The Turnstile Part 25

A MAIDEN SPEECH

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 friends.h.i.+p. 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 pa.s.sed 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 ign.o.ble 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 friends.h.i.+p. 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 att.i.tude 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 rehea.r.s.ed, and rehea.r.s.ed 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 sc.r.a.p-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 abas.e.m.e.nt. But for presumption he might now be in command of a great battle-s.h.i.+p 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-s.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.s and the evening come up out of the sea and the lights begin to glow upon the foresh.o.r.e, a cl.u.s.ter 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.