A Perfect Spy

First of all, Rick magnanimously claims full responsibility for everything. Blame, says Rick, if blame there be, should be laid squarely at his own door. Stars and ideals are nothing to the metaphors he flings at us: “If a finger is to be pointed, point it here.” A stab at his own breast. “If a price is to be paid, here’s the address. Here I am. Send me the bill. And leave them to learn by his mistakes who got them into this, if such there have been,” he challenges them, beating the English language into submission with the blade of his plump hand by way of an example. Women admired those hands till the end of Rick’s days. They drew conclusions from the girth of his fingers, which never parted when he made a gesture.

“Where did he get his rhetoric from?” I once asked Syd reverently, enjoying what he and Meg called “a small wet” at their fireside in Surbiton. “Who were his models, apart from Makepeace?”

“Lloyd George, Hartley Shawcross, Avory, Marshall Hall, Norman Birkett and other great advocates of his day,” replied Syd promptly, as if they were the runners and starters for the two thirty at Newmarket. “Your dad had more respect for the law than any man I ever knew, Titch. Studied their speeches, followed their form better than what he did the geegees. He’d have been a top judge if TP had given him the opportunities, wouldn’t he, Meg?”

“He’d have been Prime Minister,” Meg affirms devoutly. “Who else was there but him and Winston?”

Rick next passes to his Theory of Property which I have since heard him expound many times in many different ways but I believe this was its unveiling. The burden is that any money passing through Rick’s hands is subject to a redefinition of the laws of property, since whatever he does with it will improve mankind, whose principal representative he is. Rick, in a word, is not a taker but a giver and those who call him otherwise lack faith. The final challenge comes in a mounting bombardment of passionate, grammatically unnerving pseudo-Biblical phrases. “And if any one of you here present today — can find evidence of a single advantage — one single benefit — be it in the past, be it stored away for the future — directly or indirectly from this enterprise — which I have derived — ambitious though it may have been, make no two ways about it — let him come forward now, with a clear heart — and point the finger where it belongs.”

From there it is but a step to that sublime vision of the Pym & Salvation Coach Company Ltd., which will bring profit to piety and worshippers to our beloved Tabernacle.

The magic box is unlocked. Flinging back the lid Rick displays a dazzling confusion of promises and statistics. The present bus fare from Farleigh Abbott to our Tabernacle is twopence. The trolley bus from Tambercombe costs threepence, four-up in a cab from either spot costs sixpence, a Granville Hastings motor coach costs nine hundred and eight pounds discounted for cash, and seats thirty-two fully loaded, eight standing. On the sabbath alone — my assistants here have made a most thorough survey, gentlemen — more than six hundred people travel an aggregate of over four thousand miles to worship at this fine Tabernacle. Because they love the place. As Rick does. As we all do, every man and woman here present — let’s make no bones about it. Because they want to feel drawn from the circumference to the centre, in the spirit of their faith. (This last is one of Makepeace Watermaster’s own expressions and Syd says it was a bit cheeky of Rick to throw it back in his face.) On three other days in the week, gentlemen — Band of Hope, Christian Endeavour and Women’s League Bible Group — another seven hundred miles are travelled leaving three days clear for normal commercial operation, and if you don’t believe me watch my forearm as it beats the doubters from my path in a series of convulsive elbow blows, the cupped fingers never parting. From such figures it is suddenly clear there can be only one conclusion.

“Gentlemen, if we charge half the standard fare and give a free ticket to every disabled and elderly person, to every child under the age of eight — with full insurance — observing all the fine regulations which rightly apply to the operation of commercial transport carriages in this increasingly hectic age of ours — with fully professional drivers with every awareness of their responsibilities, god-fearing men recruited from our own number — allowing for depreciation, garaging, maintenance, fuel, ticketing and sundries, and assuming a fifty-percent capacity on the three days of commercial operation — there’s a forty-percent clear profit for the Appeal and room left over to see everybody right.”

Makepeace Watermaster is asking questions. The others are either too full or too empty to speak at all.

“And you’ve bought it?” says Makepeace.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re not of age, half of you.”