At Grillion’s, the famous dining-club of the elder statesmen, the speech received attention that evening. Said R.T., with that generosity of his which was due as much to his philosophic detachment as to a warmth of heart:
“It was the speech of a man bred in the modern tradition. It wasn’t sing-song, it wasn’t a lecture, it wasn’t oratory and, thank Heaven, it wasn’t rhetoric. It was conversation on a plane above conversation — conversation sharpened to a point by just phrases and a progression of ideas.”
The veteran statesman had done a really generous action that afternoon. The subject of the debate was the Naval Estimates, which at that time, owing to the rapid development of the German navy and the bellicose drum-beating which played it in, were being watched with profound interest in England. “R.T.,” as he was affectionately known, moved a reduction of a hundred pounds in the First Lord’s salary in order to call attention to the dangerous parsimony of the Admiralty in the matter of high explosive ammunition. It was understood that the First Lord himself would reply at eleven o’clock to the whole debate, and a good many members were leaving their places when Mark Thewliss was called upon. But the traditional courtesy of the place prevailed over the attractions of the lobby and the smoking-room.
“Who is this fellow?” asked Colonel Westram, a dapper, genial politician with the safest seat in England and a fresh carnation every day resplendent in his button-hole.
“Thewliss. He’s head of one of the big dye industries,” replied the Colonel’s neighbour, fixing a critical eyeglass in his eye. “Looks all right. But he doesn’t give me the impression that he’s going to cut much of a figure here.”
“Wait a bit,” said the Colonel.
Thewliss had begun his speech in a voice which sounded intolerably thin to his own ears, and indeed was discouragingly weak to his audience. There flashed into that disobedient secondary consciousness which will begin its aggravating functions at the most unaccommodating moments, a long procession of people who had failed when they first sought the attention of the House of Commons, from Phineas Finn in fiction to the young Disraeli in reality.
Then he took a hold upon himself. He had, after all, an argument of his own based upon facts of his own. That the surplus of high explosives should be small was wisdom and not parsimony. The ingredients such as picric acid, of which as a chemist concerned with synthetic dyes he knew something, could not be mixed and stored for long periods without losing their effectiveness. He gave shortly and in a formula which could be understood the ratio of loss. To keep a huge accumulation of such ammunition would only encourage a confidence which in the day of trial would be disastrous...And suddenly he was aware that his voice had volume, and was reaching without one high forced note, to every corner of the Chamber. Here and there a member, fetched out of the smoking-room or the lobby or the reading-room, by the word that something real was being said, slipped quietly into a seat near to the door by which he had entered. And no one went away. Thewliss’ secondary consciousness got to work again with an even subtler malevolence, determined to thwart him, insistent that he should fail. It began to whisper to him:
“This is power. This is what you have lived for. The sensation of power. The hour on the Alpine peak You’re a novice and all these members, experts in speeches, many of them sated with thirty years of speeches, are listening to yours. Isn’t it good? ISN’T IT GOOD?”
The secondary consciousness grew clamorous. Thewliss could not but respond. An intoxication of pleasure which was nothing less than voluptuous ran through his veins — and suddenly his mind went blank. There was even a darkness before his eyes. He babbled a word or two, he saw here and there a curious glance directed at him, and the sight gave back to him his wits.
The remedy for the deficiency in high explosives was not to be found in an accumulation of old shells. It was to be sought for in the capacity for rapid mobilisation of all the factories which could be adapted to the manufacture of new ones. Pre-eminent amongst them were those which in peace-time were devoted to the production of dyes. His speech was marching again now — measured, resonant, convincing. He could promise — he had the authority to promise on behalf of his fellow manufacturers and chemists — that at the first hint of need their men, their knowledge, their stocks, their laboratories and machines would be ungrudgingly placed at the disposal of the crown, whatever government ruled the country. The pity was there were so few of them. If the Government could only see its way so far to reform the patent laws that foreigners should be prevented from taking out patents and then leaving them unworked, so that without fear of rivalry they could produce at their ease in their own country, the opportunities upon which the Government could in an emergency rely would be enormously increased.
Thewliss sat down amidst a generous good-will. He had spoken for twenty minutes — the right length. He had made a contribution. Even the little plea at the end of his speech which should help his own particular interests, did him no harm. It had been so deftly introduced that it seemed a necessary part of his argument; and just for that reason it provoked an admiring amusement in an assembly never without its cynics. The Prime Minister turned round and shook him by the hand, and crowning generosity and crowning triumph, the great leader with whom he had contended sauntered round behind the Speaker’s chair and sat by his side for a few minutes with words of praise.
“I told you so,” said the young Whip, sidling along the bench to him half an hour later. “Now you must sit through the rest of this debate. The House of Commons doesn’t give twopence for men who shoot in, fire off their bit, and go galumphing away. Dine here and don’t take more than three-quarters of an hour. I’ll get three or four fellows and we’ll go round to the club and have supper afterwards.”
At supper the conversation turned, as on such occasions it will, to the making of careers.
“Hard work doesn’t do it,” said one of them, a shrewd and wealthy landowner, who hunted his own hounds, ran his own county, and carried a great name as great names should be carried. “Hard work leaves you a clerk. You’ve got to have luck and a guiding principle, learnt early in life and clung to. Now you!” he turned to Thewliss. “You are over forty. You are a rich man, you’re in the House, you’ve made a success there, and you tell me you come out of nowhere. What’s your guiding principle?”
“I have two,” Thewliss answered instantly. “One, to know what I know. The other just as simple, and I think just as rare. To want what I want.”
VIII. ACCORDING TO PLAN
“WELL, WHAT IS it to be?” Catherstone asked of Mark Thewliss a few days afterwards. It was seven o’clock in the evening and Catherstone was on the door. His business was to make sure that of the members hurrying out of the Lobby cloister to Palace Yard and their dinners, enough would return to protect the Government from a snap-vote. His conversation, therefore, was a little disjointed. It ran: “You will be back by ten o’clock, won’t you, Mr. Doby?...Well, what is it to be, Thewliss?...Have you got your pair, Freddie?...All right. What is it to be?” and he pulled Thewliss down on to the cushioned seat beside the door. “The rough and tumble? Or the occasional set speech with the red carpet down?”
“The rough and tumble,” Thewliss answered.
“I am glad to hear it. Debate’s the life-blood of the House, set speeches only its jewellery,” Catherstone agreed cordially. But one of his duties was to persuade the new members that loquacity was the privilege of the Front Bench and silent admiration the fitting decoration of those who sat behind. So he added: “But not too often, of course.”
The warning was unnecessary. Mark Thewliss was too shrewd and too busy to waste the small prestige he had acquired by incursions into controversies where he had nothing to contribute. But he sat assiduously in the Chamber, speaking now and then briefly in the committee stages of a Bill to an argument which he could demolish or reinforce, and twice only, during the rest of the long session, for some twenty minutes on the broader questions of principles of policy.
By the time when the House had risen in August, Mark Thewliss had risen too into the small company of the coming men.
It followed that a good many houses of which he only knew the exterior opened their doors to him. To make room for them he closed a good many doors himself. He had no compunction. It was all according to plan and therefore satisfactory. He was on the march. Old friends meant nothing to a man who had no friends at all. He moved down from Highgate to Mayfair, and at the first turn of the road Highgate ceased to be. A small house in Grosvenor Street received him; furniture chosen with a fastidious care ministered to his pride of ownership; the best chef whom money could hire cooked for him; and during such spare time as he could snatch, he proceeded to put into practice a number of little schemes excogitated against just this occasion during the years of bivouac at Highgate.
Soon after Parliament resumed he began to give a series of small dinner parties at which wines, food and guests were so choicely matched that in a very short time to receive an invitation to one of them became a tiny mark of distinction. And he was most careful not to advertise them.
“Advertisement is necessary,” he had been heard to say amongst those acquaintances whose reminiscences could not trouble him now, “but the best way to advertise is by not advertising, by declaring from every roof-top at the full pressure of your lungs that you stand aloof from such vulgarity.”
Thus he never granted an interview, but he would explain to the would-be interviewer why. His busy life amongst his beloved chemicals and his public duties left him leisure so scant that he was jealous of every instant of it. And such explanations appeared of course in print, attesting a rare modesty and widely resounding to his credit. But he cultivated with care the high dignitaries of the press; and whenever he made some small success of value to a man on the march, a flattering little letter would be written in his own hand to one of them; and the dignitaries being friendly and human, saw through the flattery and printed the useful occurrence amongst the items of public news. He had a remarkable flair for the men who were going to succeed, and the swiftest forgetfulness of the old Caspars who had served their turn.
“Never neglect the little things,” he warned himself; and so he had a blue door to his house. It was the only blue door in the street.
“I am afraid my little blue door won’t open itself to interviewers, however winningly they knock,” he would write, and the interviewers would in default of their interview make up the cleverest fables about that little blue door, until in a very short time it became quite a famous object in Grosvenor Street.
“There it is! That’s the door. Mark Thewliss’ house, isn’t it? A remarkable character according to all accounts. And he never advertises. Unusual in these days, eh? But it’s a fact. I read in the Daily Telescope only yesterday that he didn’t and wouldn’t. A type one respects.”
And even those who could never walk along Grosvenor Street, the inhabitants of Aberdeen and Glasgow, dwellers in far Cornwall and the great noisy cities of Northern England, got gradually to know of a personage of a most resounding reticence who was hidden behind a blue door in Mayfair.
All was going according to plan. With the opening of the second session of Parliament the little dinner parties were resumed. One or two of the familiar figures were dropped out — they were disappointing people who had lost their hold upon the public — and one or two new ones were set up in their places, fine talkative fellows on the very froth of success. Certainly Mark Thewliss was on the march all through this year under summer skies. He looked up at them often enough. For though his class-room had been a laboratory, and he knew nothing of the Greek dramatists but their names, he had an instinctive fear of the insolence which brings disaster in its train. He was wary of the great fist with the mallet which had dashed so many of his kind bleeding to the earth. He felt sure that he would notice the mere shadow of it in time to dodge, though it struck never so swiftly. But what if the shadow were at first but an extra depth of blue in the summer sky, and recognisable only as a marvellous new decoration to the splendour of his world?
At any rate, the month of June in the following year was memorable in Mark’s career. He made a speech of some consequence upon English policy in the Near East, and walked home afterwards with Catherstone.
“That should settle the question of office, I think,” said the young Whip. The under-secretaryship for the Colonies had just become vacant. “I have seldom heard a better speech. How is it you know so much about the Near East?”
Mark Thewliss waked from the consideration of what was apparently some heavy matter of a different kind.
“My business,” he replied. “The Near East is a great market for me.” He stopped at his door. “I wish you would come in for a moment. I would like to ask you a question or two which you could answer off-hand. But the answers would be of great value to me.”
Catherstone was a little alarmed. He had a fear that he might be asked to reveal Cabinet secrets, and since he did not know any he would be put to it to maintain his importance.
“Very well,” he said reluctantly.
Thewliss led his companion to a small and pleasant book-lined room at the back of the house, sat him down in a deep arm-chair with a whisky and soda at his elbow and himself took his stand upon the hearthrug.
“Now,” he said, without the least embarrassment. “For the first time in my life I am going to spend a week-end at a country house.”
Young Lord Catherstone sat up and stared.
“For the first time!” he exclaimed. “But you are joking!”
“Not a bit of it. I have been asked several times, but I have always refused the invitation. For one thing, I got Saturday and Sunday, two clear days, for my business affairs and my laboratory. For another, I knew nothing about the routine and did not wish to make a whole heap of mistakes.”
“Where are you going?” asked Catherstone.
“To Colonel Westram’s.”
“Tony’s? Oh, you can’t make mistakes there. There isn’t any routine.”
“I am glad to hear it,” Mark observed. “Nevertheless, I should like some information. I want you to take me hour by hour through the normal life of a visitor in a country house, beginning with his arrival on Friday afternoon and ending with his departure on Monday morning.”
Week-end visits were so customary a feature of Catherstone’s existence that he was put to it to formulate the passage of the hours and their occupations.
“Let me think,” he said. “You play golf, of course?”
“I don’t know an iron from a brassy, or a niblick from a putter.”
“Good Lord!”
Catherstone stared at Mark Thewliss in amazement. The man looked hard enough certainly.
“What in the world do you do with yourself on your holidays?”
“On a real holiday I sail a top-sail schooner. For other occasions I have a racing dinghy on the Broads.”
“Well, neither of them is going to help you in Berkshire, my friend. It’s a pity you don’t play golf. You can get away from the mob, and you’re no bother to your host.” He looked at Mark and pointed a threatening finger. “If you don’t watch it, you’ll find yourself seeing the neighbourhood in a wagonette with the ladies.”
“Heaven forbid!”
Catherstone had a sudden hope.
“Do you fish?”
“I’ve caught some mackerel.”
“There aren’t any mackerel in the Test,” cried Catherstone in despair. “Well, here goes! You arrive at half-past six on Friday evening in your own motorcar “ — and he described hour by hour, as he was bidden, the life that Thewliss might be expected to lead, and with a sigh of relief dispatched him back along the Bath Road at half-past nine on the Monday morning.
“Your host will sigh with relief, too,” Catherstone said grimly. “Luckily, it’s Tony Westram.” He laughed as he lifted himself out of the arm-chair. “As a matter of fact, you’ll enjoy yourself thoroughly. Everyone does at Gissens. Good
night.”
Young Catherstone, as befitted his age and the month, went off to change his clothes and betake himself to half a dozen parties. Mark Thewliss, now that the programme of his movements was clear, dismissed the visit from his mind. Country house visits would no doubt be rather a bore, but a few of them would be necessary and according to plan. That the plan, during two fateful days, was amazingly to expand and embrace as definite purposes mere dreams which had been toyed with, he would not have believed. But, as we have seen, his education had not taught him that Achilles had a heel. Frankenstein’s monster astonished his creator; and when the robot comes at last there will be some alloy in his metal which will turn him human in the end. Love of woman is the usual factor. But it was a very complicated form of it which was to interfere with the works of Mark Thewliss.
IX. ANGELA IS NOT DISAPPOINTED
ACCORDING TO PLAN, then, on the Friday afternoon Mark turned his car to the left, off the wide thoroughfare ten miles beyond Newbury. For three miles more he twisted amongst lanes deep in the greenery of trees and hedgerows and came to a great rectangle of a house set in a park trim with white five-barred gates. The flat, oblong windows looked across a wide space of lawn to the famous river. Big elms spread their shade over rich pastures; in a field hay-makers were turning the swathes, and between the hayfield and the house a rose garden tossed its scent and colour in the air. Tony Westram came from the field in his shirt sleeves with his hay-fork in his hand.
“I don’t suppose you’ll find a soul in the house,” he cried. He was aglow like his own rose-garden, and he conducted his conversation, as was his wont, at the top of his voice.
“We’re hardly more than the family. My little girl Angela, a nephew Derek Crayle, a good boy who has just joined my old regiment. He’s over there.” Colonel Westram pointed across the lawn to a youth who was standing back behind a bush and casting a line very carefully over a pool of the river.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 593