Читать книгу The Postmaster-General - Hilaire Belloc - Страница 9

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There is a row of semi-detached villas in the suburb of Streatham known (I know not why) as Eliza Grove. Of these semi-detached villas, one (known officially and to the gods as Number 5, but to mortals and on the front gate in white letters on a green ground, as Myrtle View) is the dear home of a small building contractor, by name Nicholas Clarke. As he has nothing whatever to do with this story and, for all his efforts, will not be allowed to appear upon these pages again, we may leave it at that. But the other villa of this Siamese twin, tied on to it, rib to rib, Number 7, also with a green door, has no particular name; for its owner has discovered in his social advance that the giving of names to small suburban houses is not done. It is plain Number 7, to gods and men alike.

Here resides that strong, humorous, kindly, thoroughly efficient, healthy man, just on sixty years of age, known to the world as Jack Williams, for the moment Home Secretary—but there, he might be anything he pleased. The ball is at his feet. He had been offered the Presidency of the Council and had refused it; partly because the opportunities were insufficient—no contracts—partly because it was not a leg up. As like as not he would have the Dominions before the end of the year, for the present Secretary of State for the Dominions, like others before him, found his job a very thankless one.

Anyhow, Jack Williams is for the moment Home Secretary, pleased with his work, as he has been pleased with everything he ever had to do, and doing it well, as he has done well everything he ever had to do.

You would notice him anywhere, for though he was but a rather short man, with heavy, undistinguished features, and those rendered common by an undignified small moustache, his carriage and still more his expression would have struck you. His twinkling steel grey eyes, intermittently narrowed as he gazed sharply at you in conversation, had a sort of fire in them: they saw everything that was going on about him. His big shoulders had strength and endurance, his deep chest vitality, and his step was solid. Also there was this about him, that when he spoke he spoke with zest, entertainingly, full of life, and yet said nothing which could betray what was in his mind. The very man for politics!

He was an early riser, and this Thursday, March 5th, at 8 o’clock, he was sitting at his breakfast table, with his admirable wife opposite him, in the little front room of Number 7.

It was the morning after that strange, abrupt conversation which had passed on the telephone during the dinner between James Haggismuir McAuley and the distracted Halterton. Jack Williams was reading his newspaper, propped up against the coffee pot, and anyone who had seen him would have said: “Here is a man who has risen from very small beginnings to a modest, but, for his station, prosperous middle age. This little semi-detached villa with its spare bedroom, its parlour and its dining-room, and its one neat servant—this humble suburban home—is for him comfort and even luxury. He contrasts it in his own mind with his origins in that miserable muddy slum up North where he passed his starved childhood under a mother broken with childbearing and a father alternately drunk and sober, and bringing in, as luck served him, about a pound a week, in the old days before the Great War when the poor were really poor.”

Anyone who had passed such a judgement would have been right. Jack Williams did feel exactly like that. He had risen, he had prospered. Indeed, he had prospered more than the observer would have imagined. He was worth about a quarter of a million pounds.

He had risen simply and naturally, as such men do, something of a hero among his fellow-boys in his teens in the mill, finding he had facility with his tongue, joining in debates, as a young man, when he was shop steward: then advancing in his Union, then secretary to it: then elected to Parliament, when he was thirty years of age, not long after the Great War. All the regular routine, the cursus honorum which is happily still the public life of England in 1960, and which blends so well with the remains of our old aristocratic policy.

He had been cordially received as he rose. He had made his mark in the House of Commons. He had first had office of a minor sort before he was fifty. He had entered the Ministry in Mrs. Boulger’s first administration. He had used his opportunities well, investing shrewdly, getting to know all he could about men, and using all that he knew, to their praise or shame, making the right friendships with rich men—real friendships upon all sides. It was a point with the young bloods to boast that they knew him. There was competition among the great hostesses to get him into their houses—and he went.

The Right Hon. John Williams, Esq. (“Honest Jack Williams”), M.P., Secretary of State for Home Affairs in Mrs. Boulger’s second administration (1960).

Among his many talents were two which just fitted such a position: he played billiards admirably—he had discovered his ability therein before he was twenty years of age in the dingy billiard-room of the “Percy Arms,” whilst he was yet a lad in the mills, but already earning good money. And he had a quick, racy sort of repartee. He never tried to lose the accent of his native town and province. If anything he exaggerated it, though whether consciously or not I cannot say.

There he sat, reading his newspaper. But he was not one of those men who read their newspapers to the discomfort of their wives. If she had helped to make him, as she had, it was not only because she was a woman of such capacity (he had married her when he was still a very young man—they both worked in the same mill and earned between them less than four pounds a week), but because he had always respected her, always cherished her, and always depended upon her judgement in a way which she could feel and be proud of. She was a woman much after his own mould in features as in bearing, equally resolute though more demure: not provided of course with the small moustache: and I am afraid, not humorous about the eyes, but steady in her gaze. Upon business affairs she had never advised him. She never interfered with any decision of his to do this or that, as he went up in his career, save now and then quietly and at critical moments, but she gave judgements usually negative, against what might have been a false move. He was careful of her, and he was right. Their one child had died while they were still poor in the North, in the old days. That grave had strengthened the bond between them, and no man and woman in England were to-day less lonely.

So he was reading his paper this morning, not selfishly to himself, but with a running commentary to her as he read, telling her the news.

“Sammy’s been at it again. He talks too much.... Hullo! Jack’s got a letter.... All about the currency, and saying nothing.”

“That Lord John never does say anything worth hearing,” commented Mrs. Williams.

“Oh, but he thinks a lot,” answered her husband; and he added, “That’s how he’s got where he is.”

“And where is he?” said Mrs. Williams superciliously. “In the soup!”

“He may be now,” answered the master of the house, nodding sagaciously, “but he’s one as crawls out of the tureen. Don’t you forget that, Martha. Now, you be kind to him!”

“Oh, I’ll be kind to him, Mr. Williams; I’ll be kind to him,” said Martha, a little ruffled.

“Yes, my dear, you always were. You always know what to do.”

There was a pause. And during that pause the husband turned over the paper and looked towards the back pages. His wife knew what that meant. He was glancing at certain high matters in stocks and shares, with which she was far too wise to interfere.

Mrs. Honest Jack Williams, one of our leading political ladies, giving her judgement that Lord John is in the soup.

He had done admirably at that game, and she knew her limitations. Always in her heart when she heard (for he sometimes blundered) of such and such a big thing brought off, or when he told her in a general way (for he did that also) how they stood before the world, how he would cut up, she remembered that there might have been a son to which all this should have gone. But she never spoke of that. She knew well enough what would happen if she survived him. It would all be at her disposal. And if he survived her, why, she knew well enough that what time might be left to him would not then matter to him much. She had a vague feeling, which people often have when they have had so close a companionship for so many years, that somehow neither would survive the other. It does not exactly happen like that; but it often happens nearly like that....

And even as Honest Jack Williams (Secretary of State for Home Affairs) looked at those stocks and shares, and even as the eyes which she could just see above the propped-up paper got a look of concentration in them, while he fastened on the figures he was following, she admired him more for his excellent judgement of the market, which she well knew to be the chief glory of a public man.

There had been ups and downs, though he had told her frankly of certain misjudgements or bits of bad luck; but on balance he had always been going upwards—and to what a height! For of all that large solid income nine-tenths was saved and went to swell the pile. There was the salary as well, so long as he was in office. And as for Number 7, Eliza Grove, slavey and all, and the taxis they were always taking, and the visits and the rest, the whole thing didn’t come to fifteen hundred a year. She had good reason to be proud of him.

In these few moments of concentration during which he interrupted that conversation with his wife, which he was very careful to maintain, Jack Williams had captured with his bright sharp eyes one point after another in the financial news before him. He had seen that the Indian Loan was steady, he had been a little annoyed at the head-lines on the Third Central Bank; there had been a half-smile on his face for half a second at an absurd puff of the New Guaranty Loan, which he had heavily sold forward upon good official knowledge, shared by not more than half-a-dozen other men. Then his expression changed again and became arrested and almost excited. His wife noticed the expression, but she could not tell what caused it.

What had caused it had been something very small but very significant. It was a line in the middle of the industrial shares, the line concerning Billies on the New York Exchange after London had closed the evening before. That line said simply:

“Durr. Imp. Tel. Ord. 29s. 6d.—31s. 6d.”

The Home Secretary gave a very low whistle, for which he politely begged his wife’s pardon. He put the paper down, and asked Mrs. Williams what she thought on a vexed question which had been a good deal debated between them: whether they should make a bid for the cottage in Surrey on the fringe of the park palings which they had hitherto leased from their very good friends and constant hosts in the big house at Henbury.

Mrs. Williams was always voluble on that subject; she knew that her husband was against buying, while she was in favour. Mr. Williams therefore expected—and got—a good long re-statement as usual of all her reasons. As she made it he nodded, taking in every point, though he had heard it twenty times before—and it gave him leisure to think without her knowing how his mind was working.

He was not bothering about the cottage. He was wondering about Billies. It would perhaps be too strong to say that he was cursing himself inwardly for not having watched the tape; he had been glued all night to the Treasury Bench, right up to the cry of “Who goes home?” ringing through the vaults of the House of Commons, he had come home too tired to think of anything, he had gone to bed at once, and meanwhile he had missed his opportunity. Lord! How Billies had jumped in New York! Nearly eight bob! Twenty-nine bob, thirty-one, from twenty-two.... What on earth had made them jump like....

The voice of his wife came to him across the table (for men like this can attend to two things at once).

“You’re always saying as you don’t want the place—saying it’s always better to look tenants of theirs anyhow—more friendly-like, and doesn’t make people call us forward. But that’s all nonsense, Mr. Williams. You never know what’s going to happen in this world, and we’ve been there now all those weeks every summer for these five years, and I couldn’t abear to part with it.”

“If they was to take it away we could buy them out big house and all,” said Mr. Williams proudly.

“Not open, we couldn’t,” answered his wife.

“My dear, there’s a great deal in what you say, but they won’t turn us out.”

Mr. Williams spoke gently and kindly—but the words that were passing through his mind were quite different: he was saying to himself:

“It’s still early, I can arrange for Gunter to get my packet before that broker leaves his house for the City: but it’s nearly ten bob a share lost already anyhow, dammit!”

Then he continued aloud, to Mrs. Williams: “I shall always do what you want in the matter, my dear—you know that: I shall always do what you want.”

And the sentence running in his mind was more like this: “They’re blazing! I’ve missed the first eight shillings, but I’ll bet they’ll go to forty and over!”

“Thank you, Jack,” said Mrs. Williams. She called him Jack every time she got her way. She rose, with a little difficulty, waddled round the table, and kissed him on the forehead. He fondled her hand, murmuring: “Anything you want, dear, I allus do say, anything you want.”

But in his mind there was running something like this:

“I’m that sure, I think I’ll cover fifty thousand.”

He pulled out his watch and sprang from his seat.

“Hullo, it’s later than I thought,” he said. “I must telephone.”

He went off to the telephone in the narrow hall. He heard his wife’s slow and heavy step proceeding to the kitchen to give her orders for the day to the unique servant, the symbol of their humility. And then, taking off the receiver, he talked to one of the gentlemen with whom he dealt—indirectly—for some at least of his business affairs.

“Is that you, Gunter? ... yes, Jack speaking. Fifty thousand.... No, I know what I’m saying.... Yes, I know all about that.... Never mind what I missed. Perhaps I didn’t miss it. Anyhow, that’s what I say.... No, it’s not too much.... Yes, I do know best. Yes, fifty thousand. The second name, the one we agreed on last week.... No, no top figure. There’ll be time enough for selling. I’ll tell you when.”

He hung up the receiver again.

The Rt. Honourable Jack Williams, M.P., one of H.M. Ministers, Secretary of State for Home Affairs, loved exercise, as any healthy, successful Englishman will. And though it threatened rain upon this early March day, he would walk, as was his custom, from Victoria to Whitehall. He would be at the office by ten.

As the train took him up to Town his mind was full of that which so often mixes with public affairs in the minds of great statesmen. He was wondering why Billies had kangarooed.

Obviously they had jumped because someone had wind, or believed he had wind, of the contract’s going to Durrant’s. But what was the nature of the information? What was its value? By the time he got to Victoria he had it well sorted out in his mind.

There were four possibilities:—

First, McAuley and his crowd, the Durrant crowd, might have had an assurance; they might have that assurance in their pockets now, and however much they wanted to conceal the fact in order to give them time to buy before the rise, it might have leaked out through a servant or a spy, or someone through whose hands the document had passed: in the typewriting as like as not—if anyone had been fool enough to have it typewritten.

That was one possibility. The second possibility was that James Haggismuir McAuley, having got his assurance solidly in writing, had deliberately released the knowledge of it indirectly, having already bought at the lowest during the little slump of yesterday, Wednesday morning, and desiring to catch a profit in passing before the big business began.

The third possibility was that there was no assurance at all, and that James, in a laudable effort to catch the same quick profit, had let it be thought that he had an assurance, though he had it not. In that case the shares would slump badly sooner or later, and must be watched. For the moment they were bound to be blazing, because all London would be reading the quotation from New York in the paper this morning.

The fourth possibility was that someone in New York had lied brazenly for his own purposes, and that there was as yet no assurance given to Durrant’s at all, or, if there was, no leakage of the assurance voluntary or involuntary, no funny business on this side at any rate.

He had got that far in his analysis, he was out of the train and on his way to walk straight to his office in Whitehall, when he suddenly remembered another factor, and he went round by back streets to the river so as to have time to think it over. The factor he had remembered was the Committee’s report—adverse to Durrant’s. Someone had set aside that report. No mere rumour would have raised the shares in face of the news that had leaked out—the news that the Committee had reported in favour of Reynier’s and against Durrant’s. Only one man could set aside that report, and that one man was the Postmaster-General.

He saw it clearly now. At some hour of the yesterday, Wednesday March the 4th—or possibly late on Tuesday the 3rd—McAuley had squared the P.M.G.

Jack Williams grew more and more convinced as he walked briskly up the river side from Horseferry Road, with the rain still threatening but not falling, and the brave south-west wind ruffling the water against the tide. As he passed the Houses of Parliament his conclusion was fixed. It was a good omen that he should have arrived at it just as he passed those august walls, which shed so benign an influence over meditations of this kind. Yes, he was absolutely certain. James Haggismuir McAuley had got his assurance in black and white with Halterton’s name on it and had released the knowledge through his own channels. Billies would blaze and soar. He was glad he had given the order! He possessed his soul in peace.

All the morning the Rt. Honourable John Williams attended to the business for which he was paid by a grateful nation his £100 a week. His rapidity of decision, his excellent manner with subordinates, the health of his presence, pervaded the place. He commuted the sentence of one man, decided to hang another (on competent advice, of course), and read with real care the report on the trouble in the “C” division, summoned the clerk who had written the minute, grasped every detail, came to a wise decision, devoted all the rest of his time to the great Police Reform, and then went out to cross the Park toward the Club at lunch time feeling that he had earned his money—which indeed he had: he was a good workman.

He glanced at the general tape as he went in, holding it up to his face, paying particular attention to the news of the Royal Wedding in Italy, but with his right eye he was shooting glances at the other ribbon to catch the price of Billies. He had to wait a little time till they came round.

“12.56 p.m.; Pelham Pref. 108—109, Reefers 79 ex.” so and so, and so on and so on ... then, at last, Billies:—

“Dur. Imp. Tel. Ord. 35s.—36s.”

Another man would have smiled. Jack Williams put on a troubled look as of slight grief, bent again for a moment over the news of the Italian Royal Wedding, sighed, and went on into the dining-room.