I’m in a hurry—I shall be late.”
He shook hands warmly with his host as the Postmaster-General showed him to the door, walking at his side. James Haggismuir McAuley stopped a moment in the passage, looked up at the wall, and said:
“That’s a fine etching, Wilfrid!”
Wilfrid turned his long thin neck round to follow the connoisseur’s gaze. As he did so, in the tenth of a second James Haggismuir McAuley had removed the envelope from the side-pocket, passed it in a flash round his back into his other hand, and got it into that breast-pocket of his where its little brother already lay.
That business transaction did not take five seconds all told. It had taken Wilfrid Halterton ten to move his neck.
He began the story of the etching, of its value, of its acquirement by him, when he felt his hand warmly grasped again by his friend from the outer, non-political world; he heard the door slam; he sighed, stooped his head somewhat forward, and shuffled back into his study.
As Wilfrid Halterton once more sat by himself in front of his wireless heater, he was filled with that powerful impression men receive but once or twice in the course of a lifetime; the impression that a whole tide about them has changed; that they have passed out of one long phase, during which the current has carried them in one direction, and that now they have come to a second phase, in which the current is to carry them the opposite way. He felt that he had achieved—or, as the phrase goes among statesmen, “made good.”
His own position in the negotiation just concluded was but one out of many such. The deal about his future salary was of a commonplace sort, something we have all come to expect in political arrangements. But it was the first one he had made in all his years of Parliament, and it impressed him accordingly. He had always been far too timid a man, in a profession where timidity is sometimes fatal, and always a handicap. Some women (and men) had blamed Mrs. Boulger for giving him Cabinet rank at all. But we know that if a man attains such a position it cannot be without high talent, which his eminent colleagues have recognized. Such talents he had abundantly shown during his tenure of office. He himself had now been for more than six months at the head of a vast machine; he had delivered daily 264,748,942 letters; 968,477,321 postcards; 7,263,402 telegrams; stamps of all denominations to the value of £6,923,410 6s. 3d. —more than the entire yearly revenue of Guatemala— and at the same time carried parcels and issued licences for armorial bearings, dogs, and male servants.
Wilfrid Halterton had managed all this for now over half a year, and there had been no hitch. It should have given him a better opinion of himself. Besides which, he should have remembered that a man is not given powers of this exalted kind unless he be also competent to deal with many other activities. Having shown his capacity for handling this huge, intricate business of the Post Office, he would be naturally chosen to direct in turn the finances of the nation, its Foreign Affairs, its Navy, its immense Police machine, public and secret, and perhaps its Museums, or even the London Parks. For it is a presumption in our constitution, and a wise one, that the talents sufficing for a Cabinet Minister in one Department will suffice for him in any other and a statesman must shift around.
Wilfrid Halterton should, I say, therefore have been less modest in the first months of high office. None the less, his original mood remained with him, and he was glad to think that his first considerable political success, this negotiation of his with James McAuley, would enable him to re-enter private life. He was content to leave to others the glory of public fame, and to take in its place a largely increased income.
He would make the delay as short as possible. There would have to be an interval, of course, between the establishment of the new Television Corporation and his taking over the prepared place and the salary agreed upon: convention demanded that, and convention must always be observed. No man in the House of Commons was more sensitive upon such points. No man knew better the decencies of public life; no man shrank more sensitively from censure in these matters. Such delicacy went naturally with his character; it was the more laudable side of that in him which also produced his hesitations. When these things are done too quickly there is—illogically enough —a savour of something indecent about them.
He pondered for a moment as he leant back in his low chair and gazed fixedly down his long legs at the glowing grid of the heater; he was estimating what exactly the interval ought to be between this moment and his taking his salary at the head of the new Television Corporation.
Better too long than too short. J. would set to work without delay. The vote establishing the Television Corporation would come on almost immediately. It would be in public use not long after the Easter recess, and earning by the end of the summer at latest.
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