_ set 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's_ second 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. As _The Tocsin_
bitterly remarked, it soon became apparent that the demand had been
foreseen and "treacherously provided against during the past two years."

The third _Tocsin_ article on the situation dealt statistically with the
oil trade of the world. It necessarily fell rather flat, because _The
Tocsin_ Special 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 submitting _The Tocsin_ young 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 on _them_, 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
on _English_ coal. 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 a _coup_ leapt 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 than
_vice 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 the _coup_, 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, _they_ are 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.




CHAPTER XVI

THE DARK WINTER


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 long _queues_ of 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 was _their_ party 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!"




CHAPTER XVII

THE INCIDENT OF THE 13TH OF JANUARY


"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?"

Sergeant Tolkeith hazarded the opinion that there were men at Scotland
Yard at that moment who could drive--he looked round the room in search
of some strange or Titanic vehicle to which the prowess of Scotland Yard
would be equal--"Well, Anything."

"A man who knows the roads," continued B. "Though, for that matter, it's
a simple enough route--the Portsmouth road all the way to Kingston, and
then across to Willesden. You had better avoid Guildford, by the way,
coming back. Now, what other assistance will you require?"

"How many are there likely to be in the car, sir?"

"No one but Salt, I am informed. He has been touring alone for a week
past, at all events."

"In that case, sir, we had better take a couple of men from Guildford
and drive towards Farnham. We can wait at a suitable place in the road
and make the arrest. Then when the irons are on I shall need no one
beyond the driver I take with me. The two local men--you'll want Mr
Salt's _chauffeur_ detained for a few hours, I suppose, sir?"

"Yes, certainly; until you are well on your way. And any one else who
may happen to be in the car. I will give you authority covering that."

"The two local men can take him, or them, back to Guildford--it will be
dark by the time they get there--for detention while enquiries are being
made. Then if a plain-clothes man meets me at Willesden we can go on,
and our driver can take the car on to Scotland Yard."

"You see no difficulty throughout?" said B. anxiously. The inspector
assured him that all seemed plain sailing. It was not his place to
foresee difficulties in B.'s plans.

"Then I shall expect you to report to me from Stafford about 10.30
to-night that everything is satisfactory. Let me impress on you as a
last word the need of care and _unconcern_ in this case. It must be
successfully carried out, and to do that there must be no fuss or
publicity."

"Sergeant," said Detective-Inspector Moeletter, when they were outside,
"between ourselves, can you tell me this: why they think it necessary to
have three mute gentlemen looking on while we arrange a matter of this
sort?"

"Between ourselves, sir," replied Sergeant Tolkeith, looking cautiously
around, "it's my belief that it's come to this: that they are all
half-afraid of themselves and can't trust one another."

"D.," remarked C., as they left together a few minutes later, "does
anything strike you about B.?"

"It strikes me that he looks rather like an undertaker's man when he is
dressed up," replied D.

"Does it not strike you that he is _afraid_?"

"Oh," admitted D., stroking his wounded cheek, "that's quite possible.
So am I, for that matter."

"So may we all be in a way," said C.; "but it is different with him. I
believe that he is in a _blue funk_. He's fey, and he's got Salt on the
brain. Just remember that I venture on this prophecy: if Salt through
any cause does not happen to get arrested, B. will throw up the sponge."

       *       *       *       *       *

The office of the Unity League in Trafalgar Chambers was little more
than an empty hive now. The headquarters of the operations had been
transferred to the colony at Hanwood, and most of the staff had
followed. With the declaration of the coal war, an entirely different
set of conditions had come into force. The old offices had practically
become a clearing house for everything connected with the League, and
the high tide of active interest swept on elsewhere.

Miss Lisle remained, a person of some consequence, but in her heart she
sighed from time to time for a sphere of action "down another little
lane."

On the afternoon of the 13th of January she returned to the office about
half-past three, and going to the instrument room unlocked the
telescribe receiver-box and proceeded to sort the dozen communications
which it contained--the accumulation of an hour--before passing them on
to be dealt with. Most fell into clearly-defined departments at a
glance. It was not until she reached the last, the earliest sent, that
she read it through, but as she read that her whole half-listless,
mechanical manner changed. With the first line apathy fell from her like
a cloak; before she had finished, every limb and feature conveyed a
sense of tingling excitement. In frantic haste she dragged the special
writing materials across the table towards her, dashed off a sprawling,
"Stop Mr Salt at any cost.--LISLE," and flashed it off to the League
agency at Farnham.

A couple of minutes must pass before she could get any reply. She picked
up the cause of her excitement, and for the second time read the message
it contained:

"If you want to keep your Mr Salt from being arrested on a charge of
murder, warn him that Inspector Moeletter from Stafford will be waiting
for him on the road between Farnham and Guildford at three o'clock this
afternoon with a warrant. No one believes in it, but he will be taken on
in his motor to Willesden, and on to Stafford by the 7.30, and kept out
of the way for a week while things have time to happen at Hanwood. There
will be just enough evidence to get a remand, as there was to get a
warrant. This is from a friend, who may remind you of it later and prove
who he is by this sign."

The letter finished with a rough drawing of a gallows and a broken rope.
It was written in a cramped, feigned hand and addressed to Sir John
Hampden. It might have been lying in the box for an hour.

The telescribe bell gave its single note. Irene opened the box in
feverish dread. An exclamation of despair broke from her lips as some
words on the paper stood out in the intensity of their significance even
before she took the letter from the box.

This was what Farnham replied:

"Hope nothing is the matter. Mr Salt left here quite half an hour ago,
in his motor, for Guildford. He will stay there the night, or proceed to
Hanwood according to the time he is occupied. Please let me know if
there is any trouble."

Half an hour! There was not the remotest chance of intercepting him.
Already, under ordinary circumstances, he would be in the outskirts of
Guildford. It only remained to verify the worst. She wrote a brief
message asking Mr Salt if he would kindly communicate with her
immediately on his arrival, and despatched it to the agency at
Guildford. If there was no reply to that request during the next
half-hour she would accept the arrest as an established fact. And there
being nothing apparently to do for the next half-hour, Miss Lisle, very
much to the surprise of ninety-nine out of her hundred friends could
they have seen her, went down on her knees in the midst of a roomful of
the latest achievements of science and began to pray that a miracle
might happen.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I suppose that I may smoke?" said Salt. He was sitting handcuffed in
his own motor-car, charged with murder, and formally cautioned that
anything he should say might be used as evidence against him. It was
scarcely a necessary warning in his case; with the exception of an
equally formal protest against the arrest, he had not opened his lips
until now. He and Moeletter had sat silently facing one another in the
comfortably-appointed, roomy car, Salt with his face to the driver and
leaning back in his easy seat with outward unconcern, the detective
braced to a more alert attitude and with his knees almost touching those
of his prisoner. For a mile or more--for perhaps seven or eight minutes
by time, for the new driver was cautious with the yet unknown car--they
had proceeded thus.

Yet Salt was very far from being unconcerned as he leaned back
negligently among the cushions. He was thinking keenly, and with the
settled, tranquil gaze that betrayed nothing, watching alertly the miles
of dreary high-road that stretched along the Hog's Back before them. He
had long foreseen the possibility of arrest, and he had taken certain
precautions; but to safeguard himself effectually he would have had to
abandon the more important part of his work, and the risk he ran was the
smaller evil of the two. But he had not anticipated this charge. Some
legal jugglery with "conspiracy" had been in his mind.

"I suppose that I may smoke?" Half a mile ahead a solitary wayfarer was
approaching. Salt might have noted him, but there was nothing remarkable
in his appearance except that pedestrians--or vehicles either, for that
matter--were rare along the Hog's Back on that bitter winter afternoon.

"Why, certainly, sir; in your own car, surely," replied the inspector
agreeably. He was there to do his duty, and he had done it, even down to
the detail of satisfying himself by search that his prisoner carried no
weapon. Beyond that there was no reason to be churlish, especially as
every one had to admit that there was no telling what might have
happened in a week's or a month's time. "Can I help you in any way?"

"Thank you, I will manage," replied Salt, and in spite of his manacles
he succeeded without much difficulty in taking out his cigarette-case
and a match-box. He lit a cigarette, blew out the match, and then looked
hesitatingly round the rather elegant car, at the rich velvety carpet on
the floor, at the half-burned vesta in his hand. Then with easy
unconcern he lowered the window by his side and leaned forward towards
it.

It was a perfectly natural action, but Inspector Moeletter owed at least
one step in his promotion to a habit of always being on his guard
against natural-seeming actions of that kind. His left foot quickly and
imperceptibly slid across the carpet, so that if Salt made any
ill-judged attempt to leave the car he must inevitably come to grief
across that rigid barrier; with a ready eye Moeletter noted afresh the
handle of the door, the size of the window frame, and every kindred
detail. His hands lay in unostentatious readiness by his side, and he
felt no apprehension.

But Salt had not the faintest intention of attempting any sensational
act. He dropped the match leisurely from between his fingers, cast a
glance up to the sky, where the lowering clouds had long been
threatening snow, and then drew in his head. But in some way, either
from his position, a jolt of the car, or a touch against the sash, as he
did so his cap was jerked off, and, despite a quick but clumsy attempt
to catch it in his fettered hands, it was whirled away behind in their
eddying wake.

"Please stop," he said, turning to Moeletter. "I am afraid that I shall
find it too cold without."

The detective was not pleased, but there was nothing in the mishap that
he could take objection to. Further, he had no wish to make his prisoner
in any way noticeable during the latter part of their journey. "Pull up,
Murphy," he called through the tube by his shoulder, and with a grinding
that set its owner's teeth on edge, the car came to a standstill in two
lengths.

Moeletter had intended that the driver should recover the cap, but he
was saved the trouble. The solitary pedestrian had happened to be on the
spot at the moment of the incident, and he was standing by the open
window almost as soon as the car stopped. Forgetful of his indignity,
Salt stretched out a manacled hand and received his property. "Thank
you," he said with a pleasant smile. "I am much obliged."

"Go on," said Moeletter, through the tube.

"I think that I had better get used to these--'darbies' is the
professional name, is it not, Inspector?--to these 'darbies' before I
look out again," remarked Salt good-humouredly.

       *       *       *       *       *

The telescribe bell announced another message. It found Irene sitting at
the table in the instrument room with ordnance maps around her and the
index book of the League's most trusted agents lying open on the shelf.
She just glanced at the clock as she jumped up. It was 4.15, exactly the
last minute of the half-hour that she had fixed as the limit of
uncertainty. The message might even yet be from Salt. But it was not; it
was this instead:

"Fear Mr Salt has been arrested. He is in his motor-car, handcuffed,
proceeding towards Guildford, in charge of man who has appearance of
belonging to police force. Driver is not Mr Salt's man. Mr S. made opp.
for me to see sit., but said nothing. Passed just W. of Puttenham 3.55.
Roads good, but snow beginning. Car trav only 10-12 m. hour. Shall
remain here on chance being use. Don't hesitate."

A hall-formed plan was already floating in the space between Miss
Lisle's adventurous brain and the maps. The Puttenham message
crystallised it. There was now something to go on. The route she knew
already; the times and mileages also lay beneath her hand. The scheme
had a hundred faults, and only one thing to recommend it--that it might
succeed. For ten minutes she flung herself into the details of the maps,
jotting down a time, a distance, here and there a detail of the road.
"Puttenham" might remain at his box till dawn, but all the work, all the
chance, was forward--before the car. At the end of ten minutes Irene
picked up the accumulation of her labours and rang up the telephone
exchange.

       *       *       *       *       *

"What is it, Murphy?" demanded the inspector through the tube, as the
car came to a dead stop. "Something else in the way?"

"I can't quite make it out, sir," was the reply. "We're just outside the
long railway arch, and there seems to be something on fire towards the
other end. Terrible lot of smoke coming through."

"Can't we run up to it?"

"This is an unusually long bridge--fifty or sixty yards, I should say. I
hardly like to take you on into that smoke, sir."

"Oh, very well. Jump down and see what it is. Only be as sharp as you
can."

It was now pitch dark, and a driving, biting storm of snow and hail was
blowing across their path from the east. When the constable-_chauffeur_
had learned sufficient of the car to give him confidence, the storm had
swept down, and their progress had been scarcely any faster. There had
been delays, too. By Ripley a heavy farm waggon had broken down almost
before their eyes, and it had been ten minutes before a spare chain
horse could be obtained to drag it to the roadside. Further on some men
felling a tree in a coppice had clumsily allowed it to fall across the
road, and another ten minutes elapsed before it was cut in two and
rolled aside. Fortunately they were not pressed for time. Fortunately,
also, the driver knew the way, for few people were afoot to face that
dreadful stream of snow and ice with the lashing wind and the numbing
cold. Two, two or three, or perhaps four men had chanced to be at hand
when the car stopped, making their way towards the bridge, but the
wreathing snow soon cut them off. Occasionally, when the wind and drift
hung for a moment, a figure or two showed dimly and gigantic in the murk
of the tunnel. Nothing of the fire could be seen, but the smoke
continued to pour out, and the mingled odour of burned and unburned oil
filled the car.

In a few minutes the driver returned. When he had left his seat
Moeletter had leaned forward, and with a gruff word of half apology had
laid a hand upon the rug across Salt's knees, so that he held, or at
least controlled, the connecting links of the handcuffs, while at the
same time his other hand had dropped quietly down to his hip-pocket. He
now lowered the window on the further side, still keeping his left hand
on the rug.

"Oil cart ablaze, sir," gasped the driver, between paroxysms of
coughing. "Road simply running fire, and the fumes awful." His face was
almost completely protected beneath cap, goggles, and a storm shade that
fell from the cap over the shoulders and buttoned across the mouth, but
no covering had seemed effectual against the suffocating reek of the
burning oil. The fire had melted the snow off his clothes, and he stood
by the door with a bar of darkness just falling across his face, and the
electric light through the lowered window blazing upon his gleaming
leathers, his gauntlets and puttee leggings, and the cumbrous numbered
badge that the regulations then imposed.

"It will be some time before the road is passable?" asked Moeletter with
a frown.

"Oh, hours perhaps," was the sputtering reply. "Would suggest going by
Molesey Bridge, sir. Best way now."

"Is it much out?"

"The turning is half a mile back. From there it is no further than this
way."

"And you know the way perfectly?"

The driver nodded. "Perfectly, sir."

"Very well; go on. We have plenty of time yet, but you might get a few
more miles out of her, if you think you can."

The driver jumped up to his seat, the horn gave its bull-like note of
warning, and gliding round the car began to head back towards Esher with
the open common on either side and the pelting wind behind. It slackened
for a moment at the fork in the high-road, turned to the right, and then
began to draw away northward with an increased speed that showed the
driver to be capable of rising to his instructions.

"It is fortunate that the inspector is not a motoring man," thought Salt
to himself with an inward smile. "This is very much too good." But the
inspector only noticed that with the increased speed the car seemed to
run more smoothly, and even then he had no means of judging what the
increase had become. The man whose car it was knew that a very different
explanation than mere speed lay behind the sudden change that made the
motion now sheer luxury. He knew with absolute conviction what had
happened, and he would have known without any further evidence that the
driver who now had his hand upon the wheel was a thousand miles ahead of
constable-_chauffeur_ Murphy in motor-craft.

It was not the first suggestion of some friendly influence at work that
had stirred his mind. The incident of the stranded waggon across the
road by Ripley was little in itself. Even when they were a second time
delayed by the fallen tree a few miles further on nothing but an
unreasoning hope could have called it more than coincidence. But with
the third episode a matured plan began to loom through the meaningless
delays. Oil was here, and where there was oil in England at that day the
hand of the Unity League might be traced not far away. In his mind's eye
Salt ran over half a dozen miles of the Portsmouth road. As far as he
could remember, if it was _intended_ to block the road there was
scarcely a more suitable spot than the long railway bridge to be found
between Esher and Kingston, and, followed the thought, if it was
intended to force Moeletter to accept the bridge at Molesey, no point in
all the high-road south of the fork would have served.

The three accidents had taken place each at the exact point where it
would best serve its purpose.

Salt did not even glance at the driver when he returned from the fire.
He leaned back in his seat in simple enjoyment, and Inspector Moeletter
thought from his appearance that he was going to sleep.

There was little to be gained by looking out, apart from the policy of
unconcern. The huge white motor-car that was waiting in the cross-road
by Esher station had its head-lights masked, and in the snow-storm and
the night it could not have been seen ten yards away. The driver of the
green car sounded his horn for the road as he swept by, and ten seconds
later the white car glided out from its place of concealment like a
ghostly mastodon, and, baring its dazzling lamps, began to thrash along
the road in the other's wake.

What would be their route when they had crossed the bridge? That was
Salt's constant thought now, not because he was troubled by the chances,
but because it was the next point in the unknown plan that would serve
to guide him. He had not long to wait under the dexterous pilotage of
the unknown hand outside. The flat, straight road became a tortuous
village street, the lights of the Molesey shops and inns splashed in
splintering blurs across the streaming windows, an iron bridge shook and
rumbled beneath their wheels, and they were in Middlesex.

The horn brayed out a continuous warning note, the car swung off to the
left, and Salt, with his eyes closed, knew exactly what had been
arranged.

But there was yet Inspector Moeletter to be reckoned with. He was
ignorant of the roads, but he had a well-developed gift of location, and
the abrupt turn to the left when he had seen what appeared to be a broad
high-road leading straight on from Molesey Bridge, gave him a moment's
thought. He turned to the speaking-tube.

"Are you sure that this is right, Murphy?" he asked sharply. "Kingston
must lie away on the right."

"We go through Hampton this way, sir, and into the Kingston road at
Twickenham," came the chattering reply in a half-frozen voice. "It is
just as near, and we don't meet the wind."

It was quite true, although the inspector might not know it, but the
ready explanation seemed to satisfy him. Another circumstance would have
set his mind at rest. At Hampton the route took them equally to the
right. Salt did not know the road intimately, but he knew that if his
surmise was correct, they must very soon draw away to the left again.
What would happen then? For three or four miles they would run between
hedges and encounter nothing more urban than a scattered hamlet.
Twickenham they would never see that night. Inspector Moeletter was far
from being unsophisticated, and his suspicion had already once,
apparently, been touched. How would the race end?

The car slowed down for a moment, but so smoothly that it was almost
imperceptible, and with a clanging bell an electric tram swung into
their vision and out again. Salt was taking note of every trifle in this
enthralling game. Why, he asked himself, had so expert a driver
slackened speed with plenty of room to pass? He saw a possible
explanation. They had been meeting and overtaking trams at intervals all
the way from Molesey Bridge. In another minute they would have left the
high-road and the tram route, and the driver wished to hide the fact
from Moeletter as long as possible. He had therefore _waited_ to meet
this tram so that the inspector might unconsciously carry in his mind
the evidence of their presence to the last possible point.

They were no longer on the high-road; they had glided off somewhere
without a warning note or any indication of speed or motion to betray
the turn they had taken. The houses were becoming sparser, fields
intervened, with here and there a strung-out colony of cottages. Soon
even the scattered buildings ceased, or appeared so rarely that they
only dotted long stretches of country lanes, and at every yard they
trembled on the verge of detection. Nothing but the glare of light
inside the vehicle and the storm and darkness beyond could have hid for
a moment from even the least suspicious of men the fact that they were
no longer travelling even the most secluded of suburban high-roads. And
now, as if aware that the deception could not be maintained much longer,
the driver began to increase the speed at every open stretch. Again
nothing but his inspired skill and the perfectly-balanced excellence of
the car could disguise the fact that they flew along the level road;
while among the narrow winding lanes they rushed at a headlong pace,
shooting down declines and breasting little hills without a pause. The
horn boomed its warning every second, and from behind came the answering
note of the long white motor. It had crept nearer and nearer since they
left the high-road, and its brilliant head-lights now lit up the way as
far as the pilot car. Little chance for Moeletter to convoy his prisoner
out of those deserted lanes whatever happened now!

What means, what desperate means, he might have taken in a gallant
attempt to retrieve the position if he had suspected treachery just a
minute before he did, one may speculate but never know.

As it was, the uneasy instinct that everything was not right awoke too
late for him to make the stand. It was less than ten minutes after
meeting the last tram that he peered out into the night doubtfully, but
in those ten minutes the green car had all but won its journey's end.

"Murphy," he cried imperiously, with his mouth to the tube and a
startled eye on Salt, "tell me immediately where we are."

"A minute, sir," came the hasty answer, as the driver bent forward to
verify some landmark. "This brake----

"Stop this instant!" roared the inspector, rising to his feet in rage
and with a terrible foreboding.

There was a muffled rattle as they shot over a snow-laden bridge, a
curious sense of passing into a new atmosphere, and then with easy
precision the car drew round and stopped dead before the open double
doors of its own house. No one spoke for a moment. There was another
muffled roar outside, the sound of heavy iron doors clashing together,
and the great white car reproduced their curve and drew up by their
side.

From the driver's seat of the green car the Hon. Bruce Wycombe, son and
heir of old Viscount Chiltern and the most skilful motorist in Europe,
climbed painfully down, and, pulling off his head-gear, opened the door
of the car with a bow that would have been more graceful if he had been
less frozen.

"Welcome to Hanwood after your long journey, Inspector Moeletter!" he
exclaimed most affably.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE MUSIC AND THE DANCE


Along the great west road, ten thousand Monmouth colliers were streaming
towards London, in every stage of famine and discomfort. What they
intended to do when they reached the Capital they had no clearer idea
than had the fifteen thousand Midlanders at Barnet. All they knew was
that they were starving at home, and they could be no worse off in
London. Also in London there was to be found the Government, the
Government that had betrayed them.

The conception of the march had been wild, the execution was lamentable.
The leaders might have taken Napoleon's descent on Moscow as their
model. Ten hand-carts exhausted their commissariat. They were to live on
the land they passed through; but the land was agricultural and poor,
the populace regarded the Monmouth colliers as foreigners, and the
response was scanty. Only one circumstance saved the march from becoming
a tragedy of hundreds instead of merely, as it was, a tragedy of scores.

The men were being fed from London. By whom, and why, not even their
leaders knew, but each night a railway truck full of provisions was
awaiting their arrival at a station on their route, and each day the
men's leader-in-chief was informed where the next supply would be. It
influenced them to continue their journey pacifically when they must
otherwise, sooner or later, have abandoned all restraint and marched
through anarchy. It enabled them to reach London. It added another
element to the Government's distraction in their day of reckoning. It
was a Detail.

But at Windsor there were no provisions waiting. No one knew why. The
station authorities had nothing to suggest. After a week's regular
supply the leaders had come to expect their daily truck-load, had come
to rely implicitly upon it, and had made no other arrangements. They
conferred together anxiously; it was all there was for them to do.
Windsor was not sympathetic towards them. They had not expected it to
be, but they had expected to be independent of Windsor's friendship. Two
thousand special constables escorted them in and shepherded them
assiduously. Otherwise there might have been disturbances, for a Castle
guard comprised the extent of Windsor's military resources then. As it
was, the miners reached the Royal Borough hungry, and left it famished.
A rumour spread along the ranks as they set out that an unfortunate
mistake had been made, but that supplies would be awaiting them in Hyde
Park.

If that was a detail, as it might well have been, it was not wholly
successful. The men were hungry and dispirited, but London was not their
immediate goal. For weeks they had been telling the vacillating Cabinet
what ought to be done with the oil at Hanwood, and as they set out they
had boasted to their brothers across the Rhymney that before they
returned they would show them how to fire a beacon that would singe the
hair of five million Leaguers. Midway between Windsor and London they
proceeded to turn off from the highway under the direction of their
leaders, and debouching from the narrow lanes on to the fields beyond,
they began to advance across the country in a straggling, far-flung
wave.

On the previous day both the Home Office and the War Office had received
applications for protection from the Company at Hanwood, backed by
evidence which left no possible doubt that the Monmouth unemployed
contemplated an organised attack on the oil store. The two departments
replied distantly, that in view of the existing conditions within the
Metropolis and the forces at their disposal, it was impossible to
despatch either troops or constabulary to protect private property in
isolated districts. Hanwood acknowledged these replies, and gave notice
with equal punctilio that they would take the best means within their
power for safeguarding their interests, and at the same time formally
notified the Government that they held them responsible, through their
failure to carry out the obligations of their office, for all the
developments that the situation might lead to--an exchange of civilities
which in private life is sometimes attained much more simply by two
disputants consigning each other to the society of the Prince of
Darkness in four words.

Whatever there might be behind the intimation, there was little to
indicate it at dusk that afternoon. The stranger or the native passing
along Miss Lisle's secluded lane would have noticed only two
circumstances to suggest anything unusual in the air.

A few hundred feet above the trees within the wall, a box-kite was
straining at its rope in the rising gale. From the basket car a man
watched every movement of the countryside through his field-glasses, and
conversed from time to time through a telephone with the kite section
down below. A second wire ran from the field telephone to a room of the
offices where Salt was engaged with half a dozen of the chiefs of the
Council of the League. Sir John Hampden was not present. He was
remaining in London to afford the Government every facility for
negotiating a settlement whenever they might desire it.

In the lane, a group of men with tickets in their hats were loitering
about the bridge. They comprised a Peaceful Picket within the meaning of
the Act. They had been there since daybreak, and so far no one had shown
any wish to dispute their position.

The war-kite and the picket in the lane were the "eyes" of the opposing
belligerents.

The League had nothing to gain by submitting the issue to the
arbitrament of lead and fire. No one had anything to gain by it, but
after a bout at fisticuffs a defeated child will sometimes pick up a
dangerous stone and fling it. The League had accepted the challenge of
those who marched beneath the red banner for war on constitutional
lines. Some of those who marched beneath the red banner were now
disposed to try the effect of beating their ploughshares into swords,
and however much the League might have preferred them to keep to their
bargain, the most effective retort was to turn their own pacific sickles
into bayonets.

In the staff room Salt was addressing his associates--half military,
half political--who now represented the innermost Council of the League.
Some of them had been members of former Ministries, others soldiers who
had worn the insignia of generals, but they rendered to this unknown man
among them an unquestioning allegiance, because of what he had already
done, because he inspired them with absolute reliance in what he would
yet succeed in doing, and, not least, because he had the air that fitted
the position.

"More than two years ago," he was saying, "the first draft of the
formation and operations of the League contained a section much to the
following effect:

"'It is an essential feature of the plan that the League should work on
constitutional lines from beginning to end and in contemplation of
bringing about the desired reforms without firing a solitary shot or
violating a single law.

"'Nevertheless, it is inevitable that when the position becomes acute
civil disorders will arise out of the involved situation, and
demonstrations of the affected people will threaten the Government of
the day on the one hand and the proposed League on the other.

"'In these circumstances it will be prudent to contemplate, as a last
phase of the struggle, an organised military attack on the property of
the League, masked under the form of a popular riot, but instigated or
connived at by responsible authorities. I propose, therefore, to
establish the League stores in a position naturally suited for defence,
and to adopt such further precautions as will render them secure against
ordinary attack.'

"We have now reached that closing phase of the struggle," continued
Salt. "On the evidence of this report from Sir John Hampden we may
assume that within twenty-four hours our aggressive work will be over.
Will our opponents, in the language of the street, 'go quietly'?"

"It has fallen to my lot to read the Riot Act on three occasions," said
one of the company, "and I have seen disturbances in Ireland; but I have
never before known an unorganised mob to surround a position completely
and then to sit down to wait for night."

"Lieutenant Vivash wishes to speak to Mr Salt personally," said a
subordinate, appearing at the door.

Salt stepped into the ante-room, and spoke through the telephone.

"Yes, Vivash," he said to the man in the kite a quarter of a mile away.
"What is it?"

"Two general service wagons with bridge-making tackle have just been
brought up, and are waiting in Welland Wood," reported Vivash. "There is
a movement among the colliers over Barfold Rise. With them are about two
hundred men carrying rifles. They are not in uniform, but they _march_."

Salt turned to another instrument and jerked the switch rapidly from
plate to plate as he distributed his orders.

"Captain Norris, strengthen the Territorials at the outer wire North."

"Send up two star rockets to recall the motor-cycle scouts."

"Tell Disturnal to have the searchlights in immediate readiness."

"Fire brigade, full strength, turn out with chemical engine, and stand
under earthwork cover at central tank."

He turned again to the kite telephone to ask Vivash a detail. There was
no response.

"Get on with Lieutenant Vivash as soon as you can, and let me know at
once," he said to the one who was in charge, as he returned to the staff
room.

In less than a minute the operator was at the door again.

"I am afraid there is something the matter, sir," he explained. "I can
get no reply either from Lieutenant Vivash or from the kite section."

"Ring up the despatch room. Let some one go at once to Mr Moore and
return here with report."

"Yes, sir." He turned to go. "Here _is_ Mr Moore," he exclaimed,
standing aside from the door.

They all read some disaster in his face as he entered.

"I am deeply sorry to say that Lieutenant Vivash has been shot."

"Is he seriously hurt?" asked some one.

"He is dead. He was shot through the head by a marksman in Welland
Wood."

Salt broke the shocked silence.

"We have lost a brave comrade," he said simply. "Come, General Trench,
let us visit the walls."

It was dark when they returned. Salt passed through the room, calling to
his side the man with whom he had been most closely associated at
Hanwood, and traversing some passages led the way up a winding staircase
into the lantern of the tower. Here, under the direction of an
ex-officer of Royal Engineers, two powerful searchlights were playing on
every inch of doubtful ground that lay within their radius beyond the
entanglement that marked the outer line of the defences.

Nothing had been seen; not a solitary invader had yet shown himself
within the zone of light. The officer in charge was explaining a
technical detail of the land when, without the faintest warning, a
fulgent blaze of light suddenly ran along the edge of a coppice half a
mile away, and a noise like the crackling of a hundred new-lit fires
drifted on the wind. With the echo, a thick hedge to the east and a wood
lying on the west joined in the vicious challenge. A few bullets
splashed harmlessly against the steel shield that ingeniously protected
the lantern.

The searchlights oscillated uncertainly from sky to earth under the
shock of the surprise, and then settled down to stream unwinkingly into
the eyes of the enemy, while in the double darkness the defenders hugged
the earth behind the wire and began to reply with cool deliberation to
the opening volleys.

There was a knock upon the door of the little lantern room, and a
telescribe message was placed before Salt. It bore a sign showing that
it had come over the private system which the League maintained between
Hanwood and the head office. He read it through twice, and for almost
the first time since he had left his youth behind, he stood in absolute
indecision.

"It is necessary for me to go at once to London," he said, turning to
his companion, when he had made an irrevocable choice. "You will take
command in my absence, Evelyn, under the guidance of the Council."

"May I venture to remind you, sir, that we are completely surrounded?"
said Orr-Evelyn through his blank surprise.

"I have not overlooked it. You will----"

There was a sullen roar away in the north, a mile behind the coppice
that had first spoken. Something whistled overhead, not unmelodiously,
and away to the south a shell burst harmlessly among the ridges of a
ploughed field. The nearer searchlight elevated its angle a fraction and
centred upon a cloud of smoke that hung for a moment until the gale
whirled it to disintegration. The army, like the navy, had reverted to
black powder. It was Economy; and as it was not intended ever to go to
war again, it scarcely mattered.

"Marsham will engage that gun from both platforms D and E. Make every
effort to silence it with the least delay; it is the only real menace
there is. Hold the entanglement, but not at too heavy a cost. If it
should be carried----Come to my room."

"You have considered the possible effect of your withdrawal at this
moment, Salt?" said Orr-Evelyn in a low voice, as they hastened together
along the passages.

"I can leave the outcome in your hands with absolute reliance," replied
Salt. "If Hanwood is successfully held until to-morrow, it will devolve
upon Sir John Hampden to dictate terms to the Government. The end is
safely in sight independent of my personality.... My reputation----!" He
dismissed that phase with a shrug.

He threw open the door of his private office. A shallow mahogany case,
about a foot square, locked and sealed, was sunk into the opposite wall.
Salt knocked off the wax and opened the case with a key which he took
off the ring and gave to Orr-Evelyn as he spoke. Inside the case were a
dozen rows of little ivory studs, each engraved with a red number.
Fastened to the inside of the lid was a scale map of the land lying
between the outer wall and the wire fence. Every stud had its
corresponding number, surrounded by a crimson circle, indicated on the
plan.

"If the entanglement should be carried you will take no further risk,"
continued Salt. "Captain Ford will give you the general indication of
the attack from the lantern. There are two men detailed to each block of
mines who will signal you the exact moment for firing each mine. Those
are the numbered indicators above the box. Good-bye."

He paused at the door; time was more than life to him, but he had an
ordered thought for everything.

"If you hear no more of me, and what might be imagined really troubles
you, Evelyn, you can make use of this," he remarked, and laid the
telescript he had received upon a table.

It was not the time for words, written or spoken, beyond those of the
sheerest necessity. Half an hour passed before Orr-Evelyn had an
opportunity of glancing through the letter that had called Salt from his
post. When he had finished it he took it down, and read it aloud to the
headquarter staff amidst the profoundest silence, in passionate
vindication of his friend and leader. This was what they heard:

     "UNITY LEAGUE, TRAFALGAR CHAMBERS.

     "The building is surrounded by mob. Seaton Street, Pantile
     Passage, and Pall Mall and the Haymarket, as far as I can see,
     densely packed with frantic men. All others in building had
     left earlier. _I shall remain._ Wires cut, and fear that you
     may not receive this, as other telescribe messages for help
     unanswered. Mob howling continuously for Sir John Hampden and
     Mr Salt; dare not look out again, stoned. Shall delay advance,
     doors and stairs, as long as possible, and burn all important
     League books and papers last resource.

     "Good-bye all, my dear friends.

     "IRENE LISLE."




CHAPTER XIX

THE "FINIS" MESSAGE


The storm had not decreased its violence when, three minutes later, Salt
stood unperceived on the broad coping outside an upper storey of the
tower, and, sinking forward into the teeth of the gale, was borne
upwards with rigid wings as a kite ascends.

In accordance with his instructions the two searchlights had turned
their beams steadily earthward for the time, and in the absolute
blackness of the upper air he could pass over the firing lines of
friends and foes in comparative safety. As he rose higher and higher
before turning to scud before the wind, he saw, as on a plan, the whole
field of operations, just distinguishable in its masses of grey and
black, with the points of interest revealing themselves by an occasional
flash. Immediately beneath him, beneath him at first, but every second
drawing away to the south-west as he drifted in the gale he breasted,
lay Hanwood, with its three outer lines of defence. From above it seemed
as though a very bright needle was every now and then thrust out from
the walls into the dark night and drawn back again. On each of the
platforms D and E two 4.7-inch quick-firing guns appeared to be rocking
slightly in the wind. By all the indication there was of smoke or noise,
or even flame, the gunners might have been standing idly behind their
shields; but over the steep scarp of the little hill, a mile and a half
away, shells were being planted every ten yards or so, with the
methodical regularity of a farmer dropping potatoes along a furrow.

Salt might not have quite expected that there would be the necessity to
fire those guns when, a year before, he had obtained for Hanwood its
complement of the finest artillery that the world produced, but when the
necessity did arise, there was no need for the League gunners to use
black powder.

When he had reached the height he required, simply leaning against the
wind, Salt moved a pinion slightly and bore heavily towards the right.
It was the supreme moment for the trial of skill, as the long flight
that followed it was the trial of endurance. If his nerve had failed, if
a limb had lost its tension for the fraction of a second, his brain
reeled amidst that tearing fury of the element, or a single ring or
swivel not answered to its work, he would have been crumpled up
hopelessly, beyond the chance of recovery, and flung headlong to the
earth. As it was, the wind swept him round in a great half circle, but
it was the wind his servant, not his master, and he turned its lusty
violence to serve his ends. He caught a passing glimpse of the coppice
whence the attack had first been opened; he saw beneath him the line of
guns ensconced behind the hill, one already overturned and centred in
confusion; and then the sweeping arc reached its limit, and he came, as
it seemed, to anchor in mid-air, with the earth slipping away beneath
him as the banks glide past a smoothly-moving train, and a thousand
weights and forces dragging at his aching arms.

He had nothing to do but to maintain a perfect balance among the
conflicting cross winds that shot in from above and below, and from
north and south, and to point his course towards the glow in the sky
that marked the Capital. A dozen words could express it, but it required
the skill of the practised wingman, the highest development of every
virile quality, and the spur of a necessity not less than life and
death, to dignify the attempt above the foolhardy. Whether beyond all
that the accomplishment lay within the bounds of human endurance was a
further step. It would at that time have been impossible to pronounce
either way with any authority, for not only had the attempt never been
made, but nothing approaching the attempt had been made. A breeze that
ran five miles an hour was considered enough for any purpose; to take to
the air when the anemometer indicated fifteen miles an hour was not
allowed at the practice grounds, and the record in this direction lay
with an expert who had accomplished a straight flight in a wind that
travelled a little less than thirty miles an hour. The storm on the
night of the 15th of January tore across the face of the land with a
general velocity of fifty or sixty miles an hour, rising at times even
higher.

Under the racking agony of every straining tendon and the heady pressure
of the wind, a sense of mundane unreality began to settle upon the
flier. He saw the earth and its landmarks being drawn smoothly and
swiftly from beneath him with the detachment of a half-conscious dream.
He saw--for he remembered afterwards--the Thames lying before him like a
whip flicked carelessly across the plain. A town loomed up, black and
inchoate, on his right, developed into streets and terraces, and slid
away into the past. It was Richmond. The river, never far away, now
slipped beneath him at right angles, reappeared to hold a parallel
course upon his left, and flung a horse-shoe coil two miles ahead. A
colony of strange shining roofs and domes next challenged recognition.
They were the conservatories at Kew, looking little more than garden
frames, and they were scarcely lost to view before he was over the
winding line of Brentford's quaint old High Street, now, as it appeared,
packed with a dense, moving crowd. The irresistible pounding of the gale
was edging the glow of London further and further to his right.
Instinctively he threw more weight into the lighter scale, and slowly
and certainly the point of his destination swung round before his face
again.

Thenceforward it was all town. Gunnersbury became Chiswick, Chiswick
merged into Hammersmith, Kensington succeeded, in ceaseless waves of
houses that ran north and south, and long vistas of roofs that stretched
east and west. It was a kaleidoscope of contrasts. Scenes of saturnalian
gaiety, where ant-like beings danced in mad abandonment round fires that
blocked the road, or seemed to gyrate by companies in meaningless
confusion, bounded districts plunged into an unnatural gloom and
solitude, where for street after street neither the footstep of a
wayfarer nor the light of a public lamp broke the uncanny spell.
Immediately beyond, by the glare of the flambeaux which they carried, an
orderly concourse might be marching eastward, and fringing on their
route a garish gutter mart, where busy costermongers drove their roaring
trade and frugal housewives did their marketing with less outward
concern than if the crisis in the State had been a crisis in the price
of butter.

The multitudinous sounds beat on his ears through the plunging gale like
a babel of revelry heard between the intermittent swinging of an
unlatched door. The sights in their grotesque perspective began to melt
together lazily. The upper air grew very cold. The weights hung heavier
every mile, the contending forces pulled more resistlessly. Strange
fancies began to assail him as the brain shrank beneath the strain;
doubts and despairs to gather round like dark birds of the night with
hopeless foreboding in the dull measure of their funereal wings. In that
moment mind and body almost failed to contend against the crushing odds;
nothing but his unconquerable heart flogged on his dying limbs.

It was scarcely more than half an hour after she had written her
despairing message that from her post at the head of the broad stone
staircase Irene Lisle heard a noise in the garret storey above that sent
her flying back to her stronghold. It was the last point from which she
had expected an attack. Through the keyhole of the door behind which she
had taken refuge, she saw a strangely outlined figure groping his way
cumbrously down the stairs, and then, without a word or cry, but with a
face whiter than the paper that had summoned him, she threw open the
door to admit Salt.

He walked heavily along the corridor and turned into his own room, while
she relocked the door and followed him. There was mute enquiry in her
eyes, but she did not speak.

A powerful oil-stove stood upon the hearth-stone, throwing its beams
across the room. He stood over it while the beaded ice melted from his
hair and fell hissing on the iron. He opened his mouth, and the sound of
his voice was like the thin piping of a reed. She caught a word, and
began to unbuckle the frozen straps of his gear. When he was free he
tried to raise his hand to a pocket of his coat, but the effort was
beyond the power of the cramped limb. Irene interpreted the action, and,
finding there a flask, filled the cup and held it to his lips.

She got a blue, half-frozen smile of thanks over the edge of the cup.
"Ah," he said, beginning to find his voice again, and stamping about the
room, "we owe Wynchley Slocombe a monument, you and I, Miss Lisle. Now
you must write a telescript for me, please; for I cannot."

"If you will remain here, where it is warmer, I will bring the
materials," she suggested.

He thanked her and allowed her to go, watching her with thoughtful eyes
that were coming back to life. She paused a moment at the top of the
stairs to listen down the shaft, and then sped quickly through the smoke
to the instrument room on the floor beneath.

Salt glanced round the office. On and about his desk all the books and
papers that might be turned to a hostile purpose had been stacked in
readiness, and by them stood the can of oil that was to ensure their
complete destruction. He stepped up to the window and looked out
cautiously. Every pane of glass was broken--every pane of glass in
Trafalgar Chambers was broken, for that matter--but it was not easy for
an unprepared mob to force an entrance. When the Unity League had taken
over the whole block of building in its expansion many alterations had
been carried out, and among these had been to fix railings that sprang
from the street and formed an arch, not only over the basement, but over
the ground floor windows also. If the shutters on the windows had been
closed in time, the assailants would have been baffled at another point,
but the shutters had been overlooked, and the mob, after lighting great
fires in the street, was now flinging the blazing billets through the
lower windows.

In a very brief minute Irene was back again with the telescribe
accessories. She seated herself at a table, dipped her pen into the ink,
and looked up without a word.

     "TRAFALGAR CHAMBERS.

     "6.25 P.M.," dictated Salt. "Most of the miners drawn off and
     passing through Brentford. Over Barfold Rise half battery of
     18-pounders, one out of action. In Spring Coppice and Welland
     Wood about four companies regulars each. Reconnoitre third
     position assuming same proportion. Act."

He stood considering whether there was anything more to add usefully.
The sound of Irene's agate pen tapping persistently against the table
caught his ear.

"You are not very much afraid?" he asked with kindly reassurance in his
voice as he looked at her hand.

"No, not now," she replied; but as she wrote she had to still the
violent trembling of her right hand with the left.

     "All going well here. Send messenger Hampden with report
     immediately after engagement," he concluded.

"I will try to sign it myself." He succeeded in sprawling a recognisable
"George Salt" across the paper, and after it wrote "Finis," which
happened to be the pass-word for the day.

"Your message came through; this may possibly do the same," he remarked.
He turned off the radiator as orderly as though he had reached the close
of a working day, and they went out together, locking the doors behind
them.

"They were attacking Hanwood when you left?" she asked with the tensest
interest. They had sent off the telescript, and it seemed to Irene that
they had reached the end of things.

"Yes," he replied. "But all the same," he added, as a fresh outburst of
cries rose from the street, and the light through the shattered window
attracted a renewed fusillade of missiles, "I think that we have kept
our promise to let you be in the thick of it."

She shook her head with the very faintest smile. "That seems a very long
time ago. But you, how could _you_ come? When I sent I never thought ...
I never dreamed----"

"It was possible to leave," he said. "My work is done. Yes," in reply to
her startled glance, "it has all happened!"

"You mean----?" she asked eagerly.

He took a paper from his pocket-book. It was, as she saw immediately, a
telescript from Sir John Hampden. It had reached him at Hanwood an hour
before he left.

     "I have this afternoon received a deputation of Ministerialists
     who have the adherence of a majority in the House without
     taking the Opposition into account," she read. "The
     Parliamentary Representation Committees throughout the country
     are frantically insisting upon members accepting _any terms_,
     if we will give an undertaking that the normal balance of trade
     and labour shall be restored at once. The Cabinet is going to
     pieces every hour, and the situation can no longer either be
     faced or ignored by the Government. There will be a great scene
     in the House to-night. The deputation will see me again
     to-morrow morning with a formal decision. I have confidential
     assurances that a complete acceptance is a foregone conclusion.
     The arrival of the Midland colliers to-night, if not of those
     from Monmouth, will precipitate matters."

Tears she could not hold back stood in her eyes as she returned to him
the paper. "Then it has not been in vain," she said softly.

"No," he replied. "Nothing has been in vain."

They stood silently for a minute, looking back over life. So might two
shipwrecked passengers have stood on a frail raft waiting for the end,
resigned but not unhopeful of a larger destiny beyond, while the
elements boiled and roared around them.

"It was very weak of me to send that message," said Irene presently;
"the message that brought you. I suppose," she added, "that it _was_ the
message that brought you?"

"Yes, thank God!" he replied.

"And if it had been impossible for you to come? If it had been an
utterly critical moment in every way, what would you have done?"

He laughed a little, quietly, as he looked at her. "The question did not
arise, fortunately," he replied.

"No," she admitted; "only I felt a little curious to know, now that
everything is over. It _is_, isn't it? There is nothing to be done?"

"Oh yes," he replied with indomitable cheerfulness. "There is always
something to be done."

"A chance?" she whispered incredulously. "A chance of escape, you mean?"

"It is possible," he said. "At least, I will go and hear what they have
to say."

"No! no!" she cried out, as a dreadful scene rose to her imagination.
"You cannot understand. Don't you hear that?... They would kill you."

"I do not suppose that I shall find myself popular," he said with a
smile, "but I will take care. You--I think you must stay here."

"Cannot I come with you?" she pleaded. "See, I am armed."

He took the tiny weapon that she drew from her dress and looked at it
with gentle amusement. It was a pretty thing of ivory and nickeled
steel, an elaborate toy. He pressed the action and shook out the
half-dozen tiny loaded caps--they were little more than that--upon his
palm.

"I would rather that you did not use this upon a mob," he said,
reloading it. "It would only exasperate, without disabling. As for
stopping a rush--why, I doubt if one of these would stop a determined
rabbit. You have better weapons than this."

"I suppose you are right. Only it gave me a little confidence. Then you
shall keep it for a memento, if you will."

"No; it might hold off a single assailant, I suppose. I should value
this much more, if I might have it." He touched a silk tie that she had
about her neck, as he spoke; it was one that she had often worn. She
held up her head for him to disengage it.

"Some day," he said, lingering a little over the simple operation, "you
will understand many things, Irene."

"I think that I understand everything now," she replied with a brave
glance. "Everything that is worth understanding."

He placed the folded tie in an inner pocket, and went down the stone
steps without another word. The well was thick with smoke, but the fire
had not yet spread beyond the lower rooms. Half-way down he encountered
a barricade of light office furniture which the girl had flung across
the stairs and drenched with oil. It was no obstacle in itself, but at
the touch of a match it would have sprung into a conflagration that
would have held the wildest mob at bay for a few precious moments. He
picked his way through it, descended the remaining stairs, and unlocked
the outer door. Beyond this was an iron curtain that had been lowered. A
little door in it opened directly on to the half-dozen steps that led
down to Seaton Street.

Salt looked through a crevice of the iron curtain, and listened long
enough to learn that there was no one on the upper steps; for the upper
steps, indeed, commanded no view of the windows, and the windows were
the centres of all interest. Satisfied on this point, he quietly
unlocked the door and stepped out.




CHAPTER XX

STOBALT OF SALAVEIRA


To the majority of those who thronged Seaton Street the effect of Salt's
sudden--instantaneous, as it seemed--and unexpected appearance was to
endow it with a dramatic, almost an uncanny, value. The front rows,
especially those standing about the steps, fell back, and the further
rows pressed forward. And because an undisciplined mob stricken by acute
surprise must express its emotion outwardly--by silence if it has
hitherto been noisy, and by exclamation if it has been silent--the
shouts and turmoil in the street instantly dwindled away to nothing,
like a breath of vapour passing from a window pane.

Salt raised his hand, and he had the tribute of unstirring silence, the
silence for the moment of blank astonishment.

"My friends and enemies," he said, in a voice that had learned
self-possession from the same school that Demosthenes had practised in,
"you have been calling me for some time. In a few minutes I must listen
to whatever you have to say, but first there is another matter that we
must arrange. I take it for granted that when you began your spirited
demonstration here you had no idea that there was a lady in the
building. Not being accustomed to the sterner side of politics, so
formidable a display rather disconcerted her, and not knowing the
invariable chivalry of English working men, she hesitated to come out
before. Now, as it is dark, and the streets of London are not what they
once were, I want half a dozen good stout fellows to see the lady safely
to her home."

"Be damned!" growled a voice among the mass. "What do you take us for?"

"Men," retorted Salt incisively; "or there would be no use in asking
you."

"Yes, men, but famished, desperate, werewolf men," cried a poor, gaunt
creature clad in grotesque rags, who stood near. "Men who have seen
_our_ women starve and sink before our eyes; men who have watched _our_
children dying by a slower, crooler death than fire. An eye for an eye,
tyrant! Your League has struck at _our_ women folk through us."

"Then strike at ours through us!" cried Salt, stilling with the measured
passion of his voice the rising murmurs of assent. "I am here to offer
you a substitute. Do you think that no woman will mourn for me?" He sent
his voice ringing over their heads like a prophetic knell. "The cause
that must stoop to take the life of a defenceless woman is lost for
ever."

As long as he could offer them surprises he could hold the mere mob in
check, but there was among the crowd an element that was not of the
crowd, a chosen sprinkling who were superior to the swaying passions of
the moment.

"Not good enough," said a decently-dressed, comfortable-looking man, who
had little that was famished, desperate, or wolfish in his appearance.
"You're both there, and there you shall both stay, by God! Eh,
comrades?" He spoke decisively, and made a movement as though he would
head a rush towards the steps.

Salt dropped one hand upon the iron door with a laugh that sounded more
menacing than most men's threats.

"Not so fast, Rorke," he said contemptuously; "you grasp too much. Even
in your unpleasant business you can practise moderation. I am here, but
there is no reason on earth why I should stay. Scarcely more than half
an hour ago I was at Hanwood--where, by the way, your friends are being
rather badly crumpled up--and you are all quite helpless to prevent me
going again."

They guessed the means; they saw the unanswerable strength of his
position, and recognised their own impotence. "Who are you, any way?"
came a dozen voices.

"I am called George Salt: possibly you have heard the name before. Come,
men," he cried impatiently, "what have you to think twice about? Surely
it is worth while to let a harmless girl escape to make certain of that
terrible person Salt."

There was a strangled scream in the vestibule behind. Unable to bear the
suspense any longer, Irene had crept down the stairs in time to hear the
last few sentences. For a minute she had stood transfixed at the horror
of the position she realised; then, half-frenzied, she flung herself
against Salt's arm and tried to beat her way past to face the mob.

"You shall not!" she cried distractedly. "I will not be saved at that
price. I shall throw myself out of the window, into the fire, anywhere.
Yes, I'm desperate, but I know what I am saying. Come back, and let us
wait together; die together, if it is to be, but I don't go alone."

The crowd began to surge restlessly about in waves of excited motion.
The interruption, in effect, had been the worst thing that could have
happened. There were in the throng many who beneath their seething
passion could appreciate the nobility of Salt's self-sacrifice; many who
in the midst of their sullen enmity were wrung with admiration for
Irene's heroic spirit, but the contagion to press forward dominated all.
Salt had irretrievably lost his hold upon their reason, and with that
hold he saw the last straw of his most forlorn hope floating away. In
another minute he must either retreat into the burning building where he
might at any time find the stairs impassable with smoke, or remain to be
overwhelmed by a savage rush and beaten to the ground.

"Men," cried Irene desperately, "listen before you do something that
will for ever make to-day shameful in the history of our country. Do you
know whom you wish to kill? He is the greatest Englishman----"

There were angry cries from firebrands scattered here and there among
the crowd, and a movement from behind, where the new contingents
hurrying down the side streets pressed most heavily, flung the nearest
rows upon the lower steps. Salt's revolver, which he had not shown
before, drove them back again and gave him a moment's grace.

"Quick!" he cried. "My offer still holds good."

One man shouldered his way through to the front, and, seeing him, Salt
allowed him to come on. He walked up the steps deliberately, with a face
sad rather than revengeful, and they spoke together hurriedly under the
shadow of the large-bore revolver.

"If it can be done yet, I'll be one of the posse to see to the young
lady," said the volunteer. "I have no mind to wait for the other job
that's coming."

"Take care of her; get her back into the hall," replied Salt. "Gently,
very gently, friend."

Two more volunteers had their feet upon the steps, one, a butcher,
reeking of the stalls, the other sleek and smug-faced, with the
appearance of a prosperous artisan.

"I'll pick my men," cried Salt sharply, and his steady weapon emphasised
his choice, one man passing on through the iron doorway, the other
turning sharp from the insistent barrel to push his way back into the
crowd with a bitter imprecation.

It was too much to hope that the position could be maintained. The
impatient mob had only been held off momentarily from its purpose as a
pack of wolves can be stayed by the fleeing traveller who throws from
his sleigh article after article to entice their curiosity. Salt had
nothing more to offer them. His life was already a hostage to the honour
of those whom he had allowed to pass. Others were pressing on to him
with vengeance-laden cries. The terrible irresistible forward surge of a
soulless mob, when individuality is merged into the dull brutishness of
a trampling herd, was launched.

"Capt'n Stobalt!" cried a lusty voice at his shoulder.

Salt turned instinctively. A man in sailor's dress, with the guns and
star of his grade upon his sleeve, had climbed along the arch of the
railings with a sailor's resourcefulness, and had reached his ear. Salt
remembered him quite well, but he did not speak a word.

"Ah, sir, I thought that warn't no other voice in the world, although
the smoke befogged my eyes a bit. Keep back, you gutter rats!" he roared
above every other sound, rising up in his commanding position and
balancing himself by a stanchion of the gate; "d'ye think you know who
you're standing up before, you toggle-chested galley-sharks! Salt? Aye,
he's _salt_ enough! 'Tis Capt'n Stobalt of the old _Ulysses_.
_Stobalt of Salaveira!_"

Three years before, the moment would have found Salt cold, as cold as
ice, and as unresponsive, but he had learned many things since then, and
sacrificed his pride and reticence on many altars.

He saw before him a phalanx of humanity startled into one common
expression of awe and incredulity; he saw the hostile wave that was to
overwhelm him spend itself in a sharp recoil. By a miracle the fierce
lust of triumphant savagery had died out of the starved, pathetic faces
now turned eagerly to him; by a miracle the gathering roar for vengeance
had sunk into an expectant hush, broken by nothing but the whispered
repetition of his name on ten thousand lips. He saw in a flash a hundred
details of the magic of that name; he knew that if ever in his life he
must throw restraint and moderation to the winds and paint his rôle in
broad and lurid colours, that moment had arrived, and at the call he
took his destiny between his hands.

They saw him toss his weapon through the railings into the space
beneath, marked him come to the edge of the step and stand with folded
arms defenceless there before them, and the very whispers died away in
breathless anticipation.

"Yes," he cried with a passionate vehemence that held their breath and
stirred their hearts, "I am Stobalt of Salaveira, the man who brought
you victory when you were trembling in despair. I saved England for you
then, but that was when men loved their country, and did not think it a
disgraceful thing to draw a sword and die for her. What is that to you
to-day, you who have been taught to forget what glory means; and what is
England to you to-day, you whose leaders have sold her splendour for a
higher wage?"

"No! No!" cried a thousand voices, frantic to appease the man for whose
blood they had been howling scarcely a minute before. "You shall be our
leader! We will follow you to death! Stobalt of Salaveira! Stobalt for
ever! Stobalt of Salaveira! Stobalt and England!"

The frenzied roar of welcome, the waving hands, the hats flung high, the
mingled cries caught from lip to lip went rolling up the street,
kindling by a name and an imperishable memory other streets and other
crowds into a tumult of mad enthusiasm. Along Pall Mall, through
Trafalgar Square, into the Strand and Whitehall, north by Regent Street
and the Haymarket to Piccadilly, running east and west, splitting north
and south, twisting and leaping from group to group and mouth to mouth,
ran the strange but stirring cry, carrying wonder and concern on its
wing, but always passing with a cheer.

Seven years had passed since the day of Salaveira, and the memory of it
was still enough to stir a crowd to madness. For there had been no
Salaveiras since to dim its splendour. Seven years ago the name of
Salaveira had brought pallor to the cheek, and the thought of what was
happening there stole like an icy cramp round the heart of every
Englishman. The nation had grown accustomed to accept defeat on land
with the comfortable assurance that nothing could avert a final victory.
Its pride was in its navy: invincible!...

The war that came had been of no one's seeking, but it came, and the
nation called upon its navy to sweep the presumptuous enemy from off the
seas. Then came a pause: a rumour, doubted, disbelieved, but growing
stronger every hour. The English fleets, not so well placed as they
might have been, "owing to political reasons that made mobilisation
inadvisable while there was still a chance of peace being maintained,"
were unable to effect a junction immediately, and were falling back
before the united power of the New Alliance. Hour after hour, day after
day, night after night, crowds stood hopefully, doubtfully,
incredulously, in front of the newspaper office windows, waiting for the
news that never came. The fleets had not yet combined. The truth first
leaked, then blazed: they were unable to combine! Desperately placed on
the outer line they were falling back, ever falling back into a more
appalling isolation. A coaling station had been abandoned just where its
presence proved to have been vital; a few battleships had been dropped
from the programme, and the loss of their weight in the chain just
proved fatal.

Men did not linger much at Fleet Street windows then; they slunk to and
fro singly a hundred times a day, read behind the empty bulletins with
poignant intuition, and turned silently away. In the mourning Capital
they led nightmare lives from which they could only awake to a more
definite despair, and the first word of the hurrying newsboy's raucous
shout sent a sickening wave of dread to every heart. There was
everything to fear, and nothing at all to hope. Could peace be made--not
a glorious, but a decent, living peace? Was--was even London safe? Kind
friends abroad threw back the answers in the fewest, crudest words.
England would have to sue for peace on bended knees and bringing heavy
tribute in her hands. London lay helpless at the mercy of the foe to
seize at any moment when it suited him.

All this time Commander Stobalt, in command of the _Ulysses_ by the
vicissitudes of unexpected war and separated from his squadron on
detached service, was supposed to be in Cura Bay, a thousand miles away
from Salaveira, flung there with the destroyers _Limpet_ and _Dabfish_
by the mere backwash of the triumphant allied fleet. According to the
rules of naval warfare he _ought_ to have been a thousand miles away;
according to the report of the allies' scouts he _was_ a thousand miles
away. But miraculously one foggy night the _Ulysses_ loomed spectrally
through the shifting mist that drifted uncertainly from off the land and
rammed the first leviathan that crossed her path, while the two
destroyers torpedoed her next neighbour. Then, before leviathans 3 and 4
had begun to learn from each other what the matter was, the _Ulysses_
was between them, sprinkling their decks and tops with small shell, and
perforating their water-line and vital parts with large shell from a
range closer than that at which any engagement had been fought out since
the day when the Treasury had begun to implore the Admiralty to impress
upon her admirals what a battleship really cost before they sent her
into action. For the _Ulysses_ had everything to gain and nothing but
herself to lose, and when morning broke over Salaveira's untidy bay, she
had gained everything, and lost so little that even the New Alliance
took no pride in mentioning it in the cross account.

It was, of course, as every naval expert could have demonstrated on the
war-game board, an impossible thing to do. Steam, searchlights, wireless
telegraphy, quick-firing guns, and a hundred other innovations had
effaced the man; and the spirit of the Elizabethan age was at a
discount. What Drake would have done, or Hawkins, what would have been a
sweet and pleasing adventure to Sir Richard Grenville, or another Santa
Cruz to Blake, would have been in their heirs unmitigated suicide by the
verdict of any orthodox court martial. Largely imbued with the
Elizabethan spirit--the genius of ensuring everything that was possible,
and then throwing into the scale a splendid belief in much that seemed
impossible--Stobalt succeeded in doing what perhaps no one else would
have succeeded in doing, merely because perhaps no one else would have
tried.

"Stobalt of Salaveira! Come down and lead us!" The wild enthusiasm, the
strange unusual cries, went echoing to the sky and reverberating down
every street and byway. Behind barred doors men listened to the shout,
and wondered; crouching in alleys, tramping the road with no further
hope in life, beggars and out-casts heard the name and dimly associated
it with something pleasant in the past. It met the force of special
constables hastening from the west; it fell on the ears of Mr Strummery,
driving by unfrequented ways towards the House. "Stobalt and England!
Stobalt for us! Stobalt and the Navy!" It was like another Salaveira
night with Stobalt there among them--the man who was too modest to be
fêted, the man whose very features were unknown at home, Stobalt of
Salaveira!

Imagine it. Measure by the fading but not yet quite forgotten memory of
another time of direful humiliation and despair what Salaveira must have
been. They had passed a week of fervent exaltation, a week of calm
assurance, a week of rather tremulous hope, and for the last quarter a
long dumb misery that conveyed no other sense of time in later years
than that of formless night. They were waiting for the stroke of doom.
Then at midnight came the sudden tumult from afar, sounding to those who
listened in painful silence strangely unlike the note of defeat, the
frantic, mingled shouts, the tearing feet in the road beneath, the wild
bells pealing out, the guns and rockets to add to the delirium of the
night, and the incredible burden of the intoxicating news: "Great
Victory! Salaveira Relieved!! Utter Annihilation of the Blockading
Fleet!!!"

The Philosopher might withdraw to solitude and moralise; the Friend of
Humanity stand aside, pained that his countrymen should possess so much
human nature, but to the great primitive emotional heart of the
community the choice lay between going out and shouting and staying in
and going mad. Never before in history had there been a victory that so
irresistibly carried the nation off its feet. To the populace it had
seemed from beginning to end to contain just those qualities of
daredevilry and fortuitous ease that appeal to the imagination. They
were quite mistaken; the conception had been desperate, but beyond that
the details of the relief of Salaveira had been as methodical, as
painstaking, and as far-seeing as those which had marked the civil
campaign now drawing to a close.

That was why a famished, starving mob remembered Salaveira. They would
have stoned a duke or burned a bishop with very little compunction, but
Stobalt ranked among their immortals. They did not even seem to question
the mystery of Salt's identity. As the flames began to lap out of the
lower windows of Trafalgar Chambers, and it became evident that their
work there was done, a stalwart bodyguard ranged themselves about his
person and headed the procession. Hurriedly committing Irene to the
loyal sailor's charge, Stobalt resigned himself good-humouredly to his
position until he could seize an opportunity discreetly to withdraw.

Not without some form of orderliness the great concourse marched into
the broader streets. Stobalt had no idea of their destination; possibly
there was no preconcerted plan, but--as such things happen--a single
voice raised in a pause gave the note. It did not fall on barren ground,
and the next minute the countless trampling feet moved to a brisker
step, and the new cry went rolling ominously ahead to add another terror
to the shadowy phantasmagoria of the ill-lit streets.

"To Westminster! Down with the Government! To Westminster!"




CHAPTER XXI

THE BARGAIN OF FAMINE


Sir John Hampden had not to wait until the morning to meet the
deputation of Ministerialists again. Late the same evening a few men,
arriving together, presented themselves at one of the barricades that
closed the Mayfair street, and were at once admitted. Many of the
residential west-end districts which were not thoroughfares for general
traffic were stockaded in those days and maintained their street guard.
The local officials protested, the inhabitants replied by instancing a
few of the cases where an emergency had found the authorities powerless
to extend protection, and there the matter ended. It was scarcely worth
while stamping out a spark when they stood upon a volcano.

Sir John received the members in the library--a disspirited handful of
men who had written their chapter of history and were now compelled to
pass on the book to other scribes, as every party must. Only this party
had thought that it was to be the exception.

"Events are moving faster than the clock," apologised Cecil Brown, with
a rather dreary smile. He was present as the representative of that body
in the House which was not indisposed to be courteous and even
conciliatory in attitude towards an opponent, while it yielded nothing
of its principles: a standpoint unintelligible to most of the rank and
file of the party. "Doubtless we are not unexpected, Sir John Hampden?"

"Comrade," corrected a member who was made of sterner metal. They were
there to deliver up their rifles, but this stalwart soldier of Equality
clung tenaciously to an empty cartridge case.

"I am no less desirous than yourselves of coming to a settlement,"
replied Sir John. "If there is still any matter of detail----?"

The plenipotentiaries exchanged glances of some embarrassment.

"Have you not heard?" asked Mr Soans, whose voice was the voice of the
dockyard labourers.

"I can scarcely say until I know what you refer to," was the plausible
reply. "I have found that all communication has been cut during the last
few hours." He lightly indicated the instruments against the wall.

They all looked towards Cecil Brown, the matter being rather an
unpleasant one.

"The fact is, the House has been invaded by a tumultuous rabble. They
overcame all resistance by the mere force of numbers, and"--he could not
think of a less ominous phrase at the moment--"well, simply turned us
out.... Quite Cromwellian proceedings. We left them passing very large
and comprehensive resolutions," he concluded.

"Your people!" said the uncompromising man accusingly.

"Scarcely," protested Hampden with a smile. "The ends may be the ends of
Esau, but the means----"

"Not our people; they couldn't possibly be ours to come and turn on us
like that."

"Suppose we say, without defining them further," said Sir John, "that
they were simply"--he paused for a second to burn the thrust gently home
with a little caustic silence--"simply The People."

Mr Vossit made a gesture of impatience towards his colleague.

"Whether Queen Anne, died of gout or apoplexy isn't very material now,"
he said with a touch of bitterness. "We are here to conduct the
funeral."

"I wish to meet you in every possible way I can," interposed Hampden,
"but I must point out to you that at so short a notice I am deprived of
the counsel of any of my associates. I had hoped that by the time of the
meeting to-morrow morning----"

"Is that necessary if the Memorandum is accepted by the Government?"

"Without discussion?"

Mr Vossit shrugged his shoulders. "As far as I am concerned, Sir John.
The concession of a word or two, or a phrase here and there, can make no
difference. It is our Sedan, and the heavier you make the terms, the
more there will be for us to remember it by."

"I am content," subscribed Mr Guppling. "We have been surprised and
routed, not by the legitimate tactics of party strife, but by methods
undistinguishable from those of civil war."

Hampden's glance was raised mechanically to an inscribed panel that hung
upon the wall in easy view, where it formed a curious decoration. The
ground colour was dull black, and on it in white lettering was set forth
a trenchant sentiment selected from the public utterances of every
prominent member of the Government and labelled with his name. It was a
vindication and a spur that he had kept before his eyes through the
years of ceaseless preparation, for in each extract one word was picked
out in the startling contrast of an almost blinding crimson, and that
one word was WAR. Even Sir John's enemies, those who called Salt a
machine of blood and iron, admitted him to be a kindly gentleman, and
his glance had been involuntary, for he had no desire to emphasise
defeat upon the vanquished. The thing was done, however, and following
the look every man who sat there met his own flamboyant challenge from
the past; for all, without exception, had thrown down the gauntlet once
in no uncertain form. War--but that had meant them waging war against
another when it was quite convenient for them to do so, not another
waging war against themselves out of season. War--but certainly not war
that turned them out of office, only war that turned their opponents out
of office.

The rather strained silence was broken by the sound of footsteps
approaching from the hall.

"We are still short of the Home Secretary and Comrade Tirrel," explained
Mr Chadwing to the master of the house. "We divided forces. They were
driving I understand. Perhaps----"

It was. They came in slowly, for the Home Secretary faltered in his gait
and had a hunted look, while Tirrel led him by the arm. Both carried
traces of disorder, even of conflict.

"Oh yes; they held us up," said Tirrel with a savage laugh, as his
colleagues gathered round. "He was recognised in Piccadilly by a crowd
of those ungrateful dogs from the pits. I shouted to the cabman to drive
through them at a gallop, but the cur jumped off his seat howling that
he was their friend. I was just able to get the reins; we bumped a bit,
but didn't upset, fortunately. I left the cab at the corner of the
street, here." He turned his back on the Home Secretary, who sat huddled
in a chair, and, facing the others, made a quick gesture indicating that
Mr Tubes was unwell and had better be left alone.

"I brought him here, Sir John," he said, crossing over to the baronet
and speaking in a half-whisper, "because I really did not know where
else to take him. For some reason he appears to be almost execrated just
now. His house in Kilburn will be marked and watched, I am afraid. And
in that respect I daresay we are all in the same boat."

"He appears to be ill," said Hampden, rising. "I will----"

"Please don't," interrupted Tirrel decisively. "Any kind of attention
distresses him, I find. It is a collapse. He has been shaken for some
time past, and the attack to-night was the climax. His nerve is
completely gone."

"As far as his safety is concerned," suggested the host with an
expression of compassion, "I think that we can ensure that here against
any irregular force. And certainly it would be the last place in which
they would think of looking for him. For the night, at least, you had
better leave him in our charge."

"Thank you," said Tirrel; "it is very good of you. I will. Of course,"
he added, as he turned away, "we shall have to assume his acquiescence
to any arrangement we may reach. Unofficially I can guarantee it."

They seated themselves round the large table, Sir John and his private
secretary occupying one end, the plenipotentiaries ranging around the
other three sides. As they took their places Mr Drugget and another
member were announced. They did not appear to have been expected, but
they found seats among their colleagues. The Home Secretary sat apart,
cowering in an easy-chair, and stretching out his hands timorously from
time to time to meet the radiant heat of the great oil stove.

The composition of the meeting was not quite the same as that of the
deputation which had paved the way to it earlier in the day. It was more
official, for the action of the deputation had forced the hand of the
Cabinet--to the relief of the majority of that body, it was whispered.
But there was one notable Minister absent.

"I represent the Premier," announced Mr Drugget, rising. "If his
attendance in person can be dispensed with, he begged to be excused."

"I offer no objection," replied Hampden. "If in the exceptional
circumstances the Prime Minister should desire to see me privately, I
will meet him elsewhere."

"The Premier is indisposed, I regret to say."

"In that case I would wait upon him at his own house, should he desire
it," proffered Sir John.

"I will convey to him your offer," replied Mr Drugget. "In the meantime
I am authorised to subscribe Mr Strummery's acquiescence to the terms,
subject to one modification."

"One word first, please," interposed Sir John. "I must repeat what I had
already said before you arrived. I am unable just now to consult my
colleagues, in concert with whom the Memorandum was drafted. If it is
necessary to refer back on any important detail----"

Mr Tubes half rose from his chair with a pitiable look of terror in his
eyes and gave a low cry as a turbulent murmur from some distant street
reached his ears.

"It's all right, comrade," said Cecil Brown reassuringly. "You're safe
enough here, Jim."

"Aye, aye," whispered Tubes fearfully; "but did you hear that
shout?--'To the lamp-post!' They fling it at me from every crowd. It
haunts me. That is what I--I--yes, that is what I fear."

"No good arguing," muttered Tirrel across the table. "Leave him to
himself; there's nothing else to be done just now."

"I can at least express the Premier's views" resumed Mr Drugget. "He
would prefer the Bill for Amending the Franchise to be brought forward
as a private Bill by a member of the Opposition rather than make it a
Government measure. The Government would grant special facilities, and
not oppose it. The Premier would advise a dissolution immediately the
Bill passed."

There was a knock at the library door. The secretary attended to it with
easy discretion, and for a minute was engaged in conversation with some
one beyond.

Sir John looked at Mr Drugget in some amazement, and most of the members
of his own party regarded their leader's proxy with blank surprise.

"I was hardly prepared for so fundamental an objection being raised at
this hour," said the baronet. "It amounts, of course, to bringing an
alternative proposal forward."

"The result would be the same; I submit that it is scarcely more than a
matter of detail."

"Then why press it?"

Mr Drugget's expression seemed to convey the suggestion that he had no
personal wishes at all in the matter, but felt obliged to make the best
case he could for his chief.

"The Premier not unnaturally desires that the real authors of so
retrogressive and tyrannical an Act should be saddled with the nominal
as well as the actual responsibility," he replied. "Possibly he fears
that in some remote future the circumstances will be forgotten, and his
name be handed down as that of a traitor."

The private secretary took the opportunity of the sympathetic murmur
which this attitude evoked to exchange a sentence with Sir John. Then he
turned to the door and beckoned to the man who stood outside.

"I must ask your indulgence towards a short interruption, gentlemen,"
said Hampden, as a cyclist, in grey uniform, entered and handed him a
despatch. "It is possible that some of my friends may even now be on
their way to join me."

They all regarded the messenger with a momentary curious interest; all
except two among them. Over Mr Drugget and the comrade who had arrived
with him the incident seemed to exercise an absorbing fascination. After
a single, it almost seemed a startled, glance at the soldier-cyclist,
their eyes met in a mutual impulse, and then instantly turned again to
fix on Hampden's face half-stealthily, but as tensely as though they
would tear the secret from behind his unemotional expression.

"It's all very well, Drugget--in justice," anxiously murmured Mr Vossit
across the table, "but, as things are, we've got to be quick, and accept
considerably less than justice. For Heaven's sake, don't prolong the
agony, after to-day's experience."

"If you hang on to that," warned Mr Guppling, "you will only end in
putting off till to-morrow not a whit better terms than you can make
to-night."

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait," muttered Mr Drugget impatiently, not
withdrawing his fascinated gaze.

In the silence of the room they again heard the crescive ululation of
the street, distant still, but sounding louder than before to their
strained imagination, and terrible in its suggestion of overwhelming,
unappeasable menace. Mr Tubes started uneasily in his chair.

"Will _that_ wait?" demanded Mr Guppling with some passion.

"A very little time longer; your coming here to-night has thrown us
out," pleaded Mr Drugget's companion, in a more conciliatory whisper.
"To-morrow morning, a few hours, an hour--perhaps even----"

The messenger had been dismissed without an answer. Looking up with
sudden directness, Hampden caught one man's eyes fixed on him with a
furtive intensity that betrayed his hopes and fears.

"The attack on Hanwood has completely failed," quietly announced Sir
John, holding the startled gaze relentlessly. "The guns have been
captured and brought in. The troops have been surrounded, disarmed, and
dispersed, with the exception of those of the higher rank who are
detained. There have, unfortunately, been casualties on both sides."

"I--I--I--Why do you address yourself to me, Sir John?" stammered the
disconcerted man, turning very white, and exhibiting every painful sign
of guilt and apprehension.

"Are we to understand that your property at Hanwood has been attacked by
an armed force of regulars?" asked one with sincere incredulity, as
Hampden remained silent.

"It is unhappily true."

"And defended by an evidently superior force of armed men, unlawfully
assembled there," retorted a militant comrade defiantly.

"In view of the strained position to which the circumstances must give
rise, I will take the responsibility of withdrawing the Premier's one
objection to the Memorandum as it stands," announced Mr Drugget with dry
lips.

"In that case I will ask Mr Lloyd to read the terms of the agreement
formally before we append our signatures," said Hampden, without
offering any further comment.

A printed copy of the Articles was passed to each delegate; on the table
before Sir John lay the engrossed form in duplicate. From one of these
the secretary proceeded to read the terms of the agreement, which was
frankly recognised on both sides as the death-warrant of socialistic
ascendency in England.

From the Government the League required only one thing: the immediate
passing of "A Bill to amend the Qualifications of Voters in
Parliamentary Elections," to be followed by a dissolution and its
inevitable consequence, a general election. But of the result of that
election no one need cherish any illusions, for it would be decided
according to the new qualification; and shorn of its parliamentary
phraseology, the new Act was to sweep away the existing adult suffrage,
and, broadly, substitute for it a £10 occupation qualification, with,
still worse, a plurality of voting power in multiples of £10, according
to the rateable value of the premises occupied. It was wholly immoral
according to the democratic tendency of the preceding age, but it was
wholly necessary according to the situation which had resulted from it.

A genial Autocrat, Professor, and Poet has set forth in one of his
works, for the sake of the warning it conveys, the story of a little boy
who, on coming into the possession of a nice silver watch, and examining
it closely, discovered among the works "a confounded little _hair_
entangled round the balance-wheel." Of course his first care was to
remove this palpable obstruction, with the result that the watch
accomplished the work of twenty-four hours in an insignificant fraction
of a second, and then refused to have anything more to do with practical
chronometry. On coming into possession of their new toy the Socialists
had discovered many "confounded little _hairs_" wrapped away among the
works of that elaborate piece of machinery, the English Constitution,
all obviously impeding its free working. Recklessly, even gaily, they
had pulled them out one after another, cut them across the middle and
left pieces hanging if they could not find the ends, dragged out lengths
anyhow. For a time the effect had been dazzlingly pyro-technical when
seen from below. The Constitution had gone very, very, very fast; it had
covered centuries in a few years; and as it went it got faster. But
unfortunately it had stopped suddenly. And every one saw that while it
remained in the hands of its nominal masters it would never go again.

Had the times been less critical some other means of effecting the same
end might have been found. But although it was scarcely more than
whispered yet, for four hours England had been involved in actual,
deadly, civil war; and water once spilled is hard to gather up. Under
ordinary circumstances the expedient of disenfranchising a party would
have proved unpopular even with the bitterest among that party's
enemies. As it was, it was simply accepted as the necessary
counterstroke to their own policy of aggression.

"If the 'most business-like Government of modern times' can instance a
single business where eleven shareholders to the amount of a sovereign
apiece can come in and outvote ten shareholders who have each a stake of
a thousand pounds in the concern, and then proceed to wreck it," was a
remark typical of the view people took, "then--why, then the record of
the Government will lose its distinction as an absolutely unique blend
of fatuous imbecility and ramping injustice, that's all."

So there was to be a general election very soon in which the issue would
lie between the League party and the shattered, shipwrecked
Administration that had no leaders, no coherence, and scarcely a name to
rally to. It was estimated that Labour of one complexion or another
might hold between thirty and forty seats, if the working classes cared
to support representatives after the Payment of Members Act had been
repealed. It was computed that in more than four hundred constituencies
League candidates would be returned unopposed. There could be no denying
that our countrymen of 1918 (_circa_) lived through an interesting
period of their country's history. The League party would go to the poll
with no pledges, and their policy for the present was summed up in the
single phrase, "As in 1905." It was to be the cleanest of slates.

"How soon can the Bill become law under the most expeditious handling?"
Hampden had asked of those who formed the earlier deputation, and the
answer had been, "Three days!" Solely from the "business" point of view
it was magnificent, and it was certainly convenient as matters stood. In
three more days a general election could be in full swing, waged, in the
emergency, on the existing register supplemented by the books of the
local authorities and the voters' receipts for rates or taxes. In a
single day it could be over. Within a week England would have
experienced a change in her affairs as far-reaching as the Conquest or
the Restoration.

Mr Lloyd, to return to Sir John Hampden's library, read the first
article to the breathless assembly. It had been tacitly agreed that the
time had come when the conditions must be accepted without discussion;
but when the fateful clause was finished a deep groan, not in empty
hostile demonstration, but irresistibly torn from the unfeigned depths
of their emotion, escaped many of the Ministers. Boabdil el Chico's
sigh, when he reached the point where the towers and minarets of Granada
were lost to him for ever, was not more sincere or heart-racked. Even
Sir John could not have claimed that he felt unmoved.

The secretary read on. The League entered into certain undertakings. It
guaranteed that the normal conditions of the home coal trade should be
restored, and the men called back to the pits by an immediate order for
ten million tons. Temporary relief work of various kinds would be
instituted at once to meet the distress. The Unemployed Grant would be
reopened for nine weeks to carry over the winter; for three weeks fully,
for three weeks at the rate of two-thirds, and for the last period
reduced to one-third. The colliers in London would be carried back to
their own districts as fast as the railways could get out the trains.

There were many other points of detail, and they all had a common
aim--the obliteration of the immediate past and the restoration of that
public confidence which in a country possessing natural resources is the
foundation stone of national prosperity. Already there were facts for
the present and portents for the future. Men of influence and position,
who had been driven out of England by the terrible atmosphere of
political squalor cast over an Empire by a Government that had learned
to think municipally, were even now beginning to return; and that most
responsive seismograph which faithfully reflected every change in the
world's condition for good or ill predicted better times. In other
words, consols had risen in three months from 54-1/2 to 68 and the bulk
of the buying was said to be for investment.

"If it is not trenching on the forbidden ground, I should like to ask
for an assurance on one point," said a member with a dash of acrimony.
The secretary had finished his task, and then for perhaps ten seconds
they had sat in silence, speculating half unconsciously upon the future,
as each dimly saw it, that lay beyond the momentous step they were about
to take. "I refer to the question of coal export. It is, of course, a
more important outlet than the domestic home consumption. Is the League
in a position to guarantee that the taxation will be rescinded without
delay?"

"I think it would be a very unwarrantable presumption for us to assume
that any one outside the governments of the countries interested
possesses that influence, and that it would be a very undesirable, a
very undiplomatic, proceeding to hint at the possibility of any such
concession in the document I have before me," replied Sir John suavely.
"Beyond that, I would add that it will be manifestly to the interest of
the next government to restore the bulk of foreign trade to a normal
level; and that should the League party find itself in office, it will
certainly make representations through the usual channels."

"Quite like old times," said Mr Soans dryly. "I suppose that we shall
have to be content with that. Let us hope that it will prove a true
saying that those who hide can find."

He picked up a pen as he finished speaking, signed the paper that had
been passed to him first by reason of his position at the table, and
thrust it vehemently from him to his neighbour. Mr Chadwing held up his
pen to the light to make sure that it contained no obstruction on so
important an occasion, signed his name with clerkly precision, and then
carefully wiped his pen on the lining of his coat. Cecil Brown looked
down with the faint smile that covered his saddest moments as he added
the slender strokes of his signature, and Tirrel dashed off the
ink-laden characters of his with tightened lips and a sombre frown.
Consciously or unconsciously every man betrayed some touch of character
in that act. Mr Vossit made a wry grimace as he passed the paper on; and
Mr Guppling, with an eye on a possible line in Fame's calendar, snapped
his traitorous pen in two and cast the pieces dramatically to the
ground.

When the last signature had been written, some of the members stood up
to take their leave at once, but Hampden and Tirrel made a simultaneous
motion to detain them. The master of the house gave way to his guest.

"I am not up to cry over spilled milk," said Tirrel with his customary
bluntness. "What is done, is done. We shall carry out the terms, Sir
John Hampden, and you and your party will be in office in a week. But
you are not merely taking over the administration of a constitution: you
are taking over a defeated country. I ask you, as the head of your party
and the future Premier, to do one thing, and I ask it entirely on my own
initiative, and without the suggestion or even the knowledge of my
friends or colleagues. Let your first act be to publish a general
amnesty. It does not touch me.... But there have been things on both
sides. You may perhaps know my views; I would have crushed your League
by strong means when it was possible if I had had my way. None the less,
there is not the most shadowy charge that could hang over me to-day, and
for that reason it is permissible for me to put in this petition. The
nation is shattered, torn, helpless. Do not look too closely into the
past ... pacify."

"The question has not arisen between my associates and myself, but I do
not imagine that we should hold conflicting views, and I may say that
for my part I enter cordially into the spirit of the suggestion,"
replied Hampden frankly. "Anything irregular that could come within the
meaning of political action in its widest sense I should be favourable
towards making the object of a general pardon.... While we are together,
I will go a step further, and on this point I have the expressed
agreement of my friends. You, sir, have assumed without any reserve that
our party will be returned to office. I accept that assumption. You have
also compared our work to the pacification of a conquered nation. That
also may be largely admitted. We shall be less a political party
returned to power by the even chances of a keenly-fought election, and
checked by an alert opposition, than a social autocracy imposing our
wishes--as we believe for the public good--on the country. For twenty
years, as I forecast the future, there will be no effective opposition.
Yet a great deal of our work will have reference to the class whom the
opposition would represent, the class upon whose wise and statesmanlike
pacification the tranquillity, and largely the prosperity, of the
country, will depend."

Some few began to catch the drift of Hampden's meaning, and those who
did all glanced instinctively towards Cecil Brown.

"You have used, and I have accepted, the comparison of a conquered
nation," continued Sir John. "When a country has been forcibly occupied
the work of pacification is one of the first taken in hand by a prudent
conqueror. There is usually a Board or Committee of Conciliation, and in
that body are to be found some of the foremost of those who resisted
invasion while resistance seemed availing.... It would be analogous to
that, in my opinion, if a supporter of the present Government was
offered and accepted a position in the next. There would be no
suggestion--there would be no possibility--of his being in accord with
the Cabinet in its general policy. He would be there as an expert to
render service to both parties in the work of healing the scars of
conflict. If the proposal appears to be exceptional and the position
untenable at first sight, it is only because the prosaic parliamentary
machinery of normal times has by a miracle been preserved into times
that are abnormal."

There was an infection of low laughter, amused, sardonic, some
good-natured and a little ill-natured, and a few cries of "Cecil Brown!"
in a subdued key.

"The moment seemed a favourable one for laying the proposal before the
members of the Government," went on Hampden, unmoved, "though, of
course, I do not expect an answer now. On the assumption that we are
returned to power, it is our intention to create a new department to
exist as long as the conditions require it, and certainly as long as the
next Parliament. Its work will be largely conciliation, and it will deal
with the disorganisation of labour. In the same confidential spirit with
which you have spoken of the future without reserve, I may say that
should I be called upon to form a Ministry, I shall--and I have the
definite acquiescence of my colleagues--offer the Presidentship of the
Board to Mr Cecil Brown ... the office of Parliamentary Secretary to Mr
Tirrel."

If Hampden had wished to surprise, he certainly succeeded. The open
laugh that greeted the first name was cut off as suddenly and completely
as the light is cut off when the gas-tap is turned, by the gasp that the
second name evoked. To many among them the offer had been the merest
party move; Cecil Brown's name a foregone conclusion. The addition of
Tirrel, whose rather brilliant qualities and quite fantastic sense of
honour they were prone to lose sight of behind his vehement
battle-front, was stupefying.

It was Tirrel who was the first to break the silence of astonishment on
this occasion, not even waiting, with characteristic impetuousness, for
his chief-designate to offer an opinion.

"You say that you do not want an answer now, Sir John, but you may have
it, as far as I am concerned," he cried, with the defiant air that
marked his controversial passages. "From any other man of your party the
proposal would have been an insult; from you it is an amiable mistake.
_You_ do not think that you can buy us with the bribe of office, but you
think that there is no further party work for us to do: that Socialism
in England to-day is dead. I tell you, Sir John Hampden, with the
absolute conviction of an inspired truth, that it will triumph yet. You
will not see it; I may not see it, but it is more likely that the hand
of Time itself should fail than that the ideals to which we cling should
cease to draw men on. We, who are the earliest pioneers of that
untrodden path, have made many mistakes; we are paying for them now; but
we have learned. Some of our mistakes have brought want and suffering to
thousands of your class, but for hundreds of years your mistakes have
been bringing starvation and misery to millions of our class. From your
presence we go down again into the weary years of bondage, to work
silently and unmarked among those depths of human misery from which our
charter springs. I warn you, Sir John Hampden--for I know that the
warning will be dead and forgotten before the year is out--that our
reign will come again; and when the star of a new and purified Socialism
arises once more on a prepared and receptive world the very forces of
nature would not be strong enough to arrest its triumphant course."

"Hear! hear!" said Mr Vossit perfunctorily, as he looked round
solicitously for his hat. "Well, I suppose we may as well be going."

Cecil Brown recalled his wistful smile from the contemplation of a
future chequered with many scenes of light and shade.

"I thank you, Sir John," he replied with a look of friendly
understanding, "but I also must go down with my own party."

"I hope that the decision in neither case will be irrevocable," said
Hampden with regret, but as he spoke he knew that the hope was vain.

They had already begun to file out of the room, with a touch here and
there of that air of constraint that the party had never been quite able
to shake off on ceremonial occasions. They left Mr Tubes cowering before
the stove, and raising his head nervously from time to time to listen to
the noises of the street.

Mr Guppling, determined that his claims should not escape the eye of
Fame, paused at the door.

"When we leave this room, John Hampden," he proclaimed in a loud and
impressive voice, and throwing out his hand with an appropriate gesture,
"we leave Liberty behind us, bound, gagged, and helpless, on the floor!"

"Very true, Mr Guppling," replied Sir John good-humouredly. "We will
devote our first efforts to releasing her."

Mr Guppling smiled a bitter, cutting smile, and left the shaft to
rankle. It was not until he was out in the street that a sense of the
possible ambiguity of his unfortunate remark overwhelmed him with
disgust.




CHAPTER XXII

"POOR ENGLAND."


With the account of the signing of the dissolution terms, and a brief
reference to the sweeping victory of the League party--already
foreshadowed, indeed, to the point of the inevitable--the unknown
chronicler, whose version of the Social War this narrative has followed,
brings his annals to a close. That war being finished, and by the
repudiation of their Socialistic mentors on the part of a large section
of the working classes, finished by more than a mere paper treaty, the
worthy scribe announces with praiseworthy restraint that there is no
more to be said.

"These men," he declares, in the quaint and archaic language of the
past,--and he might surely have added "these women" also--"came not
reluctantly, but in no wise ambitiously, out of the business of their
own private lives to serve their country as they deemed; and that being
accomplished to a successful end, would have returned, nothing loth, to
more obscure affairs, having sought no personal gain beyond that which
grew from public security, an equitable burden of citizenship, and a
recovered pride among the nations. Albeit some must needs remain to
carry on the work."

Even the not unimportant detail of who remained to carry on the work,
and in what capacities, is not recorded, but the distribution of rewards
and penalties, on the lines of strict poetic justice, may be safely left
to the individual reader's sympathies, with the definite assurance that
everything happened exactly as he would have it. At the length of three
times as much space as would have sufficed to dispose of these points
once and for all, this superexact historian goes on to set out his
reasons for not doing so. He claims, in short, that his object was to
portray the course of the social war, not to recount the adventures of
mere individuals; and with the suggestion of a wink between his pen and
paper that may raise a doubt whether he, on his side, might not be
endowed with the power of casting a critical eye upon other periods than
his own, he indulges in a little pleasantry at the expense of writers
who, under the pretext of developing their hero's character, begin with
his parent's childhood, and continue to the time of his grandchildren's
youth. For himself, he asserts that nothing apart from the course of the
social war, its rise and progress, has been allowed to intrude, and that
ended, and their work accomplished, its champions are rather heroically
treated, very much as the Arabian magician's army was disposed of until
it was required again, and to all intents and purposes turned into stone
just where they stood.

But from other sources it is possible to glean a little here and there
of the course of subsequent events. To this patchwork record the
_Minneapolis Journal_ contributes a cartoon laden with the American
satirist's invariable wealth of detail.

A very emaciated John Bull, stretched on his bed, is just struggling
back to consciousness and life. On a table by his side stands a bottle
labelled "Hampden's U. L. Mixture," to which he owes recovery. On the
walls one sees various maps which depict a remarkably Little England
indeed. Some sagacious economist, in search of a strip of canvas with
which to hold together a broken model of a black man, has torn off the
greater part of South Africa for the purpose. Over India a spider has
been left to spin a web so that scarcely any of the Empire is now to be
seen. Upper Egypt is lost behind a squab of ink which an irresponsible
urchin has mischievously taken the opportunity to fling. Every colony
and possession shows signs of some ill-usage.

"Say, John," "Uncle Sam," who has looked in, is represented as saying,
"you've had a bad touch of the 'sleeping sickness.' You'd better take
things easy for a spell to recuperate. I'll keep an eye on your house
while you go to the seashore."

That was to be England's proud destiny for the next few years--to take
things easy and recuperate! There is nothing else for the pale and
shaken convalescent to do; but the man who has delighted in his strength
feels his heart and soul rebel against the necessity. Fortunate for
England that she had good friends in that direful hour. The United
States, sinking those small rivalries over which cousins may strive even
noisily at times in amiable contention, stretched a hand across the
waters and astonished Europe by the message, "Who strikes England
wantonly, strikes me": a sentiment driven home by the diplomatic hint
that for the time being the Monroe Doctrine was suspended west of Suez.

France--France who had been so chivalrously true to her own ally in that
stricken giant's day of incredible humiliation--looked across The Sleeve
with troubled, anxious eyes, and whispered words of sympathy and hope.
Gently, very tactfully, she offered friendship with both hands, without
a tinge of the patronage or protection that she could extend; and by the
living example of her own tempestuous past and gallant recovery from
every blow, pointed the way to power and self-respect.

Japan, whose treaty had been thrown unceremoniously back to her many
years before, now drew near again with the cheerful smile that is so
mild in peace, so terrible in war. Prefacing that her own enviable
position was entirely due to the enlightened virtues of her emperor, she
now proposed another compact on broad and generous lines, by which
England--a "high contracting Power," as she was still magnanimously
described--was spared the most fruitful cause for anxiety in the East.

"You didn't mind allying with us when you were at the head of the
nations," said Japan. "We come to you--now. Besides, all very good
business for us in the end. You build up again all right, no time."

Japan's authority to speak on the subject of "building up" was not to be
disputed. The nations had forgotten the time, scarcely a quarter of a
century before, when they had been amused by "Little Japan's"
progressive ambitions. And when Japan had taken over the "awakening"
arrangements of a sister-nation on terms that gave her fifty million
potential warriors to draw upon and train (warriors whom one of
England's most revered generals had characterised as "Easily led; easily
fed; fearless of death"), non-amusement in some quarters gave way to
positive trepidation.

The sympathetic nations spoke together, and agreed that something must
be done to give "Poor England" another chance; as, in the world of
commerce, friendly rivals will often gather round the man who has fallen
on evil days to set him on his feet again.

So England was to have a fair field and liberty to work out her own
salvation. But she was not to wake up and find that it had all been a
hideous dream. Egypt had been put back to the time of the Khalifa. India
had lost sixty years of pacification and progress. Ireland was a
republic, at least in name, and depending largely on Commemoration
Issues of postage stamps for a revenue. South Africa was for the South
Africans. There were many other interesting items, but these were, as it
might be expressed to a nation of shopkeepers, the leading lines.

If the worst abroad was bad enough, there was one encouraging feature at
home. With the election of the new government industries began to
revive, trade to improve, the money market to throw off its depression,
and the natural demand for labour to increase: not gradually, but
instantly, phenomenally. It was as though a dam across some great river
had been removed, and with the impetus every sluggish little tributary
was quickened and drawn on in new and sparkling animation. It was not
necessary to argue upon it from a party point of view; it was a concrete
fact that every one admitted. There was only one explanation, and it met
the eye at every turn. Capital reappeared, and money began to circulate
freely again. Why? There was security.

It was not the Millennium; it was the year 19--, and a "capitalistic"
government was in office; but the "masses" discovered that they were
certainly not worse off than before. Working men now wore, it is true, a
little less of the air of being so many presidents of South American
republics when they walked about the streets; but that style had never
really suited them, and they soon got out of it. The men who had come
into power were not of the class who oppress. The strife of the past was
being forgotten; its lessons were remembered. What was good and
practical of Socialistic legislation was retained. So it came about that
the vanquished gained more by defeat than they would have done by
victory.

It was undeniable that, in common with mankind at large, they still from
time to time experienced pain, sickness, disappointment, hardship, and
general adversity. Those who were employed by gentlemen were treated as
gentlemen treat their work-people; those who were so unfortunate as to
be in the service of employers who had no claim to that title continued
to be treated as cads and despots treat their employés. Those among them
who were gentlemen themselves extended a courteous spirit towards their
masters, and those among them who were the reverse continued to act
towards employers and the world around as churls and blusterers act, and
so the compensating balance of nature was more or less harmoniously
preserved.

And what of the future? Will the nation that was so sharply taught dread
the fire like the burned child, or return to the flame as the scorched
moth does? Alas, the memory of a people is short, even as the wisdom of
a proverb is conflictingly two-edged.

Or, if the warning fades and the necessity grows large again, will there
be found another Stobalt to respond to the call? "For those whom Heaven
afflicts there is a chance," contributes the Sage of another land; "but
they who persistently work out their own undoing are indeed hopeless."

Or may it be that the faith of Tirrel will be justified, and that in the
process of time there will emerge from man's ceaseless groping after
perfection a new wisdom, under whose yet undreamt-of scheme and
dispensation all men will be content and reconciled?

The philosopher shakes his head weightily and remains silent--thereby
adding to his reputation. The prophets prophesy; the old men dream
dreams and the young men see visions, and the dispassionate speculate.
On all sides there is a multitude of the counsel in which, as we must
believe, lies wisdom.

It is an interesting situation, and as it can only be definitely settled
beyond the dim vista of future centuries, the pity is that we shall
never know.


THE END.




NELSON LIBRARY

_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME._


            1. The Marriage of William Ashe.
            2. The Intrusions of Peggy.
            3. The Fortune of Christina M'Nab.
            4. The Battle of the Strong.
            5. Robert Elsmere.
            6. No. 5 John Street.
            7. Quisanté.
            8. Incomparable Bellairs.
            9. History of David Grieve.
            10. The King's Mirror.
            11. John Charity.
            12. Clementina.
            13. If Youth but Knew.
            14. The American Prisoner.
            15. His Grace.
            16. The Hosts of the Lord.
            17. The God in the Car.
            18. The Lady of the Barge.
            19. The Odd Women.
            20. Matthew Austin.
            21. The Translation of a Savage.
            22. The Octopus.
            23. White Fang.
            24. The Princess Passes.
            25. Sir John Constantine.
            26. The Man from America.
            27. A Lame Dog's Diary.
            28. The Recipe for Diamonds.
            29. Woodside Farm.
            30. Monsieur Beaucaire, and The Beautiful Lady.
            31. The Pit.
            32. An Adventurer of the North.
            33. The Wages of Sin.
            34. Lady Audley's Secret.
            35. Eight Days.
            36. Owd Bob.
            37. The Duenna of a Genius.
            38. His Honor and a Lady.
            39. Marcella.
            40. Selah Harrison.
            41. The House with the Green Shutters.
            42. Mrs Galer's Business.
            43. Old Gorgon Graham.
            44. Major Vigoureux.
            45. The Gateless Barrier.
            46. Kipps.
            47. Moonfleet.
            48. Springtime.
            49. French Nan.
            50. The Food of the Gods.
            51. Raffles.
            52. Cynthia's Way.
            53. Clarissa Furiosa.
            54. Love and Mr Lewisham.
            55. The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square.
            56. Thompson's Progress.
            57. The Primrose Path.
            58. Lady Rose's Daughter.
            59. Romance.
            60. The War of the Carolinas.
            61. Katharine Frensham.
            62. The Professor on the Case.
            63. Love and the Soul-Hunters.





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