She turned and smiled down on me. "We English," she said, "are a
practical people. We assimilate 'um."
"Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?"
"Then they don't give trouble."
"They learn to shoot?"
"And all that," said Lady Forthundred. "Yes. And things go on.
Sometimes better than others, but they go on-somehow. It depends
very much on the sort of butler who pokes 'um about."
I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty
thousand a year by at least detrimental methods-socially speaking.
"We must take the bad and the good of 'um," said Lady Forthundred,
courageously…
Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. What was there in
the brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and
fifth cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing
themselves finely, against a background of deft, attentive maids and
valets, on every spacious social scene? How did things look to
them?
7
Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham
with his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face,
his unequal mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing
oratory. He led all these people wonderfully. He was always
curious and interested about life, wary beneath a pleasing
frankness-and I tormented my brain to get to the bottom of him.
For a long time he was the most powerful man in England under the
throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great majority in the
Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the concomitants
of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as waves break
against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it seemed
he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to the
last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical
aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that
he remained a commoner to the end of his days.
I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early
papers of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered
liking for him that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed.
He seemed to me to stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in
British political life. Some men one sees through and understands,
some one cannot see into or round because they are of opaque clay,
but about Evesham I had a sense of things hidden as it were by depth
and mists, because he was so big and atmospheric a personality. No
other contemporary has had that effect upon me. I've sat beside him
at dinners, stayed in houses with him-he was in the big house party
at Champneys-talked to him, sounded him, watching him as I sat
beside him. I could talk to him with extraordinary freedom and a
rare sense of beingunderstood. Other men have to be treated in a
special manner; approached through their own mental dialect,
flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and done.
Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have
ever met. The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of
stuffy little rooms looking out upon the sea.
And what was he up to? What did HE think we were doing with
Mankind? That I thought worth knowing.
I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a
dinner so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost
forced into duologues, about the possible common constructive
purpose in politics.
"I feel so much," he said, "that the best people in every party
converge. We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country
towns. There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under
every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do,
and people know it. Things that used to be matters of opinion
become matters of science-and cease to be party questions."
He instanced education.
"Apart," said I, "from the religious question."
"Apart from the religious question."
He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his
general theme that political conflict was the outcome of
uncertainty. "Directly you get a thing established, so that people
can say, 'Now this is Right,' with the same conviction that people
can say water is a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no
more to be said. The thing has to be done…"
And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely
tolerant, posing as the minister of a steadily developing
constructive conviction, there are other memories.
Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, persuasive,
indefatigable, and by all my standards wickedly perverse, leaning
over the table with those insistent movements of his hand upon it,
or swaying forward with a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a
diabolical skill to preserve what are in effect religious tests,
tests he must have known would outrage and humiliate and injure the
consciences of a quarter-and that perhaps the best quarter-of the
youngsters who come to the work of elementary education?
In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham
displayed at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his