第19章

"He is well, but heartbroken.His is a sensitive nature, Lady Caerlaverock, and he feels a stain like a wound.""There is no stain," said my aunt briskly."Every public man is a target for scandals, but no one but a fool believes them.They will die a natural death when he returns to work.An official denial would make everybody look ridiculous, and encourage the ordinary person to think that there may have been something in them.Believe me, dear Mrs.Cargill, there is nothing to be anxious about now that you are back in London again."On the contrary, I thought, there was more cause for anxiety than ever.Cargill was back in the House and the illness game could not be played a second time.I went home that night acutely sympathetic towards the worries of the Prime Minister.Mulross would be abroad in a day or two, and Vennard and Cargill were volcanoes in eruption.The Government was in a parlous state, with three demented Ministers on the loose.

The same night I first heard the story of The Bill.Vennard had done more than play golf at Littlestone.His active mind--for his bitterest enemies never denied his intellectual energy--had been busy on a great scheme.At that time, it will be remembered, a serious shrinkage of unskilled labour existed not only in the Transvaal, but in the new copper fields of East Africa.Simultaneously a famine was scourging Behar, and Vennard, to do him justice, had made manful efforts to cope with it.He had gone fully into the question, and had been slowly coming to the conclusion that Behar was hopelessly overcrowded.

In his new frame of mind--unswervingly logical, utterly unemotional, and wholly unbound by tradition--he had come to connect the African and Indian troubles, and to see in one the relief of the other.The first fruit of his meditations was a letter to The Times.In it he laid down a new theory of emigration.The peoples of the Empire, he said, must be mobile, shifting about to suit economic conditions.But if this was true of the white man, it was equally true for the dark races under our tutelage.He referred to the famine and argued that the recurrence of such disasters was inevitable, unless we assisted the poverty-stricken ryot to emigrate and sell his labour to advantage.He proposed indentures and terminable contracts, for he declared he had no wish to transplant for good.All that was needed was a short season of wage-earning abroad, that the labourer might return home with savings which would set him for the future on a higher economic plane.The letter was temperate and academic in phrasing, the speculation of a publicist rather than the declaration of a Minister.But in Liberals, who remembered the pandemonium raised over the Chinese in South Africa, it stirred up the gloomiest forebodings.

Then, whispered from mouth to mouth, came the news of the Great Bill.Vennard, it was said, intended to bring in a measure at the earliest possible date to authorise a scheme of enforced and State-aided emigration to the African mines.It would apply at first only to the famine districts, but power would be given to extend its working by proclamation to other areas.Such was the rumour, and I need not say it was soon magnified.Questions were asked in the House which the Speaker ruled out of order.Furious articles, inviting denial, appeared in the Liberal Press; but Vennard took not the slightest notice.He spent his time between his office in Whitehall and the links at Littlestone, dropping into the House once or twice for half an hour's slumber while a colleague was speaking.His Under Secretary in the Lords--a young gentleman who had joined the party for a bet, and to his immense disgust had been immediately rewarded with office--lost his temper under cross-examination and swore audibly at the Opposition.In a day or two the story universally believed was that the Secretary for India was about to transfer the bulk of the Indian people to work as indentured labourers for South African Jews.

It was this popular version, I fancy, which reached the ears of Ram Singh, and the news came on him like a thunderclap.He thought that what Vennard proposed Vennard could do.He saw his native province stripped of its people, his fields left unploughed, and his cattle untended; nay, it was possible, his own worthy and honourable self sent to a far country to dig in a hole.It was a grievous and intolerable prospect.He walked home to Gloucester Road in heavy preoccupation, and the first thing he did was to get out the mysterious brass box in which he kept his valuables.From a pocket-book he took a small silk packet, opened it, and spilled a few clear grains on his hand.

It was the antidote.

He waited two days, while on all sides the rumour of the Bill grew stronger and its provisions more stringent.Then he hesitated no longer, but sent for Lord Caerlaverock's cook.

I conceive that the drug did not create new opinions, but elicited those which had hitherto lain dormant.Every man has a creed, but in his soul he knows that that creed has another side, possibly not less logical, which it does not suit him to produce.