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perhaps rarer position of being able to
claim that he practised what he preached. He had been doing it for so long, with so much diligence and devotion, that the name of the
Saint had passed into the Valhalla
of all great names: it had become a household
word, even as the name of Miss Amelia Bloomer, an earlier crusader, was absorbed into the tongue that Shake speare did not live long enough to speak—but in a
more romantic context. And if there
were many more sharks in the broad
lagoons of technically legal righteousness who knew him better by his chosen nom de guerre than
by his real name, and who would not
even have recognised him had they
passed him in the street, that minor degree of anonymity was an asset in the Saint’s profession which more
than com pensated him for the
concurrent gaps in his publicity.
    Mr.
Wallington Titus Oates was another gentleman who did nothing by
halves.
    He was a
large red-faced man who looked exactly like a City alderman or a
master butcher, with a beefy solidity about him which disarmed
suspicion. It was preposterous, his vic tims thought, in the
early and extensive stages of their ignor ance, that such an
obvious rough diamond, such a jovial hail- fellow-well-met,
such an almost startlingly lifelike incarnation of the cartoonist’s
figure of John Bull, could be a practitioner of cunning and
deceit. Even about his rather unusual names he was delightfully frank. If he
had been an American he would certainly have called himself Wallington T.
Oates, and the “T” would have been shrouded in a mystery that
might have embraced anything from Thomas to Tamerlane. In the more reserved
manner of the Englishman, who does not have a Christian name until
you have known him for twenty-five years, he might without exciting extraordinary curiosity
have been known simply as W. T. Oates. But
he was not. His cards were printed W.
Titus Oates; and he was not even insistent on the preliminary “W.” He was, in fact, best pleased to be known as plain Titus Oates, and would chortle
heartily over his chances of tracing a
pedigree back to the notorious in ventor
of the Popish Plot who was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate and from Newgate to Tyburn some three
hundred years ago.
    But apart
from the fact that some people would have given much to apply
the same discouraging treatment to Mr. Wallington Titus
Oates, he had little else in common with his putative ancestor.
For although the better-known Titus Oates stood in the pillory
outside the Royal Exchange before his dolorous tour, it was not recorded
that he was interested in the dealings within; whereas the present
Stock Exchange was Mr. Wallington Titus Oates’s happy hunting ground.
    If there
was anything that W. Titus Oates understood from A to whatever letter
can be invented after Z, it was the manipulation of shares. Bulls and bears
were his domestic pets. Mergers and debentures were his bedfellows.
It might almost be said that he danced contangos in his sleep. And it was
all very profitable—so profitable that Mr. Oates possessed not only three Rolls-Royces but
also a liberal allowance of pocket- money to
spend on the collection of postage stamps which was his joy and relaxation.
    This is not
to be taken to mean that Mr. Oates was known in the City as a narrow evader of
the law. He was, on the contrary, a highly respected and influential
man; for it is one of the sublime subtleties of the law of England that
whilst the manipulation of the form of racehorses is a hideous
crime, to be rewarded with expulsion from the most boring clubs and other forms
of condign punishment, the manipulation of share values is a
noble and righteous occupation by which the large entrance fees to
such clubs may commendably be obtained, provided that the method of juggling
is genteel and smooth. Mr. Oates’s form as a juggler was notably genteel and
smooth; and the ambition of certain citizens to whip Mr. O ates at a
cart’s tail from Aldgate to Newgate was based not so