THE MAN WHO HAD WALKED IN THE ROAD
Harry Rames and Cynthia passed the autumn at the white house, and
hardly a day passed but one or the other was seen in the climbing
streets of Ludsey. Harry presided at the social gatherings of the
city, the musical clubs, the horticultural society, and the rest. He
was busy with his town clerk over a railway bill which the
municipality meant to oppose. He made friends with his public
opponents. Cynthia herself was hardly less active. She threw herself
into the work of committees and councils, not from enthusiasm, but in
a desperate search for that color which Mr. Arnall and his fellows had
got from politics, and her own youth demanded for herself. And with
the work, interest in it came, if color did not. They were
establishing Harry Rames in his seat--that was certain, and she had
her share in it. They were winning and, being a woman, she loved to
win. Cynthia was a success in Ludsey--she could not but know it. For
the demands for her presence and her time grew with every morning's
post. There came to her a sort of exultation of battle. She was doing
her work; she was helping to make the great career, and in the
pleasure of helping to make, she lost sight of the essential emptiness
of the thing she was making.
"Yes," said Harry one night to her. "You are making this seat safe for
me, Cynthia, for the next election."
Cynthia looked at him with her eyes bright.
"Do you think so?" she asked eagerly, asking for praise, and Arthur
Pynes, the young chairman of the association, who had been dining with
them, corroborated her husband.
"We once had a candidate whose wife would sing at the public meetings.
We couldn't stop her, and every time she sang she cost us fifty votes.
We have always stipulated for a bachelor since. But you have changed
our views now, Mrs. Rames."
"I am very glad," said Cynthia; and the trio fell to discussing plans
for the next session. "We want to see you in office before three years
are out," said Pynes to Harry Rames. "There's no reason why we
shouldn't."
"Yes, there is," said Harry Rames. "A large majority. They want you to
keep quiet and vote and, being strong, they would just as soon put
into office men who have never opened their mouths in the House as
not, and probably sooner."
"Then you must force 'em," said Arthur Pynes.
They discussed the government programme for the next session, and what
opportunities would arise from it. But the changes and transitions of
Parliament are rapid. However sternly the government may cling to its
ordered sequence of legislation, great questions will arise which have
not been foreseen, and the ballot will give to private members their
opportunity of discord. Thus the man who sits next to you may be in
hot debate with you to-morrow, and those who smiled at you from the
treasury bench yesterday may see you stroll with a fine air of
indifference into the opposition lobby to-day. Harry Rames was well
aware of the pull of the undercurrents, but neither he nor Cynthia,
nor Arthur Pynes had a suspicion that night that the next session was
to see him in definite antagonism to Devenish, the man who had been
forced to walk in the road.
It was not, indeed, until the session was more than half-way through
that Cynthia herself learnt it. She had dined with her husband at the
House. It was a warm night of early summer, and after dinner they took
their coffee upon the terrace. A private bill was occupying the
attention of a thin House, and the terrace was fairly full of members
waiting for the resumption of public business. Amongst them was Mr.
Devenish. He strolled up to the couple, and after shaking hands with
Cynthia, turned to Harry Rames:
"I hear you are against Fanshawe's bill."
"Yes," said Harry Rames.
"It comes on next Friday," continued Devenish. "The government will
accept the principle, and give the bill a second reading."
"It won't go further than that," said Harry Rames.
"Not this year. But next year we shall embody the principle in a
measure of our own, and then--?" He looked inquiringly at Harry.
"Then," said Harry deliberately, "I suppose we must try to get it
amended."
A beam of light pouring from one of the windows showed Devenish's face
clearly to Cynthia. She saw it harden and narrow. When he spoke his
voice was sharp.
"I shall be in charge," he said. "I shall not accept any amendment
which strikes at the principle."
"I am sorry," said Rames. He lit his cigar. He had not the air of a
man receding from his position.
Cynthia was leaning forward, her eyes travelling curiously from one to
the other. She had noticed the quick snap in the voice of Devenish,
the quiet indifference to it in her husband's. But she did not know on
what point they disagreed. Harry Rames turned toward her and
explained:
"Fanshawe is bringing in a land bill on Friday afternoon. I didn't
think that the government would take it up or I would have told you
about it, Cynthia, and talked it over with you."
Devenish looked quickly toward the girl. Since Rames consulted her,
could he enlist her upon his side? Cynthia read the unspoken question
in his face, and turned gratefully to her husband who had made it
clear that she had her word in his decisions.
"Fanshawe proposes that the State should buy compulsorily so much land
at intervals of so many years, split it into small holdings and lease
them," Rames continued.
"And you disapprove?" said Cynthia.
"Yes. I am against the small holding. I think that's waste. I am in
favor of the small farm. But I want the farm owned, not taken on
lease. That's my chief objection. The State's a hard landlord."
"Is a bank a better one?" asked Devenish.
"I think so," returned Rames. "A bank's a business; the State's a
machine. There's a big difference there."
"Well, I shall be interested to hear what you have to say on Friday,"
said Devenish, as he rose from his chair. "It would be a pity if we
lost your support--a great pity." He spoke with a slow significance.
The words were half a compliment, and the other half a menace. He
turned at once lightly to Cynthia. "You must persuade him, Mrs. Rames,
to be sensible, you really must," he said. "To create owners is a
long, slow process, and I can't wait." A sudden violence flamed in his
voice, and with a characteristic action he brought a clenched fist
sharply down into the open palm of his other hand. He looked out
across the Thames and leftward to the lights on Westminster bridge. He
seemed to be assuring himself that he stood at last where he had
always meant to stand, that the moment for which he had lived was
surely coming. "No, I can't wait. I want to set about the land system
in this country. With tenancies one can begin at once."
As he walked away from them Cynthia recalled the description of him
which Harry Rames had given to her. "As a boy he had always to walk in
the road, and he has not forgotten it." She began to understand the
phrase now. Devenish's swift and bitter outburst had been an
illumination.
He had been forced to walk in the road. Rames had shown a shrewd
insight into a complex character when he coined the phrase. Devenish
was the son of a small struggling tradesman, in a little town
surrounded by land which was carefully preserved. Therefore he was
chased out of the woods and off the grass. The game-keeper was his
enemy, and an enemy always at hand. To feel the turf beneath his feet
he must use stealth like a criminal. He lived in a good grass country,
and all the share he had of it was the dust kicked up from the road by
the wheels of carriages. In his boyhood he had brooded over his
exclusion, and through the hard struggles of his youth his thoughts
had been rancorous. Now, it is true, the rancor had diminished. At the
age of forty-five he had reached high office, and with high office,
for the first time, a regular and sufficient income. He was freed for
a while, at all events, from the desperate endeavor to pay his way
outside and keep his footing inside the House of Commons. He met men
of diverse pursuits from the far corners of the earth. The world
broadened out before him magically.
He entered late, as it were, upon his youth; the arts swept into his
view, a glittering procession, and enchanted him. All was new to him
as to a child. The natural charm of the man found an outlet; he had
good-humor now, and a pleasant friendliness. Gradually the doors of
great houses had been opened to him--and he had looked in. It was to
his credit that he had only looked in. He had come away unspoilt,
uncaptured. But though he recognized that for him the world had become
wonderfully a place of amenities, he had not forgotten that as a boy
he had been forced to walk in the road; and the dust of it was still
bitter in his mouth. "For those who come after me," he had said to
himself, "it shall not be so," and he was in a hurry to set about the
change. To create peasant proprietors? There was a world of obstacles
in the way. To create tenants of the State? A single budget would
suffice. Fanshawe's scheme should be the chief item in the government
programme of next year, and Captain Rames must look to himself if he
stood firm to oppose it.
Captain Rames, on his side, had no intention to give way. He drove
away from the House that night with Cynthia, and in the carriage he
said:
"I shall put up as big a fight as I can, Cynthia, on this question."
"Against Mr. Devenish?"
"Yes."
Cynthia was silent, and Harry Rames turned to her swiftly with a
question upon his lips. "You think it rash?" he was going to ask, but
he never did. He saw her eyes shining at him out of the darkness, and
in a low tone she said:
"You feel very strongly about it, strongly enough to risk your future.
Oh, I am so glad!"
There was a throb of joy in her voice. She was still a girl. Though
she professed to laugh at the enchanted garden of her dreams, there
was still some yearning for it at her heart. The men with ideas had
peopled it. It seemed that after all her husband, since at all costs
he meant to stand up against Mr. Devenish for an idea, must be one of
them. But a slight, almost an uneasy gesture, which Harry made,
stopped her on the threshold of a great happiness. She lay back,
chilled with disappointment.
If Harry had spoken, he would have said: "No, I don't feel strongly
about it. I don't feel about it, at all. I simply recognize that it is
my opportunity." And thus he would have spoken before their marriage,
perhaps, too, during the first few weeks after it. But a change had
inevitably come for both of them. The frankness which Rames had
deliberately used, so that she might know him for what he was, no
longer served. Always it had hurt Cynthia, even though she had
welcomed it. More than once he had seen her flinch from it as from a
blow. But now that they were so much together, a hint or silence had
to take its place. Blunt honesty was all very well twice a week or so,
but repeated every hour, it bruised too heavily. So, too, with
Cynthia. Her business as a wife was to help, not chide. Their year of
marriage had taught them the little diplomacies and managements which
made life together possible for them. Frankness was to save them--so
they had planned. What was saving them was reticence.
This time, however, Cynthia was told the truth by her husband's
gesture. He was going to follow the old historic, dangerous road, the
road of the third parties, the short cut to power which has lured so
many ambitious men to disappointment, and advanced a very few before
their time. And he had chosen William Devenish to tilt against, a man
supple and quick in debate, sharp of tongue, with a gift of ridicule
and a wealth of language; a speaker who hit with a nice discrimination
just above the belt in the House, and just a little bit lower outside
of it. To Cynthia it seemed that Harry must be gambling on his
success; that he had cast his prudence from him like a cloak. Harry
Rames answered some part of her thought.
"It's not so mad as it appears to be," he said. "In the first place
the question of tenancy against ownership is an open one. You are not
breaking away from your party whatever view you take. You may be
breaking away from a minister, but that's a different thing."
Cynthia's fears were assuaged. In her relief she turned eagerly to
Rames.
"But your minister is Mr. Devenish," she cried.
"I know," he returned. "A hard fighter. All the more gain then, if I
can stand square to him, and remain standing. Besides, Devenish has a
peculiar weakness."
"Yes?" cried Cynthia. "You can make use of it?" and she stopped,
wondering at herself. She was startled to realize that for the first
time she herself was keeping his eyes from lifting to the high path
above.
"I have noticed it," Rames continued. "He can stand any amount of
opposition from his opponents. If he gets heated, he remains master of
his wit and tongue. But he cannot endure criticism from the benches
behind him. It strikes some hidden string of arrogance in him. He
loses his control. He says foolish things. He hands himself over a
victim, if his critic has courage and skill enough to use his chance."
"I see," said Cynthia. "And the third point?"
"Oh," said Harry carelessly. "The question is an important one for the
country. It must provoke discussion. Yes, I shall move the rejection
of Fanshawe's bill if I get the chance."
He put down on the notice paper, with some twenty members on the
opposition side, a motion for rejection. He rose on the Friday,
immediately after Fanshawe had sat down, and was called upon by the
Speaker. He was content with two objections. But either of them, if
established, was fatal to the bill. He argued against the small
holding, which he regarded as the pastime of the well-to-do tradesman
in the neighboring town, rather than as a serious method of settling a
genuine peasantry on the land; and he pleaded for the farm of sixty or
seventy acres. It is a matter nowadays of ancient dispute, yet he
managed to say a new thing about it, not parading his knowledge--for
there were too many in that House who had made land the study of their
lives--but suggesting it with a deference, which took his audience.
The great farm, he maintained, was a modern product, due to quite
other causes than natural development. It came from the vanity of the
eighteenth century, its love of spaciousness and show. The monstrous
porticoed houses and the huge farms were the symbols of its parade.
But in the seventeenth century, when agriculture really prospered, the
small farm of seventy acres was the rule. It was at a return to this
condition that policy and legislation ought to aim.
He passed to his second argument. Tenancy under the State was bad. For
the State was a hard landlord, and could be nothing else. It took no
account of bad seasons or the shortness of money. It had to collect
its revenues and rents within the year. Moreover, the idea was petty
in its conception. (Here Mr. Devenish turned an outraged head toward
the orator.) Legislation should aim at something beyond the immediate
benefit it conferred. Otherwise let them commit the fortunes of the
country to a parish council, and themselves go home.
"There is to my mind one question by which all legislation can be
tested," said Rames, "and that question is not: 'Does it supply an
immediate need?' but 'Does it help to strengthen the character of the
race?'"
The bill failed according to that test. For it meant no more than the
substitution of one landlord for another, and left the tenant pretty
much where he was. If Mr. Fanshawe had taken a bold course and
produced a just measure, with the object of creating owners, then the
bill would not have failed. For the desire to possess land was the
surest sign of a sound and healthy race. It was that desire in men
which good legislation would try to keep alive. This bill merely
fobbed them off with a miserable makeshift, and shut the door against
ownership. Ownership with its obligations and its responsibility, and
its response to the most primal and most durable of all ambitions, was
the only policy worthy of a great Parliament.
Mr. Devenish replied later in the afternoon, and quite briefly, He did
not, he said, propose to enter into the discussion, but simply to
state the intention of the government. It would give the bill a second
reading, accepting thus the two principles of small holdings and
tenancies under the State; and next year it would introduce a measure
of its own, based upon those principles, and press it through until it
was placed upon the statute-book. Mr. Devenish studiously refrained
from any reference to Captain Rames, and as soon as he sat down, the
hands of the clock then pointing within a minute of five, Mr. Fanshawe
moved the closure, and the Speaker accepted the motion. The closure
was accepted without a division, and the main question was put.
In the interval, while the division bells were ringing, a slim,
middle-aged man, with a moustache which was beginning to grow gray,
and a handsome, ineffective face, passed into the House from the
lobby, and took a seat on the bench by Rames's side.
"What are you going to do, Rames?" he asked.
"Vote as I spoke," said Harry.
"Then I'll go with you," said his companion. "I didn't hear your
speech, or indeed anything of the debate. But I am sure Devenish is
wrong."
Harry Rames laughed.
"That sounds like a good working rule. Thank you, Brook. Let us go and
vote."
The two men, alone of their party, strolled into the opposition lobby,
and that was the beginning of the great cave. It was a Friday
afternoon in summer, the weather was very hot, the House very thin and
Mr. Devenish and his under-secretary the only men present on the
treasury bench. No one paid any attention to the revolt; the
newspapers next day had the briefest reports of the debate. Cynthia
herself, who had come to the House to listen to a fierce and tingling
discussion, was disappointed at the gentle apathy which overlay the
proceedings of that afternoon.
But Harry said: "Wait a little, Cynthia"; and Mr. Brook, who from that
time began to drop in frequently at their house in Curzon Street,
chuckled like a man with secret knowledge.
"Eight men on our side," Harry explained, "had met several times in
one of the committee rooms before Friday, to decide what course they
should take to resist this bill. I did not know of their meetings at
the time, and they agreed to do nothing until they were sure of the
line the government was going to take. Had they suspected that I was
going to move the rejection of the bill, they would have attended and
voted with me."