William Bailey was at this time nearer fifty than forty years of age.
Those who saw him for the first time would have imagined him to be an
exceptionally vigorous and well-preserved man of maturer years, for
while his eyes were energetic and lively the skin of his face had been
hardened and lined by travel in very different climates. Moreover, his
hair, though not scanty, had turned that peculiar steely grey which men
so often preserve well on into old age.
His stature, which was considerable, he owed to a pair of very long
thin legs, which looked the longer from the invariably ill-fitting
loose trousers that he wore; his boots were of enormous size. These,
again, were exaggerated to the ordinary beholder from his habit of
purchasing pairs far too large for him; and these, I regret to say,
were ready made, with square toes, very flat heels, and those offensive
deep creases across the instep which betray the slovenly man.
His face, which was long and good-humoured, was framed by two vast
whiskers which seemed to belong to an earlier age. And in general his
appearance, while certainly denoting ability, might have led one to
expect a sort of reticent good-nature. The impression was heightened
by his habit of leaning good-humouredly forward with his hands in his
pockets, and a genial half-smile, to listen attentively to whatever
words were addressed to him, especially if those words proceeded from
an unknown man or from one who seemed proud of his acquaintance.
There were none that met him casually in the world, but expected from
him the most kindly judgments and the most reasonable if independent
views. They were invariably deceived.
The man had acquired peculiarities of outlook which in any society less
tolerant than our own would have doomed him to isolation. As it was,
the most part of his equals treated him as a joke they could afford to
laugh at; but some few out of the many to whom he had given legitimate
offence found themselves unable to forgive, and these were filled in
his presence with an ill ease which he, of all men, had the least right
to impose: among these--I bitterly regret--was even to be found that
gracious, kind old man, the Duke of Battersea, who in all his long and
useful life had hardly spoken harshly of a single foe.
In politics none could say whether William Bailey were National or
Opposition; his religion it was impossible to discover; even those
philosophies which attract in their turn most men of intelligence
appeared to leave him indifferent; he was ignorant of Hegel of
Nietzsche and of Oppenheim, but his opinions were none the less
expressed with a violence and a tenacity which sometimes produced
the illusion of a general system, though a collection of his real or
affected prejudices would have proved many of them contradictory one
of the other. He would rail, for instance, against the practice of
drinking champagne with meat, and he would denounce it with the same
fervour as he would use against things so remote from him as the Senate
of Finland or the Republican party in the United States.
His dislike, or his assumed dislike, of certain English writers,
notably the poet Hibbles, on which he might at least be allowed an
opinion or even a prejudice (for he was admittedly a good judge of
verse), was not so strong as his detestation of Tolstoi (not one word
of whose works he could read in the original or had even read in
translations!), or his contempt for Harnack, the very A B C of whose
science he ignored. He denied with equal decision the theory of natural
selection and the hypothesis of a recent glacial epoch, and had more
than once committed himself to print in points of etymology on which
he knew nothing, and his excursion into which had only rendered him
ridiculous.
It would be too easy to explain the man as a mere mass of opposition,
though it is certain that the greater part of his enthusiasms,
if enthusiasms they were, were aroused by the spectacle of some
universally received opinion. It would be truer to say that he was
ever ready to use his quick and not untrained intelligence in defence
of chance likes and dislikes which, when he had so defended them
for a sufficient time, took on in his mind a curious and unnatural
hardness that sometimes approached and sometimes passed the line of
complete conviction. On some points, indeed, he had been compelled to
retreat. His theory that the English Press was not the property of its
ostensible owners but was subsidised by a mysterious gang of foreign
financiers, he discreetly dropped on finding it untenable, though for
years he had startled his new acquaintances and wearied his relatives
by various aspects of that particular piece of nonsense; and his
repeated assertion that Japanese torpedo boats had really been present
on the Dogger Bank during the deplorable incident of 1904, he had been
singularly silent about after the delivery of the Paris award: but the
most part of his follies survived.
He did at least pick up a new mania from time to time, which relieved
the tedium of his repeated dogmatisings; but his friends looked
forward with horror to that inevitable phase which he must meet with
advancing years, when the elasticity of his fanaticism should fail him,
and they should be compelled to listen to an unvarying tale throughout
his old age.
He was, as I have said, not fifty, but that phase seemed already
arrived in one particular. He had gone mad upon the Hebrew race.
He saw Jews everywhere: he not only saw them everywhere, but he saw
them all in conspiracy. He would not perhaps have told you that the
conspiracy was conscious, but its effects he would have discovered all
the same.
According to him Lombroso was a Jew, Mr. Roosevelt's friends and
supporters the Belmonts were Jews, half the moneyed backers of
Roosevelt were Jews, the famous critic Brandes was a Jew, Zola was
a Jew, Nordau was a Jew, Witte was a Jew--or in some mysterious way
connected with Jews; Naquet was a Jew; the great and suffering Hertz
was a Jew. All actors and actresses _en bloc_, and all the foreign
correspondents he could lay hands on were Jews; the late and highly
respected M. de Blowitz (a fervent Catholic!) he nicknamed "Opper," and
having found that a member of the very excellent West Country family
of Wilbraham had ardently supported the Russian revolutionists in the
columns of the _Times_, he must say, forsooth, that a certain "Brahms"
(who rapidly developed into "Abrahams") was the inspirer of the premier
journal; and this mythical character so wrought upon his imagination
that in a little while the manager of the paper itself, and heaven
knows who else, were attached to the Synagogue.
In his eyes the governors of colonies, the wives of Viceroys, the
holders of Egyptian bonds, the mortgagees of Irish lands, half the
Russian patriots, and all the brave spokesmen of Hungary, were swept
into the universal net of his mania.
It got worse with every passing year: there were Jews at Oxford, and at
Cambridge, and at Trinity College, Dublin; the Jews overran India; they
controlled the _Neue Frie Presse_ of Vienna, the _Tribuna_ of Rome, the
_Matin_ of Paris, and for all I know, the _Freeman's Journal_ in Dublin.
The disease advanced with his advancing age; soon all the great family
of Arnold were Jews; half the English aristocracy had Jewish blood; for
a little he would have accused the Pope of Rome or the Royal Family
itself; and I need hardly say that every widespread influence, from
Freemasonry to the international finance of Europe, was Israelite in
his eyes; while our Colonial policy, and especially the gigantic and
successful struggle in South Africa, he twisted into a sort of petty
huckstering, dependent upon Petticoat Lane.
Mary Smith loved her brother. She did all she could to dispel these
mists and to bring out that decent side of him which had made him
years ago as popular a young man as any in London--but he was past
praying for. A private income, large, like all the Bailey incomes,
of over £4000 a year, permitted him a dangerous independence; and in
his freehold house in Bruton Street he lived his own life altogether,
attached to his servants, whom he never changed, subscribing to absurd
foreign papers that dripped with anti-Semitic virus, and depending upon
the perpetual attention of his manservant Zachary, an honest fellow
enough, but one who, from perpetual association with his master, seemed
to have imbibed something of that master's eccentricities. _He_ was as
dandy as the gentleman who employed him was slovenly, and all Bruton
Street noted with a smile the extraordinary figure the fellow made when
he went out on his rare holidays, in a tight frock-coat, a hat like
polished ebony, and gloves that were always new.
To individuals, as is so often the case with men of this temper and
of good birth, William Bailey was often kind and sometimes positively
generous. The personal enmities he bore to men whom he had actually
known, were very rare, and such as they were they would take the form
rather of abstaining from their society than of intriguing against
them. Indeed, characters of this sort are not usually possessed of
that tenacity in action which intrigue requires. His name was mentioned
with no woman's; he had never married. In early youth he was supposed
to have felt some attraction to a lady considerably older than himself,
who subsequently became the wife of another yet older than herself, an
Anglo-Indian official of high standing. But the passion could hardly
have been deep or lasting, for he preserved no relic of her in any
form; he had no picture of her, he never mentioned her name, and when
she returned to England from time to time, he made no effort to renew
her acquaintance and seemed even to avoid her presence.
Some have attempted to attribute his violent eccentricities of
judgment to disappointed ambition. His career would hardly lead one
to such a conclusion. As a boy he determined upon the Army, and had
greatly annoyed his family, who would have preferred the Guards, by
joining the Engineers. He had not been four years a sapper when he as
suddenly abandoned that honourable and useful corps, and compelled his
father to use influence for his appointment as an _attaché_--of all
places in the world--to Pekin. Transferred from that distant capital
to Paris, he begged for Constantinople, was granted it, and within
two years abandoned the career of diplomacy as light-heartedly as he
had abandoned that of arms. His father's death at this moment added
to his already sufficient private means, and it was thought by such
relatives as still took some interest in his talents that commercial
activity would bring him into harness. A stall was purchased for him
at Lloyds, and for three months he appeared to devote himself steadily
to speculation. But the wisest of his relatives, especially his Aunt
Winifred, still had their misgivings; they were amply justified.
In the election of 1892 which shortly followed his introduction to
the City, he was asked by the family to make a third candidate in
East Rutland in order to split, what was then called, the 'Liberal'
vote against his brother James, who had presented himself in what was
then called the 'Conservative' interest. William Bailey, naturally
good-natured and thinking to enjoy the mild excitement of a short
campaign, was delighted to present himself as an Independent Liberal,
and until within a few days of the poll, conducted himself as the
situation required, taking care to draw upon himself such votes--and
no more--as might secure his brother's election. Unhappily the twisted
spirit of the man got the better of him in the last week before the
poll, and he fell into a deplorable breach of good taste and family
feeling; he suddenly began deliberately to attract the attention and
win the support of every sort of elector. To his own considerable
surprise (but it must be admitted to his secret gratification) he
was returned--with what consequent and final effect upon his family
relations need not be told!
During the short life of that parliament he made himself conspicuous
by abstaining from the narrow and perilous divisions to which his
party was subjected, by asking the most offensive personal questions
of responsible Ministers, by shouting interjections which repeatedly
called upon him the severe reprimand of the highly distinguished man
who then occupied the Chair, and by moving, when the luck of the
ballot fell his way, a motion so offensive to every loyal and generous
feeling, that even the Opposition found themselves compelled to support
the Government in an early adjournment to prevent its discussion.
In the early summer of 1895 he appeared to suffer a sudden conversion,
spoke frequently in the most decent and weighty of parliamentary
manners, was present at every division, supported his colleagues in the
country and then--utterly without warning--betrayed one of the safest
seats in England by refusing at the General Election to present himself
again as a candidate.
A man who acts thus in our public life bars every serious career
against himself. Whether Mr. Bailey had foreseen this or no, he was at
any rate content henceforward to live as a private gentleman in his
little house in Bruton Street. But his restless temper still led him
from one set to another, mingling with every one and seen everywhere.
He wrote, he occasionally spoke, and above all it was his delight,
by insinuation or by direct disclosure, to embarrass and expose his
fellow-beings; a man dangerous in the extreme, and, I repeat, one whom
no society less tolerant than ours would have endured for a year.
Such was the rock on which the proud ship of Mr. Clutterbuck's good
fortune struck.
In a mood less irritable and less inflamed he would have been safe; but
doubtful, suspicious, angered as he was he fell an easy--alas! too easy
a prey--to the inconsequent and empty enthusiast; and it was his ruin.
* * * * *
Mr. Clutterbuck was back at The Plâs, and the thorn in his soul struck
sore. Too many words were enigmas. He suffered too much silence. He
would speak.
They were together in the Art Gallery of The Plâs, Mr. Clutterbuck and
Charlie, the Master and the Man.
Mr. Clutterbuck was sitting at a desk where he often did his work,
under the inspiration of the big Manet which Charlie had purchased that
summer of Raphael and Heinz. Fitzgerald was smoking a cigarette lazily
at the end of the long room, and reading one of those articles in the
_Spectator_ which have so profound an influence week by week upon the
political situation.
Mr. Clutterbuck suddenly looked up from his writing, turned round to
him and said:
"Mr. Fitzgerald, what is a Peabody Yid?"
Charlie Fitzgerald was so startled that he let the premier review
of the Anglo-Saxon Race fall to the floor; but a glance at Mr.
Clutterbuck's honest though troubled profile reassured him.
"Oh, a Yid," he said laughing, "I suppose a Yid's a name for a German,
or something of that sort. Then Peabody--oh, the Peabody Buildings!"
"Is it a kind of man, then?" said Mr. Clutterbuck, solemnly.
"Why," said Fitzgerald, thoughtfully, "I suppose it is."
"I thought it was one man," said Mr. Clutterbuck, still in doubt, and
in a tone which made Charlie Fitzgerald look at him again, but again
feel reassured.
"It would be one fellow, of course," said Fitzgerald manfully, "if
you were only speaking of one: if you said 'a Peabody Yid,' for
instance.... But if you were talking of several," he mused, "why you'd
say 'Peabody Yids,' I s'pose. What?"
Mr. Clutterbuck was lost in thought. "But Yid means a Jew surely,
doesn't it, Mr. Fitzgerald?" said the older man. "It's a vulgar name
for a Jew, isn't it?"
"Why-y, yes," answered the other with nonchalance. "A German, or a Jew,
or something of that sort. Then Peabody was a sort of philanthropical
fellow: architect, I think."
Mr. Clutterbuck having got so far, said: "Oh!" He said no more; he went
on writing; but, like the man in the Saga, his heart was ill at ease.
For the first time in many months he was as sore and as anxious as ever
he had been in the old days before good fortune came to him.
The seventh day of the New Year broke brightly, but never a word from
Peter Street. Mr. Clutterbuck went so far as to speak first to his
secretary, before his secretary had spoken to him, and to ask him, but
with all the courtesy imaginable, whether something could not be done
to reassure him?
Charlie Fitzgerald more than hinted that it was all nervousness.
"Things aren't done in that way," he said worriedly. "They won't give
me anything in writing, of course."
Mr. Clutterbuck foresaw yet another futile verbal message and he came
as near to anger as such a man can come at all. He was quite evidently
put out and annoyed. He went so far as to say:
"Mr. Fitzgerald, I did hope you would have done something for me."
And Charlie, who had a fine sense which told him when he had gone too
far, got up and put a gentle hand on his employer's arm.
"I'm afraid, Mr. Clutterbuck," he said in a tone of low and grave
sincerity, "I'm afraid you misunderstood me. I can't do more than find
out, but I'll find out in more detail, and you must give me two days."
"Of course," said Mr. Clutterbuck, "of course; you know what you have
to do, Mr. Fitzgerald, I won't expect you back until I hear." But he
added in a sort of appealing voice: "But do do something! You see
... it touches a man's pride, and ... to be perfectly frank ... Mrs.
Clutterbuck doesn't like it. One feels odd when one's friends come."
The poor old gentleman was perfectly straightforward and it went to
Charlie Fitzgerald's heart. Nevertheless a telegram which came for him
a few hours later, after he had sent a telephone message to London,
detained him yet another day. He fully explained to Mr. Clutterbuck the
nature of the delay: the person whom he had expected to meet in town
would not be back till the evening of the 9th; but Mr. Clutterbuck was
only partially relieved and he announced his intention of seeing to
some business in the City. The business--alas! that I should have to
admit duplicity in such a character--was an interview with Mr. William
Bailey.
That eccentric had at least opened him one door of sympathy, and in Mr.
Clutterbuck's distress the business man's natural mistrust of uncertain
and fantastic characters was forgotten.
He found Mr. Bailey occupying his worse than useless leisure in drawing
up an enormous list of names, and by the side of each, in a second
column, a second name was appended. He was so engrossed upon this task,
in the prosecution of which he was surrounded by twenty or a dozen
books of reference, collections of newspaper cuttings and memoranda of
every sort, that he did not so much as look up when Zachary announced
Mr. Clutterbuck, but went on murmuring:
"Beaufort---- Rosenberg, date uncertain;
"Belvedere---- Cohen, 1873;
"Belmont---- Schoenberg, 1882 (probably)...."
He had go so far when he jumped up, remembered his manners, and begged
Mr. Clutterbuck to excuse his absorption.
"I was making out a list of people," he said, "a sort of dictionary."
"Are you going to publish it?" asked Mr. Clutterbuck politely, by way
of beginning the conversation.
"Well," said Mr. Bailey, "I rather think I am. I dare say I should have
to get it printed abroad, but that's no drawback."
"I hope it's all right," said Mr. Clutterbuck in alarm.
"Oh yes, it's quite moral," said Mr. Bailey airily. "But one often has
to get things done abroad. Would you like to look at some of it?"
Mr. Clutterbuck had the courtesy to glance at the yards of double names
and dates, but they meant nothing to him. He asked which column one
read first, and William Bailey could only find the stupid and would-be
enigmatic reply that some read it one way and some read it the other.
"Beaufort equals Rosenberg, or Rosenberg equals Beaufort: it's all the
same thing. It's usually French on the left and German on the right,"
he said quizzically, putting his head on one side. "Middle Ages there,
Modern Ages here," he went on, wagging his head symbolically right and
left; and then suddenly broke out: "What've you come to see me about?
Still hanging fire?"
Mr. Clutterbuck admitted that it was, and Mr. Bailey surveyed him with
great kindness. It was evident the crank had no desire to eat up this
particular millionaire; he would give _him_ a certificate of pure
blood. He smiled at his sister's new acquaintance with deep benediction
and at last he said in a knowing tone:
"Look here, Mr. Clutterbuck, I think I can only do _one_ thing for you,
but it's a very useful thing. It's just a rule of thumb, and I'm afraid
you'll think it something in the dark; but it's no good making any more
of it just now than a plain rule of thumb. It's just a plain rule of
thumb."
Mr. Clutterbuck groaned inwardly. He was in the fog again. But William
Bailey went on quite composed:
"I know a good deal of things," he said, stretching his arms and
yawning as he said it.
"Yes, Mr. Bailey, certainly," said Mr. Clutterbuck fervently.
"Well then, if I just tell you a simple little dodge--don't think it
too simple--just take it as a tip from me, and I'll see you through.
I mean what I say. I don't think I'd do it for anybody else. TRY THE
ANAPOOTRA RUBY MINES."