(1913)
Our drive till then had been quite a success. The other men in the car
were my friend Woodhouse, young Ollyett, a distant connection of his,
and Pallant, the M.P. Woodhouse's business was the treatment and cure of
sick journals. He knew by instinct the precise moment in a newspaper's
life when the impetus of past good management is exhausted and it
fetches up on the dead-centre between slow and expensive collapse and
the new start which can be given by gold injections--and genius. He was
wisely ignorant of journalism; but when he stooped on a carcase there
was sure to be meat. He had that week added a half-dead, halfpenny
evening paper to his collection, which consisted of a prosperous London
daily, one provincial ditto, and a limp-bodied weekly of commercial
leanings. He had also, that very hour, planted me with a large block of
the evening paper's common shares, and was explaining the whole art of
editorship to Ollyett, a young man three years from Oxford, with
coir-matting-coloured hair and a face harshly modelled by harsh
experiences, who, I understood, was assisting in the new venture.
Pallant, the long, wrinkled M.P., whose voice is more like a crane's
than a peacock's, took no shares, but gave us all advice.
'You'll find it rather a knacker's yard,' Woodhouse was saying. 'Yes, I
know they call me The Knacker; but it will pay inside a year. All my
papers do. I've only one motto: Back your luck and back your staff.
It'll come out all right.'
Then the car stopped, and a policeman asked our names and addresses for
exceeding the speed-limit. We pointed out that the road ran absolutely
straight for half a mile ahead without even a side-lane. 'That's just
what we depend on,' said the policeman unpleasantly.
'The usual swindle,' said Woodhouse under his breath. 'What's the name
of this place?'
'Huckley,' said the policeman. 'H-u-c-k-l-e-y,' and wrote something in
his note-book at which young Ollyett protested. A large red man on a
grey horse who had been watching us from the other side of the hedge
shouted an order we could not catch. The policeman laid his hand on the
rim of the right driving-door (Woodhouse carries his spare tyres aft),
and it closed on the button of the electric horn. The grey horse at once
bolted, and we could hear the rider swearing all across the landscape.
'Damn it, man, you've got your silly fist on it! Take it off!' Woodhouse
shouted.
'Ho!' said the constable, looking carefully at his fingers as though we
had trapped them. 'That won't do you any good either,' and he wrote once
more in his note-book before he allowed us to go.
This was Woodhouse's first brush with motor law, and since I expected
no ill consequences to myself, I pointed out that it was very serious. I
took the same view myself when in due time I found that I, too, was
summonsed on charges ranging from the use of obscene language to
endangering traffic.
Judgment was done in a little pale-yellow market-town with a small,
Jubilee clock-tower and a large corn-exchange. Woodhouse drove us there
in his car. Pallant, who had not been included in the summons, came with
us as moral support. While we waited outside, the fat man on the grey
horse rode up and entered into loud talk with his brother magistrates.
He said to one of them--for I took the trouble to note it down--'It
falls away from my lodge-gates, dead straight, three-quarters of a mile.
I'd defy any one to resist it. We rooked seventy pounds out of 'em last
month. No car can resist the temptation. You ought to have one your side
the county, Mike. They simply can't resist it.'
'Whew!' said Woodhouse. 'We're in for trouble. Don't you say a word--or
Ollyett either! I'll pay the fines and we'll get it over as soon as
possible. Where's Pallant?'
'At the back of the court somewhere,' said Ollyett. 'I saw him slip in
just now.'
The fat man then took his seat on the Bench, of which he was chairman,
and I gathered from a bystander that his name was Sir Thomas Ingell,
Bart., M.P., of Ingell Park, Huckley. He began with an allocution
pitched in a tone that would have justified revolt throughout empires.
Evidence, when the crowded little court did not drown it with applause,
was given in the pauses of the address. They were all very proud of
their Sir Thomas, and looked from him to us, wondering why we did not
applaud too.
Taking its time from the chairman, the Bench rollicked with us for
seventeen minutes. Sir Thomas explained that he was sick and tired of
processions of cads of our type, who would be better employed breaking
stones on the road than in frightening horses worth more than themselves
or their ancestors. This was after it had been proved that Woodhouse's
man had turned on the horn purposely to annoy Sir Thomas, who happened
to be riding by'! There were other remarks too--primitive enough,--but
it was the unspeakable brutality of the tone, even more than the quality
of the justice, or the laughter of the audience that stung our souls out
of all reason. When we were dismissed--to the tune of twenty-three
pounds, twelve shillings and sixpence--we waited for Pallant to join us,
while we listened to the next case--one of driving without a licence.
Ollyett with an eye to his evening paper, had already taken very full
notes of our own, but we did not wish to seem prejudiced.
'It's all right,' said the reporter of the local paper soothingly. 'We
never report Sir Thomas _in extenso_. Only the fines and charges.'
'Oh, thank you,' Ollyett replied, and I heard him ask who every one in
court might be. The local reporter was very communicative.
The new victim, a large, flaxen-haired man in somewhat striking
clothes, to which Sir Thomas, now thoroughly warmed, drew public
attention, said that he had left his licence at home. Sir Thomas asked
him if he expected the police to go to his home address at Jerusalem to
find it for him; and the court roared. Nor did Sir Thomas approve of the
man's name, but insisted on calling him 'Mr. Masquerader,' and every
time he did so, all his people shouted. Evidently this was their
established _auto-da-fé_.
'He didn't summons me--because I'm in the House, I suppose. I think I
shall have to ask a Question,' said Pallant, reappearing at the close
of the case.
'I think _I_ shall have to give it a little publicity too,' said
Woodhouse. 'We can't have this kind of thing going on, you know.' His
face was set and quite white. Pallant's, on the other hand, was black,
and I know that my very stomach had turned with rage. Ollyett was dum.
'Well, let's have lunch,' Woodhouse said at last. 'Then we can get away
before the show breaks up.'
We drew Ollyett from the arms of the local reporter, crossed the Market
Square to the Red Lion and found Sir Thomas's 'Mr. Masquerader' just
sitting down to beer, beef and pickles.
'Ah!' said he, in a large voice. 'Companions in misfortune. Won't you
gentlemen join me?'
'Delighted,' said Woodhouse. 'What did you get?'
'I haven't decided. It might make a good turn, but--the public aren't
educated up to it yet. It's beyond 'em. If it wasn't, that red dub on
the Bench would be worth fifty a week.'
'Where?' said Woodhouse. The man looked at him with unaffected surprise.
'At any one of My places,' he replied. 'But perhaps you live here?'
'Good heavens!' cried young Ollyett suddenly. 'You _are_ Masquerier,
then? I thought you were!'
'Bat Masquerier.' He let the words fall with the weight of an
international ultimatum. 'Yes, that's all I am. But you have the
advantage of me, gentlemen.'
For the moment, while we were introducing ourselves, I was puzzled. Then
I recalled prismatic music-hall posters--of enormous acreage--that had
been the unnoticed background of my visits to London for years past.
Posters of men and women, singers, jongleurs, impersonators and
audacities of every draped and undraped brand, all moved on and off in
London and the Provinces by Bat Masquerier--with the long wedge-tailed
flourish following the final 'r.'
'_I_ knew you at once,' said Pallant, the trained M.P., and I promptly
backed the lie. Woodhouse mumbled excuses. Bat Masquerier was not moved
for or against us any more than the frontage of one of his own palaces.
'I always tell My people there's a limit to the size of the lettering,'
he said. 'Overdo that and the ret'na doesn't take it in. Advertisin' is
the most delicate of all the sciences.'
'There's one man in the world who is going to get a little of it if I
live for the next twenty-four hours,' said Woodhouse, and explained how
this would come about.
Masquerier stared at him lengthily with gunmetal-blue eyes.
'You mean it?' he drawled; the voice was as magnetic as the look.
'_I_ do,' said Ollyett. 'That business of the horn alone ought to have
him off the Bench in three months.' Masquerier looked at him even longer
than he had looked at Woodhouse.
'He told _me_,' he said suddenly, 'that my home-address was Jerusalem.
You heard that?'
'But it was the tone--the tone,' Ollyett cried.
'You noticed that, too, did you?' said Masquerier. 'That's the artistic
temperament. You can do a lot with it. And I'm Bat Masquerier,' he went
on. He dropped his chin in his fists and scowled straight in front of
him.... 'I made the Silhouettes--I made the Trefoil and the Jocunda. I
made 'Dal Benzaguen.' Here Ollyett sat straight up, for in common with
the youth of that year he worshipped Miss Vidal Benzaguen of the Trefoil
immensely and unreservedly. '"_Is_ that a dressing-gown or an ulster
you're supposed to be wearing?" You heard _that_?... "And I suppose you
hadn't time to brush your hair either?" You heard _that_?... Now, you
hear _me_!' His voice filled the coffee-room, then dropped to a whisper
as dreadful as a surgeon's before an operation. He spoke for several
minutes. Pallant muttered 'Hear! hear!' I saw Ollyett's eye flash--it
was to Ollyett that Masquerier addressed himself chiefly,--and
Woodhouse leaned forward with joined hands.
'Are you _with_ me?' he went on, gathering us all up in one sweep of the
arm. 'When I begin a thing I see it through, gentlemen. What Bat can't
break, breaks him! But I haven't struck that thing yet. This is no
one-turn turn-it-down show. This is business to the dead finish. Are you
with me, gentlemen? Good! Now, we'll pool our assets. One London
morning, and one provincial daily, didn't you say? One weekly commercial
ditto and one M.P.'
'Not much use, I'm afraid,' Pallant smirked.
'But privileged. _But_ privileged,' he returned. 'And we have also my
little team--London, Blackburn, Liverpool, Leeds--I'll tell you about
Manchester later--and Me! Bat Masquerier.' He breathed the name
reverently into his tankard. 'Gentlemen, when our combination has
finished with Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., and everything else that
is his, Sodom and Gomorrah will be a winsome bit of Merrie England
beside 'em. I must go back to town now, but I trust you gentlemen will
give me the pleasure of your company at dinner to-night at the Chop
Suey--the Red Amber Room--and we'll block out the scenario.' He laid his
hand on young Ollyett's shoulder and added: 'It's your brains I want.'
Then he left, in a good deal of astrachan collar and nickel-plated
limousine, and the place felt less crowded.
We ordered our car a few minutes later. As Woodhouse, Ollyett and I were
getting in, Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., came out of the Hall of
Justice across the square and mounted his horse. I have sometimes
thought that if he had gone in silence he might even then have been
saved, but as he settled himself in the saddle he caught sight of us and
must needs shout: 'Not off yet? You'd better get away and you'd better
be careful.' At that moment Pallant, who had been buying
picture-postcards, came out of the inn, took Sir Thomas's eye and very
leisurely entered the car. It seemed to me that for one instant there
was a shade of uneasiness on the baronet's grey-whiskered face.
'I hope,' said Woodhouse after several miles, 'I hope he's a widower.'
'Yes,' said Pallant. 'For his poor, dear wife's sake I hope that, very
much indeed. I suppose he didn't see me in Court. Oh, here's the parish
history of Huckley written by the Rector and here's your share of the
picture-postcards. Are we all dining with this Mr. Masquerier to-night?'
'Yes!' said we all.
* * * * *
If Woodhouse knew nothing of journalism, young Ollyett, who had
graduated in a hard school, knew a good deal. Our halfpenny evening
paper, which we will call _The Bun_ to distinguish her from her
prosperous morning sister, _The Cake_, was not only diseased but
corrupt. We found this out when a man brought us the prospectus of a new
oil-field and demanded sub-leaders on its prosperity. Ollyett talked
pure Brasenose to him for three minutes. Otherwise he spoke and wrote
trade-English--a toothsome amalgam of Americanisms and epigrams. But
though the slang changes the game never alters, and Ollyett and I and,
in the end, some others enjoyed it immensely. It was weeks ere we could
see the wood for the trees, but so soon as the staff realised that they
had proprietors who backed them right or wrong, and specially when they
were wrong (which is the sole secret of journalism), and that their fate
did not hang on any passing owner's passing mood, they did miracles.
But we did not neglect Huckley. As Ollyett said our first care was to
create an 'arresting atmosphere' round it. He used to visit the village
of week-ends, on a motor-bicycle with a side-car; for which reason I
left the actual place alone and dealt with it in the abstract. Yet it
was I who drew first blood. Two inhabitants of Huckley wrote to
contradict a small, quite solid paragraph in _The Bun_ that a hoopoe had
been seen at Huckley and had, 'of course, been shot by the local
sportsmen.' There was some heat in their letters, both of which we
published. Our version of how the hoopoe got his crest from King Solomon
was, I grieve to say, so inaccurate that the Rector himself--no
sportsman as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy--wrote to us to
correct it. We gave his letter good space and thanked him.
'This priest is going to be useful,' said Ollyett. 'He has the impartial
mind. I shall vitalise him.'
Forthwith he created M.L. Sigden, a recluse of refined tastes who in
_The Bun_ demanded to know whether this Huckley-of-the-Hoopoe was the
Hugly of his boyhood and whether, by any chance, the fell change of name
had been wrought by collusion between a local magnate and the railway,
in the mistaken interests of spurious refinement. 'For I knew it and
loved it with the maidens of my day--_eheu ab angulo!_--as Hugly,' wrote
M.L. Sigden from Oxf.
Though other papers scoffed, _The Bun_ was gravely sympathetic. Several
people wrote to deny that Huckley had been changed at birth. Only the
Rector--no philosopher as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy--had
his doubts, which he laid publicly before Mr. M.L. Sigden who suggested,
through _The Bun_, that the little place might have begun life in
Anglo-Saxon days as 'Hogslea' or among the Normans as 'Argilé,' on
account of its much clay. The Rector had his own ideas too (he said it
was mostly gravel), and M.L. Sigden had a fund of reminiscences. Oddly
enough--which is seldom the case with free reading-matter--our
subscribers rather relished the correspondence, and contemporaries
quoted freely.
'The secret of power,' said Ollyett, 'is not the big stick. It's the
liftable stick.' (This means the 'arresting' quotation of six or seven
lines.) 'Did you see the _Spec._ had a middle on "Rural Tenacities" last
week. That was all Huckley. I'm doing a "Mobiquity" on Huckley
next week.'
Our 'Mobiquities' were Friday evening accounts of easy
motor-bike-_cum_-side-car trips round London, illustrated (we could
never get that machine to work properly) by smudgy maps. Ollyett wrote
the stuff with a fervour and a delicacy which I always ascribed to the
side-car. His account of Epping Forest, for instance, was simply young
love with its soul at its lips. But his Huckley 'Mobiquity' would have
sickened a soap-boiler. It chemically combined loathsome familiarity,
leering suggestion, slimy piety and rancid 'social service' in one
fuming compost that fairly lifted me off my feet.
'Yes,' said he, after compliments. 'It's the most vital, arresting and
dynamic bit of tump I've done up to date. _Non nobis gloria!_ I met Sir
Thomas Ingell in his own park. He talked to me again. He inspired
most of it.'
'Which? The "glutinous native drawl," or "the neglected adenoids of the
village children"?' I demanded.
'Oh, no! That's only to bring in the panel doctor. It's the last flight
we--I'm proudest of.'
This dealt with 'the crepuscular penumbra spreading her dim limbs over
the boskage'; with 'jolly rabbits'; with a herd of 'gravid polled
Angus'; and with the 'arresting, gipsy-like face of their swart,
scholarly owner--as well known at the Royal Agricultural Shows as that
of our late King-Emperor.'
'"Swart" is good and so's "gravid,"' said I, 'but the panel doctor will
be annoyed about the adenoids.'
'Not half as much as Sir Thomas will about his face,' said Ollyett. 'And
if you only knew what I've left out!'
He was right. The panel doctor spent his week-end (this is the
advantage of Friday articles) in overwhelming us with a professional
counterblast of no interest whatever to our subscribers. We told him so,
and he, then and there, battered his way with it into the _Lancet_ where
they are keen on glands, and forgot us altogether. But Sir Thomas Ingell
was of sterner stuff. He must have spent a happy week-end too. The
letter which we received from him on Monday proved him to be a kinless
loon of upright life, for no woman, however remotely interested in a man
would have let it pass the home wastepaper-basket. He objected to our
references to his own herd, to his own labours in his own village, which
he said was a Model Village, and to our infernal insolence; but he
objected most to our invoice of his features. We wrote him courtously to
ask whether the letter was meant for publication. He, remembering, I
presume, the Duke of Wellington, wrote back, 'publish and be damned.'
'Oh! This is too easy,' Ollyett said as he began heading the letter.
'Stop a minute,' I said. 'The game is getting a little beyond us.
To-night's the Bat dinner.' (I may have forgotten to tell you that our
dinner with Bat Masquerier in the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey had
come to be a weekly affair.) 'Hold it over till they've all seen it.'
'Perhaps you're right,' he said. 'You might waste it.'
At dinner, then, Sir Thomas's letter was handed round. Bat seemed to be
thinking of other matters, but Pallant was very interested.
'I've got an idea,' he said presently. 'Could you put something into
_The Bun_ to-morrow about foot-and-mouth disease in that fellow's herd?'
'Oh, plague if you like,' Ollyett replied. 'They're only five measly
Shorthorns. I saw one lying down in the park. She'll serve as a
sub-stratum of fact.'
'Then, do that; and hold the letter over meanwhile. I think _I_ come in
here,' said Pallant.
'Why?' said I.
'Because there's something coming up in the House about foot-and-mouth,
and because he wrote me a letter after that little affair when he fined
you. 'Took ten days to think it over. Here you are,' said Pallant.
'House of Commons paper, you see.'
We read:
DEAR PALLANT--Although in the past our paths have not lain
much together, I am sure you will agree with me that on the
floor of the House all members are on a footing of equality.
I make bold, therefore, to approach you in a matter which I
think capable of a very different interpretation from that
which perhaps was put upon it by your friends. Will you let
them know that that was the case and that I was in no way
swayed by animus in the exercise of my magisterial duties,
which as you, as a brother magistrate, can imagine are
frequently very distasteful to--Yours very sincerely,