CHAPTER VIII.
Wharton was sitting in a secluded corner of the library of the House of Commons. He had a number of loose sheets of paper on a chair beside him, and others in his hand and on his knee. It was Friday afternoon; questions were going on in the House; and he was running rapidly for the last time through the notes of his speech, pencilling here and there, and every now and then taking up a volume of Hansard that lay near that he might verify a quotation.
An old county member, with a rugged face and eye-glasses, who had been in Parliament for a generation, came to the same corner to look up a speech. He glanced curiously at Wharton, with whom he had a familiar House-of-Commons acquaintance.
"Nervous, eh?" he said, as he put on his eye-glasses to inspect first
Wharton, then the dates on the backs of the Reports.
Wharton put his papers finally together, and gave a long stretch.
"Not particularly."
"Well, it's a beastly audience!" said the other, carrying off his book.
Wharton, lost apparently in contemplation of the ceiling, fell into a dreamy attitude. But his eye saw nothing of the ceiling, and was not at all dreamy. He was not thinking of his speech, nor of the other man's remark. He was thinking of Marcella Boyce.
When he left her the other day he had been conscious, only more vividly and intensely, more possessively as it were, than she, of the same general impression that had been left upon her. A new opening for pleasure—their meeting presented itself to him, too, in the same way. What had he been about all this time? Forget?—such a creature? Why, it was the merest wantonness! As if such women—with such a brow, such vitality, such a gait—passed in every street!
What possessed him now was an imperious eagerness to push the matter, to recover the old intimacy—and as to what might come out of it, let the gods decide! He could have had but a very raw appreciation of her at Mellor. It seemed to him that she had never forced him to think of her then in absence, as he had thought of her since the last meeting.
As for the nursing business, and the settlement in Brown's Buildings, it was, of course, mere play-acting. No doubt when she emerged she would be all the more of a personage for having done it. But she must emerge soon. To rule and shine was as much her métier as it was the métier of a bricklayer's labourer to carry hods. By George! what would not Lady Selina give for beauty of such degree and kind as that! They must be brought together. He already foresaw that the man who should launch Marcella Boyce in London would play a stroke for himself as well as for her. And she must be launched in London. Let other people nurse, and pitch their tents in little workmen's flats, and live democracy instead of preaching it. Her fate was fixed for her by her physique. Il ne faut pas sortir de son caractère.
The sight of Bennett approaching distracted him.
Bennett's good face showed obvious vexation.
"He sticks to it," he said, as Wharton jumped up to meet him. "Talks of his conscience—and a lot of windy stuff. He seems to have arranged it with the Whips. I dare say he won't do much harm."
"Except to himself," said Wharton, with dry bitterness. "Goodness! let's leave him alone!"
He and Bennett lingered a few minutes discussing points of tactics. Wilkins had, of course, once more declared himself the enfant terrible of a party which, though still undefined, was drawing nearer day by day to organised existence and separate leadership. The effect of to-night's debate might be of far-reaching importance. Wharton's Resolution, pledging the House to a Legal Eight Hours' Day for all trades, came at the end of a long and varied agitation, was at the moment in clear practical relation to labour movements all over the country, and had in fact gained greatly in significance and interest since it was first heard of in public, owing to events of current history. Workable proposals—a moderate tone—and the appearance, at any rate, of harmony and a united front among the representatives of labour—if so much at least could be attained to-night, both Wharton and Bennett believed that not only the cause itself, but the importance of the Labour party in the House would be found to have gained enormously.
"I hope I shall get my turn before dinner," said Bennett, as he was going; "I want badly to get off for an hour or so. The division won't be till half-past ten at earliest."
Wharton stood for a moment in a brown study, with his hands in his pockets, after Bennett left him. It was by no means wholly clear to him what line Bennett would take—with regard to one or two points. After a long acquaintance with the little man, Wharton was not always, nor indeed generally, at his ease with him. Bennett had curious reserves. As to his hour off, Wharton felt tolerably certain that he meant to go and hear a famous Revivalist preacher hold forth at a public hall not far from the House. The streets were full of placards.
Well!—to every man his own excitements! What time? He looked first at his watch, then at the marked question paper Bennett had left behind him. The next minute he was hurrying along passages and stairs, with his springing, boyish step, to the Ladies' Gallery.
The magnificent doorkeeper saluted him with particular deference.
Wharton was in general a favourite with officials.
"The two ladies are come, sir. You'll find them in the front—oh! not very full yet, sir—will be directly."
Wharton drew aside the curtain of the Gallery, and looked in. Yes!—there was the dark head bent forward, pressed indeed against the grating which closes the front of the den into which the House of Commons puts its ladies—as though its owner were already absorbed in what was passing before her.
She looked up with an eager start, as she heard his voice in her ear.
"Oh! now, come and tell us everything—and who everybody is. Why don't we see the Speaker?—and which is the Government side?—oh, yes, I see. And who's this speaking now?"
"Why, I thought you knew everything," said Wharton as, with a greeting to Miss Craven, he slipped in beside them and took a still vacant chair for an instant. "How shall I instruct a Speaker's great-niece?"
"Why, of course I feel as if the place belonged to me!" said Marcella, impatiently; "but that somehow doesn't seem to help me to people's names. Where's Mr. Gladstone? Oh, I see. Look, look, Edith!—he's just come in!—oh, don't be so superior, though you have been here before—you couldn't tell me heaps of people!"
Her voice had a note of joyous excitement like a child's.
"That's because I'm short-sighted," said Edith Craven, calmly; "but it's no reason why you should show me Mr. Gladstone."
"Oh, my dear, my dear!—do be quiet! Now, Mr. Wharton, where are the Irishmen? Oh! I wish we could have an Irish row! And where do you sit?—I see—and there's Mr. Bennett—and that black-faced man, Mr. Wilkins, I met at the Hallins—you don't like him, do you?" she said, drawing back and looking at him sharply.
"Who? Wilkins? Perhaps you'd better ask me that question later on!" said Wharton, with a twist of the lip; "he's going to do his best to make a fool of himself and us to-night—we shall see! It's kind of you to wish us an Irish row!—considering that if I miss my chance to-night I shall never get another!"
"Then for heaven's sake don't let's wish it!" she said decidedly. "Oh, that's the Irish Secretary answering now, is it?"—a pause—"Dear me, how civil everybody is. I don't think this is a good place for a Democrat, Mr. Wharton—I find myself terribly in love with the Government. But who's that?"
She craned her neck. Wharton was silent. The next instant she drew hurriedly back.
"I didn't see," she murmured; "it's so confusing."
A tall man had risen from the end of the Government bench, and was giving an answer connected with the Home Secretary's department. For the first time since their parting in the Mellor drawing-room Marcella saw Aldous Raeburn.
She fell very silent, and leant back in her chair. Yet Wharton's quick glance perceived that she both looked and listened intently, so long as the somewhat high-pitched voice was speaking.
"He does those things very well," he said carelessly, judging it best to take the bull by the horns. "Never a word too much—they don't get any change out of him. Do you see that old fellow in the white beard under the gallery? He is one of the chartered bores. When he gets up to-night the House will dine. I shall come up and look for you, and hand you over to a friend if I may—a Staffordshire member, who has his wife here—Mrs. Lane. I have engaged a table, and I can start with you. Unfortunately I mustn't be long out of the House, as it's my motion; but they will look after you."
The girls glanced a little shyly at each other. Nothing had been said about dining; but Wharton took it for granted; and they yielded. It was Marcella's "day off," and she was a free woman.
"Good-bye, then," he said, getting up. "I shall be on in about twenty minutes. Wish me well through!"
Marcella looked round and smiled. But her vivacity had been quenched for the moment; and Wharton departed not quite so well heartened for the fray as he could have wished to be. It was hard luck that the Raeburn ghost should walk this particular evening.
Marcella bent forward again when he had gone, and remained for long silent, looking down into the rapidly filling House. Aldous Raeburn was lying back on the Treasury bench, his face upturned. She knew very well that it was impossible he should see her; yet every now and then she shrank a little away as though he must. The face looked to her older and singularly blanched; but she supposed that must be the effect of the light; for she noticed the same pallor in many others.
"All that my life can do to pour good measure—down—running over—into yours, I vowed you then!"
The words stole into her memory, throbbing there like points of pain. Was it indeed this man under her eyes—so listless, so unconscious—who had said them to her with a passion of devotion it shamed her to think of.
And now—never so much as an ordinary word of friendship between them again? "On the broad seas of life enisled"—separate, estranged, for ever? It was like the touch of death—the experience brought with it such a chill—such a sense of irreparable fact, of limitations never to be broken through.
Then she braced herself. The "things that are behind" must be left. To have married him after all would have been the greatest wrong. Nor, in one sense, was what she had done irreparable. She chose to believe Frank Leven, rather than Edward Hallin. Of course he must and should marry! It was absurd to suppose that he should not. No one had a stronger sense of family than he. And as for the girl—the little dancing, flirting girl!—why the thing happened every day. His wife should not be too strenuous, taken up with problems and questions of her own. She should cheer, amuse, distract him. Marcella endeavoured to think of it all with the dry common-sense her mother would have applied to it. One thing at least was clear to her—the curious recognition that never before had she considered Aldous Raeburn, in and for himself, as an independent human being.
"He was just a piece of furniture in my play last year," she said to herself with a pang of frank remorse. "He was well quit of me!"
But she was beginning to recover her spirits, and when at last Raeburn, after a few words with a minister who had just arrived, disappeared suddenly behind the Speaker's chair, the spectacle below her seized her with the same fascination as before.
The House was filling rapidly. Questions were nearly over, and the speech of the evening, on which considerable public expectation both inside and outside Parliament had been for some time concentrated, was fast approaching. Peers were straggling into the gallery; the reporters were changing just below her: and some "crack hands" among them, who had been lounging till now, were beginning to pay attention and put their paper in order. The Irish benches, the Opposition, the Government—all were full, and there was a large group of members round the door.
"There he is!" cried Marcella, involuntarily, with a pulse of excitement, as Wharton's light young figure made its way through the crowd. He sat down on a corner seat below the gangway and put on his hat.
In five minutes more he was on his feet, speaking to an attentive and crowded House in a voice—clear, a little hard, but capable of the most accomplished and subtle variety—which for the first moment sent a shudder of memory through Marcella.
Then she found herself listening with as much trepidation and anxiety as though some personal interest and reputation depended for her, too, on the success of the speech. Her mind was first invaded by a strong, an irritable sense of the difficulty of the audience. How was it possible for any one, unless he had been trained to it for years, to make any effect upon such a crowd!—so irresponsive, individualist, unfused—so lacking, as it seemed to the raw spectator, in the qualities and excitements that properly belong to multitude! Half the men down below, under their hats, seemed to her asleep; the rest indifferent. And were those languid, indistinguishable murmurs what the newspapers call "cheers"?
But the voice below flowed on; point after point came briskly out; the atmosphere warmed; and presently this first impression passed into one wholly different—nay, at the opposite pole. Gradually the girl's ardent sense—informed, perhaps, more richly than most women's with the memories of history and literature, for in her impatient way she had been at all times a quick, omnivorous reader—awoke to the peculiar conditions, the special thrill, attaching to the place and its performers. The philosopher derides it; the man of letters out of the House talks of it with a smile as a "Ship of Fools"; both, when occasion offers, passionately desire a seat in it; each would give his right hand to succeed in it.
Why? Because here after all is power—here is the central machine. Here are the men who, both by their qualities and their defects, are to have for their span of life the leading—or the wrecking?—of this great fate-bearing force, this "weary Titan" we call our country. Here things are not only debated, but done—lamely or badly, perhaps, but still done—which will affect our children's children; which link us to the Past; which carry us on safely or dangerously to a Future only the gods know. And in this passage, this chequered, doubtful passage from thinking to doing, an infinite savour and passion of life is somehow disengaged. It penetrates through the boredom, through all the failure, public and personal; it enwraps the spectacle and the actors; it carries and supports patriot and adventurer alike.
Ideas, perceptions of this kind—the first chill over—stole upon and conquered Marcella. Presently it was as though she had passed into Wharton's place, was seeing with his eyes, feeling with his nerves. It would be a success this speech—it was a success! The House was gained, was attentive. A case long familiar to it in portions and fragments, which had been spoilt by violence and discredited by ignorance, was being presented to it with all the resources of a great talent—with brilliancy, moderation, practical detail—moderation above all! From the slight historical sketch, with which the speech opened, of the English "working day," the causes and the results of the Factory Acts—through the general description of the present situation, of the workman's present hours, opportunities and demands, the growth of the desire for State control, the machinery by which it was to be enforced, and the effects it might be expected to have on the workman himself, on the great army of the "unemployed," on wages, on production, and on the economic future of England—the speaker carried his thread of luminous speech, without ever losing his audience for an instant. At every point he addressed himself to the smoothing of difficulties, to the propitiation of fears; and when, after the long and masterly handling of detail, he came to his peroration, to the bantering of capitalist terrors, to the vindication of the workman's claim to fix the conditions of his labour, and to the vision lightly and simply touched of the regenerate working home of the future, inhabited by free men, dedicated to something beyond the first brutal necessities of the bodily life, possessed indeed of its proper share of the human inheritance of leisure, knowledge, and delight—the crowded benches before and behind him grudged him none of it. The House of Commons is not tolerant of "flights," except from its chartered masters. But this young man had earned his flight; and they heard him patiently. For the rest, the Government had been most attractively wooed; and the Liberal party in the midst of much plain speaking had been treated on the whole with a deference and a forbearance that had long been conspicuously lacking in the utterances of the Labour men.
"'The mildest mannered man' et cetera!" said a smiling member of the late Government to a companion on the front Opposition bench, as Wharton sat down amid the general stir and movement which betoken the break-up of a crowded House, and the end of a successful speech which people are eager to discuss in the lobbies. "A fine performance, eh? Great advance on anything last year."
"Bears about as much relation to facts as I do to the angels!" growled the man addressed.
"What! as bad as that?" said the other, laughing. "Look! they have put up old Denny. I think I shall stay and hear him." And he laid down his hat again which he had taken up.
Meanwhile Marcella in the Ladies' Gallery had thrown herself back in her chair with a long breath.
"How can one listen to anything else!" she said; and for a long time she sat staring at the House without hearing a word of what the very competent, caustic, and well-informed manufacturer on the Government side was saying. Every dramatic and aesthetic instinct she possessed—and she was full of them—had been stirred and satisfied by the speech and the speaker.
But more than that. He had spoken for the toiler and the poor; his peroration above all had contained tones and accents which were in fact the products of something perfectly sincere in the speaker's motley personality; and this girl, who in her wild way had given herself to the poor, had followed him with all her passionate heart. Yet, at the same time, with an amount of intellectual dissent every now and then as to measures and methods, a scepticism of detail which astonished herself! A year before she had been as a babe beside him, whether in matters of pure mind or of worldly experience. Now she was for the first time conscious of a curious growth—independence.
But the intellectual revolt, such as it was, was lost again, as soon as it arose, in the general impression which the speech had left upon her—in this warm quickening of the pulses, this romantic interest in the figure, the scene, the young emerging personality.
Edith Craven looked at her with wondering amusement. She and her brothers were typical Venturists—a little cynical, therefore, towards all the world, friend or foe. A Venturist is a Socialist minus cant, and a cause which cannot exist at all without a passion of sentiment lays it down—through him—as a first law, that sentiment in public is the abominable thing. Edith Craven thought that after all Marcella was little less raw and simple now than she had been in the old days.
"There!" said Marcella, with relief, "that's done. Now, who's this? That man Wilkins!"
Her tone showed her disgust. Wilkins had sprung up the instant Wharton's Conservative opponent had given the first decisive sign of sitting down. Another man on the same side was also up, but Wilkins, black and frowning, held his own stubbornly, and his rival subsided.
With the first sentences of the new speech the House knew that it was to have an emotion, and men came trooping in again. And certainly the short stormy utterance was dramatic enough. Dissent on the part of an important north-country Union from some of the most vital machinery of the bill which had been sketched by Wharton—personal jealousy and distrust of the mover of the resolution—denial of his representative place, and sneers at his kid-gloved attempts to help a class with which he had nothing to do—the most violent protest against the servility with which he had truckled to the now effete party of free contract and political enfranchisement—and the most passionate assertion that between any Labour party, worthy of the name, and either of the great parties of the past there lay and must lie a gulf of hatred, unfathomable and unquenchable, till Labour had got its rights, and landlord, employer, and dividend-hunter were trampled beneath its heel—all these ugly or lurid things emerged with surprising clearness from the torrent of north-country speech. For twenty minutes Nehemiah Wilkins rioted in one of the best "times" of his life. That he was an orator thousands of working men had borne him witness again and again; and in his own opinion he had never spoken better.
The House at first enjoyed its sensation. Then, as the hard words rattled on, it passed easily into the stage of amusement. Lady Cradock's burly husband bent forward from the front Opposition bench, caught Wharton's eye, and smiled, as though to say: "What!—you haven't even been able to keep up appearances so far!" And Wilkins's final attack upon the Liberals—who, after ruining their own chances and the chances of the country, were now come cap in hand to the working man whining for his support as their only hope of recovery—was delivered to a mocking chorus of laughter and cheers, in the midst of which, with an angry shake of his great shoulders, he flung himself down on his seat.
Meanwhile Wharton, who had spent the first part of Wilkins's speech in a state of restless fidget, his hat over his eyes, was alternately sitting erect with radiant looks, or talking rapidly to Bennett, who had come to sit beside him. The Home Secretary got up after Wilkins had sat down, and spent a genial forty minutes in delivering the Government non possumus, couched, of course, in the tone of deference to King Labour which the modern statesman learns at his mother's knee, but enlivened with a good deal of ironical and effective perplexity as to which hand to shake and whose voice to follow, and winding up with a tribute of compliment to Wharton, mixed with some neat mock condolence with the Opposition under the ferocities of some others of its nominal friends.
Altogether, the finished performance of the old stager, the habitué. While it was going on, Marcella noticed that Aldous Raeburn had come back again to his seat next to the Speaker, who was his official chief. Every now and then the Minister turned to him, and Raeburn handed him a volume of Hansard or the copy of some Parliamentary Return whence the great man was to quote. Marcella watched every movement; then from the Government bench her eye sped across the House to Wharton sitting once more buried in his hat, his arms folded in front of him. A little shiver of excitement ran through her. The two men upon whom her life had so far turned were once more in presence of, pitted against, each other—and she, once more, looking on!
When the Home Secretary sat down, the House was growing restive with thoughts of dinner, and a general movement had begun—when it was seen that Bennett was up. Again men who had gone out came back, and those who were still there resigned themselves. Bennett was a force in the House, a man always listened to and universally respected, and the curiosity felt as to the relations between him and this new star and would-be leader had been for some time considerable.
When Bennett sat down, the importance of the member for West Brookshire, both in the House and in the country, had risen a hundred per cent. A man who over a great part of the north was in labour concerns the unquestioned master of many legions, and whose political position had hitherto been one of conspicuous moderation, even to his own hurt, had given Wharton the warmest possible backing; had endorsed his proposals, to their most contentious and doubtful details, and in a few generous though still perhaps ambiguous words had let the House see what he personally thought of the services rendered to labour as a whole during the past five years, and to the weak and scattered group of Labour members in particular, since his entrance into Parliament, by the young and brilliant man beside him.
Bennett was no orator. He was a plain man, ennobled by the training of religious dissent, at the same time indifferently served often by an imperfect education. But the very simplicity and homeliness of its expression gave additional weight to this first avowal of a strong conviction that the time had come when the Labour party must have separateness and a leader if it were to rise out of insignificance; to this frank renunciation of whatever personal claims his own past might have given him; and to the promise of unqualified support to the policy of the younger man, in both its energetic and conciliatory aspects. He threw out a little not unkindly indignation, if one may be allowed the phrase, in the direction of Wilkins—who in the middle of the speech abruptly walked out—and before he sat down, the close attention, the looks, the cheers, the evident excitement of the men sitting about him,—amongst whom were two-thirds of the whole Labour representation in Parliament—made it clear to the House that the speech marked an epoch not only in the career of Harry Wharton, but in the parliamentary history of the great industrial movement.
The white-bearded bore under the gallery, whom Wharton had pointed out to Marcella, got up as Bennett subsided. The house streamed out like one man. Bennett, exhausted by the heat and the effort, mopped his brow with his red handkerchief, and, in the tension of fatigue, started as he felt a touch upon his arm. Wharton was bending over to him—perfectly white, with a lip he in vain tried to steady.
"I can't thank you," he said; "I should make a fool of myself."
Bennett nodded pleasantly, and presently both were pressing into the out-going crowd, avoiding each other with the ineradicable instinct of the Englishman.
Wharton did not recover his self-control completely till, after an ordeal of talk and handshaking in the lobby, he was on his way to the Ladies' Gallery. Then in a flash he found himself filled with the spirits, the exhilaration, of a schoolboy. This wonderful experience behind him!—and upstairs, waiting for him, those eyes, that face! How could he get her to himself somehow for a moment—and dispose of that Craven girl?
"Well!" he said to her joyously, as she turned round in the darkness of the Gallery.
But she was seized with sudden shyness, and he felt, rather than saw, the glow of pleasure and excitement which possessed her.
"Don't let's talk here," she said. "Can't we go out? I am melted!"
"Yes, of course! Come on to the terrace. It's a divine evening, and we shall find our party there. Well, Miss Craven, were you interested?"
Edith smiled demurely.
"I thought it a good debate," she said.
"Confound these Venturist prigs!" was Wharton's inward remark as he led the way.