‘I knew you at once,’ said Pallant, the trained M.P., and I promptly backed the lie. Woodhouse mumbled excuses. Bat Masquerier was not moved for or against us any more than the frontage of one of his own palaces.
‘I always tell My people there’s a limit to the size of the lettering,’ he said. ‘Overdo that and the ret’na doesn’t take it in. Advertisin’ is the most delicate of all the sciences.’
‘There’s one man in the world who is going to get a little of it if I live for the next twenty-four hours,’ said Woodhouse, and explained how this would come about.
Masquerier stared at him lengthily with gun-metal-blue eyes.
‘You mean it?’ he drawled; the voice was as magnetic as the look.
‘I do,’ said Ollyett. ‘That business of the horn alone ought to have him off the Bench in three months.’ Masquerier looked at him even longer than he had looked at Woodhouse.
‘He told me,’ he said suddenly, ‘that my home-address was Jerusalem. You heard that?’
‘But it was the tone – the tone,’ Ollyett cried.
‘You noticed that, too, did you?’ said Masquerier. ‘That’s the artistic temperament. You can do a lot with it. And I’m Bat Masquerier,’ he went on. He dropped his chin in his fists and scowled straight in front of him … ‘I made the Silhouettes – I made the Trefoil and the Jocunda. I made ’Dal Benzaguen.’ Here Ollyett sat straight up, for in common with the youth of that year he worshipped Miss Vidal Benzaguen of the Trefoil immensely and unreservedly. ‘ “Is that a dressing-gown or an ulster you’re supposed to be wearing?” You heard that? … “And I suppose you hadn’t time to brush your hair either?” You heard that? … Now, you hear me!’ His voice filled the coffee-room, then dropped to a whisper as dreadful as a surgeon’s before an operation. He spoke for several minutes. Pallant muttered ‘Hear! hear!’ I saw Ollyett’s eye flash – it was to Ollyett that Masquerier addressed himself chiefly, – and Woodhouse leaned forward with joined hands.
‘Are you with me?’ he went on, gathering us all up in one sweep of the arm. ‘When I begin a thing I see it through, gentlemen. What Bat can’t break, breaks him! But I haven’t struck that thing yet. This is no one-turn turn-it-down show. This is business to the dead finish. Are you with me, gentlemen? Good! Now, we’ll pool our assets. One London morning, and one provincial daily, didn’t you say? One weekly commercial ditto and one M.P.’
‘Not much use, I’m afraid,’ Pallant smirked.
‘But privileged. But privileged,’ he returned. ‘And we have also my little team – London, Blackburn, Liverpool, Leeds – I’ll tell you about Manchester later – and Me! Bat Masquerier.’ He breathed the name reverently into his tankard. ‘Gentlemen, when our combination has finished with Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., and everything else that is his, Sodom and Gomorrah will be a winsome bit of Merrie England beside ’em. I must go back to town now, but I trust you gentlemen will give me the pleasure of your company at dinner to-night at the Chop Suey – the Red Amber Room – and we’ll block out the scenario.’ He laid his hand on young Ollyett’s shoulder and added: ‘It’s your brains I want.’ Then he left, in a good deal of astrakhan collar and nickel-plated limousine, and the place felt less crowded.
We ordered our car a few minutes later. As Woodhouse, Ollyett and I were getting in, Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., came out of the Hall of Justice across the square and mounted his horse. I have sometimes thought that if he had gone in silence he might even then have been saved, but as he settled himself in the saddle he caught sight of us and must needs shout: ‘Not off yet? You’d better get away and you’d better be careful.’ At that moment Pallant, who had been buying picture-postcards, came out of the inn, took Sir Thomas’s eye and very leisurely entered the car. It seemed to me that for one instant there was a shade of uneasiness on the baronet’s grey-whiskered face.
‘I hope,’ said Woodhouse after several miles, ‘I hope he’s a widower.’
‘Yes,’ said Pallant. ‘For his poor, dear wife’s sake I hope that, very much indeed. I suppose he didn’t see me in Court. Oh, here’s the parish history of Huckley written by the Rector and here’s your share of the picture-postcards. Are we all dining with this Mr Masquerier to-night?’
‘Yes!’ said we all.
If Woodhouse knew nothing of journalism, young Ollyett, who had graduated in a hard school, knew a good deal. Our halfpenny evening paper, which we will call The Bun to distinguish her from her prosperous morning sister, The Cake, was not only diseased but corrupt. We found this out when a man brought us the prospectus of a new oil-field and demanded sub-leaders on its prosperity. Ollyett talked pure Brasenose to him for three minutes. Otherwise he spoke and wrote trade-English – a toothsome amalgam of Americanisms and epigrams. But though the slang changes the game never alters, and Ollyett and I and, in the end, some others enjoyed it immensely. It was weeks ere we could see the wood for the trees, but so soon as the staff realised that they had proprietors who backed them right or wrong, and specially when they were wrong (which is the sole secret of journalism), and that their fate did not hang on any passing owner’s passing mood, they did miracles.
But we did not neglect Huckley. As Ollyett said our first care was to create an ‘arresting atmosphere’ round it. He used to visit the village of week-ends, on a motor-bicycle with a side-car; for which reason I left the actual place alone and dealt with it in the abstract. Yet it was I who drew first blood. Two inhabitants of Huckley wrote to contradict a small, quite solid paragraph in The Bun that a hoopoe had been seen at Huckley and had, ‘of course, been shot by the local sportsmen.’ There was some heat in their letters, both of which we published. Our version of how the hoopoe got his crest from King Solomon was, I grieve to say, so inaccurate that the Rector himself – no sportsman as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy – wrote to us to correct it. We gave his letter good space and thanked him.
‘This priest is going to be useful,’ said Ollyett. ‘He has the impartial mind. I shall vitalise him.’
Forthwith he created M. L. Sigden, a recluse of refined tastes who in The Bun demanded to know whether this Huckley-of-the-Hoopoe was the Hugly of his boyhood and whether, by any chance, the fell change of name had been wrought by collusion between a local magnate and the railway, in the mistaken interests of spurious refinement. ‘For I knew it and loved it with the maidens of my day – eheu ab angulo! – as Hugly,’ wrote M. L. Sigden from Oxford.
Though other papers scoffed, The Bun was gravely sympathetic. Several people wrote to deny that Huckley had been changed at birth. Only the Rector – no philosopher as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy – had his doubts, which he laid publicly before Mr M. L. Sigden, who suggested, through The Bun, that the little place might have begun life in Anglo-Saxon days as ‘Hogslea’ or among the Normans as ‘Argilé,’ on account of its much clay. The Rector had his own ideas too (he said it was mostly gravel), and M. L. Sigden had a fund of reminiscences. Oddly enough – which is seldom the case with free reading-matter – our subscribers rather relished the correspondence, and contemporaries quoted freely.
‘The secret of power,’ said Ollyett, ‘is not the big stick. It’s the liftable stick.’ (This means the ‘arresting’ quotation of six or seven lines.) ‘Did you see the Spec. had a middle on “Rural Tenacities” last week. That was all Huckley. I’m doing a “Mobiquity” on Huckley next week.’
Our ‘Mobiquities’ were Friday evening accounts of easy motor-bike-cum-side-car trips round London, illustrated (we could never get that machine to work properly) by smudgy maps. Ollyett wrote the stuff with a fervour and a delicacy which I always ascribed to the side-car. His account of Epping Forest, for instance, was simply young love with its soul at its lips. But his Huckley ‘Mobiquity’ would have sickened a soap-boiler. It chemically combined loathsome familiarity, leering suggestion, slimy piety and rancid ‘social service’ in one fuming compost that fairly lifted me off my feet.
‘Yes,’ said he, after compl
iments. ‘It’s the most vital, arresting and dynamic bit of tump I’ve done up to date. Non nobis gloria! I met Sir Thomas Ingell in his own park. He talked to me again. He inspired most of it.’
‘Which? The “glutinous native drawl,” or “the neglected adenoids of the village children”?’ I demanded.
‘Oh, no! That’s only to bring in the panel doctor. It’s the last flight we – I’m proudest of.’
This dealt with ‘the crepuscular penumbra spreading her dim limbs over the boskage’; with ‘jolly rabbits’; with a herd of ‘gravid polled Angus’; and with the ‘arresting, gipsy-like face of their swart, scholarly owner – as well known at the Royal Agricultural Shows as that of our late King-Emperor’.
‘ “Swart” is good and so’s “gravid”, ’ said I, ‘but the panel doctor will be annoyed about the adenoids.’
‘Not half as much as Sir Thomas will about his face,’ said Ollyett. ‘And if you only knew what I’ve left out!’
He was right. The panel doctor spent his week-end (this is the advantage of Friday articles) in overwhelming us with a professional counterblast of no interest whatever to our subscribers. We told him so, and he, then and there, battered his way with it into the Lancet where they are keen on glands, and forgot us altogether. But Sir Thomas Ingell was of sterner stuff. He must have spent a happy week-end too. The letter which we received from him on Monday proved him to be a kinless loon of upright life, for no woman, however remotely interested in a man, would have let it pass the home wastepaper-basket. He objected to our references to his own herd, to his own labours in his own village, which he said was a Model Village, and to our infernal insolence; but he objected most to our invoice of his features. We wrote him courteously to ask whether the letter was meant for publication. He, remembering, I presume, the Duke of Wellington, wrote back, ‘publish and be damned.’
‘Oh! This is too easy,’ Ollyett said as he began heading the letter.
‘Stop a minute,’ I said. ‘The game is getting a little beyond us. To-night’s the Bat dinner.’ (I may have forgotten to tell you that our dinner with Bat Masquerier in the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey had come to be a weekly affair.) ‘Hold it over till they’ve all seen it.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘You might waste it.’
At dinner, then, Sir Thomas’s letter was handed round. Bat seemed to be thinking of other matters, but Pallant was very interested.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said presently. ‘Could you put something into The Bun to-morrow about foot-and-mouth disease in that fellow’s herd?’
‘Oh, plague if you like,’ Ollyett replied. ‘They’re only five measly Shorthorns. I saw one lying down in the park. She’ll serve as a substratum of fact.’
‘Then, do that; and hold the letter over meanwhile. I think I come in here,’ said Pallant.
‘Why?’ said I.
‘Because there’s something coming up in the House about foot-and-mouth, and because he wrote me a letter after that little affair when he fined you. ’Took ten days to think it over. Here you are,’ said Pallant. ‘House of Commons paper, you see.’
We read:
DEAR PALLANT – Although in the past our paths have not lain much together, I am sure you will agree with me that on the floor of the House all members are on a footing of equality. I make bold, therefore, to approach you in a matter which I think capable of a very different interpretation from that which perhaps was put upon it by your friends. Will you let them know that that was the case and that I was in no way swayed by animus in the exercise of my magisterial duties, which as you, as a brother magistrate, can imagine are frequently very distasteful to – Yours very sincerely,
T. INGELL.
P.S. – I have seen to it that the motor vigilance to which your friends took exception has been considerably relaxed in my district.
‘What did you answer?’ said Ollyett, when all our opinions had been expressed.
‘I told him I couldn’t do anything in the matter. And I couldn’t – then. But you’ll remember to put in that foot-and-mouth paragraph. I want something to work upon.’
‘It seems to me The Bun has done all the work up to date,’ I suggested. ‘When does The Cake come in?’
‘The Cake,’ said Woodhouse, and I remembered afterwards that he spoke like a Cabinet Minister on the eve of a Budget, ‘reserves to itself the fullest right to deal with situations as they arise.’
‘Ye-eh!’ Bat Masquerier shook himself out of his thoughts. ‘ “Situations as they arise.” I ain’t idle either. But there’s no use fishing till the swim’s baited. You’ – he turned to Ollyett – ‘manufacture very good ground-bait … I always tell My people— What the deuce is that?’
There was a burst of song from another private dining-room across the landing. ‘It ees some ladies from the Trefoil,’ the waiter began.
‘Oh, I know that. What are they singing, though?’
He rose and went out, to be greeted by shouts of applause from that merry company. Then there was silence, such as one hears in the form-room after a master’s entry. Then a voice that we loved began again: ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May – nuts in May – nuts in May!’
‘It’s only ’Dal – and some nuts,’ he explained when he returned. ‘She says she’s coming in to dessert.’ He sat down, humming the old tune to himself, and till Miss Vidal Benzaguen entered, he held us speechless with tales of the artistic temperament.
We obeyed Pallant to the extent of slipping into The Bun a wary paragraph about cows lying down and dripping at the mouth, which might be read either as an unkind libel or, in the hands of a capable lawyer, as a piece of faithful nature-study.
‘And besides,’ said Ollyett, ‘we allude to “gravid polled Angus”. I am advised that no action can lie in respect of virgin Shorthorns. Pallant wants us to come to the House to-night. He’s got us places for the Strangers’ Gallery. I’m beginning to like Pallant.’
‘Masquerier seems to like you,’ I said.
‘Yes, but I’m afraid of him,’ Ollyett answered with perfect sincerity. ‘I am. He’s the Absolutely Amoral Soul. I’ve never met one yet.’
We went to the House together. It happened to be an Irish afternoon, and as soon as I had got the cries and the faces a little sorted out, I gathered there were grievances in the air, but how many of them was beyond me.
‘It’s all right,’ said Ollyett of the trained ear. ‘They’ve shut their ports against – oh yes – export of Irish cattle! Foot-and-mouth disease at Ballyhellion. I see Pallant’s idea!’
The House was certainly all mouth for the moment, but, as I could feel, quite in earnest. A Minister with a piece of typewritten paper seemed to be fending off volleys of insults. He reminded me somehow of a nervous huntsman breaking up a fox in the face of rabid hounds.
‘It’s question-time. They’re asking questions,’ said Ollyett. ‘Look! Pallant’s up.’
There was no mistaking it. His voice, which his enemies said was his one parliamentary asset, silenced the hubbub as toothache silences mere singing in the ears. He said:
‘Arising out of that, may I ask if any special consideration has recently been shown in regard to any suspected outbreak of this disease on this side of the Channel?’
He raised his hand; it held a noon edition of The Bun. We had thought it best to drop the paragraph out of the later ones. He would have continued, but something in a grey frock-coat roared and bounded on a bench opposite, and waved another Bun. It was Sir Thomas Ingell.
‘As the owner of the herd so dastardly implicated—’ His voice was drowned in shouts of ‘Order!’ – the Irish leading.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked Ollyett. ‘He’s got his hat on his head, hasn’t he?’
‘Yes, but his wrath should have been put as a question.’
‘Arising out of that, Mr Speaker, Sirrr!’ Sir Thomas bellowed through a lull, ‘are you aware that – that all this is a conspiracy – part of a dastardly conspiracy to mak
e Huckley ridiculous – to make us ridiculous? Part of a deep-laid plot to make me ridiculous, Mr Speaker, Sir!’
The man’s face showed almost black against his white whiskers, and he struck out swimmingly with his arms. His vehemence puzzled and held the House for an instant, and the Speaker took advantage of it to lift his pack from Ireland to a new scent. He addressed Sir Thomas Ingell in tones of measured rebuke, meant also, I imagine, for the whole House, which lowered its hackles at the word. Then Pallant, shocked and pained: ‘I can only express my profound surprise that in response to my simple question the honourable member should have thought fit to indulge in a personal attack. If I have in any way offended—’
Again the Speaker intervened, for it appeared that he regulated these matters.
He, too, expressed surprise, and Sir Thomas sat back in a hush of reprobation that seemed to have the chill of the centuries behind it. The Empire’s work was resumed.
‘Beautiful!’ said I, and I felt hot and cold up my back.
‘And now we’ll publish his letter,’ said Ollyett.
We did – on the heels of his carefully reported outburst. We made no comment. With that rare instinct for grasping the heart of a situation which is the mark of the Anglo-Saxon, all our contemporaries and, I should say, two-thirds of our correspondents demanded how such a person could be made more ridiculous than he had already proved himself to be. But beyond spelling his name ‘Injle,’ we alone refused to hit a man when he was down.
‘There’s no need,’ said Ollyett. ‘The whole press is on the huckle from end to end.’
Even Woodhouse was a little astonished at the ease with which it had come about, and said as much.
‘Rot!’ said Ollyett. ‘We haven’t really begun. Huckley isn’t news yet.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Woodhouse, who had grown to have great respect for his young but by no means distant connection.
‘Mean? By the grace of God, Master Ridley, I mean to have it so that when Huckley turns over in its sleep, Reuters and the Press Association jump out of bed to cable.’ Then he went off at score about certain restorations in Huckley Church which, he said – and he seemed to spend his every week-end there – had been perpetrated by the Rector’s predecessor, who had abolished a ‘leper-window’ or a ‘squinch-hole’ (whatever these may be) to institute a lavatory in the vestry. It did not strike me as stuff for which Reuters or the Press Association would lose much sleep, and I left him declaiming to Woodhouse about a fourteenth-century font which, he said, he had unearthed in the sexton’s tool-shed.
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1 Page 75