[PART VI]
THE MAN IN THE CLUB
I
I always have the lurking feeling that Democracy would be all right but for its numbers. I am aware that this sounds paradoxical, and that in its numbers is supposed to lie its strength, but I do not see how that can ever be a properly directed executive strength. There are too many cooks. Taken one at a time, how admirable are its impulses, how just in the main its judgments! But block-vote it——! Take away its trust in Princes and put it in Polls——! Convert its votes, not into effective action, but into arid deserts of statistics——!... Two men can make a holy friendship; among three there can be a useful understanding; but ten will ever winnow the wind with talk, and a hundred are a mere arithmetical obstruction in the way of ever getting anything done at all.
I am moved to these reflections (as no younger novelist ever dares to say) by a series of occurrences that began at that time so to harass me and to put me so completely off my private work that, like poor Monty Rooke, I might almost as well have stopped in bed till midday. These were the occurrences that I had already dimly foreseen when that photograph of the house in Lennox Street had so suddenly appeared in that morning's issue of the Roundabout. By an unforeseen fluke the peril of the coroner's inquest had been safely passed, but I had felt in my bones that others were gathering.
Well, they gathered. I learned, no matter how, that the Scepter Insurance Company was consulting its solicitors and its solicitors were instructing counsel. The plane and parachute people, as I had expected, were investigating scraps of twisted metal and pieces of scorched fabric, and the Accidents Investigation Committees were getting to work.
Understand that none of these happenings were official happenings. If the Scepter wanted to resist, it had its ordinary remedy at civil law. The Committees had no authority whatever except to draw up reports for their own information and satisfaction. The interests of the owners and manufacturers were likewise purely private ones.