JOHN ENDOR went down to the House of Commons and made the speech of his life. Soon after five, when he rose to benches more than half empty, to demand a remedy against that ever-growing evil, the menace of the Newspaper Trust, many honorable members smiled. In a few brief years, the disintegration of the Mother of Parliaments was all but complete. This crowd of time-servers and adventurers, composed in the main of bagmen and trade-union officials were under no illusion as to the terms of their tenure. These hungry ravens knew better than to peck the gentle hand that fed them.
How often, besides, had they heard all this “gup.” There was nothing new in it. And this man Endor was either an egotistical donkey or a purblind idiot not to be aware that he was merely butting his head against a stone wall. At the next general election, which might come at any time now, it would simply be a case of “Endor must go.” And Endor would go. The Endors always did.
Didn’t this triple-play ass know that every word he uttered was digging his own grave? Such passion, such irony, such precision, such cumulative force simply asked for the scrap heap. Dating from the middle of the late war, that thrice blessed upheaval! the scrap heap was where all the Endors had gone. Education, breeding, dedication, were back numbers at Westminster. The country’s, the Empire’s, government, thank God! was now in the hands of business men. “We believe in the U. P. and we are registered subscribers!” That was the open sesame, just that simple and modest oath of allegiance. It was as easy as swallowing butter.
Some of the honorable members dozed a little in the course of this crack-brained fellow’s oratory, others retired to the refreshment room to get a cup of tea. And the few who listened to the strange words, so much out of place within those walls, two or perhaps three of the old hands, hardened æsthetes, not yet quite dead of fatty degeneration of the soul, could not restrain their minds from reverting to the days before the deluge. Bright! Gladstone! Asquith! Grey! Be it so. In the end, every country had the government it really wanted.
Just one there was, among those who deigned to hear John Endor who went even a step farther than these disloyal camp-followers of the U. P. On each side of this magnate on the Treasury Bench was an overdressed but underbred colleague—an ordinance sometimes resorted to by Divine Providence to restore the aurea mediocritas—for the magnate himself happened to be the prime minister.
There is no need, at any rate, in these pages, to decorate him with the pomp of capital letters. The prime minister of Britain was a supine and ignoble figure in the view of many. Wilberforce Williams by name, he was generally known as “Slippery Sam,” because, as his fervent admirers claimed, “you never knew when you ’ad him.”
Nobody knew exactly how, when or why Slippery Sam had made his way to his present eminence. Nobody cared. But there he was on the front bench with his boots cocked up on the table in front of him, master of all he surveyed, with a whole set of blank coupons, two books full, in his pocket. There he was and if possible there he meant to stay.
On principle the prime minister listened to John Endor. It may seem a little odd that such a man as Mr. Williams should have had a principle to indulge; certainly it was not at the call of mere duty or at the beck of truth that he now listened to this young man who took himself and his country so seriously. But Mr. Williams was a little intrigued by him, in the way he was a little intrigued by so many things. For, like other prime ministers before him, he was by way of being an amateur of the human comedy. Therefore, he knew the authentic note when he heard it.
Nobody, not even the Colossus himself, had penetrated to the fact that, in point of sheer cleverness, Slippery Sam was at that moment without a peer in the realm. Cleverness may not be a specially high attribute, and Mr. Williams, who was perfectly frank with himself, would have been the first to say so, but occasions do arise when it has its uses.
One of these now occurred. Midway through the speech of this rather simple but very gifted young man, there came the word China.
The prime minister, it seemed, had lately been paying a good deal of attention to China. His thoughts were in this wise. “In my pocketbook is the ukase that infernal fellow H. had the effrontery to hurl at me the other day in his own handwriting.”
“Saint James’s Square,
“Friday afternoon
“MY DEAR W. W.:
“Send the Fleet to Peking before Japan gets in, or forfeit all claim to thinking Imperially.
“Yours, in haste,
“S. H.”
Mr. Williams’ mind as it now reverted to China was a complex of many things. Listening to that name of ill omen on the lips of the member for Blackhampton, listening to the burning scorn of his words, the prime minister suddenly remembered the giants of his youth. Above all, he remembered Gladstone’s power of carrying not only the House, but the country with him on a live issue.
This young man Endor, out of date as he was, a rather tragic anachronism in that cénacle sprawling, dozing and sneering around him, was a voice from the past. He had not the ear of the House it was true. The simple fact was, the House no longer possessed an ear; it had no longer the power to react to style or tradition. Demosthenes himself could not have pierced these professional hardbakes, who ran the country on the lines of their trade-unions. The British House of Commons was now the most soulless and vulgar of all assemblies; the U. P. had castrated it; but the prime minister, at any rate, was still able to recognize the divine fire.
Moreover, the flame burning in the heart of this young man, John Endor, set him thinking.