David Lloyd George

“ After the great speculation had been decided on it was settled that young David should be brought up as a solicitor. This necessitated not only the provision of certain heavy fees in connection with the examinations, but also time spent in a prolonged course of study. The few hundreds of pounds was a small-enough amount, and it was obvious that it would have to be sparingly expended if it were to cover all that was required. Young Lloyd George was a brilliant youth, but even his brilliancy could not help beyond a certain point. The old cobbler saw one way of economizing. ”

“ David Lloyd, LL.D., was born at Downham Market, Norfolk, 21 Oct. 1801. After a short residence at Christ's College, Cambridge, he removed to Lincoln College, Oxford, whence he proceeded B.A. 1824, and M.A. 1825. He was ordained deacon and priest in the latter year by the Bishop of Oxford, and was for some years curate of Wellesbourne in Warwickshire. He was curate of Stow Bardolph, Norfolk, as early as 1840; in 1852 his friend, Sir Thomas Hare, presented him to the vicarage of Stow Bardolph with Wimbotsham, a living worth more than 500l. per annum. ”

“ Surely the time to dictate the conditions of your repayment of a loan—when you propose to pay, how much you propose to pay, or whether you mean to pay at all—is when you are borrowing and not after you have spent the money. ”

“ Let us not judge France by the fussy little men that give expression to her petulance in the fits of temper that overtake every nation, but by the great men who have given noble expression to her immortal soul. ”

“ How utterly devoid of reason it is may be gathered from the fact that it is almost entirely confined to nations who worship Jewish prophets and apostles, revere the national literature of the Hebrews as the only inspired message delivered by the deity to mankind, and whose only hope of salvation rests on the precepts and promises of the great teachers of Judah. Yet in the sight of these fanatics the Jews of to-day can do nothing right. If they are rich they are birds of prey. If they are poor they are vermin. ”

“ He lost the school—he had become not quite orthodox in his ideas and was inclined to rail at church doctrine. He never was intended for manual labor; he worked hard when he could get work, but everything seemed against him. Then Penelope came, and he was left alone with her, and it made him bitter. I tried to get him to come to me; but could you imagine a man as proud as he, David—a man of his mind—coming to me after what had happened! Why, he called my offer charity. Then he left the valley, too, and I wrote to him from Pittsburgh, where I had bought a little mill. ”

“ Suddenly his arms shot out. "Try to be more, David. Try to be what Rufus and I combined would have been. Try to work for something better than three meals a day. Wake up, David, before you fall asleep in a land where everybody dozes like the very dogs."
To enforce his admonition his hands closed on my shoulders; he lifted me from my chair and began to shake me. Being so much in earnest he was rather violent, so that James, now in the doorway, saw me wincing and looking up with a grimace of fright and eyes of pleading. ”

“ This is the way most wars come.
Read the history of the war of 1870. It came about in the same confused, clumsy, purposeless way. In all these cases there is always in the background the sinister figure of that force for mischief which used to be known by our Puritan fathers as the devil. Have these hatreds and suspicions abated? Are there no rivalries to-day? ”

“ I must be up and doing." He had risen, and was speaking rapidly as he paced the narrow limits of the room. "Money is what I need and I will have it. Money has always seemed to me a paltry thing to work for, but now it is for Penelope's sake. There has been a plan in my mind for some time, David, only I have delayed starting on it—for Penelope's sake, you understand. I'm going to Argentina. There was a man on my ship coming out from Yokohama who was bound for Argentina, and he told me——"
The Professor launched into a glowing account of the promise of the southern country. ”

“ Bannister is a good soul," Penelope said when, side by side, we were away on that wonderful walk uptown. "She has to be properly handled though or I should be her slave. Her husband was a broker, or something like that, and died during a panic, and as she was in straitened circumstances she came to us. You see, she knows everybody, and is awfully well connected. You must be very nice to her, David."
She called me David as naturally as though it really had been yesterday that we went fishing in the meadow. My heart beat quicker. ”

“ LLOYD, DAVID (1597–1663) , author of the ‘Legend of Captain Jones,’ born at Berthlwyd in the parish of Llanidloes, Montgomeryshire, in 1597, was son of David Lloyd. His uncle, Oliver Lloyd, fellow of All Souls, advocate of Doctors' Commons, and a benefactor of Jesus College, Oxford, was appointed dean of Hereford in 1617, and held that preferment until his death in 1625 at the age of fifty-four. ”

“ A moment later down the hall she heard the familiar thump! thump! of David's crutches. The sound grew fainter and finally died away as the door closed downstairs. Out of her hearing and out of her life David Lloyd had gone, thumping on his way alone.
A few minutes later Varick found her in her room, her head buried in her arms.
"Bab," he said, "look up at me." Obediently she raised her face. "It isn't the best man who's got you, dear; but I love you. I always have!" ”

“ What a man David Malcolm became that night! He won everything that the world holds worth striving for. He won them all so easily by always doing what was right. He travelled far because he marched so straight. Then he mounted to the highest peak—a feat so rare that even his great modesty could not suppress a cry of exultation. He heard the crunching of a hoe, and, following the sound, saw the Professor battling with the ever-charging weeds. The gaunt man regarded him quietly; then said: "David, you have come far." He raised the hoe and pointed to the sky. ”

“ I said firmly, "there are some things which you and I must straighten out here and now."
"There is nothing to straighten out," she said. "Everything is settled. We are friends." Lifting a hand, she pointed over the plain. "What does that remind you of, David?"
"A little of the valley," I answered. Then I raised my hand too. "There are the mountains, Penelope, and just before them the ridge over which we rode that morning. Do you remember it? Do you remember how Nathan ran away over the trail, how you clung to me and called to me to save you? Home should be down there where you see the village. ”

“ And when he turned from that great hall, from his heavy table and his liveried servants, to speak of counting eggs and weighing butter, I had not even smiled at the incongruity. Then the dam broke, and memories backed up in years of silence broke forth in a quick and troubled flood.
"It was my fault, David, as much as his. I was a grub—a dull, toiling grub. But those long hours that I was toiling came to be good hours for me when it was for her sake. Why, it seemed that every pound of sugar I sold, that every little profit I made, was for her. ”

“ The village dominie could not carry David as far as that.
Here seemed a formidable gulf to bridge. Less formidable barriers have closed careers to others and driven them back into the workshop.
But human love can leap over great obstacles; and Richard Lloyd was no ordinary man. ”

“ Why, if it wasn't for Penelope I should go back to the valley, just to be near him. It would be better than golf—to sit with him on the store porch on a sunny day listening to the mill rumbling by the creek and the killdee whistling in the meadow, to watch the shadows crawl along the mountains, and now and then to hear Bill Hansen say something. That would be living—eh, David? ”

“ She pointed over the tangled briers to the woods, to the very spot where the path breaks through the bushes and leads to the brook.
"Yesterday, David—it seems but yesterday—I dragged you out of the deep pool, and to-day—a moment ago—I heard Harry there, shouting."
"He has probably caught a trout," said I as I lighted a cigar. "A small boy always shouts when he lands a fish."
Penelope laughed.
"And if," I went on, between critical puffs—"if he falls in, James is with him and James will pull him out. ”

“ I think that she divined what I wanted her to understand—that though Gladys Todd had painted tulips on black plaques, she had acquired the dignity that comes with travel and the grace of a widened view.
"You must both come and dine with me when she gets home," Penelope said, with a manner of increased interest. "I suppose she is studying, David, music or painting."
"Travelling," I answered, encouraged to nonchalance by the impression I was making, for to travel merely sounded much more prosperous than to be working at the rudiments of an art. ”

“ Now tell me of my friend Talcott—what of him?"
Penelope sat up very straight and her head tossed. "David, I should think that one subject which you would avoid."
"I confess myself consumed with merely idle curiosity," I returned. "Talcott once made a great deal of trouble for me. Don't you remember the day on the Avenue when you cut me?"
"And if I had met you here a year ago, David, I should not have known you," she said severely. "A woman resents being made a fool of, nor can she easily forgive one who exposes the sham in which she has a part. ”

“ China isn't a place to accomplish much, and I might as well have gone on to Lhasa as to do what I did—work three years in the consulate at Che-Foo as interpreter and useful man, eyes, arms, and brains for a politician from Missouri. But my one purpose was to get home, to see Penelope, to see her a woman grown, and perhaps—I would say to myself sometimes—to speak to her."
"And you have found her a woman grown," said I. "Now you have only to speak to her."
He shook his head. "I've been here three months now, David, and I have seen her perhaps a score of times ”

“ But a man with ideas, David, must some day rise above adversity. All he needs is a field of action." He looked across the bare room and out of the door, where the weeds were charging in masses against the very threshold ”

“ Forget you! I swore to Gladys Todd that I had been idly boasting. I would have carried her image to the grave, burned on my heart. The memory of her would have been the only light in all my life of darkness. But now there was no darkness. For us there was only glorious day. The astonishing thing, the incomprehensible thing, was that Gladys Todd could love me; that it was really true that she loved me that first night we met; that she loved me yesterday when she sat on the vine-clad porch painting tulips so carelessly.
"But I did, David," she protested. ”

“ The girl was just twenty, but she had lived for years, first with a disreputable father, and then in a perpetual camaraderie, within the field of art, with men of all sorts and kinds. There are certain feminine blooms which a milieu like this effaces with deadly rapidity.
For the first time David was jarred. The idealist in him recoiled. His conscience, too, was roused about Louie. He had handed her over, it seemed, to the custody of a drunkard and his wife, who had immediately thrown her into the company of a man no decent woman ought to know. And Mademoiselle Delaunay had led him into it. ”

“ He referred again to Talcott.
"I can't understand it—a man happy doing nothing. I suppose I am a sort of machine—I must have work fed into me. Here I am at fifty-five and not a wheel moving. It was the power of the mills that kept me running. Now I have lost that." For a moment he was silent. Then he leaned toward me and said in a wistful voice: "David, you remember my brother. He could be happy just sitting thinking. ”

“ Lloyd watched the group. Matilda was earnestly searching in the pages of the Concordance; David sat waiting, with a little curiosity; Norton with impatient defiance. Matilda was busy for some minutes with one page and another; then, "Here it is!" she said; and looked up. She saw that Mrs. Lloyd's attention was fixed, and that Mrs. Laval also was listening. She glanced at Norton, then met David's eyes; and then bent her head over her book and read.
"'Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. ”

“ Feel thirty years younger. Am transported as by a magical Eastern carpet to times when Don José rushed about the country, fluttering his Unauthorised Programme, bearding barons in their dens, lashing out at landlords, and unceremoniously digging dukes in the ribs, what time a pack of scandalised Tories barked furiously at his heels. Lloyd George is an able man, courageous to boot, endowed with gift of turning out sentences that dwell in the memory, delighting some hearers, rankling in hearts of others. ”

“ The course of events in Scotland during the next seven years is outside the life of David. A new race of patriotic leaders—Murray of Bothwell, Robert the Steward, Douglas the Knight of Liddesdale—worthily sustained the fame of Robert Bruce, Douglas, and Randolph. At first they carried on the war with varying success, but ultimately they freed the country and retook all the castles. The greater attraction of a French campaign prevented Edward from ever using his whole strength against the northern kingdom. Not much is known of David's residence in France. ”