politics are made of. If you like, I'll tell you all about it." And the following,
recast in a less allusive and conversational manner, is the story that he told.
Nobody privileged of late years to meet Sir Henry Harland Fisher would
believe that he had ever been called Harry. But, indeed, he had been boyish
enough when a boy, and that serenity which shone on him through life, and
which now took the form of gravity, had once taken the form of gayety. His
friends would have said that he was all the more ripe in his maturity for having
been young in his youth. His enemies would have said that he was still light
minded, but no longer light hearted. But in any case, the whole of the story
Horne Fisher had to tell arose out of the accident which had made young
Harry Fisher private secretary to Lord Saltoun. Hence his later connection
with the Foreign Office, which had, indeed, come to him as a sort of legacy
from his lordship when that great man was the power behind the throne. This
is not the place to say much about Saltoun, little as was known of him and
much as there was worth knowing. England has had at least three or four such
secret statesmen. An aristocratic polity produces every now and then an
aristocrat who is also an accident, a man of intellectual independence and
insight, a Napoleon born in the purple. His vast work was mostly invisible,
and very little could be got out of him in private life except a crusty and rather
cynical sense of humor. But it was certainly the accident of his presence at a
family dinner of the Fishers, and the unexpected opinion he expressed, which
turned what might have been a dinner-table joke into a sort of small
sensational novel.
Save for Lord Saltoun, it was a family party of Fishers, for the only other
distinguished stranger had just departed after dinner, leaving the rest to their
coffee and cigars. This had been a figure of some interest—a young
Cambridge man named Eric Hughes who was the rising hope of the party of
Reform, to which the Fisher family, along with their friend Saltoun, had long
been at least formally attached. The personality of Hughes was substantially
summed up in the fact that he talked eloquently and earnestly through the
whole dinner, but left immediately after to be in time for an appointment. All
his actions had something at once ambitious and conscientious; he drank no
wine, but was slightly intoxicated with words. And his face and phrases were
on the front page of all the newspapers just then, because he was contesting
the safe seat of Sir Francis Verner in the great by-election in the west.
Everybody was talking about the powerful speech against squirarchy which he
had just delivered; even in the Fisher circle everybody talked about it except
Horne Fisher himself who sat in a corner, lowering over the fire.
"We jolly well have to thank him for putting some new life into the old
party," Ashton Fisher was saying. "This campaign against the old squires just
hits the degree of democracy there is in this county. This act for extending