'One of the babies was awake. He told me that--that 'my sort of questions ''--he slapped the pile of cables--'were only taken between 11 and 2 P.M. So I waited.'
'And when you got to business?' I asked.
He made a gesture of despair. 'It was like talking to children. They'd never heard of it.'
'And your Opposite Number?'
Penfentenyou described him.
'Hush! You mustn't talk like that!' I shuddered. 'He's one of the best of good fellows. You should meet him socially.'
'I've done that too,' he said. 'Have you?'
'Heaven forbid!' I cried; 'but that's the proper thing to say.'
'Oh, he said all the proper things. Only I thought as this was England that they'd more or less have the hang of all the--general hang-together of my Idea. But I had to explain it from the beginning.'
'Ah! They'd probably mislaid the papers,' I said, and I told him the story of a three-million pound insurrection caused by a deputy Under-Secretary sitting upon a mass of green-labelled correspondence instead of reading it.
'I wonder it doesn't happen every week,' the answered. 'D'you mind my having the Agent-General to dinner again tonight? I'll wire, and he can motor down.'
The Agent-General arrived two hours later, a patient and expostulating person, visibly torn between the pulling Devil of a rampant Colony, and the placid Baker of a largely uninterested England. But with Penfentenyou behind him he had worked; for he told us that Lord Lundie--the Law Lord was the final authority on the legal and constitutional aspects of the Great Idea, and to him it must be referred.
'Good Heavens alive!' thundered Penfentenyou. 'I told you to get that settled last Christmas.'
'It was the middle of the house-party season,' said the Agent-General mildly. 'Lord Lundie's at Credence Green now--he spends his holidays there. It's only forty miles off.'
'Shan't I disturb his Holiness?' said Penfentenyou heavily. 'Perhaps 'my sort of questions,'' he snorted, 'mayn't be discussed except at midnight.'
'Oh, don't be a child,' I said.
'What this country needs,' said Penfentenyou, 'is--' and for ten minutes he trumpeted rebellion.
'What you need is to pay for your own protection,' I cut in when he drew breath, and I showed him a yellowish paper, supplied gratis by Government, which is called Schedule D. To my merciless delight he had never seen the thing before, and I completed my victory over him and all the Colonies with a Brassey's 'Naval Annual' and a 'Statesman's Year Book.'
The Agent-General interposed with agent-generalities (but they were merely provocateurs) about Ties of Sentiment.
'They be blowed!' said Penfentenyou. 'What's the good of sentiment towards a Kindergarten?'
'Quite so. Ties of common funk are the things that bind us together; and the sooner you new nations realize it the better. What you need is an annual invasion. Then you'd grow up.'
'Thank you! Thank you!' said the Agent-General. 'That's what I am always trying to tell my people.'
'But, my dear fool,' Penfentenyou almost wept, 'do you pretend that these banana-fingered amateurs at home are grown up?'
'You poor, serious, pagan man,' I retorted, 'if you take 'em that way, you'll wreck your Great Idea.'
'Will you take him to Lord Lundie's to-morrow?' said the Agent-General promptly.
'I suppose I must,' I said, 'if you won't.'
'Not me! I'm going home,' said the Agent-General, and departed. I am glad that I am no colony's Agent- General.
Penfentenyou continued to argue about naval contributions till 1.15 A.M., though I was victor from the first.
At ten o'clock I got him and his correspondence into the motor, and he had the decency to ask whether he had been unpolished over-night. I replied that I waited an apology. This he made excuse for renewed arguments, and used wayside shows as illustrations of the decadence of England.
For example we burst a tyre within a mile of Credence Green, and, to save time, walked into the beautifully kept little village. His eye was caught by a building of pale-blue tin, stencilled 'Calvinist Chapel,' before whose shuttered windows an Italian organ-grinder .with a petticoated monkey was playing 'Dolly Grey-'
'Yes. That's it!' snapped the egoist. 'That's a parable of the general situation in England. And look at those brutes!' A huge household removals van was halted at a public-house. The men in charge were drinking beer from blue and white mugs. It seemed to me a pretty sight, but Penfentenyou said it represented Our National Attitude.
Lord Lundie's summer resting-place we learned was a farm, a little out of the village, up a hill round which curled a high hedged road. Only an initiated few spend their holidays at Credence Green, and they have trained the householders to keep the place select. Penfentenyou made a grievance of this as we walked up the lane, followed at a distance by the organ-grinder.
'Suppose he is having a house-party,' he said: 'Anything's possible in this insane land.'
Just at that minute we found ourselves opposite an empty villa. Its roof was of black slate, with bright unweathered ridge-tiling; its walls were of blood-coloured brick, cornered and banded with vermiculated stucco work, and there was cobalt, magenta, and purest apple-green window-glass on either side of the front door. The
