Chapter X

William Bailey was at this time nearer fifty than forty years of age. Those who saw him for the first time would have imagined him to be an exceptionally vigorous and well-preserved man of maturer years, for while his eyes were energetic and lively the skin of his face had been hardened and lined by travel in very different climates. Moreover, his hair, though not scanty, had turned that peculiar steely grey which men so often preserve well on into old age.

His stature, which was considerable, he owed to a pair of very long thin legs, which looked the longer from the invariably ill-fitting loose trousers that he wore; his boots were of enormous size. These, again, were exaggerated to the ordinary beholder from his habit of purchasing pairs far too large for him; and these, I regret to say, were ready made, with square toes, very flat heels, and those offensive deep creases across the instep which betray the slovenly man.

His face, which was long and good-humoured, was framed by two vast whiskers which seemed to belong to an earlier age. And in general his appearance, while certainly denoting ability, might have led one to expect a sort of reticent good-nature. The impression was heightened by his habit of leaning good-humouredly forward with his hands in his pockets, and a genial half-smile, to listen attentively to whatever words were addressed to him, especially if those words proceeded from an unknown man or from one who seemed proud of his acquaintance.

There were none that met him casually in the world, but expected from him the most kindly judgments and the most reasonable if independent views. They were invariably deceived.

The man had acquired peculiarities of outlook which in any society less tolerant than our own would have doomed him to isolation. As it was, the most part of his equals treated him as a joke they could afford to laugh at; but some few out of the many to whom he had given legitimate offence found themselves unable to forgive, and these were filled in his presence with an ill ease which he, of all men, had the least right to impose: among these--I bitterly regret--was even to be found that gracious, kind old man, the Duke of Battersea, who in all his long and useful life had hardly spoken harshly of a single foe.

In politics none could say whether William Bailey were National or Opposition; his religion it was impossible to discover; even those philosophies which attract in their turn most men of intelligence appeared to leave him indifferent; he was ignorant of Hegel of Nietzsche and of Oppenheim, but his opinions were none the less expressed with a violence and a tenacity which sometimes produced the illusion of a general system, though a collection of his real or affected prejudices would have proved many of them contradictory one of the other. He would rail, for instance, against the practice of drinking champagne with meat, and he would denounce it with the same fervour as he would use against things so remote from him as the Senate of Finland or the Republican party in the United States.

His dislike, or his assumed dislike, of certain English writers, notably the poet Hibbles, on which he might at least be allowed an opinion or even a prejudice (for he was admittedly a good judge of verse), was not so strong as his detestation of Tolstoi (not one word of whose works he could read in the original or had even read in translations!), or his contempt for Harnack, the very A B C of whose science he ignored. He denied with equal decision the theory of natural selection and the hypothesis of a recent glacial epoch, and had more than once committed himself to print in points of etymology on which he knew nothing, and his excursion into which had only rendered him ridiculous.

It would be too easy to explain the man as a mere mass of opposition, though it is certain that the greater part of his enthusiasms, if enthusiasms they were, were aroused by the spectacle of some universally received opinion. It would be truer to say that he was ever ready to use his quick and not untrained intelligence in defence of chance likes and dislikes which, when he had so defended them for a sufficient time, took on in his mind a curious and unnatural hardness that sometimes approached and sometimes passed the line of complete conviction. On some points, indeed, he had been compelled to retreat. His theory that the English Press was not the property of its ostensible owners but was subsidised by a mysterious gang of foreign financiers, he discreetly dropped on finding it untenable, though for years he had startled his new acquaintances and wearied his relatives by various aspects of that particular piece of nonsense; and his repeated assertion that Japanese torpedo boats had really been present on the Dogger Bank during the deplorable incident of 1904, he had been singularly silent about after the delivery of the Paris award: but the most part of his follies survived.

He did at least pick up a new mania from time to time, which relieved the tedium of his repeated dogmatisings; but his friends looked forward with horror to that inevitable phase which he must meet with advancing years, when the elasticity of his fanaticism should fail him, and they should be compelled to listen to an unvarying tale throughout his old age.

He was, as I have said, not fifty, but that phase seemed already arrived in one particular. He had gone mad upon the Hebrew race.

He saw Jews everywhere: he not only saw them everywhere, but he saw them all in conspiracy. He would not perhaps have told you that the conspiracy was conscious, but its effects he would have discovered all the same.

According to him Lombroso was a Jew, Mr. Roosevelt's friends and supporters the Belmonts were Jews, half the moneyed backers of Roosevelt were Jews, the famous critic Brandes was a Jew, Zola was a Jew, Nordau was a Jew, Witte was a Jew--or in some mysterious way connected with Jews; Naquet was a Jew; the great and suffering Hertz was a Jew. All actors and actresses _en bloc_, and all the foreign correspondents he could lay hands on were Jews; the late and highly respected M. de Blowitz (a fervent Catholic!) he nicknamed "Opper," and having found that a member of the very excellent West Country family of Wilbraham had ardently supported the Russian revolutionists in the columns of the _Times_, he must say, forsooth, that a certain "Brahms" (who rapidly developed into "Abrahams") was the inspirer of the premier journal; and this mythical character so wrought upon his imagination that in a little while the manager of the paper itself, and heaven knows who else, were attached to the Synagogue.

In his eyes the governors of colonies, the wives of Viceroys, the holders of Egyptian bonds, the mortgagees of Irish lands, half the Russian patriots, and all the brave spokesmen of Hungary, were swept into the universal net of his mania.

It got worse with every passing year: there were Jews at Oxford, and at Cambridge, and at Trinity College, Dublin; the Jews overran India; they controlled the _Neue Frie Presse_ of Vienna, the _Tribuna_ of Rome, the _Matin_ of Paris, and for all I know, the _Freeman's Journal_ in Dublin.

The disease advanced with his advancing age; soon all the great family of Arnold were Jews; half the English aristocracy had Jewish blood; for a little he would have accused the Pope of Rome or the Royal Family itself; and I need hardly say that every widespread influence, from Freemasonry to the international finance of Europe, was Israelite in his eyes; while our Colonial policy, and especially the gigantic and successful struggle in South Africa, he twisted into a sort of petty huckstering, dependent upon Petticoat Lane.

Mary Smith loved her brother. She did all she could to dispel these mists and to bring out that decent side of him which had made him years ago as popular a young man as any in London--but he was past praying for. A private income, large, like all the Bailey incomes, of over £4000 a year, permitted him a dangerous independence; and in his freehold house in Bruton Street he lived his own life altogether, attached to his servants, whom he never changed, subscribing to absurd foreign papers that dripped with anti-Semitic virus, and depending upon the perpetual attention of his manservant Zachary, an honest fellow enough, but one who, from perpetual association with his master, seemed to have imbibed something of that master's eccentricities. _He_ was as dandy as the gentleman who employed him was slovenly, and all Bruton Street noted with a smile the extraordinary figure the fellow made when he went out on his rare holidays, in a tight frock-coat, a hat like polished ebony, and gloves that were always new.

To individuals, as is so often the case with men of this temper and of good birth, William Bailey was often kind and sometimes positively generous. The personal enmities he bore to men whom he had actually known, were very rare, and such as they were they would take the form rather of abstaining from their society than of intriguing against them. Indeed, characters of this sort are not usually possessed of that tenacity in action which intrigue requires. His name was mentioned with no woman's; he had never married. In early youth he was supposed to have felt some attraction to a lady considerably older than himself, who subsequently became the wife of another yet older than herself, an Anglo-Indian official of high standing. But the passion could hardly have been deep or lasting, for he preserved no relic of her in any form; he had no picture of her, he never mentioned her name, and when she returned to England from time to time, he made no effort to renew her acquaintance and seemed even to avoid her presence.

Some have attempted to attribute his violent eccentricities of judgment to disappointed ambition. His career would hardly lead one to such a conclusion. As a boy he determined upon the Army, and had greatly annoyed his family, who would have preferred the Guards, by joining the Engineers. He had not been four years a sapper when he as suddenly abandoned that honourable and useful corps, and compelled his father to use influence for his appointment as an _attaché_--of all places in the world--to Pekin. Transferred from that distant capital to Paris, he begged for Constantinople, was granted it, and within two years abandoned the career of diplomacy as light-heartedly as he had abandoned that of arms. His father's death at this moment added to his already sufficient private means, and it was thought by such relatives as still took some interest in his talents that commercial activity would bring him into harness. A stall was purchased for him at Lloyds, and for three months he appeared to devote himself steadily to speculation. But the wisest of his relatives, especially his Aunt Winifred, still had their misgivings; they were amply justified.

In the election of 1892 which shortly followed his introduction to the City, he was asked by the family to make a third candidate in East Rutland in order to split, what was then called, the 'Liberal' vote against his brother James, who had presented himself in what was then called the 'Conservative' interest. William Bailey, naturally good-natured and thinking to enjoy the mild excitement of a short campaign, was delighted to present himself as an Independent Liberal, and until within a few days of the poll, conducted himself as the situation required, taking care to draw upon himself such votes--and no more--as might secure his brother's election. Unhappily the twisted spirit of the man got the better of him in the last week before the poll, and he fell into a deplorable breach of good taste and family feeling; he suddenly began deliberately to attract the attention and win the support of every sort of elector. To his own considerable surprise (but it must be admitted to his secret gratification) he was returned--with what consequent and final effect upon his family relations need not be told!

During the short life of that parliament he made himself conspicuous by abstaining from the narrow and perilous divisions to which his party was subjected, by asking the most offensive personal questions of responsible Ministers, by shouting interjections which repeatedly called upon him the severe reprimand of the highly distinguished man who then occupied the Chair, and by moving, when the luck of the ballot fell his way, a motion so offensive to every loyal and generous feeling, that even the Opposition found themselves compelled to support the Government in an early adjournment to prevent its discussion.

In the early summer of 1895 he appeared to suffer a sudden conversion, spoke frequently in the most decent and weighty of parliamentary manners, was present at every division, supported his colleagues in the country and then--utterly without warning--betrayed one of the safest seats in England by refusing at the General Election to present himself again as a candidate.

A man who acts thus in our public life bars every serious career against himself. Whether Mr. Bailey had foreseen this or no, he was at any rate content henceforward to live as a private gentleman in his little house in Bruton Street. But his restless temper still led him from one set to another, mingling with every one and seen everywhere. He wrote, he occasionally spoke, and above all it was his delight, by insinuation or by direct disclosure, to embarrass and expose his fellow-beings; a man dangerous in the extreme, and, I repeat, one whom no society less tolerant than ours would have endured for a year.

Such was the rock on which the proud ship of Mr. Clutterbuck's good fortune struck.

In a mood less irritable and less inflamed he would have been safe; but doubtful, suspicious, angered as he was he fell an easy--alas! too easy a prey--to the inconsequent and empty enthusiast; and it was his ruin.

* * * * *

Mr. Clutterbuck was back at The Plâs, and the thorn in his soul struck sore. Too many words were enigmas. He suffered too much silence. He would speak.

They were together in the Art Gallery of The Plâs, Mr. Clutterbuck and Charlie, the Master and the Man.

Mr. Clutterbuck was sitting at a desk where he often did his work, under the inspiration of the big Manet which Charlie had purchased that summer of Raphael and Heinz. Fitzgerald was smoking a cigarette lazily at the end of the long room, and reading one of those articles in the _Spectator_ which have so profound an influence week by week upon the political situation.

Mr. Clutterbuck suddenly looked up from his writing, turned round to him and said:

"Mr. Fitzgerald, what is a Peabody Yid?"

Charlie Fitzgerald was so startled that he let the premier review of the Anglo-Saxon Race fall to the floor; but a glance at Mr. Clutterbuck's honest though troubled profile reassured him.

"Oh, a Yid," he said laughing, "I suppose a Yid's a name for a German, or something of that sort. Then Peabody--oh, the Peabody Buildings!"

"Is it a kind of man, then?" said Mr. Clutterbuck, solemnly.

"Why," said Fitzgerald, thoughtfully, "I suppose it is."

"I thought it was one man," said Mr. Clutterbuck, still in doubt, and in a tone which made Charlie Fitzgerald look at him again, but again feel reassured.

"It would be one fellow, of course," said Fitzgerald manfully, "if you were only speaking of one: if you said 'a Peabody Yid,' for instance.... But if you were talking of several," he mused, "why you'd say 'Peabody Yids,' I s'pose. What?"

Mr. Clutterbuck was lost in thought. "But Yid means a Jew surely, doesn't it, Mr. Fitzgerald?" said the older man. "It's a vulgar name for a Jew, isn't it?"

"Why-y, yes," answered the other with nonchalance. "A German, or a Jew, or something of that sort. Then Peabody was a sort of philanthropical fellow: architect, I think."

Mr. Clutterbuck having got so far, said: "Oh!" He said no more; he went on writing; but, like the man in the Saga, his heart was ill at ease. For the first time in many months he was as sore and as anxious as ever he had been in the old days before good fortune came to him.

The seventh day of the New Year broke brightly, but never a word from Peter Street. Mr. Clutterbuck went so far as to speak first to his secretary, before his secretary had spoken to him, and to ask him, but with all the courtesy imaginable, whether something could not be done to reassure him?

Charlie Fitzgerald more than hinted that it was all nervousness. "Things aren't done in that way," he said worriedly. "They won't give me anything in writing, of course."

Mr. Clutterbuck foresaw yet another futile verbal message and he came as near to anger as such a man can come at all. He was quite evidently put out and annoyed. He went so far as to say:

"Mr. Fitzgerald, I did hope you would have done something for me."

And Charlie, who had a fine sense which told him when he had gone too far, got up and put a gentle hand on his employer's arm.

"I'm afraid, Mr. Clutterbuck," he said in a tone of low and grave sincerity, "I'm afraid you misunderstood me. I can't do more than find out, but I'll find out in more detail, and you must give me two days."

"Of course," said Mr. Clutterbuck, "of course; you know what you have to do, Mr. Fitzgerald, I won't expect you back until I hear." But he added in a sort of appealing voice: "But do do something! You see ... it touches a man's pride, and ... to be perfectly frank ... Mrs. Clutterbuck doesn't like it. One feels odd when one's friends come."

The poor old gentleman was perfectly straightforward and it went to Charlie Fitzgerald's heart. Nevertheless a telegram which came for him a few hours later, after he had sent a telephone message to London, detained him yet another day. He fully explained to Mr. Clutterbuck the nature of the delay: the person whom he had expected to meet in town would not be back till the evening of the 9th; but Mr. Clutterbuck was only partially relieved and he announced his intention of seeing to some business in the City. The business--alas! that I should have to admit duplicity in such a character--was an interview with Mr. William Bailey.

That eccentric had at least opened him one door of sympathy, and in Mr. Clutterbuck's distress the business man's natural mistrust of uncertain and fantastic characters was forgotten.

He found Mr. Bailey occupying his worse than useless leisure in drawing up an enormous list of names, and by the side of each, in a second column, a second name was appended. He was so engrossed upon this task, in the prosecution of which he was surrounded by twenty or a dozen books of reference, collections of newspaper cuttings and memoranda of every sort, that he did not so much as look up when Zachary announced Mr. Clutterbuck, but went on murmuring:

"Beaufort---- Rosenberg, date uncertain;

"Belvedere---- Cohen, 1873;

"Belmont---- Schoenberg, 1882 (probably)...."

He had go so far when he jumped up, remembered his manners, and begged Mr. Clutterbuck to excuse his absorption.

"I was making out a list of people," he said, "a sort of dictionary."

"Are you going to publish it?" asked Mr. Clutterbuck politely, by way of beginning the conversation.

"Well," said Mr. Bailey, "I rather think I am. I dare say I should have to get it printed abroad, but that's no drawback."

"I hope it's all right," said Mr. Clutterbuck in alarm.

"Oh yes, it's quite moral," said Mr. Bailey airily. "But one often has to get things done abroad. Would you like to look at some of it?"

Mr. Clutterbuck had the courtesy to glance at the yards of double names and dates, but they meant nothing to him. He asked which column one read first, and William Bailey could only find the stupid and would-be enigmatic reply that some read it one way and some read it the other.

"Beaufort equals Rosenberg, or Rosenberg equals Beaufort: it's all the same thing. It's usually French on the left and German on the right," he said quizzically, putting his head on one side. "Middle Ages there, Modern Ages here," he went on, wagging his head symbolically right and left; and then suddenly broke out: "What've you come to see me about? Still hanging fire?"

Mr. Clutterbuck admitted that it was, and Mr. Bailey surveyed him with great kindness. It was evident the crank had no desire to eat up this particular millionaire; he would give _him_ a certificate of pure blood. He smiled at his sister's new acquaintance with deep benediction and at last he said in a knowing tone:

"Look here, Mr. Clutterbuck, I think I can only do _one_ thing for you, but it's a very useful thing. It's just a rule of thumb, and I'm afraid you'll think it something in the dark; but it's no good making any more of it just now than a plain rule of thumb. It's just a plain rule of thumb."

Mr. Clutterbuck groaned inwardly. He was in the fog again. But William Bailey went on quite composed:

"I know a good deal of things," he said, stretching his arms and yawning as he said it.

"Yes, Mr. Bailey, certainly," said Mr. Clutterbuck fervently.

"Well then, if I just tell you a simple little dodge--don't think it too simple--just take it as a tip from me, and I'll see you through. I mean what I say. I don't think I'd do it for anybody else. TRY THE ANAPOOTRA RUBY MINES."