Mr. Clutterbuck's Election

by Hilaire Belloc

The weakness of his position was not, it may be admitted, entirely due to his personality nor even to the wild popularity which the cause of Fishmonger and Another had recently acquired. Indeed he was as ardent a champion of the incarcerated Fishmonger as was Mr. Clutterbuck himself, and differed from his opponent only in modifying his language where it might have shocked the English sense of the respect which we all owe to the Bench.

His principal ally in a struggle which seemed to disturb him so little was his wife. Lady Henfield, a woman of the most captivating vitality, called at every house in the constituency, smiled, flattered, and joked into friendship the hearts of all the women, and fearlessly bestowed upon either sex indifferently the marks of a warm appreciation which, from such a woman, are never thrown away. Many a household could tell, long before the contest was engaged, of deeds of kindness which her genuine sympathy with the populace forbade her to noise abroad, and her known influence upon the Board of Pleeson's Charity, a social work of immense importance in the neighbourhood, lent her a high and most legitimate influence in all that she did in Mickleton. She had had the sense to take a house for her husband in the locality, and though they but rarely slept in this distant quarter of the metropolis, the excellent way in which it was served and furnished naturally impressed her neighbours of every degree.

All this counteracted, to no slight extent, Lord Henfield's insufficient performances upon the platform, and no one acquainted with electoral campaigning will deny that the enthusiasm or disapproval of popular audiences counts little as compared with the domestic effect of private visits and of good deeds coming from the heart. To all this was added on the Wednesday, a false step on the part of Mr. Clutterbuck, which for the first time, and that so near the poll, was a serious setback to the tide in his favour. A gentleman of considerable means, a printer and dyer of the name of Stephens, who had frequently appeared upon Mr. Clutterbuck's platform and had seemed, even to the keen eye of Charlie Fitzgerald, to be an inoffensive plutocrat, insisted upon receiving the candidate and his wife as his guests at Bongers End during the last days of the struggle.

"It will save your husband," he said to Mrs. Clutterbuck, "those long night journeys to Croydon which a man at his age cannot afford to despise, and will give Mrs. Stephens and myself and my two sons and my daughter Clara and Miss Curle the very greatest pride and pleasure."

This apparently innocuous proposal, which Mrs. Clutterbuck eagerly accepted for her husband, was a threefold error. A long-standing rivalry, or rather enmity, existed between their new host and a Mr. Clay, whose engineering works were perhaps the most important industry in Mickleton, and who as a Tory Home Ruler of some years' standing, was now naturally the head of the National Party since the establishment of a Parliament in Dublin and the framing of the new tariff had called that party into existence. He bitterly resented the honour shown to his rival, and it needed all the tact of Fitzgerald to prevent his influence being thrown into the wrong scale. But that tact was well exercised. Fitzgerald called upon Mr. Clay late at night, described Mr. Clutterbuck's intense desire to have been the guest of Mr. Clay, his hesitation to invite himself, the brutal forwardness of his rival, while the whole story was cemented by a description of blood relationship between Mrs. Clutterbuck and Mrs. Stephens, which, in later days, Fitzgerald himself did not hesitate to deny.

To lead the close of the campaign from Mr. Stephen's mansion at Bongers End was still more dangerous, from the fact that a quarrel had arisen between that gentleman and one of his workmen, whom indeed he had almost dismissed: had the tragedy actually occurred, the situation would have been not very different from the famous cause of the strike at Podger's Wharf, and the parallel was often drawn between the one case and the other in the humbler homes of Mickleton. Finally, Mr. Clutterbuck had not calculated, when he yielded to the warm pressure of his host, that his famous declaration upon total abstinence would there be taken in its literal sense. The principles of the National Party—which had now for two years advocated voluntary abstinence as an alternative to predatory legislation against the trade—forbade Mr. Clutterbuck to touch wine or spirits when he was actually present in the constituency, and he knew very well that if he were returned to the House of Commons it would be necessary for him to take his meals in the new rooms set apart for those who not only denied themselves the use of such beverages, but had the stalwart manhood to forego so much as the sight of others who were causing Israel to sin. But he would never have been able to support the fatigues of those wild days had he not carried in his pocket a flask of B.Q. cognac, and had he not been able from time to time to escape from a midday meal to his club, or better still, to some restaurant where he was unknown. He had, further, on returning to Surrey every night, freely restored his energies by vigorous draughts of port, a wine to which he had grown accustomed and whose use he could ill spare.

It was, therefore, no small handicap to find continual allusion made under Mr. Stephens's roof to his valiant and thorough-going principles, nor did it help the situation to see round him every member of the household, including Mrs. Clutterbuck and his secretary, served with the most generous vintages, while he was compelled to choose milk (which he had never yet been able to digest), water, against which he had been often warned, or those aerated substitutes which his doctor had repeatedly insisted to be, in his particular case, no better than windy poisons.

His vigour declined; his voice grew worse and worse; he hesitated in the midst of his speeches; he contradicted himself more than once. The first serious opposition, upon the Wednesday night, threw him into a fever of anxiety from which he had not recovered the next day. He appeared unpunctually before an impatient audience and actually forgot to appear at all at a smaller meeting later in the evening: a piece of folly that cost him fifty votes.

Meanwhile the renewed energies of his opponents rendered his position less and less enviable as the day of the poll approached, although the Opposition suffered in this election, as in every other, from the very grave drawback that it had no fixed name.