Chapter VII “Vote for Dolphin.”
“The truth is,” said grandpapa, “that I have got to know some of the shop people here. Not the stuck-up cads who live in the big houses by night and sneak up to London to sell boots and beer and underclothing by day; not the purse-proud rubbish that sticks ‘Esquire’ after its name without any right; but genuine people, who live over their shops in Chislehurst, and sell boots and beer and underclothing openly, and don’t mind admitting it. Mr. Lomax, our butcher, is proposing me, and Rogers, the landlord of the Eight Bells Inn, has seconded my nomination. I’m going to write an address to the electors, and leave no stone unturned to get in.”
“Is it worth while, my dearest?” I ventured to ask.
“Of course it’s worth while,” he answered testily. “You’re always nagging at me in a quiet way to use my precious time; and when I undertake a big enterprise like this you throw cold water on it. And another thing: it’s rather doubtful taste your questioning my actions at all. I look sixty and I feel sixty, but I am a hundred and four and your grandfather. Don’t let appearances make you forget that. Rogers says I’m safe to get in. Then I shall wake this place up a bit, and say a thing or two that wants saying.”
He had Mr. Rogers and his wife and daughter in to dine. “Socially they are nothing,” my grandpapa admitted; “but when you’re running for a public appointment you must be all things to all men, and not disdain to make use of mere canaille.”
Mr. Rogers was a very vulgar, plain-spoken man, and his wife had caught his manner. Their daughter I liked less than them. She allowed herself to worry too much over her parents’ ignorance. She corrected their grammar openly; shivered ostentatiously when they dropped an “h” or inserted the aspirate unexpectedly; told them plainly where to use a fork when habit and inclination led them to employ a knife, and so forth. After the meal we went to the drawing-room, and when her mother had gone to sleep in a corner, Miss Rogers told me that her parents were a source of great sorrow to her. They had given her an education of exceptional thoroughness and gentility; which was weak of them, because it enabled her to see their shortcomings, but had not made her a lady or anything like one. She was called Marie—christened Mary no doubt—and she was engaged to a life insurance agent in a fair way of business—so he said.
This young man—one Mr. Walter Widdicombe—and his prospective father-in-law, the innkeeper, worked very hard on grandpapa’s behalf. Mr. Widdicombe understood canvassing, and he gladly accepted a sovereign a day for his expenses, and went about beating up voters and making people promise to poll for Daniel Dolphin. Grandpapa’s election motto was “Advance,” and he wrote a manifesto in the local paper. It was full of suggested reforms and plain-speaking and hard hitting, and made the old man a great many enemies.
If grandfather had been a peaceful, unassertive person, he might have slunk through those terrible years of his existence without attracting undue attention; if he had even been a moral and fairly religious man, his position (and mine) would have presented less frightful complications. But he began to grow more boisterous and unprincipled as his vital energy returned. His disposition had always been at once cantankerous and pushing, and now the circumstance of his prospects only embittered and accentuated the worse traits in his character. He was reckless, unbound by any ordinary guiding and controlling views of this life or the next, simply determined to “make the running,” “go it up to the knocker,” and so on. The expressions, of course, are his own. I was ignorant of their exact meaning until he practically illustrated them.
Grandpapa got in by twenty votes, after a great struggle. He gave a dinner, to men only, at the Eight Bells. They had a large public room there, used for important occasions; and ladies were allowed to sit in a little gallery which ran round it, and listen to the speeches and watch their heroes dine. The same thing is done on a bigger scale by more important people.
I sat by Miss Rogers, who nearly fell out of the gallery on to the table below when her papa began to eat peas with a knife. She suffered also during his speech, which was faulty in manner, though I thought the matter excellent. He praised grandpapa’s good qualities, noted his fiery, manly spirit, hinted that in approaching old institutions the reformer must begin with caution and the thin end of the wedge. But grandpapa showed by the tone of certain remarks, in which he responded to the toast of his health, that “caution” was not going to be his watchword by any means. He was flushed with success, and hardly looked a day more than fifty. He alluded to the “bright-eyed angels” hovering above him in the gallery, and hinted at garden parties in our back garden, and made me extremely uncomfortable by ordering a dozen of champagne to be sent up to us.
I left him smoking cigars, and getting very noisy and excited. He came home at half-past one o’clock, between Mr. Rogers and Mr. Lomax, our butcher. I need not dwell upon his condition. I saw everything in the moonlight through my Venetian blind. One of his supporters found grandfather’s latch-key and opened the door with it. Then both dragged him up to his room and went home, shutting the front door behind them. Grandpapa was very poorly indeed during the night, but refused my aid. I offered to fetch a medical man, but he told me to let him alone and go and bury myself. Of course I could not disguise the truth. Grandpapa had taken too much to drink. The thought went through me like a knife. Indeed, I cried all night, and when I rose my pillow was still wet with tears.
In the morning he was looking ten years older, and for a short time I thought and hoped the New Scheme had broken down. But, after a glass of brandy and soda-water, he brightened up, and his headache went off. He declared that he had enjoyed himself extremely, spent a royal night, and felt all the better for it.
“I find,” he said, “that I don’t care a straw for wine yet, but the old taste for spirits has come back. We must get in a few gallons at once. And cigars, too; I’m taking to cigars again.”
He was rather sulky when I did up his accounts, but he considered it money well spent. Then he put on his hat and went out “to see the boys.”
He came back in a terrible rage, and used three new expletives, and hinted at murder. It appeared that his defeated rivals on the Local Board had lodged a protest against him for bribery and corruption. Grandpapa nearly went mad with rage. He knocked a man down in the open street, and was summoned and appeared at a police court, and had to be bound over to keep the peace. Finally he lost his seat on the Local Board, the case going against him; and as he dashed into the kitchen, where I was showing the cook how to make something, he absolutely foamed at the mouth. He threatened to buy dynamite, to blow Chislehurst to the skies, to destroy his political opponents with poison. Then he talked seriously of ending his own existence, from which step I dissuaded him, feeling at the same time, that he could hardly make worse arrangements for his future than he had already done. After dinner on that day he said he should give up trying to do good, and he kept his word. He took to living at the Eight Bells, and to writing insulting letters to the local papers. One of these cost him a hundred pounds in a libel action. Then (and I was not sorry for it) he found some brown hair on his head. This threatened to spread and attract attention, so I considered that the time had come for us to make another move, and begin life upon a new plan with altered relationships.