On arriving at the hotel I handed the cabman a fare roughly equivalent to the cash value of the cab, and then proceeded to distribute largesse to a crowd of menials who kindly undertook the task of lifting the luggage from the roof and conveying it to our rooms. The horse, having no vote, received no pecuniary return for its labours, but was rewarded for its devotion to Conservative principles by a lump of sugar, which Phillis had been tightly holding in a moist hand ever since Cash had handed it to her at the station—a pretty and thoughtful act of disinterested kindness which was duly noted in the Stoneleigh Herald next morning, and effectually secured the votes of several elusive but sentimental wobblers on polling day.
After this unostentatious entry into my constituency I duly established myself in my apartments, where I spent most of the afternoon writing cheques. The restoration of the North Transept proved to be in an even more deplorable state of backwardness than I had feared; but the Dean ultimately left me with the utmost expressions of goodwill, promising to reassure the most exacting spirits in Cathedral society as to my soundness on the questions of (1) Disestablishment and (2) Secular Education in Elementary Schools.
Thereafter I received the captain of the local football team, who begged to remind me that my subscription of five guineas, as Honorary Vice-President of the club, was now due, and further requested that I would do himself and colleagues the honour of kicking-off in the match against the Scrappington Hotstuffs on Saturday week. (Saturday next, I heard afterwards, had been reserved for my rival.) He finally departed with my cheque in his pocket, and, I expect, his tongue in his cheek.
Robin next let in upon me a sub-section of the General Purposes Committee of the Municipal Library, who begged that I would kindly consent to open the new wing thereof, jointly with the rival Candidate, at three o'clock next Wednesday; and intimated as an afterthought that the oak bookcase in the eastern alcove was still unpaid for. They departed calling down blessings upon my head. (Five pounds ten.)
Next, after a brief call from a gentleman in a blue ribbon, who came to solicit a guinea for the Band of Hope, and who left in exchange one hundred copies of a picture of the interior of a drunkard's stomach, executed in three colours, came Beery Bill, to whom the reader has already been introduced. He had not come to talk Politics, he said, but just to have a quiet chat with one whom he hoped he could regard as a personal friend. (I got out my fountain pen.) The chat materialised presently into an intimation that the Licensed Victuallers Benevolent Something-or-Other was short of cash; and my visitor suggested that a trifle in support of the charities of that most deserving institution would come gracefully from my pocket. On handing me the receipt he informed me that the brewing trade was in a bad way, and that he looked to me to do something for it if he used his influence on my behalf at the Election.
The next visitor was an eccentric but harmless old gentleman who eked out a precarious livelihood as a Herbalist—whatever that may be—in the most plebeian quarter of the town. He inhabited a small and stuffy shop up a discreet alley, suffered much from small boys, sold curious drugs and potions of his own composition, and prescribed for persons whose means or modesty precluded them from consulting an orthodox practitioner.
He was threatened, it appeared, with the penalties of the law. He had sold a "love-philtre" (pronounced infallible for recalling errant fiancés to a sense of duty) to an amorous kitchen-maid who was seeking to rekindle the sacred flame in the bosom of an unresponsive policeman. The damozel had mingled the potion in a plate of beefsteak pudding, and had handed the same out of the scullery window to her peripatetic swain; with the sole result that that limb of the law had been immediately and violently sick, and, the moment he felt sufficiently recovered to do so, had declared the already debilitated match at an end. The kitchen-maid, rendered desperate, had told him the whole truth; and consequently my esteemed caller was now wanted by the police.
The catastrophe of the pie, he explained, was in no way to be attributed to the love-philtre (which was composed of sifted sugar and cinnamon), but was due to the fact that instead of the philtre he had inadvertently handed his fair client a packet out of the next drawer, which contained ready-made-up doses of tartaric acid for immediate use in the case of small boys who had swallowed sixpences. Hinc lacrymcoe. In spite of his complete consciousness of his own innocence, he now found himself compelled in a few days' time to defend his conduct in a court of law. The proceedings would cost money, of which he of course possessed little or none. He had called, he said, confident in the hope that I would assist him to defray the expense of vindicating his integrity as a high-class Herbalist by purchasing six bottles of his world-renowned specific for neuralgia, from which dread malady he had been informed—quite incorrectly, by the way—that I occasionally suffered. The thirty shillings thus subscribed, together with a few odd coins which he himself had contrived to scrape together during a long life of thrift, would secure the services of a skilled advocate, who would doubtless be able to prove to the satisfaction of justice that no high-class Herbalist would ever dream, save in the way of kindness, of putting tartaric acid into a policeman's beefsteak pudding.
He added, rather inconsequently, that he had voted Conservative at the last three elections, and had moreover persuaded all the other members of the Royal and Ancient Brotherhood of High-class Herbalists to do the same. (One pound ten.)
My last visitor was a seedy individual in corduroys, who asked for a private interview with the Candidate, and, on this favour being granted, informed me in a confidential and husky whisper that he knew of ten good men and true, fully qualified voters, who were prepared to go to the poll on my behalf for the trifling fee of two pound ten a-head and no questions asked. He was politely but firmly shown into the street. One has to be on the look-out against persons of this type.