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.