“But you keep an account of them, don’t you?” he asked, almost anxiously.
This afforded me the extraordinary experience of finding a man who knew less about fire insurance than I did; and I remembered how, in the far past, months ago, Mr. Pepys had spoken slightingly of his knowledge of the business. I felt quite an old, trusty official after this—one of the faithful, dogged sort of men who are actuated solely by enthusiasm for their masters’ interests. I slightly patronised Mr. Pepys, but not intentionally. I said:
“Oh yes, sir; we don’t allow them to pass.”
“That’s right!” he replied, and showed a satisfaction which may or may not have been genuine.
“They are all embalmed in the archives of the Society, sir,” I added.
He looked at me doubtfully after this, and didn’t seem to be sure of his ground. At any rate, it silenced him; to my disappointment he made no further remarks about fire insurance or anything else, but took up his pen again, sighed, and signed a few more policies. At this moment another director entered, and Mr. Pepys wished him good morning, and he said, “Morning!”
He was a very different type of Capital. He was, in fact, a retired general officer of some repute in his time, which was, however, long past. He had recently been made a peer, and from being called Lamb had soared into a title and taken the name of some place that interested him in Scotland. I doubt, when selecting his title, whether he had remembered the policies of the Apollo; for while “Lamb” is a word you can dash off in a second, “Corrievairacktown” is not. He laboured frightfully at it and heaved like a ship at sea, and sometimes actually forgot how to spell it! He jerked his snow-white head abruptly, as though he had acquired the habit of dodging cannon-balls, and from time to time he gave off little sharp explosions of breath, like a cat when trodden upon. This man realised his own greatness in a way that perhaps nobody else did. He was a Conservative to his soldierly backbone, and I think sometimes, when he came to the Apollo for the tame occupation of signing policies, he was almost ashamed that a man, who had seen many a shot fired in anger and moved like an avenging spirit under the hurtling wings of the God of War, should have come down to signing policies for such homely things as—cooking utensils, and so on.
To illustrate the nerve and courage of Mr. Bright at a supreme crisis, I may tell you that in his younger days he had once been attending to General Sir Hastings Lamb, as he was then, and during an explosion on the part of the gallant warrior he hurled fifty or sixty policies in a heap to the ground. Doubtless, he expected Mr. Bright to bound forward and pick them up again; but far from it!
Mr. Bright, well versed in Capital and Labour and Political Economy and the Rights of Man, knew that he was not there to pick policies off the floor which an irritated representative of Capital had thrown upon it. He knew the machinery of the office provided that, in such a contingency, he must ring the Board Room bell and summon a messenger, for the subordinate task of putting the policies on the table again. Accordingly, he summoned a messenger and directed him how to proceed. Whereupon, the representative of Capital subsided instantly and signed the rest of the policies like the lamb he was in those days. Undoubtedly you might call this a triumph for the sacred rights of man; and it also showed that Mr. Bright’s moral courage was equal to his physical, which is saying a great deal.