CHAPTER IV
KEBLE had received a petition signed by Conservatives throughout the county inviting him to present himself as candidate for the provincial elections. He had foreseen this, but hesitated to accept the nomination. In the first place he was barely thirty; in the second place success at the polls would mean protracted absences from the ranch; in the third place he was not sure that Louise would approve. He remembered her saying, apropos of her Uncle Alfred Mornay-Mareuil, “If he had only been able to control his ambition! Politics is as demoralizing as gambling.” And Keble quite often took Louise’s remarks at their literal value.
When it came time to select a candidate for the elections, the scattered Conservatives of the district, knowing that the only hope of making a showing against their entrenched opponents was to induce Keble Eveley, with his important holdings and the prestige of his name, to stand for them, had encountered opposition from the supporters of the mayor of Witney, who in several consecutive elections had suffered defeat at the hands of the Liberal candidate, but who had learned to look forward to his periodical worsting as an agreeable break in the monotony of his days. The repeated success of the Liberal representative had resulted in over-confidence on the part of that gentleman. He had been weaned from his county, had invested his savings in the capital, and returned home only to collect rents or sell at a substantial profit stock which he had acquired at bargain prices. A feeling was abroad, among Liberals and Progressives, as well as Conservatives, that the electors were being “used for a good thing.”
The Conservative leaders knew Keble through business dealings or hearsay. Some of them had joined in a deputation to receive Lord Eveley and Mr. Windrom at Witney. They all saw the wisdom of putting up a vigorous, intelligent, and earnest young man, and the supporters of the veteran Conservative candidate, in the hope of a change of luck, ended by yielding to the suggestion. The official invitation was brought to Hillside by Pat Goard, the campaign manager, and his henchman, the editor of the “Witney Weekly News”.
It was on a mild October afternoon. Keble received the delegates in the library, heard their arguments, and asked for an hour to consider. Aunt Denise had bowed with frigid graciousness and withdrawn. Keble asked Miriam to show the visitors over the grounds, then ran down the path to the jetty, jumped into the launch, and motored across the lake, which to-day was an expanse of bright blue rippled by the most gentle of breezes. The slender white trees on the lower shore with their scanty remnants of pale yellow foliage, the bare branches of other hardwoods, and the deep rust of the underbrush were the only tangible proofs of the season. Everything else was gold and sapphire.
As he neared the boat-slip Keble saw that Louise had set up a deck chair in a sunny patch before the cabin, and had installed Dare in it. It was his first glimpse of Dare in several weeks and he was shocked at the wasted face that appeared above the rugs. For the first time he had some inkling of what the other man had been through, and a wave of compassion and affection surged through him.
Louise was sitting at Dare’s side, and they were talking quietly, intimately. Although there was almost a life and death contrast between the two, Keble was no longer blind to the fact that his wife had worn herself to a dangerous margin, and while he could approve of her act, in the sense in which Aunt Denise approved of it, he could not, like Aunt Denise, look on unmoved. Something in the languor of the scene, something in the intimacy which seemed to unite the two, aroused a throbbing ache within him. Like Miriam he had felt futile in the face of this struggle, and now he almost envied Dare the suffering that had opened to him a secret garden. He paid blind tribute to whatever force in Dare,—a force transcending mere personality,—awakened in Louise a spirit that he had never been able to evoke. “I blunder and obtain forgiveness,” he reflected, “while Dare is right, and pays terrific penalties.”
Louise came to the end of the jetty to meet him, and they talked about Dare’s first day outside the improvised hospital.
“Only for an hour,” she said. “Then he has to go back. But it marks the beginning of a new era.”
Keble would not let himself speculate on the nature of the new era. “And you can soon rest,” he said. “Be very careful now. This is the most dangerous time of all for you.”
She waved away the fear. “Who are those men on the terrace?”
Keble explained their mission. “I’d like you to decide for me.”
She remembered an occasion when Keble had wished her to decide upon decorations for the Castle, and she had hurt him by her indifference.
As she sat thinking, her arms resting limply in her lap, Keble noted with a pang the absence of her old elasticity. She looked older, and tired. He had an impulse to get out of the boat and take her in his arms. He reflected that a man like Dare, in his place, would have scouted her precautions. But there was the baby to think of, and,—cautious men were cautious.
“I’m hesitating,” Louise finally said, “only because I’m timid about deciding for you. But I don’t mind saying that if you accepted and were successful the monkey and his grandfathers and I would be highly gratified.”
Tears came to Keble’s eyes,—an indiscretion which he lost no time in correcting. “Right-oh! . . . Tell Dare how glad we are to know he’s on the mend, and find out if there’s anything he’d especially like. The people in Vancouver wrote that his ticket to Japan will be valid for a reservation on any later boat . . . Good-bye dear. Miriam and I will call again after dinner.”
“Bring a volume of Swinburne if you think of it. We’ve been trying to recall some lines.”
He promised, and she laughed to see him make a methodical note of it.
“Good luck!” she called out, as he started the engine.
“Thanks, old girl. Awfully decent of you to think I may have a chance.”
“It’s in your blood!”
“It’s a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal constituency,” he deprecated. “And what isn’t Liberal leans towards the Progressive.”
“I’d despise a victory I hadn’t had to fight for!”
“I believe you would,” he laughed, as though her militancy were one of her amusing caprices.
Miriam’s unwieldy charges were drinking whisky and soda on the terrace, in preference to tea in the drawing-room.
“How’s the patient?” she inquired.
“Able to sit up and take a little Swinburne,” Keble reported with a truculence that wasn’t meant to be as unkind as it sounded.
“Consulted the missus, have you?” inquired a business-like campaign manager.
“I have. The answer is in the affirmative.”
Keble received a thump on the back that made him vividly conscious of the sort of thing he had now let himself in for. Could he thump, he wondered. The first attempt was not too great a success, but one would undoubtedly improve with practise.
“Now let’s get down to tacks,” said Mr. Goard, when further drinks had been consumed in honor of the event.
The delegates required a message to take back to party headquarters, and Keble dictated an outline of his political credo, the logic of which was warmed and colored in conformity with the ejaculated amendments of Pat Goard.
“Will that do the trick?” Keble finally asked.
“That’ll do for a start,” Mr. Goard replied, and Miriam went to transcribe her notes at the typewriter.
“Our best to the missus,” said the manager half an hour later as he got into the car that had brought him to Hillside. “You couldn’t have a better platform than her.” Mr. Goard went on to express the opinion that it would be the “best fight ever put up”, but added that “those birds took a lot of beating”.
Keble promised to fight his hardest, and had a final word for the newspaper man. “Be sure to emphasize that it’s a straight program of common sense,—without flummery or mud-slinging or rosy promises that can’t be fulfilled.”
The editor acquiesced, but privately reserved the prerogative of serving up Keble’s phrases at a temperature and with garnishings adapted to the Witney palate. He had seen elections won by lungs and knuckles.
“Well,” Keble laughed on returning to Miriam’s side. “That’s done it! Do you remember the play, ‘What Every Woman Knows’? You’ll have to be Maggie Wylie and edit my speeches.”
Miriam’s tyrant exulted, but her honesty compelled her to say, “I doubt whether your supporters will appreciate my genius; it runs to neatness of copy and pluperfective subjunctives. Maggie Wylie put damns into her husband’s speeches, and Louise is the only person who can find the Witney and Valley equivalents. Is there any occasion she can’t rise to, for that matter?” This last remark was a trifle bitter.
In Keble’s mind was an image of Louise sitting beside her patient, quoting Swinburne. “We’ll submit our efforts to her,” he agreed. “We’ll pack Louise into an imaginary hall on the boat-slip, and I’ll stand up on an imaginary platform and rant. Louise will be the proletariat and boo, clap, or heckle. Then we shall know where we stand.”
“We are babes in the wood, you and I,” Miriam observed, with a familiar sense of incompetence.
For days they collected statistics, held consultations with visiting politicians and office-seekers, wrote and answered letters, made rough drafts of speeches which were in turn delivered before the “vast audience of one” on the boat-slip. More than once Keble and Miriam, seated in the launch, glanced at each other in dismay as Louise tore their sentences limb from limb.
“It’s beautiful comme argument,” she once commented, “only it lacks drama. Remember, darling, you have to sway them, not convince them. Once you get inside the Assembly you may be as cool as a cucumber and as logical as Euclid, but if you wish the natives to get you there, you have to tickle and sting them! That argument about neglected roads needs to be played up stronger. Picture the perils of taking your best girl for a Sunday drive from Witney to the Valley, with the horse getting mired and the off wheel starting an avalanche down the side of the Witney canyon and your best girl rolling down the hill to kingdom come; then suddenly turn serious and describe what decent roads would do for everybody, including yourself. Don’t be afraid to make the farmers see that you yourself have something to gain. Show them how the reforms you advocate would stimulate your trade as well as theirs and increase the value of your property.”
After this comment a detailed overhauling of the address in question was commenced, with Keble dictating and Louise, insinuating metaphors in the local vernacular. Dare from his deck chair in the distance watched or dozed until the boat had departed.
“How is the campaign progressing?” he asked after one prolonged consultation.
“Splendidly. Keble and Miriam are up to their neck in statistics. They go to Witney to-morrow for a preliminary duster . . . Papa says we’ll be out of quarantine before election day.”
Dare watched her silently for some time. “Why do you always bracket their names? You seem to do it deliberately, as though it were a difficult phrase which you were bent on mastering.”
“It may be.”
“You can confess to me, you know. We’ve proved at least that.”
She patted his hand.
“May I guess out loud?” he asked.
She nodded.
He paused to choose his words. “You feel that Keble and Miriam have grown to depend on each other in some way analogous to the way in which you and I depended on each other.”
She did not deny it.
“With us, our relation flared up one day into a white flame which for you seemed merely to cast a light over your past and future, but which for me burnt into me till I—began to rave.”
Again she stroked his hand. Lines of fatigue showed in her face, and her eyes were fixed on the ground.
“For the sake of the good we had brought each other, you felt that when I,—the weaker of the two as it turned out,—collapsed, you owed it to me and to yourself to patch my life together again. You felt that we had gone into an expedition together, an intellectual expedition, and that one of us had succumbed to an emotional peril. Like a good comrade you stood by. When you had wrestled with the Angel of Death you made sure that the Angel of Life should have a fair field. When I was strong enough to realize what had made life too great a burden, you began tenderly, wisely, patiently to make me see that, even without the fulfilment of the greatest boon I had ever craved, life still held possibilities. You dug up all my old sayings, pieced together my damaged philosophy which had seemed sufficient in the days before the white flame burned my cocksure ideas to a crisp, and you made a more beautiful garment of it than I had ever succeeded in fashioning. You showed me how I could keep the fragrance of the flower without crushing the flower itself. You read me passages, God save the mark, from La Nouvelle Héloise which a few years ago I would have dismissed with a snort, but in which you made me believe. You read me one of your early poems which bore to your present wisdom the relation of a chrysalis to a winged faith and you ended by persuading me that my collapse merely marked the transition of my old chrysalis of a philosophy into something winged and courageous like yours,—a transition that cannot be accomplished without pain. . . . The patience, the love even, that you expended on me ended by making me see, as you intended it should, that this crisis, my overthrowing of my angel of selfishness, was a greater blessing than any blessing which could have grown out of a surrender on our part to the urge we both felt,—for you did feel it, too, I think . . . You led me back to my own path by quoting the lines:
In the world of dreams I have chosen my part,
To sleep for a season and hear no word
Of true love’s truth or of light love’s art,
Only the song of a secret bird.
Your faith in me,—a generous faith that wasn’t afraid of caresses,—was a faith in life, in human decency. And now you are extending it, on some generous impulse, to another quarter. I think I’m guessing right?”
Louise showed no wish to interrupt him, and he ventured on. “In the companionship of Keble and Miriam you see something which suggests an analogy with our relation. We had adventurousness to offer each other; they have inhibitions to share. You feel that interference on your part would deprive them of a right you have claimed yourself: their right to work out some problem of their own; just as interference in our case would have denied us a privilege of deep understanding and sacrifice.”
He paused for a moment. “That’s my guess. Now may I offer a suggestion, for what it’s worth?”
“Go on.”
“You have one terrible weakness. In mending another’s life you are infallible. You are less sure when it comes to taking care of your own. The thought that you might be prompted by selfish motives would be enough to make you refrain from interference. But have you the right to stand by and see two lives drifting on a course that might entail your own destruction? If you had been able to put yourself irrevocably into my keeping, that would have been one thing. But you weren’t quite. At the same time you came far enough in my direction to jeopardize your old security. If you were to become lost, now, on no man’s land, I should never forgive myself for letting myself be persuaded by you . . . I’ve put an extreme case because I know you’re not afraid of facing any conceivable contingencies.”
“There’s more in it than that,” she finally replied, and her voice announced a maturity born of suffering. “Because it’s a relationship for which I am responsible. If I were to get lost on no man’s land, which isn’t at all likely, it would be a direct result of my objection to trenches, and no one but myself could be made to pay the penalty of my recklessness. I brought Miriam here for my own reasons, and kept her here. Keble and I were traveling independently; for I couldn’t resist dashing off his pathway whenever the mood seized me. The more liberties I took, the more obvious it became that Miriam and Keble had a similar gait. They were always there, together. I was glad for Keble’s sake, and certainly, since I felt free to scamper about in any direction I chose, I couldn’t deny him the right to the companionship of any one who could keep in step with him. People have to have companions.
“I have even been glad for Miriam’s sake. Miriam gave me more than I asked of her. At times I must have got on her nerves. What had she by way of compensation? By way of penalty she had a gradual alienation from her old life. I could no more think of destroying her new sources of interest than I could think of destroying the new sources of interest to which she brought me the clue. The fact that Keble may have become the central figure of Miriam’s new interests is an accident over which I have no control, just as the fact that you became a vital force in my new enthusiasms was an accident over which Keble had no control, over which no one but myself had any control, and not even until I had learned its full significance. Life is an uncharted ocean full of such reefs; only fools try to sail through them; wise people sail around them. If I’ve learned anything in the last two years I’ve learned that freedom, like everything worth having, costs heavily; every great happiness is bought at the price of a great unhappiness. That’s only fair. And I won’t be niggardly . . . When Keble and Miriam learn the full significance of their problem, as I have already done, they will find their own solution. Human liberty means that, if it means anything . . .
“You and I fought out our issue and came to our conclusion, which happened to be that our ways lie apart. You have the song of your secret bird. I have something equivalent,—though it doesn’t exactly sing! If one has played the game according to one’s own rules, and not cheated,—not enough to count,—then that in itself puts a sort of backbone into one’s life . . . At times a lot of horrid little devils come tripping up through me, tempting me to be cheap and jealous, to interfere, to kick and scratch,—oh Mr. Dare dear, why do you let me say all these rubbishy things? I talk like a book of sermons to convince myself, but the real me is terribly wordless and weak and silly and bad and preposterous——”
She broke down, and Dare drew her head to his side, stroking her hair and patting courage into her shoulders.