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nation."
"What about your friend the General? Will he truly help us?"
"That's the beauty of it!" Mick declared. "The diplomats thought Sam Houston
was a bit stiff-
necked, didn't care for some of his actions and policies, didn't back him as
strongly as they should have. But the Texian junta that replaced him is far
worse. They're openly hostile to
British interests! Their days are numbered. The General has had to cool his
heels a bit in exile here in England, but now he's on his way back to Texas,
for what's his by right." He shrugged.
"Should have happened years ago. Our trouble is that Her Majesty's Government
don't know their own mind! There's factions among 'em. Some don't trust Sam
Houston -- but the French will help us anyhow! Their Mexican clients have a
border war with the Texians. They need the General!"
"You're going to war, then, Mick?" She found it difficult to imagine Dandy
Mick leading a cavalry charge.
"Coup d'etat, more like," he assured her. "We won't see much bloodshed. I'm
Houston's political man, you see, and his man I'll stay, for I'm the one's
arranged this London speaking-
tour, and on to France, and I'm the one's made certain approaches as resulted
in him being granted his audience with the French Emperor . . . " But could
that be true, really? "And I'm the one as runs Manchester's newest and best
through the kino for him, sweetens the press and British public opinion, hires
the bill-stickers . . . " He drew on his cigar, his fingers kneading her
there, and she heard him puff out a great satisfied cloud of cherry smoke.
But he mustn't have felt like doing it again, not then, because she was soon
asleep and dreaming, dreaming of Texas, a Texas of rolling downs, contented
sheep, the windows of gray manors glinting in late-afternoon sunlight.
Sybil sat in an aisle seat, third row back in the Garrick, thinking unhappily
that General Sam
Houston, late of Texas, was not drawing much of a crowd. People were filtering
in as the five-man orchestra squeaked and sawed and honked. A family party was
settling in the row before her, two boys, in bluejackets and trousers, with
laid-down shirt-collars, a little girl in a shawl and a braided frock, then
two more little girls, ushered in by their governess, a thin-looking sort with
a hooked nose and watery eyes, sniffling into her handkerchief. Then the
oldest boy, sauntering in, a sneer on his face. Then papa with dress-coat and
cane and whiskers, and fat mama with long ringlets and a big nasty hat and
three gold rings on her plump soft fingers. Finally all were seated, amid a
shuffling of coats and shawls and a munching of candied orange-peel, quite
patently well-behaved and expecting improvement. Clean and soaped and
prosperous, in their snug machine-
made clothes.
A clerky fellow with spectacles took the next seat to Sybil's, an inch-wide
blue strip showing at his hairline, where he'd shaved his forehead to suggest
intellect. He was reading Mick's program and sucking an acidulated lemon-drop.
And past him a trio of officers, on furlough from the Crimea, looking very
pleased with themselves, come to hear about an old-fashioned war in
Texas, fought the old-fashioned way. There were other soldiers speckled
through the crowd, bright in their red coats, the respectable sort, who didn't
go for drabs and gin, but would take the
Queen's pay, and learn gunnery arithmetic, and come back to work in the
railroads and shipyards, and better themselves.
The place was full of bettering-blokes, really: shopkeepers and store-clerks
and druggists, with their tidy wives and broods. In her father's day, such
people, Whitechapel people, had been angry and lean and shabby, with sticks in
their hands, and dirks in their belts. But times had changed under the Rads,
and now even Whitechapel had its tight-laced scrubfaced women and its cakey
clock-watching men, who read the 'Dictionary of Useful Knowledge' and the
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'Journal of Moral
Improvement', and looked to get ahead.
Then the gas-lights guttered in their copper rings, and the orchestra swung
into a flat rendition of "Come to the Bower." With a huff, the limelight
flared, the curtain drew back before the kinotrope screen, the music covering
the clicking of kino-bits spinning themselves into place.
Broken frills and furbelows grew like black frost on the edges of the screen.
They framed tall letters, in a fancy alphabet of sharp-edged Engine-Gothic,
black against white:
Editions
Panoptique
Presents
And below the kinotrope, Houston entered stage-left, a bulky, shabby figure,
limping toward the podium at the center of the stage. He was drowned in
dimness for the moment, below the raw and
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