Chapter 3

"No. But I understand that the Ballingers will be leaving in June. You said that at any time, if you had a house, I should have it."

"I said a house, Mrs. Levitt, not a cottage."

"It's all the same to me. The Ballingers' cottage could be made into an adorable little house."

"It could. With a few hundred pounds spent on it."

"Well, you'd be improving your property, wouldn't you? And you'd get it back in the higher rent."

"I'm not thinking about getting anything back. And nothing would please me better. Only, you see, I can't very well turn Ballinger out as long as he behaves himself."

"I wouldn't have him turned out for the world.... But do you consider that Ballinger _has_ behaved himself?"

"Well, he played me a dirty trick, perhaps, when he went to Grainger; but if Grainger can afford to pay for him I've no right to object to his being bought. It isn't a reason for turning the man out."

"I don't see how he can expect you to refuse a good tenant for him."

"I must if I haven't a good house to put him into."

"He doesn't expect it, Mr. Waddington. Didn't you give him notice in December?"

"A mere matter of form. He knows he can stay on if there's nowhere else for him to go to."

"Then why," said Mrs. Levitt, "does he go about saying that he dares you to let the cottage over his head?"

"Does he? Does he say that?"

"He says he'll pay you out. He'll summons you. He was most abusive."

Mr. Waddington's face positively swelled with the choleric flush that swamped its genial fatuity.

"It seems somebody told him you were going to do up the cottage and let it for more rent."

"I don't know who could have spread that story."

"I assure you, Mr. Waddington, it wasn't me!"

"My dear Mrs. Levitt, of course.... I won't say I wasn't thinking of it, and that I wouldn't have done it, if I could have got rid of Ballinger...." He meditated.

"I don't see why I shouldn't get rid of him. If he dares me, the scoundrel, he's simply asking for it. And he shall have it."

"Oh, but I wouldn't for worlds have him turned into the street. With his wife and babies."

"My dear lady, I shan't turn them into the street. I shouldn't be allowed to. There's a cottage at Lower Wyck they can go into. The one he had when he first came to me."

He wondered why he hadn't thought of it before. It wasn't, as it stood, a decent cottage; but if he was prepared to spend fifty pounds or so on it, it could be made habitable; and, by George, he _was_ prepared, if it was only to teach Ballinger a lesson. For it meant that Ballinger would have to walk an extra mile up hill to his work every day. Serve him right, the impudent rascal.

"Poor thing, he won't," said Mrs. Levitt, "have his nice garden."

"He won't. Ballinger must learn," said Mr. Waddington with magisterial severity, "that he can't have everything. He certainly can't have it both ways. Abuse and threaten me and expect favours. He may go ... to Colonel Grainger."

"If it really _must_ happen," said Mrs. Levitt, "do you mean that I may have the house?"

"I shall be only too delighted to have such a charming tenant."

"Well, I shan't threaten and abuse you and call you every nasty name under the sun. And you won't, you _won't_ turn me out when my lease is up?"

He bowed over the hand she held out to him.

"You shall never be turned out as long as you want to stay."

By twelve o'clock they had arranged the details; Mr. Waddington was to put in a bathroom; to throw the two rooms on the ground floor into one; to build out a new sitting-room with a bedroom over it; and to paint and distemper the place, in cream white, throughout. And it was to be called the White House. By the time they had finished with it Ballinger's cottage had become the house Mrs. Levitt had dreamed of all her life, and not unlike the house Mr. Waddington had dreamed of that minute (while he planned the bathroom); the little bijou house where an adorable but not too rigorously moral lady--He stopped with a mental jerk, ashamed. He had no reason to suppose that Elise was or would become such a lady.

And the poor innocent woman was saying, "Just one thing, Mr. Waddington, the rent?"

(No earthly reason.) "We can talk about that another time. I shan't be hard on you."

No. He wouldn't be hard on her. But in that other case there wouldn't have been any rent at all.

As he left the house he could see Mrs. Rickards hurrying towards it across the square.

"She waddles like a duck," he thought. The movement suggested a plebeian excitement and curiosity that displeased him. He recalled her face. Her extraordinary face. "Quite enough," he thought, "to put all that into my head. Poor Elise"

He liked to think of her. It made him feel what he had felt last night over Barbara Madden--virtuous--as though he had struggled and got the better of an impetuous passion. He was so touched by his own beautiful renunciation that when he found Fanny working in the garden he felt a sudden tenderness for her as the cause of it. She looked up at him from her pansy bed and laughed. "What are you looking so sentimental for, old thing?"

3

Mrs. Levitt's affair settled, he could now give his whole time to the serious business of the day.

He was exceedingly anxious to get it over. Nothing could be more disturbing than Fanny's suggestion that the name of Sir John Corbett might carry more weight with his Committee than his own. The Waddingtons of Wyck had ancestry. Waddingtons had held Lower Wyck Manor for ten generations, whereas Sir John Corbett's father had bought Underwoods and rebuilt it somewhere in the 'seventies. On the other hand Sir John was the largest and richest landowner in the place. He could buy up Wyck--on--the--Hill to--morrow and thrive on the transaction. He therefore represented the larger vested interest And as the whole object of the League was the safeguarding of vested interests, in other words, of liberty, that British liberty which is bound up with law and order, with private property in general and landownership in particular; as the principle of its very being was the preservation of precisely such an institution as Sir John himself, the Committee of the Wyck Branch of the League could hardly avoid inviting him to be its president. There was no blinking the fact, and Fanny hadn't blinked it, that Sir John was the proper person. Most of Fanny's suggestions had a strong but unpleasant element of common sense.

But the more interest he took in the League, the more passionately he flung himself into the business of its creation, the more abhorrent to Mr. Waddington was the thought that the chief place in it, the presidency, would pass over his head to Sir John.

His only hope was in Sir John's well-known indolence and irresponsibility. Sir John was the exhausted reaction from the efforts of a self-made grandfather and of a father spendthrift in energy; he had had everything done for him ever since he was a baby, and consequently was now unable or unwilling to do anything for himself or other people. You couldn't see him taking an active part in the management of the League, and Mr. Waddington couldn't see himself doing all the work and handing over all the glory to Sir John. Still, between Mr. Waddington and the glory there was only this supine figure of Sir John, and Sir John once out of the running he could count without immodesty on the unanimous vote of any committee he formed in Wyck.

It was possible that even a Sir John Corbett would not really carry it over a Waddington of Wyck, but Mr. Waddington wasn't taking any risks. What he had to do was to suggest the presidency to Sir John in such a way that he would be certain to refuse it.

He had the good luck to find Sir John alone in his library at tea-time, eating hot buttered toast.

There was hope for Mr. Waddington in Sir John's attitude, lying back and nursing his little round stomach, hope in the hot, buttery gleam of his cheeks, in his wide mouth, lazy under the jutting grey moustache, and in the scrabbling of his little legs as he exerted himself to stand upright.

"Well, Waddington, glad to see you."

He was in his chair again. With another prodigious effort he leaned forward and rang for more tea and more toast.

"Did you walk?" said Sir John. His little round eyes expressed horror at the possibility.

"No, I just ran over in my car."

"Drove yourself?"

"No. Too much effort of attention. I find it interferes with my thinking."

"Interferes with everything," said Sir John. "'Spect you drove enough during the war to last you for the rest of your life."

"Ah, Government service. A very different thing. That reminds me; I've come to-day to consult you on a matter of public business."

"Business?" (He noted Sir John's uneasy pout.) "Better have some tea first." Sir John took another piece of buttered toast.

If only Sir John would go on eating. Nothing like buttered toast for sustaining that mood of voluptuous inertia.

When Mr. Waddington judged the moment propitious he began. "While I was up in London I had the pleasure of lunching with Sir Maurice Gedge. He wants me to start a branch of the National League of Liberty here."

"Liberty? Shouldn't have thought that was much in your line. Didn't expect to see you waving the red flag, what? Why didn't you put him on to our friend Grainger?"

"My dear Corbett, what are you thinking of? The object of the League is to put down all that sort of thing--Socialism--Bolshevism--to rouse the whole country and get it to stand solid for order and good government."

"H'm. Is it? Queer sort of title for a thing of that sort--League of Liberty, what?"

Mr. Waddington raised a clenched fist. Already in spirit he was on his platform. "Exactly the title that's needed. The people want liberty, always have wanted it. We'll let 'em have it. True liberty. British liberty. I tell you, Corbett, we're out against the tyranny of Labour minorities. You and I and every man that's got any standing and any influence, we've got to see to it that we don't have a revolution and Communism and a Soviet Government here."

"Come, you don't think the Bolshies are as strong as all that, do you?"

Mr. Waddington brought his fist down on the arm of his chair. "I _know_ they are," he said. "And look here--if they get the upper hand, it's the great capitalists, the great property holders, the great _land_owners like you and me, Corbett, who'll be the first to suffer.... Why, we're suffering as it is, here in Wyck, with just the little that fellow Grainger can do. The time'll come, mark my words, when we shan't be able to get a single labourer to work for us for a fair wage. They'll bleed us white, Corbett, before they've done with us, if we don't make a stand, and make it now.

"That's what the League's for, to set up a standard, something we can point to and say: These are the principles we stand for. Something you can rally the whole country round. We shall want your support--"

"I shall be very glad--anything I can do--"

Mr. Waddington was a little disturbed by this ready acquiescence.

"Mind you, it isn't going to end here, in Wyck. I shall start it in Wyck first; then I shall take it straight to the big towns, Gloucester, Cheltenham, Cirencester, Nailsworth, Stroud. We'll set 'em going till we've got a branch in every town and every village in the county."

He thought: "That ought to settle him." He had created a vision of intolerable activity.

"Bless me," said Sir John, "you've got your work cut out for you."

"Of course I shall have to get a local committee first. I can't take a step like that without consulting you."

Sir John muttered something that sounded like "Very good of you, I'm sure."

"No more than my duty to the League. Now, the point is, Sir Maurice was anxious that _I_ should be president of this local branch. It needs somebody with energy and determination--the president's work, certainly, will be cut out for him--and I feel very strongly, and I think that my Committee will feel that _you_, Corbett, are the proper person."

"H'm--m."

"I didn't think I should be justified in going further without first obtaining your consent."

"We-ell--"

Mr. Waddington's anxiety was almost unbearable. The programme had evidently appealed to Sir John. Supposing, after all, he accepted?

"I wouldn't ask you to undertake anything so--so arduous, but that it'll strengthen my hands with my Committee; in fact, I may get a much stronger and more influential Committee if I can come to them, and tell them beforehand that you have consented to be president."

"I don't mind being president," said Sir John, "if I haven't got to do anything."

"I'm afraid--I'm _afraid_ we couldn't allow you to be a mere figurehead."

"But presidents always are figureheads, aren't they?"

There was a bantering gleam in Sir John's eyes that irritated Mr. Waddington. That was the worst of Corbett; you couldn't get him to take a serious thing seriously.

"'T any rate," Sir John went on, "there's always some secretary johnnie who runs round and does the work."

So that was Corbett's idea: to sit in his armchair and bag all the prestige, while he, Waddington of Wyck, ran round and did the work.

"Not in this case. In these small local affairs you can't delegate business. Everything depends on the personal activity of the president."

"The deuce it does. How do you mean?"

"I mean this. If Sir John Corbett asks for a subscription he gets it. We've got to round up the whole county and all the townspeople and villagers. It's no use shooting pamphlets at 'em from a motor-car. They like being personally interviewed. If Sir John Corbett comes and talk to them and tells them they must join, ten to one they will join.

"And there isn't any time to be lost if we want to get in first before other places take it up. It'll mean pretty sharp work, day in and day out, rounding them all up."

"Oh, Lord, Waddington, _don't_. I'm tired already with the bare idea of it."

"Come, we can't have you tired, Corbett. Why, it won't be worse, it won't be half as bad as a season's hunting. You're just the man for it. Fit as fit."

"Not half as fit as I look, Waddington."

"There's another thing--the meetings. If the posters say Sir John Corbett will address the meeting people'll come. If Sir John Corbett speaks they'll listen."

"My dear fellow, that settles it. I can't speak for nuts. You _know_ I can't. I can introduce a speaker and move a vote of thanks, and that's about all I _can_ do. It's your show, not mine. _You_ ought to be president, Waddington. You'll enjoy it and I shan't."

"I don't know at all about enjoying it. It'll be infernally hard work."

"Precisely."

"You don't mean, Corbett, that you won't come in with us? That you won't come on the Committee?"

"I'll come on all right if I haven't got to speak, and if I haven't got to do anything. I shan't be much good, but I could at least propose you as president. You couldn't very well propose yourself."

"It's very good of you."

Mr. Waddington made his voice sound casual and indifferent, so that he might appear to be entertaining the suggestion provisionally and under protest. "There'll have to be one big meeting before the Committee's formed or anything. If I let you off the presidency," he said playfully, "will you take the chair?"

"For that one evening?"

"That one evening only."

"You'll do all the talking?"

"I shall have to."

"All right, my dear fellow. I daresay I can get my wife to come on your committee, too. That'll help you to rope in the townspeople.... And now, supposing we drop it and have a quiet smoke."

He roused himself to one more effort. "Of course, we'll send you a subscription, both of us."

Mr. Waddington drove off from Underwoods in a state of pleasurable elation. He had got what he wanted without appearing--without appearing at all to be playing for it. Corbett had never spotted him.

There he was wrong. At that very moment Sir John was relating the incident to Lady Corbett.

"And you could see all the time the fellow wanted it himself. I put him in an awful funk, pretending I was going to take it."

All the same, he admitted very handsomely that the idea of the League was "topping," and that Waddington was the man for it. And the subscription that he and Lady Corbett sent was very handsome, too. Unfortunately it obliged Mr. Waddington to contribute a slightly larger sum, by way of maintaining his ascendancy.

4

On his way home he called at the Old Dower House in the Square to see his mother. He had arranged to meet Fanny and Barbara Madden there and drive them home.

The old lady was sitting in her chair, handsome, with dark eyes still brilliant in her white Roman face, a small imperious face, yet soft, soft in its network of fine grooves and pittings. An exquisite old lady in a black satin gown and white embroidered shawl, with a white Chantilly scarf binding rolled masses of white hair. She had been a Miss Postlethwaite, of Medlicott.

"My dear boy--so you've got back?"

She turned to her son with a soft moan of joy, lifting up her hands to hold his face as he stooped to kiss her.

"How well you look," she said. "Is that London or coming back to Fanny?"

"It's coming back to you."

"Ah, she hasn't spoilt you. You know how to say nice things to your old mother."

She looked up at him, at his solemn face that simmered with excited egoism. Barbara could see that he was playing--playing in his ponderous, fatuous way, at being her young, her not more than twenty-five years old son. He turned with a sudden, sportive, caracoling movement, to find a chair for himself. He was sitting on it now, close beside his mother, and she was holding one of his big, fleshy hands in her fragile bird claws and patting it.

From her study of the ancestral portraits in the Manor dining-room Barbara gathered that he owed to his mother the handsome Roman structure that held up his face, after all, so proudly through its layers of Waddington flesh. He had the Postlethwaite nose. The old lady looked at her, gratified by the grave attention of her eyes.

"Miss Madden can't believe that a little woman like me could have such a great big son," she said. "But, you see, he isn't big to me. He'll never be any older than thirteen."

You could see it. If he wasn't really thirteen to her he wasn't a day older than twenty-five; he was her young grown-up son whose caresses flattered her.

"She spoils me, Miss Madden."

You could see that it pleased him to sit close to her knees, to have his hand patted and be spoilt.

"Nonsense. Now tell me what happened at Underwoods. Is it to be John Corbett or you?"

"Corbett says it's to be me."

"I'm glad he's had that much sense. Well--and now tell me all about this League of yours."

He told her all about it, and she sat very quietly, listening, nodding her proud old head in approval. He talked about it till it was time to go. Then the old lady became agitated.

"My dear boy, you mustn't let Kimber drive you too fast down that hill. Fanny, will you tell Kimber to be careful?"

Her face trembled with anxiety as she held it to him to be kissed. At that moment he was her child, escaping from her, going out rashly into the dangerous world.

"I like going to see Granny," said Fanny as Kimber tucked them up together in the car. "She makes me feel young."

"You may very well feel it," said Mr. Waddington. "It's only my mother's white hair, Miss Madden, that makes her look old."

"I thought," said Barbara, "she looked ever so much younger"--she was going to say, "than she is"--"than most people's mothers."

"You will have noticed," Fanny said, "that my husband is younger than most people."

Barbara noticed that he had drawn himself up with an offended air, unnaturally straight. He didn't like it, this discussion about ages.

They were running out of the Square when Fanny remembered and cried out, "Oh, stop him, Horatio. We must go back and see if Ralph's coming to dinner."

But at the White Hart they were told that Mr. Bevan had "gone to Oxford on his motor-bike" and was not expected to return before ten o'clock.

"Sorry, Barbara."

"I don't see why you should apologize to Miss Madden, my dear. I've no doubt she can get on very well without him."

"She may want something rather more exciting than you and me, sometimes."

"I'm quite happy," Barbara said.

"Of course you're happy. It isn't everybody who enjoys Ralph Bevan's society. I daresay you're like me; you find him a great hindrance to serious conversation."

"That's why _I_ enjoy him," Fanny said. "We'll ask him for to-morrow night."

Barbara tucked her chin into the collar of her coat. The car was running down Sheep Street into Lower Wyck. She stared out abstractedly at the eastern valley, the delicate green cornfields and pink fallows, the muffling of dim trees, all washed in the pale eastern blue, rolling out and up to the blue ridge.

It made her happy to look at it. It made her happy to think of Ralph Bevan coming to-morrow. If it had been to-night it would have been all over in three hours. And something--she was not sure what, but felt that it might be Mr. Waddington--something would have cut in to spoil the happiness of it. But now she had it to think about, and her thoughts were safe. "What are you thinking about, Barbara?"

"The view," said Barbara. "I want to sketch it."

V

1

Mr. Waddington was in his library, drawing up his prospectus while Fanny and Barbara Madden looked on. At Fanny's suggestion (he owned magnanimously that it was a good one) he had decided to "sail in," as she called it, with the prospectus first, not only before he formed his Committee, but before he held his big meeting. (They had fixed the date of it for that day month, Saturday, June the twenty-first.)

"You come before them from the beginning," she said, "with something fixed and definite that they can't go back on." And by signing the prospectus, Horatio Bysshe Waddington, he identified it beyond all contention with himself.

It was at this point that Barbara had blundered.

"Why," she had said, "should we go to all that bother and expense? Why can't we send out the original prospectus?"

"My dear Barbara, the original prospectus isn't any good."

"Why isn't it?"

"Because it isn't Horatio's prospectus."

Barbara looked down and away from the dangerous light in Fanny's eyes.

"But it expresses his views, doesn't it?"

"That's no good when he wants to express them himself."

And so far from being any good, the original prospectus was a positive hindrance to Mr. Waddington. It took all the wind out of his sails; it took, as he justly complained, the very words out of his mouth and the ideas out of his head; it got in his way and upset him at every turn. Somehow or other he had got to stamp his personality upon this thing. "It's no good," he said; "if they can't recognize it as a personal appeal from ME." And here it was, stamped all over, and indelibly, with the personalities of Sir Maurice Gedge and his London Committee. And he couldn't depart radically from the lines they had laid down; there were just so many things to be said, and Sir Maurice and his Committee had contrived to say them all.

But, though the matter was given him, Mr. Waddington, before he actually tackled his prospectus, had conceived himself as supplying his own fresh and inimitable manner; the happy touch, the sudden, arresting turn. But somehow it wasn't working out that way. Try as he would, he couldn't get away from the turns and touches supplied by Sir Maurice Gedge.

"It would have been easy enough," he said, "to draw up the original prospectus. I'd a thousand times rather do that than write one on the top of it."

Fanny agreed. "It's got to _look_ different," she said, "without _being_ different."

"Couldn't we," said Barbara, "turn it upside down?"

"Upside down?" He stared at her with great owl's eyes, offended, suspecting her this time of an outrageous levity.