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.