It was a large café, with a band, where you get the kind of tea that doesn’t include bread-and-butter. You can get tea-cake that is like hot skin and oil, and you can put aniline raspberry jam on it, and follow it down with dandelion-coloured cake that has a suspicious flavour. But if you ask for bread-and-butter, the rather spent young person with the apron says, “Cut bread-and-butter, did you mean?” and makes it sound like a faddy temperance food. If you are brave enough to admit that you do mean cut bread-and-butter, she brings something thin and mottled like German sausage. But it was only for convenience that we turned in there; it is not like criticizing Polly’s tea.
“We have only got a week or two to do it in,” said Reginald, “and there is a lot to do. The organization is not up to much.”
“But look here,” I said; “I don’t know anything at all about politics, and I can’t argue, because I always agree with what anybody says; it always seems so sensible until one thinks it over quietly at home.”
“Well, common sense will teach you the main line of what you have got to drum into them,” said Reginald. “You see, there are always no end of things that they want ‘put down.’ Very well, then. I am the man to put them down, whatever they are, because I have a good deal of time to give to the job, see? Then there’s the Church. There’s Canon Black—you know the man I mean—they all know him, and he’s very much liked. If he speaks for me, we’ll get a lot of votes; do you know him, by the way?”
“No,” I said, “I’ve never heard of him.”
“Yes, you have,” Reginald corrected me, “because I have just told you about him; so you can say that you know he approves of me—he does, really—I’m not joking. Well then, you know, I haven’t got any fads—temperance or such things—but if any one wants you to say that I’ll support their fads, you must just use tact, and, if necessary, say I’ll call. You write on the card—here, I’ll show you.”
He pulled a card out of his pocket and showed it to me. It was a drab little article, with the mysteriously depressing influence which always accompanies a space for a name and address. Anything which emphasizes the fact that we are one of millions of similar works of the Almighty has the same dingy effect. To be one of numberless leaves on a tree is delightful enough, but to have a caterpillar come round with a note-book and enter, “Name of tree, number of branch, time of fall in preceding year,” etc., gives an air of squalor to the whole tree. There was, unhappily for my peculiar talent, no space in which to record the appearance of the voter, but the canvasser was instructed to classify her victims as “Conservative,” “Liberal,” or “doubtful,” and was encouraged, besides, to add such code signals of distress as “Mr. —— call,” “won’t say,” “dead,” “at sea,” “carriage on day of election,” or anything else likely to be helpful in the committee rooms.
For the benefit of those who have never canvassed, I here explain the spiritual meaning of these different signals. “Mr. —— call” means that it is impossible for the candidate to blandish each of his four thousand or so of voters, so he reserves himself for the very good and the very bad, and those who are described in the jargon of the committee rooms as “the doubtful ones.” But beware of the trap which underlies the fair word “doubtful”! There are no doubtful ones. People who express doubts on any subject are rarely concerned with the merits of the case on either side. All they are waiting for is something that will turn up to give a picturesque glow to whichever side their instinct favours; and they are seldom disappointed. Except in certain spots, where some common interest—like nationality or sectarianism, or the nature of their employment—makes a group of people definite and outspoken in their political feelings, it is remarkable what a lot of ratepayers one may fawn upon without being thrown off the door-step or welcomed with open arms. This alleged indecision is a pastime and a trap which the canvasser provides and falls into with unfailing regularity. The attitude of the voter is generally that of the tease among school-children. “Ticky, ticky, tack, which hand will you have?” he asks, and the coveted apple or vote shifts about with hardly a show of deception. Now and then they are secret, like a dog with a bone. “We have the benefit of the ballot,” they say, with the most aggressive purity-in-politics face, all pursed up. But if no one came prying to find out where their sympathies were hidden, they would be the first to throw out hints of “hot and cold” to promote the game. The voters who throw the “benefit of the ballot” in our teeth are regular old chase-me-Charlies.
But it took me three cold, wet, weary, underfed weeks in October to discover all this. Reginald took his election very seriously; so did his rival. Millport was shaken by the warfare of other excellent gentlemen in different parts of the town, and they were all serious. So far as one can see, it is only bad men who go into politics or administration with a light heart. Playful minds are so easily led astray. Reginald made all his canvassers take it seriously too. He put the fear of John Bull into them. Our faces grew long or wide with the timid earnestness of the perfect lady, convinced of the honesty of her commander. So did the faces of the Liberal candidate’s assistants, only they were of a rather different build from ours—very nice, but bonier than ours as a rule; and when we met them on the opposite side of the street, sometimes actually on the same door-step, they looked to me the sort of women who can carve a duck for eight people.
“Will you take these cards, please, Mrs. Molyneux?” said a fat, cheery man at the committee rooms when I presented myself there for the first time. The room seemed full of men, strangely shaped like fancy breads; some of them writing at a bare table; all of them as active as dry leaves at that time of year.