The Secret of the League: The Story of a Social War

"'From the definite nature of this statement you will gather that the negotiations are more than in the air. The distribution of Cabinet offices will have to be considered at once. B – might be first gained over with the offer of the Exchequer. He carries great weight with a considerable section of his party, and is dissatisfied with his recognition so far. Heape is a representative man who would repay early attention, especially as he is, at the moment, envious of R – 's better treatment. But these are matters of detail. The great thing is to get back on any terms. Once in power, by a modification of the franchise we might make good our position. I trust that this, a desperate remedy in a desperate time, will earn at least your tacit acquiescence. Much is irretrievably lost; England remains – yet.

"Yours sincerely,

"John Hampden.'"

Six men were on their feet before the signature was reached. With an impatient gesture Strummery waved them collectively aside.

"We all know your opinion on the writer and the letter, and we can all put it into our own words without wasting time in listening," he said with suppressed fury. "In five minutes' time I shall entirely reopen the consideration of the reports which we met this afternoon to discuss."

"Has any effort been made to learn the nature of Estair's reply?" enquired Tirrel. If he was not the least moved man in the room he was the least perturbed, and he instinctively picked out the only point of importance that remained.

"It probably does not exist in writing," replied Mr Tubes, avoiding Tirrel's steady gaze. "I find that he arrived in town last night. There would certainly be a meeting."

"Was Bannister summoned to this Council?" demanded another. It was taken for granted that "B" stood for Bannister.

"Yes," replied the Premier, with one eye on his watch. "He was indisposed."

"I protest against the reference to myself," said Heape coldly.

Mr Strummery nodded. "Time's up," he announced.

That is the "secret history" of the Government's sudden and inexplicable conversion to the necessity of the Minimum Wage Bill and to the propriety of imposing the Personal Property Tax. A fortnight later the Prime Minister outlined the programme in the course of a speech at Newcastle. The announcement was received almost with stupefaction. For the first time in history, property – money, merchandise, personal belongings – was to be saddled with an annual tax apart from, and in addition to, the tax it paid on the incomes derived from it. It was an entire wedge of the extreme policy that must end in Partition. It was more than the poorer classes had dared to hope; it was more than the tax-paying classes had dared to fear. It marked a new era of extended privilege for the one; it marked the final extinction of hope even among the hopeful for the other.

"It could not have happened more opportunely for us even if we had arranged it in every detail," declared Hampden, going into Salt's room with the tidings in huge delight, a fortnight later.

"No," agreed Salt, looking up with his slow, pleasant smile. "Not even if we had arranged it."

CHAPTER X

THE ORDER OF ST MARTIN OF TOURS

Sir John Hampden paused for a moment with arrested pen. He had been in the act of crossing off another day on the calendar that hung inside his desk, the last detail before he pulled the roll-top down for the night, when the date had caught his eye with a sudden meaning.

"A week to-day, Salt," he remarked, looking up.

"A week to-day," repeated Salt. "That gives us seven more days for details."

Hampden laughed quietly as he bent forward and continued the red line through the "14."

"That is one way of looking at it," he said. "Personally, I was rather wishing that it had been to-day. I confess that I cannot watch the climax of these two years approaching without feeling keyed up to concert pitch. I suppose that you never had any nerves?"

"I suppose not. If I had, the Atlantic water soon washed them out."

"But you are superstitious?" he asked curiously. It suddenly occurred to him how little he really knew of the man with whom he was linked in such a momentous hazard.

"Oh yes. Blue water inoculates us all with that. Fortunately, mine does not go beyond trifles, such as touching posts and stepping over paving stones – a hobby and not a passion, or I should have to curb it."

"Do you really do things like that? Well, I remember Northland, the great nerve specialist, telling me that most people have something of the sort – a persistent feeling of impending calamity unless they conform to some trivial impulse. I am exempt."

"Yes," commented Salt; "or you would hardly be likely to cross off the date before the day is over."

"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Hampden. "What an age we live in! Is it tannin or the dregs of paganism? And you think it would be tempting Providence to do it while there are five more hours to run?"

"I never do it, as a matter of fact," admitted Salt with perfect seriousness. "Of course, I know that nothing would happen in the five hours if I did, but, all the same, I rather think that something would."

"I hope that something will," said Hampden cheerfully. "Dinner, for example. Did I ever strike you as a gourmet, Salt? Well, nevertheless, I am a terrific believer in regular meals, although I don't care a straw how simple they are. You may read of some marvellous Trojan working under heavy pressure for twenty-four hours, and then snatching a hurried glass of Château d'Yquem and a couple of Abernethy biscuits, and going on again for another twenty-four. Don't believe it, Salt. If he is not used to it, his knees go; if he is used to it, they have gone already. If I were a general I solemnly declare that I would risk more to feed my men before an engagement, than I would risk to hold the best position all along the front. Your hungry man may fight well enough for a time, but the moment he is beaten he knows it. And, strangely enough, we English have won a good many important battles after we had been beaten."

He had been locking up the safe and desk as he ran on, and now they walked together down the corridor. At the door of his own office Salt excused himself for a moment and went in. When he rejoined the baronet at the outer door, he held in his hand a little square of thin paper on which was printed in bold type

JULY 14.

"You will regret it," said Hampden, not wholly jestingly. He saw at once that it was the tag for the day, torn from his calendar, that Salt held.

"No," he replied, crumpling up the scrap of paper and throwing it away, "I may remember, but I shall not regret. When you have to think twice about doing a thing like that, it is time to do it… You have no particular message for Deland?"

"None at all, personally, I think. You will tell him as much as we decided upon. Let him know that his post will certainly be one of the most important outside the central office. What time do you go?"

"The 10 train from Marylebone. Deland will be waiting up for me. There is an early restaurant train in the morning – the 7.20, getting in at 10.40. I shall breakfast en route, and come straight on here."

"That's right. Look out for young Hampshire in the train; he will probably wait on you, but you won't recognise him unless you remember the Manners-Clinton nose in profile. He regards it as a vast joke, but he is very keen. And sleep all the time you aren't feeding. Can't do better. Good night."

Salt laughed as he turned into Pall Mall, speculating for a moment, by the light of his own knowledge, how little time this strenuous, simple-living man devoted to the things he advocated. If he had been able to follow Sir John's electric brougham for the remainder of that night he would have had still more reason to be sceptical.

When Hampden reached his house and strode up to the door with the elastic step of a young man, despite his iron-grey hair and burden of responsibility, instead of the bronze Medusa knocker that had dropped from the hands of Pietro Sarpi and Donato in its time, his eyes encountered the smiling face of his daughter as she swung open the door before him. She had been sitting at an open window of the dull-fronted house until she saw the Hampden livery in the distance.

"There is some one waiting in the library to see you," she said, as he kissed her cheek. "He said that he would wait ten minutes; you had already been seven."

"Who is it?" he asked in quiet expectation. It was not unusual for Muriel to watch for him from the upper room, and to come down into the hall to welcome him, but to-night he saw at once that there was a mild excitement in her manner. "Who is it?" he asked.

She told him in half a dozen whispered words, and then returned to the drawing-room and the society of a depressing companion, who chanced to be a poor and distant cousin, while Sir John turned toward the library.

"Tell Styles to remain with the brougham if he is still in front," he said to a passing footman. The visit might presage anything.

A young man, an inconspicuous young man in a blue serge suit, rose from the chair of Jacobean oak and Spanish leather where he had been sitting with a bowler hat between his hands and a cheap umbrella across his knees, and made a cursory bow as he began to search an inner pocket.

"Sir John Hampden?" he enquired.

"Yes," replied the master of the house, favouring his visitor with a more curious attention than he received in return. "You are from Plantagenet House, I believe?"

The young man detached his left hand from the search and turned down the lapel of his coat in a perfunctory display of his credentials. Pinned beneath so that it should not obtrude was an insignificant little medal, so small and trivial that it would require the closest scrutiny to distinguish its design and lettering.

But Sir John Hampden did not require any assurance upon the point. He knew by the evidence of just such another medallion which lay in his own possession that upon one side, around the engraved name of the holder, ran the inscription, "Every man according as he purposeth in his heart;" upon the other side a representation of St Martin dividing his cloak with the beggar. It was the badge of the Order of St Martin of Tours.

The Order of St Martin embodied the last phase of organised benevolence. In the history of the world there had never been a time when men so passionately desired to help their fellow men; there had never been a time when they found it more difficult to do so to their satisfaction. From the lips of every social reformer, from the reports of the charitable organisations, from the testimony of the poor themselves the broad indictment had gone forth that every casual beggar was a rogue and a vagabond. Promiscuous alms-giving was tabulated among the Seven Curses of London.

Organised charity was the readiest alternative. Again obliging counsellors raised their conscientious voices. Organised charity was wasteful, inelastic, unsympathetic, often superfluous. The preacher added a warning note: Let none think that the easy donation of a cheque here and there was charity. It was frequently vanity, it was often a cowardly compromise with conscience, it was never an absolution from the individual responsibility.

So brotherly love continued, but often did not fructify, and the man who felt that he had the true Samaritan instinct, as he passed by on the one side of the suburban road, looked at his ragged neighbour lying under the hedge on the other side in a fit which might be epilepsy but might equally well be soap-suds in the mouth, and assured himself that if only he could believe the case to be genuine there was nothing on earth he would not do for the man.

It was a very difficult age, every one admitted: "Society was so complex."

There was evidence of the generous feeling – ill-balanced and spasmodic, it is true – on every hand. The poor were bravely, almost blindly, good to their neighbours in misfortune. The better-off were lavish – or had been until a few years previously – when they had certified proof that the cases were deserving. If a magistrate or a police court missionary gave publicity to a Pathetic Case, the Pathetic Case might be sure of being able to retire on a comfortable annuity. If only every Pathetic Case could have been induced to come pathetically into the clutches of a sympathetic police court cadi, instead of dying quite as pathetically in a rat-hole, one of the most pressing problems of benevolence might have been satisfactorily solved.

The Order of St Martin of Tours was one of the attempts to reconcile the generous yearnings of mankind with modern conditions. Its field of action had no definable limit, and whatever a man wished to give it was prepared to utilise. It was not primarily concerned with money, although judged by the guaranteed resources upon which it could call if necessary, it would rank as a rich society. It imposed no subscription and made no outside appeal. Upon its books, against the name of every member, there was entered what he bound himself to do when it was required of him. It was a vast and comprehensive list, so varied that few ever genuinely applied for the services of the Order without their needs being satisfied. The city man willing to give a foolish and repentant youth another chance of honest work; the Sussex farmer anxious to prove what a month of South Down fare and Channel breezes would do for a small city convalescent; the prim little suburban lady, much too timid to attempt any personal contact with the unknown depths of sin and suffering, but eager to send her choicest flowers and most perfect fruit to any slum sick-room; the good-hearted laundry girl who had been through the fires herself, offering to "pal up to any other girl what's having a bit of rough and wants to keep straight without a lot of jaw," – all found a deeper use in life beneath the sign of St Martin's divided cloak. Children, even little children, were not shut out; they could play with other, lonely, little children, and renounce some toys.

The inconspicuous young man standing in Sir John Hampden's library – he was in a cheap boot shop, but he gave his early closing day to serve the Order as a messenger, and there were millionaires who gave less – found the thing he searched for, and handed to Sir John an unsealed envelope.

"I accept," said the baronet, after glancing at the slip it contained. This was what he accepted:

ORDER OF ST. MARTIN OF TOURS.

Case.. John Flak, 45 Paradise Buildings, Paradise Street, Drury Lane, W.C.

Cause. Street Accident.

Requirement. Service through the night.

Recommender. L. K. Stone, M.D., 172 Great Queen Street, W.C.

Waltham, Master.

He could have declined; and his membership would have been at an end. But in a mission of personal service he could not accept and appoint a substitute. The Order was modern, business-like, reasonable, unemotional, and quite prepared to take humanity as it was. It did not seek to impose the ideal Christian standard, logically recognising that if a man gave all he possessed, a system of Christian laws (a Cæsar whom he was likewise bidden to obey) would at once incarcerate him in a prison for having no visible means of subsistence, and, if he persisted in his unnatural Christian conduct, in a lunatic asylum, where in its appointed season he would have the story of the Rich Ruler read for his edification.

The Order was practical and "very nice to do with;" but it had a standard, and as a protest against that widespread reliance in the omnipotence of gold that marred the age it allowed no delegation of an office of mercy. On all points it was open; its thin medallion symbolised no mysteries or secret vows; nor, and on this one point it was unbending, as far as lay in the power of the Order should any second-hand virtue find place beneath its saintly ensign.

A few years before, Paradise Street, with that marked inappropriateness that may be traced in the nomenclature of many London thoroughfares, had been the foulest, poorest, noisomest, most garbage-strewn and fly-infested region even in the purlieus of Drury Lane. It was not markedly criminal, it was merely filthy; and when smell-diseases broke out in central London it was generally found that they radiated from Paradise Street like ripples from a dead dog thrown into a pond. Presently a type foundry in the next street, growing backwards because it was impossible to expand further in any other direction, pushed down the flimsy tenements that stood between and reared a high wall, pierced with windows of prismatic glass, in their place. Soon public authorities, seeing that the heavens did not fall when a quarter of Paradise Street did, suddenly and unexpectedly tore down another quarter as though they had received a maddened impulse and Paradise Street had been a cardboard model. The phœnix that appeared on this site was a seven-storied block of workmen's dwellings. It could not be said to have given universal satisfaction. The municipal authorities who devised it bickered entertainingly over most of the details that lay between the foundations and the chimney-pots; the primitive dwellers in Paradise Street looked askance at it, as they did at most things not in liquid form; social reformers complained that it drove away the very poor and brought in a class of only medium poor; and ordinary people noticed that in place of the nearest approach to artistic dirt to be found in the metropolis, some one had substituted uninteresting squalor.

Hampden dismissed his carriage in Lincoln's Inn Fields and walked the remainder of the way. He had changed into a dark lounge suit before he left, but, in spite of the principle he had so positively laid down, he had not stayed to dine. The inevitable, morbid little group marked the entrance to Paradise Buildings, but the incident was already three hours old, and the larger public interest was being reserved for the anticipated funeral.

A slipshod, smug-faced woman opened the door of No. 45 in response to his discreet knock. He stepped into a small hall where coal was stored in a packing-case, and, on her invitation, through into the front room. Five more untidy women, who had been drinking from three cups, got up as he entered, and passed out, eyeing him with respectful curiosity as they went, and each dropping a word of friendly leavetaking to the slatternly hostess.

"Don't be down'arted, my dear."

"See you later, Emm."

"Let's know how things are going, won't you?"

"You'll remember about that black alpaker body?"

"Well, so long, Mrs Flak. Gord bless yer."

Sir John waited until the hall door closed behind the last frowsy woman.

"I am here to be of any use I can," he said. "Did Dr Stone mention that some one would come?"

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," she replied. She stood in the middle of the room, a picture of domestic incapacity, with a foolish look upon her rather comely features. The room was not bare of furniture, was not devoid of working-class comforts, but the dirty dishes, the dirty clothing, the dirty floor, told the plain tale.

"I do not know any particulars of the case yet." He saw at once that he would have to take the lead in every detail. "Did the doctor speak of coming again, or leave any message?"

"Yes, sir," she replied readily. She lifted an ornament on the mantelpiece and gave him a folded sheet of paper, torn from a note-book, that had been placed there for safety. He had the clearest impression that it would never have occurred to the woman to give it to him unasked.

"To rep of O. St M.," ran the pencilled scrawl. "Shall endeavour to look in 8-8.30. – L.K.S."

Even as he took out his watch there came a business-like knock at the door, an active step in the hall, and beneath the conventional greeting, the two men were weighing one another.

Dr Stone had asked the Order to send a man of common-sense who could exercise authority if need be, and one who would not be squeamish in his surroundings. For reasons of his own he had added that if with these qualifications he combined that of being a Justice of the Peace, so much the better. Dr Stone judged that he had the man before him. Hampden saw a brisk, not too well shaven, man in a light suit, with a straw hat and a serviceable stick in his hands, until he threw them on the table. There was kindness and decision behind his alert eyes, and his manner was that of a benevolent despot marshalling his poor patients – and he had few others – as a regiment before him, marching them right and left in companies, bringing them sharply to the front, and bidding them to stand there and do nothing until they were told.

"You haven't been into the other room yet?" he asked. "No, well – "

He stopped with his hand on the door knob, turned back like a pointer on the suspicion of a trail, and looked keenly at the woman, then around the bestrewn room. If her eyes had slid the least betraying glance, Hampden did not observe it, but the doctor, without a word, strode to the littered couch, put his hand behind a threadbare cushion, and drew out a half-filled bottle. There was a gluggling ripple for a few seconds, and the contents had disappeared down the sink, while the terebinthine odour of cheap gin hung across the room.

"Not here, Mrs Flak," he said sharply; and without changing her expression of vacuous good-nature, the woman meekly replied, "No, sir."

Dr Stone led the way into the inner room and closed the door behind them. A man, asleep, insensible, or dead, lay on the bed, his face half hidden in bandages.

"This is the position," explained the doctor, speaking very rapidly, for his time was mapped out with as little waste as there is to be found between the squares on a chess board. "This man went out of here a few hours ago and walked straight into an empty motor 'bus that was going round this way. That's how they all put it: he walked right into the thing. Why? He was a sober enough man, an attendant of some kind at one of the west end clubs. Because, as I have good reason to suppose, he was thinking absorbingly of something else.

"Well, they carried him in here; it ought to have been the hospital, of course, but it was at his own doorstep it took place, you see, and it doesn't really matter, because to-morrow morning – !"

"He will die then?" asked Hampden in a whisper, interpreting the quick gesture.

"Oh, he will die as sure as his head is a cracked egg-shell. Between midnight and dawn, I should say. But before the end I look confidently for an interval of consciousness, or rather sub-consciousness. If I am wrong I shall have kept you up all night for nothing; if I am right you will probably hear something that he wants to say very much."

"Whatever was in his mind when he met with the accident?"

"That is my conviction. There has already been an indication of partial expression. Curiously enough, I have had two exactly similar cases, and this is going just the same way. In one it was a sum of money a man had banked under another name to keep it from his wife and for his children; in the second it was a blow struck in a scuffle, and an innocent man was doing penal servitude for it."

"That is what you wished to have some one here for chiefly, then?" asked Hampden.

"Everything, practically. You see the kind of people around? The wife is a fool; the neighbours are the class of maddening dolts who leave a suicide hanging until a policeman comes to cut him down. They would hold an orgie in the next room. In excitement the women fly to gin as instinctively as a nun flies to prayer. Order them out if they come, but I don't think that they will trouble you after I have spoken to the woman as I go. If there is anything to be caught it will have to be on the hop, so to speak. It may be a confession, a deposition of legal value, or only a request; one cannot guess. Questioning, when the sub-conscious stage is reached, might lead to something. It's largely a matter of luck, but intelligence may have an innings."

"Is there nothing to be done – in the way of making it easier for him?"

Dr Stone made a face expressive of their helplessness and shrugged his shoulders; then mentioned a few simple details.

"He will never know," he explained. "Even when he seems conscious he will feel no pain and remember nothing of the accident. The clock will be mercifully set back." He smiled whimsically. "Forgive me if it never strikes." He turned to go. "The nearest call office is the kiosk in Aldwych," he remarked. "I am 7406 Covent Garden." No paper being visible he wrote the number on the wall. "After 10.30 as a general thing," he added.