YET to her astonishment Harry Rames came that very week on the Friday afternoon. Cynthia received him with an elaborate dignity. There was no acidity in her welcome, neither was there any joy. She seemed intensely unaware that she had not seen him for three months. Her nose was perhaps a trifle too high in the air, but she was not conscious of it. On the whole she was greatly pleased with her demeanor. She was behaving as a woman of the world to whom one acquaintance, more or less, is a matter of complete indifference. She offered him tea, and seating herself upon a sofa in front of the table poured it out. Harry Rames took his cup with humility. Cynthia was quick to notice it, no less quick to be gratified by his exhibition of a quality which hitherto he had lacked. He was abashed. He was ashamed. He was uneasy. No doubt he had come expecting the flattery of questions. Her unconsciousness of the length of his absence put him at a loss. When he spoke, it was with difficulty. And then, suddenly, Cynthia saw his lips twitching at the corners. He was not abashed at all. He was simply trying not to laugh. Cynthia grew hot. Alas! her great dignity had barely sustained her in contentment for five minutes! The old indignation shone in her eyes. The indifferent great lady vanished. Almost before she was aware of it she was talking in broken, resentful sentences—as any other ordinary girl might have done who had been wounded and whose wound had betrayed her into speech.
“People who insist on making friends with other people who didn’t at the beginning want to be friends at all, haven’t the right afterward to drop being friends calmly, without a word of explanation. Of course, if people are bored—but even then they should have guessed they were going to be bored before they perhaps made other people count a little—oh, not so much, of course, but just a little—on their friendship. No, I object to that. It’s hateful—and then you saunter in as if—No.” Cynthia, oppressed with a sense of utter isolation in a most neglectful world, which probably hated her when it stopped to think of her at all, was perilously near to tears. She took refuge in sarcasm of a crude kind:
“You probably wouldn’t understand that suddenly to stay away after you have been friendly is rather humiliating to a girl. But you will take it from me, won’t you, that it is so?”
She spoke as one giving a kindly lesson in tact to a boorish person. But her lips shook. Harry Rames rose from his chair and crossing the room took up the Times which lay still neatly folded in its original square upon a table.
“You have not opened your paper to-day,” he said; and once more he saw Cynthia flinch as though he had struck her a blow—flinch and sit dumb, with her great eyes full of pain.
“Oh, please don’t make any mistake,” he said quickly, and with the newspaper in his hand he came back to her side. “I wasn’t taking what you said carelessly. But if you had read your Times to-day you would have understood, I think, why I have stayed away till now. You might, perhaps, have guessed why I have come this afternoon.”
Cynthia took the newspaper from him and unfolded it, with her eyes resting in doubt upon his. Then comprehension came to her. She turned the pages quickly and stopped at one particular sheet of closely printed columns. “Oh,” she cried, “you have made your maiden speech.”
“Yes, last night.”
In a second her resentment was forgotten. She was all smiles. She reached out an eager hand to him. “It was successful? But why do I ask? I have watched the newspapers ever since the House met. I thought you were never going to speak.”
“I always meant to hold back at the beginning,” said the wise Harry Rames. “There were new men tumbling over one another to speak on the address; I let them get that start of me without any fear. I wanted to learn the way of speaking which carries you home in the House of Commons.”
Cynthia laughed and made room for him on the sofa at her side.
“Yes, there I recognize you.”
“Besides,” Rames continued, “the address fights the election over again, sums it up, and parades its consequences—consequences already known to all. It’s very difficult to make any real mark in the debate on the address. So while the other men talked I sat quiet. Night after night through the address, through the two months which followed it, I sat in the House, listening and watching. And I learned my lesson.”
“Yes?” said Cynthia.
“I learned that the House scoffs at oratory and has no use for perorations; that it won’t listen to leading articles; that it won’t tolerate conceit, except in the biggest men, and hates it in them; that it is conscious of dignity and requires the same consciousness in the members who address it. It requires too that the man who intervenes in a debate should contribute something out of himself.”
“Does it always get that?” asked Cynthia in bewilderment.
“No, indeed. But, on the other hand, it goes out into the lobby, or it talks. Smale’s a wise man. He told me once that hardly ever did a Parliament produce more than three new men. Just think of it! For five or six years, for six or eight or ten months in each of those years, there’s one perpetual flow of talk during eight hours of the day in that Chamber; and yet out of all that sludge of talk only three men emerge of any account. I want to be one of the three men in this Parliament. Otherwise you are right and I am wrong. I have mischosen my career. So I sat quiet and learned my lesson.”
“Until last night,” said Cynthia.
“Yes, my opportunity came.”
“With a subject on which you could contribute?”
“Well, on which I thought I could,” said Rames; and once again Cynthia wondered at the patience with which he had sat night after night awaiting his moment, and yet counting calmly as among the possibilities of failure his own incompetence. “It was Asiatic immigration.”
Cynthia made a grimace.
“Sounds dull?” asked Rames. “Very likely. But it’s an important question for us and one that’s going to be still more important in the future. You see, as a power, we are in a queer position. We are at once the white people resisting the Asiatic immigrant, and the Asiatic immigrant wanting the outlet of immigration—but I won’t make my speech over again to you. I raised the question myself on the colonial vote, and here is what I said,”—he took the newspaper from her hands, folded it, and gave it back to her. Then he sat quietly by her side while she read the speech through. She appreciated the labor and thought which had gone to its making; the half column which the Times gave to reporting it enabled her to realize that it had been delivered with a vivid economy of phrase which gave his meaning aptly and never frittered it away. If only the trouble had been taken and the speech delivered for the sake of the question! The question was a big one. Cynthia understood that through the spectacles of Harry Rames’s speech.
“You made a great success?” she asked turning toward him. She noticed that he was sitting very still beside her, as though he set great store upon her judgment. And in a voice of greater warmth she said:
“But of course you did.”
Again Rames took the newspaper and again he folded it. He pointed to the first leader, from which his name stood out in bigger type than the rest of the text.
“It doesn’t so very often happen that the Times takes the subject of its chief leading article from a man’s first speech in the House of Commons.”
Then he folded the paper again at the parliamentary report and pointed to a paragraph here and there. “That’s what the leader of the opposition said. Here’s the reference the colonial minister made when he wound up the debate. You see, both dealt with my speech.”
There was a note of quiet elation in Harry Rames’s voice. He had taken another step along the chosen path. He had passed through another of the ordeals.
Cynthia did not answer. She sat with the newspaper on her knees, gazing forward with perplexed eyes. She looked almost disheartened.
Rames noticed the look and smiled.
“I know what’s troubling you, Miss Daventry. You are wondering whether it isn’t, after all, the horrible truth that a desire to get on and excel can achieve quite as much, and be quite as useful to the world, as enthusiasm for a cause, the pure, genuine enthusiasm to make the world better.”
Cynthia turned to him with a start.
“Yes, I was wondering just in that way.”
“Well, I’ll answer you,” said Rames firmly. “The desire to get on achieves more and better things than enthusiasm for an idea.”
“I can’t believe it,” cried Cynthia in revolt.
“Think it over,” continued Rames. “Enthusiasm for cause blinds you to the harm, the injustice which you may do in furthering your cause. The desire to get on makes you appreciate the cause, and weigh it, yes, but it makes you weigh also the methods of advance.”
“No, no,” cried Cynthia. “You push a garden roller over all my frail illusions. Some day, I think, you’ll pay;” and she turned suddenly toward him. “Yes, I’m afraid you’ll pay.”
She glanced down at the paper and suddenly swept it off her knees. His were ignoble views; she was sure of it. But none the less he was her friend, and she took refuge from his views, as was her wont, in her friendship. After all, he had come hot from his little triumph to tell her of it. She recognized that she was making him an ungenerous return.
“Tell me what you felt when you got up to speak! Were you nervous?” she asked, and Rames relaxed from his attitude of vigilance and leaned back with a laugh.
“I should have run away if I could,” he said. “But I couldn’t. I had taken the trouble to make flight impossible. The House goes into Committee over the estimates. I had asked Smale to speak to the Chairman of Committees. He had done so. An opportunity had been made for me. I had to make the best of it I could.”
“Tell me,” Cynthia insisted; and as more than once he had done before, having lost ground in her thoughts, he marched forward and unconsciously regained it. For he drew her with humor and a vivid truth the picture of a man in one of the ordeals of his life. He neither posed as the triumphant hero for whom there are no difficulties, nor did he exaggerate his terrors or apprehensions so that his ultimate success might glow the brighter. He was true to himself, as he had always striven to be with Cynthia. The labor of forethought, the stress of fear, the strain upon the nerves, and the tiny victory won as the consequence were set before her in their due proportions. He ceased to be a thing of cold calculations and inevitable triumphs. He became a man, stiffening his knees against tremors and alarms.
He had walked down to the House early on that Thursday. For his speech had been thought out, and there was nothing more for him to do, and now he must keep moving. He went down onto the broad terrace over the Thames, and there, during the hour of questions which precedes debate, in a cold wind he wandered miserable. One tall and burly policeman was the calm guardian of that deserted place. Harry Rames walked from the Speaker’s house to the House of Lords and back again, trying to repeat over to himself the argument of his speech. But the policeman loomed too large between him and it. Rames detected something supercilious in his imperturbability. No doubt he knew that Rames that day was going to make his maiden speech. He must have seen so many pace this terrace during the hour of questions with the same apprehensions. The signs would be visible.
Rames turned his back upon the policeman and leaned on the parapet. But the speech would not come. He had left the opening sentences to the moment when he should be upon his legs. For he must link what he had to say onto what already had been said, lest he should lose altogether the effect of spontaneity. The rest he had prepared and rehearsed, and rehearsed again, with the intention to know it so well that he should be free to twist into its scheme the speeches made immediately before. But now that he tried to say it over on the terrace it lost altogether its continuity. The argument halted; the chosen words failed him; he stumbled from unconnected epigram to inappropriate metaphor; he clung to half-remembered phrases, and with a sinking heart repeated them, and repeated them—and repeated them. He shut his eyes. The great effort was going to be just a failure of fine talk—the mere scrap-heap of a speech.
He looked down at the brown water, followed it eastward below the bridge; and then his eyes were caught by a small torpedo-boat lying opposite at a mooring in front of St. Thomas’s Hospital. And the aspect of this familiar thing smote him down to the depths of abasement. But for presumption he might now be in command of a great battle-ship doing the things he had been trained to do, and doing them with confidence. And his thoughts swept him away to Spithead; and the vision of a great, dark battle-ship, sitting steadily in a tumbled sea between Southsea and the Isle of Wight, clear of the Solent fairway, and west of the checkered forts, rose up and drew him for a moment as with chains. He hated his ambitions; he thought of this dreadful hour to which they had lured him. He saw the day pass and the evening come up out of the sea and the lights begin to glow upon the foreshore, a cluster at Southsea pier, a little chain running up the hill of Union Street, at Ryde, and close down by the water’s edge tiny lights in cottages and houses like glow-worms in a forest.
Then another step sounded on the pavement and he turned away from his vision. After all he might be laughing at all these fears in an hour’s time, he took the courage to reflect; and he went up the stairs and across the lobby into the Chamber itself. He looked for a seat on the second bench below the gangway, but the House was full.
Colonel Challoner, again passed over in the choice of under-secretaries, looked up at him from the corner seat, and noticed the blue-book and a volume of Hansard under his arm.
“Are you going to speak?” he asked.
“If I can get called,” said Rames.
Challoner made room for him at his side.
“I mean to say a word or two myself,” he said, “but we shall probably neither of us get a chance. Those front-bench men think it beneath their dignity to take less than an hour.”
Certainly, so far as the first speech was concerned, Colonel Challoner was right. It was delivered from the opposition bench by an ex-minister, William Kenway, a man of a kindly and generous disposition who yet managed by some perversity of tact to rasp the temper of the House from wall to wall. For a full hour he stood there now, saying the wrong thing with determination, giving little lessons with the air of a school-master, irritating by a certain priggishness his friends behind him as well as his opponents in front.
Rames sat and listened. He realized that the very opportunity which he wanted was being given to him. Kenway, with a white paper in his hand, came to the problem of Asiatic immigration. Rames was no longer trying to remember the consecution of his speech. He sat waiting for the long speech to end, making a note or two, grasping at a beginning for his speech, and clinging firmly to it.
When Kenway sat down, he found himself standing upon his legs. He was aware at once that some one was standing beside him, Colonel Challoner. Both men had risen. Almost he resumed his seat, and then he heard his name called by the chairman, and from a very long way off an encouraging cheer reached his ears.
He was conscious of the lack of a table in front of him or the barrier of a platform—something on which he could rest a hand. He felt strangely defenceless without it. He faltered through his opening sentences in a voice which sounded to his ears weak and thin as a ghost’s. He saw a member take off his hat on the opposite benches, rise, and make his way out; and at once he was certain that he was making a dismal failure. Suddenly he remembered one member who had risen to speak, had been called upon and had sunk back in his seat without uttering more than a few unintelligible words. Was his to be the same fate, he asked himself? And asking himself he lost the thread of what he was saying and with a gasp retrieved it.
“It seemed to me,” he said in describing the scene to Cynthia, “that I stood there dumb and helpless for twenty seconds. As a matter of fact, the interval was so short that not even my neighbors noticed it. I suppose that I only paused for the fraction of a second, really.”
“Yes,” said Cynthia, and the trifle remained in her mind.
He was speaking, too, with a haze before his eyes and his hands clutching at the edges of his coat. But he went on, and then quite suddenly the haze thinned so that he saw the House and he heard his voice ringing out clear and firm, not loud nor arrogant, filling the Chamber and with just that note of deference which he had planned to strike and had struck because the deference was sincere. He turned in his place. He was no longer conscious of the need of a table in front of him; he looked down the House toward the clock above the entrance door, and he saw that the bar was thronged with members. Curiosity, no doubt, had brought them in from the library and the smoking-room and the lobby when his name went up on the tape—he had, after all, a reputation. He, the least romantic of men, had some aura of romance about him in that assembly; enough at all events to invite a momentary interest. But they stayed, and as he spoke in a voice that went steadily forward with the rhythm of marching men, he saw now one, now another come out from the throng at the bar and slip into a seat. With a throb of joy he realized that he was not failing, that now he was not going to fail. The House had filled since he had risen and on all the benches there was a great quiet. He turned toward the Speaker’s chair. The space at the sides of it was crowded too. He saw more than one cabinet-minister standing. Above, behind the grille, he saw the big hats and shadowy forms of the ladies in the gallery, and here and there the gleam of an ermine stole against the light behind them. That happened to him again which had happened in the Corn Exchange at Ludsey. He turned over the consecutions of his argument like the pages of a printed book. He was master of himself. He worked in his predecessor’s points and replied to them with force and without offence because they were just the points he had foreseen. He provoked interruptions from his opponents; he had foreseen them and was ready, and the cheers broke out from the benches about him and behind him. He spoke for just twenty minutes. The applause, generous and friendly, came from both sides of the House when he resumed his seat. The Prime-Minister leaned across the gangway and shook him by the hand. And as for the great battle-ship at Spithead, anybody could have it as a gift.
Rames leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. So the third step of the great career had been taken. He had been chosen candidate, he had been elected member, he had made something of a small triumph out of his maiden speech. Now he would wait without any hurry. He would make one speech more later on in the session, perhaps two—not more than two, certainly. And next session he would plunge boldly and take up his part in the impromptu debating on the Committee stages of Bills. In that work lay the real test of parliamentary capacity.
Thus he planned, and content with his plan he opened his eyes again. At once he was made uneasy. He met the eyes of a small, white-haired man with a deeply lined, brown face who was watching him fixedly from the benches opposite. This was Albert Coulter, a man of many expeditions in untravelled countries, when there were countries still untravelled, whose name had become a signal for dark whispers. A callous selfishness, when selfishness might mean the life or health of his companions, and a relentless severity with his natives, was rightly or wrongly imputed. The survivors of his expeditions came back with queer stories. But he had never failed until the moment, when at the age of fifty and with the looks of seventy, he had entered the House of Commons. There, an interesting yet ineffective figure, he sat day after day, solitary, disliked, with brooding eyes under a bristle of gray eyebrows which seemed to be haunted with sinister memories of deep tropical forests and days long past. His eyes rested upon Harry Rames now, not enviously, not encouragingly, but without expression, almost indeed like the eyes of a dead man. Their fixed gaze chilled the blood of Harry Rames and all his satisfaction was marred. He had to move from his place and beyond the reach of those brooding eyes before he shook the impression off. And even now so distinct was it in his memories that he omitted it altogether and deliberately from the story he told that afternoon to Cynthia Daventry. He related in its place another incident which had happened later in the evening.
“We had a division,” he said. “I was walking through the lobby and just at the turnstiles where the clerks tick off our names, I found Henry Smale in front of me. The R’s and the S’s go through the same turnstile. He turned round as I passed through behind him, and said to me in a low voice, ‘You have the ear of the House now. Keep your eye on the treasury bench.’ That from Smale, who was dissuading me to enter Parliament, means a good deal.”
Harry Rames turned and looked at Cynthia.
“Yes,” said Cynthia.
There was a smile upon her face rather wistful, rather ironic.
“So you have turnstiles in your House of Commons,” she said slowly.
“No. Did I say turnstiles?” he asked. “There’s no actual barrier which revolves. But there’s only room for one at a time to pass between the desks. The clerks stand at the desks and register your votes for publication. Otherwise where would party government be?”
“You mean if the votes weren’t published men would vote according to their convictions?”
Rames nodded.
“But it’s a superficial view,” he said. “You have got to take the sum of your policy. As a whole, is it better than the other fellow’s? That’s what you have to ask yourself when you are going to register a vote upon some particular point which may help to turn your government out and let the other fellows in.”
“Yes, I see that,” said Cynthia; and once more her eyes fell upon the Times and she was suddenly conscious of a queer pride. Others to-day were aware of the success which Harry Rames had made; probably she alone was aware of the thought, and the apprehension and the tribulation of soul which had gone to the making of the success. To the others he would just be one of the inevitably successful—what indeed she had herself been wont to think him. To-day, however, he was to her human as he had never been. He had shown himself to her, bleating with fear like an ordinary man at the approach of the fateful moment which was to put him to the test. He had drawn the picture with a sense of humor, but he had not blurred it. Would he have drawn it for any one else, she asked herself? She turned impulsively toward him:
“I wanted you to come to me this week,” she said impulsively. “And I thank you very much for telling me not merely that you succeeded, but how near you were to breaking down. But,” and she hesitated for a few moments, “I should have been still more grateful if you had come to me the day before you made your speech.”
“I almost did,” said Harry Rames.
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