okes and little
personalities. A Teutonic journalist, a musical critic, I suppose,
inquired as to the origin of the meagre pheasant. Fox replied that it
had been preserved in the back-yard. The dramatic critic mumbled unheard
that some piece or other was off the bills of the Adelphi. I grinned
vacantly. Afterward, under his breath, Fox put me up to a thing or two
regarding the inner meaning of the new daily. Put by him, without any
glamour of a moral purpose, the case seemed rather mean. The dingy
smoking-room depressed me and the whole thing was, what I had, for so
many years, striven to keep out of. Fox hung over my ear, whispering.
There were shades of intonation in his sibillating. Some of those "in
it," the voice implied, were not above-board; others were, and the tone
became deferential, implied that I was to take my tone from itself.

"Of course, a man like the Right Honourable C. does it on the straight,
... quite on the straight, ... has to have some sort of semi-official
backer.... In this case, it's me, ... the _Hour_. They're a bit splitty,
the Ministry, I mean.... They say Gurnard isn't playing square ... they
_say_ so." His broad, red face glowed as he bent down to my ear, his
little sea-blue eyes twinkled with moisture. He enlightened me
cautiously, circumspectly. There was something unpleasant in the
business--not exactly in Fox himself, but the kind of thing. I wish he
would cease his explanations--I didn't want to hear them. I have never
wanted to know how things are worked; preferring to take the world at
its face value. Callan's revelations had been bearable, because of the
farcical pompousness of his manner. But this was different, it had the
stamp of truth, perhaps because it was a little dirty. I didn't want to
hear that the Foreign Minister was ever so remotely mixed up in this
business. He was only a symbol to me, but he stood for the stability of
statesmanship and for the decencies that it is troublesome to have
touched.

"Of course," he was proceeding, "the Churchill gang would like to go on
playing the stand-off to us. But it won't do, they've got to come in or
see themselves left. Gurnard has pretty well nobbled their old party
press, so they've got to begin all over again."

That was it--that was precisely it. Churchill ought to have played the
stand-off to people like us--to have gone on playing it at whatever
cost. That was what I demanded of the world as I conceived it. It was so
much