he found playing a mixed
foursome on a suburban golf links. She impressed upon him, as she had
upon all his colleagues the appalling wickedness of shooting the
citizens of Belfast. Every one, it appeared, agreed with her on this
point. The Government's policy, so they told her and she told us, was
to cow, not to kill, the misguided people who were rioting in
Belfast. She besought Moyne to use all his influence to moderate the
anti-Home Rule enthusiasm of Malcolmson and the Dean.

Moyne smiled in a sickly way when we came to this advice.

The other long telegram was from Babberly. I must say that Babberly at
this crisis displayed immense energy and something like political
genius. Having been all his life a strong Conservative, and a
supporter of force as a remedy for every kind of social
unpleasantness, he turned a most effective somersault and appealed
suddenly to the anti-militarist feelings of the Labour Party. He
succeeded--I cannot even imagine how--in organizing a mass meeting in
Trafalgar Square to protest against the murder of the working-men of
Belfast in the streets of their own city, by the hired mercenaries of
the capitalist classes. The meeting was actually engaged in making its
protest while Moyne and I were reading the telegrams. Babberly's case
was really extraordinarily strong. Soldiers were shooting off guns in
Belfast, and the people they fired at--or as we knew, fired over--were
working-men. There was occasion for a strong and eloquent appeal to
the sentiment of the solidarity of labour. Babberly was just the man
to make it with the utmost possible effectiveness. I pictured him
perched on the head of one of the British lions which give its quite
peculiar dignity to Trafalgar Square, beseeching a crowd of confused
but very angry men not to allow the beast to open its mouth or show
its teeth. I could easily imagine that the news of Babberly's
exertions, dribbling in during the day to the offices of harassed
Ministers, might have reinforced with grave political considerations
the hysterical humanitarian telegrams which Clithering was shooting
off from the seat of war. A Tory Government might survive a little
bloodshed. A Liberal Government convicted of having incited a soldier
to shoot a working-man would be in a perilous position.

"I must say," I said, "that Babberly is infernally clever. I don't
quite know where he'll find himself afterwards, but--"

"What does it matter about afterwards?" said M