“Well, things are moving,” he began darkly, as he led me to the Turf and Stage and pointed from an unobserved corner of the gallery to Lord Lingfield’s customary table.
I needed a few minutes to penetrate the familiar externals. My cousin Laurence Hunter-Oakleigh was entertaining a party of American revue actresses; Sam Dainton was dancing with Ivy Gaymer; and the inscrutable Gaspard was watching and ministering with his wonted resourcefulness and address. It was like going back to a play at the end of a long run. I felt that they must all of them have been frozen in the same attitude since last I looked down on the top of their heads a year before. The band, which played unceasingly from the moment we arrived to the moment we left, might well have been playing for twelve months on end. It was impossible to think of these sleek heads and slim figures without their Turf and Stage frame, unless you thought of them as the brilliant, glossy chorus of mannequins and salesmen in a musical comedy at the Hilarity in old days. Had they homes? Had they private lives?
“I see Wister is withdrawing the support of his papers from the coalition,” I said.
“Yes, he’s out for an all-conservative ministry,” answered Saltash. “Foreditch put him up to it; and you can see they’re trying to nobble Wilmot Dean for their new ginger-group. The rank-and-file tories don’t want to drive Ll-G. out, though, till they’re sure of keeping him out. And Lingfield, who’s leading the rank-and-file, doesn’t believe they can do it yet, unless Bonar comes back. That’s why he wants a centre party, to include Birkenhead, Winston and that lot. It’s interesting, devilish interesting! The dying lion ain’t dead yet.”
“What line are you taking yourself?,” I asked.
“A wise man wouldn’t commit himself till the dying lion was much nearer his last kick,” Saltash answered with refreshing candour. “If Lingfield’s centre party falls down, he and Birkenhead and Austen won’t get any mercy from Foreditch and the men who want an all-conservative ministry; and, if Foreditch wounds Ll-G. without killing the coalition, his die-hard tories needn’t look for office from the centre party. It’s too early to say. When I give you the hint . . . I’m here most evenings,” he concluded with an affability that rather disquieted me.
“I’ll remember that,” I said; and, when the last of many political crises ended fifteen months later in the prime minister’s resignation, I made it my business to dine nightly at the Turf and Stage. I was never a member; but Sonia, who also was not a member, introduced me to Gaspard; and Gaspard, bowing from the waist, assured me in the French of the Midi that Mrs. O’Rane’s friends were always welcome.
4
She was not at the club on the night when Saltash took me to observe the signs of the times; but I found her husband talking to Barbara when I arrived home. He was armed with the notes of an article and wished to use my paper for an attack on the entire English system of inheritance and property.
“We’re hypnotized by 1914,” he broke out stormily. “We treat the old world like a vast Pompeii, which we’re uncovering bit by bit. People won’t see that we’re repairing from copies of old models.” . . .