The Complete Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace Page A

none. Satisfied that a certain procedure was less wrong than any other, he adopted it. Satisfied that a measure was for the immediate or ultimate good of his fellows, he carried that measure through to the bitter end. It may be said of him that he had no ambitions – only aims. He was the most dangerous man in the Cabinet, which he dominated in his masterful way, for he knew not the meaning of the blessed word ‘compromise’.
    If he held views on any subject under the sun, those views were to be the views of his colleagues.
    Four times in the short historyof the administration had‘Rumoured Resignation of a Cabinet Minister’ filled the placards of the newspapers, and each time the Minister whose resignation was ultimately recorded was the man whose views had clashed with the Foreign Secretary. In small things, as in great, he had his way.
    His official residence he absolutely refused to occupy, and No. 44 Downing Street was converted into half office, half palace. Portland Place was his home, and from there he drove every morning, passing the Horse Guards clock as it finished the last stroke of ten.
    A private telephone wire connected his study in Portland Place with the official residence, and but for this Sir Philip had cut himself adrift from the house in Downing Street, to occupy which had been the ambition of the great men of his party.
    Now, however, with the approach of the day on which every effort would be taxed, the police insisted upon his taking up his quarters in Downing Street.
    Here, they said, the task of protecting the Minister would be simplified. No 44 Downing Street they knew. The approaches could be better guarded, and, moreover, the drive – that dangerous drive! – between Portland Place and the Foreign Office would be obviated.
    It took a considerable amount of pressure and pleading to induce Sir Philip to take even this step, and it was only when it was pointed out that the surveillance to which he was being subjected would not be so apparent to himself that he yielded.
    ‘You don’t like to find my men outside your door with your shaving water,’ said Superintendent Falmouth bluntly. ‘You objected to one of my men being in your bathroom when you went in the other morning, and you complained about a plain-clothes officer driving on your box – well, Sir Philip, in Downing Street I promise that you shan’t even see them.’
    This clinched the argument.
    It was just before leaving Portland Place to take up his new quarters that he sat writing to his agent whilst the detective waited outside the door.
    The telephone at Sir Philip’s elbow buzzed – he hated bells – and the voice of his private secretary asked with some anxiety how long he would be.
    ‘We have got sixty men on duty at 44,’ said the secretary, zealous and young, ‘and today and tomorrow we shall – ’ And Sir Philip listened with growing impatience to the recital.
    ‘I wonder you have not got an iron safe to lock me in,’ he said petulantly, and closed the conversation.
    There was a knock at the door and Falmouth put his head inside.
    ‘I don’t want to hurry you, sir,’ he said, ‘but – ’
    So the Foreign Secretary drove off to Downing Street in something remarkably like a temper.
    For he was not used to being hurried, or taken charge of, or ordered hither and thither. It irritated him further to see the now familiar cyclists on either side of the carriage, to recognise at every few yards an obvious policeman in mufti admiring the view from the sidewalk, and when he came to Downing Street and found it barred to all carriages but his own, and an enormous crowd of morbid sightseers gathered to cheer his ingress, he felt as he had never felt before in his life – humiliated.
    He found his secretary waiting in his private office with the rough draft of the speech that was to introduce the second reading of the Extradition Bill.
    ‘We are pretty sure to meet with a great deal of opposition,’ informed the