Teresa asked delicately if it mattered whether Lady St Loo approved. It transpired that it did. Lady St Loo was the head of the Conservative Women’s Association, and the Conservative Women were a power in St Loo. They ran things, and managed things, and got up things, and they had, so Carslake said, a great influence on the women’s vote. The women’s vote, he said, was always tricky.
Then he brightened up a little.
‘That’s one reason why I’m optimistic about Gabriel,’ he said. ‘He gets on with women.’
‘But not with Lady St Loo?’
Lady St Loo, Carslake said, was being very good about it … She acknowledged quite frankly that she was old-fashioned. But she was whole-heartedly behind whatever the Party thought necessary.
‘After all,’ said Carslake sadly, ‘times have changed. We used to have gentlemen in politics. Precious few of them now. I wish this chap was a gentleman, but he isn’t, and there it is. If you can’t have a gentleman, I suppose a hero is the next best thing.’
Which, I remarked to Teresa after he had left, was practically an epigram.
Teresa smiled. Then she said she was rather sorry for Major Gabriel.
‘What do you think he’s like?’ she said. ‘Pretty dreadful?’
‘No, I should think he was rather a nice chap.’
‘Because of his VC?’
‘Lord, no. You can get a VC for being merely reckless—or even for being just stupid. You know, it’s always said that old Freddy Elton got his VC for being too stupid to know when to retire from an advanced position. They called it holding on in face of almost insurmountable odds. Really he had no idea that everyone else had gone.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Hugh. Why do you think this Gabriel person must be nice?’
‘Simply, I think, because Carslake doesn’t like him. The only man Carslake would like would be some awful stuffed shirt.’
‘What you mean is, that you don’t like poor Captain Carslake!’
‘No poor about it. Carslake fits into his job like a bug in a rug. And what a job!’
‘Is it worse than any other job? It’s hard work.’
‘Yes, that’s true. But if your whole life is spent on the calculation of what effect this has on that—you’ll end up by not knowing what this and that really are.’
‘Divorced from reality?’
‘Yes, isn’t that what politics really boil down to in the end? What people will believe, what they will stand, what they can be induced to think? Never plain fact.’
‘Ah!’ said Teresa. ‘How right I am not to take politics seriously.’
‘You are always right, Teresa,’ I said and kissed my hand to her.
I myself didn’t actually see the Conservative Candidate until the big meeting in the Drill Hall.
Teresa had procured for me an up-to-date type of wheeled invalid couch. I could be wheeled out on the terrace on it and lie there in a sheltered sunny place. Then, as the movement of the chair caused me less pain, I went further afield. I was occasionally pushed into St Loo. The Drill Hall meeting was an afternoon one, and Teresa arranged that I should be present at it. It would, she assured me, amuse me. I replied that Teresa had curious ideas of amusement.
‘You’ll see,’ said Teresa, adding, ‘it will entertain you enormously to see everyone taking themselves so seriously.’
‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘I shall be wearing my Hat.’
Teresa, who never wears a hat unless she goes to a wedding, had made an expedition to London and had returned with the kind of hat which was, according to her, suitable for a Conservative Woman.
‘And what,’ I inquired, ‘is a hat suitable to a Conservative Woman?’
Teresa replied in detail.
It must, she said, be a hat of good material, not dowdy, but not too fashionable. It must set well on the head and it must not be frivolous.
She then produced the hat, and it was indeed all that Teresa had set forth that it should be.
She put it on and Robert and I applauded.
‘It’s damned good, Teresa,’ said Robert. ‘It makes you look earnest and as though you had a purpose in life.’
You will understand, therefore, that to see Teresa sitting on the platform wearing the Hat lured me irresistibly to the Drill Hall on a remarkably fine summer’s afternoon.
The Drill Hall was well filled by prosperous-looking elderly people. Anybody under forty was (wisely, in my opinion) enjoying the pleasures of the seaside. As my invalid couch was carefully wheeled by a boy scout to a position of vantage near the wall by the front seats, I speculated as to the usefulness of such meetings. Everyone in this hall was sure to vote our way. Our opponents were holding an opposition meeting in the Girls’ School. Presumably they, too, would have a full meeting of staunch supporters. How, then, was public opinion influenced? The loud-speaker truck? Open-air meetings?
My speculations were interrupted by the shuffling of a small party of people coming on to the platform which hitherto had held nothing but chairs, a table, and a glass of water.
They whispered, gesticulated, and finally got settled in the required positions. Teresa, in the Hat, was relegated to the second row amongst the minor personalities.
The Chairman, several tottery old gentlemen, the Speaker from Headquarters, Lady St Loo, two other women and the Candidate arranged themselves in the front row.
The Chairman began to speak in a quavery, rather sweet voice. His mumbled platitudes were practically inaudible. He was a very old general who had served with distinction in the Boer War. (Or was it, I queried to myself, the Crimean?) Whatever it was, it must have been a long time ago. The world he was mumbling about did not, I thought, now exist … The thin apple-sweet old voice stopped, there was spontaneous and enthusiastic applause—the applause given always, in England, to a friend who has stood the test of time … Everyone in St Loo knew old General S——. He was a fine old boy, they said, one of the old school.
With his concluding words, General S——had introduced to the meeting a member of the new school, the Conservative Candidate, Major Gabriel, VC.
It was then, with a deep and gusty sigh, that Lady Tressilian, whom I suddenly discovered to be in the end seat of a row close to me (I suspected that her maternal instinct had placed her there), breathed poignantly:
‘It’s such a pity that he’s got such common legs.’
I knew immediately what she meant. Yet asked to define what is or is not common in a leg, I could not for the life of me tell you. Gabriel was not a tall man. He had, I should say, the normal legs for his height—they were neither unduly long nor unduly short. His suit was quite a well-cut one. Nevertheless, indubitably, those trousered legs were not the legs of a gentleman. Is it, perhaps, in the structure and poise of the nether limbs that the essence of gentility resides? A question for the Brains Trust.
Gabriel’s face did not give him away, it was an ugly, but quite interesting face, with remarkably fine eyes. His legs gave him away every time.
He rose to his feet, smiled (an engaging smile), opened his mouth and spoke in a flat, slightly cockney voice.
He spoke for twenty minutes—and he spoke well. Don’t ask me what he said. Offhand I should say that he said the usual things—and said them more or less in the