Were I a novelist sketching a character for Henry Herbert Drayton I would have him, except in one item, just about all that he is not. He should be unmarried, live with his maiden aunt, most of his time make very little money and depend for his income upon winning about three good criminal prosecutions a year; the rest of his time to be spent reading up criminal psychology and taking his aunt to see pictures. The commonplace scene-shifter who places behind people the scenery of real life has bungled Sir Henry, thereby robbing him of much interest. What a net a man with his classic patience and enormous ferret instinct for minutiae could have woven about some cunning but once too often embezzler! Instead we have Drayton, K.C., pushing himself methodically through a series of legal metamorphoses, at each change getting one convolution higher, by public corporation solicitorships and county attorneyships, burrowing into hydro-electric affairs for Toronto until he becomes Dominion Railway Commission chairman--seven years at that--and at last steps out into the full glare of undramatic notoriety by taking office as Minister of Finance in 1919.
Well, in that capacity he has rubber-stamped millions of people in the region of their pockets whom he would have missed altogether had he been taking his maiden aunt to the picture galleries between detective cases. Besides, he has three or four children, and I'm sure that when some lady writes the cinema of his life she will portray him as a hugely devoted papa with perfect young geniuses of children who yearn to spend papa's money upon the very luxuries against which he is warning the parents of other young people.
Once,--it was something to do with Niagara power--I heard Mr. Drayton weaving a dull dry web of apparently trivial evidence about some very important people. It seems to me that one William Mackenzie was a particular object; if not he should have been. Once you admit that Drayton belongs to corporation instead of criminal law--though sometimes there's precious little difference--Mackenzie and Adam Beck are just the sort of audacious public-interest performers that a man like him should be after. He seemed to have an insatiable capacity for picking out little filaments of dry-as-dust technique from which on behalf of an impersonal client like the city of Toronto he could manage to inveigle a web of silk about any anti-civic despot who regards a city as a thing to be worked for dividends, and people merely as common economic dots and carry ones.