“Come to inspect my bunch?,” he enquired, with a careless nod and a less careless scrutiny of our liqueurs. Then, as I hesitated for an answer: “You’re too dam’ superior for these times. When you’ve been in the game as long as I have . . . Funny thing! The first slogan I ever heard in the States was that politics was not a job for a gentleman; ten years later I heard it in Canada; I’ve heard it in Australia; and, from what I’ve seen of your rag, you’re sighing for the great days of Salisbury and Pitt and all that lot.”
“I should hardly expect to find them here,” I said.
“They wouldn’t be in a state to come here! Old Pitt was a rare one for the booze. People don’t change much. You remember the old Limehouse days? Lloyd-George said that an aristocracy was like old cheese; and the aristocracy answered that Lloyd-George was a dirty little Welsh attorney: ‘Oh, how vulgar!,’ you cried. Was that worse than your old Salisbury’s nicknaming Joey Chamberlain ‘Jack Cade’?” He looked round with a fuddled but tolerant smile, as a miller might look when his wheel stopped suddenly, at the corner where startling silence had fallen on the conspiratorial, closely grouped heads of Dean, Wister and Lingfield. “The war opened up a place in the sun for people who hadn’t been brought up to your kid-glove ideas of public life.”
The whispering group was joined by Sir Rupert Foreditch, whose chief claim on his country’s gratitude is that he sacrificed the dilatory chance of promotion on the staff in order to race home after Neuve Chapelle and offer himself for a place in the first coalition. It was by an accident of geography rather than through any lack of zeal that others were before him; but he and the group that broke the first war-administration have the comfort of knowing that all decisions at the Dardanelles were postponed till an embarrassed government could decide which of their willing swords must be declined.
“Would you say,” I asked, “that there was a touch of the adventurer about some of them?”
“A man,” enunciated Saltash, “is only an adventurer till he arrives; then he’s a pioneer. Nobody minds new men when they’re like Asquith. Nobody minds rich men when they’re like Derby.” . . .
“For one reason, because the Stanleys don’t drift from one country to another, seeing which they can turn to their own greatest profit.”
Saltash shook his head incredulously:
“Don’t try to pull any stake-in-the-country stuff on me. That’s well enough for your father-in-law. I sat next to old Crawleigh at a city dinner last week; and he didn’t know what to make of things. I did. And I told him. ‘The aristocracy,’ I said, ‘has been swamped by the middle-classes. Well, if the aristocracy couldn’t keep its end up against men like Chamberlain and Asquith and Lloyd-George, it was best out of the way.’ D’you mind if I bring Foreditch over here? He’s just back from Germany; and I want to know how the land lies there.”
I could not repel such a man at a time when my sole function in the Turf and Stage was to study the new leaders in our political life. When I first met Sir Rupert at Oxford, he was an unbending radical; but the 1906 election brought into the world more radical mouths than there was bread to feed, and, when I took my seat, Foreditch was spaciously enthroned in the wastes of opposition. As a hired assassin, his tale of Budget Leaguers’ scalps won him the deputy-leadership of the Die-Hards when the Parliament Bill came to be fought; and, in the Home Rule controversy, he preached rebellion in Ulster with a gusto not exceeded by Mr. Bonar Law, Sir Edward Carson and Mr. F. E. Smith. An incautious declaration that the kaiser could be trusted to save Ulster from a false Hanoverian, as William of Orange had saved her from a perfidious Stuart, kept Foreditch from reaping the reward of his shell-intrigue in 1916; but, if he missed cabinet rank, he achieved a greater position as the unofficial plenipotentiary who was always being sent, with the easy informality introduced by a ‘business’ government, to make overtures and arrange deals. His ambition, I think, was to play the part of Colonel House to Mr. Lloyd-George’s President Wilson: in the last years of the war he was always vanishing mysteriously to Stockholm or Berne; and, two years after this date, I heard that he was visiting, in disguise, the leaders of all the parties in Ireland.