“After 1916 I could never trust a coaly-lib again,” he answered. “Now, if your paper would help us into a position where we could hold the balance . . .”
“That,” I said, “is simply overturning one coalition to make way for another. And you’ve no more programme to-day than you had in 1918, when you let Ll-G.’s mad promises pass without a protest. We’re paying for your silence to-day, at Chanak and wherever the French can hit us.”
Before Jellaby had time to answer, we were hurried one stage farther along the ever unfinished road of contemporary politics. Lord Saltash, whom I had observed moving from table to table with the manner of a conspirator rather far gone in wine, raised his eyebrows suddenly as ‘Blob’ Wister hacked his way across the dancing-floor. There was a quick nod; and Saltash lurched towards the telephone-boxes, only pausing to whisper thickly in my ear:
“He’s going! Bonar, I mean. Meeting to-morrow.”
“Are you betting on the result?” I asked.
“He’s not coming back politics sake being losing side,” Saltash answered telegraphically, laying a squat index-finger against one side of his nose. “Last kick dying lion. Wash-out George. Number up.”
Jellaby was silent for a few minutes; then he smiled as one who had waited patiently by the mills of the gods.
“Had Zimri peace, who slew his master?,” he demanded at large.
“This is the end of the liberal party for a generation,” I said; which was not the answer expected of me.
And then I stood up to say good-by. There is little difference of age between Jellaby and myself; but he has been nurtured more strictly on the official hatreds of a whips’ office. I was born and bred a liberal, whereas Jellaby embraced that faith as he embraced agnosticism, the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough, the painting of Manet, the æsthetics of Pater and, for a time, total abstinence. They were all fashionable among the members of one coterie at Balliol in his day.