THE MAYOR AND THE MAN
St. Anne's Hall stands tucked away in a narrow street of Ludsey by the
spacious square; and from its ancient windows you look out between the
lozenges of stained glass upon the great church of St. Anne with its
soaring spire and its wide graveyard. Into this hall the ballot-boxes
were brought from the polling-booths on the next evening, and at long
tables in the Council Chamber the voting papers were sorted and
counted. Harry Rames walked from table to table. He seemed to see
nothing but crosses against his opponent's name. He did not dare to
put a question to any of the scrutineers standing behind the sorters.
The very swiftness with which the votes were counted impressed him
with a sense of disaster. For the first time he began to ask himself
how he was to shape his life if to-night he were defeated. Thus an
hour passed and then the chief constable drew him aside to a bench
under the musician's gallery at one end of the room.
"I've been watching the tables, Captain Rames," he said, "and I think
you are going to be elected."
"You do?" said Rames eagerly. "Yes, and I shall be very glad if you
are."
"Thank you," exclaimed Rames. He could have wrung off the chief
constable's hand in the fervor of his gratitude.
"Oh, I am not speaking as a politician," the chief constable returned
with a smile. "I have the order of my city to look after. That's all I
am thinking about. If you weren't by any chance to get in, I am afraid
there would be trouble to-night in Ludsey. And I want you if you are
returned to get back to your hotel at once. It's important from my
point of view that you should show up on your balcony as soon as
possible after the result is declared."
"I see," said Rames.
"I will take you out the back way through the police station," the
chief constable continued, "and there's a lane opposite which will
lead you straight to your back door. You had better run, I think. For
your own friends would tear you to pieces to-night without noticing
they were doing you any harm."
The chief constable suddenly changed his tone. One of the scrutineers
on the side of Rames's opponent had drawn close to them. The chief
constable had no intention to allow a suspicion that he favored one
side more than the other. He raised his voice.
"You have noticed our tapestry, perhaps. It is quite invaluable, I
believe. We lent it two years ago to the South Kensington Museum.
There was an American millionaire here the other day who wished to buy
it."
Raines looked across the room.
"Isn't there some portion of it missing?" he asked.
"Yes. That disappeared in the Commonwealth times. Let us go and look
at it."
Rames walked at the chief constable's side up the floor of the room
toward the dais where Mr. Redling the Mayor, with his chain of office
about his shoulders, sat in his big chair in the centre of the long
council table. His mace lay upon the table in front of him, and he
surveyed the busy scene over which he presided with an imperturbable
gravity. But Mr. Redling was a genial soul with a twinkling eye and a
red, round face like a crumpled cherub's; and as Harry Rames advanced
toward the dais, Mr. Redling beckoned to him with a discreet twist of
the finger of a hand lying idle upon the table.
Harry Rames took a seat beside the Mayor at the long table and again
words of comfort were poured into his ears in a gentle undertone.
"I think you are going to do it," said Mr. Redling, repeating almost
word for word the utterance of his chief constable. "Of course, I
couldn't take any part. But you know what I should have been doing if
I hadn't been Mayor, don't you? But I have asked quietly here and
there about your chance and I fancy it's all right."
He winked, and his face broke into triumphant smiles. He was a man.
Then he remembered again that he was a Mayor, and he sat a pillar of
municipal propriety.
"It's good of you to say that," cried Harry Rames in a low voice. "I
needed to hear it, I can tell you."
Mr. Redling looked at his face. The three weeks had taken a heavy toll
of him. He had thinned and sharpened; his eyes were heavy and very
tired; for the moment his buoyancy had gone.
"Yes," said Mr. Redling. "An election takes a good deal out of one.
And these two hours are the worst of it when the fight's all over and
there's nothing to do but wait. Gives you a kind of glimpse into what
women have to put up with all their lives, eh?"
Harry Rames glanced at the Mayor with interest.
"Why, I suppose that's true."
Mr. Redling nodded his head.
"Yes. It teaches you that sitting with your hands in your lap isn't
the same as sitting soft, after all."
Harry Rames felt comfort steal in upon him from the neighborhood of
the little Mayor. Mr. Redling was that rare bird, a strong politician
without a fad, and, therefore, a veritable haven of refuge to a
candidate in the cudgelling of an election. On the few afternoons when
Harry Rames had been able to snatch a half hour of leisure he had been
wont to run round to the Mayor's house and spend a restful interval
with one of the Mayor's cigars. Mr. Redling laid his Mayoralty aside
with the silk hat he invariably wore, and when he took off his chain
of office he usually took off his coat too. He had had his ups and
downs, and as he discoursed upon his city in his shirt-sleeves, Harry
Rames never failed to draw comfort from his talk, so strong a spirit
of human friendship breathed from him.
"They like you here," continued Mr. Redling; "both sides. Take us for
all in all we are not violent people. Give us the right sort of man,
and we'll be sure he won't do us harm, whatever his politics," and
then as Mr. Benoliel, who was acting as one of Rames's scrutineers,
came to him with a doubtful voting paper, he switched off to another
topic; and it happened quite naturally that he chose the very same
subject as the chief constable had done.
"Have you noticed our tapestry?" he asked. "We are proud of it. An
American gentleman, a Mr. Cronin, came over here last week with Mr.
Benoliel to see it. And after he had seen it, he wanted to buy it."
"Oh, did he?" said Benoliel as he handed the voting paper to the
Mayor. "But I might have guessed that he would. I brought him over
from Culver, and we met Mrs. Royle just outside here. She came in with
us. Mrs. Royle seemed as interested in the tapestry as Cronin
himself."
While Mr. Redling examined the voting paper, Harry Rames cast an eye
over the tapestry. The aesthetic qualities formed a quite insignificant
element in his nature. Of art he thought nothing at all. It noted in
his mind long hair and an absence of baths--such was his ignorance.
The only picture-gallery into which he had ever entered was the Royal
Academy; and the only occasion upon which he had ventured over that
threshold was the Academy dinner to which he had been invited after
his return from his Antarctic expedition. He had a primitive
appreciation of scarlet as a color and he recognized that women upon
canvas could look beautiful. There for him art ended. So he gazed at
the tapestry with a lack-lustre eye. There was no vividness of color,
and the human forms worked upon it had an angularity and a thickness
of joint which pleased him not at all.
"I suppose it's very beautiful," he said.
"It's unique," replied Mr. Benoliel; "that's why Cronin wanted it. Let
a thing be unique, he'll not trouble his head so much about its
beauty, and I am told he will ask no questions how it comes to be
offered to him."
"Well, he offered us a hundred thousand pounds," Mr. Redling remarked
with half a sigh. Ludsey was growing at a pace which made it difficult
for the borough council to keep up with it. Mr. Redling thought of
baths and schools and houses. "A hundred thousand pounds--a good deal
of money for a municipality to refuse. But of course, we did. We
couldn't let that tapestry go." He returned to the voting paper and
gave his decision upon it. Harry Rames drifted down again into the
body of the hall. He troubled no more about the priceless tapestry
swinging under the high carved roof in this ancient place. He was a
man of his own day, absorbed in its doings, and wondering always in a
great labor of thought how he might make his name familiar in all
men's mouths before nightfall swept him into the darkness. His
anxieties were now diminished, his heart beat high. For here were two
men, both experienced in elections and both convinced that he would
surely win. So the first small victory, it seemed, was won. He crossed
to the row of windows and looked down through a lozenge of white in
the painted pattern into the street below. And having once looked he
could not again withdraw his eyes.
It was a night of January, dreary and loud with a roar of falling
rain. A light wind carried the rain at a slant so that it shot down
past the street lamps like slender javelins of steel. And exposed to
that pitiless assault a silent crowd of men stood packed together in
the narrow street between St. Anne's Hall and the railings of the
church. A few, a very few, carried umbrellas over their heads, the
rest stood with their coat collars turned up about their throats and
their hands deep in their pockets. No one moved, for there was no room
to move; and all the faces were uplifted under the brims of their
soaking hats to the great window beyond the hall whence the result
should be declared. The patience of the throng, its acquiescence in
discomfort, as though discomfort were the ordinary condition of its
life, suddenly caught hold of Harry Rames. He took a step, nay, a
stride forward. Last night when he had come out of the Exchange and
the herd of animals had been transfigured into the uplifted faces of
men, his thought had been:
"This is for me."
But now his thoughts changed. The men of Ludsey did not wait in vain
that night. For Harry Rames the glamour faded off the arena. At the
very moment when the bars were being withdrawn for him to enter it the
exultation of battle died out of his heart. He woke to something
new--the claim of the constituency. The longer he looked, the stronger
the claim grew, the more loudly the silence of that throng proclaimed
and shouted it. They stood under the javelins of the rain, the men who
had voted for him. They emphasized their claim by their extraordinary
quietude. Almost they menaced.
"A queer sight," said a voice at his elbow.
Harry Rames turned. It was Mr. Arnall who had interrupted him.
"I shall not easily forget it," said Rames, drawing a breath, and then
with an irritable outburst he said: "They look to Parliament for more
than parliaments can do, to candidates for more than members can
achieve. Each election is to open paradise for them."
"And whose fault is that?" asked Mr. Arnall dryly.
Rames nodded.
"Ours, I suppose," he said; and behind him in the room there was a
bustle and a grating of chairs upon the floor. The votes had been
sorted. The candidates and their friends gathered about the long table
on the raised dais.
"They are taking yours first," said Mr. Arnall to Harry. "That's a
good sign."
The papers cast for Harry Rames were brought to the table in sets of
fifty. They were placed crosswise, one set on the top of the first,
and the third on the second, until five hundred had been counted.
Against that pile of five hundred votes a second rose. Gradually the
orderly heaps of paper extended along the table's edge in front of the
Mayor. There were half a dozen now. Rames's agent stood by them like a
bull-dog on the chain. The half-dozen became ten, eleven, twelve. And
as the twelfth heap was completed a quick movement ran among all of
Rames's friends. He had polled now half the electorate of the city.
One more set of papers and he was in.
It was laid next to the others at that moment, and Rames's hands were
silently grasped and shaken. But the heaping up of the votes went on.
There were three more piles to be added before the end was reached.
Eighty-four per cent of the electorate had recorded their votes. Harry
Rames had won by a majority well on to two thousand. He stood there in
a buzz of congratulations, with a sudden vacancy of mind and thought.
He remembered the extraordinary agility with which Mr. Redling whipped
out of the room, trying to say unconcernedly:
"I'll just announce the result at once."
He heard the storm of cheers in the street below. That patient silence
was broken now in a hurricane of enthusiasm and even through it he
could distinguish the words of the exultant cry:
"Rames is our man!"
He saw the Mayor return, much out of breath. He proposed the vote of
thanks to the returning officers, with the usual eulogy of his
opponents and depreciation of himself. But even at that moment the
claim of the constituency would importunately obtrude and find
acknowledgment in his words.
"You look to me very likely for more than I can do," he said simply.
"At all events you shall have what I can."
But the most memorable achievement that night was the reply of Mr.
Redling.
As he rose to his feet to acknowledge the vote of thanks, the man ran
forward and got a fair start of the Mayor. He cried out, all one
bubble of delight:
"I need hardly say, gentlemen, how utterly I rejoice at--" and then
the Mayor put on a spurt and caught up the man--"at the admirable
manner in which this contest has been conducted by both sides."
But the correction deceived no one. Mr. Redling's politics were known,
and so, in a general splutter of good-humored laughter, the Ludsey
election came to an end.
The Mayor turned from the table wiping his forehead.
"I nearly made a bad break there," he said in a whisper. "They won't
come at you again, I think. I reckon you have got Ludsey, Captain
Rames," and then Rames felt the hand of the chief constable laid upon
his arm. He was rushed across the Mayor's parlor, down the stairs
through the police station, where the police at their supper rose and
gave him a loud cheer.
"Silence!" cried the chief constable savagely. He opened the street
door and peeped out.
"All's clear. Run--down that alley opposite. Say something from your
balcony, never mind what--they won't hear more than two words."
"That's just all that I want them to hear," cried Rames.
He had foreseen that moment. He ran with one or two of his friends to
the back door of his hotel. A path was made for them through the
crowded hall. He came out upon the balcony, and up and down the hill
as far as his eyes could see the street was thronged. He stretched out
his hand. He had a second of absolute silence, and in that second his
voice rang out:
"My constituents----"
The roar which answered him showed him that once more his foresight
had served him well. No other word of his was heard. But any other
words would have spoiled the two which he had uttered.