And all the way home the voice repeated—as if it simply couldn’t get away from it: “I believe I could get well there. I do believe I could! I’m very sorry.”
Bluecaster affairs were keeping Lanty very busy just at this time, sending him to London more than once, and otherwise pinning him to his office, so that the electorate saw little of him and his particular friends less. His clerk, a young person of enthusiasms, with a vivid admiration for everything Blue—and Lancastrian, scamped his meal-hours in order to put in a little electioneering on his own, but he generally returned convinced that he had risked his digestion for nothing. The men he interviewed assured him that as long as a Lancaster was putting up he could be certain of their word. Happen they’d vote for Miss Harriet as well—Mr. Shaw (him over at Watters) seemed to think they ought to be having her on, and they weren’t saying but she’d her head set straight enough on her shoulders for a lass, and they’d all thought a deal of the old man, and pity there weren’t a few more like him—but Mr. Lancaster anyhow could be sure of their cross when the time came—ay, that he could! But he never got as far as the women, and indeed he never worried about them at all. The women always voted for Lanty, because he was young and unmarried. The clerk had a penchant for the study of human nature, and rather fancied he knew all about women—at least, politically. Perhaps he did; but straws may blow different ways in the same wind.
The poll opened on a Monday at twelve, but long before that hour the Watters cars—the limousine, driven by the chauffeur, and Dandy’s little Delage cheeping like a scurrying chick behind Hamer in the touring Austin—were running through the ring of villages. They made quite an effective little procession, carrying Stubbs’ old racing colours flying from the screens, and wonderful placards devised by Hamer: “Wild Duck Wins!” “Vote for the Old Stock!” “Help for Harriet!” etc. The candidate, rolling down the hill in the float five minutes after noon, with no more ostentation than lay in shining harness in front of her and a well-trimmed Stubbs at her side, frowned a little at the flaunting gaiety before the booth; but objection was impossible in face of Hamer’s joyful excitement as he hurried to her with outstretched hand. Thorne’s thin, furtive countenance could be seen peering round the doorpost for the children he had stationed at the gate with milkcans labelled “Watered Wild Duck.” He was puzzled to know why the war-cry arranged for Harriet’s arrival had missed fire, but the reason was not far to seek. On the front seat of the limousine sat Grumphy, very black and fat and swathed in ribbon, with a collar of snowdrops round his neck and a red rose nodding over his ear, smiling eternally at the wondering childish faces below.
Inside the booth the polling-clerk greeted the lady-farmer with polite amusement tinged with admiration, and the early voters, brought in by the Watters contingent, shook her warmly by the hand. Even Thorne offered her the same pledge of goodwill, and she returned it brusquely.
“I doubt you’ll be too much for me, Miss Harriet!” he remarked, with his thin smile. “You’re so popular, and those friends of yours have been working terribly hard. I’ve no cars to fetch folks along to vote for me, so I must just depend on a little kindly feeling and any service I may have done the district in all these years. That may carry me a bit of the way, but I fear it won’t go far against motors and ribbons!”
“Thorne’s funking you—that’s a sure thing!” Hamer observed outside. “He’s thinking he’s out of the game from the start. Lancaster’s certain to go through—everybody says that—so the Creeping Jesus has a very thin chance, I’m afraid. Now, Kavanagh, off you get to Stone Riggs for those almshouse folk—four of ’em, mind now! Dandy Anne, the Sunflatts district’s yours; you know how we mapped it out. I’ll run over to Halfrebeck for that old chap I couldn’t get a promise from. It might help a bit, Harriet, if you came along, too. It’s only about a mile.”
Wiggie, who was wearing her colours in his buttonhole, gave her his seat behind the driver, and hopped in behind; and, as they slid over the hill, found himself observing the candidate from a fresh mental standpoint. There was something new about Harriet, to-day, that wasn’t to be accounted for by the dark-gray tailor-made and trim suède hat. The impression of strength, almost of rough power, already familiar, was now fused with a more courteous dignity and a nervous self-possession very different from her usual sledge-hammer assurance. Memory had leaped upon her from under a snapped lock, showing her similar crises in her grandfather’s career. Just so had he said this, done the other, looked and thought—one of the fine men a county never quite forgets. It was pretty fair cheek, perhaps, to think she was fit to follow him. It would be a rotten turn-out if she made a mess of it. For all our vaunted superiority, what trembling children we are, in the first moment of feeling for our fathers’ shoes!
Lanty had arrived by the time they came back, with the wobbler triumphantly installed in the tonneau, and shortly afterwards Bluecaster motored down. Voters were coming in quickly, now, and a cheerful crowd was collecting round the booth, Helwise’s voice being easily distinguishable above the rest, as she informed his lordship that he must certainly call and see the perfectly sweet “porcelain on legs,” and there was also just one other little matter of a washhouse boiler. She had worked him up to offering her an entire kitchen range when the Watters limousine groaned round the corner, with four inside, a few more in front, and Grumphy fatly ensconced within the luggage-rail; and under cover of its entry he escaped.
The day wore on, but still the tireless cars ran in and out, and smiling ladies were dug from dark corners in strange garments that seldom saw the sun. After six o’clock the rush quickened again until closing-time at eight, and then, under the fallen curtain of night, began the weary wait during the count. The crowd that had ebbed and flowed all day now drifted back, and where the motor-lamps flung their rays, familiar faces stood out whitely. The door of the booth had shut with a final click as the last strokes from the church clock died, and the mean face of the Creeping Jesus had peered out for the last time. The black figures hung patiently round the railings, while the slow half-hours spoke over their heads. In the grouped cars the weary canvassers turned anxious eyes to the one bright window of the dark building. Grumphy alone slumbered soundly, with a fat head laid on the knee of the yawning chauffeur. It was very chill and dismal, and the lights ringing the square seemed lost in separate hollows of gloom. Dandy was sitting in the Austin with Helwise and Wiggie, exchanging conversation with the doctor and his wife, who had given them tea; and the passage of the fateful minutes filled her with vague depression. Close to the Austin’s lamps her father was standing with Bluecaster and Lanty’s clerk, Stubbs leaning against the door, and it struck her that they all looked worried. The clerk was talking rapidly in a low voice, hammering in his statements fist on palm, while Bluecaster nodded assent from time to time. The shrieking children playing on the outskirts of the crowd quietened suddenly, and the clerk’s words came up sharply over the car.
“It doesn’t do to take a thing for granted with the women! There’s never any getting at what they understand and what they don’t. You can explain till you’re black in the face, and then have to start at the beginning and say it all over again. Why, at the Parish Council Elections, I’ve known them stick their mark against every man-jack on the card, though the whole boiling had been at them telling them they could only vote for nine! They do other daft things, too—put the cross half-way between a couple of names, or plump for the very man they don’t want, thinking it’ll out him, and then swear afterwards that you told ’em to do it! I don’t know what sort you breed in Lancashire, Mr. Shaw, but some of our lot up here want a lot of looking after. A deal of them don’t bother much about politics in between election-times, and I’m not saying they’re any the worse for that; but it makes it a bit stiff working with them when it comes to the vote. You’ve got to be dead sure that they know what you want of them, and then you have to go back and see that they haven’t got it upside down in the meantime! I may be wrong, sir, and nobody’s wishing it harder than myself, but I’m very much afraid that you’ve gone and done it, this time, without meaning to. It’ll be a bad day for Bluecaster, if you have!”