Sweet and Twenty (3 page)

Martha declared that his being a bachelor was bound to bring out every mother with a daughter to dispose of, and that his engagement to Sara must not be announced till after he was elected. Lillian did not feel this would present any pressing problem, but like a dutiful niece she kept her opinion to herself and let on she had found him “conversable,”
which was the strange epithet Martha came up with to describe his speeches.

The household at New Moon was delighted to receive an invitation to dinner at St. Christopher’s Abbey the very next day. It was accepted eagerly, the party to meet at six. To sustain themselves for what promised to be a late dinner, they had tea late and set out shortly after 5:30.

They assumed it was to be a regular dinner party, and Martha and Lillian were looking forward to meeting Lord Allingham and Mr. Basingstoke among the required extra gentlemen. Certainty Lady Monteith hadn’t an idea who might be on visiting terms with her next-door neighbor. But when they were shown into his saloon, there was only one other gentleman present, and he was a stranger to them all.

Mr. Hudson was first taken to be an elderly gentleman, for he had gray wings at the temples of his dark hair, but upon closer inspection he was seen to be neither lined nor hagged, and his age was set as being no more than in the early thirties. It was clear at a glance he was no country squire. The sleek barbering of his hair, the lines of his black jacket and his easy manners proclaimed a metropolitan gentleman of fashion.

The elder Miss Monteith quickly pegged him as a “smart”
or “swell,”
while Miss Watters noted with interest that there was present on his countenance a quick change of expression, a sensitiveness, an intelligence that made her hope the conversation under Mr. Fellows’s roof might be improved from her last visit. Sara thought he looked divinely handsome but was quite likely of that breed that asked hard questions.

They were all made acquainted, and Sara didn’t know whether she was gratified or terrified when Mr. Hudson appeared at some little pains to gain a seat beside her. His first question did not prove impossible of replying to with dignity. She knew
very well
she lived at New Moon, and how far away it was. She was able to verify such details as her father’s death a year previously and her aunt and cousin visiting them from Yorkshire without wrinkling her brow.

She was less easy when he inquired what she felt Mr. Fellows’s chances to be in the election, but she said at least that she hoped he would win, for she did want to see a bridge between Crockett and Chepstow, and the Tories wouldn’t let them have one. She was truly at a loss when he asked whether all the girls at Crockett were as pretty as herself, but she knew it for a compliment, and colored up so prettily that Mr. Hudson accepted a second glass of sherry and leaned back in his chair with satisfaction to pass the time till dinner in her company.

This left Mr. Fellows to entertain the three other ladies, and he did so by telling them that Mr. Hudson was going to be an excellent whipper-in. “He is very strict, mind you,”
he told them. “We want to run a good, clean campaign. No smear tactics. It will be fought on principles and issues.”

Indeed, Mr. Hudson’s appearance gave no reason to doubt this. With his dignified gray hair, his face of a noble cast, and his serious expression, he looked a perfect judge. How should they know that he was teasing the life out of Sara, and telling her that when she walked through the door he had thought she was an angel come to earth to guide Fellows to victory? They took her squirming embarrassment to be the result of hard questions—those of them who paid any attention at all to her.

But Mr. Fellows was still Martha’s first priority, and she turned to speak to him. “It may begin that way,”
she said, “but it has been my experience in the past that sooner or later you will both end up sinking into
argumentum ad hominem
tactics. It happened in the West Riding at the last election. They accused our Whig of being an atheist.”

Mr. Fellows looked aghast. He had never expected such a low trick from a female as spouting Latin at him. His gentlemen acquaintances he knew to be sadly addicted to this vice, especially those who had been to university. He never had himself. He had twice applied to Oxford and been twice rejected as inadequately prepared, despite years of tutoring and study. He felt this deficiency of formal education in his background very strongly. It was his ardent desire to be taken for an Oxford man, and to this end  he introduced every break-teeth word he knew
into his discourse, and even had a dozen Latin quotations ready to use, but
argumentum ad hominem
was not one of them. He was lost.

“Do you think so?”
he asked, hoping for enlightenment.

“It always happens,”
Miss Monteith replied unhelpfully.

He looked nervously across the room to his manager. There was a fellow who would know exactly what she was talking about. “What do you have to say to this, Mr. Hudson?”
he asked.

Mr. Hudson looked up and asked for the question again. He had spent a wearying afternoon with his new acquaintance, and after having mentioned that money was a
sine qua non
to winning, and having had to explain this, he deduced the problem as soon as he heard the question.

“I hope you may be wrong, Miss Monteith,”
he said. “I hope it does not come down to an
ad hominem
campaign—our two candidates making charges of a personal and abusive nature against each other. We hope to keep the tone higher than that, but should that be the case, I don’t think we need fear. Mr. Fellows has nothing to hide. He has never done anything. Anything wrong I mean,”
he added quickly, seeing what had accidentally slipped out. It was in fact a pity Mr. Fellows had never done anything right either—never done a single thing for the community at large. Never
headed a single committee or set up a petition or even put his signature to one. He feared that despite Mr. Fellows’s being one of the best-off people in the neighborhood, he had kept very much to himself and did not have a large circle of friends and supporters to fall back on. It seemed hard that the party had saddled him with such an unpopular man in this difficult riding.

He foresaw many difficulties in putting this handsome dummy up for election, but overcoming difficulties was his job, so he was not despondent about pulling the thing off. He had hoped to get down to business tonight with Basingstoke and Allingham and give Fellows a good briefing—of which he clearly stood is
need
—and so had welcomed the idea of a dinner party where he could meet some local worthies and feel them out on the issues.

Instead, the party consisted of themselves and four females. Not one vote in the party, except for Fellows himself. He didn’t know what Fellows was about to waste a whole evening, but once he was fairly caught in the toils, it was too late to do anything, and Hudson hoped to pass the time with a little flirtation with the fair charmer on his left. She was a stunning-looking creature, but seemed stunned as well, alas. One could admire a pretty doll for only so long, and he had about had his fill of looking.

“We certainly need not fear an
ad hominem
campaign,”
Mr. Fellows assured them all, storing up the phrase eagerly to add to his list. “If Alistair sinks to that, people are bound to hear about his prison record.”

Mr. Hudson started from his seat in surprise and delight. For hours together that afternoon he had been trying to discover something about Alistair, the Conservative candidate, and had gained nothing but that he was a bruising rider to hounds and kept a good cellar. He had been heartily wishing it were Alistair he had been running. And now, out of the blue, to hear the man had a prison record. It was manna from heaven.

“You told me nothing about that, Mr. Fellows! What is his record?”

“Why, it was young Alistair who was on the committee to look into conditions at Dartmoor, that prison they set up at Prince Town for the French captives from the war, and he made a botch of it. They said—Allingham mentioned it—that it took them so long to look into it the war was over before they sent their report, and then there was nothing in it.”

Hudson stared at him. “You mean he
worked
on a commission to look into prison conditions?
That
is his prison record?”

“Certainly he did, and made a botch of it. They only dragged it out so long to line their pockets. The Tories are all alike, grabbing every cent they can get their hands on. His prison record is nothing to be proud of.”

“I see,”
Mr. Hudson said weakly, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I had hoped you meant he had been to prison himself.”

“What, an
Alistair
in prison?”
Fellows asked, shocked. “Gracious me, no! They are an excellent old family. We have known them forever.”

“That’s too bad,”
Mr. Hudson said.

“You would not have used the fact, Mr. Hudson?”
Lillian asked. “You said you did not intend to make it that sort of a campaign. No dragging up disgraceful conduct on either side. No
ad hominem
arguments.”

“A prison record would be something quite different. It is actually illegal for a man with a prison record—-for certain crimes, that is—to run for Parliament at all. Certainly for such behavior as that I would feel justified to raise the question of personal conduct.”

“Yes, I suppose you are right,”
she allowed.

Mr. Hudson, his attention now directed at Miss Watters, looked at her more closely than he had done before. Not a beautiful girl; brown hair, very dark eyes—her finest feature. A little thinner than he liked, but not a bad-looking girl at all.

“I never cared for homonyms myself,”
Sara said to him in a consoling fashion.

“Did you not?”
he asked, perplexed. He thought he must have missed some intervening statement on her part. She had a low-pitched voice that was pleasing to him, but required sharp listening.

The two groups fell into separate discourse til dinner was called. Mr. Fellows made some effort to balance his lopsided party, putting Mr. Hudson at its foot, with one young lady and one aunt along either side of the board. Liking Sara’s admiring and undemanding conversation, he kept her for himself and placed Miss Watters on Hudson’s left. This was the first chance either had to form any clear idea of the other. Hudson repeated a few of his questions already posed to Sara to Miss Watters; then he
asked her one that would have terrified her cousin. Did she have any experience at all in politics?

“Only in Yorkshire, and there, you know, the only issue in the campaign was the Luddites. The country at large may be concerned about other things, but at Barnsley the campaign was fought over the textile industry and the efforts of the manufacturers to introduce machines that will throw many people out of work. Those who do work find it extremely degrading and mechanical, sitting at a machine all day long. And of course the product turned out is grossly inferior.”

“Still, I think it foolish the way the Luddites set about righting what is certainly a grave wrong—forming groups to smash the machines. There must be a more sensible way to solve the matter. Who is this Captain Ludd who has organized the workers? Is he an actual person?”

“He is a general now, if you please—General Ned Ludd. Well, he
is
a
real person, but a sort of village idiot from Leicestershire. He was chasing some children who were tormenting him one day, and followed them into their home, where they managed to hide from him. He vented his anger on their parents’
frames, and so now, whenever machinery is destroyed, it is said to be done by General Ludd, no matter who actually did it. It preserves anonymity for the workers.”

“Violence is no answer. It begets more violence, and we’ll end up with a civil war on our hands.”

“Try if you can convince the government of it in London. When the workers were prevented by law from setting up a trade union, they formed an ‘Institution,’
using the pretext of its being a sick club to tend to the needs of members out of work through illness. The Institution went to London to present its case to the Parliamentary Committee on the Woolen Trade, and the members were treated little better than criminals. They had some good ideas, too, such as a tax on woolen goods to help tide the unemployed workers over till they could find some other work. And even when frameworkers got a weak bill through the Commons, it was thrown out by the Lords. No alternative was left to them but violence.”

“That’s the Tories for you.”

“Yes. With the mill-owners holding the majority of the votes, a Tory member was returned and the rioting was pretty-well squelched by the army, but it was an infamous thing. It turned many people into Whigs, my aunt and myself included. But we are not informed Whigs; it is a reaction against the Tories rather. All this business will have little influence on the election here, I suppose. What do you see as the issues in this by-election?”

“We’ll make it local issues,”
he said.

“
Make
it? But surely there are real issues that ought to be discussed. You can’t just
make
issues.”

“Concentrate on local issues, I mean. People are interested in what goes on in their own back yards more than in what is going on in the country as a whole. Well, you just proved it, didn’t you, by saying your election was fought on the issue of the Luddite riots? This is a farming community; the Luddites will not interest them. It is the damned—excuse me—the price of corn that will be one issue certainly.”

“And a poor one for you! The farmers are all in favor of the Corn Laws the Tory government passed. It is good for their pockets, guaranteeing them ten shillings a bushel.”

“I am aware of it, and foresee the need of another issue as well.”

“What does Mr. Fellows suggest?”
she asked, wondering if Mr. Hudson had had more luck talking to him than they had themselves.

“He mentions the war quite often, but I see no gain to be got from that. It’s over. Of course there are the veterans who are not treated well. Very likely that’s what he meant.”