1
THE dark and undefined cloud which had fallen upon the reception seemed to have overshadowed the Treasury as well. The Speaker had precipitately driven thither, taking Henry Watkins with him in the carriage and not waiting for Jeremy, who reached the door only in time to see that he must follow on foot. The Speaker’s unexpected return, coupled with the unusual expression on his face and perhaps some rumor already set afloat, had unsettled the household. When Jeremy arrived he found the clerks and even the servants, together with the attendants of the Lady Burney and the Lady Eva, standing about in little groups in the entrance-hall. They were talking among themselves in low voices, and they all raised their eyes questioningly to his as he passed by. There was a universal atmosphere of confusion and alarm.
At the door which led from the entrance-hall towards the Speaker’s room, Jeremy paused disconsolately, uncertain what he ought to do. The Speaker had asked for his help, but had not stayed for him. Perhaps he ought to go to the Speaker; but he was unwilling to intrude into what seemed to be a council of the first importance. His doubts were relieved by a servant, who came anxiously searching among the loiterers and appeared relieved when he caught sight of Jeremy.
“Here you are, sir!” he said. “The Speaker has been asking for you ever since he came back. Will you please go to his room at once?” Jeremy’s sense of a moment of crisis was by no means lessened as he threaded the dark, empty corridors of the private wing.
When he entered he found himself unnoticed, and had a few seconds in which to distinguish the members of the little group clustered at the other end of the room. The Speaker was standing motionless, with his eyes turned upwards to the ceiling, in an attitude apparently indicating complete unconcern. Yet, to Jeremy he seemed to be controlling himself by an enormous effort of will, while his whole body quivered with suppressed excitement. Below him and, to the eye, dominated by him, five men sat around a table. Jeremy saw at once the Canadian and Henry Watkins and another chief notable, named John Hammond, with whom he was slightly acquainted. The others had their backs to him; but their backs were unfamiliar, somehow out of place, with something uneasy and hostile in the set of their shoulders. As he came into the room, Henry Watkins was leaning forward to one of these strangers and saying earnestly:
“I want to make certain that we understand what this sentence means.” He tapped a paper in front of him as he spoke.
“T’ letter meaans what it saays,” the stranger replied gruffly. His words and the broad, rasping accent in which they were spoken came to Jeremy as a shock, as something incomprehensibly foreign to what he had expected. His colleague nodded vigorously, and signified his agreement in a sound between a mutter and a growl.
“Yes,” Henry Watkins began again patiently; “but what I want to know——”
The Speaker suddenly forsook his rigid posture, with the effect of a storm let loose, and, striding to the table, struck it violently with his fist. It seemed as if the last fetter of his restraint had given way without warning.
“That’s no matter,” he cried hoarsely. “What I want to know is this: if I make another offer, will you take it back to your master?”
The stranger squared his shoulders and thrust his chin forward with an air of dogged ferocity. “We caame to get yes or noa,” he answered in a deep grumbling voice. “T’ letter saays soa.”
Henry Watkins started at this outburst in the negotiations and looked around him with an appearance of fright. In doing this he caught sight of Jeremy hesitating by the door, and whispered a word to the Speaker, who cried out, without moderating the violence of his tone: “There you are! Come here now, I want you.” And turning again to the strangers, he added, with an odd note of triumph: “This is Jeremy Tuft. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”
The strangers, who had not yet noticed Jeremy’s arrival, slewed around together and stared at him; and one of them said: “Oh, ay, we’ve heerd on him, reet enough.” The others at the table stared too, while Jeremy reluctantly advanced. But before he could speak, Henry Watkins sprang up and murmured importunately in the Speaker’s ear. Jeremy could catch the words:
“Talk privately ... before we decide....”
“Very well,” said the Speaker roughly, aloud. “Have it your own way. But I won’t change my mind.”
Henry Watkins returned to the table and addressed the strangers suavely: “The Speaker will give you his answer in a very short time,” he said. “Will you be so good as to withdraw while he considers it?” And, when they had uncouthly assented, he conducted them to the door, showed them into an ante-room, and returned, his face full of anxiety.
Jeremy stood apart in a condition of great discomfort. He realized that he was regarded by all, save the Speaker, as an intruder, the reason for whose presence none could conjecture. He was not relieved by the dubious glance which Henry Watkins threw at him before he began to speak. But the Speaker made no sign, and the anxious counselor proceeded, with an air of distraction and flurry.
“Think, sir,” he pleaded, “before you refuse. It is so grave a thing to begin again—after a hundred years. And who can tell what the end of it may be? We know that they are formidable——”
“All this is nonsense to Jeremy Tuft,” the Speaker interrupted harshly. “We must tell him what the matter is before we go any further.” Henry Watkins, with a movement of his hands, plainly expressed his opinion that there was no good reason why it should not all remain nonsense to Jeremy; and Jeremy felt slightly less at ease than before.
But the Speaker had begun to explain, with the sharp jerkiness of impatience in his voice: “We’ve had a message from the people up north. Perhaps you could see for yourself what sort of men they are. They are very unlike any one you have ever met here—rough, fierce, quarrelsome men. They have kept some of their machinery still going up there—in some of the towns they even work in factories. They have been growing more and more unlike us for a hundred years, and now the end has come—they want to force a quarrel on us. Do you understand?”
Jeremy replied that he did, and thought that he was beginning to understand a great deal besides.
“Well, then,” the Speaker went on, growing a little calmer, “I told you when first we met that we were standing on the edge of a precipice. Now these are the people that want to throw us over. The chief of them, the Chairman of Bradford, has sent me a message. I won’t explain the details to you. It comes to this, that in future he proposes to collect the taxes in his district, not for me, but for himself. I must say he very kindly offers to send me a contribution for the upkeep of the railways. But he wants a plain yes or no at once; and if we say no, then it means WAR!” In the last sentence his voice had begun to run upwards: he pronounced the final word in a sudden startling shout, and then stood silent for a moment, his eyes burning fiercely. When he continued, it was in a quieter and more reasonable tone. “There has been no fighting in this country since the end of the Troubles, a hundred years or so ago. A brawl here and there, a fight with criminals or discontented laborers—I don’t say; but no more than enough to make our people dislike it. Of all of us here in this room, only you and Thomas Wells know what war is. Now”—and here he became persuasive and put a curious smooth emphasis on each word—“now, knowing all that you do know, what advice would you give me?”
Jeremy stood irresolute. Henry Watkins and John Hammond seemed to throw up their hands in perplexed despair, and the Canadian’s thin, supercilious smile grew a trifle wider and thinner. The Speaker waited, rocking hugely to and fro on his feet with a gentle motion.
“I think,” Jeremy began, and was disconcerted to find himself so hoarse that the words came muffled and inaudible. He cleared his throat. “I think I hardly know enough about it for my advice to be of any use. I don’t even know what troops you have.”
The Speaker made a deep booming sound in his chest, clasped his hands sharply together, and looked as though he were about to burst out again in anger. Then he abruptly regained his self-command and said: “Then you shall speak later. Henry Watkins, what do you say? Remember, we must make up our minds forever while we are talking now. It will not do to argue with them, or temporize or make them any other offer.”
Henry Watkins got up from his seat and went to the Speaker’s side as though he wished to address him confidentially. Jeremy had an impression of a long dark face, unnaturally lengthened by deep gloom, and two prominent eyes that not even the strongest emotion could make more than dully earnest.
“I beg of you, sir,” he implored, low and hurried, holding out his hands, “to attempt to argue with them, to offer them some compromise. You know very well that they are forcing this quarrel on us, because they are sure that they are the stronger, as I believe them to be. And anything, anything would be better than to begin the Troubles again!”
The Speaker surveyed him as if from an immense height. “And do you think that we can avoid the Troubles again, and worse things even than that, in any way except by defeating these people? Am I to surrender all that my grandfather and my great-grandfather won? Do you not see that they have sent us just these two men, stupider and stubborner even than the rest, so that we shall not be able to argue with them? They have been told to carry back either our yes or our no. If we do not give them a yes, they will take no by default. There is no other choice for us. What do you think, John Hammond?”
“I agree with Henry Watkins,” said the big man hastily. He had not spoken before, and seemed to do so now only with great reluctance.
“Then we need not hear your reasons. And you, Thomas Wells?”
“Why, fight,” said the Canadian promptly; and then he continued in a deliberate drawl, stretching himself a little as he spoke: “These folks are spoiling for trouble, and they’ll give you no peace until they get it. I guess your troops aren’t any good—I’ve seen some of them—but I know no way to make them so except by fighting. And besides, I’ve an idea that there’s something else you haven’t told us yet.”
Jeremy shot a suspicious glance at him, and received in return a grin that was full at once of amusement and dislike. The Speaker appeared to be balancing considerations in his mind. When he spoke again, it was in a tone more serious and deliberate than he had yet used.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “my decision remains unaltered. I shall refuse and there will be war. But Thomas Wells is right. I have had something in my thoughts that I have not yet disclosed to you. But I will tell you now what it is, because I do not wish you to lose your spirits or to be half-hearted in supporting me. Only I must command you”—he paused on the word, looked around sternly, and repeated it—“I must command you not to speak a word of it outside this room until I give you leave.” He paused again and surveyed them with the air of a man who delays his certain triumph for a moment in order the better to savor it. “Gentlemen, when our troops take the field against these rebels, they will have something that no other army in the world has got. They will have guns!”
The great announcement had come, had passed, and seemed to have failed of its effect. Silence reigned in the council. Henry Watkins shifted from one foot to the other and regarded the Speaker with gloomy intentness. Then Thomas Wells broke the hush, with a faint tone of disappointment in his voice:
“Is that it? Well, I don’t know how that will work out. I thought that perhaps you had got some of the bosses up there in your pay.”
Henry Watkins was as silent as his companion, bewildered, disturbed, apprehensive. But the Speaker continued, his air of jubilation increasing rather than diminishing.
“And not only have we guns, but we have also a trained artilleryman to handle them. Jeremy Tuft, I must tell you, fought in the artillery in the great war against the Germans before the Troubles began. And now, Jeremy Tuft, let us hear your opinion, remembering that we have guns and they have none. Do you think we should fight or surrender?”
Jeremy was hard put to it not to give way physically before the old man’s blazing and menacing stare. His mind scurried hastily through half a hundred points of doubt. How could he know, when he had been in this world no more than a few weeks? And yet it seemed pretty clear, from what he had heard, that the soldiers from Yorkshire would be better than those that the Speaker had at his disposal. He could see only too plainly that the Speaker was trusting to the guns to work a miracle for him. He remembered that the guns were only just finished, had not been tested, that no gun-crew to fight them had yet been trained or even thought of. He had a sick feeling that an intolerable responsibility rested on him, that he must explain how much the effect of two guns in an infantry battle would depend on luck. He remembered that time at Arras, when they had got properly caught in the enemy’s counter-battery work, and he had sat in his dug-out, meditating on the people, whoever they were, that had started the war, and wondering how human beings could be so diabolical.... He woke abruptly from this train of thought as he raised his eyes and saw the Speaker still regarding him with that terrible, that numbing stare. His strength gave way. He stammered weakly:
“Of course, the guns would make a great difference....”
The Speaker caught up his words. “They would make just the difference we need. That is why I have made up my mind to fight now. Let those two men come in again.”
There was dead silence in the room for a moment, and Jeremy was aware of the progress of a breathless spiritual conflict. He could feel his own inarticulate doubts, the timidity of Watkins and Hammond, the cynical indifference of the Canadian, hanging, like dogs around the neck of a bull, on the old man’s fanatical determination. Then something impalpable seemed to snap: it was as though the bull had shaken himself free. Without uttering a sound, Henry Watkins went to the door of the ante-room and held it open. The two envoys from the north again appeared. They seemed unwilling to come more than a pace into the room; perhaps they thought it unnecessary since they wished to hear only a single word.
The Speaker was as anxious as they to be brief. “I refuse,” he said with great mildness.
“That’s t’ aanswer, then?” asked the first envoy with a kind of surly satisfaction.
“That’s t’ aanswer. Coom on,” his companion said, before any one else could reply.
“Good daay to you then, sirs,” the first muttered phlegmatically; and with stumping strides they lumbered to the door. Henry Watkins hurried after them to find a servant to bring them their horses.