V
I had occasion to envy Loring and the passengers of the "White Seal" during the next few months. A second winter election, the false enthusiasm and cheap victories of the platform, the endless canvass and cold wet nights and days as my car splashed through the crumbling lanes of Wiltshire—all would have been a heavy price to pay even had I been returned. But the shrewd voters of the Cranborne Division were not a second time to be gulled—at least by me. There was a clear House of Lords issue: my old opponent, the Honourable Trevor Lawless, fought on the anti-Home-Rule "ticket," I once again on the sanctity of Free Trade reinforced by Land Reform. He was elected by a twelve-hundred majority, and I, in an interview with the spirituous, rain-soaked reporter of the "Cranborne Progressive and East Wilts Liberal Gazette," claimed a moral victory for the House of Commons control of finance.
To anyone who knew the 1906 Parliament when there was not room on the Government side for all the ministerialists, the first 1910 election was profoundly depressing. My uncle's majority was brought down to forty-seven, and many a Unionist, returned like Sir Roger Dainton after four years' absence, could say that the country was perceptibly returning to its senses.
"There's no victory without its casualty list," I replied to my friend Jellaby, the Whip, when he telegraphed a message of sympathy. There seemed nothing amiss with the sentiment, and I consoled myself with the prospect of wintering at San Remo with my mother.
"Can give you another seat to fight," Jellaby wired back, as my packing came to an end, and I ordered myself a place in the train-de-luxe.
"Must resist casualty habit," I returned and abandoned England for two months.
April was well advanced by the time I came back to Princes Gardens. When the bitterness of defeat is past, I know few sensations sweeter than that of not being in the House of Commons. It was irritating at first to be debarred from the smoking-room, but, as master of my own time, with no more interrupted dinners, no autumn sessions and no deputations to Ministers, I wondered what frenzy of enthusiasm could have made me for four years the slave of an urbane but vigilant young man like Jellaby, whose one duty in life was to lay me by the heels if I tried to leave the House unpaired.
"I said you'd outgrow the phase," my uncle commented one morning at breakfast. His daily post-bag brought him hundreds of letters; mine, since I had parted from Westminster, a couple of dozen at the outside.
"I may stand again if I can arrange always to winter on the Mediterranean," I said, "or if I can get returned unopposed. London in March and the Great Movement of Men in the Cranborne Division don't appeal to me, Bertrand, as they once did."