On returning from our morning drive (which usually included an open-air meeting) we took luncheon, generally in the presence of various anæmic young men who represented local organs of public opinion, and who expected the long-suffering candidate to set forth his views between mouthfuls of chop and sips of sherry. I usually turned these over to Robin, who understood their ways; and he charmed them so wisely that even the relentless Cash was compelled to admit that our press notices might have been worse.
Robin was a tower of strength. Indeed he and Dolly were my two chief lieutenants; Dilly and Dicky, as became a pair who had only been married a few months, proving but broken reeds. A week's electioneering proved sufficient for their requirements; and, declining flatly to "grin like a dog and run about the city"—Dilly's pithy summary of the art of canvassing—any longer, they left us ten days before polling-day to pay a country-house visit. But Robin was everywhere. He answered my letters and he interviewed reporters. He could keep a meeting in hand (pending my arrival from another) with such success that when I finally appeared upon the platform to take up the wondrous tale of my party's perfections, the audience were loth to let Robin go. In six days he acquired a knowledge of the wants, peculiarities, weaknesses, and traditions of my constituents which had occupied all my powers of concentration and absorption for six arduous years. He used to drop into his speeches little topical allusions and local "gags" which, though Greek to the uninitiated, never failed to produce a roar: and a political speaker who can unfailingly make his audience laugh with him—not at him—has gone far on the road to success.
Once, at a meeting, when I was half-way through a speech to an unmistakably bored and rather hostile audience, Robin, who was sitting beside me, slipped a sheet of paper on to my table. The message on the paper, written large for me to read, said—Compare Stridge to the Old Lady of Dippleton. What the lady had done I did not know, neither had I time to inquire; but I took my secretary's advice, and, after pausing for a brief drink of water, concluded my sentence—
"—and I maintain, gentlemen, that my opponent, in advocating such a policy as that which he has had the—the—yes, the effrontery to lay before a clear-thinking and broad-minded Stoneleigh audience last night, has shown himself to be no wiser in his generation, no better or more statesmanlike in character, than—than—what shall we say? than"—I glanced at the paper on the table—"the Old Lady of Dippleton!"
There was a great roar of laughter, and I sat down. I was ultimately awarded a vote of thanks, which should by rights have been given to the heroine of my closing allusion. I may mention here that no subsequent inquiry of mine ever elicited from Robin or any one else what the Old Lady of Dippleton had done. Probably it was one of those things that no real lady ever ought to do, and I discreetly left it at that.
Dolly, too, proved a treasure. Her strong line was canvassing. She could ingratiate herself with short-tempered and over-driven wives apparently without effort; surly husbands melted before her smile; sheepish young men forgot the encumbering existence of their hands and feet in her presence; and she was absolutely infallible with babies. Her methods were entirely her own, and gratifyingly free from the superior and patronising airs usually adopted by fine ladies when they go to solicit the votes of that variegated and much-graded community which they cheerfully and indiscriminately sum up as "the lower classes."
Let us follow her as she flits on her way to pay a morning call upon Mr Noah Gulching of Jackson's Row.
Mr Gulching, she finds, is absent in search of a job, while Mrs Gulching, thoroughly cross and worried, is doing the housework with one hand and dangling a fractious teething baby from the other. The rest of the family are engaged in playing games of skill and chance (on the win, tie, or wrangle principle), in the middle of the street outside; and piercing screams testify to the fact that John William Gulching, aged two, had just been uprooted by Mary Kate Gulching, who wants to lay out a new Hop-Scotch court, from the flagstone upon which he has been seated for the last half hour and dumped down upon another, the warming of which, even his untutored sensations inform him, will be a matter of some time and trouble.
Dolly, not a whit dismayed by a thoroughly ungracious reception, tucks up her skirt, rolls up her sleeves, finishes washing-up, makes a bed, and peels some potatoes. Then she takes the baby and attends to its more conspicuous wants, what time Mrs Gulching, thoroughly mollified,—she had thought at first that Dolly was "a person with tracks,"—goes round the corner to the "Drop Inn," at which hostelry the work of which her spouse is habitually in pursuit invariably goes to ground, and brings that gentleman home with her, to find Dolly playing with a spotless infant whom she gradually recognises as her own offspring.
Dolly begins at once.