2
Roger Vaile was divided between disappointment and pride at Jeremy’s favor with the Speaker, and expressed both feelings with the same equability of demeanor.
“I hope I shall see you again some time,” he said; “but the Speaker has always disliked me.”
Jeremy experienced an acute discomfort and sought to relieve himself by replying with warmth, “But you saved my life. I told him that you did.”
Roger shook his head and smiled. “Of course he took no more notice of that than I do. After all, it is rather absurd, isn’t it? I merely happened to be the first man that saw you. But I liked looking after you, and I should be sorry if I never saw you again. And so would my uncle.”
At the mention of the priest contrition assailed Jeremy. He had a vision of the old man desiring information about the twentieth century and not receiving it. Roger saw what was passing through his mind and again shook his head slightly.
“The Speaker thinks my uncle an old fool,” he went on reflectively, “and from some points of view he’s right. And he thinks me a young fool, which I shouldn’t presume to dispute. For that matter he thinks most people are fools. And the Lady Burney thinks I am a good-for-nothing young scoundrel—but she has her own reasons for that.”
“And what does the Lady Eva think of you?” Jeremy asked curiously.
“Oh, the Lady Eva’s a wonder!” Roger said with more fervor than he usually displayed. “She’s not like any one else alive. Why, do you know the other day, when she was out riding with her groom she beckoned to me and made me ride with her for ten minutes while I told her all about you.”
Jeremy supposed that this must be unusually daring conduct for a young girl of the twenty-first century, and he acknowledged the impression it made on him by nodding his head two or three times.
“That’s the chief reason why the Lady Burney hates me,” Roger continued, a slight warmth still charging his voice. “But she doesn’t understand her own daughter. The Lady Eva takes no particular interest in me. She merely can’t bear being cooped up, like other girls, and not being able to talk to any one she wants to. And because I’ve gone to her once or twice when she has called to me, they think there’s something between us. But there isn’t: I wish there were.”
Jeremy regarded with admiration this moderate and gentle display of passion. “But whom will she marry?” he ventured, feeling himself a little disturbed by his own question as soon as it was uttered.
“I believe the Lady Burney would like her to marry that horrible Canadian. And her father would marry her to any one if he saw his profit in it. It’s lucky for her that the Chairman of Bradford is married already.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He’s the biggest man of the North and one of the men, so they say, that the Speaker is most afraid of. There’s some kind of dispute going on between them now. But it’s all nonsense,” Roger concluded indifferently. “There’s really nothing for them to quarrel about and nothing will come of it. But the Speaker always does excite himself about nothing and always has. He’s a very strange old man; and the Lady Eva is like him in some ways. And then there’s that Canadian.... You will find yourself among a queer lot: I own that I don’t understand them.”
But in spite of Roger’s wishes and Jeremy’s protestations their meetings were, for some time after this conversation, casual and infrequent. The Speaker, as he grimly said, had a use for Jeremy, and was determined to see it accomplished. Day after day they went together to the guarded and mysterious workshop behind Waterloo Station. There, day after day, Jeremy painfully revived his rusty knowledge of mechanics, and, himself driven by the Speaker, drove the gang of old men to feats of astonishing skill.
He was astonished at the outset to see what they had actually done. To have made two rifled, wire-wound guns, with their failing wits and muscles and with the crazy museum of machinery which they showed him, had been truly an amazing performance. He learnt later that this was the eleventh pair that had been cast in fifteen years, and the first since they had mastered the art of properly shrinking on the case. They were still in difficulties with the screw-thread inside the gun that locked the breech-block; and as he set them time and time again at the task of remedying this or that fault in their workmanship, he understood why they had taken so long and why so many guns had blown up. What he could not understand was the Speaker’s indomitable persistence in this fantastic undertaking, which, but for his own arrival in the world, might have taken fifteen years more and outlasted all the old men concerned in it.
But while he slaved, sweating and harassed, sometimes despairing because of a scrap of knowledge that evaded his memory or because of the absence of some machine that would have ensured accurate working, the Speaker hovered round him and, little by little, in long harangues and confessions, laid bare the main-springs of his nature. These extraordinary scenes lasted in Jeremy’s mind, moved before his eyes, echoed in his ears, when he had left the shed, when he sat at dinner or in the darkness when he was trying to sleep, until he found that he was gradually being infected with a dogged, unreasoning enthusiasm like that of his dotard fellow-workers. He even felt a little ashamed of himself for succumbing to the fanatical influence of an insane old Jew.
But the Speaker would stand at his elbow, when he was adjusting a decrepit lathe that ought to have been long ago on the scrap-heap, and rhapsodize endlessly in his thick muttering voice that rose sometimes to a shout, accompanied by lifted hands and flashing eyes.
“I was born too late,” he would cry, “and I should perhaps have given up hope if I had not found you. But you and I, when this task is done, will regenerate the kingdom. How long I have labored and these easy-going fools have not once helped me or understood me! But now our triumph begins—when the guns are made.”
Jeremy, standing up to ease his back and wiping his hands on an oily rag, would reflect that if it took so long to cut a screw-thread correctly, the regeneration of the whole kingdom was likely to be a pretty considerable task. Besides, when he was away from the Speaker or when his absorption in the machinery removed him from that formidable influence, his thoughts took a wider cast. He was sometimes far from sure that a regeneration which began by the manufacture of heavy artillery was likely to be a process of which he could wholly approve. He found this age sufficiently agreeable not to wish to change it.
It was true that innumerable conveniences had gone. But on the other hand most of the people seemed to be reasonably contented, and no one was ever in a hurry. The Speaker, Jeremy often thought, was principally bent on regenerating those vices of which the world had managed to cure itself. The trains were few and uncertain, and, from the universal decay of mechanical knowledge, were bound in time to cease altogether; but England, so far as Jeremy could see, would get on very well without any trains at all. There was no telephone; but that was in many ways a blessing. There was no electric light, except here and there, notably, so he learnt, in some of the Cotswold towns, which were again flourishing under the rule of the wool-merchants and where it was provided by water-power to illuminate their great new houses. But it was certainly possible to regard candles and lamps as more beautiful. The streets were dark at night and not oversafe; but no man went out unarmed or alone after sunset, and actual violence was rare. Jeremy was anxious to see what the countryside looked like, when the Speaker would allow him a tour out of London. He gathered that it was richer and more prosperous than he had known it, and that the small country town had come again into its own. He learnt with joy that the wounds made by the bricks and mortar of the great manufacturing cities had, save in isolated places, in parts of Yorkshire and Wales, long been healed by the green touch of time. He formed for himself a pleasant picture of the new England, and, when his mind was his own, he shrank from disturbing it.
But when the Speaker, with mad eyes and clawing gestures, muttered beside him, he turned again with an almost equal fanaticism to the hopeless business of restoring all that was gone and that was better gone. And, under this slave-driver’s eye, he had little time for anything else. Even at night they generally dined alone together in the Speaker’s own room; and Jeremy, drugged and stupefied with fatigue, sat silent while the old man continued his unflagging monologue. And every day his enthusiasm grew greater, his demands for haste more frequent and more urgent. Only never, in all the ramblings of his speech, did he once betray the use he intended to make of the guns, the reason for his urgency.
Jeremy looked out from this existence and saw a resting world in which he alone must labor. The strain began to tell on his nerves; and he sometimes complained weakly to himself that the nightmare, into which he had awakened, endured and seemed to have established itself as a permanency. He had none save fleeting opportunities of seeing the Lady Eva. On the few occasions when they met it had been in the presence of the Lady Burney; and the girl had conducted herself with silent, almost too perfect, propriety. Jeremy, much too tired and harassed to think out anything clearly, concluded that circumstances had, once again in his life, taken the wrong turn and that his luck was out.
One morning, about three weeks after his first visit to the workshop, he succeeded for the first time in fitting the already completed breech-block into the gun and satisfied himself that the delicate mechanism, though it left much to be desired and would not last very long, would do well enough. He looked up wearily from this triumph and saw the old gnomes, his colleagues, grotesquely working all around him. Gradually, as he became convinced of the Speaker’s insanity, these uncouth creatures had grown more human and individual in his eyes and less like a chorus in one of Maeterlinck’s plays. He had not been busy all the time with that infernal screw-thread. He had looked now and then into a smaller shed close by, where in the most primitive manner and with an appalling disregard of safety, an aged workman occupied himself with the production of explosives. This man was a little more intelligent than the rest, and had studied with devotion a marvelous collection of old and rapidly disintegrating handbooks on his subject. He was a small and skinny creature, with an alert manner and a curious skipping walk; and Jeremy had got used to seeing the hatchet face bobbing towards him with demands for help.
Now, as he rested for a moment, there was a noise that penetrated even his dulled consciousness; and, as he started up in alarm, Hatchet-face skipped in, bursting with inarticulate excitement. It appeared, when he was able to speak, that he had just missed blowing off his left hand with the first detonator to function in an entirely satisfactory way; and, while one of his fellows bandaged his hurts, he continued to rejoice, showing a praiseworthy absence of self-concern. The hubbub attracted the Speaker, who was not far away; and when he arrived he learnt with delight of its cause. Jeremy capped this news with his of the breech-lock; and for a moment the old man’s terrifying countenance was lit up with a wholly human and simple happiness. Then he announced that they would not attend at the workshop that afternoon. Jeremy, from the bench on which he had laxly subsided, remarked that they deserved a holiday.
“It is not that,” said the Speaker, frowning again. “It is a reception to which I must go, an affair of ceremony, and I wish you to come with me. There will be some kind of a show.”
Jeremy was not sure what significance this variable word might by now have acquired, and he did not much care. He looked forward to an afternoon’s relaxation. He was thankful for so much; but he wondered at the back of his mind what the Speaker would want to start on now that the guns were nearly finished.