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 chauffeurs, 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 catechism, 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