DECLARATION OF WAR
1
The dark and undefined cloud which had fallen upon the reception
seemed to have overshadowed the Treasury as well. The Speaker had
precipitately driven thither, taking Henry Watkins with him in the
carriage and not waiting for Jeremy, who reached the door only in time
to see that he must follow on foot. The Speaker’s unexpected return,
coupled with the unusual expression on his face and perhaps some rumor
already set afloat, had unsettled the household. When Jeremy arrived he
found the clerks and even the servants, together with the attendants of
the Lady Burney and the Lady Eva, standing about in little groups in
the entrance-hall. They were talking among themselves in low voices,
and they all raised their eyes questioningly to his as he passed by.
There was a universal atmosphere of confusion and alarm.
At the door which led from the entrance-hall towards the Speaker’s
room, Jeremy paused disconsolately, uncertain what he ought to do. The
Speaker had asked for his help, but had not stayed for him. Perhaps
he ought to go to the Speaker; but he was unwilling to intrude into
what seemed to be a council of the first importance. His doubts
were relieved by a servant, who came anxiously searching among the
loiterers and appeared relieved when he caught sight of Jeremy.
“Here you are, sir!” he said. “The Speaker has been asking for you ever
since he came back. Will you please go to his room at once?” Jeremy’s
sense of a moment of crisis was by no means lessened as he threaded the
dark, empty corridors of the private wing.
When he entered he found himself unnoticed, and had a few seconds in
which to distinguish the members of the little group clustered at
the other end of the room. The Speaker was standing motionless, with
his eyes turned upwards to the ceiling, in an attitude apparently
indicating complete unconcern. Yet, to Jeremy he seemed to be
controlling himself by an enormous effort of will, while his whole
body quivered with suppressed excitement. Below him and, to the eye,
dominated by him, five men sat around a table. Jeremy saw at once
the Canadian and Henry Watkins and another chief notable, named John
Hammond, with whom he was slightly acquainted. The others had their
backs to him; but their backs were unfamiliar, somehow out of place,
with something uneasy and hostile in the set of their shoulders. As he
came into the room, Henry Watkins was leaning forward to one of these
strangers and saying earnestly:
“I want to make certain that we understand what this sentence means.”
He tapped a paper in front of him as he spoke.
“T’ letter meaans what it saays,” the stranger replied gruffly. His
words and the broad, rasping accent in which they were spoken came to
Jeremy as a shock, as something incomprehensibly foreign to what he had
expected. His colleague nodded vigorously, and signified his agreement
in a sound between a mutter and a growl.
“Yes,” Henry Watkins began again patiently; “but what I want to
know----”
The Speaker suddenly forsook his rigid posture, with the effect of a
storm let loose, and, striding to the table, struck it violently with
his fist. It seemed as if the last fetter of his restraint had given
way without warning.
“That’s no matter,” he cried hoarsely. “What I want to know is this: if
I make another offer, will you take it back to your master?”
The stranger squared his shoulders and thrust his chin forward with an
air of dogged ferocity. “We caame to get yes or noa,” he answered in a
deep grumbling voice. “T’ letter saays soa.”
Henry Watkins started at this outburst in the negotiations and looked
around him with an appearance of fright. In doing this he caught sight
of Jeremy hesitating by the door, and whispered a word to the Speaker,
who cried out, without moderating the violence of his tone: “There you
are! Come here now, I want you.” And turning again to the strangers, he
added, with an odd note of triumph: “This is Jeremy Tuft. Maybe you’ve
heard of him.”
The strangers, who had not yet noticed Jeremy’s arrival, slewed around
together and stared at him; and one of them said: “Oh, ay, we’ve heerd
on him, reet enough.” The others at the table stared too, while Jeremy
reluctantly advanced. But before he could speak, Henry Watkins sprang
up and murmured importunately in the Speaker’s ear. Jeremy could catch
the words:
“Talk privately ... before we decide....”
“Very well,” said the Speaker roughly, aloud. “Have it your own way.
But I won’t change my mind.”
Henry Watkins returned to the table and addressed the strangers
suavely: “The Speaker will give you his answer in a very short time,”
he said. “Will you be so good as to withdraw while he considers it?”
And, when they had uncouthly assented, he conducted them to the door,
showed them into an ante-room, and returned, his face full of anxiety.
Jeremy stood apart in a condition of great discomfort. He realized
that he was regarded by all, save the Speaker, as an intruder, the
reason for whose presence none could conjecture. He was not relieved
by the dubious glance which Henry Watkins threw at him before he began
to speak. But the Speaker made no sign, and the anxious counselor
proceeded, with an air of distraction and flurry.
“Think, sir,” he pleaded, “before you refuse. It is so grave a thing to
begin again--after a hundred years. And who can tell what the end of it
may be? We know that they are formidable----”
“All this is nonsense to Jeremy Tuft,” the Speaker interrupted harshly.
“We must tell him what the matter is before we go any further.” Henry
Watkins, with a movement of his hands, plainly expressed his opinion
that there was no good reason why it should not all remain nonsense to
Jeremy; and Jeremy felt slightly less at ease than before.
But the Speaker had begun to explain, with the sharp jerkiness of
impatience in his voice: “We’ve had a message from the people up north.
Perhaps you could see for yourself what sort of men they are. They are
very unlike any one you have ever met here--rough, fierce, quarrelsome
men. They have kept some of their machinery still going up there--in
some of the towns they even work in factories. They have been growing
more and more unlike us for a hundred years, and now the end has
come--they want to force a quarrel on us. Do you understand?”
Jeremy replied that he did, and thought that he was beginning to
understand a great deal besides.
“Well, then,” the Speaker went on, growing a little calmer, “I told you
when first we met that we were standing on the edge of a precipice.
Now these are the people that want to throw us over. The chief of
them, the Chairman of Bradford, has sent me a message. I won’t explain
the details to you. It comes to this, that in future he proposes to
collect the taxes in his district, not for me, but for himself. I must
say he very kindly offers to send me a contribution for the upkeep of
the railways. But he wants a plain yes or no at once; and if we say
no, then it means WAR!” In the last sentence his voice had begun to
run upwards: he pronounced the final word in a sudden startling shout,
and then stood silent for a moment, his eyes burning fiercely. When
he continued, it was in a quieter and more reasonable tone. “There
has been no fighting in this country since the end of the Troubles, a
hundred years or so ago. A brawl here and there, a fight with criminals
or discontented laborers--I don’t say; but no more than enough to make
our people dislike it. Of all of us here in this room, only you and
Thomas Wells know what war is. Now”--and here he became persuasive and
put a curious smooth emphasis on each word--“now, _knowing all that you
do know_, what advice would you give me?”
Jeremy stood irresolute. Henry Watkins and John Hammond seemed to
throw up their hands in perplexed despair, and the Canadian’s thin,
supercilious smile grew a trifle wider and thinner. The Speaker waited,
rocking hugely to and fro on his feet with a gentle motion.
“I think,” Jeremy began, and was disconcerted to find himself so hoarse
that the words came muffled and inaudible. He cleared his throat. “I
think I hardly know enough about it for my advice to be of any use. I
don’t even know what troops you have.”
The Speaker made a deep booming sound in his chest, clasped his hands
sharply together, and looked as though he were about to burst out again
in anger. Then he abruptly regained his self-command and said: “Then
you shall speak later. Henry Watkins, what do you say? Remember, we
must make up our minds forever while we are talking now. It will not do
to argue with them, or temporize or make them any other offer.”
Henry Watkins got up from his seat and went to the Speaker’s side
as though he wished to address him confidentially. Jeremy had an
impression of a long dark face, unnaturally lengthened by deep gloom,
and two prominent eyes that not even the strongest emotion could make
more than dully earnest.
“I beg of you, sir,” he implored, low and hurried, holding out his
hands, “to attempt to argue with them, to offer them some compromise.
You know very well that they are forcing this quarrel on us, because
they are sure that they are the stronger, as I believe them to be. And
anything, anything would be better than to begin the Troubles again!”
The Speaker surveyed him as if from an immense height. “And do you
think that we can avoid the Troubles again, and worse things even than
that, in any way except by defeating these people? Am I to surrender
all that my grandfather and my great-grandfather won? Do you not see
that they have sent us just these two men, stupider and stubborner even
than the rest, so that we shall not be able to argue with them? They
have been told to carry back either our yes or our no. If we do not
give them a yes, they will take no by default. There is no other choice
for us. What do you think, John Hammond?”
“I agree with Henry Watkins,” said the big man hastily. He had not
spoken before, and seemed to do so now only with great reluctance.
“Then we need not hear your reasons. And you, Thomas Wells?”
“Why, fight,” said the Canadian promptly; and then he continued in a
deliberate drawl, stretching himself a little as he spoke: “These folks
are spoiling for trouble, and they’ll give you no peace until they get
it. I guess your troops aren’t any good--I’ve seen some of them--but I
know no way to make them so except by fighting. And besides, I’ve an
idea that there’s something else you haven’t told us yet.”
Jeremy shot a suspicious glance at him, and received in return a grin
that was full at once of amusement and dislike. The Speaker appeared to
be balancing considerations in his mind. When he spoke again, it was in
a tone more serious and deliberate than he had yet used.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “my decision remains unaltered. I shall refuse
and there will be war. But Thomas Wells is right. I have had something
in my thoughts that I have not yet disclosed to you. But I will tell
you now what it is, because I do not wish you to lose your spirits
or to be half-hearted in supporting me. Only I must command you”--he
paused on the word, looked around sternly, and repeated it--“I must
command you not to speak a word of it outside this room until I give
you leave.” He paused again and surveyed them with the air of a man who
delays his certain triumph for a moment in order the better to savor
it. “Gentlemen, when our troops take the field against these rebels,
they will have something that no other army in the world has got. They
will have guns!”
The great announcement had come, had passed, and seemed to have failed
of its effect. Silence reigned in the council. Henry Watkins shifted
from one foot to the other and regarded the Speaker with gloomy
intentness. Then Thomas Wells broke the hush, with a faint tone of
disappointment in his voice:
“Is that it? Well, I don’t know how that will work out. I thought that
perhaps you had got some of the bosses up there in your pay.”
Henry Watkins was as silent as his companion, bewildered, disturbed,
apprehensive. But the Speaker continued, his air of jubilation
increasing rather than diminishing.
“And not only have we guns, but we have also a trained artilleryman to
handle them. Jeremy Tuft, I must tell you, fought in the artillery in
the great war against the Germans before the Troubles began. And now,
Jeremy Tuft, let us hear your opinion, remembering that we have guns
and they have none. Do you think we should fight or surrender?”
Jeremy was hard put to it not to give way physically before the old
man’s blazing and menacing stare. His mind scurried hastily through
half a hundred points of doubt. How could he know, when he had been in
this world no more than a few weeks? And yet it seemed pretty clear,
from what he had heard, that the soldiers from Yorkshire would be
better than those that the Speaker had at his disposal. He could see
only too plainly that the Speaker was trusting to the guns to work a
miracle for him. He remembered that the guns were only just finished,
had not been tested, that no gun-crew to fight them had yet been
trained or even thought of. He had a sick feeling that an intolerable
responsibility rested on him, that he must explain how much the effect
of two guns in an infantry battle would depend on luck. He remembered
that time at Arras, when they had got properly caught in the enemy’s
counter-battery work, and he had sat in his dug-out, meditating on the
people, whoever they were, that had started the war, and wondering
how human beings could be so diabolical.... He woke abruptly from
this train of thought as he raised his eyes and saw the Speaker still
regarding him with that terrible, that numbing stare. His strength gave
way. He stammered weakly:
“Of course, the guns would make a great difference....”
The Speaker caught up his words. “They would make just the difference
we need. That is why I have made up my mind to fight now. Let those two
men come in again.”
There was dead silence in the room for a moment, and Jeremy was aware
of the progress of a breathless spiritual conflict. He could feel
his own inarticulate doubts, the timidity of Watkins and Hammond,
the cynical indifference of the Canadian, hanging, like dogs around
the neck of a bull, on the old man’s fanatical determination. Then
something impalpable seemed to snap: it was as though the bull had
shaken himself free. Without uttering a sound, Henry Watkins went to
the door of the ante-room and held it open. The two envoys from the
north again appeared. They seemed unwilling to come more than a pace
into the room; perhaps they thought it unnecessary since they wished to
hear only a single word.
The Speaker was as anxious as they to be brief. “I refuse,” he said
with great mildness.
“That’s t’ aanswer, then?” asked the first envoy with a kind of surly
satisfaction.
“That’s t’ aanswer. Coom on,” his companion said, before any one else
could reply.
“Good daay to you then, sirs,” the first muttered phlegmatically; and
with stumping strides they lumbered to the door. Henry Watkins hurried
after them to find a servant to bring them their horses.
2
No less than the rest the Lady Eva was disturbed and made uneasy in
her mind by the unexpected end of Henry Watkins’s reception. The short
drive back to the Treasury, sitting beside her mother in the vast,
lumbering carriage, was a torment to her. Involuntarily she asked
questions, well aware that the Lady Burney neither knew, nor was
interested in, the answers. She was obliged to speak to assuage her
restlessness, and expected the reproof which she received.
“It’s not your business,” said the Lady Burney heavily. “You must not
meddle in your father’s affairs. It shows a very forward and unbecoming
spirit in you to have noticed that anything happened out of the
ordinary. What people would say of you if they knew as much of your
behavior as I do, I simply cannot think. They must see too much as it
is. Remember that we ought to set an example to other people.”
The Lady Eva was silent, white with restraint and anxiety. But when
they arrived at the Treasury and came into the atmosphere of expectancy
which filled the entrance-hall, she again showed signs of excitement,
and seemed to wish to stop and share in the general state of suspense.
Her mother ordered her to her room in a thick intense whisper. She
remembered herself and went on, sighing once sharply.
She found her room empty. It was a pleasant place, looking over the
gardens, furnished in an awkward and mixed style which reflected her
distaste for her mother’s notions of decoration, combined with her
own inability to think of any better substitute. A riding-whip and
gloves were thrown down on a table, beside a half-finished piece of
needlework. Writing materials and a book lay on another. One of her
eccentricities, not regarded so severely by the Lady Burney as the
rest, was her wish to retain such slight knowledge of the arts of
reading and writing as the scanty education of the women of that time
had given her. But it was a hard business, starting from so insecure a
foundation and proceeding with so little encouragement. The old books
that she was able to obtain were very dull, very hard to understand,
and told her little of what she wanted to know. Her companions of her
own age laughed at her heartily for reading with so much devotion,
after she had been released from the school-room, the works of the
great poet, Lord Tennyson, from which they had all been taught their
own language. She desired vaguely to be able to help her father,
whose loneliness she obscurely but poignantly felt. But when in order
to understand the old times she struggled through ragged and mildewed
books, she despaired at the little assistance she was able to get from
them.
She once expressed a timid wish that she might be allowed to learn
history from Father Henry Dean, of whose knowledge she had heard
confused but marvelous stories. But on this occasion her father had
unexpectedly joined her mother to prevent her. He had said bluntly
that the priest was an addled old man, while the Lady Burney had said
that the suggestion was both improper and dangerous. Between the two
opinions, her wish was effectually frustrated. Indeed, she got little
encouragement from her father, whose loneliness often seemed to her to
be in great part purely wilful. Now and then he would listen to her
for a few minutes, and then rhapsodize cloudily for a long time on his
hopes and fears. But when he did this, after the first few sentences he
was up and away from her; and she soon realized that he talked to her
only instead of talking to himself, and did not for the purpose much
alter his method of address.
A minute or two after she came into her room, two of her attendants
followed her, asking, without much hope, for news. She shook her head
sharply, with compressed lips. She had no news, she knew nothing of the
danger that threatened her father and had shaken his steady old hand
so abruptly while he was reading that mysterious letter. The two girls
broke at once into a babble of rumors and conjectures. The plague had
reached England again, or the Chinese had begun to invade Europe, or
the Pope had done something or other that was unexpected, it was not
clear what.
These attendants were daughters of good families who came to be half
maids, half companions to the Lady Burney and the Lady Eva for a year
or two, as a way of graduating in the world, much as young men came to
be clerks to the Speaker. But the cases were not quite parallel. All
young men of family entered the Speaker’s service, or would do so if
they could. There was a certain tradition of gentility in the work of
government. But only the daughters of the poorer and smaller houses
came to wait on the Speaker’s wife and daughter. The rich families,
though they obeyed the Speaker, would not accord him royal prestige or
his wife and daughter the privilege of noble ladies-in-waiting. They
treated him and his household with respect, not with deference. Only
the lesser among them thought that something might be gained by their
daughters holding positions at what they would fain regard as a court,
or that they might perhaps make good marriages, a hope which now and
then miscarried into something less gratifying. They maintained that it
was an honor to serve the ruling family, and were sneered at by their
greater fellows.
The Lady Eva, though she was often indolent and was pleased to be
waited on, would have preferred to be attended by servants. These
girls claimed some sort of equality with her, and, though she had no
objection to that, she wished that she could prevent them speaking
to her, unless she called on them. She found them tedious. Now she
listened to them patiently, and said at last with a faint ironic smile:
“Do you really know anything about it?” They began to protest and to
double their rumors, but she stopped them with a lifted hand. “There is
a council in my father’s room, is there not?” And when they had said
that there was, she went on: “Can you tell me who has been called to
it?”
“Jeremy Tuft was called to it just before we came to you,” answered
Rose, simpering a little and placing her head on one side. Jeremy
did not know that among the young girls in the Treasury he was the
object of some longings and the subject of some confessions. He drew
attention because of the air of mystery which surrounded his short and
rather commonplace person. It was fashionable to affect a deliciously
shuddering attraction towards the elements of eeriness and terror
in what was known of his story. But this fashion was not allowed to
interfere with any more practical project of love-making that happened
to be going.
“I saw him go,” affirmed Mary with an even more pronounced simper.
“Is Thomas Wells there?” the Lady Eva shot at her quickly. Mary winced,
looked guilty and said that she believed he was. Then she fell silent
in a self-conscious attitude.
The Lady Eva frowned a little. These girls, though she despised them
for their shallowness, led fuller lives than she. They conformed more
easily than she did with the prevailing ideal of womanly conduct; and
yet in the Treasury they were free to do much what they pleased, to
choose lovers if they were foolish enough ... as she guessed this girl
had been. And the reflection had annoyed her, for she thought it likely
that she would have to marry Thomas Wells. He and her father had been
bargaining interminably about something, her father importunate but
cozening, Thomas Wells smiling but obdurate. It might occur to her
father at any moment to throw her person into the scale; and she would
not like for a husband the lover of one of her attendants. Then, as she
stood musing, it suddenly occurred to her with great force that she
would not like to marry Thomas Wells in any circumstances. Strange! She
had been long accustomed to the idea that she, her father’s only child,
must marry some one who would be chosen to become his heir; and she had
quite calmly contemplated the likelihood of Thomas Wells being chosen.
Only to-day did she perceive that the idea was distasteful to her, and
she wondered why. A vague answer presented itself....
“Go back, both of you,” she commanded, “and bring me the news when
you hear any.” They left her at once, Rose anxious to return to the
center of excitement, and Mary glad to escape any further uncomfortable
questions.
The Lady Eva, left alone, walked up and down her room with short,
impatient steps. It was very difficult to wait thus for news, more
difficult still in view of the fact that she might not get any. She
conceived cloudy romantic notions of intervening in the council, of
persuading her father in the middle of it that she understood him and
was with him against all the rest of the world. She walked towards the
door in an exalted fit, certain that now at least in this moment of
anxiety she could convince him. Then she remembered other appeals, made
when she was alone with him and when his mood had seemed to promise
sympathy. But he had smiled at her, patted her head or her hand, and
answered vaguely in words that meant nothing and humiliated her. Once,
gathering from one of the soliloquies, in which he so evidently forgot
her presence, that he was concerned by the state of the railways, she
had brooded on the problem through sleepless nights, at last hitting on
a plan, which she laid eagerly before him. It had seemed as crude and
childish to her as to him, after his first comment. A flash of realism
showed her the injured and astonished big men at the council, if she
appeared there, the grinning contempt of Thomas Wells, her father’s
anger. She turned away again from the door.
Minutes passed. She went through stages of careless dullness, of
unbearable suspense. At last, moved by an ungovernable longing, she
left the room. She intended no longer to go to her father, but she
would at least see the door behind which he was sitting with the
others. She had an unreasonable certainty, which she could not examine,
that waiting would be easier near the place where all was being decided.
She slipped along the corridor as softly as she could, ruefully aware
that she did not usually move quietly and had often been reproved for
it. But the intensity of her purpose helped her to avoid anything that
could draw notice to her strange conduct. Soon the corridor was cut by
another at right angles, which a few steps to the left led to the door
of the Speaker’s room. At the corner the Lady Eva paused and looked
cautiously around. In this part of the ill-constructed house reigned a
perpetual dusk, and any passer-by would be heard by her long before he
could see her.
Her certainty was justified. Waiting was easier here; and the time
slipped by less oppressively. She did not know how long she had been
standing pressed close against the wall, when her father’s door opened
and two men came out and stamped up the corridor to the right. Even in
that gloom she could see that they were strangers; and their odd looks
and something odd in their manner, as though they were departing with a
sinister purpose, increased her curiosity. She craned her neck to keep
them in sight as long as she could, and drew back hastily when Henry
Watkins came out. He was obviously distressed, and, as he went by her,
following the strangers, he was rapidly clenching and unclenching his
hands.
A minute passed. Then the door opened again and Thomas Wells sauntered
into the corridor. He hesitated by the corner where she stood, and
then thrust his hands into his pockets, and strolled after the others,
whistling under his breath. She could still hear his steps when John
Hammond emerged and also followed with bowed shoulders and dejected
bearing. The Lady Eva’s sense of terror grew greater and she wondered
whether the news, whatever it might be, would not be come at easier
elsewhere. But her father and Jeremy Tuft were still conversing behind
the closed door and she longed to know what they were saying. When she
first met him she had had a fleeting idea that he might prove to be a
bridge between her and her father.
A long interval elapsed and left her still in suspense. Once she went
a few paces in the direction of her own room, but she was ineluctably
drawn back again. She stared desperately behind her, to the right,
at the ground, anywhere rather than at her father’s door, which had
for her a fascination she felt she must resist. She was not looking
at it when she heard the sound of the handle. When she looked, it was
standing wide, and Jeremy and her father were framed in the opening,
their faces lit from the windows in the room.
Her father’s face wore an expression of exultation which she had never
seen there before, and, with a hand on his shoulder, was stooping over
Jeremy, who looked worried, sullen, fatigued.
“Then all will be ready in a week,” the old man was saying.
“Yes, they’ll be ready ... so far as that goes,” Jeremy replied in a
heavy toneless voice. “But there’s another thing we haven’t thought of.
They haven’t been tested yet.”
“They can’t be tested now,” the Speaker said firmly. “It would take
too long, and besides, we mustn’t have the slightest risk of the
news leaking out before we first use them. And you say that you are
satisfied with them, don’t you?”
“Yes, as far as I can see,” Jeremy muttered. “But there may be
something wrong that I haven’t noticed.”
“No doubt there may,” the Speaker agreed. “But if there is, it would be
too late to remedy it; and we should certainly be beaten without them.
We may as well disregard that.”
“But if there is,” Jeremy said with an air of protest, raising his
voice a little, “we may be....”
“Yes, yes,” the Speaker murmured, “you may all be blown up. But
there....” He drew Jeremy by the shoulder into the corridor, and both
their faces came into the shadow. The Lady Eva, seized by a sudden
terror, picked up her skirts and ran, miraculously noiseless, back to
her room.