Chapter XIV

Next to Mr. Clay's great shed there was an office which during the daytime served for the time checker. It was used that night as the ante-room to the meeting.

Small as it was, some twenty or thirty of the greater people of Mickleton had crowded into it, and more were coming of those who were to occupy the platform upon this decisive night. But though the hour of half-past eight approached, struck, and went past, Mr. Clay was increasingly anxious to observe that no Mr. Clutterbuck was there. With this exception, all the arrangements he was sure had been businesslike, practical, and thorough, but he could not conceal it from himself that no amount of organising power could make up for the absence of the ex-Member, whom the vast crowd had come to hear; and in his heart he laid that absence down to the irresponsibility and wayward temperament of William Bailey; he noticed also the absence of Mr. Fitzgerald.

In the great shed next door the audience were beginning to stamp their feet, and there were sounds as though their impatience might be dangerous, but Mr. Clay dared not proceed.

Just at the moment when his own patience was breaking, and when he had determined to take the platform at any risk and to carry off the meeting as best he could, Mr. William Bailey swished up in his taximeter, stepped out of it with perfect and exasperating coolness, elbowed his way through the little crowd to Mr. Clay and said:

"Well, Clay, he hasn't turned up, and I don't think he will."

Let those who have the power to construct new words discover one to describe Mr. Clay's interior emotions at the news. The words he used were these:

"I don't understand. Why not? Whose fault is that? Something must be done! You can't do that sort of thing. I do wish it hadn't happened. I'm not a rich man, but I'd give £5! We ought to wait! I really can't conceive--I do wish!" and one or two other pronouncements of the same sort which betrayed not only in their phraseology but in their tone, an alarming perturbation. His face wore a look of intense suffering, and he was in no way calmed by the intermittent roars proceeding from an audience which had now waited over half an hour, and in many of whom enthusiasm was already fermenting into anger.

The larger body of influential people who were to have supported the ex-Member for Mickleton upon the platform were to the full as anxious as their Chairman. Only Mr. Bailey appeared to regard the accident with complete calm. He answered the agitated Clay by suggesting a short excursion on to the platform and an explanation to the audience that their hero had been kidnapped.

Mr. Clay's voice rose as high as a woman's:

"_He's been kidnapped!_" he screamed.

"No, no, no," said Mr. Bailey, "I didn't say he'd been kidnapped. I said 'let's go and tell the audience he's been kidnapped!' I don't know what's happened to him, and neither do you nor anybody else. Perhaps he's dead; perhaps his motor's broken down. Perhaps he made a mistake about the hour. Perhaps he's gone mad. It's no good speculating; the point is to prevent a riot."

As he said this the noise within the hall grew so like that of a herd of wild bulls that Mr. Clay was spurred to yet further activity.

"But you can't go and tell them an untruth," he said, almost crying as he said it. "... Oh, let's go in and hold the meeting," he added, and then concluded with the apparently irrelevant words: "I'm a business man and I like business ways."

Mr. Bailey acceded as he would have acceded to any other misfortune, and the whole troop of them came tramping in, following Mr. Clay up the rough, improvised steps on to the platform.

The appearance of these notables solemnly filing in and taking their chairs soothed for a moment the angry mass below, but they looked in the procession for the dome-like forehead and the crescent moustache of a Clutterbuck: neither were there. Mr. Bailey watched the seething audience kindly through his spectacles, and marvelled at the numbers who had come.

There must have been over five thousand men present; the furthest recesses of the great shed were crowded with lads and young labourers standing upon the benches the better to follow the speeches, and packed as close as herrings, and a big mob outside was even now struggling at the doors. It was fearfully hot and close, and at the back a woman had fainted. He feared for the result.

Mr. Clay whispered to him hurriedly, but Mr. Bailey was observed to shake his head. Then Mr. Clay was seen to turn to Mr. Alderman Thorne and urge--perhaps implore--his aid: that gentleman ponderously rose to speak. His voice was deep and resonant: his gestures large. He reminded his hearers of many things: that English freedom was at stake, that their ancestors had torn up the railings in Hyde Park, and that the spirit of Cromwell still lived. Then next, as he had been hurriedly advised, he suggested that they should sing that great new song and hymn which expressed their determination and their hopes.

As yet no one moved. He recited the first verse and begged them with religious enthusiasm to sing it when he had completed the opening words:

"_The Lion, the Lion, his teeth are prepared, He has blown the loud bugle, his sabre is bared._"

Kipling's magnificent words brought a dozen to their feet; a few more were thinking of rising; a woman's voice had already begun, somewhat prematurely, "_The Lion_ ..." in a high treble, when a large, bearded man, with a fearless face and an appearance of fixed determination sprang up in the body of the meeting and said with a rich North country burr:

"Mrrr. Chairrman."

The others looked about them and sat down. The woman's treble piped away into nothing, and the North Countryman, still standing huge, said again much more loudly:

"Mr. Chairman!"

This simple remark elicited on every side large shouts of "You're quoite roight! Don't give wye," and other encouraging expressions.

"Mr. Chairman," said the stranger for the third time, when their cries subsided, "before we hear this gentleman or sing yonder, perr-haps you'll tell us why ourr Memberr is not heerr?"

Mr. Clay, who was smiling pleasantly during this episode, and moving his feet with great rapidity to and fro under the table to relieve the tension of his nerves, was about to reply when the stranger, as is the custom of plain straightforward men in the poorer ranks of society, proceeded to speak at some length in support of his query; and Mr. Clay was too much pleased with such a respite to call him to order. The honest fellow pointed out, under various heads, not without rhetorical embellishments, and with considerable movement of the right arm, what the constituency had a right to expect, what was and what was not an insult to working men, and continually measured the circumstances of the evening by the fixed standards of what one gentleman has a right to expect from another. He was repeatedly cheered, and his Christian name, embellished with endearing epithets, was called out more than once in lively accents.

When he had sat down, and before Mr. Clay, who was half on his feet, could reply, another and totally different being in quite another quarter of the room, rose to make what he affirmed was a very different protest, but one which, in the course of his making it, turned out to be nearly identical with the first which had been heard.

Then at last Mr. Clay had his chance and was free to observe, to loud cries of "Speak up!" and other less complimentary commands, that the occasion was one in which a little patience----

It was at this precise moment that an orange, fired with incredible rapidity, whizzed past the speaker's head and broke with considerable force upon the mantled shoulder of Mrs. Battersby.

"If that was one of my men----" shouted Mr. Clay--but he got no farther. To the protests which were now rising from the greater part of the audience, were added inconsequent songs raised by mere rowdies, and to add to the confusion a free fight began in the south-eastern corner of the room between two gentlemen who were of the same opinion, but of whom each had completely misunderstood the attitude of the other upon the subject to which the evening was to have been devoted. The diversion afforded by this conflict attracted a larger and a larger number of champions upon both sides, and suddenly, for no apparent reason and prompted only by that brutish instinct which will often seize upon a mob when it gets out of hand, a considerable body of the electors present broke and surged towards the Platform.

The Platform in its turn attempted to go out, but the single door of issue so considerably impeded their determined efforts that their rear, if I may so express myself, was hopelessly outflanked by their assailants long before the communications of the retreat had been properly organised. It cannot be denied that Mr. Alderman Thorne made a good fight of it for a man of his age and dimensions, and at the very moment when Mrs. Battersby, emitting piercing shrieks, was being squeezed sideways through the door, he was observed planting his fist with some vigour into the face of one of his own colleagues whom he had mistaken for the enemy.

Mr. Clay, who was quite unused to other combat than that of religious debate, improvised a defence with a chair, the legs of which he pushed back and forth rapidly with such considerable effect as to permit him to abandon his post almost the last and without a wound.

As for Mr. Bailey, he took refuge in his mere height; he retreated somewhat to the back of the platform, stood up, surveyed the swaying tangle of struggling men. He was pleased to note that the sound tradition which forbids men of inferior reach and weight to engage in coarse physical contest, spared him the active exertions necessary to so many of his friends. When he saw, or thought he saw, that the last of these as they backed towards the door were in danger of ill-treatment, he elbowed his way without much resistance in their direction, and with some good humour pushed aside the first rank of their assailants.

Meanwhile the platform was completely covered with the victorious band who had stormed it; the moment was propitious for the entry of the police, who had been telephoned for from the ante-room; ten of these stalwart fellows marched in with military precision, and by their vigorous efforts prevented any further ingress to the platform which they erroneously supposed they had come in time to defend.

Mr. Bailey, shuffling out into the street in the midst of his still heated neighbours, thought it would be entertaining to approach the main door and to hear the opinion of the electorate. He was not disappointed. When the last of them had come out and when he had managed to explain himself to the police, who were all for making him their unique prisoner, he walked slowly homewards, meditating upon the forces of the modern world and imagining doubtless a hundred hare-brained theories to account for the very simple accident which had befallen the unfortunate Clutterbuck. To his diseased mind there seemed no third explanation beyond kidnapping and blackmail; and when he considered the shortness of the time available for the discovery of Mr. Clutterbuck's foibles, his futile judgment had determined _à priori_ and without a shadow of proof, that as Mr. Clutterbuck could not have been blackmailed, Mr. Clutterbuck had been spirited away.

* * * * *

Next morning, between eleven and twelve, William Bailey lay in bed amusing himself by reading for once a whole batch of Sunday papers, for all of which he had just despatched Zachary to a large agent.

The ridiculous fellow was drawing up a memorandum, annotated with queries and remarks of the most fantastic kind, upon the names of the proprietors, the careers of the editors and the reasons each might have for giving his particular version of the affair. He noted what percentage mentioned the meeting at all; the adjectives used with regard to each: the motives ascribed to its promoters and to the indignation of the audience. The fact that the _Observer_ had no space to mention the ridiculous bagarre he put down, as my readers may well imagine, to some dark and mysterious conspiracy connected with the Hebrew people. The fact that of those who mentioned it only two alluded vaguely to the Ruby Mines and none to the Duke of Battersea he ascribed, of course, not to the very natural reason that these details could not concern the general public, but to what he was pleased to term "corruption." And altogether his disappointment at the result of the evening before, though it was a result which he had more than half expected, was amply made up for by his perverted pleasure in the contemplation of that next morning's Press.

He was in such a mood and ready for any false assumption or for any wicked slander, when a telegram was brought him. He opened it. It was from Stow-in-the-Wold; it begged Mr. Bailey to explain if possible and to make things right if it was not too late. Unfortunately within the narrow limits of such a message it was impossible to give the nature of the accident that had happened, and William Bailey's most foolish suppositions were only the more confirmed.

* * * * *

Sunday is not a good day for getting about. Mr. Bailey estimated things, and rightly judged that the motor-car, forlorn in those far Cotswold Hills, would be in no mood to return the eighty miles to town, and he saw that the trains of a Sunday were not the most convenient.

He let it stand till Monday, but that evening a figure worn with travel and shaken with unusual experience appeared before him. It was the figure of Mr. Clutterbuck.

He recited the adventure at large; he had not dared look at the Sunday papers; he had come because he could not rest until he had heard news of the dreadful affair. He was almost incoherent in his rapidity. Charlie was back at the Plâs; he had seen Mrs. Clutterbuck a moment--he had not told her. How had the constituency taken it, oh how had they taken it?

"Like a lot of animals," said William Bailey with vivid memories of the night, "and not quiet animals either; like a lot of wolves," he said.

Mr. Clutterbuck was heart-broken. "Couldn't something----" he began.

"Oh, _no_!" said William Bailey, really put out by the futility of the phrase that was coming. "No! Nothing! It's all over. When you're defeated, retreat in good order--keep your train intact. _We're_ defeated all right!" Then he had the absurd irrelevance to add: "Come into the House with me on Tuesday?"

"But I'm not a member now," gasped Mr. Clutterbuck.

"Oh, I mean under the gallery, just to look at it," said William Bailey impatiently. "I'm not a member now either, thank God! It's one of the few things they can't force on a man nowadays." Such indeed is the cynical attitude of too many men who secretly know their own failure, and whom bad tactics, or more frequently adverse majorities, have driven from the House of Commons.

Mr. Clutterbuck mournfully consented. He felt that impulse which the bereaved know so well, and which leads the widower to the freshly covered grave.

Upon Tuesday Mr. Bailey obtained for him the magnificent spectacle of the opening of Parliament. Mr. Clutterbuck heard the King's Speech, saw the peers in their robes, aye, and the peeresses too, and was glad to remember that there was one institution at least of a greater splendour than that to which he might now never attain.

As they went out, Mr. Bailey said, _à propos_ of nothing: "Sack Charlie."

"Mr. Fitzgerald.... Why on earth?" said Mr. Clutterbuck with an open mouth.

"Well, don't if you don't like: I won't interfere. Lunch to-morrow?"

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

"Right," said Mr. Bailey, "and we'll get under the gallery."

In the train Mr. Bailey's advice echoed, and echoed ill in the merchant's ears, but he had not been in the house ten minutes when he heard Charlie Fitzgerald's happy voice calling him, and begging for congratulations.

Any vague suspicions that might have passed through his mind were instantly dispelled, as he told the news--but he told it, protesting his willingness to continue his services if Mr. Clutterbuck desired to retain them. If he were free, however, Charlie had the option of a post in India.

His face was glorious with anticipation.

"In the Civil Service?" said Mr. Clutterbuck innocently.

"No," answered Charlie with nonchalance, "in some works out there, a sort of company; but I shall like it. It's mining, you know; it puts me right to the top at once."

"You'll do well," said Mr. Clutterbuck, wringing his hand with more familiarity than he had yet shown, and remembering as a business man must, the splendid organising power that lay behind the Irish ease of the Daniel-Daniels-Fitzgeralds.

Next day Mr. Bailey and Mr. Clutterbuck were watching the first working day of the Session of 1912:--what thoughts passed through the merchant's mind were much too deep for words as he noted one face after another so long familiar to him in the comic journals, and heard, under the disguise of their constituencies, names that shook the world. The wit, the intelligence, the judgment, the rhetoric overwhelmed him, and there were two tears in his eyes as he looked.

He heard one timid supplementary question on the Anapootra Ruby Mines, the thunderous cries for order that met it, and the sharp rebuke from the chair: then suddenly William Bailey moved from his side--he had seen the young Prime Minister, flushed with glory, but touched as it seemed with fatigue, go out for a moment behind the Speaker's chair. He said to Mr. Clutterbuck, "I'll be back in a moment," and he went off hurriedly through the lobbies.

William Bailey had one more task before him, and for once it was innocuous. He passed through the well-known corridors to the Prime Minister's room, opened the door without knocking, nodded to the secretary, and went in.

There are wearinesses in the common desert of political life, and an exception to its tedium, however anomalous or eccentric, will prove at some moments refreshing. The young Prime Minister was really glad to see the tall and absurd figure striding into the room, and he said: "Good old Bill!" with an accent of earlier times. Then he put his forearm squarely on the big official table, and before William Bailey could speak, with his firm, half-smiling lips he said:

"It'll save you trouble, Bill, to know that whatever it is I'm not going to do it."

"That's a pity," said William Bailey, "for the first thing I was going to ask was whether you'd come to the Follies on Friday."

The Prime Minister was hugely relieved. "There's no one else in London, Bill, who comes into this particular room to ask that particular kind of question."

"Oh?" said Mr. Bailey thoughtfully. "By the way," he went on, "there's another thing; old Clutterbuck's got to have it."

"Oh, damn and blast old Clutterbuck," said the Prime Minister, jumping up from his chair as some men do when they see a black cat. "Oh, it's perfectably intolerable! Whether it's Charlie, or whether it's Mary, or whether it's Bozzy, or whether it's you, you shoot out that word 'Clutterbuck' the moment you've got the range. The only man in London who has the decency to spare me Clutterbuck is the Peabody Yid."

"_Et pour cause_," said Mr. Bailey, who spoke French but rarely.

The Prime Minister began to smile, then checked himself.

"I don't think it can be done, Bill," he said gently. "He's out of the way, I know, but it really would be too ridiculous. What would people say?"

"They wouldn't say anything," said Mr. Bailey, "they never do say anything, and it has its advantages, you know: a friend's a friend and an enemy's an enemy; he's dreadfully sore just now. Besides which, what harm does it do a soul to give the poor chap a hoist? What harm did it do any mortal soul even when the Peabody Yid bought his peerage? And _he_ bought the right to make interminable speeches with a lisp. I remember your father about him years ago: he was a godsend to your father in the Lords; your father could do the Yid better than any one in London."

Mr. William Bailey indulged in an imitation of the lisp, and the Prime Minister, who also remembered his father's intense amusement, was melted to another smile. He half gave way.

"The trouble is to find the recognition, you know," he said, "'in recognition'--in recognition of what? It's like the despatches from South Africa when they had to stick in every man Jack of them, or never dine again. But it's easier to give a D.S.O. because the public aren't there looking on. What the devil has old Clutterbuck ever done?"

"Oh," said Mr. Bailey gaily, "he declared strongly against allowing the fall in Consols to go on, and in favour of a large gold reserve, and one or two other things." Mr. Bailey looked the Prime Minister straight in the eye, and the Prime Minister's eye fell.

He took a pen and began drawing on the blotting-paper before him. "Do suggest something," he murmured.

There was a long silence.

"In recognition of his active services and labours in connection with the Royal Caterham Valley Institute," said Mr. Bailey at last.

"What on earth's that?" asked the Prime Minister, looking up blankly.

"We--ll, it doesn't exist--yet," said William Bailey, "but it will, you know, it will."

"I don't mind," said the Prime Minister wearily, "but it can't be before Easter."

"Well, now I'll tell you," said William Bailey by way of finale; "you write me a little note so that the poor fellow can be certain of Empire Day, and you will have done a really good deed."

"I can trust you, Bill?" said the young man anxiously. (How human they are!)

"Oh yes," said Mr. Bailey, "I'll give you a hostage."

He wrote out a few words on a slip of paper, signed it, and handed it over to his relative.

The Prime Minister took it with a funny little laugh and threw it into the fire.

"Don't be a fool, Bill," he said. "Of course I can trust you."

He wrote on a sheet of notepaper:

"My dear Mr. Bailey,

"_I can well understand, but, as you will easily see, it is
impossible before Empire Day. I have, however, received commands upon
the matter with regard to that date, and I trust Mr.---- _"

"Empire Day's in the season, isn't it?" he added anxiously.

"At the beginning of the season," replied William Bailey solemnly, "just before the middle class begin marrying into the plutocracy."

"You're quite right," said the Prime Minister seriously, "only I wanted to get the date more or less right. One must have time, and there's going to be a list on Empire Day--anyhow it's after Easter"--then he went on writing.

"What's the name?" he said in the middle of his writing.

"The name," said Mr. Bailey, "was to be Percy, I think--yes, Percy."

"_Mr. Percy Clutterbuck_," the Prime Minister went on writing, "_will accept your assurance and will use every discretion in the matter_." He wrote a few more lines and signed. "There," he said, handing it over.

"You're a very good fellow," said William Bailey, taking the note and putting it carefully into a monstrous old-fashioned wallet. "I'll send it back to you within a week--not necessarily for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith."

As he said this the Premier's secretary came in with the unpleasing news that the deputation had come to time.

William Bailey hurriedly went out by the little private side door which he knew so well.

* * * * *

It was not until Mr. Bailey had successfully persuaded Mrs. Clutterbuck herself of the interest taken in the Highest Quarters in the Royal Caterham Valley Institute that he dared show that little note to her husband; but she--indomitable soul!--willingly accepted the opportunity at which he hinted. The bazaar was held, subscriptions gathered, Patronage of the most conspicuous sort received, the first stone of the Institute was laid with many allusions to the approaching festival of Anglo-American goodwill. William Bailey had long returned that dangerous little letter, and on that day which is now the chief festival of our race, when so many and such varied qualities receive their high rewards, the storm-tossed spirit of Sir Percy Clutterbuck was at rest.

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