I started. It was not Sweeting who spoke, but Slater. The little demon stood grinning in the background, his tongue in his cheek, and his hands in his trousers pockets.
“H’mph!” said the Prime Minister. “Very apt, sir. I recall the witticism. It is singularly applicable at the moment to the reorganization of the Liberal party. ‘Take a hole and pour brass round it.’ Exactly.”
His manner, there was no denying it, was extremely severe as he again addressed the perspiring Sweeting—
“Once more, sir,” he said, “I resume our discussion of a passage, the intellectual rights in which you would seem to have made over to your friends.” And, with a positive scowl, he continued his reading.
“ ‘So well’ (writes the impassioned Nonconformist) ‘for the national appreciation of beauty that is physical. On the other hand (tell me, dear. It would come so reassuringly from your lips), what can account for the spasmodic recurrence in our midst of the inspired singer? What makes his reproduction possible among a people endowed with tunelessness, innocent of a metrical ear?’ ”
Quite abruptly the Prime Minister ended, and, deliberately folding his paper, hypnotized with a searching stare his unhappy examinee.
“The question, Mr. Sweeting,” said he, “is before the House. You will recognize it as ending—with some psychologic subtlety, to be continued in our next—number 10—the last published of the “Argonaut.” To me, I confess, the answer can be, like the Catholic Church, only one and indivisible. Upon the question of your conformity with my view depends the nature of the communication which I am to have the pleasure, conditionally, of making to you. Plainly, then, sir, what makes possible the spasmodic recurrence of the inspired singer in the midst of a people endowed with tunelessness and innocent of a metrical ear? I feel convinced you can return no answer but one.”
A dead silence fell upon the room. Sweeting scratched his right calf with his left foot, and giggled. Then in a moment, yielding the last of his wits to the unendurable strain, he gave all up, and, wheeling upon Slater—
“O, look here, Slate’!” he said. “What does?” and without waiting for the answer, drove himself a passage through his satellites, and collapsed half dead upon a sofa.
The Premier, with an amazing calm, returned the “Argonaut” to his pocket.