"In the Civil Service?" said Mr. Clutterbuck innocently.
"No," answered Charlie with nonchalance, "in some works out there, a sort of company; but I shall like it. It's mining, you know; it puts me right to the top at once."
"You'll do well," said Mr. Clutterbuck, wringing his hand with more familiarity than he had yet shown, and remembering as a business man must, the splendid organising power that lay behind the Irish ease of the Daniel-Daniels-Fitzgeralds.
Next day Mr. Bailey and Mr. Clutterbuck were watching the first working day of the Session of 1912:—what thoughts passed through the merchant's mind were much too deep for words as he noted one face after another so long familiar to him in the comic journals, and heard, under the disguise of their constituencies, names that shook the world. The wit, the intelligence, the judgment, the rhetoric overwhelmed him, and there were two tears in his eyes as he looked.
He heard one timid supplementary question on the Anapootra Ruby Mines, the thunderous cries for order that met it, and the sharp rebuke from the chair: then suddenly William Bailey moved from his side—he had seen the young Prime Minister, flushed with glory, but touched as it seemed with fatigue, go out for a moment behind the Speaker's chair. He said to Mr. Clutterbuck, "I'll be back in a moment," and he went off hurriedly through the lobbies.
William Bailey had one more task before him, and for once it was innocuous. He passed through the well-known corridors to the Prime Minister's room, opened the door without knocking, nodded to the secretary, and went in.
There are wearinesses in the common desert of political life, and an exception to its tedium, however anomalous or eccentric, will prove at some moments refreshing. The young Prime Minister was really glad to see the tall and absurd figure striding into the room, and he said: "Good old Bill!" with an accent of earlier times. Then he put his forearm squarely on the big official table, and before William Bailey could speak, with his firm, half-smiling lips he said:
"It'll save you trouble, Bill, to know that whatever it is I'm not going to do it."
"That's a pity," said William Bailey, "for the first thing I was going to ask was whether you'd come to the Follies on Friday."