1
THE Speaker’s reception was a gorgeous and tedious assembly, held in the afternoon for the better convenience of a society which had but indifferent resources in the way of artificial light. A great hall in the Treasury had been prepared for it; and here the “big men,” and their wives and sons and daughters, showed themselves, paid their respects to the Speaker and to the Lady Burney, paraded a little, gathered into groups for conversation, at last took their leave.
Jeremy walked through the crowd at the Speaker’s elbow and was presented by him to the most important of the guests. This was a mark of favor, of recognition, almost of adoption. He had at first been afraid of it and had wished to avoid it. But the Speaker’s determination was unalterable.
“If it were nothing more,” he said, with a contemptuous smile on his heavy but mobile mouth, “I shall be giving them pleasure by exhibiting you. You are a show, a curiosity to them. They are all longing to see you—once.... Only you and I know that you are something more. And to know it pleases me; I hope it pleases you.”
This explanation hardly reconciled Jeremy to the ordeal; but the Speaker had easily overborne his reluctance. They walked through the room together, a couple strangely unlike; and the old man showed towards the younger all the tenderness, all the proud complaisances of a father to a son.
From this post of vantage Jeremy could at least see all that was to be seen. The assembly seemed to be gay and animated. The men wore the dress of ceremony, the latter-day version of evening dress; and some of them, especially the more youthful, were daring in the colors of their coats and in the bravado of lace at throat and breast and wrist. The women wore more elaborate forms of the gown of every day, simply cut in straight lines, descending to the heel and tortuously ornamented with embroideries in violent colors. Jeremy saw one stout matron who was covered from neck to shoes in a pattern of blowsy roses and fat yellow butterflies, like a wall-paper of the nineteenth century, another whose embroidery took the shape of zigzag stripes of crimson, blue and green, adjoining on the bodice, separated on the skirt.
But he was impressed by a certain effect of good breeding which their behavior produced and which contradicted his first opinion, based on the strangeness of their dress. They nodded to him (for the shaking of hands had gone quite out of fashion), stared at him a little, asked a colorless question or two, murmured politely on his reply, and drifted away from him. Where he expected crudity and vulgarity, he found a prevailing vagueness, tepidity, indifference, almost fatigue.... He was forced to conclude that the flamboyancy of their appearance was mild to themselves, that they had no wish to appear startling, and did so only as the result of a universal lack of taste.
He moved among them, steadfastly following the Speaker, but feeling tired and stiff and inert. His limbs ached with unaccustomed labor, his left hand was torn and bandaged, and he had still in his nostrils the thick, greasy smell of the workshops in which he had spent the morning. Here, after his first shock of surprise at the sight of the guns, he had soon understood that he was expected to do much more than admire and approve. These, the Speaker said, were by no means his first experiments in the art of gun-casting. And, after that, the old man had recounted to Jeremy, assisted by occasional uncouth ejaculations from the aged foreman of that amazing gang of centenarians, a story that had been nothing less than stupefying.
The last men in whose fading minds some glimmer of the art still remained had been gathered together, at the cost of infinite trouble, from the districts where machinery was still most in use, chiefly from Scotland, Yorkshire, and Wales. They had been brought thither on the pretense that their experience was needed in the central repairing-shops of the railways; and apparently it had been necessary in all possible ways to deceive and to reassure the principal men of their native districts. Once they had been obtained, they had slaved for years with senile docility to satisfy the demands which the Speaker’s senile and half-lunatic enthusiasm made on their disappearing knowledge. Somehow he had created in them a queer pride, a queer spirit of endeavor. That grotesque chorus of ancients had become inspired with a single anxiety, to create before they perished a gun which could be fired without instantly destroying those who fired it.
They had had trouble with the breech mechanism, the Speaker nonchalantly remarked; and Jeremy had a vision of men blown to pieces in the remote and lonely valley where the first guns were tried. The immediate purpose for which Jeremy’s help was required was the adjustment of the process of cutting the interrupted screw-thread by which the breech-block was locked into the gun. He had toiled at it all the morning, surrounded by jumping and antic old men, whose speech he could hardly understand and to whom he could only with the greatest exertion communicate his own opinions. He had wrestled with, and tugged at, antiquated and dilapidated machinery, had cursed and sworn, had given himself a great cut on the palm of his left hand and had descended almost to the level of his ridiculous fellow-workers. And yet, when he had finished, the difficult screw-thread was in a fair way to be properly cut.
He came hot from these nightmare experiences to the Speaker’s reception; and when he looked round and contrasted the one scene with the other, he had a sense of phantasmagoria that made him feel dizzy. It was almost too much for his reason ... on top of a transition that would have overbalanced most normal men.... He was recalled from his bewildering reflections by the Speaker’s voice, low and grumbling in his ear.
They had drifted for a moment away from the thickest of the crowd into a corner of the room, and the old man was able to speak without fear of being overheard. “It is as I have noticed for years,” he said, “but it gets worse and worse. These are only from the south.”
Jeremy started and replied a little at random: “Only from the south...?”
“Listen carefully to all I say to you. It is all useful. These people here are only from the south, from Essex, like that young Roger Vaile, and Kent and Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire. The big men from the north and west come every year less often to the Treasury. And yet these fools hardly notice it, and would see nothing remarkable in it if they did.”
“You mean ...” Jeremy began. But before he could get farther he saw the Speaker turn aside with a smile of obvious falsity and exaggerated sweetness. The sinister little person, whom Jeremy knew from a distance as “the Canadian,” was approaching them with a characteristically arrogant step and bearing.
The Speaker made them known to one another in a manner that barely concealed a certain uneasiness and unrest. “Thomas Wells,” he explained in a loud and formal voice, “is the son of one of the chief of the Canadian Bosses, whom we reckon among our subjects and who by courtesy allow themselves to be described as such. But I reckon it as an honor to have Thomas Wells, the son of George Wells, for my guest in the Treasury.”
“That’s so,” said the Canadian gravely, without making it quite clear which part of the Speaker’s remark he thus corroborated. Then he stared keenly at Jeremy, apparently controlling a strong instinct of discomfort and dislike by an effort of will. Jeremy returned the stare inimically.
“I believe we have met before,” he suggested, not without a little malice.
“That’s so,” the Canadian agreed; and as he spoke he sketched the sign of the cross in an unobtrusive manner that made it appear as though it might have been a chance movement of his hand. The Speaker hung over them with evident anxiety, and at last said:
“You two are both strangers to this country. You ought to be able to compare your impressions.”
“I would much rather hear something about Canada,” Jeremy answered.
Thomas Wells shrugged his shoulders. “It isn’t like this country,” he said carelessly. “We can’t be as easy-going as the people are here. We have to fight—but we do fight and win,” he concluded, momentarily baring his teeth in a savage grin.
“The Canadians, as every one knows, are the best soldiers in the world,” the Speaker interpolated. “They are always fighting.”
“And whom do you fight?” Jeremy asked.
“Oh, anybody.... You see, the people to the south of us are always quarreling among themselves, and we chip in. And then sometimes we send armies down to Mexico or the Isthmus.”
“But the people to the south ...” Jeremy began. “Haven’t you still got the United States to the south of you? And I should have thought they’d be too many for you?”
“There are no United States now—I’ve heard of them.” Thomas Wells’s dislike of Jeremy seemed to have been overcome by a swelling impulse of boastfulness. “From what I can make out, they never did get their people in hand as we did. They’ve always been disturbed. Their leaders don’t last long, and they fight one another. And we’re always growing in numbers and getting harder, while they get fewer and softer. Why, they’re easy fruit!”
Jeremy could find nothing for this but polite and impressed assent. Thomas Wells allowed his lean face to be split by a startling grin and went on: “I suppose you’ve never heard of me? No! Well, I’m not like these people here. I was brought up to fight. My dad fought his way to the top. His dad was a small man, out Edmonton way, with not more than two or three thousand bayonets. But he kept at it, and now none of the Bosses in Canada are bigger than we are. It was me that led the raid on Boston when I was only twenty.”
Jeremy turned aside from the last announcement with a feeling of disgust. He thought that Thomas Wells looked like some small blood-thirsty animal, a ferret or a stoat, with pale burning eyes and thin stretched mouth that sought the throat of a living creature. He was saved from the necessity for an answer by the Canadian turning sharply on his heel, as though something had touched a spring in his body. Jeremy followed the movement with his eyes and saw the Lady Eva making her way towards them through the crowd.
Thomas Wells went to meet her with an air of exaggerated gallantry, and murmured something with his bow. She seemed to be to-day in a mood of modest behavior, for she received his salutation with downcast eyes and no more than a movement of the lips. As he watched them Jeremy again became aware of the Speaker standing beside him, whom he had for a moment forgotten. He stole a look at the old man and saw that his brow was troubled and that, though his hands were clasped behind his back in an apparently careless attitude, the fingers were clenched and the knuckles white. As he registered these impressions, the Lady Eva, still with downward glance, sailed past Thomas Wells and approached him. When he saw her intention, a faint disturbance sprang up in his heart and interfered with his breathing.
She had already halted beside him when he realized that now, in the presence of this company, her deportment being what it was, he must make the first speech. He stuttered awkwardly and said: “I have been hoping to see you again.”
She raised her eyes a trifle, and he fancied that he saw the shadow of a smile in the corners of her mouth. Her reply was pitched in so low a tone as to be at first incomprehensible, and there followed a moment of emptiness before he realized that she had said, “You have been with Roger Vaile.”
He interpreted it as in some sort of a reproach, and was about to protest when he saw the Speaker frowning at him. He did not understand the frown, but he moderated his vehemence. “I have been learning,” he said in level tones. “I have been learning a great deal.” And then he added more quietly, “Not but what you could teach me much more.”
At this she raised her head and laughed frankly; and he, looking up too, saw that the Speaker had drawn Thomas Wells away and that the backs of both were disappearing in the throng. A strange, uncomfortable sense of an intrigue, which he could not understand, oppressed him. He glared suspiciously at the girl, but read nothing more than mischief and merriment in her face.
“I was well scolded the last time I spoke to you,” she said, “but I have behaved well this time, haven’t I?”
Exhilaration chased all his doubts away. He gazed at her openly, took in the wide eyes, the straight nose, the sensitive mouth, the healthy skin. Then he tried to pull himself together, to recover a dry, sane consciousness of his situation. It was absurd, he told himself—at his age!—to be unsettled by a conversation with a beautiful girl who might have been, if he had had any, one of his remote descendants. He felt unaccountably like a man glissading on the smooth, steep slope of a hill. Of course, he would in a moment be able to catch hold of a tuft of grass, to steady himself by digging his heels into the ground.... But meanwhile the Lady Eva was looking at him.
“What do you think I could teach you?” she asked.
“I know so little,” he answered haphazard. “I know nothing about any of the people here. I suppose you know them all?”
“They are the big men and their wives. What can I tell you about them?”
“What do you think of them yourself?”
She eyed him a little askance, doubtful but almost laughing. “What would you think ... what would they think—if I were to tell you that?”
“But they will never know,” he urged, in a tone of ridiculously serious entreaty.
“Don’t you know that I am already considered a little ... strange? I don’t think I could tell you anything about our society that would be any use to you. My mother tells me every day that I don’t know how to behave myself; and I daresay all these people would say the same.”
“But why?”
“Oh, I don’t know....” She half swung round, tapped the floor with her heel and returned to him, grown almost grave. “I hate the ... the ... the easiness of everybody. They all stroll through life, and the women do nothing and behave modestly—they’re not alive. I suppose I am like my father. He is odd too.”
“But I am like him,” Jeremy said earnestly. “If you are like him, then I must be like you. But I don’t know enough to be sure how different every one else is. They seem very amiable, very gentle....”
“I hate their gentleness,” she began in a louder tone. But instead of going on, she dropped her eyes to the ground and stood silent. Jeremy, perplexed for a minute, suddenly became aware of the Lady Burney beside them, an expression of dull disapproval on her brilliantly carmined face. He had the presence of mind to bow to her very respectfully.
“I am glad to see you again, Jeremy Tuft,” she said with a heavy and undeceiving graciousness. As she spoke she edged herself between him and the Lady Eva; and Jeremy could quite plainly see her motioning her daughter away with a gesture that she only affected to conceal. He strove to keep an expression of annoyance from his face and answered as enthusiastically as he could. She spoke a few more listless sentences with an air of fighting a rearguard action. When she left him he sought through the room for the Lady Eva, disregarding all who tried to accost him; but he could not come at her again.