“Well, I must be off,” he said; and I know he was recapitulating again: “You. And your wife. And six servants . . .”
“I’m glad to have had this talk,” I said, “even though we’ve not convinced each other. If you think I’ve misrepresented you, I can only offer you equal space in our columns to put yourself right with our readers.”
“I shan’t have time,” he answered.
“You can do it in two lines. If you’ll answer my charge that you’re working, consciously or unconsciously, for a revolution . . .”
“I’m answering it now,” he interrupted. “From here I go to King’s Cross and from King’s Cross to the north. Putting things to the test. I shall be back again in just the time that it takes us to walk here.”
As he disappeared from sight, Barbara commented admiringly on his exit:
“For a third curtain, it was unsurpassed. I do want to know what’s going to happen in the last act.”
4
If I did not know then, I had a strength of conviction that amounted almost to knowledge. There was going to be public excitement; there was going to be loose speaking; there was going to be bad blood. And, after that, there might well be rioting.
I have replayed the game a hundred times since that day and asked myself what I could have done to change the issue. Before the war I should have talked to Bertrand; and, if he had shared my apprehensions, he would have spoken a word to the responsible ministers. With this new government of men unknown to me, with this new House no longer even in session, there was no one I could approach. During the war, when we broke down most of the interdepartmental walls, a telephone message from the Admiralty would have stirred sympathetic chords in Scotland Yard or the Home Office. Now I had long severed my connection with the public service; Philip Hornbeck was my one remaining link; and, if I bothered him again, I ran the risk of being told that Griffiths was become a bee in my bonnet.