THE PRIME MINISTER (56 page)

‘Well, Drought, if you ask me, you know, I can only speak as I feel. Everything
must be dead when men holding different opinions on every subject under the sun come together in order that they may carry on a government as they would a trade business. The work may be done, but it must be done without spirit.’

‘But it may be all important that the work should be done,’ said the Baronet, apologizing for his past misconduct.

‘No doubt; – and I am very far from judging those
who make the attempt. It has been made more than once before, and has, I think, always failed. I don’t believe in it myself, and I think that the deathlike torpor of which you speak is one of its worst consequences.’ After that Mr Boffin admitted Sir Orlando back into his heart of hearts.

Then the end of the Session came, very quietly and very early. By the end of July there was nothing left
to be done, and the world of London was allowed to go down into the country almost a fortnight before its usual time.

With many men, both in and out of Parliament, it became a question whether all this was for good or evil. The Boffinites had of course much to say for themselves. Everything was torpid. There was no interest in the newspapers, – except when Mr Slide took the tomahawk into his
hands. A member of Parliament this Session had not been by half so much bigger than another man as in times of hot political warfare. One of the most moving sources of our national excitement seemed to have vanished from life. We all know what happens to stagnant waters. So said the Boffinites, and so also now said Sir Orlando. But the Government was carried on and the country was prosperous. A few
useful measures had been passed by unambitious men, and the Duke of St Bungay declared that he had
never known a Session of Parliament more thoroughly satisfactory to the ministers.

But the old Duke in so saying had spoken as it were his public opinion, – giving, truly enough, to a few of his colleagues, such as Lord Drummond, Sir Gregory Grogram and others, the results of his general experience;
but in his own bosom and with a private friend he was compelled to confess that there was a cloud in the heavens. The Prime Minister had become so moody, so irritable, and so unhappy, that the old Duke was forced to doubt whether things could go on much longer as they were. He was wont to talk of these things to his friend Lord Cantrip, who was not a member of the Government, but who had been
a colleague of both the Dukes, and whom the old Duke regarded with peculiar confidence. ‘I cannot explain it to you,’ he said to Lord Cantrip. ‘There is nothing that ought to give him a moment’s uneasiness. Since he took office there hasn’t once been a majority against him in either House on any question that the Government has made its own. I don’t remember such a state of things, – so easy for
the Prime Minister, – since the days of Lord Liverpool. He had one thorn in his side, our friend who was at the Admiralty, and that thorn like other thorns has worked itself out. Yet at this moment it is impossible to get him to consent to the nomination of a successor to Sir Orlando.’ This was said a week before the Session had closed.

‘I suppose it is his health,’ said Lord Cantrip.

‘He’s
well enough as far as I can see; – though he will be ill unless he can relieve himself from the strain on his nerves.’

‘Do you mean by resigning?’

‘Not necessarily. The fault is that he takes things too seriously. If he could be got to believe that he might eat, and sleep, and go to bed, and amuse himself like other men, he might be a very good Prime Minister. He is over troubled by his conscience.
I have seen a good many Prime Ministers, Cantrip, and I’ve taught myself to think that they are not very different from other men. One wants in a Prime Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be clever but need not be a genius; he should be conscientious but by no means strait-laced; he should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have
a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin. These are the gifts we want,
but we can’t always get them, and have to do without them. For my own part, I find that though Smith be a very good Minister, the best perhaps to be had at the time, when he breaks down Jones does nearly as well.’

‘There will be a Jones, then, if your Smith does break down?’

‘No doubt. England wouldn’t
come to an end because the Duke of Omnium shut himself up at Matching. But I love the man, and, with some few exceptions, am contented with the party. We can’t do better, and it cuts me to the heart when I see him suffering, knowing how much I did myself to make him undertake the work.’

‘Is he going to Gatherum Castle?’

‘No; – to Matching. There is some discomfort about that’

‘I suppose,’ said
Lord Cantrip, – speaking almost in a whisper, although they were closeted together, – ‘I suppose the Duchess is a little troublesome.’

‘She’s the dearest woman in the world,’ said the Duke of St Bungay. ‘I love her almost as I do my own daughter. And she is most zealous to serve him.’

‘I fancy she overdoes it’

‘No doubt’

‘And that he suffers from perceiving it,’ said Lord Cantrip.

‘But a
man hasn’t a right to suppose that he shall have no annoyances. The best horse in the world has some fault. He pulls, or he shies, or is slow at his fences, or doesn’t like heavy ground. He has no right to expect that his wife shall know everything and do everything without a mistake. And then he has such faults of his own! His skin is so thin. Do you remember dear old Brock? By heavens; – there was
a covering, a hide impervious to fire or steel! He wouldn’t have gone into tantrums because his wife asked too many people to the house. Nevertheless, I won’t give up all hope.’

‘A man’s skin may be thickened, I suppose.’

‘No doubt; – as a blacksmith’s arm.’

But the Duke of St Bungay, though he declared that he wouldn’t give up hope, was very uneasy on the matter. ‘Why won’t you let me go?’
the other Duke had said to him.

‘What; – because such a man as Sir Orlando Drought throws up his office?’

But in truth the Duke of Omnium had not been instigated to ask the question by the resignation of Sir Orlando. At that very moment the
People’s Banner
had been put out of sight at the bottom of a heap of other newspapers behind the Prime Minister’s chair, and his present misery had been
produced by Mr Quintus Slide. To have a festering wound and to be able to show the wound to no surgeon, is wretchedness indeed! ‘It’s not Sir Orlando, but a sense of general failure,’ said the Prime Minister. Then his old friend had made use of that argument of the ever-recurring majorities to prove that there had been no failure. ‘There seems to have come a lethargy upon the country,’ said the poor
victim. Then the Duke of St Bungay knew that his friend had read that pernicious article in the
People’s Banner
, for the Duke had also read it and remembered that phrase of a ‘lethargy on the country’, and understood at once how the poison had rankled.

It was a week before he would consent to ask any man to fill the vacancy made by Sir Orlando. He would not allow suggestions to be made to him
and yet would name no one himself. The old Duke, indeed, did make a suggestion, and anything coming from him was of course borne with patience. Barrington Erle, he thought, would do for the Admiralty. But the Prime Minister shook his head. ‘In the first place he would refuse, and that would be a great blow to me.’

‘I could sound him,’ said the old Duke. But the Prime Minister again shook his
head and turned the subject. With all his timidity he was becoming autocratic and peevishly imperious. Then he went to Lord Cantrip, and when Lord Cantrip, with all the kindness which he could throw into his words, stated the reasons which induced him at present to decline office, he was again in despair. At last he asked Phineas Finn to move to the Admiralty, and, when our old friend somewhat reluctantly
obeyed, of course he had the same difficulty in filling the office Finn had held. Other changes and other complications became necessary, and Mr Quintus Slide, who hated Phineas Finn even worse than the poor Duke, found ample scope for his patriotic indignation.

This all took place in the closing week of the Session, filling our poor Prime Minister with trouble and dismay, just when other people
were complaining that there was nothing to think of and nothing to do. Men do not really like leaving London before the
grouse calls them, – the grouse, or rather the fashion of the grouse. And some ladies were very angry at being separated so soon from their swains in the city. The tradesmen too were displeased, – so that there were voices to re-echo the abuse of the
People’s Banner
. The Duchess
had done her best to prolong the Session by another week, telling her husband of the evil consequences above suggested, but he had thrown wide his arms and asked her with affected dismay whether he was to keep Parliament sitting in order that more ribbons might be sold! ‘There is nothing to be done,’ said the Duke almost angrily.

‘Then you should make something to be done,’ said the Duchess,
mimicking him.

The Duchess had been at work with her husband for the last two months in the hope of renewing her autumnal festivities, but had been lamentably unsuccessful. The Duke had declared that there should be no more rural crowds, no repetition of what he called London turned loose on his own grounds. He could not forget the necessity which had been imposed upon him of turning Major
Pountney out of his house, or the change that had been made in his gardens, or his wife’s attempt to conquer him at Silverbridge. ‘Do you mean,’ she said, ‘that we are to have nobody?’ He replied that he thought it would be best to go to Matching. ‘And live a Darby and Joan Life?’ said the Duchess.

‘I said nothing of Darby and Joan. Whatever may be my feelings I hardly think that you are fitted
for that kind of thing. Matching is not so big as Gatherum, but it is not a cottage. Of course you can ask your own friends.’

‘I don’t know what you mean by my own friends. I endeavour always to ask yours.’

‘I don’t know that Major Pountney, and Captain Gunner, and Mr Lopez were ever among the number of my friends.’

‘I suppose you mean Lady Rosina?’ said the Duchess. ‘I shall be happy to have
her at Matching if you wish it’

‘I should like to see Lady Rosina De Courcy at Matching very much.’

‘And is there to be nobody else? I’m afraid I should find it rather dull while you two were opening your hearts to each other.’ Here he looked at her angrily. ‘Can you think of anybody besides Lady Rosina?’

‘I suppose you will wish to have Mrs Finn?’

‘What an arrangement! Lady Rosina for you
to flirt with, and Mrs Finn for me to grumble to.’

‘That is an odious word,’ said the Prime Minister.

‘What; – flirting? I don’t see anything bad about the word. The thing is dangerous. But you are quite at liberty if you don’t go beyond Lady Rosina. I should like to know whether you would wish anybody else to come?’ Of course he made no becoming answer to this question, and of course no becoming
answer was expected. He knew that she was trying to provoke him because he would not let her do this year as she had done last. The house, he had no doubt, would be full to overflowing when he got there. He could not help that. But as compared with Gatherum Castle the house at Matching was small, and his domestic authority sufficed at any rate for shutting up Gatherum for the time.

I do not know
whether at times her sufferings were not as acute as his own. He, at any rate, was Prime Minister, and it seemed to her that she was to be reduced to nothing. At the beginning of it all he had, with unwonted tenderness, asked her for her sympathy in his undertaking, and, according to her powers, she had given it to him with her whole heart. She had thought that she had seen a way by which she
might assist him in his great employment, and she had worked at it like a slave. Every day she told herself that she did not, herself, love the Captain Gunners and Major Pountneys, nor the Sir Orlandos, nor, indeed the Lady Rosinas. She had not followed the bent of her own inclination when she had descended to sheets and towels, and busied herself to establish an archery-ground. She had not shot an
arrow during the whole season, nor had she cared who had won and who had lost. It had not been for her own personal delight that she had kept open house for forty persons throughout
four months of the year, in doing which he had never taken an ounce of the labour off her shoulders by any single word or deed! It had all been done for his sake, – that his reign might be long and triumphant, that
the world might say that his hospitality was noble and full, that his name might be in men’s mouths, and that he might prosper as a British Minister. Such, at least, were the assertions which she made to herself, when she thought of her own grievances and her own troubles. And now she was angry with her husband. It was very well for him to ask for her sympathy, but he had none to give her in return!
He could not pity her failures, – even though he had himself caused them! If he had a grain of intelligence about him he must, she thought, understand well enough how sore it must be for her to descend from her princely entertainments to solitude at Matching, and thus to own before all the world that she was beaten. Then when she asked him for advice, when she was really anxious to know how far
she might go in filling her house without offending him, he told her to ask Lady Rosina De Courcy! If he chose to be ridiculous he might. She would ask Lady Rosina De Courcy. In her active anger she did write to Lady Rosina De Courcy a formal letter, in which she said that the Duke hoped to have the pleasure of her ladyship’s company at Matching Park on the 1st of August. It was an absurd letter,
somewhat long, written very much in the Duke’s name, with overwhelming expressions of affection, instigated in the writer’s mind partly by the fun of the supposition that such a man as her husband should flirt with such a woman as Lady Rosina. There was something too of anger in what she wrote, some touch of revenge. She sent off this invitation, and she sent no other. Lady Rosina took it all in
good part, and replied saying that she should have the greatest pleasure in going to Matching. She
¹
had declared to herself that she would ask none but those he had named, and in accordance with her resolution she sent out no other written invitations.