Mr. Petre

by Hilaire Belloc

Any one who has engaged in the sale and purchase of land knows what a long business it is; but no one was in any hurry in the matter of the Paddenham Site. On the selling side there was a happy conviction that delay increases appetite and a fine faith in the staying powers of John K. Petre. As to the buyer, if indeed His Majesty (through and with the advice of that Secretary of his who happened for the moment to preside over the Board of Education) should have the good fortune to acquire the Paddenham Site, there was no need to betray violent hurry whatever eagerness the Department might be repressing in its gizzard. After all, it was other people’s money, and not a salary in the Department would be increased by a farthing, however advantageous the deal.

What did push things forward a little was the appearance in the market of an Anonymous Benefactor.

This excellent man proposed in a letter to the Public Press to purchase the Paddenham Site as an Open Space for the People, a new Lung for London. And he would stand the racket.

It was astonishing—considering he was anonymous—what a lot the papers had to say about him, and how loudly they praised his truly British generosity. From my own insufficient experience in these matters I should say that, counting one thing with another, the noise need not have cost more than £500; but it had the effect of thousands. There was opposition too. There were angry letters of protest against the object of the proposed benefaction, a sheer waste of land; but there were warm letters of approval from the public also, and there was even one very solemn communication, in which the Anonymous Benefactor gave it to be understood that the sum asked by the Paddenham Estate (for under that guise did Mr. Petre move, or rather Mr. Petre’s kindly friends) was satisfactory; and though it came to far more than another site which had been suggested, the central position was essential to it.

The Great Unknown remained a complete mystery. Those fantastic fools—happily few in our sane English world—who are for ever imagining vast conspiracies and deep-hidden plots, whispered that Messrs. Blake and Blake knew too much about it. They suspected even such absurdly innocent and obvious encounters as Charlie Terrard’s dining twice with one Editor and three times with another—as though in that world people did not constantly meet. They remarked that when Charlbury went off to France for a short holiday the excitement waned. In a word, they indulged in the maddest surmises and even affirmations. It was well for them that they did not print their libels. For our Courts of Justice are never more severe than in the due punishment of such monstrous defamations of well-established people.

The Department was not slow in discovering the sum which the Anonymous Benefactor was prepared to pay, and indeed were told all about it by many mutual friends of the Minister and the Anonymous Benefactor. It is the pride of our civil servants that they will do a job as thoroughly, without the incentive of private advantage, as any man of affairs would do for profit. And though they were not so basely impertinent as to seek who the Anonymous Benefactor might be (and after all, that was immaterial), they did find that he would be prepared to go to the neighborhood of three millions.

Now another adviser of His Majesty—no less a person than the Secretary of State who looks after expenditure, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (or to be strictly accurate, the young man who did all the hard work for the third of the Permanent Officials in the Treasury)—had marked one and a half millions as the very limit. There was a difference of one hundred per cent., and it did look for a moment as though the Anonymous Benefactor would have a walk-over. For he was evidently a man determined on his object, and apparently one of those sudden modern apparitions with visions in their heads and quite incredible sums in their pockets.

That £750 poet in the Education Department, who was keenest on the whole affair, the man who years before had started the idea of the C.P.C.T.G.D.P., the man who had already erected in his imagination all that mass of acoustic theaters, baths, miniature ranges, and above all, Dromes, through which the children of London should be passed in myriad relays (there also on great screens the ravages of alcohol upon the human body should be depicted in novel and more striking form), the man whom Providence had raised up to save our little ones and do Mr. Petre that exceedingly good turn, was distracted at the sudden peril of losing the Paddenham Site. It would be a cruel thing if his great dream were never to be realized!

Now this same humble individual had come, through Lady Gwryth, to know everybody—an excellent form of knowledge even in an educationalist. In the serious drawing-rooms a counter-offensive developed against the Anonymous Benefactor.

It was as well; for had the Anonymous Benefactor had it all his own way, it is terrible to think what would have happened to Mr. Charlbury, to Charlie Terrard, to the hard-faced man, and to all the host of little people who were ready for their pickings. As for what would have happened to Mr. Petre I dare not think of it. But at any rate, the Anonymous Benefactor, that mysterious, gigantic figure, lost the throw. After a good many questions in Parliament, two speeches and the threat of a Commission; after a joke or two in the Revues and on the Bench, a passionate protest from the Morning Post, a bleat from the Anti-Communist League and a fierce howl from the absurd Taxpayers’ Union, all the general routine of such affairs—the Paddenham Site issued an august communication in its turn and announced that it preferred the good of Education to its miserable pocket.