"I shall certainly come again," I said, as we shook hands.
Walking along Millbank, Grayle broke into an unexpected laugh.
"I thought I'd met most kinds of lunacy," he remarked. "Fellow said he was in the House, didn't he? I must look him up in the directory to-morrow and see what their name is. 'The Sanctuary.' I suppose that's a symbol, too."
4
A reputation for honesty is often embarrassing; when coupled with efficiency, it is always disastrous. For five-and-twenty years I have reeled under the name of a "good business man," and this has exposed me to attack by every impulsive woman and woolly-headed man who has wanted something done without quite knowing how to do it, who has wished money collected without quite knowing how to set about it, who has dragged his committee and himself knee-deep into the mire of stagnant insolvency without knowing whether to go on or to struggle back. Then someone has said, "We must co-opt Mr. Raymond Stornaway."
As the reputation has long ceased to be an honour and is now only a nuisance, I propose to affect no false modesty about it. Before the war I was always being made a governor of some new school or hospital, and my success is to be measured by the fact that I almost invariably got my own way in committee—(if I was not voted into the chair at once, I overwhelmed the chairman until he yielded place)—and as invariably I raised the funds which I had been appointed to find. Perhaps I hoped that, as everyone had comfortably survived my absence for a year, I should be allowed a respite, but on the morrow of this Arabian Night of mine I was to discover that London contained as many voluble, sympathetic and unpractical women as ever, all convinced that they had only to form a committee of their friends, dispense with book-keeping, insert their photographs in the illustrated papers and stretch out both hands to a man who knew a man who had a friend on one of the daily papers.
Lady Maitland rustled in, grey-haired and majestic, as I was finishing breakfast the first morning; the Duchess of Ross starved me into submission before she would let me go down to luncheon; and by night I was duly included in the Committees of the Belgian Relief Fund, the Emergency Hospital Fund and the Prisoners of War Relief Fund. The following day Mountstuart of the Treasury wheedled me into the Deputy Commissionership of the War Charities Control Department, and I found myself after an interval of thirty years once more a Government servant, charged to see that the amateur enthusiasm of Eleanor Ross and her friends did not defraud the public too flagrantly and that a reasonable proportion of the money collected was in fact paid over to the objects for which it had been raised.
Throughout August and the first half of September I set myself to learn my new duties, spending the morning in the St. James' Street Committee rooms and the afternoon at the Eaton Hotel, where my Department had been installed in a faded coffee-room enlivened by a sardonic portrait of Lord Beaconsfield in Garter robes and made business-like by rickety trestle tables, paste pots and letter trays, internecine telephones and japanned deed-boxes earmarked as His Majesty's property by a white crown and "G.R." It took me several bashful days to grow acclimatised to the epicene life of the office, but I discovered in time and with relief that the expensive young women with the Johnsonian capacity for conversation and tea were every whit as much frightened of me as I of them. The men afforded material for my insatiable interest in my fellow creatures; we had a few journalists, a stockbroker or two, several college tutors, an elderly miscellany which had retired some years before and was returning to active service for the duration of the war, two or three men rejected or invalided out of the army and three or four whose reason for not being in the army was not so obvious—a gathering which was partly patriotic, wholly impecunious and very different from the collection of unfledged naked intelligences which were distributed through the public offices of other days by the Civil Service Commissioners.
When I had subdued Lady Pentyre in the morning and ploughed through the familiar files in the afternoon, I devoted the evening to private business. A year's accumulation of letters made a considerable pile, which was not reduced by the kindly friends who thought it necessary to congratulate me on my return; nor was my leisure increased by those others who invited me to lunch or dinner with a persistency that brooked no refusal. In time, however, I had read myself abreast of the periodical literature produced by the hospitals and schools; in time, too, I began to tackle the Lancing inheritance and paid formal visits to Ripley Court and the house in Pall Mall to see that they were satisfactory to the War Office. So long as the war continued, I was not likely to be faced by poor Deryk Lancing's inability to dispose of the income of the Trust.
A month slipped imperceptibly away before I had got rid of the arrears of work and felt justified in taking on extra burdens. Then I paid my first visit to the House of Commons and tried in one evening to get the temper of a House which I had left toiling acrimoniously in 1914 with the third presentation of the Home Rule Bill. The Front Benches were pleasantly mingled in late-found amity, there was a solid, unquestioning Ministerial majority, but in place of an official opposition I found a curious collection of cliques not wholly satisfied with all the heroic remedies of the Government and fearful that criticism might be construed as factiousness. I was to find later that, with the abdication of the House of Commons, all control of administration fell gradually into the hands of the Press.