1

Mr. Waddington was in his library, drawing up his prospectus while Fanny and Barbara Madden looked on. At Fanny's suggestion (he owned magnanimously that it was a good one) he had decided to "sail in," as she called it, with the prospectus first, not only before he formed his Committee, but before he held his big meeting. (They had fixed the date of it for that day month, Saturday, June the twenty-first.)

"You come before them from the beginning," she said, "with something fixed and definite that they can't go back on." And by signing the prospectus, Horatio Bysshe Waddington, he identified it beyond all contention with himself.

It was at this point that Barbara had blundered.

"Why," she had said, "should we go to all that bother and expense? Why can't we send out the original prospectus?"

"My dear Barbara, the original prospectus isn't any good."

"Why isn't it?"

"Because it isn't Horatio's prospectus."

Barbara looked down and away from the dangerous light in Fanny's eyes.

"But it expresses his views, doesn't it?"

"That's no good when he wants to express them himself."

And so far from being any good, the original prospectus was a positive hindrance to Mr. Waddington. It took all the wind out of his sails; it took, as he justly complained, the very words out of his mouth and the ideas out of his head; it got in his way and upset him at every turn. Somehow or other he had got to stamp his personality upon this thing. "It's no good," he said; "if they can't recognize it as a personal appeal from ME." And here it was, stamped all over, and indelibly, with the personalities of Sir Maurice Gedge and his London Committee. And he couldn't depart radically from the lines they had laid down; there were just so many things to be said, and Sir Maurice and his Committee had contrived to say them all.

But, though the matter was given him, Mr. Waddington, before he actually tackled his prospectus, had conceived himself as supplying his own fresh and inimitable manner; the happy touch, the sudden, arresting turn. But somehow it wasn't working out that way. Try as he would, he couldn't get away from the turns and touches supplied by Sir Maurice Gedge.

"It would have been easy enough," he said, "to draw up the original prospectus. I'd a thousand times rather do that than write one on the top of it."

Fanny agreed. "It's got to look different," she said, "without being different."

"Couldn't we," said Barbara, "turn it upside down?"

"Upside down?" He stared at her with great owl's eyes, offended, suspecting her this time of an outrageous levity.

"Yes. Really upside down. You see, the heads go in this order—Defence of Private Property; Defence of Capital; Defence of Liberty; Defence of Government; Defence of the Empire; Danger of Revolution, Communism and Bolshevism; Every Man's Duty. Why not reverse them? Every Man's Duty; Danger of Bolshevism, Communism and Revolution; Defence of the Empire; Defence of Government; Defence of Liberty; Defence of Capital; Defence of Private Property."

"That's an idea," said Fanny.

"Not at all a bad idea," said Mr. Waddington. "You might take down the heads in that order."

Barbara took them down, and it was agreed that they presented a very original appearance thus reversed; and, as Barbara pointed out, the one order was every bit as logical as the other; and though Mr. Waddington objected that he would have preferred to close on the note of Government and Empire, he was open to the suggestion that, while this might appeal more to the county, with the farmers and townspeople, capital and private property would strike further home. And by the time he had changed "combat the forces of disorder" to "take a stand against anarchy and disruption," and "spirit of freedom in this country" to "British genius for liberty," and "darkest hour in England's history" to "blackest period in the history of England," he was persuaded that the prospectus was now entirely and absolutely his own.

"But I think we must sound the note of hope to end up with. My own message. How about 'We must remember that the darkest hour comes before dawn'?"

"My dear Horatio, if you inflate yourself so over your prospectus, you'll have no wind left when you come to speak. Be as wildly original as you please, but don't be wasteful and extravagant."

"All right, Fanny. I will reserve the dawn. Please make a note of that, Miss Madden. Speech. 'Blackest'—or did I say 'darkest'?—'hour before dawn.'"

"You'd better reserve all you can," said Fanny.

When Barbara had typed the prospectus, Mr. Waddington insisted on taking it to Pyecraft himself. He wanted to insure its being printed without delay, and to arrange for the posters and handbills; he also wanted to see the impression it would make on Pyecraft and on the young lady in Pyecraft's shop. He liked to think of the stir in the composing room when it was handed in, and of the importance he was conferring on Pyecraft.

"You haven't said what you think of the prospectus," said Fanny, as they watched him go.

"I haven't said what I think of the League of Liberty."

"What do you think of it?"

"I think it looks as if somebody was in an awful funk; and I don't see that there's going to be much liberty about it."

"That," said Fanny, "is how it struck me. But it'll keep Horatio quiet for the next six months."

"Quiet? And afterwards?"

"Oh, afterwards there'll be his book."

"I'd forgotten his book."

"That'll keep him quieter than anything else; if you can get him to settle down to it."

2

That evening Barbara witnessed the reconciliation of Mr. Waddington and Ralph Bevan. Mr. Waddington made a spectacle of it, standing, majestic and immovable, by his hearth and holding out his hand long before Ralph had got near enough to take it.

"Good evening, Ralph. Glad to see you here again."

"Good of you to ask me, sir."

Barbara thought he winced a little at the "sir." He had a distaste for those forms of deference which implied his seniority. You could see he didn't like Ralph. His voice was genial, but there was no light in his bulging stare; the heavy lines of his face never lifted. She wondered: Was it Ralph's brilliant youth that had offended him, reminding him, even when he refused to recognize his fascination? For you could see that he did refuse, that he regarded Ralph Bevan as an inferior, insignificant personality. Barbara had to revise her theory. He wasn't jealous of him. It would never occur to him that Fanny, or Barbara for that matter, could find Ralph interesting. Nothing could disturb for a moment his immense satisfaction with himself. He conducted dinner with a superb detachment, confining his attention to Fanny and Barbara, as if he were pretending that Ralph wasn't there, until suddenly he heard Fanny asking him if he knew anything about the National League of Liberty and what he thought of it.

"Mr. Waddington doesn't want to know what I think of it."

"No, but we want to."

"My dear Fanny, any opinion, any honest opinion—"

"Oh, Ralph's opinion will be honest enough."

"Honest, I daresay," said Mr. Waddington.

"Well, if you really want to know, I think it's a pathological symptom."

"A what?" said Mr. Waddington, startled into a show of interest.

"Pathological symptom. It's all funk. Blue funk. True blue funk."

"That's what Barbara says."

The young man looked at Barbara as much as to say, "I knew I could trust you to take the only intelligent view."

"It's run," he said, "by a few imbeciles, like Sir Maurice Gedge.
They're scared out of their lives of Bolshevism."

"Do you mean to say that Bolshevism isn't dangerous?"

"Not in this country."

"Perhaps, then, you'd like to see a Soviet Government in this country?"

"I didn't say so."

"But I understand that you uphold Bolshevism?"

"I don't uphold funk. But," said Ralph, "there's rather more in it than that. It's being engineered. It's a deliberate, dishonest, and malicious attempt to discredit Labour."

"Absurd," said Mr. Waddington. "You show that you are ignorant of the very principles of the League."

If he recognized Ralph's youth, it was only to despise it as crude and uninformed.

"It is—the—National—League—of Liberty."

"Well, that's about all the liberty there is in it—liberty to suppress liberty."

"You may not know that I'm starting a branch of the League in Wyck."

"I'm sorry, sir. I did not know. Fanny, why did you lay that trap for me?"

"Because I wanted your real opinion."

"Before you set up an opinion, you had better come to my meeting on the twenty-first. Then perhaps you'll learn something about it."

Fanny changed the subject to Sir John Corbett's laziness.

"A man," said Mr. Waddington, "without any seriousness, any sense of responsibility."

After coffee Mr. Waddington removed Fanny to the library to consult with him about the formation of his Committee, leaving Barbara and Ralph Bevan alone. Fanny waved her hand to them from the doorway, signalling her blessing on their unrestrained communion.

"It's deplorable," said Ralph, "to see a woman of Fanny's intelligence mixing herself up with a rotten scheme like that."

"Poor darling, she only does it to keep him quiet."

"Oh, yes, I admit there's every excuse for her."

They looked at each other and smiled. A smile of delicious and secret understanding.

"Isn't he wonderful?" she said.

"I thought you'd like him…. I say, you know, I must come to his meeting. He'll be more wonderful than ever there. Can't you see him?"

"I can. It's almost too much—to think that I should be allowed to know him, to live in the same house with him, to have him turning himself on by the hour together. What have I done to deserve it?"

"I see," he said, "you have got it."

"Got what?"

"The taste for him. The genuine passion. I had it when I was here. I couldn't have stood it if I hadn't."

"I know. You must have had it. You've got it now."

"And I don't suppose I've seen him anything like at his best. You'll get more out of him than I did."

"Oh, do you think I shall?"

"Yes. He may rise to greater heights."

"You mean he may go to greater lengths?"

"Perhaps. I don't know. You'd have, of course, to stop his lengths, which would he a pity. I think of him mostly in heights. There's no reason why you shouldn't let him soar…. But I mustn't discuss him. I've just eaten his dinner."

"No, we mustn't," Barbara agreed. "That's the worst of dinners."

"I say, though, can't we meet somewhere?"

"Where we can?"

"Yes. Where we can let ourselves rip? Couldn't we go for more walks together?"

"I'm afraid there won't be time."

"There'll be loads of time. When he's off in his car 'rounding up the county.'"

"When he's 'off,' I'm 'on' as Mrs. Waddington's companion."

"Fanny won't mind. She'll let you do anything you like. At any rate, she'll let me do anything I like."

"Will you ask her?"

"Of course I shall."

So they settled it.

3

When Barbara said to herself that Mr. Waddington would spoil her evening with Ralph Bevan, she had judged by the change that had come over the house since the return of its master. You felt it first in the depressed faces of the servants, of Partridge and Annie Trinder. A thoughtful gloom had settled even on Kimber. Worse than all, Fanny Waddington had left off humming. Barbara missed that spontaneous expression of her happiness.

She thought: "What is it he does to them?" And yet it was clear that he didn't do anything. They were simply crushed by the sheer mass and weight of his egoism. He imposed on them somehow his incredible consciousness of himself. He left an atmosphere of uneasiness. You felt it when he wasn't there; even when Fanny had settled down in the drawing-room with "Tono-Bungay" you felt her fear that at any minute the door would open and Horatio would come in.

But Barbara wasn't depressed. She enjoyed the perpetual spectacle he made. She enjoyed his very indifference to Ralph, his refusal to see that he could command attention, his conviction of his own superior fascination. She knew now what Ralph meant when he said it would be unkind to spoil him for her. He was to burst on her without preparation or description. She was to discover him first of all herself. First of all. But she could see the time coming when her chief joy would be their making him out, bit by bit, together. She even discerned a merry devil in Fanny that amused itself at Horatio's expense; that was aware of Barbara's amusement and condoned it. There were ultimate decencies that prevented any open communion with Fanny. But beyond that refusal to smile at Horatio after eating his dinner, she could see no decencies restraining Ralph. She could count on him when her private delight became intolerable and must be shared.

But there were obstacles to their intercourse. Mr. Waddington couldn't very well start on what he called his "campaign" until he was armed with his prospectus, and Pyecraft took more than a week to print it. And while she sat idle, thinking of her salary, the fiend of conscience prompted Barbara to ask him for work. Wasn't there his book?

"My book? My Cotswold book?" He pretended he had forgotten all about it. He waved it away. "The book is only a recreation, an amusement. Plenty of time for that when I've got my League going. Still, I shall be glad when I can settle down to it, again."…. He was considering it now with reminiscent affection…. "If it would amuse you to look at it—"

He began a fussy search in his bureau.

"Ah, here we are!"

He unearthed two piles of manuscript, one typed, the other written, both scored with erasures, with almost illegible corrections and insertions.

"It's in a terrible mess," he said.

She saw what her work would be: to cut a way through the jungle, to make clearings.

"If I were to type it all over again, you'd have a clean copy to work on when you were ready."

"If you would be so good. It's that young rascal Ralph. He'd no business to leave it in that state."

Her scruple came again to Barbara.

"Mr. Waddington, you'd take him on again for your secretary if he'd come back?"

"He'd come back all right. Trust him."

"And you'd take him?"

"My dear young lady, why should I? I don't want him; I want you."

"And I don't want to stand in his way."

"You needn't worry about that."

"I can't help worrying about it. You'd take him back if I wasn't here."

"You are here."

"But if I weren't?"

"Come, come. You mustn't talk to me like that."

She went away and talked to Fanny.

"I can't bear doing him out of his job. If he'll come back—"

"My dear, you don't know Ralph. He'd die rather than come back. They've made it impossible between them."

"Mr. Waddington says he'd take him back if I wasn't here."

"He wouldn't. He only thinks he would, because it makes him feel magnanimous. He offered Ralph half a year's salary if he'd go at once. And Ralph went at once and wouldn't touch the salary. That made him come out top dog, and Horatio didn't like it. Not that he supposed he could score off Ralph with money. He isn't vulgar."

No. He wasn't vulgar. But she wondered how he would camouflage it to himself—that insult to his pride. And there was Ralph's pride that was so fiery and so clean. Yet—

"Yet Mr. Bevan comes and dines," she said.

"Yes, he comes and dines. He'll always be my cousin, though he won't be Horatio's secretary. He's got a very sweet nature and he keeps the issues clear."

"But what will he do? He can't live on his sweet nature."

"Oh, he's got enough to live on, though not enough to—to do what he wants on. But he'll get a job all right. You needn't bother your dear little head about Ralph."

Fanny said to herself: "I'll tell him, then he'll adore her more than ever. If only he adores her enough he'll buck up and get something to do."