When William Came

Yeovil, while standing aloof from his wife’s participation in this social event, had made private arrangements for being a personal spectator of the scene; as one of the ticket-buying public he had secured a seat in the back row of a low-priced gallery, whence he might watch, observant and unobserved, the much talked-of debut of Gorla Mustelford, and the writing of a new chapter in the history of the fait accompli.  Around him he noticed an incessant undercurrent of jangling laughter, an unending give-and-take of meaningless mirthless jest and catchword.  He had noticed the same thing in streets and public places since his arrival in London, a noisy, empty interchange of chaff and laughter that he had been at a loss to account for.  The Londoner is not well adapted for the irresponsible noisiness of jesting tongue that bubbles up naturally in a Southern race, and the effort to be volatile was the more noticeable because it so obviously was an effort.  Turning over the pages of a book that told the story of Bulgarian social life in the days of Turkish rule, Yeovil had that morning come across a passage that seemed to throw some light on the thing that had puzzled him:

“Bondage has this one advantage: it makes a nation merry.  Where far-reaching ambition has no scope for its development the community squanders its energy on the trivial and personal cares of its daily life, and seeks relief and recreation in simple and easily obtained material enjoyment.”  The writer was a man who had known bondage, so he spoke at any rate with authority.  Of the London of the moment it could not, however, be said with any truth that it was merry, but merely that its inhabitants made desperate endeavour not to appear crushed under their catastrophe.  Surrounded as he was now with a babble of tongues and shrill mechanical repartee, Yeovil’s mind went back to the book and its account of a theatre audience in the Turkish days of Bulgaria, with its light and laughing crowd of critics and spectators.  Bulgaria!  The thought of that determined little nation came to him with a sharp sense of irony.  There was a people who had not thought it beneath the dignity of their manhood to learn the trade and discipline of arms.  They had their reward; torn and exhausted and debt-encumbered from their campaigns, they were masters in their own house, the Bulgarian flag flew over the Bulgarian mountains.  And Yeovil stole a glance at the crown of Charlemagne set over the Royal box.

In a capacious box immediately opposite the one set aside for royalty the Lady Shalem sat in well-considered prominence, confident that every press critic and reporter would note her presence, and that one or two of them would describe, or misdescribe, her toilet.  Already quite a considerable section of the audience knew her by name, and the frequency with which she graciously nodded towards various quarters of the house suggested the presence of a great many personal acquaintances.  She had attained to that desirable feminine altitude of purse and position when people who go about everywhere know you well by sight and have never met your dress before.

Lady Shalem was a woman of commanding presence, of that type which suggests a consciousness that the command may not necessarily be obeyed; she had observant eyes and a well-managed voice.  Her successes in life had been worked for, but they were also to some considerable extent the result of accident.  Her public history went back to the time when, in the person of her husband, Mr. Conrad Dort, she had contested two hopeless and very expensive Parliamentary elections on behalf of her party; on each occasion the declaration of the poll had shown a heavy though reduced majority on the wrong side, but she might have perpetrated an apt misquotation of the French monarch’s traditional message after the defeat of Pavia, and assured the world “all is lost save honours.”  The forthcoming Honours List had duly proclaimed the fact that Conrad Dort, Esquire, had entered Parliament by another door as Baron Shalem, of Wireskiln, in the county of Suffolk.  Success had crowned the lady’s efforts as far as the achievement of the title went, but her social ambitions seemed unlikely to make further headway.  The new Baron and his wife, their title and money notwithstanding, did not “go down” in their particular segment of county society, and in London there were other titles and incomes to compete with.  People were willing to worship the Golden Calf, but allowed themselves a choice of altars.  No one could justly say that the Shalems were either oppressively vulgar or insufferably bumptious; probably the chief reason for their lack of popularity was their intense and obvious desire to be popular.  They kept open house in such an insistently open manner that they created a social draught.  The people who accepted their invitations for the second or third time were not the sort of people whose names gave importance to a dinner party or a house gathering.  Failure, in a thinly-disguised form, attended the assiduous efforts of the Shalems to play a leading role in the world that they had climbed into.  The Baron began to observe to his acquaintances that “gadding about” and entertaining on a big scale was not much in his line; a quiet after-dinner pipe and talk with some brother legislator was his ideal way of spending an evening.

Then came the great catastrophe, involving the old order of society in the national overthrow.  Lady Shalem, after a decent interval of patriotic mourning, began to look around her and take stock of her chances and opportunities under the new regime.  It was easier to achieve distinction as a titled oasis in the social desert that London had become than it had been to obtain recognition as a new growth in a rather overcrowded field.  The observant eyes and agile brain quickly noted this circumstance, and her ladyship set to work to adapt herself to the altered conditions that governed her world.  Lord Shalem was one of the few Peers who kissed the hand of the new Sovereign, his wife was one of the few hostesses who attempted to throw a semblance of gaiety and lavish elegance over the travesty of a London season following the year of disaster.  The world of tradesmen and purveyors and caterers, and the thousands who were dependent on them for employment, privately blessed the example set by Shalem House, whatever their feelings might be towards the fait accompli, and the august newcomer who had added an old Saxon kingdom and some of its accretions to the Teutonic realm of Charlemagne was duly beholden to an acquired subject who was willing to forget the bitterness of defeat and to help others to forget it also.  Among other acts of Imperial recognition an earldom was being held in readiness for the Baron who had known how to accept accomplished facts with a good grace.  One of the wits of the Cockatrice Club had asserted that the new earl would take