HARRY RAMES, however, told her who it was the next morning as they sat at breakfast. He had come down late and Cynthia looked at him with anxious eyes.
“You were kept late in your study?” she said, thinking of the critical week which lay in front of him.
“Yes.”
Harry Rames laid down his Sunday newspaper.
“Walter Hemming was here.”
“Hemming?”
To Cynthia the name was quite unfamiliar. There had been no Walter Hemming at Bramling.
“He was one of my officers on the Perhaps. He has got together some money, has bought the old ship and is off to the South.”
“He takes up your work?”
“Yes. I never saw a man so enthusiastic. Suppose he reaches the Pole, what then?” Harry Rames laughed contemptuously.
“Aren’t there discoveries to be made, maps to be drawn of that continent and something to be learned from the soundings?” asked Cynthia, recollecting Harry Rames’s own book upon his voyage. He shook his head.
“That’s all trimmings, Cynthia. You have got to surround your expedition with a scientific halo. It gets you money, and official support, and the countenance of the learned societies. But the man who goes south into the Antarctic goes with just one reason—to reach the Pole. Why? You can’t give a rational answer to that Cynthia. No one can. Such men are just driven on by a torment of their souls.”
No stranger watching Harry Rames as he speculated with an indulgent smile upon the aimlessness of Walter Hemming’s long itinerary could have imagined that he had once himself led just such an expedition. Even Cynthia found the fact difficult of belief. By so complete a dissociation of spirit he was cut off from the race of the wanderers.
“Let a man become insane in the East,” he continued, “and he’s looked upon as a holy man, touched by the finger of God. The fellows who go South and North are our holy men of the West.” He turned back again to his newspaper, and then uttered an exclamation:
“They have offered that Under Secretaryship to Edgington!”
“Of course he’ll refuse it,” said Cynthia.
“He has taken it. There’s the first defection.”
“A traitor. I never liked him. He was thinking of himself all the while,” said Cynthia, with a heat which made Harry look toward her curiously. She had not been wont to side so heartily with him and his plans in the days of the contest at Ludsey. He became suddenly aware of the remarkable change which had come over her character since that date. She who had blamed him with all the enthusiasm of a romantic girl because he would not take the high road, now walked the low road herself with her eyes concentrated, even more closely than his, upon the pathway at her feet. A pang of remorse made him wince.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” he answered drily, “if Devenish says the same of me.”
But his comment fell upon inattentive ears. Cynthia’s eyes had been caught by the blank, cheerless look of the street outside. It was a morning of black frost. There was no fog, but there was no glint of sunlight, either. London lay unburnished, like an ill-kept yacht, and the emptiness of Sunday made it dreary beyond all words. The chill of that day and the fevers of the week to come caused Cynthia’s heart to sink. A vision rose before her eyes with unexpected vividness of another place where life ran occupied with smoother matters. Not in Warwickshire, but over far seas. She thought with a sudden poignancy of longing of the Daventry estancia where to-day the golden leagues of corn would be rippling to the sun and the cattle searching for the rare blades of green in the burnt pastures. Remorse came to her as it had come to her husband. So seldom had she thought of that spacious and wide place which had lain so close to her adopted father’s heart. He had prayed her to go thither from time to time. Greatly she wished that she were there now.
“It’s a pity Mr. Hemming stayed so late,” she said.
“Oh, that’s all right,” replied Harry. “My amendment can’t come on before Wednesday. It may not be chosen at all. And there’s always the possibility that the Land Bill may not be mentioned in the King’s speech. However, that’s not likely. We shall know to-morrow.”
The Land Bill was mentioned as one of the principal measures of the session, and Harry handed in at the clerk’s table his humble prayer to His Majesty that no solution of the land question would be found lasting or real which did not provide opportunities for the acquisition of small farms as freehold properties. Thursday was set aside for the discussion of Rames’s amendment, and the fact that it was deemed of sufficient importance to take precedence of a host of other amendments was in itself regarded as a triumph by his adherents.
“Go your own way over it,” Robert Brook advised in an agitated voice. “Don’t sink your personality in a conventional speech. You must strike a special note on Thursday. The third bench below the gangway and the corner seat. That will be the best place for you. You command the House from there. And we’ll be all together around you. It’s a great thing to have some voices to cheer you at your elbow. Howard Fall will speak in support of you. He always gets called.” Robert Brook ceased from his stage-managements to whisper with a lengthened face, “By the way, have you heard?”
“What?” asked Harry.
“That Challoner’s weakening. Yes, it’s true. The whips have been getting at him, I expect. At all events he came to me pleading that the amendment need not be pressed to a division if we get anything like a friendly reply.”
Harry Rames smiled.
“We shan’t get that. I’ll take care not to get it. So you can agree with Challoner. We can’t afford to let any one break away now. I’ll speak to him myself.”
The colonel strenuously disavowed any faintness of heart. “You must go to a division, Rames, unless you get a satisfactory reply. That’s understood. We’ve got to stick to our guns. I think we all know that. Edgington’s example isn’t one any of us would care to follow. No. All my idea was that perhaps the government might be willing to take our view, but unable at this moment to say so publicly. However, don’t you worry about us. Think of your speech, Rames. We look to you to do something unusual on Thursday.”
Harry went away to his study and from his documents and blue books labored to hammer out some spark of his own which should set fire to the Thames or to that portion of it at all events which flows under Westminster Bridge. He woke at five o’clock on the Thursday morning, and lying in bed repeated his speech word by word to himself. Then he dismissed it into the chamber of his memory to wait until it was needed. But the knowledge that the day was to be one of supreme importance to his career hung over him all that forenoon. The labor was over and therefore the strain upon him was the heavier. His nerves had free play and he wandered restlessly from room to room, calm outwardly except for some spasmodic movements which people unacquainted with him would never have remarked, but inwardly a creature in torment. He had pitted himself against his own government. The enormity of his presumption grew with every lagging hour. Failure to-day would cover him with ridicule. He saw himself as one of those bubbles ripe for pricking with which the House of Commons is perpetually iridescent. Before twelve o’clock he was already looking at his watch lest he should be too late to fix before prayers the card in the slot at the back of his seat which would reserve his place for him during the day.
Cynthia, with a covert fear, watched his fever, but said never a word, either of comfort or inquiry. It was her part to notice nothing of his agitation. She had claimed, when he had asked her to marry him, her share in the troubles and the terrors which went before the public success. But married life had taught her that much of her share must come to her by guesswork, by intuition, by observation, by any means except those of question and answer. So she said little and left Harry Rames mostly to himself, only coming upon him now and again on some indifferent errand, when they would speak for a moment or two, he chiefly at random and upon any chance subject which came uppermost in his mind. Thus once he said abruptly:
“There was a stamp struck. Did you ever see it, Cynthia?”
“No,” she answered; “you must show it to me.”
“I will; I have a specimen somewhere. I’ll look it out.”
“Do,” said Cynthia in a voice which conveyed that it would be a particular joy to her to see that stamp.
But she was quite in the dark about it. She had no notion at all that he was speaking of that great territory which he had discovered far to the south, beyond the ice-floes, beyond the open blue water. It had no inhabitants but the penguins; yet since Rames had spent a winter of darkness on its inhospitable shores and had annexed it for Great Britain, a penny stamp had been struck and postage duly established. The recollection passed in and out of Harry Rames’s head, with a hundred trivial thoughts and memories. And it was the mark and consequence of his agitation that his mind acquired an extraordinary and unnatural lucidity so that his thoughts became swift visions of things with a small but surprisingly clear definition, as though he saw them through a diminishing glass.
In this supersensitive spirit he walked down Parliament Street at half-past one in the afternoon on the eastern side of the road; and when he had come opposite to the Horse-Guards, he suddenly stopped. Behind the Horse-Guards’ Arch and a little to the north rose the great red building of the Admiralty where Cynthia and he had been made acquainted with one another. But it was not of the first meeting nor of the quarrel which ended it that Harry Rames was thinking. He was not looking at the main mass of the Admiralty Building, but only at the three grayish-blue domes which surmounted it. From these domes rose three tall spars at the points of a triangle, each of them rigged and dressed with wires to which were attached curious little hoops and contrivances of cane like Catherine wheels set for a night of fireworks. He was gazing at the mechanism of wireless telegraphy.
He had passed those poles either just here or on the other side of the Horse-Guards’ Parade in St. James’s Park on every day when Parliament was in session; and no doubt he had often enough lifted his head and seen them with the blind eyes of a man for the landmarks he habitually walks by. But this morning his imagination was made acute by a night of wakefulness and the tension of his nerves, and he was sensitive to all the suggestion of that aerial toyshop of contrivances. He stopped. He almost fancied that he heard—so keen was the lucidity of his senses—the messages of distant ships, here tumbling on seas of storm there upright on seas of sunshine, whizzing homeward to the dim smoke-wreathed city, crowding the air. He almost fancied that he saw them, the myriad bright spokes of an illimitable wheel which hung poised roof-high over all the world. His thoughts were swept quite away from England, and the roar of Whitehall died from his ears. He saw the big roadsteads of the East and West Indies and anchored vessels mirrored in waveless seas. He saw the meetings of ships in the narrows of the great trade-routes, barkentine and schooner, tramp and liner, and in and out amongst them like the gray shadows of sharks seen beneath the water, the long cruisers of the fleet.
He walked on like a man in a dream. He left the busy harbors and the great trade-routes behind him. The stately procession of vessels receded and now he saw only one—a little, full-rigged, black-hulled ship quite alone on a silent sea, the Perhaps, reeling down with all her canvas drawing, from her sky-sail to her spanker, reeling down with the water breaking from her broad stern bows into the mists of the south. The picture was so vivid in his mind that he could see the brightness of the binnacle and the wheel spinning in the helmsman’s hands. He paused again to consider why, and paused with a curious sense of comfort. Once before, on the occasion of his maiden speech, the vision of a ship had risen before his eyes. But then it was fear which had evoked the picture. He had longed to be safely upon its bridge doing the thing he knew how to do. Now he had no such fear. He was nervous, but he had no desire to run away, he had no terror that the necessary words would fail him, he had no longing to stand upon the deck of the Perhaps. He was strung up for the contest of the afternoon. He walked slowly on and turned in at the gate of Palace Yard, and still the Perhaps fled southward before his eyes.
Back | Words Home | A.E.W. Mason Home | Site Info. | Feedback