LITMIR.BIZ

      V.

       I TAKE A PARTNER

       Table of Contents

      That meeting with Lumley scared me badly, but it also clinched my resolution. The most pacific fellow on earth can be gingered into pugnacity. I had now more than my friendship for Tommy and my sympathy with Pitt-Heron to urge me on. A man had tried to bully me, and that roused all the worst stubbornness of my soul. I was determined to see the game through at any cost.

      But I must have an ally if my nerves were to hold out, and my mind turned at once to Tommy’s friend, Chapman. I thought with comfort of the bluff independence of the Labour Member. So that night at the House I hunted him out in the smoking-room.

      He had been having a row with the young bloods of my party that afternoon and received me ungraciously.

      “I’m about sick of you fellows,” he growled. (I shall not attempt to reproduce Chapman’s accent. He spoke rich Yorkshire, with a touch of the drawl of the western dales.) “They went and spoiled the best speech, though I say it as shouldn’t, which this old place has heard for a twelvemonth. I’ve been workin’ for days at it in the Library. I was tellin’ them how much more bread cost under Protection, and the Jew Hilderstein started a laugh because I said kilometres for kilogrammes. It was just a slip o’ the tongue, for I had it right in my notes, and besides, these furrin words don’t matter a curse. Then that young lord as sits for East Claygate gets up and goes out as I was gettin’ into my peroration, and he drops his topper and knocks off old Higgins’s spectacles, and all the idiots laughed. After that I gave it them hot and strong, and got called to order. And then Wattles, him as used to be as good a Socialist as me, replied for the Government and his blamed Board, and said that the Board thought this and the Board thought that, and was blessed if the Board would stir its stumps. Well I mind the day when I was hanging on to the Board’s coattails in Hyde Park to keep it from talking treason.”

      It took me a long time to get Chapman settled down and anchored to a drink.

      “I want you,” I said, “to tell me about Routh—you know the fellow I mean—the ex-Union leader.”

      At that he fairly blazed up.

      “There you are, you Tories,” he shouted, causing a pale Liberal Member on the next sofa to make a hurried exit. “You can’t fight fair. You hate the Unions, and you rake up any rotten old prejudice to discredit them. You can find out about Routh for yourself, for I’m damned if I help you.”

      I saw I could do nothing with Chapman unless I made a clean breast of it, so for the second time that day I told the whole story.

      I couldn’t have wished for a better audience. He got wildly excited before I was half through with it. No doubt of the correctness of my evidence ever entered his head, for, like most of his party, he hated anarchism worse than capitalism, and the notion of a highly-capitalised, highly-scientific, highly-undemocratic anarchism fairly revolted his soul. Besides, he adored Tommy Deloraine.

      Routh, he told me, had been a young engineer of a superior type, with a job in a big shop at Sheffield. He had professed advanced political views, and, although he had strictly no business to be there, had taken a large part in Trade Union work, and was treasurer of one big branch. Chapman had met him often at conferences and on platforms, and had been impressed by the fertility and ingenuity of his mind and the boldness of his purpose. He was the leader of the left wing of the movement, and had that gift of half-scientific, half-philosophic jargon which is dear at all times to the hearts of the half-baked. A seat in Parliament had been repeatedly offered him, but he had always declined; wisely, Chapman thought, for he judged him the type which is more effective behind the scenes.

      But with all his ability he had not been popular. “He was a cold-blooded, sneering devil,” as Chapman put it, “a sort of Parnell. He tyrannised over his followers, and he was the rudest brute I ever met.”

      Then followed the catastrophe, in which it became apparent that he had speculated with the funds of the Union and had lost a large sum. Chapman, however, was suspicious of these losses, and was inclined to suspect that he had the money all the time in a safe place. A year or two earlier the Unions, greatly to the disgust of old-fashioned folk, had been given certain extra- legal privileges, and this man Routh had been one of the chief advocates of the Unions’ claims. Now he had the cool effrontery to turn the tables on them, and use those very privileges to justify his action and escape prosecution.

      There was nothing to be done. Some of the fellows, said Chapman, swore to wring his neck, but he did not give them the chance. He had disappeared from England, and was generally believed to be living in some foreign capital.

      “What I would give to be even with the swine!” cried my friend, clenching and unclenching his big fist. “But we’re up against no small thing in Josiah Routh. There isn’t a crime on earth he’d stick at, and he’s as clever as the old Devil, his master.”

      “If that’s how you feel, I can trust you to back me up,” I said. ” And the first thing I want you to do is to come and stay at my flat. God knows what may happen next, and two men are better than one. I tell you frankly, I’m nervous, and I would Like to have you with me.”

      Chapman had no objection. I accompanied him to his Bloomsbury lodgings, where he packed a bag, and we returned to the Down Street fiat. The sight of his burly figure and sagacious face was a relief to me in the mysterious darkness where I now found myself walking.

      Thus began my housekeeping with Chapman, one of the queerest episodes in my life. He was the best fellow in the world, but I found that I had misjudged his character. To see him in the House you would have thought him a piece of granite, with his Yorkshire bluntness and hard, downright, north-country sense. He had all that somewhere inside him, but he was also as romantic as a boy. The new situation delighted him. He was quite clear that it was another case of the strife between Capital and Labour—Tommy and I standing for Labour, though he used to refer to Tommy in public as a “gilded popinjay,” and only a month before had described me in the House as a ” viperous lackey of Capitalism.” It was the best kind of strife in which you had not to meet your adversary with long-winded speeches, but might any moment get a chance to pummel him with your fists.

      He made me ache with laughter. The spying business used to rouse him to fury. I don’t think he was tracked as I was, but he chose to fancy he was, and was guilty of assault and battery on one butcher’s boy, two cabbies, and a gentleman who turned out to be a bookmaker’s assistant. This side of him got to be an infernal nuisance, and I had many rows with him. Among other things, he chose to suspect my man Waters of treachery—Waters, who was the son of a gardener at home, and hadn’t wits enough to put up an umbrella when it rained.

      “You’re not taking this business rightly,” he maintained one night. “What’s the good of waiting for these devils to down you? Let’s go out and down them.” And he announced his intention, from which no words of mine could dissuade him, of keeping watch on Mr Andrew Lumley at the Albany.

      His resolution led to a complete disregard of his Parliamentary duties. Deputations of constituents waited for him in vain. Of course he never got a sight of Lumley. All that happened was that he was very nearly given in charge more than once for molesting peaceable citizens in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly and Regent Street.

      One night on my way home from the Temple I saw in the bills of the evening papers the announcement of the arrest of a Labour Member. It was Chapman, sure enough. At first I feared that he had got himself into serious trouble, and was much relieved to find him in the flat in a state of blazing anger. It seemed that he had found somebody whom he thought was Lumley, for he only knew him from my descriptions. The man was in a shop in Jermyn Street, with a car waiting outside, and Chapman had—politely, as he swore—asked the chauffeur his master’s name. The chauffeur had replied abusively, upon which Chapman had haled him from the driver’s seat and shaken him till his teeth rattled. The owner came out, and Chapman was

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