Some Do Not … · Part I · Chapter 1 3 (3/3)

“I’m going to have a word with that swine!” He pointed his square chin rather rigidly before him, and looking past the two brandy drinkers, Macmaster saw one of those faces that frequent caricature made familiar and yet strange. Macmaster couldn’t, at the moment, put a name to it. It must be a politician, probably a Minister. But which? His mind was already in a dreadful state. In the glimpse he had caught of the telegraph form now in his hand he had perceived that it was addressed to Sylvia Tietjens and began with the word “agreed.” He said swiftly:

“Has that been sent or is it only a draft?”

Tietjens said:

“That fellow is the Rt. Hon. Stephen Fenwick Waterhouse. He’s chairman of the Funded Debt Commission. He’s the swine who made us fake that return in the office.”

That moment was the worst Macmaster had ever known. A worse came. Tietjens said:

“I’m going to have a word with him. That’s why I’m not dining at Mountby. It’s a duty to the country.”

Macmaster’s mind simply stopped. He was in a space, all windows. There was sunlight outside. And clouds. Pink and white. Woolly! Some ships. And two men: one dark and oily, the other rather blotchy on a blonde baldness. They were talking, but their words made no impression on Macmaster. The dark, oily man said that he was not going to take Gertie to Budapest. Not half! He winked like a nightmare. Beyond were two young men and a preposterous face.⁠ ⁠… It was all so like a nightmare that the Cabinet Minister’s features were distorted for Macmaster. Like an enormous mask of pantomime: shiny, with an immense nose and elongated, Chinese eyes.

Yet not unpleasant! Macmaster was a Whig by conviction, by nation, by temperament. He thought that public servants should abstain from political activity. Nevertheless, he couldn’t be expected to think a Liberal Cabinet Minister ugly. On the contrary, Mr. Waterhouse appeared to have a frank, humorous, kindly expression. He listened deferentially to one of his secretaries, resting his hand on the young man’s shoulder, smiling a little, rather sleepily. No doubt he was overworked. And then, letting himself go in a side-shaking laugh. Putting on flesh!

What a pity! What a pity! Macmaster was reading a string of incomprehensible words in Tietjens’ heavily scored writing. Not entertain⁠ ⁠… flat not house⁠ ⁠… child remain at sister.⁠ ⁠… His eyes went backwards and forwards over the phrases. He could not connect the words without stops. The man with the oily hair said in a sickly voice that Gertie was hot stuff, but not the one for Budapest with all the Gitana girls you were telling me of! Why, he’d kept Gertie for five years now. More like the real thing! His friend’s voice was like a result of indigestion. Tietjens, Sandbach and the General were stiff, like pokers.

What a pity! Macmaster thought.

He ought to have been sitting.⁠ ⁠… It would have been pleasant and right to be sitting with the pleasant Minister. In the ordinary course he, Macmaster, would have been. The best golfer in the place was usually set to play with distinguished visitors, and there was next to no one in the south of England who ordinarily could beat him. He had begun at four, playing with a miniature cleek and a found shilling ball over the municipal links. Going to the poor school every morning and back to dinner; and back to school and back to bed! Over the cold, rushy, sandy links, beside the grey sea. Both shoes full of sand. The found shilling ball had lasted him three years.⁠ ⁠…

Macmaster exclaimed: “Good God!” He had just gathered from the telegram that Tietjens meant to go to Germany on Tuesday. As if at Macmaster’s ejaculation Tietjens said:

“Yes. It is unbearable. If you don’t stop those swine, General, I shall.”

The General sibilated low, between his teeth:

“Wait a minute.⁠ ⁠… Wait a minute.⁠ ⁠… Perhaps that other fellow will.”

The man with the black oily hair said:

“If Budapest’s the place for the girls you say it is, old pal, with the Turkish baths and all, we’ll paint the old town red all right, next month,” and he winked at Tietjens. His friend, with his head down, seemed to make internal rumblings, looking apprehensively beneath his blotched forehead at the General.

“Not,” the other continued argumentatively, “that I don’t love my old woman. She’s all right. And then there’s Gertie. ’Ot stuff, but the real thing. But I say a man wants⁠ ⁠…” He ejaculated, “Oh!”

The General, his hands in his pockets, very tall, thin, red-cheeked, his white hair combed forward in a fringe, sauntered towards the other table. It was not two yards, but it seemed a long saunter. He stood right over them, they looking up, open-eyed, like schoolboys at a balloon. He said:

“I’m glad you’re enjoying our links, gentlemen.”

The bald man said: “We are! We are! First-class. A treat!”

“But,” the General said, “it isn’t wise to discuss one’s⁠ ⁠… eh⁠ ⁠… domestic circumstances⁠ ⁠… at⁠ ⁠… at mess, you know, or in a golf house. People might hear.”

The gentleman with the oily hair rose and exclaimed:

“Oo, the⁠ ⁠…”

The other man mumbled: “Shut up, Briggs.”

The General said:

“I’m the president of the club, you know. It’s my duty to see that the majority of the club and its visitors are pleased. I hope you don’t mind.”

The General came back to his seat. He was trembling with vexation.

“It makes one as beastly a bounder as themselves,” he said. “But what the devil else was one to do?” The two city men had ambled hastily into the dressing-rooms; the dire silence fell. Macmaster realised that, for these Tories at least, this was really the end of the world. The last of England! He returned, with panic in his heart, to Tietjens’ telegram.⁠ ⁠… Tietjens was going to Germany on Tuesday. He offered to throw over the department.⁠ ⁠… These were unthinkable things. You couldn’t imagine them!

He began to read the telegram all over again. A shadow fell upon the flimsy sheets. The Rt. Hon. Mr. Waterhouse was between the head of the table and the windows. He said:

“We’re much obliged, General. It was impossible to hear ourselves speak for those obscene fellows’ smut. It’s fellows like that that make our friends the suffragettes! That warrants them.⁠ ⁠…” He added: “Hullo! Sandbach! Enjoying your rest?”

The General said:

“I was hoping you’d take on the job of telling these fellows off.”

Mr. Sandbach, his bulldog jaw sticking out, the short black hair on his scalp appearing to rise, barked:

“Hullo, Waterslop! Enjoying your plunder?”

Mr. Waterhouse, tall, slouching and untidy-haired, lifted the flaps of his coat. It was so ragged that it appeared as if straws stuck out of the elbows.

“All that the suffragettes have left of me,” he said, laughingly. “Isn’t one of you fellows a genius called Tietjens?” He was looking at Macmaster. The General said:

“Tietjens⁠ ⁠… Macmaster⁠ ⁠…” The Minister went on very friendly:

“Oh, it’s you?⁠ ⁠… I just wanted to take the opportunity of thanking you.”

Tietjens said:

“Good God! What for?”

“You know!” the Minister said, “we couldn’t have got the Bill before the House till next session without your figures⁠ ⁠…” He said slyly: “Could we, Sandbach?” and added to Tietjens: “Ingleby told me⁠ ⁠…”

Tietjens was chalk-white and stiffened. He stuttered:

“I can’t take any credit.⁠ ⁠… I consider⁠ ⁠…”

Macmaster exclaimed:

“Tietjens⁠ ⁠… you⁠ ⁠…” he didn’t know what he was going to say.

“Oh, you’re too modest,” Mr. Waterhouse overwhelmed Tietjens. “We know whom we’ve to thank⁠ ⁠…” His eyes drifted to Sandbach a little absently. Then his face lit up.

“Oh! Look here, Sandbach,” he said⁠ ⁠… “Come here, will you?” He walked a pace or two away, calling to one of his young men: “Oh, Sanderson, give the bobbie a drink. A good stiff one.” Sandbach jerked himself awkwardly out of his chair and limped to the Minister.

Tietjens burst out:

“Me too modest! Me!⁠ ⁠… The swine.⁠ ⁠… The unspeakable swine!”

The General said:

“What’s it all about, Chrissie? You probably are too modest.”

Tietjens said:

“Damn it. It’s a serious matter. It’s driving me out of the unspeakable office I’m in.”

Macmaster said:

“No! No! You’re wrong. It’s a wrong view you take.” And with a good deal of real passion he began to explain to the General. It was an affair that had already given him a great deal of pain. The Government had asked the statistical department for figures illuminating a number of schedules that they desired to use in presenting their new Bill to the Commons. Mr. Waterhouse was to present it.

Mr. Waterhouse at the moment was slapping Mr. Sandbach on the back, tossing the hair out of his eyes and laughing like a hysterical schoolgirl. He looked suddenly tired. A police constable, his buttons shining, appeared, drinking from a pewter-pot outside the glazed door. The two city men ran across the angle from the dressing-room to the same door, buttoning their clothes. The Minister said loudly:

“Make it guineas!”

It seemed to Macmaster painfully wrong that Tietjens should call anyone so genial and unaffected an unspeakable swine. It was unjust. He went on with his explanation to the General.

The Government had wanted a set of figures based on a calculation called B 7. Tietjens, who had been working on one called H 19⁠—for his own instruction⁠—had persuaded himself that H 19 was the lowest figure that was actuarially sound.

The General said pleasantly: “All this is Greek to me.”

“Oh no, it needn’t be,” Macmaster heard himself say. “It amounts to this. Chrissie was asked by the Government⁠—by Sir Reginald Ingleby⁠—to work out what 3 ✕ 3 comes to: it was that sort of thing in principle. He said that the only figure that would not ruin the country was nine times nine⁠ ⁠…”

“The Government wanted to shovel money into the workingman’s pockets, in fact,” the General said. “Money for nothing⁠ ⁠… or votes, I suppose.”

“But that isn’t the point, sir,” Macmaster ventured to say. “All that Chrissie was asked to do was to say what 3 ✕ 3 was.”

“Well, he appears to have done it and earned no end of kudos,” the General said. “That’s all right. We’ve all, always, believed in Chrissie’s ability. But he’s a strong-tempered beggar.”

“He was extraordinarily rude to Sir Reginald over it,” Macmaster went on.

The General said:

“Oh dear! Oh dear!” He shook his head at Tietjens and assumed with care the blank, slightly disappointing air of the regular officer. “I don’t like to hear of rudeness to a superior. In any service.”

“I don’t think,” Tietjens said with extreme mildness, “that Macmaster is quite fair to me. Of course he’s a right to his opinion as to what the discipline of a service demands. I certainly told Ingleby that I’d rather resign than do that beastly job⁠ ⁠…”

“You shouldn’t have,” the General said. “What would become of the services if everyone did as you did?”

Sandbach came back laughing and dropped painfully into his low armchair.

“That fellow⁠ ⁠…” he began.

The General slightly raised his hand.

“A minute!” he said. “I was about to tell Chrissie, here, that if I am offered the job⁠—of course it’s an order really⁠—of suppressing the Ulster Volunteers⁠ ⁠… I’d rather cut my throat than do it⁠ ⁠…”

Sandbach said:

“Of course you would, old chap. They’re our brothers. You’d see the beastly, lying Government damned first.”

“I was going to say that I should accept,” the General said, “I shouldn’t resign my commission.”

Sandbach said:

“Good God!”

Tietjens said:

“Well, I didn’t.”

“General! You! After all Claudine and I have said⁠ ⁠…”

Tietjens interrupted:

“Excuse me, Sandbach. I’m receiving this reprimand for the moment. I wasn’t, then, rude to Ingleby. If I’d expressed contempt for what he said or for himself, that would have been rude. I didn’t. He wasn’t in the least offended. He looked like a cockatoo, but he wasn’t offended. And I let him over-persuade me. He was right, really. He pointed out that, if I didn’t do the job, those swine would put on one of our little competition wallah head clerks and get all the schedules faked, as well as starting off with false premises!”

“That’s the view I take,” the General said, “if I don’t take the Ulster job the Government will put on a fellow who’ll burn all the farmhouses and rape all the women in the three counties. They’ve got him up their sleeve. He only asks for the Connaught Rangers to go through the north with. And you know what that means. All the same⁠ ⁠…” He looked at Tietjens: “One should not be rude to one’s superiors.”

“I tell you I wasn’t rude,” Tietjens exclaimed. “Damn your nice, paternal old eyes. Get that into your mind!”

The General shook his head:

“You brilliant fellows!” he said. “The country, or the army, or anything, could not be run by you. It takes stupid fools like me and Sandbach, along with sound, moderate heads like our friend here.” He indicated Macmaster and, rising, went on: “Come along. You’re playing me, Macmaster. They say you’re hot stuff. Chrissie’s no good. He can take Sandbach on.”

He walked off with Macmaster towards the dressing-room.

Sandbach, wriggling awkwardly out of his chair, shouted:

“Save the country.⁠ ⁠… Damn it⁠ ⁠…” He stood on his feet. “I and Campion.⁠ ⁠… Look at what the country’s come to.⁠ ⁠… What with swine like these two in our club houses! And policemen to go round the links with Ministers to protect them from the wild women.⁠ ⁠… By God! I’d like to have the flaying of the skin off some of their backs. I would. By God I would.”

He added:

“That fellow Waterslops is a bit of a sportsman. I haven’t been able to tell you about our bet, you’ve been making such a noise.⁠ ⁠… Is your friend really plus one at North Berwick? What are you like?”

“Macmaster is a good plus two anywhere when he’s in practice.”

Sandbach said:

“Good Lord.⁠ ⁠… A stout fellow⁠ ⁠…”

“As for me,” Tietjens said, “I loathe the beastly game.”

“So do I,” Sandbach answered. “We’ll just lollop along behind them.”