Part 9

In times of peace the mass of men live like fish in tanks, aware of dim shades that come and go beyond, recking little of what is outside their own tiny range of weed and gravel. To be great with the mass is not to be a collection of definite great facts, but only a constantly recurring vagueness. ‘I know his name,’ is the sum of ordinary knowledge of great men. But with constant repetition the name of a man or a cause takes on an awe-inspiring, trust-compelling quality, and the fishes cry ecstatically: ‘Napoleon!’ ‘Buller!’ ‘Chamberlain!’ ‘Carter’s Little Liver Pills!’ ‘Hurrah!’--and this makes fame. While the great Poet is starving obscurely into immortality, the crowd without is staring awestruck at the famous Laureate’s feather-nodding coach, as it rolls him to oblivion in St. Paul’s. Why are all these people craning and jostling in the roadway? Is it because they loved the Laureate’s poems? Did he touch some chord in their hearts which the poor Poet’s fingers were too delicate to handle? Not a bit! They know the one man’s verses no better than the other’s; they stand lamenting for the Laureate simply because they have so often heard his name.

And now Dwala’s was such a name. His mind and character were still unknown, even to journalists; but the wavering darkness of his name had long been familiar to the fish in every tank. For months they had read of him in papers and magazines: his wealth, his success, his eccentricity, had been the talk of England. Then he had gone into Parliament and figured large in the comic cartoons. Others, after short notability, had lost favour by their speeches or their deeds; Dwala had left his reputation to grow of itself, like a tree. They felt his largeness. He was talked of everywhere as the capable man of the Cabinet. A Minister, he was remarkable even among ordinary Members as the man who never spoke. He was the ‘strong and silent man in a babbling age.’

In the hour of despair the people clamoured, with as much reason as they usually have for such clamouring: ‘Prince Dwala alone can save us! Down with Glendover! Down with Whitstable! Down with Huggins! Dwala for ever!’ The papers talked of a new era and a new man, who was to ‘cleanse the Augean stable’ and set Old England on its legs again.

For the lobby and the drawing-room all this had to be translated into a new language, full of such terms as ‘popular in the House’--‘the support of the Church Party’--‘keep things going’--‘able to entertain’--‘stop the mouth of the Irish Members.’ The division of ‘politics’ from national life which such phrases indicate does not arise from any cynicism in the ruling classes, but from our system of government itself. The evil begins in the polling booth, where men are elected, not to sit for England, but to sit for a party or for local wants. The interest of the nation is the only interest unrepresented in the House of Commons.

Deafened with the shouts of the people, afraid to venture to his official home through the angry crowds that filled Whitehall, the Premier tendered his resignation, and retired--poor scapegoat--to his gardened grange, to finish his book on Problems of Pure Thought.

XXVIII

Disturnal came and went with an air of genial mystery. The cab that carried him from Lady Wyse’s to Prince Dwala’s carried the fate of the nation on its two wheels. He came to assure Dwala of the support of the powerful Catholic Anglican party, of which he was business manager.

‘Of course, I’m only a layman,’ he said, with his broad muscular clean-shaven smile; ‘but you may take it the thing is done. The Bishop of Windsor will have to come and see you, just as a matter of form. He’s our President. He’s a dear old thing; you’ll like him. You’ll only have to give him some lunch, and pat him on the back and send him home again. I’ve settled it all with Lady Wyse.’

The Bishop came to lunch--really a ‘dear old thing’; a crumpled and furrowed saint, with the wise brow of a Scotch terrier, fitted for better things than to be managed by a scheming Jesuit like Disturnal. Dwala respected him as a man; Huxtable as a Bishop; Hartopp as neither. The mere title of Bishop was enough to provoke the fury of that pewed ox. The old Fence broke in on the respectable conversation of the lunch-table with ribald questions and sly allusions to Lady Wyse, and parsons, and hopes of the Archbishopric--all of which amused him very much, and only bewildered the good prelate, who had no notion what he was driving at. Hartopp soon pushed his plate away, and sat with his chin resting on the table and his pale blind eye-balls turned on the Bishop, chuckling to himself, like the head of some decapitated sorcerer in the ‘Arabian Nights’ making fun of a wicked Caliph.

His conversational successes pleased him so much that he grew gay and gallant when Dwala brought up Lady Wyse herself an hour later to his rooms to introduce her.

That crafty lady had prepared the way for friendship three weeks before by sending him ‘The Doings of Thomasina,’ over which the world was laughing--written by a lady of fashion, and absolutely true to life, so Huxtable assured him. It had been the delight of many evenings when Huxtable read it aloud to him and Dwala.

‘If people went on like that in Seven Dials,’ he said, ‘there’d be black eyes all round, and a lickin’ for the girl at the end of every page.’

But he chuckled hugely, relishing it as a light upon the manners and customs of the nobs.

He had the first floor to himself now, eight rooms in a suite. He was very strict in his sense of property, rushing out like an angry spider from his lair if he heard sounds of intrusion. But this afternoon he needed company as an outlet for the pride of his conversational performance, and he hobbled forth on the landing with a grin when he heard voices on the stairs.

‘Ah, Lady Wyse, is it? We had some talk about you at lunch to-day, my lady. “Lady Wyse is an old friend of mine,” says the Bishop. “Ha, ha,” says I; “she’s a fine woman by all accounts.” And then I laughed, and Huxtable up and asked the Bishop about the state of the Parsons’ Relief Fund. “Parsons,” says I; “why I read the Bible right through once when I was a boy, for a bet, and the word parson isn’t mentioned once in the whole of the book. I suppose you hope to be Archbishop some day?” says I. He pretended not to hear; but I wasn’t going to let him off. “Didn’t Lady Wyse say anything about you bein’ made Archbishop?” I says. “Not a word,” says he. “Didn’t she wink?” says I. “One doesn’t wink at Bishops,” says Huxtable. “Ah,” says I; “you don’t know Lady Wyse”; and I and the Bishop roared with laughter. The old man knows a thing or two.’

Lady Wyse listened patiently, and charmed the Fence outright, without exertion, by sitting down at the piano--_his_ piano, which nobody might touch without his leave--and playing him ‘Simple Aveu’ and ‘The Song which Reached my Heart.’ The proletariat, who abhor sentimentality in real life, like nothing else in art. The sound of the music drew Joey, a sad little creature now that she saw the possible limitations of the pleasure of wearing new hats and steaming slowly in a motor-car round the Park. Hearing her footstep four rooms off, while he was leaning, full of noble emotion, over the plaintive piano, Hartopp rushed thumping away, knocking over little tables as he went, and cursing to himself.

‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s only me, Toppin.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I come to hear the music.’

‘What do you mean by comin’ in without askin’? Have you cleaned yourself up?’

‘Not partic’lar.’

‘Then clear out! I’ve got visitors. Wait till you’re sent for.’

XXIX

They had tea in Hartopp’s room. Lord Glendover came in to inquire after Dwala’s health, which had been visibly failing the last few days.

‘We’ve cleared the last obstacle now,’ said Lady Wyse, marching up and down the room. ‘To-morrow Dwala will step into the Premiership. Hooray for the new Premier!’

She waved her cigarette triumphantly in the air.

‘The Church Party practically held the balance, don’t you see? Well, they were ready to follow Lord Whitstable, or Huggins, or Strafford-Leslie, or Prince Dwala. Lord Glendover, of course, was out of it. Well, Whitstable’s shelved: he’s incompetent, and he knows it.’

‘It’s very hard on him,’ said Lord Glendover.

‘Still, he gets the Governorship of Australia,’ said Lady Wyse; ‘and that’s fifteen thousand or so a year; not so bad after all. He’s responsible for the loss of thousands of lives in Africa.’

‘Yes; but think of the poor beggar’s feelings!’

‘Huggins’s hopes were ruined by his case against the Red Sea Shipping Company. It came out that his firm had been exporting arms to the Mad Mullah.’

‘But quite innocently!’ said Lord Glendover. ‘He’s a business man; he didn’t know it was against the law.’

‘So there was only the Prince and Strafford-Leslie left in the running. Strafford-Leslie offered an Episcopal Council for Church Jurisdiction; and we ... well, we really offered nothing.’

She laughed.

XXX

His appointment as Prime Minister was in the papers two days later, with a throng of leading articles shouting Evoë!

A spirit of busy gaiety ruled over the big house in Park Lane; such a spirit of Bohemian ease as comes where private theatricals are preparing. The policy of the Empire and the distribution of places centred there. Everything bustled cheerfully; doors stood open; people came and went; meals were snatched on corners of littered tables: the servants were infected; footmen ran up and down the stairs like school-boys; housemaids tittered at baize-doors, and forgot pails on landings.

And in the midst of it, still and listless, sat Dwala--the new Prime Minister. Something strange had happened; he saw the world fading and losing interest before his eyes. What was the thing he had looked forward to so eagerly? A joke? What is a joke? In this new obscurity his mind could not piece the thing together aright. Some sort of surprise and ridicule? No matter. He was sorry for these pitiful actors now; there was something so futile about all this busy scheming in a world of shades. To show the unimportance of importance? Was that his joke? Pooh! the joke itself was not important enough to amuse him now; five minutes’ fun for a Hartopp; nothing more.

Strange that the world should have altered so! He had noticed something amiss with it that day he went to Windsor to receive his appointment as Prime Minister; an unnatural clearness, like the clearness of a landscape before a storm.

As he stood on the platform at Paddington, looking at the crowd of pleasure-seekers--men and women in boating-costumes--he had seen them, not as creatures of flesh and clothes, but as translucent wraiths, grinning and gibbering in one another’s faces; the only real live being there, the Guard--Odysseus playing Charon in Hades--watchful, responsible, long-glancing down the train, touching his hat, receiving obols from the shades.

Tears came into Lady Wyse’s heart as she sat and looked at him. She guessed the truth, which he did not suspect; death was going to take from her the companion-mind which had made her wilderness green again. But that belief she put away from herself and him.

In other things they thought together, these two minds: his, the elemental, the slow, the encompassing; hers, the polished, the swift, the penetrating; his, like the thunder rolling, huge and formless; hers, like the music of the master’s fiddle, delicate, exact, exhaustive. Both saw their old scheme for laughter vanish like a mirage in the desert as the traveller approaches; and in its place, from the heart of all things, welled up the new thought, the greater thought, suited to the solemn grandeur of their friendship.

Dwala was at a table, coughing feebly; opposite him Huxtable, busy with ink and papers. Lady Wyse sat talking intermittently, absently, listlessly, with Lord Glendover by the empty tea-cups. She rose, and strayed over to Dwala’s table, where she stood awhile picking up papers and throwing them down again.

‘What this?... “The best hundred books.”’

‘That’s for the prospectus of Glenister’s new “Dwala Classics,”’ said Huxtable.

‘“The Bible, Shakespere, Confucius, Hi-ti-hi, Kipling, the Q’urân, The Doings of Thomasina” ...’

She tore it up and threw it on the floor, paying no heed to Huxtable. Then she picked up another paper and read it out aloud: “I am in favour of inducing the Colonies to put heavy duties on all foreign goods. This will promote a friendly feeling between England and her dependencies.”

‘That’s rather neat,’ said Lord Glendover.

‘Dull, I call it,’ said Lady Wyse.

‘It’s out of the draft for the new pronouncement,’ said Huxtable.

She took a pencil, and amended it.

‘“I am in favour of inducing the Colonies to put heavy duties on one another’s goods. This will promote a friendly feeling between England and foreign countries.” That’s better, don’t you think, Lord Glendover?’

‘Yes, I think it is,’ said the noble Lord; ‘I like that touch about “foreign countries.”’

Huxtable leaned forward as if about to speak; but sank back and cracked his thumbs. She stood biting her pencil for a little time, and then tore the pronouncement also in pieces, and threw it on the floor. She walked up and down, and stopped in front of Lord Glendover, with folded arms, and with tears standing in her eyes.

‘It is a pitiful, pitiful thing,’ she said; ‘you are all so good, one is obliged to believe in the Devil.’

‘That don’t hang together, you know,’ said Lord Glendover gravely.

‘It is like some hideous game, where each child has to speak a harmless word in turn, and the whole sentence is rank blasphemy and wickedness. Each of you goes through a foolish, innocent routine, with a clear conscience and the applause of the poor multitude; and the result is misery, misery, misery. Not random misery, here and there, such as you harmless creatures might chance on by the way, but a fearful consistent scheme of deeply-calculated, universal misery--a thing of hellish contrivance, worthy of the fiery genius of the sulphur pit. What am I, and what is this poor Lord Glendover? Makers and unmakers of men? Pah! We are pitiful pawns in the awful game, dreaming we move of our own accord only because the other pawns do not jostle us. Why do we stay cumbering the board? God knows! And yet without us there would be no game. It lies with us, it lies with us to put an end to it.’

She spoke with lifted arm and ringing voice, like a prophet of repentance; while Lord Glendover leaned back in his low chair, looking up over his brown clasped hands with frightened eyes. There was something comical in this big creature’s dependent, child-like look. Lady Wyse smiled suddenly at him:

‘We must kick over the board, my little man, and spoil the Devil’s game.’

The scared look spread downwards to his mouth. He did not understand any of the words she spoke; but a vague instinct of wisdom and alarm shot through him, as through a baby hare, which thought it was play, and suddenly finds death baying on every side.

‘You don’t mean reconstruction, do you, Lady Wyse? Dwala’s not going to....’

The awfulness was too sudden-spreading to be crumpled back into words. She smiled again.

‘Revolution, my child, revolution! We’ll make Old England stand on its head and shout.’

‘Good Gad! But he’s bound to us in honour. Dwala’s a gentleman--we look to him. We’d never have put him up if he hadn’t been pledged in honour. He can’t go back on us now.’

‘He’s pledged to nothing, any more than I am; any more than a ship is that you may charter to carry a cargo of slaves to Jamaica. And if the ship is turned round in mid-Atlantic, and carried back to the coast of Africa, what use is it your crying out: “You’re not a gentleman, you ship! We trusted you, we chartered you to carry our blacks to slavery, and here you are taking us back to be eaten by the cannibals.” I’m sorry for you, Lord Glendover, quite sorry enough. You’re a good man, and not more stupid than most. You might have been a decent farmer, or bricklayer, or gamekeeper; but you’ve gone along the beaten track that leads to villainy--unconscious, irreclaimable villainy. You don’t see it, and you never will. Go home and be obscure. I’m sorry for you; but I’m sorrier for the forty million blacks that we have on board, and now we mean to carry them back to Africa.’

Lord Glendover went away, gloomy and bewildered, feeling great national misfortunes gathering in the air. He visited his colleagues, and considered how the country could be saved.

But salvation was not to come from Lord Glendover.

XXXI

Parliament was dissolved, and the Great Policy was launched. The obscurity had been suddenly lifted from Dwala’s mind: a hectic strength and clearness took its place. He and Lady Wyse did not so much invent the New Charter as discover it: it was the revelation of a thing existent; as they sat pen in hand the words came to them from some far place, illuminating and inevitable.

XXXII

A month had passed. The General Election was over. The great drought, the heaviness, the dull unrest was ended. The Dragon of the myth, the monster which slowly sucks up the waters, condemning the land to infertility and pestilence, was slain, and the waters gushed forth again to fruitfulness. The myriad warriors who had helped to pierce his flanks went coursing over the plain, with a brandishing of spears and cries of ‘Victory!’ St. George turned in his long sleep and opened his heavy eyes. Well did he know those triumphing shouts. Was the race of dragons ended now, or would a new dragon spring from the blood of the old as heretofore?

XXXIII

Success is a strong wine. It was running vividly in Dwala’s veins. Every least thing he did seemed to him fate-ordered and conclusive. Oh, the pride of it, the joy of it, the ease of it! The acclamations and the consciousness of right!

The new Civilisation was like a poem, the scheme of which has come whole and organic to the poet, and which germinates therefore without constraint into its natural, necessary verses. The right men and the right ideas fell of themselves into their places, like particles forming a system of crystals. Dwala had found the basic idea, which all this turbid mass had been so long awaiting. He created life and received it. That same life flowed into his fibres, from the movement of the multitude, which flows into the peasant-woman’s baby out of the dust gathered on the busy highway.

Lady Wyse, seeing the easy joyful motion of his limbs and hearing the deep vigour of his voice, put her presentiments away. Dwala himself looked back in wonder at that grey mood when the world had faded from him. He was like the traveller who stands in the garish whirl of the fair, wondering if this can be the place that looked so grim on Sunday. He was enjoying the strong rush of life which a kindly Heaven sends to the consumptive as consolation for their early death.

He had new friends about him now. The Glendovers, the Disturnals, and the rest of that crew had vanished into the Unknown; they were growing turnips, shooting partridges, or riding on motor-ears somewhere in the Outer Darkness. Hartopp and Prosser were still there; Joey had run away to Seven Dials; Huxtable had packed his boxes, and stayed on in a condition of provisional irresolution.

On Dwala’s third floor lived an ascetic pensioner--a certain Mr. Bone, an American, a traveller in the East, a friend of Lady Wyse--connected by some mystery of familiarity with Dwala’s past. Rumour had it that he was an adventurer who had been Dwala’s Prime Minister in his days of sovereignty.

Dwala’s palace, in fact, was fast turning into a monastery, where the Abbot, with his little cell by the hall-door, was the least luxuriously housed of all.

Prosser, as I said, was still there, but he was no longer there as valet. The acceptance of such personal service was inconsistent with the Prince’s New Humanity, and Prosser was quite incapable of performing his duties properly. For some time he had contented himself with a life of ease in his own room. But _his_ politics also had changed: he did not see why he should be worse off than Hartopp, and, by force of gradual asking, acquired the whole of the second floor, over Hartopp, for his portion. He had everything he could think of wanting in his rooms; but even that did not content him. He had thought that wealth was all he needed to make him happy in his sober intervals; but soon found out that he was mistaken. His career had given him a longing for _other_ people’s property; things lost their interest for him once they became his own. He craved for the excitements of the past. Scissors, and ashtrays, and other glittering things got a way of disappearing wherever he went about the house. One night Dwala was aroused by the screaming of a police whistle from one of Hartopp’s windows over him, and going up he found the Fence sitting on Prosser’s chest in the window-seat, and blowing for all he was worth. A broken cupboard and a trailing jemmy explained the situation.

‘All right, guvnor, I’ll go quietly,’ said Prosser, in a squeezed husky voice; ‘I’m nabbed right enough this time.’ All the household crowded in at the doorway with scared faces; policemen appeared, and the alarm ended with the lights being turned up and everybody sitting down together, policemen and all, to a scratch supper in the dining-room, and laughing uproariously, as if something very funny had occurred.

The best of Prosser was that he never made any unpleasantness about being arrested. He would surrender at discretion to the housemaid or the boot boy, and offer to ‘go quietly.’ The policemen outside entered into the joke of it, and were ready on the doorstep to come in for their supper and half-crown whenever the episcopal butler ran out of a night--as he always did--to fetch them. The American was the only one who missed the fun of the thing; he swore that if he found anyone prowling about his rooms he would punch his head and hand him over, bag and baggage, to the police.

Dwala himself was already tired of the joke, when the butler--rather dishevelled--came in to the picture-gallery where he was pacing up and down, one afternoon, with a sheaf of spoons in one hand and the crestfallen Prosser in the other.

‘Why don’t you steal something big and have done with it?’ Dwala said, when he and the ex-valet were left alone. ‘One of these pictures, for instance; they’re very valuable some of them, I know. Now here’s a tremendously fine thing, I’m told. Who’s it by? The name’s written on the frame.’

‘Rubens, sir.’

‘Now you take that, Prosser, some night. I don’t want it a bit, I assure you. It’s worth something like fifteen thousand pounds, I’m told.’

Prosser returned it after a couple of days.

‘I can’t sleep with it in the room, I can’t, sir. When I shuts my eyes I seems to see all them ladies rollin’ up and down and every way till I’m fairly giddy. But I promise you, sir, I won’t go in no more for little thievin’s, I’ll keep my eyes open for something big.’

XXXIV

Sir Peter Parchmin was a rare visitor. He disliked the company which Dwala kept; he couldn’t get on with Mr. Cato, who was always in and out of the house. He was growing visibly older in the effort of keeping his countenance, while his colleagues gloated over despatches of the Missing Link Expedition, which kept writing hopefully from Borneo that it was on the eve of achieving its object; Mr. Holmes had seen curious scratches on trees, or had heard peculiar noises at night; once they sent home a button which he had discovered in the forest. The hopes of the scientific world ran high.

‘You must get those people to come home, Sir Peter,’ said Dwala to the Biologist, on one of his visits. ‘He’s a terrible fellow is that Mr. Holmes; I shouldn’t feel safe in going back while he’s out there. He’d have me, tail and all, in no time.’