d.
Something had to be done. Somebody must be the middleman. Aitken had an
uncanny faculty for sizing up situations; for manipulating men; for
interpreting ambition--because no man in England had an ambition
surpassing his own. He could play political chess and absorb superficial
culture at the same time. Books, plays, authors, artists, manners,
accent--all were grist to his mill. He was an astute actor. He could
assume a virtue; simulate anxiety; hover about closed doors on tiptoe;
speak in the awed whisper; in the event of a crisis peer tragically into
men's faces.

England knew she had taken a queer character to bosom; a child who was
growing up at Gargantuan speed, an _enfant terrible_ of sudden and
prodigious experience; a creature who could sit up o' nights and plot and
organize and cabal and next morning rub out the wrinkles at tennis,
amiable if he beat his opponent, growling and savage if beaten, ready for
a campaign in the afternoon, a speech in the evening and a conference at
midnight. Or he could plunge into polite arts, talk familiarly of
literature with duchesses, undergo a surgical operation to-day and sit up
for correspondence to-morrow. He has a brain whose recipe for complete
rest is "change of work"! Barring Lloyd George and De Valera, he has
perhaps the most unusual brain in Great Britain.

No Canadian, already a millionaire, had ever done these things. Not even
Gilbert Parker had so amazingly cultivated the accent. Greenwood,
diligent and talented, had been slow and determined. Aitken--opened the
heavy doors. As in Canada, he was at last able to close out all but
those who could play the game of the hour. This Canadian could not only
talk, but act, Empire; not merely ape, but superficially assimilate,
England; and he understood the United States--because he was
temperamentally something of an American.

His success on the surface is incomprehensible. The one key to it is his
persistent cultivation of Bonar Law, who in the Coalition was the great
prop to the Premier. Beaverbrook hugely admires Lloyd George. He
reverences Bonar Law. The Premier and himself had too many points,
though not characteristics, in common to become running mates.
Intimately congenial to the Unionist leader, Aitken was never allowed to
become indispensable to the Premier. His brief term as member of the War
Cabinet terminated almost suddenly. Was it voluntary? Or ambitious?
What did this Warwick want as