Just at about this time a resident at Claydamp-on-the-Wash was astonished, in the course of a country walk, to see a tall, thin gentleman leaning over a gate in an attitude of insupportable dejection. The enormous brogues; the ill-fitting brown suit; the high-domed forehead; the bushy brown spade beard; the huge spectacles perched on the lofty sensitive nose; the dreamy eyes looking far away into the mists, all suggested a certain literary personage. Could it be? Was it possible? Overcoming a natural hesitation at intruding upon the privacy of one who was obviously a recluse, he hesitatingly ventured to approach. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “but surely I am addressing Mr. Lytton Strachey?” and without giving the stranger time to answer he added, “Is anything the matter? Can I help in any way?”
The solitary turned upon him eyes that were suffused with tears. “Oh, no,” he replied, “no. Nothing. I was born too early, that is all.” And on being pressed for a further explanation he continued, “By the ordinary processes of Nature I must inevitably predecease this monstrosity of talent; and I am excluded from the possibility of writing the only Georgian biography that offers any kind of scope for my abilities.”
He was of politics; and he was not of politics. He built up abstract theories of Government in his articles in the morning Press: and demolished them in the evening in his speeches in the House of Commons. He attracted the sympathies of simple folk by a life of Spartan discipline; and disgusted them by a profuse and shameless bestowal of peerages and honours. He angled for the votes of the mercenary and idle by a wholesale creation of state benevolences; and threw away what he had gained by an almost niggardly supervision and husbandry of the national income. As Controller and chief proprietor of the great Press Trust, he denounced the infamies and exactions of the great profiteering combines in which he himself was the principal partner: and as Prime Minister of a secular Government he disestablished the Church of which he, as Cardinal Archbishop, was the protesting head. Writing at about this time Count Puffendorff Seidlitz, the Megalomanian Ambassador, reported to his Government that it was perfectly vain to cherish the slightest hope of undermining the national popularity of one who so supremely embodied in himself the qualities, and the inconsistencies, and the portentous humbug that chiefly characterised the nation of which he was the head. Nothing could be done at present. Above all there must be no haste. “But I do not despair,” he added, “for, though ignorant of music, the man has a certain coarse feeling for the arts—and that, in a country of Philistines, must in the long run betray him into our hands.”
Fatal self-complacency! At the very moment when those words were being penned, McCann was—where? He was in the anteroom of the Princess Vodkha, that luckless Ambassador’s sovereign, waiting to seal with a courtly handclasp the Trade Agreement between Megalomania and this country. Poor Count Puffendorff Seidlitz! Where Lord Thundercliffe and his brother Lord Miasma has failed, it was hardly to be supposed that he would succeed.
So ended, in a thin filmy haze, a life of service and sacrament. To the very end they thought he might be saved. The general public, brought suddenly to the realisation of the approaching calamity, stood dumbly in the streets, or hurried away—hoping. But the sands were running down; the tide, long since turned, was ebbing with inexorable swiftness; the night was indeed at hand. A greater and more terrible accuser than Lord Thundercliffe hovered over the sick man’s bed; and a greater and wiser Judge than public opinion was waiting to pronounce the verdict from which there is no appeal.
MY FIRST DERBY
“No,” I said, “as a matter of fact I’ve never been to the Derby—and to tell you the truth——” I went on.