Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives

by Frank Frankfort Moore

CHAPTER XXIV

It was in this happy spirit that they approached Mr. Franklin Forrester the next day, Jack having had a chat with him through the telephone.

Mr. Forrester was delighted—at his own sagacity in playing his hand so as to win Mrs. Wingfield to his side. He took care to make his principals aware of his sagacity in this particular, and they also were delighted. They smiled, of course, at the suggestion that the seat might be taken by his friend Wingfield, but he would come forward and contest it in their interest, and that was something. People, especially those of the opposition, must not get it into their heads that The Party could not put a man into the field to oppose Lawford, who would, of course, win the seat, but not so easily as he expected—not so easily as to reflect seriously upon the resources of The Party who were running Wingfield.

That was the way the leaders of the organization to which Forrester belonged looked at the candidature of Wingfield. And the way Forrester himself looked at it was that the fact of his being able to bring Wingfield up to the scratch—that was his metaphor in referring to his success—would raise him to the extent of another rung in the political ladder which he had set himself to climb some years before, and up which he had already made a creditable ascent.

One thing he saw clearly, and that was that his candidate’s having married the daughter of a farmer—not a gentleman farmer nor an amateur farmer, but a farmer, and a farmer, too, who was well known to make his business pay—was a distinct point in his favour. It would assuredly be accounted to him for righteousness by a constituency like Nuttingford, which was so largely agricultural.

He mentioned this to Jack, who, he found, was fully alive to the importance of making every legitimate use of this claim upon the electorate. So far as he could make out, it was the solitary claim which he had to their attention, and this made him value it all the more highly. He delighted Mr. Forrester by the ease with which he showed himself ready to adapt himself to circumstances and circumstances to his candidature. Most high class men, Mr. Forrester’s experience had shown him, had been at first inclined to take a very high tone on approaching a constituency, striking the attitude of a patriot or a philanthropist and assuring him that if they could not be returned solely on their own merits without such adventitious aids as family interests or business interests or the interest which attaches to an interesting wife, they would much prefer not to be returned at all. Such high-toned men very soon got such nonsense knocked out of them. One of them, who was the father of two little girls with lovely eyes, had the mortification of seeing his antagonist romp in ahead of him solely because he had appeared every morning on the balcony of the hotel carrying on his shoulder a flaxen-curled little boy in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, though he had only borrowed the child for the election.

“What did the crowds outside the hotel care whether the boy was his or not?” cried Mr. Forrester. “They gave him their votes; and there was the other man thrown out, though he might have played off his two lovely little girls against the borrowed brat with every chance of success. Oh, children are simply thrown away upon superior men like that!”

But Wingfield showed himself superior to such ridiculous affectations of superiority and high-tonedness. He knew enough about practical politics to be aware of the affinity of the cult to the pastry industry of the roadside. To attain success in the making of mud pies one must not be over-careful of one’s hands. There is no making mud pies without mud, and there is no dabbling in politics if you mean to devote your best energies to the culture of lilies—not the speckled variety nor even the golden, but the pure saint of flowerland, the snow-white sort.

Of this fact Jack Wingfield was well aware, so he did not resent—certainly not openly—Mr. Forrester’s advice: “You must run your wife’s connection with farming for all that it’s worth.”