we hear about threatenin’ letters? Surely you’re not goin’ to take notice of things of that sort—why, I get two or three every day of my life.”
The Minister strode impatiently away from the group, but Tester—the member—caught his arm.
“Look here——” he began.
“Go to the devil,” said the foreign secretary plainly, and walked quickly to his room.
“Beastly temper that man’s got, to be sure,” said the honourable member despairingly. “Fact is, old Ramon’s in a blue funk. The idea of making a song about threatenin’ letters! Why, I get——”
A group of men in the members’ smokeroom discussed the question of the Just Four in a perfectly unoriginal way.
“It’s too ridiculous for words,” said one oracularly. “Here are four men, a mythical four, arrayed against all the forces and established agencies of the most civilised nation on earth.”
“Except Germany,” interrupted Scott, MP, wisely.
“Do you think Ramon will withdraw the bill?” asked the senior member for Aldgate East.
“Ramon? Not he—he’d sooner die.”
“It’s a most unusual circumstance,” said Aldgate East; and three boroughs, a London suburb, and a midland town nodded and “thought it was.”
“In the old days, when old Bascoe was a young member”—Aldgate East indicated an aged senator bent and white of beard and hair, who was walking painfully toward a seat—“in the old days——”
“Thought old Bascoe had paired?” remarked an irrelevant listener.
“In the old days,” continued the member for the East End, “before the Fenian trouble—”
“If I were Ramon,” resumed Aldgate East profoundly, “I know exactly what I should do. I should go to the police and say ‘Look here——’ ”
A bell rang furiously and continuously, and the members went scampering along the corridor. “Division—‘vision.”
Clause Nine of the Medway Improvement Bill having been satisfactorily settled and the words “Or as may hereafter be determined” added by a triumphant majority of twenty-four, the faithful Commons returned to the interrupted discussion.
“What I say, and what I’ve always said about a man in the Cabinet,” maintained an important individual, “is that he must, if he is a true statesman, drop all consideration for his own personal feelings.”
“Hear!” applauded somebody.
“His own personal feelings,” repeated the orator. “He must put his duty to the state before all other—er—considerations. You remember what I said to Barrington the other night when we were talking out the Estimates? I said, ‘The right honourable gentleman has not, cannot have, allowed for the strong and almost unanimous desires of the great body of the electorate. The action of a Minister of the Crown must primarily be governed by the intelligent judgment of the great body of the electorate, whose fine, feelings’—no—‘whose higher instincts’—no—that wasn’t it—at any rate I made it very clear what the duty of a Minister was,” concluded the oracle lamely.
“Now I—” commenced Aldgate East, when an attendant approached with a tray on which lay a greenish-grey envelope.
“Has any gentleman dropped this?” he inquired, and, picking up the letter, the member fumbled for his eyeglasses.
“To the Members of the House of Commons,” he read, and looked over his pince-nez at the circle of men about him.
“Company prospectus,” said the stout member for West Brondesbury, who had joined the party; “I get hundreds. Only the other day——”
“Too thin for a prospectus,” said Aldgate East, weighing the letter in his hand.
“Patent medicine, then,” persisted the light of Brondesbury. “I get one every morning—‘Don’t burn the candle at both ends’, and all that sort of rot. Last week a feller sent me——”
“Open it,” someone suggested, and the member obeyed. He read a few lines and turned red.
“Well, I’m damned!” he gasped, and read aloud:
Citizens,
The Government is about to pass into law a measure which will place in the hands of the most evil Government of modern times men who are patriots and who are destined to be the saviours of their countries. We have informed the Minister in charge of this measure, the title of which appears in the margin, that unless he withdraws this Bill we will surely slay him.
We are loath to take this extreme step, knowing that otherwise he is an honest and brave gentleman, and it is with a desire to avoid fulfilling our promise that we ask the members of the Mother of Parliaments to use their every influence to force the withdrawal of this Bill.
Were we common murderers or clumsy anarchists we could with ease wreak a blind and indiscriminate vengeance on the members of this assembly, and in proof thereof, and as an earnest that our threat is no idle one, we beg you to search beneath the table near the recess in this room. There you will find a machine sufficiently charged to destroy the greater portion of this building.
(Signed)
Four Just Men
Postscript.—We have not placed either detonator or fuse in the machine, which may therefore be handled with impunity.
As the reading of the letter proceeded the faces of the listeners grew pallid.
There was something very convincing about the tone of the letter, and instinctively all eyes sought the table near the recess.
Yes, there was something, a square black something, and the crowd of legislators shrank back. For a moment they stood spellbound—and then there was a mad rush for the door.
“Was it a hoax?” asked the prime minister anxiously, but the hastily summoned expert from Scotland Yard shook his head.
“Just as the letter described it,” he said gravely, “even to the absence of fuses.”
“Was it really——”
“Enough to wreck the House, sir,” was the reply.
The premier, with a troubled face, paced the floor of his private room.
He stopped once to look moodily through the window that gave a view of a crowded terrace and a mass of excited politicians gesticulating and evidently all speaking at once.
“Very, very serious—very, very serious,” he muttered. Then aloud, “We said so much we might as well continue. Give the newspapers as full an account of this afternoon’s happenings as they think necessary—give them the text of the letter.” He pushed a button and his secretary entered noiselessly.
“Write to
