IV

The next week was an epoch in my life. I seemed to live in the centre

of a Mad Tea-party, where every one was convinced of the madness, and

yet resolutely protested that nothing had happened. The public events

of those days were simple enough. While Lord Mulross's ankle

approached convalescence, the hives of politics were humming with

rumours. Vennard's speech had dissolved his party into its parent

elements, and the Opposition, as nonplussed as the Government, did not

dare as yet to claim the recruit. Consequently he was left alone till

he should see fit to take a further step. He refused to be

interviewed, using blasphemous language about our free Press; and

mercifully he showed no desire to make speeches. He went down to golf

at Littlestone, and rarely showed himself in the House. The earnest

young reformer seemed to have adopted not only the creed but the habits

of his enemies.

Mr. Cargill's was a hard case. He returned from Oldham, delighted with

himself and full of fight, to find awaiting him an urgent message from

the Prime Minister. His chief was sympathetic and kindly. He had long

noticed that the Home Secretary looked fagged and ill. There was no

Home Office Bill very pressing, and his assistance in general debate

could be dispensed with for a little. Let him take a fortnight's

holiday--fish, golf, yacht--the Prime Minister was airily suggestive.

In vain Mr. Cargill declared he was perfectly well. His chief gently

but firmly overbore him, and insisted on sending him his own doctor.

That eminent specialist, having been well coached, was vaguely

alarming, and insisted on a change. Then Mr. Cargill began to suspect,

and asked the Prime Minister point-blank if he objected to his Oldham

speech. He was told that there was no objection--a little strong meat,

perhaps, for Young Liberals, a little daring, but full of Mr. Cargill's

old intellectual power. Mollified and reassured, the Home Secretary

agreed to a week's absence, and departed for a little salmon-fishing in

Scotland. His wife had meantime been taken into the affair, and

privately assured by the Prime Minister that she would greatly ease the

mind of the Cabinet if she could induce her husband to take a longer

holiday--say three weeks. She promised to do her best and to keep her

instructions secret, and the Cargills duly departed for the North. "In

a fortnight," said the Prime Minister to my aunt, "he will have

forgotten all this nonsense; but of course we shall have to watch him

very carefully in the future."

The Press was given its cue, and announced that Mr. Cargill had spoken

at Oldham while suffering from severe nervous breakdown, and that the

remarkable doctrines of that speech need not be taken seriously. As I

had expected, the public put its own interpretation upon this tale.

Men took each other aside in clubs, women gossiped in drawing-rooms,

and in a week the Cargill scandal had assumed amazing proportions. The

popular version was that the Home Secretary had got very drunk at

Caerlaverock House, and still under the influence of liquor had

addressed the Young Liberals at Oldham. He was now in an Inebriates'

Home, and would not return to the House that session. I confess I

trembled when I heard this story, for it was altogether too libellous

to pass unnoticed. I believed that soon it would reach the ear of

Cargill, fishing quietly at Tomandhoul, and that then there would be

the deuce to pay.

Nor was I wrong. A few days later I went to see my aunt to find out

how the land lay. She was very bitter, I remember, about Claudia

Barriton. "I expected sympathy and help from her, and she never comes

near me. I can understand her being absorbed in her engagement, but I

cannot understand the frivolous way she spoke when I saw her yesterday.

She had the audacity to say that both Mr. Vennard and Mr. Cargill had

gone up in her estimation. Young people can be so heartless."

I would have defended Miss Barriton, but at this moment an astonishing

figure was announced. It was Mrs. Cargill in travelling dress, with a

purple bonnet and a green motor-veil. Her face was scarlet, whether

from excitement or the winds of Tomandhoul, and she charged down on us

like a young bull.

"We have come back," she said, "to meet our accusers."

"Accusers!" cried my aunt.

"Yes, accusers!" said the lady. "The abominable rumour about Alexander

has reached our ears. At this moment he is with the Prime Minister,

demanding an official denial. I have come to you, because it was here,

at your table, that Alexander is said to have fallen."

"I really don't know what you mean, Mrs. Cargill."

"I mean that Alexander is said to have become drunk while dining here,

to have been drunk when he spoke at Oldham, and to be now in a

Drunkard's Home." The poor lady broke down, "Alexander," she cried,

"who has been a teetotaller from his youth, and for thirty years an

elder in the U.P. Church! No form of intoxicant has ever been

permitted at our table. Even in illness the thing has never passed our

lips."

My aunt by this time had pulled herself together. "If this outrageous

story is current, Mrs. Cargill, there was nothing for it but to come

back. Your friends know that it is a gross libel. The only denial

necessary is for Mr. Cargill to resume his work. I trust his health is

better."

"He is well, but heartbroken. His is a sensitive nature, Lady

Caerlaverock, and he feels a stain like a wound."

"There is no stain," said my aunt briskly. "Every public man is a

target for scandals, but no one but a fool believes them. They will

die a natural death when he returns to work. An official denial would

make everybody look ridiculous, and encourage the ordinary person to

think that there may have been something in them. Believe me, dear

Mrs. Cargill, there is nothing to be anxious about now that you are

back in London again."

On the contrary, I thought, there was more cause for anxiety than ever.

Cargill was back in the House and the illness game could not be played

a second time. I went home that night acutely sympathetic towards the

worries of the Prime Minister. Mulross would be abroad in a day or

two, and Vennard and Cargill were volcanoes in eruption. The

Government was in a parlous state, with three demented Ministers on the

loose.

The same night I first heard the story of The Bill. Vennard had done

more than play golf at Littlestone. His active mind--for his bitterest

enemies never denied his intellectual energy--had been busy on a great

scheme. At that time, it will be remembered, a serious shrinkage of

unskilled labour existed not only in the Transvaal, but in the new

copper fields of East Africa. Simultaneously a famine was scourging

Behar, and Vennard, to do him justice, had made manful efforts to cope

with it. He had gone fully into the question, and had been slowly

coming to the conclusion that Behar was hopelessly overcrowded. In his

new frame of mind--unswervingly logical, utterly unemotional, and

wholly unbound by tradition--he had come to connect the African and

Indian troubles, and to see in one the relief of the other. The first

fruit of his meditations was a letter to The Times. In it he laid down

a new theory of emigration. The peoples of the Empire, he said, must

be mobile, shifting about to suit economic conditions. But if this was

true of the white man, it was equally true for the dark races under our

tutelage. He referred to the famine and argued that the recurrence of

such disasters was inevitable, unless we assisted the poverty-stricken

ryot to emigrate and sell his labour to advantage. He proposed

indentures and terminable contracts, for he declared he had no wish to

transplant for good. All that was needed was a short season of

wage-earning abroad, that the labourer might return home with savings

which would set him for the future on a higher economic plane. The

letter was temperate and academic in phrasing, the speculation of a

publicist rather than the declaration of a Minister. But in Liberals,

who remembered the pandemonium raised over the Chinese in South Africa,

it stirred up the gloomiest forebodings.

Then, whispered from mouth to mouth, came the news of the Great Bill.

Vennard, it was said, intended to bring in a measure at the earliest

possible date to authorise a scheme of enforced and State-aided

emigration to the African mines. It would apply at first only to the

famine districts, but power would be given to extend its working by

proclamation to other areas. Such was the rumour, and I need not say

it was soon magnified. Questions were asked in the House which the

Speaker ruled out of order. Furious articles, inviting denial,

appeared in the Liberal Press; but Vennard took not the slightest

notice. He spent his time between his office in Whitehall and the

links at Littlestone, dropping into the House once or twice for half an

hour's slumber while a colleague was speaking. His Under Secretary in

the Lords--a young gentleman who had joined the party for a bet, and to

his immense disgust had been immediately rewarded with office--lost his

temper under cross-examination and swore audibly at the Opposition. In

a day or two the story universally believed was that the Secretary for

India was about to transfer the bulk of the Indian people to work as

indentured labourers for South African Jews.

It was this popular version, I fancy, which reached the ears of Ram

Singh, and the news came on him like a thunderclap. He thought that

what Vennard proposed Vennard could do. He saw his native province

stripped of its people, his fields left unploughed, and his cattle

untended; nay, it was possible, his own worthy and honourable self sent

to a far country to dig in a hole. It was a grievous and intolerable

prospect. He walked home to Gloucester Road in heavy preoccupation,

and the first thing he did was to get out the mysterious brass box in

which he kept his valuables. From a pocket-book he took a small silk

packet, opened it, and spilled a few clear grains on his hand. It was

the antidote.

He waited two days, while on all sides the rumour of the Bill grew

stronger and its provisions more stringent. Then he hesitated no

longer, but sent for Lord Caerlaverock's cook.

V

I conceive that the drug did not create new opinions, but elicited

those which had hitherto lain dormant. Every man has a creed, but in

his soul he knows that that creed has another side, possibly not less

logical, which it does not suit him to produce. Our most honest

convictions are not the children of pure reason, but of temperament,

environment, necessity, and interest. Most of us take sides in life

and forget the one we reject. But our conscience tells us it is there,

and we can on occasion state it with a fairness and fulness which

proves that it is not wholly repellent to our reason. During the

crisis I write of, the attitude of Cargill and Vennard was not that of

roysterers out for irresponsible mischief. They were eminently

reasonable and wonderfully logical, and in private conversation they

gave their opponents a very bad time. Cargill, who had hitherto been

the hope of the extreme Free-traders, wrote an article for the

Quarterly on Tariff Reform. It was set up, but long before it could be

used it was cancelled and the type scattered. I have seen a proof of

it, however, and I confess I have never read a more brilliant defence

of a doctrine which the author had hitherto described as a childish

heresy. Which proves my contention--that Cargill all along knew that

there was a case against Free Trade, but naturally did not choose to

admit it, his allegiance being vowed elsewhere. The drug altered

temperament, and with it the creed which is based mainly on

temperament. It scattered current convictions, roused dormant

speculations, and without damaging the reason switched it on to a new

track.

I can see all this now, but at the time I saw only stark madness and

the horrible ingenuity of the lunatic. While Vennard was ruminating on

his Bill, Cargill was going about London arguing like a Scotch

undergraduate. The Prime Minister had seen from the start that the

Home Secretary was the worse danger. Vennard might talk of his

preposterous Bill, but the Cabinet would have something to say to it

before its introduction, and he was mercifully disinclined to go near

St. Stephen's. But Cargill was assiduous in his attendance at the

House, and at any moment might blow the Government sky-high. His

colleagues were detailed in relays to watch him. One would hale him to

luncheon, and keep him till question time was over. Another would

insist on taking him for a motor ride, which would end in a break-down

about Brentford. Invitations to dinner were showered upon him, and

Cargill, who had been unknown in society, found the whole social

machinery of his party set at work to make him a lion. The result was

that he was prevented from speaking in public, but given far too much

encouragement to talk in private. He talked incessantly, before, at,

and after dinner, and he did enormous harm. He was horribly clever,

too, and usually got the best of an argument, so that various eminent

private Liberals had their tempers ruined by his dialectic. In his

rich and unabashed accent--he had long discarded his

Edinburgh-English--he dissected their arguments and ridiculed their

character. He had once been famous for his soapy manners: now he was

as rough as a Highland stot.

Things could not go on in this fashion: the risk was too great. It

was just a fortnight, I think, after the Caerlaverock dinner-party,

when the Prime Minister resolved to bring matters to a head. He could

not afford to wait for ever on a return of sanity. He consulted

Caerlaverock, and it was agreed that Vennard and Cargill should be

asked, or rather commanded to dine on the following evening at

Caerlaverock House. Mulross, whose sanity was not suspected, and whose

ankle was now well again, was also invited, as were three other members

of the Cabinet and myself as amicus curiae. It was understood that

after dinner there would be a settling-up with the two rebels. Either

they should recant and come to heel, or they should depart from the

fold to swell the wolf-pack of the Opposition. The Prime Minister did

not conceal the loss which his party would suffer, but he argued very

sensibly that anything was better than a brace of vipers in its bosom.

I have never attended a more lugubrious function. When I arrived I

found Caerlaverock, the Prime Minister, and the three other members of

the Cabinet standing round a small fire in attitudes of nervous

dejection. I remember it was a raw wet evening, but the gloom out of

doors was sunshine compared to the gloom within. Caerlaverock's

viceregal air had sadly altered. The Prime Minister, once famous for

his genial manners, was pallid and preoccupied. We exchanged remarks

about the weather and the duration of the session. Then we fell silent

till Mulross arrived.

He did not look as if he had come from a sickbed. He came in as jaunty

as a boy, limping just a little from his accident. He was greeted by

his colleagues with tender solicitude,--solicitude, I fear, completely

wasted on him.

"Devilish silly thing to do to get run over," he said. "I was in a

brown study when a cab came round a corner. But I don't regret it, you

know. During the last fortnight I have had leisure to go into this

Bosnian Succession business, and I see now that Von Kladow has been

playing one big game of bluff. Very well; it has got to stop. I am

going to prick the bubble before I am many days older."

The Prime Minister looked anxious. "Our policy towards Bosnia has been

one of non-interference. It is not for us, I should have thought, to

read Germany a lesson."

"Oh, come now," Mulross said, slapping--yes, actually slapping--his

leader on the back; "we may drop that nonsense when we are alone. You

know very well that there are limits to our game of non-interference.

If we don't read Germany a lesson, she will read us one--and a damned

long unpleasant one too. The sooner we give up all this milk-blooded,

blue-spectacled, pacificist talk the better. However, you will see

what I have got to say to-morrow in the House."

The Prime Minister's face lengthened. Mulross was not the pillar he

had thought him, but a splintering reed. I saw that he agreed with me

that this was the most dangerous of the lot.

Then Cargill and Vennard came in together. Both looking uncommonly

fit, younger, trimmer, cleaner. Vennard, instead of his sloppy clothes

and shaggy hair, was groomed like a Guardsman; had a large

pearl-and-diamond solitaire in his shirt, and a white waistcoat with

jewelled buttons. He had lost all his self-consciousness, grinned

cheerfully at the others, warmed his hands at the fire, and cursed the

weather. Cargill, too, had lost his sanctimonious look. There was a

bloom of rustic health on his cheek, and a sparkle in his eye, so that

he had the appearance of some rosy Scotch laird of Raeburn's painting.

Both men wore an air of purpose and contentment.

Vennard turned at once on the Prime Minister. "Did you get my letter?"

he asked. "No? Well, you'll find it waiting when you get home. We're

all friends here, so I can tell you its contents. We must get rid of

this ridiculous Radical 'tail.' They think they have the whip-hand of

us; well, we have got to prove that we can do very well without them.

They are a collection of confounded, treacherous, complacent prigs, but

they have no grit in them, and will come to heel if we tackle them

firmly. I respect an honest fanatic, but I do not respect those

sentiment-mongers. They have the impudence to say that the country is

with them. I tell you it is rank nonsense. If you take a strong hand

with them, you'll double your popularity, and we'll come back next

year with an increased majority. Cargill agrees with me."

The Prime Minister looked grave. "I am not prepared to discuss any

policy of ostracism. What you call our 'tail' is a vital section of

our party. Their creed may be one-sided, but it is none the less part

of our mandate from the people."

"I want a leader who governs as well as reigns," said Vennard. "I

believe in discipline, and you know as well as I do that the Rump is

infernally out of hand."

"They are not the only members who fail in discipline."

Vennard grinned. "I suppose you mean Cargill and myself. But we are

following the central lines of British policy. We are on your side,

and we want to make your task easier."

Cargill suddenly began to laugh. "I don't want any ostracism. Leave

them alone, and Vennard and I will undertake to give them such a time

in the House that they will wish they had never been born. We'll make

them resign in batches."

Dinner was announced, and, laughing uproariously, the two rebels went

arm-in-arm into the dining-room.

Cargill was in tremendous form. He began to tell Scotch stories,

memories of his old Parliament House days. He told them admirably, with

a raciness of idiom which I had thought beyond him. They were long

tales, and some were as broad as they were long, but Mr. Cargill

disarmed criticism. His audience, rather scandalised at the start,

were soon captured, and political troubles were forgotten in

old-fashioned laughter. Even the Prime Minister's anxious face relaxed.

This lasted till the entree, the famous Caerlaverock curry.

As I have said, I was not in the secret, and did not detect the

transition. As I partook of the dish I remember feeling a sudden

giddiness and a slight nausea. The antidote, to those who had not

taken the drug, must have been, I suppose, in the nature of a mild

emetic. A mist seemed to obscure the faces of my fellow-guests, and

slowly the tide of conversation ebbed away. First Vennard, then

Cargill, became silent. I was feeling rather sick, and I noticed with

some satisfaction that all our faces were a little green. I wondered

casually if I had been poisoned.

The sensation passed, but the party had changed. More especially I was

soon conscious that something had happened to the three Ministers. I

noticed Mulross particularly, for he was my neighbour. The look of

keenness and vitality had died out of him, and suddenly he seemed a

rather old, rather tired man, very weary about the eyes.