EASTER, as those who survive will know, fell early in 1915—to be exact, upon April 4th; Ole Man Benson had returned on the 11th; on the 12th Mary had seen Dolly; and the week after Ole Man Benson’s return to these shores, the week after he had delivered his important and somewhat depressing news to the young household, the week after Mary and Dolly had conferred at the Petheringtons’—was the week in which Parliament met after the Recess, the third week in April. In that week also there began to crop up here and there unexpectedly, beautifully, like the spring flowers, short newspaper notes upon George Mulross Demaine.
They were notes of where he had been, whether he had been there or not,—at least at first they were notes of that kind. There had always been some such notes on him in the papers, but they seemed to be getting numerous.
The public would hear that George Mulross loved his great poodle dog; next that the pressure of his engagements forbade him to open an Enormous[63] Institution for the Cultivation and Study of Virulent Diseases, and in connection with this news the Institution was described at great length, and the passionate regrets at the absence of George Mulross Demaine sounded like a small but perceptible dirge in the corners of the daily press.
He was attacked gently but cleverly in a paper upon his own side of politics; short biographical notes, only a few among several score, gave details of his happy little ways. He was fond of riding, said one author who can have had but little intimacy with her subject; he was fond of children, said another who had even less. He had “an eye for black game,” said a third, whose lack of intimacy included not only George himself but certainly black game as well.
Later came anecdotes of his goodness of heart; how he had run over a boy in the Park with his motor and had then picked him up; and how he had good-humouredly refrained from telling people who he was in the railway accident, and had permitted the wounded to be taken to hospital before he himself would accept conveyance.
Finally, as the month ended, and as May brought in the London season, George Mulross began to find himself uncomfortably prominent. For he very sincerely and very heartily hated fame. He could not so much as upset a glass of wine or stumble over public stairs without hearing his name whispered; and once when he had called at the wrong number,[64] the servant, recognising him from some caricature in the papers, had mentioned his own name to him with reverence, though the door was the door of a house whose occupants he did not know.
Meanwhile the tiny balance at the bank had gone. The overdraft was large and at any moment there might come a note which he dreaded. And Mary Smith had compelled him to look for a small house in Westminster and to make every preparation for leaving Demaine House. He kicked feebly, but she insisted: and even Sudie gave way.
“You haven’t enough to keep the house dry,” Mary said. And she compelled them both to a sense of business which Theocritus himself would have failed to make them feel.
All this business was well advanced when Mary Smith proceeded to the next stage of the campaign.
She carefully looked up the nature of the Court of Dowry, and when she had learned all that she could learn from her books (it took her half a day—though she was a woman of exceptional intelligence and excellent education) she set herself to learn all that could be learned from living men.
The Court of Dowry, in its very survival and still more perhaps in the functions to-day attached to it, affords an admirable example of the value of fixed institutions in the life of a people.
It was originally instituted to try cases falling within the jurisdiction of that Queen Mother of the[65] Middle Ages to whom the poet Gray so pathetically alludes in the striking lines
“She-wolf of France with unrelenting fangs
Tearing the bowels,” etc.
It had cognizance of all Escheats, Novels Tabulate and Malprisions Reguardaunt in the County of Ponthieu and the Seniory of Lucq. But when active jurisdiction over these continental territories was interrupted under King Henry VI., there remained no function for the Court but the trial of cases arising in or without foreign ports upon decks subject to the Crown of England.
It lingered thus into the beginning of the sixteenth century, at which moment it was reduced to a Clerk known as the Mangeur, and a Warden, each holding what were virtually sinecures (and not highly paid sinecures at that) about the Palace.
Henry VIII., whom we cannot call a good but whom surely we may call a great man, rudely suppressed the office of Mangeur with a cruel jest at the executioner’s expense, and only permitted the Wardenship itself to survive on the strict understanding that the salary should be paid to himself. The title, however, remained, a minor distinction among the numerous baubles of the time, and was, if I may so express it, resurrected from obscurity by the great family of Heygate at the moment of the Restoration of Charles II.
In their gladness at their recovery of a legitimate[66] sovereign, this dominant house (now represented by the Parrells) trapped themselves in every accoutrement of joy, and, among other posts, the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry was voted in 1661 an annual salary of ￡2000, for which sum held by the same Act as an hereditary right, the head of the House of Heygate was content to license the annual holding of the Court within the Royal Manor and Liberties of Tooting.
At first this Court sat for one full day in each year—St. Luke’s—but later, from 1731, this session was maintained in fiction alone. A crier in Westminster Hall, at the opening of every Hilary Term, would rapidly read out a list of three fictitious cases which went by default, claim seventeen and sixpence, and for ever after hold his peace.
During the eighteenth century the fixed yearly salary of ￡2000 hereditarily enjoyed by the Heygate family steadily grew, till, by the time of the Reform Bill, it had reached the very considerable sum of ￡15,000, still payable to the Heygates though now all vestige of activity in the office had disappeared.
Our grandfathers, in the zeal of that somewhat iconoclastic moment, swept away the corrupt figment. The emoluments of the post were ruthlessly cut down to the original ￡2000; its hereditary character was, after a violent debate in the House of Lords, destroyed by a majority of over fifty votes, determined (as were so many of the great changes of that time!) by the voice of Eldon. The Detainer of the[67] office (for such was his official title) received in compensation a lump sum of half a million only—not twenty years’ purchase—and certain apparently unimportant functions were attached to the place which from that day forward became an appointment changing with the Administration.
Mark here the silent virtue of organic constitutional growth, and how a gentry can find it possible to create where demagogues would have destroyed.
Point by point and function by function, one marine interest after another attached itself to the Court of Dowry as the beautiful organisms of the sea attach themselves to the ships that plough its waters, until there had grown up round the Court of Dowry by the end of the nineteenth century so considerable a mass of precedent and custom and, with the vast extension of our maritime commerce, duties so manifold and of such moment to the nation, that the office re-emerged after its life of six centuries, an organ of capital importance in the workings of English Government.
As must be the case in any old and secure State, certain anomalous duties were further attached to it: the inspection of patent medicines for instance, the giving out of contracts for buoys and rockets, and the formal stamping of licences to sell sarsaparilla. Even so the wretched and insufficient salary of ￡2000 remained the sole remuneration of the Warden, though the great name of GHERKIN had raised it to be among the foremost posts of the[68] Cabinet, and it had since seen the brilliancy, the learning and the judgment respectively of a Dibley, a Powker and a Hump. By 1912 its strict control over the great steamship lines, its supervision of wrecks, derelicts, Hunnage, Mixings, and Ports Consequent, made it second only to the Foreign Office in the matter of public interest, and, like the Foreign Office, largely removed from the wranglings of party.
Some months later the salary was raised, amid the cheers (as I have said) of a united House, to ￡5000 a year, with a further allowance of ￡5000 for the expenses of entertainment and travel, which fall with peculiar severity upon this great Department; and in the hands of Charles Repton it had risen to be something even more, if that were possible, than GHERKIN had made it.
So much did Mary Smith discover: partly in what she already knew, partly in her reading. The living voices of men told her further things.
It seemed that in the dingy offices which (by a lovely trait in the character of politics!) house this great Department—they stand between Parliament Street and New Scotland Yard—a certain Mr. Sorrel had for now seven years exercised his marvellous and hidden powers, and while all were prepared to admit the genius of Charles Repton, those who best knew the workings of a great Government office, spoke almost as though Mr. Sorrel were in himself the Court of Dowry.
[69]The quaint customs attaching to the office of Warden, the little bells upon the shoes, the bearing of a model ship, bareheaded, upon Empire Day (a recent innovation and one awkward only to the bald or the blind), though to some they seemed a drawback, to others were but an additional attraction, and the ceremony of waggling in backwards upon all fours into the presence of the Sovereign at Inauguration, had been, with perhaps doubtful wisdom, abolished, to suit the eccentric Radicalism of GHERKIN, who refused to take office under any other condition.
The Accolade, or Ceremonial Stroke, however, heavily administered with a beam of ebony across the back of the Warden Accept, was retained and has often afforded a subject for illustration and arch?ological research.
Mary Smith learnt even more. She learnt that while decency forbade any saving to be effected on the further ￡5000 that was an allowance for entertainment and travel, yet custom allowed it to be spent in all forms of hospitality, and that travel might include such social visits as were necessary to the occupant of so high an office. When she learnt this she was but the more confirmed in her determination that Charles Repton who for the moment encumbered the post of Warden, should accept a barony, and that quickly; for she saw the agony of Demaine House already begun. Upon a certain morning in the mid-week of May the last stage of her beneficent action was ready.
[70]
In his study on that same morning, Charles Repton, a little weary but with all his action planned and designed, suffered again for a moment that slight dull pain behind the ears, where Caryll’s Ganglia are: he was dazed. He went out and sought his wife, and she was astonished to see as he put to her some simple question on the management of the household, a look of innocence in his eyes. It quickly faded. The pain also departed, and he returned to his study.
Mary Smith sent a note over to Demaine House.
Mary’s note found George Mulross Demaine risen after a lonely lunch and wondering, as he regularly wondered every day, what was going to turn up.
His wonderment had bewilderment in it also. Something was going to turn up he knew ... people were noticing him so. Only last evening there was a savage attack upon him in the Moon, saying that he had torn Hares to pieces with his own reeking hands, and killed a Carted Stag with a blunt knife; while the Capon, with more truth, had pointed out the beauty of the Sir Joshuas in his house, but had erroneously suggested that they were heirlooms in his family.
He was still gazing at the May morning and gloomily considering the buds in the formal garden, when Mary’s note was forced upon him by a huge Dependant.
A note in the firm hand of Mary Smith was[71] always a pleasant thing to get; for a bewildered man it had something in it of salvation.
George Mulross went in a mood lighter than any he had known for many weeks, towards his cousin’s house. He found her, of course, alone.
“Dimmy,” she said, lifting his hand gently from the chimneypiece where he was moving it aimlessly among several breakable and valuable things,—“Dimmy, when did you last ask a question in the House?”
He looked frightened, and said:
“Oh! ages ago.”
“Now look here, Dimmy,” she said smoothly, “I want you to go and ask this to-day,”—and she handed him a bit of paper.
“Have you got any money in it?” he asked innocently.
“No, certainly not,” she answered. “You silly ass! What could that have to do with it? Read it.”
He read: “Mr. G. M. Demaine: to ask the Prime Minister whether his attention has been called to the fact that the Van Huren Company is not registered in London as the law provides, and what steps he proposes to take in view of this evasion of a public safeguard?”
“What on earth have I to do with that?” he asked, looking up at her, a little put out and evidently unwilling to take any risks. “What is it anyhow?”
“Now look here, Dimmy,” she said, “do be a good fellow: it’s all for your good.”
[72]“Well anyhow,” he said, “I can’t get an answer for two days.”
“Yes you can,” she said, “I’ve sent Dolly a little note typewritten, and signed it in your name; and you can call it a ‘matter of which you have given him private notice.’”
“Oh, you have!” said Demaine, almost moved to energy.
“Yes, I have,” said Mary Smith firmly. “There are a hundred and eight questions to-day; it’s half-past three and you’ve time to get down to the House comfortably. I’ll take you there.”
She did: and amid the general indifference of most members in a crowded House, the amusement of perhaps a couple of dozen, and the red-hot silent rage of at least two, G. M. Demaine in a half-audible voice, mumbled his query.
The Prime Minister received more than a murmur of applause when he answered in his clear and rather high voice that in a matter of such importance and in a moment such as this, it was not to the interest of the country to give a public reply.
If there was one thing George Mulross Demaine dreaded more than another it was to be questioned, and still more to be congratulated, upon things he did not understand. Luckily for him a scene of some violence connected with the religious differences of the Scotch, prevented the immediate opening of the debate at the end of Questions, and he had the opportunity to slip away. But to his[73] terror he found the motor waiting for him and Mary Smith beckoning him from within; like the fascinated bird of the legend he was captured. He hoped that she would drive him to some more congenial air. But no, she produced, from a large and business-like wallet which she only carried in her most imperious moments, two questions to be set down for the day after the morrow.
He took them with a groan and yielded as yield he must to her command that he should set them down. They were of no importance, the one was to his uncle by a second marriage, the First Civil Lord, to ask him the name of a Company that had proved less able than was expected in the manufacture of armour plates; the other to his cousin the Chancellor of the Exchequer asking if the action of some obscure servant of the Treasury in a peaceful Buckinghamshire village had received the attention which his recent services seemed to require.
The day and hour came round. George Mulross in a voice perhaps a little more assured than that of two days before, said when his turn came: “Twenty-nine.”
To his surprise the Chancellor of the Exchequer answered with some tartness that he had nothing whatever to add to his predecessor’s answer of July 9th ten years before, and added amid general approval, that insinuations such as were those contained in the question were greatly to be deplored.
A man of excitable temperament had already[74] leapt to his feet to ask a supplementary question when he was sharply checked by the Chair and the curious incident closed.
Some ten minutes passed and once again, sweating with fear, Demaine heard his name called out and said in a voice still audible: “Fifty-four.—I mean Forty-five.”
The First Lord of the Admiralty rose solemnly in all the dignity of his great white beard, adjusted his spectacles, looked fully at the intruder upon his peace, and said with his unmistakable accent, that the name of the Company could be dithcovered through the ordinary thourceth of information.
So the game continued for ten days. In vain did his friends assure him that he was losing position in the House by this perpetual pose of the puritan and the sleuth hound. Mary Smith was a woman who must be obeyed, and of twenty-three questions which she put into his unwilling lips at least one had gone home. And the First Lord of the Admiralty in the same dignity of the same white beard and with the same striking accent, had admitted the nethethity of thtriking from the litht of contractorth the name of the firm of which, until that moment, the unhappy George Mulross had never even heard.
He knew, he felt, that he, the most blameless of men, was making enemies upon every side. The allusions to his public spirit which were now occasionally to be discovered in the Opposition papers,[75] the little bitter sentences in those which were upon the contrary subsidised by his own party, filled him with an equal dread.
He was in no mood for going further, when upon the top of all this Mary Smith quietly insisted that he must make a speech.
It need not be long: she would write it out for him herself. He must learn it absolutely by heart and must take the greatest care to pronounce the words accurately. She chose a debate in which he could talk more or less at large and put before him as gentle, as well reasoned, as terse and as broad-minded a piece of wisdom as the House might have listened to for many months.
Morning and afternoon, a patient governess, Mary Smith heard him recite that speech; but as day succeeded day she slowly determined that it wouldn’t do. One slip might be his ruin. Upon the tenth rehearsal he still said “very precious” for “meretricious.” He was still unable to restrain a sharp forward movement at the words “I will go a step further”; and he could never get in its right order the simple phrase: “I yield to no one in my admiration for the right honourable gentleman.”
First he would yield to a right honourable gentleman; then no one would yield to him; then he would yield to no admiration, and at last she gave it up in despair.
A woman of less tenacity would have abandoned her design; not so Mary Smith. She discovered[76] with careful art that there was no reason why a Warden of the Court of Dowry should speak in the House at all; he might hold his post for three years and do no more than answer questions, leaving to a subordinate the duty of speaking upon those very rare public Bills, which, however distantly, concerned his office.
She had already made him a name; she was determined not to destroy it by following up this false scent of training him to public speaking. At last, as the month of May was drawing to a close, she determined to put him upon the rails.
Dolly and she were agreed. Perhaps Dimmy would need to be persuaded; he was naturally modest, and what was more he would very certainly be afraid, but still more certainly he wanted money most abominably.
When the day came for him to receive his great illumination she called him to her once more, and once more he found her alone. She lunched him first, and gave him a wine of which she knew he could drink in moderation, for she felt he would need courage; she let him drink his coffee, she lit her own tiny cigar, and at last she said:
“Dimmy, what does it take you to live?”
“I don’t know,” said Dimmy with some terror in his eyes.
Mary Smith looked at him a little quizzically. He did not like those looks though he was fond of her. It made him feel like an animal.
[77]“Dimmy,” she said, “could you and Sudie manage it on seven thousand a year, or say on six thousand?”
Dimmy thought long and painfully. For him there were but two scales of income, the poor and the rich. In the days when it was such a bore to raise a sovereign, he was poor. For nearly two years with an unlimited capital behind him, and about twenty thousand a year for his wife to spend, he had considered himself positively and fixedly among the rich. He had felt comfortable: he had had elbow room. Six thousand pounds puzzled him: it was neither one thing nor the other. A brilliant thought struck him.
“Can you tell me, Mary,” he said gently, “some one who has got about six thousand? I think I could judge then.”
“I can tell you one positively,” said Mary Smith. “Charlie Fitzgerald and his wife. Till the old Yid dies they’ve got six thousand exactly. I ought to know, considering that I went over every scrap of paper in order to make sure of Charlie repaying me.”
“Oh!” said Demaine judicially. “Charlie Fitzgerald and his wife....” He thought for a long time. “Well, they’re pretty comfortable,” he said suddenly. “Of course they haven’t got a place and grounds; I suppose if they had a place and grounds they couldn’t do it.”
“No,” said Mary, “but the house in Westminster is very large when you get inside through the narrow[78] part. When are you going into Westminster, Dimmy?”
“I don’t know,” said Dimmy hopelessly. “Sudie’s got all muddled about it. She saw ‘City of Westminster’ stuck up on one of those khaki Dreadnought hats that the street sweepers wear, an’ the man was getting horrors into a cart right up by our house, an’ she said that where we were was Westminster anyhow. And then when I argued with her she shoved me to the window and pointed out his hat. She was quite rough.” And George Mulross sighed.
Mary Smith got testy. “Don’t talk rubbish,” she said, “and don’t bother me about your wife. Have you looked at anything in Westminster at all?”
“I don’t know,” said Demaine humbly.
“You must know,” said Mary sharply, and with a strong inclination to slap him. “Have you looked in Dean’s Yard, for instance?”
“Yes,” said Demaine, slowly reviewing his perambulations of the last few days. “Yes, I’ve looked at Dean’s Yard. There’s nothing there.... All the rest seems to be so slummy, Mary.”
“There are some exceedingly good new houses,” said Mary severely, “and everybody’s going there; and the old houses are perfectly delicious. Anyhow, Westminster’s the place; and I’ll tell you something else. You’ve got to take office!”
George Mulross, worried as he always was when[79] she began drilling him, on hearing the word “office” said simply:
“Well I won’t, that’s flat. I don’t believe in it. I’ve seen lots of men do that kind of thing. They get to the City and they think they’re learning business, and they’re rooked before....”
“I said ‘TAKE office’!” shouted Mary Smith, “TAKE office—get a post.... Dolly will give you a post. Now do you understand?”
“What?” said Demaine vaguely.
“Dimmy,” she said more quietly but with great firmness, “look at me.”
He looked at her. It was a muscular strain upon his eyes to keep them fixed under her superior will.
“That’s right.... Now listen carefully. The salary of the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry is five thousand a year—and ex’s.”
“Yes,” said Demaine.
“When the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry is vacant—if you play up worth tuppence, it’s yours for the asking. Do ... you ... understand?”
“I don’t know,” repeated George Demaine.
It was as though he had been told that he had been asleep all these years, that his real name was Jones and that he lived in Australia, or as though he had discovered himself to be covered with feathers. He was utterly at sea. Then he said slowly:
“Repton’s Warden of the Court of Dowry.” He was proud of knowing this, for he often blundered about the Cabinet.
[80]“Will you or will you not fix your mind upon what I have said?” said Mary Smith.
The full absurdity of it grew increasingly upon Demaine’s imagination. “The House would think Dolly was mad,” he remarked with really beautiful humility.
“Nonsense!” said Mary Smith in disgust, “the House will know nothing about it one way or the other. The House doesn’t meddle with government—thank God! You’re popular enough I suppose?”
“Oh yes,” said Demaine.
“And you never speak, do you?”
“No,” said Demaine, “only once three years ago, the time I fell down, you know; an’ that was quite short.”
“How many people do you know in the House?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Demaine.
“Oh NONSENSE!... I mean how many people would write to you for instance, and congratulate you?”
Demaine gave it up. But one could see from his demeanour what she had guessed from her own study of the debates and from her great knowledge of London: a month ago people just knew that Demaine was in the House and that was about all. They knew him now as a man whose name they had seen fifty times and who asked questions. A better candidature could not be conceived, and his close family connection with so many men on both front[81] benches would render the appointment reasonable in all eyes.
All sorts of things were lumbering against each other in George Mulross’ brain. He wondered whether one had to know anything, or what one had to do, and how the money was paid; and whether income tax was deducted at source; and how long the Government would stay in. Then the absurdity of it recurred to him.
“Of course there was Pitson,” he murmured, “and everybody laughed and said he was a half-wit,—but he was in with everybody, although he was a half-wit.”
“So are you,” said Mary.
“Yes, but I don’t laugh and go about as he did.”
“It’s against a man to laugh much,” said Mary, “and really, if it comes to going about, even a dog can do that. You’ve only got to go and sniff round people.”
The conversation could not profitably be continued. Demaine had been introduced to the idea, and that was all Mary desired to do.
She sent him home and invited herself that weekend to a house in which she would find Dolly: the Kahns’—but no matter. Dolly was there.
When the Prime Minister saw that dear figure of hers with its promise of importunities he groaned in spirit. She brought him up to the sticking point during a long walk on Sunday afternoon, and he promised her that at least he would sound.
[82]“But I don’t know, Mary,” he said, half trying to retreat, “Repton’s not a man to speak unless he chooses, and he’s like a stone wall against one unless he also chooses to hear.”
“Take him walking as I’m taking you,” said Mary.
It was Sunday, the 31st of May. The weather had begun to be large and open and warm. He thought there was something in what she said.
“Meet him as he comes out of his house to-morrow. Do you know when he comes out?”
“Yes,” said the Prime Minister a little shamefacedly, “I do. It’s always half-past nine.”
“Well,” said Mary, “I really don’t see what your trouble is.”
“It’s an absurd hour to catch a man, half-past nine—and I should have to get up God knows when—besides to-morrow’s a bad day,” said the Premier, pressing his lips together when he had spoken. “It’s a bad moment. It’s a big week for him. He’s got a dinner on that’s something to do with his dam companies to-morrow evening. I know that. And then Tuesday he’s got that big Van Diemens meeting in the City. And before the end of the week, I know he’s talking at the big Wycliffite Conference—I can’t remember the day though. Pottle told me about it.”
They had turned to go home, and Mary Smith for the first hundred yards or so was honestly wondering in her mind why men found so difficult what women find so easy.
[83]“I’ve told you what to do,” she said. “Catch him by accident outside his house as he leaves after breakfast, then he’ll walk with you. Say you’re walking. Anything can be said when one’s walking.”
“Are you sure he’ll come with me?” asked the Prime Minister.
“Positive!” said Mary Smith in a very quiet tone.
The air was serene above them, and one lark had found his way so high that they could hardly hear him singing. The Prime Minister wished from the bottom of his heart that he could live in that field for a week. He rose to one despairing rally:
“Mary,” he said, “suppose it rains?”
“Oh Dolly, Dolly, Dolly!” she answered, stopping short and standing in front of him. “It’s for all the world as though you were just back from school for the last time, and I was a little girl who had been sent for on the grand occasion to tea.”
She put both hands on his awkward shoulders to stop him, and she kissed him anywhere upon the face.
“It won’t rain, Dolly,” she said, “I’ve seen to that.”