There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the great peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa, Framboya--Cromer, Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example.So far as that easier task of holding sword and scales had gone, they had shown the finest qualities, but they had returned to the perplexing and exacting problem of the home country, a little glorious, a little too simply bold.They wanted to arm and they wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate necessity made them far more eager to arm than to educate, and their experience of heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for obedience in a homogeneous country.They didn't understand raw men, ill-trained men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are the things that matter in England....There were also the great business adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord Paddockhurst).My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the scale between a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the perception of crude vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar competitiveness, and a mere habitual persistence in the pursuit of gain.For a time I saw a good deal of Cossington--I wish I had kept a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark how he could vary from day to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman, and a very bold and wide-thinking political schemer.He had a vanity of sweeping actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to violent ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed him in the slightest degree.By an accident I plumbed the folly in him--but I feel I never plumbed his wisdom.I remember him one day after a lunch at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound meditation over the end of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem to light the whole interior being of a man."Some day," he said softly, rather to himself than to me, and A PROPOS of nothing--"some day I will raise the country.""Why not?" I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the little silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette....
Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and again there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and their big lawyers, accustomed to--well, qualified statement.And below the giant personalities of the party were the young bloods, young, adventurous men of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen service in South Africa, who had travelled and hunted; explorers, keen motorists, interested in aviation, active in army organisation.
Good, brown-faced stuff they were, but impervious to ideas outside the range of their activities, more ignorant of science than their chaffeurs, and of the quality of English people than welt-politicians; contemptuous of school and university by reason of the Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come their way, witty, light-hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, with a certain aptitude for bullying.They varied in insensible gradations between the noble sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the Tories of our Pentagram club on the other.You perceive how a man might exercise his mind in the attempt to strike an average of public serviceability in this miscellany! And mixed up with these, mixed up sometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary, whose predominant idea was that the village schools should confine themselves to teaching the catechi**, hat-touching and courtesying, and be given a holiday whenever beaters were in request....
I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the figure of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the library of Stamford Court after lunch.One foot rested on one of those things--I think they are called gout stools.He had been playing golf all the morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he had sat at my table and talked in the overbearing manner permitted to irascible important men whose insteps are painful.Among other things he had flouted the idea that women would ever understand statecraft or be more than a nuisance in politics, denied flatly that Hindoos were capable of anything whatever except excesses in population, regretted he could not censor picture galleries and circulating libraries, and declared that dissenters were people who pretended to take theology seriously with the express purpose of upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the Established Church."No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose, argue about religion," he said."They mean mischief." Having delivered his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to the left of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an appreciative encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable, responded to some respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a number of classical anecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive retorts and scandalous miscarriages of justice that are so dear to the forensic mind.Now he reposed.He was breathing heavily with his mouth a little open and his head on one side.One whisker was turned back against the comfortable padding.His plump strong hands gripped the arms of his chair, and his frown was a little assuaged.
How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours, wealth, influence, respect, he had them all.How scornful and hard it had made his unguarded expression!
I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake him up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
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