You would feel quite uncomfortable if you heard Dalrymple talk. He conveys the impression that everything is badly in the way and ought to be removed at once. That's his view. Dalrymple has no patience with the social system. This includes everything, from the washing bill to the House of Commons.
Dalrymple said the General Election made him impatient. By the way, Dalrymple is a fine upstanding personage, with just the coloured hair the lady novelists dote on, and eyes in harmony; but despite his handsome placid bearing Dalrymple is a fire-eater of the hungriest.
"What you want to do is to make a clean sweep of everything," he said. "Money is an anachronism, and in a perfectly ordered State would not be required."
Of course it is no more use arguing with Dalrymple than it would be to attempt a controversy on naval affairs with Lord Nelson on his pedestal.
And then there is this about Dalrymple—you remember what some Court poet said concerning Louis THE FOURTEENTH; it was to the effect that quand le Roi parle—well, apparently everything and everybody else had to put up the shutters. I forget exactly how the thing ran. It is just so with Dalrymple. He comes into my room in the City and warms himself, though no fire is needed to fan his enthusiasm for destruction. The Bolsheviks are peaceable Sunday folk compared with him. A Nihilist on a war footing would be considered Quaker-like in his symptoms.
Dalrymple is neck or nothing. He is a whole-hogger even to the most indigestible bit of crackling.
"What we want is a fresh start," he said. "Then you could begin anew and everybody would have a chance. Burn things, blow them up, leave nothing; then we should see something. Your whole scheme is faulty. Your Underground—" Dalrymple has an irritating habit of fathering things on me, which is unfair, for, as regards the Tubes, for instance, I am sorry to say I have not even a share, and often not as much as a strap.
"But the Underground is only a bit overcrowded," I ventured to say. "It can't help that, you know."
"It is all wrong," said Dalrymple. "The entire gadget is defective. Look at France, look at America, look at Germany and Russia and the Jugo-Slavs."
It was rather breathless work looking at all these nations and peoples, but I did my best. Dalrymple is particularly strong when it is a question of the Jugo-Slavs, and he always gave me the idea that he spent his Saturday afternoons enunciating chatty pleasantries in Trafalgar Square and on Tower Hill.