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 friendship. 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 passed 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 ignoble 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
friendship. 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 attitude 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
rehearsed, and rehearsed 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 scrap-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
abasement. But for presumption he might now be in command of a great
battle-ship 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-ship, 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 pass and the evening come
up out of the sea and the lights begin to glow upon the foreshore, a
cluster 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.
Then another step sounded on the pavement and he turned away from his
vision. After all he might be laughing at all these fears in an hour's
time, he took the courage to reflect; and he went up the stairs and
across the lobby into the Chamber itself. He looked for a seat on the
second bench below the gangway, but the House was full.
Colonel Challoner, again passed over in the choice of
under-secretaries, looked up at him from the corner seat, and noticed
the blue-book and a volume of Hansard under his arm.
"Are you going to speak?" he asked.
"If I can get called," said Rames.
Challoner made room for him at his side.
"I mean to say a word or two myself," he said, "but we shall probably
neither of us get a chance. Those front-bench men think it beneath
their dignity to take less than an hour."
Certainly, so far as the first speech was concerned, Colonel Challoner
was right. It was delivered from the opposition bench by an
ex-minister, William Kenway, a man of a kindly and generous
disposition who yet managed by some perversity of tact to rasp the
temper of the House from wall to wall. For a full hour he stood there
now, saying the wrong thing with determination, giving little lessons
with the air of a school-master, irritating by a certain priggishness
his friends behind him as well as his opponents in front.
Rames sat and listened. He realized that the very opportunity which he
wanted was being given to him. Kenway, with a white paper in his hand,
came to the problem of Asiatic immigration. Rames was no longer trying
to remember the consecution of his speech. He sat waiting for the long
speech to end, making a note or two, grasping at a beginning for his
speech, and clinging firmly to it.
When Kenway sat down, he found himself standing upon his legs. He was
aware at once that some one was standing beside him, Colonel
Challoner. Both men had risen. Almost he resumed his seat, and then he
heard his name called by the chairman, and from a very long way off an
encouraging cheer reached his ears.
He was conscious of the lack of a table in front of him or the barrier
of a platform--something on which he could rest a hand. He felt
strangely defenceless without it. He faltered through his opening
sentences in a voice which sounded to his ears weak and thin as a
ghost's. He saw a member take off his hat on the opposite benches,
rise, and make his way out; and at once he was certain that he was
making a dismal failure. Suddenly he remembered one member who had
risen to speak, had been called upon and had sunk back in his seat
without uttering more than a few unintelligible words. Was his to be
the same fate, he asked himself? And asking himself he lost the thread
of what he was saying and with a gasp retrieved it.
"It seemed to me," he said in describing the scene to Cynthia, "that I
stood there dumb and helpless for twenty seconds. As a matter of fact,
the interval was so short that not even my neighbors noticed it. I
suppose that I only paused for the fraction of a second, really."
"Yes," said Cynthia, and the trifle remained in her mind.
He was speaking, too, with a haze before his eyes and his hands
clutching at the edges of his coat. But he went on, and then quite
suddenly the haze thinned so that he saw the House and he heard his
voice ringing out clear and firm, not loud nor arrogant, filling the
Chamber and with just that note of deference which he had planned to
strike and had struck because the deference was sincere. He turned in
his place. He was no longer conscious of the need of a table in front
of him; he looked down the House toward the clock above the entrance
door, and he saw that the bar was thronged with members. Curiosity, no
doubt, had brought them in from the library and the smoking-room and
the lobby when his name went up on the tape--he had, after all, a
reputation. He, the least romantic of men, had some aura of romance
about him in that assembly; enough at all events to invite a momentary
interest. But they stayed, and as he spoke in a voice that went
steadily forward with the rhythm of marching men, he saw now one, now
another come out from the throng at the bar and slip into a seat. With
a throb of joy he realized that he was not failing, that now he was
not going to fail. The House had filled since he had risen and on all
the benches there was a great quiet. He turned toward the Speaker's
chair. The space at the sides of it was crowded too. He saw more than
one cabinet-minister standing. Above, behind the grille, he saw the
big hats and shadowy forms of the ladies in the gallery, and here and
there the gleam of an ermine stole against the light behind them. That
happened to him again which had happened in the Corn Exchange at
Ludsey. He turned over the consecutions of his argument like the pages
of a printed book. He was master of himself. He worked in his
predecessor's points and replied to them with force and without
offence because they were just the points he had foreseen. He provoked
interruptions from his opponents; he had foreseen them and was ready,
and the cheers broke out from the benches about him and behind him. He
spoke for just twenty minutes. The applause, generous and friendly,
came from both sides of the House when he resumed his seat. The
Prime-Minister leaned across the gangway and shook him by the hand.
And as for the great battle-ship at Spithead, anybody could have it as
a gift.
Rames leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. So the third step
of the great career had been taken. He had been chosen candidate, he
had been elected member, he had made something of a small triumph out
of his maiden speech. Now he would wait without any hurry. He would
make one speech more later on in the session, perhaps two--not more
than two, certainly. And next session he would plunge boldly and take
up his part in the impromptu debating on the Committee stages of
Bills. In that work lay the real test of parliamentary capacity.
Thus he planned, and content with his plan he opened his eyes again.
At once he was made uneasy. He met the eyes of a small, white-haired
man with a deeply lined, brown face who was watching him fixedly from
the benches opposite. This was Albert Coulter, a man of many
expeditions in untravelled countries, when there were countries still
untravelled, whose name had become a signal for dark whispers. A
callous selfishness, when selfishness might mean the life or health of
his companions, and a relentless severity with his natives, was
rightly or wrongly imputed. The survivors of his expeditions came back
with queer stories. But he had never failed until the moment, when at
the age of fifty and with the looks of seventy, he had entered the
House of Commons. There, an interesting yet ineffective figure, he sat
day after day, solitary, disliked, with brooding eyes under a bristle
of gray eyebrows which seemed to be haunted with sinister memories of
deep tropical forests and days long past. His eyes rested upon Harry
Rames now, not enviously, not encouragingly, but without expression,
almost indeed like the eyes of a dead man. Their fixed gaze chilled
the blood of Harry Rames and all his satisfaction was marred. He had
to move from his place and beyond the reach of those brooding eyes
before he shook the impression off. And even now so distinct was it in
his memories that he omitted it altogether and deliberately from the
story he told that afternoon to Cynthia Daventry. He related in its
place another incident which had happened later in the evening.
"We had a division," he said. "I was walking through the lobby and
just at the turnstiles where the clerks tick off our names, I found
Henry Smale in front of me. The R's and the S's go through the same
turnstile. He turned round as I passed through behind him, and said to
me in a low voice, 'You have the ear of the House now. Keep your eye
on the treasury bench.' That from Smale, who was dissuading me to
enter Parliament, means a good deal."
Harry Rames turned and looked at Cynthia.
"Yes," said Cynthia.
There was a smile upon her face rather wistful, rather ironic.
"So you have turnstiles in your House of Commons," she said slowly.
"No. Did I say turnstiles?" he asked. "There's no actual barrier which
revolves. But there's only room for one at a time to pass between the
desks. The clerks stand at the desks and register your votes for
publication. Otherwise where would party government be?"
"You mean if the votes weren't published men would vote according to
their convictions?"
Rames nodded.
"But it's a superficial view," he said. "You have got to take the sum
of your policy. As a whole, is it better than the other fellow's?
That's what you have to ask yourself when you are going to register a
vote upon some particular point which may help to turn your government
out and let the other fellows in."
"Yes, I see that," said Cynthia; and once more her eyes fell upon the
_Times_ and she was suddenly conscious of a queer pride. Others to-day
were aware of the success which Harry Rames had made; probably she
alone was aware of the thought, and the apprehension and the
tribulation of soul which had gone to the making of the success. To
the others he would just be one of the inevitably successful--what
indeed she had herself been wont to think him. To-day, however, he was
to her human as he had never been. He had shown himself to her,
bleating with fear like an ordinary man at the approach of the fateful
moment which was to put him to the test. He had drawn the picture with
a sense of humor, but he had not blurred it. Would he have drawn it
for any one else, she asked herself? She turned impulsively toward
him:
"I wanted you to come to me this week," she said impulsively. "And I
thank you very much for telling me not merely that you succeeded, but
how near you were to breaking down. But," and she hesitated for a few
moments, "I should have been still more grateful if you had come to me
the day before you made your speech."
"I almost did," said Harry Rames.