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

by Ernest Bramah · English · Gutenberg #34522 · 567,847 chars · public domain (US)

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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

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECRET OF THE LEAGUE: THE STORY OF A SOCIAL WAR ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)









                      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--aerolanguisis 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 L5000 should be spent upon a
sanatorium at Hai Yang and L5,000,000 upon a dockyard at Pittiescottie,
or L5,000,000 upon a dockyard at Hai Yang and L5000 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 naive!" 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 "Vae 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 employes 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 aegis; 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 Hebertists. 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 Hebert 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
_bona 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 _blase_ 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 _regime_. 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 

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