THE NIGHT BEFORE THE POLL
The walls of the great Corn Exchange were draped with banners and hung
with gigantic mottoes. Cynthia sat in the front row of chairs upon the
platform with Isaac Benoliel upon one side of her, and beyond him
Diana Royle. It was the first public meeting at which she had ever
been present, and now that the shy uneasiness at the prominence of her
position which had troubled her when she took her seat was passing
away, she gazed about her, eagerness in her eyes and a throb of
excitement at her heart. In front of her a rostrum had been built out
from the edge of the platform so that the speakers might stand upon
the exact spot whence the voice carried with the greatest sonority.
The rostrum was railed and hung with red cloth; the chairman's table,
with the inevitable water-bottle, occupied it; and the small, square
space was the only empty space in all that cavern of a hall. A few
rows of chairs for members of the association were ranged at the front
upon the floor; behind the chairs the people stood packed and massed
to the doors, most of them men. The one gallery was crowded to its
furthest nook; behind Cynthia the platform was thronged. Wherever her
eyes turned she saw faces, faces, faces, all set in one direction, all
white under the glare of light, all inclined toward the empty rostrum.
It was the eve of the poll. There was a tingle of excitement in the
air, a hushed expectancy. Only when Cynthia raised her eyes did she
lose the vague feeling of suspense. Overhead a skylight in the roof
was covered with a horizontal blind. One tattered corner hung down and
as she looked up from the indistinguishable throng of faces, it
arrested her attention as something especially individual and definite
and single.
Suddenly came a buzz and a stir. The chairman was seen to rise from a
flight of steps at the side of the platform. He was followed by a
tall, gaunt, loose-limbed man with a bony face, a white moustache, and
a high, bald head. He had the look of a soldier. Cynthia took no heed
of him. He stalked before her and sank unnoticed in his place. Behind
him came Harry Rames, and as he passed along the narrow gangway
between the crowded chairs, those who had seats sprang to their feet;
and three thousand people broke like a wave into a flutter of
handkerchiefs and a shattering thunder of applause. Above the applause
a chant gradually swelled, two lines of a tune rather like a chime.
Cynthia could not hear the words, but the sound, with its rise and
fall, surged backward and forward against the walls of the Exchange
for a full minute.
Mr. Benoliel leaned toward Cynthia.
"They have given him their foot-ball song. In a city of artisans, keen
on foot-ball, that's a good sign."
Cynthia nodded. But she hardly heard, she could not have answered.
Here was something quite new to her, and overwhelmingly new. The
thunderous outburst had taken her by the throat; for a second she felt
choked; she had no part in politics, yet emotion woke in her and the
tears sprang into her eyes.
"What's the matter, Cynthia?" asked Diana Royle.
Cynthia replied with a break in her voice between a laugh and a sob.
"I don't know. It's just the crowd, I think."
"And the enthusiasm of the crowd," added Mr. Benoliel. "You make me
feel very old, Cynthia. I can listen to it quite unmoved now. But
there was a time when I couldn't without a choking in my throat. It's
the splendid faith of the crowd."
Cynthia, arrested by the phrase, looked quickly at Benoliel. Greatly
as she liked him she was never quite sure of him. Kind as he had been
to her she always suspected some touch of the charlatan. He had the
look of a man quite in earnest.
"I wonder," she said, "whether mere magnetism is enough to arouse it."
Mr. Benoliel did not answer; for the chairman rose at his table; and
while he spoke the harmless necessary words, Cynthia took stock of
Harry Rames, who was seated in the rostrum at the side of the table in
front of her and a little to her left. The last weeks of exertion had
left their marks; the flesh had worn thin upon his face; there were
dark hollows beneath his eyes; he had gained a look of spirituality
which did not belong to him. He was nervous; his hands, with the long
fingers which never seemed to accord with the rest of him, moved
uneasily and restlessly from the buttons of his coat to the slip of
notes which he had placed upon the table. Cynthia was deceived by the
look of him as she had been deceived by the fervor of the gathering.
The outburst was not entirely, was not even chiefly, a tribute to the
candidate. Ludsey was a political city, and by three weeks of speeches
and agitation political feeling had been whipped to a climax of
excitement. It sought and found its outlet to-night at this final
rally before the poll.
The cheers broke out again when Harry Rames rose and leaned his
hand upon the rail of the rostrum. When they died down he began to
speak--first a faltering word or two of thanks. Then his voice
suddenly strengthened and rang firm. His fingers ceased to twitch, and
he turned over in his mind the consecutions of his thoughts as though
he were turning over the pages of a book. All that he had planned to
say came clearly to him in its due order, and brought the comforting
assurance that the rest would follow. He was master of himself, and
being master of himself set his audience at ease to listen, Cynthia
among the rest. Anxious as he himself, she knew now that the speech
would go right on to its considered end. She leaned forward, all ears
to catch the words, and all eagerness to read into them, if she could,
the something more which was not there.
But she could not; yet it was a night of triumph for Harry Rames,
"Breezy Harry Rames." She recalled her own phrase with a disappointed
droop of the lips more than once during the next hour. He was going to
win. She had no doubt of it. Confidence swept from his audience to him
and back again in waves. And he savored the joys of the orator as he
never had before. He had the arts of the platform, and more than the
arts, a power to bend his audience to sympathy. He knew that night the
supreme reward, the hush of a mass of people constraining themselves
to silence and even to immobility while a voice, low as a whisper,
sounded audibly in every nook. He played with the suspense, prolonging
it to the last moment of endurance, and then, by a sudden swoop to a
sharp, clever phrase, drawing the audience to its feet and coining the
silence in a stormy tumult of applause.
He had the gift of speech; Cynthia gladly conceded it. An aptness of
homely words, an absence of all extravagance, and a voice resonant and
pleasant as a clear-toned, bell impressed her more than she had
expected to be impressed. A day's rest had restored his voice for the
time, even though M. Poizat's Lungatine had not contributed to the
restoration.
She was surprised, too, by a certain shrewdness in the matter of the
speech. It was not so much of the platform as his manner. There was
very little reference to the navy. "I don't mean to be considered a
'service member,'" he had said to her once. "No one pays attention to
the service member in the House of Commons." But here and there came
views which struck her as new and worth consideration.
"If you could teach the wives of the artisans to cook and to take an
interest in cooking, you would have done a great deal more to solve
the question of intemperance in this country than if you closed half
the public-houses," he cried once and developed his theme with humor
and some courage. He drew a picture of a wife putting her husband's
supper on the fire, ready against the time when he should come home
from his factory, and then running out into the street to talk to a
neighbor and leaving the meat to grill to the toughness and dryness of
leather.
"The man comes home, sits down to it, and rises from it unsatisfied.
What does he do? He goes out and strolls round to the public-house.
Put a good meal, well-cooked, inside of him, and he'll not be so
disposed to move. He'll be inclined to smoke his pipe by the fire in
his kitchen."
He passed on to other topics. The whole speech was clever and was
uttered on a lift of enthusiasm. But again Cynthia argued, it was the
enthusiasm for the arena, not for a cause. It was ambition without
ideals, power without high motive.
Diana Royle inclined toward her.
"Aren't you satisfied now?" she asked.
"Oh, he will get on," said Cynthia; and then she suddenly sat upright
in her chair, with her lips parted and the blood bright in her cheeks.
"But, after all," Rames was saying; his voice was beginning to grow
hoarse and he raised his hand in an appeal for silence, "here are we
discussing the work to be done, and leaving out in our discussion the
great necessity. I don't know what you think, but to my notion there
is no greatness in any work unless it has a dream at the heart of it.
The world's work is done by the great dreamers. Well, here is my last
word before the poll, perhaps the last word I shall speak in this
constituency."
He was interrupted as he had meant to be by loud repudiations of such
a possibility.
"No, no!"
"You're a member already."
"We'll put you in."
Such phrases broke in upon the words and then a cheery voice, louder
than the rest, shouted from the back of the hall:
"Never fear! You're well patronized in Ludsey, Captain."
A burst of laughter followed upon the words, and a flush of annoyance
darkened Rames's face.
"I will remind my friend that I am not a public entertainer," he said.
"And it's really against the spirit represented in that sentence that
I wish to direct my first words. I have my dream too--a dream. I speak
openly to you--at my very heart. Let me tell it you. It involves a
confession. When I first came to Ludsey six months ago, when for the
first time I saw from the windows of my railway carriage across the
summer fields the tall chimneys and high, long roofs of its factories,
the delicate steeples of its churches, it was to me just a town like
another. I will be frank, it was just a polling-booth. But as I got to
know your city that error passed out of my thoughts."
Cynthia leaned forward. He had used her own words. She could not but
be flattered by his use of them. They had been acclaimed, too, by this
great gathering, and she was proud of that. Not for anything would she
have had their authorship revealed, but she was proud to hear them
used, proud, too, because they seemed to have led, if she dared
believe her ears, Harry Rames out of his detested breeziness into a
contemplation of something other than the personal gain. She could
hardly doubt him now; he spoke with so simple a sincerity. She had a
sudden glimpse once more of her enchanted garden wherein she had
walked with and helped the great ones of the earth. To help, herself
unknown except by those she helped!--that had been the dream when she
had encouraged dreams; and it sprang once more into life now as she
listened.
"It is a city," Rames continued, "where a few steps will take you out
of the thronged streets into some old garden, quiet with the peace of
ancient memories; some old close of plaster and black beams; some old
room with windows deep-set in four-foot walls and wide hearths of
centuries ago. And round about these old places stands a ring of
factories where in good times the lights blaze until the morning and
the whir of its machines never ceases from your ears. It is a city
whose continuous life is written for all to see upon its buildings.
Here kings and queens have tarried on their journeys; there chambers
of commerce hold their meetings. From small and ancient beginnings it
has been made by the activity of generations of men into a modern
industrial city. Well, I have my dream. It is to be one little link in
the continuity of its life and to do my share of service in the
forwarding of its prosperity."
A shout answered his words. He had his audience in hand. He stilled it
with a swift gesture and his voice rang out with a laugh which had all
the exultation of battle.
"Well, we shall know to-morrow night. We are in the ice-pack now, but
we are coming to the outer rim of it. We can see the blue water
already. We shall be sailing smoothly upon it this time to-morrow
night."
He had been chary of references to the voyage which had made his
reputation; all the more, therefore, this one struck home. He sat down
tempestuously acclaimed, and turning in his chair held out his hand to
Cynthia Daventry.
"I am glad that you came," he said. "I have achieved two triumphs
to-night. I have brought you and Mr. Benoliel to your first political
meeting and both of you are on my platform."
He shook hands with Isaac Benoliel and with Diana Royle. Cynthia
leaned a little forward.
"I, too, am glad that I came," she returned with a smile. Because of
those last words of his, friendship was warm in her toward Harry
Rames. She added, "You knew then that I was here--just behind you?"
Rames nodded.
"Yes, but I was too nervous to turn to you before I had made my
speech. The flesh wears a little thin after three weeks of this. One
gets jumpy. Even the tattered corner of blind hanging down there from
the skylight seemed to-night charged with some important message." He
spoke, ridiculing the fancy, and Cynthia, with a smile and a quick
lift of her eyebrows, cried:
"I noticed that too."
"Then for the first time," said Rames, "we have something in common.
You and I are probably the only people in the hall who noticed it. We
have a bond of union."
"A strip of tattered blind!" said Cynthia.
"Well, there was nothing at all before," said Captain Rames, and he
suddenly turned back to his seat. For the tall, gaunt man was on his
legs.
Cynthia neither heard his name nor followed his speech with any
particular attention. It was indeed difficult to follow. He was an old
hack of the platform with all the sounding phrases at the tip of his
tongue. Rolling sentences, of the copybook, flowed out of him;
declamations too vague to be understood were delivered with the vigor
of a prophet. But he interspersed them with the familiar cliches of
the day and each one received its salvo of applause. To Cynthia he was
a man not so much stupid as out of place. She could imagine him at the
head of a cavalry squadron. Here he seemed simply grotesque.
On the other hand, Captain Rames did not; and the contrast between the
two men bent her to consider whether, after all, she had not been
wrong in her condemnation of his new career. She was in the mood to
admit it; and when the meeting broke up and the crowd was pouring
through the doors into the street, and those upon the platform were
descending its steps, she found herself alone for a second on the
rostrum with Harry Rames.
"Perhaps I was wrong," she said. "I remember what you told me of Mr.
Smale. A vivid gift of phrase--he thought that necessary. You have
it."
"On the platform--yes. But the platform's not the House," said Rames.
"Smale told me that too. I have yet to see whether I shall carry the
House."
"Yet those last words," said Cynthia--"about the city and the
continuity of its life and your pride to have a little share in it.
Oh, that was finely done."
And upon Rames's face there came a grin.
"Yes, I thought that would fetch 'em," he said.
Cynthia stepped back. Once again it occurred to Rames, as it had done
on the night of their first meeting at the Admiralty, that just so
would she look if he struck her a blow.
"Then--then--the city is still a polling-booth," she stammered.
"Yes," said Rames.
The hero newly perched upon his pediment tumbled off again.
"You used what I said to you because you just thought it would go
down."
Rames did not deny it. He remained silent.
"I remember," she continued, "it was no doubt a foolish thing I said.
But even when I said it, you were thinking this is the sort of thing
that will take."
That she was humiliated, her voice and her face clearly proved. Yet
again Rames did not contradict her. Again he was silent. For there was
nothing to be said.
"You do not allow me many illusions about you," Cynthia said gently,
and she began to turn away.
But now he arrested her.
"I don't mean to," he said quickly; and by the reply he undid some
portion of the harm he had done himself in her eyes.