Once more I vehemently cursed him. It was half-past eight at night, with nothing unusual doing at the office, and I had left Willett in charge so that I might find Westbury. It was perfectly certain that after Hodgson's leading article of that morning Westbury would not spend the evening in the retirement of his home, but would be out for what young Willett calls "gin-and-glory." As it happened, I had run him to earth at my very first attempt, in the same Saloon Bar in which I had first seen him.
You may know Hodgson's leading-article style. If we on the Circus don't imitate it it is not that we deny that it "gets across." It is allusive, rorty and familiar, and there is frequently common sense behind it. If the Man in the Public-house likes his news served up in that way you can't blame Hodgson for meeting his wishes. This is what he had written, no doubt sending his Chelsea sales up by hundreds of quires:—
"TOM, DICK AND ICARUS.
"Our correspondent Mr. Harry Westbury is some lad. You will find his letter at the foot of the next column to this. Why, asks Harry, in these days when you may consider yourself lucky to have a roof over your head at all, should your head and that roof be brought into sudden and violent contact? Not that Harry is a jumper; he isn't going to challenge Joe Darby; but the ceiling and your occiput can establish connection just the same if the former comes down on the latter. What he really means is that aeroplanes, subject to sudden syncopes of the engines, have no business over Chelsea's pleasant roofs at all.
"H.W. does not claim that he personally suffered damage from the crash we reported last Friday. But he is a respected House and Estate Agent residing in the district and speaks feelingly. C'est son métier, as our gallant and Gallic Allies say. He means, we take it, that if civil aviation is to develop, corresponding safeguards must be developed side by side with it. Here we are with Harry all the way. Our Olympians may have burst a number of brain-cells over the present Regulations, but they will have to find a new wave-length. Tom, Dick and Harry we know, but we have not yet been properly introduced to Tom, Dick and Icarus. No, sir, not with building materials at their present price and the plumber rolling up in his Rolls-Ford. The pilot who came down in Chelsea last Thursday is said to have been employed by the Aiglon Company. Nuff said. If the Aiglon or any other Company is out for public support it knows what to do. In the meantime we hope Mr. Westbury won't raise his house premiums. But that is another story.
"The Man in the Public-house."
That was the whole text of it. Was it fair comment on a matter of public interest? Well, I don't say it wasn't. Was it a timely reminder that high-spirited lads who had lately been praised for their dare-devilry must now pull themselves together and fall into line with the new conditions? Very likely. Was it a legitimate attempt to arouse interest in the age's new wonder, or merely a political stick with which covertly to beat some high official dog or other? I didn't know.
For my mind was occupied with quite other thoughts. From round the edge of my paper I was trying to sum up Westbury—a young man, but unexercised; seldom drunk, as a man in decent physical condition would have been on half that he swallowed, but already habituated and inured; probably quite well-to-do, in that mysterious way that causes tradesmen quietly to acquire their own houses and to drive in their own two-seaters to places of entertainment such as that I was in; and yet in a sense a minor man of affairs as distinct from a tradesman, a cut above the shirt-sleeves-and-counter business, if not exactly entitled to style his occupation a profession. He had got over the first overweening stage of the vanity of that day's publicity; he was now a little disparaging what he wouldn't have allowed anybody else to disparage; was treating Hodgson quite as a familiar, in fact, which as far as I was concerned he was perfectly at liberty to do. A dangerous beast, I thought again, and none the less dangerous now that Billy Mackwith, as foreman of that coroner's jury, had got his back thoroughly up.
"Yes, Mr. Mackwith, K.C. or O.B.E., or whatever you call yourself," he was muttering again, "they laugh best that laugh last. If he'd even said to me, 'What's your opinion, sir?' I won't say but what I should have thought a bit more of him, but him and his silk hat and gloves ... you wait a bit! There's a few will be surprised before this Case is over!"
It seemed to me that he scarcely took the trouble to veil what he really meant. Nor was I surprised at the way in which his hearers evidently took his words. For, looking from his cunning yet stupid face to the six or seven other faces about him, I could make a guess at their attitude too. Remember those first faint rumors that had found their way with the morning's milk to Audrey Cunningham's doorstep. Remember what whispered currency they must have had before they had come to Audrey at all. Remember that photograph in the Roundabout that had filled Lennox Street with a gaping crowd that morning, a crowd that had taken a couple of days to diminish and die away. Esdaile told me later, too, that for a week he had been conscious of turning heads as he had walked along the streets.... Oh, I could have made this Case of ours a thing of pistols and parachutes only, but I wished to go a little farther than that. Not that I have any particular views on mass-suggestion at large. My business is simply to observe its working. And here I was, in a Saloon Bar, observing it in a very curious form.