The Devil's Paw Part 12

"There's a difference," Furley protested. "Today the people are all right, but the Rienzi isn't here--My G.o.d!"

He broke off suddenly, pursuing another train of thought. He leaned forward.

"Look here," he said, "we'll talk about the fate of that communication later. What about Miss Abbeway?"

"Miss Abbeway," Julian told him, "was in imminent danger last night of arrest as a spy. Against my principles and all my convictions, I have done my best to protect her against the consequences of her ridiculous and inexcusable conduct. I don't know anything about your a.s.sociation, Furley, but I consider you a lot of rotters to allow a girl to take on a job like this."

Furley's eyes flashed in sympathy.

"It was a cowardly action, Julian," he agreed. "I'm hot with shame when I think of it. But don't, for heaven's sake, think I had anything to do with the affair! We have a secret service branch which arranges for those things. It's that skunk Fenn who's responsible. d.a.m.n him!"

"Nicholas Fenn, the pacifist!" Julian exclaimed. "So you take vermin like that into your councils!"

"You can't call him too hard a name for me at this moment," Furley muttered.

"Nicholas Fenn," Julian repeated, with a new light in his eyes. "Why, the cable I censored was to him! So he's the arch traitor!"

"Nicholas Fenn is in it;" Furley admitted, "although I deny that there's any treason whatever in the affair."

"Don't talk nonsense!" Julian replied. "What about your German hairdresser who was shot this morning?"

"It was a mistake to make use of him," Furley confessed. "Fenn has deceived us all as to the method of our communications. But listen, Julian. You'll be able to get Miss Abbeway out of this?"

"If I don't," Julian replied, "I shall be in it myself, for I've lied myself black in the face already."

"You're a man, for all the starch in you, Julian," Furley declared. "If anything were to happen to that girl, I'd wring Fenn's neck."

"I think she's safe for the present," Julian p.r.o.nounced. "You see, she isn't in possession of the incriminating doc.u.ment. I took it from her when she was in danger of arrest."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"You can't have much doubt about that," was the composed reply. "I shall go to town to-morrow and hand it over to the proper authorities."

Julian rose to his feet as he spoke. Furley looked at him helplessly.

"How in heaven's name, man," he groaned, "shall I be able to make you see the truth!"

A touch of the winter sunlight was upon Julian's face which, curiously enough, at that moment resembled his father's in its cold, patrician lines. The mention of Nicholas Fenn's name seemed to have transformed him.

"If I were you, Furley," he advised, "for the sake of our friendship, I wouldn't try. There is no consideration in the world which would alter my intentions."

There was the sound of the lifting of the outer latch, a knock at the door. The incoming visitors stood upon no ceremony. Mr. Stenson and Catherine showed themselves upon the threshold.

Mr. Stenson waved aside all ceremony and at once checked Furley's attempt to rise to his feet.

"Pray don't get up, Furley," he begged, shaking hands with him. "I hope you'll forgive such an informal visit. I met Miss Abbeway on my way down to the sea, and when she told me that she was coming to call on you, I asked leave to accompany her."

"You're very welcome, sir," was the cordial response. "It's an honour which I scarcely expected."

Julian found chairs for every one, and Mr. Stenson, recognising intuitively a certain state of tension, continued his good-humoured remarks.

"Miss Abbeway and I," he said, "have been having a most interesting conversation, or rather argument. I find that she is entirely of your way of thinking, Furley. You both belong to the order of what I call puffball politicians."

Catherine laughed heartily at the simile.

"Mr. Stenson is a glaring example," she pointed out, "of those who do not know their own friends. Mr. Furley and I both believe that some time or other our views will appeal to the whole of the intellectual and unselfish world."

"It's a terrible job to get people to think," Furley observed. "They are nearly always busy doing something else."

"And these aristocrats!" Catherine continued, smiling at Julian. "You spoil them so in England, you know. Eton and Oxford are simply terrible in their narrowing effect upon your young men. It's like putting your raw material into a sausage machine."

"Miss Abbeway is very severe this morning," Stenson declared, with unabated good humour. "She has been attacking my policy and my principles during the whole of our walk. Bad luck about your accident, Furley. I suppose we should have met whilst I am down here, if you hadn't developed too adventurous a spirit."

Furley glanced at Julian and smiled.

"I am not so sure about that, sir," he said. "Your host doesn't approve of me very much."

"Do political prejudices exist so far from their home?" Mr. Stenson asked.

"I am afraid my father is rather old-fashioned," Julian confessed.

"You are all old-fashioned--and stiff with prejudice," Furley declared.

"Even Orden," he went on, turning to Catherine, "only tolerates me because we ate dinners off the same board when we were both making up our minds to be Lord High Chancellor."

"Our friend Furley," Julian confided, as he leaned across the table and took a cigarette, "has no tact and many prejudices. He does write such rubbish about the aristocracy. I remember an article of his not very long ago, ent.i.tled 'Out with our Peers!' It's all very well for a younger son like me to take it lying down, but you could scarcely expect my father to approve. Besides, I believe the fellow's a renegade. I have an idea that he was born in the narrower circles himself."

"That's where you're wrong, then," Furley grunted with satisfaction. "My father was a boot manufacturer in a country village of Leicestershire. I went in for the Bar because he left me pots of money, most of which, by the bye, I seem to have dissipated."

"Chiefly in Utopian schemes for the betterment of his betters," Julian observed drily.

"I certainly had an idea," Furley confessed, "of an asylum for incapable younger sons."

"I call a truce," Julian proposed. "It isn't polite to spar before Miss Abbeway."

"To me," Mr. Stenson declared, "this is a veritable temple of peace. I arrived here literally on all fours. Miss Abbeway has proved to me quite conclusively that as a democratic leader I have missed my vocation."

She looked at him reproachfully. Nevertheless, his words seemed to have brought back to her mind the thrill of their brief but stimulating conversation. A flash of genuine earnestness transformed her face, just as a gleam of wintry sunshine, which had found its way in through the open window, seemed to discover threads of gold in her tightly braided and luxuriant brown hair. Her eyes filled with an almost inspired light:

"Mr. Stenson is scarcely fair to me," she complained. "I did not presume to criticise his statesmanship, only there are some things here which seem pitiful. England should be the ideal democracy of the world. Your laws admit of it, your Government admits of it. Neither birth nor money are indispensable to success. The way is open for the working man to pa.s.s even to the Cabinet. And you are nothing of the sort. The cause of the people is not in any country so shamefully and badly represented.

You have a bourgeoisie which maintains itself in almost feudal luxury by means of the labour which it employs, and that labour is content to squeak and open its mouth for worms, when it should have the finest fruits of the world. And all this is for want of leadership. Up you come you David Sands, you Phineas Crosses, you Nicholas Fenns, you Thomas Evanses. You each think that you represent Labour, but you don't. You represent trade--the workers at one trade. How they laugh at you, the men who like to keep the government of this country in their own possession! They stretch down a hand to the one who has climbed the highest, they pull him up into the Government, and after that Labour is well quit of him. He has found his place with the G.o.ds. Perhaps they will make him a 'Sir' and his wife a 'Lady,' but for him it is all over with the Cause. And so another ten years is wasted, while another man grows up to take his place."

"She's right enough," Furley confessed gloomily. "There is something about the atmosphere of the inner life of politics which has proved fatal to every Labour man who has ever climbed. Paul Fiske wrote the same thing only a few weeks ago. He thought that it was the social atmosphere which we still preserve around our politics. We no sooner catch a clever man, born of the people, than we dress him up like a mummy and put him down at dinner parties and garden parties, to do things he's not accustomed to, and expect him to hold his own amongst people who are not his people. There is something poisonous about it."

"Aren't you all rather a.s.suming," Stenson suggested drily, "that the Labour Party is the only party in politics worth considering?"

"If they knew their own strength," Catherine declared, "they would be the predominant party. Should you like to go to the polls to-day and fight for your seats against them?"

"Heaven forbid!" Mr. Stenson exclaimed. "But then we've made up our mind to one thing--no general election during the war. Afterwards, I shouldn't be at all surprised if Unionists and Liberals and even Radicals didn't amalgamate and make one party."