He was a very different type of Capital. He was, in fact, a retired
general officer of some repute in his time, which was, however, long
past. He had recently been made a peer, and from being called Lamb had
soared into a title and taken the name of some place that interested him
in Scotland. I doubt, when selecting his title, whether he had
remembered the policies of the Apollo; for while “Lamb” is a word you
can dash off in a second, “Corrievairacktown” is not. He laboured
frightfully at it and heaved like a ship at sea, and sometimes actually
forgot how to spell it! He jerked his snow-white head abruptly, as
though he had acquired the habit of dodging cannon-balls, and from time
to time he gave off little sharp explosions of breath, like a cat when
trodden upon. This man realised his own greatness in a way that perhaps
nobody else did. He was a Conservative to his soldierly backbone, and I
think sometimes, when he came to the Apollo for the tame occupation of
signing policies, he was almost ashamed that a man, who had seen many a
shot fired in anger and moved like an avenging spirit under the hurtling
wings of the God of War, should have come down to signing policies for
such homely things as—cooking utensils, and so on.
To illustrate the nerve and courage of Mr. Bright at a supreme crisis, I
may tell you that in his younger days he had once been attending to
General Sir Hastings Lamb, as he was then, and during an explosion on
the part of the gallant warrior he hurled fifty or sixty policies in a
heap to the ground. Doubtless, he expected Mr. Bright to bound forward
and pick them up again; but far from it!
Mr. Bright, well versed in Capital and Labour and Political Economy and
the Rights of Man, knew that he was not there to pick policies off the
floor which an irritated representative of Capital had thrown upon it.
He knew the machinery of the office provided that, in such a
contingency, he must ring the Board Room bell and summon a messenger,
for the subordinate task of putting the policies on the table again.
Accordingly, he summoned a messenger and directed him how to proceed.
Whereupon, the representative of Capital subsided instantly and signed
the rest of the policies like the lamb he was in those days. Undoubtedly
you might call this a triumph for the sacred rights of man; and it also
showed that Mr. Bright’s moral courage was equal to his physical, which
is saying a great deal.
XII
“With an auspicious and a dropping eye,” as Shakespeare says, I returned
in due course to the Parent Office of the Apollo. I was glad to go back
to Mr. Blades and Travers and other friends; but I was exceedingly sorry
to leave Mr. Walter and Mr. Bright. In fact, I missed them a great deal,
and wrote to them once or twice; and they answered without hesitation,
and hoped to see me again at some future time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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