CHAPTER 12.
A light but insistent tapping put an end to Dilling’s reflections.
“Come in!” he called, impatiently, and turned towards the window as if intent upon the landscape.
There was a slight pause, and then, like a well-timed bit of stage business, a woman stood framed in the open door.
Dilling appreciated the dramatic note even while he resented it. On general principles he despised the theatrical.
“Oh, I am lucky!” cried his visitor, in a well-disciplined contralto. “I scarcely dared hope to find you alone. Every atom of courage I possessed oozed out of my finger-tips at the thought of interrupting a secret caucus, or some other of the dark conspiracies that are supposed to occupy our Members’ time!”
She advanced and extended an ungloved hand. Dilling touched her fingers without speaking.
“My name is Hebe Barrington,” she went on, “Mrs. Arthur, on my calling cards, you know . . . and I’m here on a desperately serious mission. Its success means everything to me, and you, yourself, Mr. Dilling, have buoyed me up with the hope that I shall not fail.”
She shifted her position slightly, contriving to draw her skirt close about her long, slender limbs like a sheath.
But Dilling was not looking. He had taken a penknife from his pocket, and was giving First Aid to an untutored finger-nail.
“How shall I begin?” she went on, watching him from beneath her lashes. It was one of her prettiest gestures.
“Perhaps, if you made some notes and sent them to me—”
“Oh, please!” she protested. “That’s heartless of you. And do sit down! I can’t think while you wear that ‘Time’s up’ expression. It drives every idea from my head. I tell you frankly, Mr. Dilling, I expected you would be much more kind.”
She flung him a smile that had dazzled many another man. Dilling received it with indifference, in a wholly unprecedented manner. Mrs. Barrington found the experience somewhat disconcerting.
In his expression there was no appreciation of her loveliness. Neither was there the disapproval that betokens a recognition of it, or a sign of that wariness by which man betrays his knowledge of its danger. There was nothing.
In the abstract, Dilling saw men as trees, walking, but women he saw scarcely at all. Emotionally, he was vestigial. Artistically, he was numb. Beauty in any form registered only through his outward eye. He missed the inner vision that should have quickened his soul.
Mrs. Barrington was not an unfamiliar figure to him, although he had never been sufficiently interested to ask her name. Frequently, of late, he had seen her in the restaurant, or in the corridors, sometimes surrounded by a group of Parliamentary gallants, and sometimes in earnest tete-a-tete with just one man. If he thought of her at all, it was to conclude that like other women who haunt the House, she was engaged in the popular occupation known as lobbying, and he felt an instinctive opposition to whatever request she might be about to make.
On her part, Mrs. Barrington felt the disappointment of one who has been unexpectedly repulsed at the first line of attack, and sees the necessity for finer strategy. She laid aside the ineffectual weapon of physical charm, and took up the subtler blade of flattery.
“I have come to you,” she said, “because you are not only essentially, but so patently, sincere. Not your speeches alone, but your whole manner, proclaim it. I suppose that is a good deal to say of a politician, is it not?”
“By no means!”
“There is little evidence to the contrary! Most of them rant about a loftier patriotism, service for the public weal that knows no respite and the realisation of a higher idealism for Twentieth Century Canada, but their actual performances are not marked with the large disinterestedness they profess. You are different. Perhaps you won’t like my saying so, Mr. Dilling, but as you sit in the House, surrounded by your colleagues, yours is a noticeably solitary figure. I felt it the instant I saw you, and the impression has grown steadily stronger . . . with reason. You have brought a different element into politics, Mr. Dilling. Like Disraeli, you are on the side of the angels! You have brought what I call practical spirituality, a force that can and will defeat materialism, if—if—you do not get discouraged, and tired of struggling on, alone.”
“Aren’t you rather disheartening?”
The question was asked with such utter unconcern that Mrs. Barrington could not deceive herself into thinking she had made an impression. Had Dilling taken her seriously, or accorded her half the sincerity she professed to impute to him, he would have been unconscionably embarrassed. As matters stood, her words, like her beauty, failed to touch him. He heard them as he heard agreeable music, without annoyance, but without pleasure. It was said of him, that once, in Pinto Plains, when asked if he enjoyed piano playing he had answered, “Oh, I don’t mind it!” and he could aptly have applied the same phrase to this woman’s conversation.
He didn’t mind it! He was listening without giving particular heed to what she said. He knew that she had come to ask a favour, and he was not sufficiently amenable to feminine wiles to lose sight of the methods of a shrewd campaigner.
“I may be disheartening,” he heard her say, “but I am sincere. Would you have me pretend—tell you how popular you are, and how certain to become the idol of the people? Do you not remember that the Cæsars and Lincolns of history have been slandered and slain by their friends and compatriots, and can you hope to escape a similar fate at the hands of our people—even though despotism is not tempered with assassination here, as it was a hundred years ago in Russia?”
Dilling was conscious of a flicker of interest. It was curious, he reflected, that this woman should have come to him and given expression to the very thoughts that had been uppermost in his mind. He wondered whether she had been talking to Azalea.
“And what has all this to do with your mission?” he asked, closing his penknife with a snap.
“Everything!” she cried, vehemently. “Everything depends upon the honesty behind your protestations, upon the fact that you are not merely content to talk about idealism, but will work to see it blossom throughout the country. Moreover, I have counted on your vision, your ability to see the benefit of what, to others, may look like an impractical measure. Any other type of man would laugh at me,” she added.
She stopped and waited for him to speak. But he made no comment.
He was not insensible to the cleverness with which she assembled her points. There was about her address a climacteric quality that compelled his admiration. But her speech fell flat because he failed to pick up his cues. The obvious retort that she must have anticipated, was never spoken; so each pause was pregnant with the suggestion of finality, of failure.
“I felt as though I were being driven, blindfold, along a crooked passage,” she said, later, in describing the interview to Sullivan. “Each time I turned a corner, some one rose and struck me in the face, so that I reeled and lost my bearings and had to wait a bit in order to recover myself and my sense of direction.”
Dilling half suspected this. He did not, however, assume a difficult and disinterested manner, deliberately, nor did he act with conscious rudeness. He simply felt no curiosity in Mrs. Barrington nor in the object of her visit, and no obligation to pretend that he did.
“I have come to you,” she said, again, “because you are the embodiment of all the qualities I have mentioned. Your sympathy, I take for granted, for the reason that the cause I plead is a spiritual cause, Mr. Dilling. I am asking for the development of a nation’s soul.”
“Oh!”
This response, though almost imperceptible, affected the woman as applause breaking suddenly over an unfriendly house, stimulates an actor to greater achievement. She left her chair and stood before him, a vision of aggressive beauty. She nearly lost herself in the part she was playing, and allowed impulse rather than design to dominate the moment.
“We admit that in the fierce struggle for existence, a young country must concern itself primarily with material problems, and that the song of the spirit is often stifled by the cry of hungry children. But has not the day arrived for us when our thought, and at least a small part of our resources, should be devoted to providing nourishment for the Canadian soul? I know that this sounds like the spell-binder’s affluence of speech, but, believe me, Mr. Dilling, I have a practical proposition behind it.”
“Well?” said Dilling, without enthusiasm.
She pointed to the Little Theatre movement, to various literary and dramatic organisations that have sprung up throughout the Dominion, as a proof that we are seeking a means of artistic expression, for spiritual development, that we are feeling a reaction from the wave of materialism which, in these times, holds the land in thrall. “In a word,” she said, “we are looking for happiness, only just realising that we have striven without it all these years. We are not a happy nation, Mr. Dilling.”
“Show me a more prosperous one,” he cried.
“Ah! But there’s our trouble. Prosperity and happiness may lie at opposite poles. The one is of the earth and its fulness, the other of the spirit, and in our pursuit of the former, we too frequently forget the needs of the latter. Happiness depends upon the emotions, Mr. Dilling, and Canadians have almost suffocated theirs.”
Obviously, the spark of interest she had ignited had turned to ashes. He was silent, so she hurried on.
“We need Art—the medium through which spirituality flows into the life of man. We want to hear the symphonies of our composers, the songs of our poets, as well as the throb and thunder of motor factories and power plants. I would ask the Government to recognise the organisations that are endeavouring to promote artistic creation, and to give financial assistance to the conspicuously talented artists throughout the Dominion!”
“Hold on!” cried Dilling, stung into repelling this premeditated attack upon the National Treasury. “We maintain a big Gallery out at the Museum. We subsidise Art.”
“Yes,” she countered, quickly, “but not the artist. What you do only goes to swell the pay-roll of the Civil Service . . . You don’t go far enough! Hasn’t the Government helped to build up the industries of this country? Has it not pap-fed factories and commercial enterprises of various kinds? You know it has! If I should want a water-power for some silly little saw-mill, shall I not have it from my Province, for the asking? There’s not a doubt of it! Yet, no one thinks of providing a greater power and one whereby this growing unrest can be composed. We are making a great point of conserving our natural resources, but who thinks of conserving our spiritual resources, Mr. Dilling? We need the one no less than the other. Men are reaching out towards Art!”
“Government is organised to legislate for peace and order in the community.”
“Aristotle said that Government was organised to make people happy. I scarcely think we have made good along his principles, do you?”
“You can’t legislate people into happiness.”
“No! But you can provide the things that will create that state of mind. I should like to see a National Theatre, Mr. Dilling, in which the struggles and triumphs of Canada might be told by her own sons and daughters. Love of our common country can be fostered in no happier way. Let us have annual prizes for excelling talent in the Arts, and Science, and Literature!”
“Have we any poets worth recognising?” interrupted Dilling.
“Ah, I knew you would make that objection!” cried Hebe Barrington. “I knew that your thoughts would fly at once to Milton, and Keats, and Shelley . . . and the greatest of them all, Shakespeare. You immediately compare us with the immortals, and feel that we lose by the comparison. I don’t profess to offer you a Homer or a Sappho. But there were lesser poets in Athens whom Pericles favoured at the expense of the people’s purse. It’s harder for poetry and the Arts to flourish to-day, than two thousand years ago—Oh, don’t you see, we need a National Theatre?”
“It’s an idea,” conceded Dilling, with caution.
Hebe Barrington was clever. She did not press her slight advantage but prepared to beat a strategic retreat.
“I knew that you would see it,” she cried. “How else can we make idealism real save by expressing it first through Art and then weaving it into our practical experiences? How else can we keep alive the traditions that have given us our Empire? How teach them to the young? I am full of schemes for working this thing out. May I come to see you again—or better still,” she amended, watching him intently with her great, soft eyes, “will you come to me, say this day week?”
“If you like,” he said, opening the door.
Presently, he opened the window, too. The room was close with a heavy, sweetish odour that offended him.
He looked down the river, past the Mint and the Archives. Catching sight of the smoke-clouded roof of Earnscliffe—once the stately residence of Sir John Macdonald—he fell to wondering what the Grand Old Man would have said to such a proposition . . .
A National Theatre!
The Greeks, he remembered, spared neither time nor money on their dramatic temple, which was free! On the other hand, the Canadian theatre was almost prohibitive in point of admission fee, and far from being the object of Governmental support, it was controlled by a group of Semitic gentlemen whose habitat was Broadway and whose taste reflected anything but a Canadian National spirit. In Rome, Mommens had taught him, there were fewer occupations more lucrative than those of actor and dancer—Roscius, one of the former, receiving the equivalent of $30,000 as his annual income, and Dionysia, a fairy-footed maid, $10,000 yearly—more than twice the amount of his Parliamentary indemnity!
Why should Canada not have her theatre?
He had dreamed of leisure to write—a drama of the West. Often he had pictured its theme unfolding in a mighty spectacle that would rival those of Ancient Rome, when six hundred mules passed in review across the stage of a military pageant, and whole armies were in requisition to give verisimilitude to a production.
He saw vast herds of buffalo and cattle; he heard the thunder of their flying hoofs and the yells of the pursuing Red Men. From the south and east, troops of devil-may-care cowboys burst upon the scene. The whirr of arrows, the snap of rifles, beat across his consciousness. And as the play progressed, over the flaming prairie there crawled a slow, white streak, coming to a halt at last in what looked like the heart of infinity. And presently, there appeared a tiny farm.
Deep in moonlit gorges, Dilling saw fur traders, whiskey smugglers, Indians, and cattle thieves, threading a cautious way. Then came the flash of scarlet coats and diminishing disorder.
And along the trails made by the thirsty buffalo, followed by wary Red Men, rediscovered by ambitious young surveyors who found that wisdom was born in brute, and even in primeval man, before it made its way to books, the railway flung its slender arms across an infant nation; and settlers came hard upon the heels of construction crews, a strange assortment who spoke their parts in the music of unfamiliar, polyglot tongues.
And on the site of some forgotten Indian encampment, where patient squaws pounded out their corn, there grew a field of wheat which gave way to a small settlement, and then a town where gigantic storehouses now husbanded the grain!
Ah, God, the glamour of the West—his West! Suddenly, it sang in his blood, it shone in his eyes, it dazzled him and provoked emotions that no woman had ever stirred.
A National Theatre? Well, it certainly was an idea, but he must not be intrigued by it; there was no hurry. The proposition needed thinking . . . Dilling crossed the room, took the receiver from its hook and called up Azalea. He was unaccountably disappointed to learn that she was out.
He realised with a sense of shock that she was the only friend he had made since coming to the Capital. At the moment, he felt that she was more than a friend . . . that she was a necessity. But he resisted this weakness as he would have resisted dependence upon a stimulant or sedative. Dilling liked to believe in his self-sufficiency, his detachment from all human ties. He could not deny, however, that Azalea fed him intellectually—food convenient for him.
“She feeds my mind,” he repeated, surprised that this should be so. “Isn’t it curious that she should possess this power . . .” It was all he asked of God.
His feeling was one that did honour to Platonism and now, as he sat reflecting upon it, Raymond Dilling wondered just what Azalea thought of him. Did she think his standards worthy of his calling? Had she faith in his singleness of purpose, and did she commend his policy for its wisdom? Or could she have misunderstood him, read into his unashamed confessions, the easy cant of him who makes a profession of sincerity?
He had taken for granted that she was in accord with his political creed, that she appreciated his native worth; but never before had he asked himself the question . . . did she like him? He had no assurance that she did. Admitting her acceptance of him upon his own terms, so to speak, might she not feel for him as we so often feel towards estimable persons whose blameless characters inspire us with nothing but respectful tolerance? On the other hand, suppose she did not regard him as a worthy figure, would she dislike him? Are there not natures to whom an impostor presents a personality unreasonably appealing? Has not the world had its Casanovas and Cagliostros?
What manner of man did Azalea like? What type stirred her rich imagination?
These unanswerable questions provoked him to an unwonted consideration of the girl, but he failed to recollect an occasion when she had revealed her inner thoughts and aspirations to him. What heart throbs, he asked himself, pulsed beneath that strange, drab exterior? What spirit wounds were covered with the cuirass of her whimsical satire? What was her philosophy of life, and what did she really think of him?
He had no idea, but he did know that he wished to be her friend.
Dilling couldn’t recall ever formulating a definite opinion on the subject of friendship, and he was not at all sure what Azalea might require of him. Sympathy, he mused, might be helpful in times of strain, but he was not prepared to admit that friendships were vital. A man could—perhaps should—be independent of their fetters, unseeking and unsought. Friendship had its rise in the emotions according to philosophers, and was therefore a weakness. Yet, was it? History showed that great men transmuted it into strength.
Which would it be for him, a weakness or a source of strength? And if the latter, how best could he convert its power into fuel for his energy?
He looked at his watch. Almost time for lunch. Azalea should be at home now, he thought. Again, he turned to the telephone.
In the room above, Mrs. Barrington was eagerly accepting a whisky and soda from the hospitable Member for Morroway.
“You look as though a little stimulant would do you no harm,” observed Howarth, busily attentive with the cigarettes.
“Without it, I shan’t last till sundown,” returned the woman. “Never have I spent such a half hour . . . and never again!”
“Difficult, eh?” asked Sullivan.
“Impossible! Why, Uncle Rufus, that man’s not human! Heaven knows, I’m not a vain woman,” she declared, “but for all the notice he took of me, he might have been a graven image, or I might have been one of the shrieking sisterhood! There wasn’t a smile . . . there wasn’t a flicker of response! I kept thinking all the time of Congreve, and his Lady Wishfort trying to captivate that stupid ass, old Mirabell!” Her full voice trembled with excitement and anger. Into her cheeks flooded a wave of natural colour, beneath their expertly applied rouge. “I’m through . . . I’m through,” she cried. “He made me think of a eunuch contemplating a statue of Venus!”