THE INDOMITABLES.
There is trouble ahead for some of our Peers.
I have just come across three fore-warnings of it.
The first was in the train. A fat man was telling his grievance to a thin man.
"I'll stick at nothing," he said. "I mean to see this through. The idea! Why, we've only been in the house seven weeks. Remember that. Remember also that gas is half-a-crown a thousand. And understand that we're most economical; we're always turning the lights down, my wife and I. Now then; in spite of this the rascals want me to pay on sixty thousand feet! It's preposterous. We couldn't have got through so much if we had never let a burner or a stove go out day or night. And we're economical! What do you say to that?"
The thin man said that he had never heard anything so infamous in his life.
"But I'm going to fight it, I can tell you," said the fat man. "Oh yes. If necessary I'll take it to the House of Lords."
"Quite right," said the thin man, picking up his paper.
The second case was late at night, in the corner of a restaurant. Two men were talking near me and I heard most of it.
"It was like this," said one, who might have been a journalist from the look of him, to the other, whom I could not exactly place, but fancied he was perhaps remotely connected with music. He yawned rather more than I should have liked had I been the narrator. "It was like this. There were eight of us to dinner and five of us had old brandy at two bob a go. Only five. The first lot was poured out by the waiter, so there can be no trouble over that; that's ten bob. Then three or four of us had another go. Do you see?"
The musician came back to earth and said that he saw.
"Very well. Even supposing that we did overpour a little, we didn't have more than ten portions altogether. That I can swear to. Yet what do you think the bill said? 'Liqueurs, two pounds.' Think of it!"
The musician woke up and made the motions of a man thinking of it and finding it the limit.
"Of course I refused to pay," the journalist went on.
"Of course," said the musician.
"And now we're fighting it. But I don't care if it breaks me, I'll resist it. If necessary I'll take it to the House of Lords."
The third case happened only this morning. I met in the street an artist friend.
"Hullo," I said, "I don't often see you out and about at this hour when there's so little decent daylight."
"No," he said, "it's an awful bore, but I've got to see a lawyer. The fact is I'm in for litigation."
"You?" I cried.
"Yes, me. It's dead against my nature, I know, but this is serious. In the public interest a fellow must do something unpleasant now and then."
"What is it?" I asked, drawing him towards a comfortable resort where cordials against this appalling weather were obtainable.
"The fact is," he said, "my wife's been poisoned."
"Poisoned!"
"I don't mean in the Borgia way. Not any Catherine de Medici tricks. No, merely in a London restaurant. Out shopping the other day she had lunch in one of those West End places and she's been ill ever since. A dish of curry. Well, I'm going to have those people's blood, and incidentally some money too, I hope."
"I wish you joy of the experience," I said.
"I know all about that," he replied dismally; "but it's got to be done. And I'm going through with it."
"You'll stick at nothing?" I said.
"Nothing," he replied. "If necessary—"
"I know," I said.
"What?"
"If necessary you'll take it to the House of Lords."
"Yes; but how did you know?"
"I guessed it," I replied; "but you'll be horribly congested there."
And so, I repeat, there is a busy time ahead for some of our Peers.