‘Certainly, this thing keeps on opening up, and up,’ I remarked inanely.

‘It’s beyond me!’ said Bat.  ’I don’t think if I’d known I’d have ever ...  Yes, I would, though.  He said my home address was—­’

‘It was his tone—­his tone!’ Ollyett almost shouted.  Woodhouse said nothing, but his face whitened as he brooded.

‘Well, any way,’ Bat went on, ’I’m glad I always believed in God and Providence and all those things.  Else I should lose my nerve.  We’ve put it over the whole world—­the full extent of the geographical globe.  We couldn’t stop it if we wanted to now.  It’s got to burn itself out.  I’m not in charge any more.  What d’you expect’ll happen next.  Angels?’

I expected nothing.  Nothing that I expected approached what I got.  Politics are not my concern, but, for the moment, since it seemed that they were going to ‘huckle’ with the rest, I took an interest in them.  They impressed me as a dog’s life without a dog’s decencies, and I was confirmed in this when an unshaven and unwashen Pallant called on me at ten o’clock one morning, begging for a bath and a couch.

‘Bail too?’ I asked.  He was in evening dress and his eyes were sunk feet in his head.

‘No,’ he said hoarsely.  ’All night sitting.  Fifteen divisions.  ’Nother to-night.  Your place was nearer than mine, so—­’ He began to undress in the hall.

When he awoke at one o’clock he gave me lurid accounts of what he said was history, but which was obviously collective hysteria.  There had been a political crisis.  He and his fellow M.P.’s had ’done things’—­I never quite got at the things—­for eighteen hours on end, and the pitiless Whips were even then at the telephones to herd ’em up to another dog-fight.  So he snorted and grew hot all over again while he might have been resting.

’I’m going to pitch in my question about that miscarriage of justice at Huckley this afternoon, if you care to listen to it,’ he said.  ’It’ll be absolutely thrown away—­in our present state.  I told ’em so; but it’s my only chance for weeks.  P’raps Woodhouse would like to come.’

‘I’m sure he would.  Anything to do with Huckley interests us,’ I said.

’It’ll miss fire, I’m afraid.  Both sides are absolutely cooked.  The present situation has been working up for some time.  You see the row was bound to come, etc. etc.,’ and he flew off the handle once more.

I telephoned to Woodhouse, and we went to the House together.  It was a dull, sticky afternoon with thunder in the air.  For some reason or other, each side was determined to prove its virtue and endurance to the utmost.  I heard men snarling about it all round me.  ’If they won’t spare us, we’ll show ’em no mercy,’ ’Break the brutes up from the start.  They can’t stand late hours.’  ’Come on!  No shirking!  I know you’ve had a Turkish bath,’ were some of the sentences I caught on our way.  The House was packed already, and one could feel the negative electricity of a jaded crowd wrenching at one’s own nerves, and depressing the afternoon soul.