Part 42

The latter remained silent, returning that remarkable stare, while Blink withdrew beneath the seat and pressed her chin to the ground, savouring the sensation of a new motion.

“Yes,” he thought, “those eyes have an almost superhuman force and cunning. They are the eyes of a spider in the centre of a great web. They seem to draw me.”

“You are undoubtedly the Unseen Power, sir,” he said suddenly, “and I have reached the heart of the mystery. From your own lips I shall soon know whether I am a puppet or a public man.”

The Personage, who by his movements was clearly under the impression that he had to do with a lunatic, sat forward with his hands on his knees ready to rise at a moment's notice; he kept his cigar in his mouth, however, and an enforced smile on the folds of his face.

“What can I do for you, sir?” he said.

“Will you have a cigar?”

“No, thank you,” replied Mr. Lavender, “I must keep the eyes of my spirit clear, and come to the point. Do you rule this country or do you not? For it is largely on the answer to this that my future depends. In telling others what to do am I speaking as my conscience or as your conscience dictates; and, further, if indeed I am speaking as your conscience dictates, have you a conscience?”

The Personage, who had evidently made up his mind to humour the intruder, flipped the ash off his cigar.

“Well, sir, he said, I don't know who the devil you may be, but my conscience is certainly as good as yours.”

“That,” returned Mr. Lavender with a sigh, “is a great relief, for whether you rule the country or not, you are undoubtedly the source from which I, together with the majority of my countrymen, derive our inspirations. You are the fountainhead at which we draw and drink. And to know that your waters are pure, unstained by taint of personal prejudice and the love of power, will fortify us considerably. Am I to assume, then, that above all passion and pettiness, you are an impersonal force whose innumerable daily editions reflect nothing but abstract truth, and are in no way the servants of a preconceived and personal view of the situation?”

“You want to know too much, don't you think?” said the Personage with a smile.

“How can that be, sir?” asked Mr. Lavender: “If you are indeed the invisible king swaying the currents of national life, and turning its tides at will, it is essential that we should believe in you; and before we can believe in you must we not know all about you?”

“By Jove, sir,” replied the Personage, “that strikes me as being contrary to all the rules of religion. I thought faith was the ticket.”

By this answer Mr. Lavender was so impressed that he sat for a moment in silence, with his eyebrow working up and down.

“Sir,” he said at last, “you have given me a new thought. If you are right, to disbelieve in you and the acts which you perform, or rather the editions which you issue, is blasphemy.”

“I should think so,” said the Personage, emitting a long whiff of smoke. “Hadn't that ever occurred to you before?”

“No,” replied Mr. Lavender, naively, “for I have never yet disbelieved anything in those journals.”

The Personage coughed heartily.

“I have always regarded them,” went on Mr. Lavender, “as I myself should wish to be regarded, 'without fear and without reproach.' For that is, as I understand it, the principle on which a gentleman must live, ever believing of others what he would wish believed of himself. With the exception of Germans,” he added hastily.

“Naturally,” returned the Personage. “And I'll defy you to find anything in them which disagrees with that formula. Everything they print refers to Germans if not directly then obliquely. Germans are the 'idee fixe', and without an 'idee fixe', as you know, there's no such thing as religion. Do you get me?”

“Yes, indeed,” cried Mr. Lavender, enthused, for the whole matter now seemed to him to fall into coherence, and, what was more, to coincide with his preconceptions, so that he had no longer any doubts. “You, sir—the Unseen Power—are but the crystallized embodiment of the national sentiment in time of war; in serving you, and fulfilling the ideas which you concrete in your journals, we public men are servants of the general animus, which in its turn serves the blind and burning instinct of justice. This is eminently satisfactory to me, who would wish no better fate than to be a humble lackey in that house.” He had no sooner, however, spoken those words than Joe Petty's remarks about Public Opinion came back to him, and he added: “But are you really the general animus, or are you only the animus of Mayors, that is the question?”

The personage seemed to follow this thought with difficulty. “What's that?” he said.

Mr. Lavender ran his hands through his hair.

“And turns,” he said, “on what is the unit of national feeling and intelligence? Is it or is it not a Mayor?”

The Personage smiled. “Well, what do you think?” he said. “Haven't you ever heard them after dinner? There's no question about it. Make your mind easy if that's your only trouble.”

Mr. Lavender, greatly cheered by the genial certainty in this answer, said: “I thank you, sir. I shall go back and refute that common scoffer, that caster of doubts. I have seen the Truth face, to face, and am greatly encouraged to further public effort. With many apologies I can now get out,” he added, as the train stopped at South Croydon. “Blink!” And, followed by his dog, he stepped from the train.

The Personage, who was indeed no other than the private secretary of the private secretary of It whom Mr. Lavender had designated as the Truth watched him from the window.

“Well, that WAS a treat, dear papa!” he murmured to himself, emitting a sigh of smoke after his retreating interlocutor.