CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A Lamb in Wolf’s Clothing

I now retired to a nursing home for an operation. The operation had nothing to do with my visit to Valentino, for it was only ‘tonsils’--and I spent my few days of rest in reading _Main Street_, which had a very cheering effect by making one remember how many disagreeable people there were in the world with whom it was not necessary to live.

One afternoon I was deep in the atmosphere of the Middle West when I looked up and saw, standing in the doorway, a youth with fair hair, agreeable features, quizzical smile, and appalling clothes.

‘Who are you?’ I said.

‘I’m Oliver Baldwin,’ replied the apparition.

Now, Oliver Baldwin is, to the best of one’s knowledge, a figure unique in English history, and as biographies will certainly be written about him when he is old and respectable there seems every reason for writing something about him while he is young and--Oliver.

Oliver’s father is, of course, Prime Minister. But Oliver himself was and is the most violent revolutionary, with a considerable flair for public speaking, a complete independence of thought, and an absolute loathing for his father’s Party.

England was therefore presented with the engaging spectacle of a young man filling the bookshelves of Number 11 Downing Street with treatises on the best way to blow up Cabinet Ministers. In fairness to Oliver it should be observed that he only did this while his father was Chancellor of the Exchequer. In the more exalted days of the present he avoids Downing Street like the plague.

In spite of the discouragement of tonsils we were very soon talking with gusto.

‘Does your father mind your wanting to be the President of the First English Republic?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t know. Never asked him.’

‘But isn’t it--don’t you think it’s rather ... I mean....’ (Impossible to finish this sentence.)

Oliver smiled. ‘You mean, don’t I think it’s bad form to attack my own papa in public? No. The only things which are bad form are the things which are not sincere. I am terribly sincere. And I’m not attacking _him_, I’m attacking the programme he stands for.’

More talk, Oliver departed, and it was arranged that we should meet again.

In the meanwhile I found out a little more about Master Baldwin which made me realize that he was a person with whom, one day, we should be forced to reckon. Before his exploits the adventures of Huckleberry Finn pale into insignificance. After a cloistered youth in the shadow of Eton, he suddenly, at the outbreak of war, enlisted in the Second Cambridge Cadet Corps, became a sergeant-instructor, an officer in the Irish Guards, went through France, and was a seasoned warrior before he was out of his teens. The war over, he departed to Russia to fight the Bolsheviks, was imprisoned by these gentlemen for months under sentence of death, escaped, got into Armenia, avoided meeting Mr. Michael Arlen, grew (with infinite pains) a beard, joined the Armenian army, became in rapid succession a Captain, Major, Colonel, General, bought a white horse, and led, like a new Joan of Arc, the army of the Armenians against the Bolsheviks. All these things--even the beard--probably had singularly little effect on the course of events, but they showed the stuff of which Oliver was made.

Oliver is not in the least the vulgar tub-thumper of popular imagination. He is almost absurdly sensitive about his position. I remember motoring down from London to Oxford with him once, coming within a few miles of Chequers, and demanding firmly to be driven there at once. ‘Do you think we ought to?’ he said. ‘Why not?’ said I. ‘There won’t be any Cabinet Ministers there, and even if there are, they can’t bite us. I rather wish they could. It would be fun to be bitten by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’

So we went to Chequers, simply because I shamelessly insisted.

We arrived when it was still early morning, with the mist of an English autumn drifting down the lanes and lying, like a caress, over the little green fields. What a paradise! When the Lees left it to the Prime Ministers of England, they must have been thinking of future Labour governments, because this old place is so peaceful, so mellow, so typical of all that is gracious and lovely in English history (as we fondly imagine it to have been), that nobody could dwell within its walls for more than a few hours without wishing to preserve the spirit which had created it.

I won’t give a catalogue of the treasures of Chequers, because they would fill a whole volume, from the magnificent Rembrandt which dreams in the dusk of the tall entrance hall to the marvellous collection of unique volumes which line the shelves of the long, quiet library. What most appealed to one was the entire absence of any ‘museum’ feeling, all the more remarkable when one remembers that Chequers belongs to the nation, and is only a temporary resting-place for successive ministers.

Nothing is locked up under glass cases. Looking back on it, I think that it might be just as well if some of the things were protected. For example, when Oliver was not looking, I put a ring of Queen Elizabeth on my finger (she must have had very large fingers), clasped a sword of Oliver Cromwell’s in my hand and read aloud the original Cromwell letter in which he describes the rout of the Cavaliers as ‘God made them as stubble to our swords.’ The combined effect of all these actions gave one a feeling that was a cross between a museum and the worst type of tourist.

At Chequers there is a very charming lady who occupies the post of châtelaine, and who could probably tell more secrets than any other woman in Europe, for she has seen all the Prime Ministers in their moments of play and rest, when they have been most likely to tell the truth. However, she is discretion itself, and when one asked if Lloyd George ever said what he really thought about Asquith, or if any of the Prime Ministers ever got drunk, one was met with an evasive smile. However, I did learn later, from another source, that they were all passionately devoted to Chequers itself. In fact, as soon as the news of Lloyd George’s downfall came through, Megan Lloyd George, who was in the entrance hall at the time, walked disconsolately to the window, looked out over the moonlit garden, and said, ‘Oh dear! This means that we shall have to leave Chequers.’ The thought of that, you see, had eclipsed even the disaster which had befallen her father.

Another thing which one realized while at Chequers was the insatiable passion of British Prime Ministers for music. In the great banqueting hall (where nobody banquets now) is a pianola. The first thing which harassed Premiers always did was to rush to this pianola, switch it on, and lie back, forgetting the trials of office. Lloyd George, whose natural taste would seem, to the uninitiated, to be for marches and military music, found himself most soothed by Chopin nocturnes. Baldwin, on the other hand, invariably played, as his first number, some Schubert variations on a theme by (I believe) Mozart. Winston Churchill had the best taste of the lot. He confined himself rigorously to Beethoven.

The surroundings of Chequers are ideally beautiful. On one side, level meadows, on the other, rising hills, thickly wooded. As soon as we had ‘done’ Chequers, we motored away, got out again, and went for a walk in these woods. And there, under the yellowing leaves of immemorial elms, like the two thoroughly shameless young men that we were, improvised a debate in which Oliver was the President of the First English Republic, and I was the leader of the fast vanishing and decadent English aristocracy--rôles of singular charm for both of us. The subject was a fantastic one, being concerned with a Bill brought in by the government to requisition all the sticks and leaves in the country for the purpose of burning the House of Lords. Still, it gave us endless opportunities for rhetoric, and as our words floated out into the valley, I wondered if there would ever come a time when the scene would be transferred to the realms of reality. I should imagine that it is most unlikely.