I went and had some dinner.  It was seasoned by small jokes and little personalities.  A Teutonic journalist, a musical critic, I suppose, inquired as to the origin of the meagre pheasant.  Fox replied that it had been preserved in the back-yard.  The dramatic critic mumbled unheard that some piece or other was off the bills of the Adelphi.  I grinned vacantly.  Afterward, under his breath, Fox put me up to a thing or two regarding the inner meaning of the new daily.  Put by him, without any glamour of a moral purpose, the case seemed rather mean.  The dingy smoking-room depressed me and the whole thing was, what I had, for so many years, striven to keep out of.  Fox hung over my ear, whispering.  There were shades of intonation in his sibillating.  Some of those “in it,” the voice implied, were not above-board; others were, and the tone became deferential, implied that I was to take my tone from itself.

“Of course, a man like the Right Honourable C. does it on the straight, ... quite on the straight, ... has to have some sort of semi-official backer....  In this case, it’s me, ... the Hour.  They’re a bit splitty, the Ministry, I mean....  They say Gurnard isn’t playing square ... they say so.”  His broad, red face glowed as he bent down to my ear, his little sea-blue eyes twinkled with moisture.  He enlightened me cautiously, circumspectly.  There was something unpleasant in the business—­not exactly in Fox himself, but the kind of thing.  I wish he would cease his explanations—­I didn’t want to hear them.  I have never wanted to know how things are worked; preferring to take the world at its face value.  Callan’s revelations had been bearable, because of the farcical pompousness of his manner.  But this was different, it had the stamp of truth, perhaps because it was a little dirty.  I didn’t want to hear that the Foreign Minister was ever so remotely mixed up in this business.  He was only a symbol to me, but he stood for the stability of statesmanship and for the decencies that it is troublesome to have touched.

“Of course,” he was proceeding, “the Churchill gang would like to go on playing the stand-off to us.  But it won’t do, they’ve got to come in or see themselves left.  Gurnard has pretty well nobbled their old party press, so they’ve got to begin all over again.”

That was it—­that was precisely it.  Churchill ought to have played the stand-off to people like us—­to have gone on playing it at whatever cost.  That was what I demanded of the world as I conceived it.  It was so much less troublesome in that way.  On the other hand, this was life—­I was living now and the cost of living is disillusionment; it was the price I had to pay.  Obviously, a Foreign Minister had to have a semi-official organ, or I supposed so....  “Mind you,” Fox whispered on, “I think myself, that it’s a pity he is supporting the Greenland business.  The thing’s not altogether straight.  But it’s going to be made to pay like hell, and there’s the national interest to be considered.  If this Government didn’t take it up, some other would—­and that would give Gurnard and a lot of others a peg against Churchill and his.  We can’t afford to lose any more coaling stations in Greenland or anywhere else.  And, mind you, Mr. C. can look after the interests of the niggers a good deal better if he’s a hand in the pie.  You see the position, eh?”