“I never let you!,” cried Saltash. “Remember the Flying Corps scandal? I did that. And you soon forgot about Dormer. I told him from the first he had only to lie quiet. . . . Later on . . .”
Later on, without prompting, I remembered Dormer’s reappearance. Discovered by the caricaturists and taken to the heart of the public, Dormer—with his vast chin and grotesque hat—became a music-hall hero. “Our Willie” was acclaimed by the gallery with the loyal fervour accorded in other days to “good old Joe”. The Snap-Shot shewed him pruning roses with his smiling wife in an “old-world garden” and playing bumble-puppy with his apple-cheeked children. Finally, in the last days of a united front against a common foe, his portrait was thrown on the screen—after those of King Albert and General Joffre, Lord Kitchener and Mr. Lloyd-George—as the man who had saved England from starvation.
The cost of Dormer’s apotheosis was one baronetcy and the promise of a peerage when the more squeamish section of the government was better used to the Saltash idea.
“Spot-light,” repeated the wizard. “People can’t look at more than one thing at a time. Has it ever occurred to you why the old coalition went and the new one came? The ginger-group were working that way from the day Asquith carried conscription for them; they didn’t need him after that, but the public wasn’t ready for a change. Well, it was my job to make the public ready. I concentrated opinion against certain men and never left ’em alone; I concentrated in favour of others. The Dardanelles. Mesopotamia. Shells. Food. You and I know that the new lot were tarred with the same brush as the old; but we made the public think they’d been on another planet when all these messes were made. The old lot were too quiet; they never hit back.”
“There was a war on,” I reminded him.
“They would never have fallen if they’d shewn fight,” Saltash retorted. “A man’s power in politics is what he makes others believe it to be. ‘This war is too big for ordinary folk,’ people were saying: ‘we want supermen.’ Well, we said the new lot were supermen. When there weren’t enough to go round, we made so much din that office-sweepers seemed like supermen. We restored confidence; and we frightened the Germans. Now, you say you’re reviving the old rag and your slogan is to be ‘a lasting peace’. You’ll be called pro-Boche. You’ll be told you’re letting the Hun off. I don’t despair, though. The first thing is to out the present lot; and I can do that on departmental scandals alone. ’Got all the papers. Then we must prepare a big peace-boost. . . . Lunch with me and talk it over.”
Though I had nothing to discuss, I went with Saltash because Saltash hypnotized me to come. All the vitality of young America radiated from him, though he styled himself a Canadian; his features recalled semitic South Russia, though he dissembled his love for the Jews; in the ten or twelve years that I had known him I never detected a trace of breeding, education or principle; and in the next two years I was never to see him entirely sober. Until he has his first stroke, however, I count him one of the six most dangerous men in Europe, for the “yellow” press of every country is an instrument on which he has played himself into wealth and power. As a purveyor of publicity, he is the logical conclusion from the cheap press that came into existence when England was taught, willy-nilly, to read; and England is imperilled by him, as she is imperilled by every man who, in his daily work and life, has everything to gain and nothing to risk.
“I trouble waters,” he explained thickly. “Other fellers do fishing. No personal axe t’ grind.”
After a champagne luncheon he talked to me of these others. If the war unified the British Empire, it also brought to England a number of adventurous spirits who had made existence unsafe for themselves in their native dominions and whose claim to a hearing depended less on their political wisdom than on the number of miles they had travelled to reach Downing Street. The blatant harangues of Mr. Giles to indulgent imperial conferences were received with so much respect that hysterical women petitioned to have him included in the war-cabinet; a country with population and wealth equal to the city of Glasgow ranked in our councils as a great power.
“I did that,” Saltash confided. “Overseas dominions. Young wolves claiming place council-rock. People here crawled to him. And the government didn’t dare snub him.”