I handed on this opinion to Bertrand next day, with the rider that he looked like winning an old bet on the life of the coalition. Before I went north again to bring Barbara back to London, the Lloyd-George government was under sentence; and, had Bertrand been at hand in October to claim his wager, I should have had to entertain him at dinner.
3
Mindful of Lord Saltash’s invitation, I called without delay at the Turf and Stage to hear the latest movements of political parties. Now, as before, there was no one to turn the prime minister out if he could hold his cabinet together; now, as before, the insurgents were thrown into confusion by their cross-divisions. While Rupert Foreditch ran up and down in search of a conservative leader, the centre party counted its big guns.
“It is hard,” the Lingfield press stated, “to imagine a conservative administration without Lord Birkenhead, Sir Robert Horne and Mr. Chamberlain, all of whom, it is well known, have promised their allegiance to Mr. Lloyd-George.”. . .
“Recent events in the near east,” retorted the Wister papers, “have signed the death-warrant of the coalition.”. . .
The organs of both parties combined to ignore the existence of liberal ministers; and I judged that the political wire-pullers on all sides were estimating whether the old but awkward conservative organization or the new but efficient coalition would be the harder to split.
As I failed to see Saltash, I deduced that the tocsin was either not to ring yet or else had rung already in some other place; and my nearest approach to a party-manager was the trim and ill-informed Frank Jellaby, who demanded without preamble what line my paper would take in the election.
“What line are the independent liberals taking?,” I asked in my turn. “And how many seats can you be sure of winning? I’d support the devil himself if he promised a homogeneous majority.”
“Our line . . .” he began eagerly; and, as I turned from the things he had forgotten to the things he had never learned, I classed him unhesitatingly with those who—in O’Rane’s phrase—would not admit that a war had taken place.
“I suppose a political whip can’t live without an abnormal endowment of optimism,” I said, more to myself than to him.