His appointment as Prime Minister was in the papers two days later, with a throng of leading articles shouting Evoë!
A spirit of busy gaiety ruled over the big house in Park Lane; such a spirit of Bohemian ease as comes where private theatricals are preparing. The policy of the Empire and the distribution of places centred there. Everything bustled cheerfully; doors stood open; people came and went; meals were snatched on corners of littered tables: the servants were infected; footmen ran up and down the stairs like school-boys; housemaids tittered at baize-doors, and forgot pails on landings.
And in the midst of it, still and listless, sat Dwala—the new Prime Minister. Something strange had happened; he saw the world fading and losing interest before his eyes. What was the thing he had looked forward to so eagerly? A joke? What is a joke? In this new obscurity his mind could not piece the thing together aright. Some sort of surprise and ridicule? No matter. He was sorry for these pitiful actors now; there was something so futile about all this busy scheming in a world of shades. To show the unimportance of importance? Was that his joke? Pooh! the joke itself was not important enough to amuse him now; five minutes’ fun for a Hartopp; nothing more.
Strange that the world should have altered so! He had noticed something amiss with it that day he went to Windsor to receive his appointment as Prime Minister; an unnatural clearness, like the clearness of a landscape before a storm.
As he stood on the platform at Paddington, looking at the crowd of pleasure-seekers—men and women in boating-costumes—he had seen them, not as creatures of flesh and clothes, but as translucent wraiths, grinning and gibbering in one another’s faces; the only real live being there, the Guard—Odysseus playing Charon in Hades—watchful, responsible, long-glancing down the train, touching his hat, receiving obols from the shades.
Tears came into Lady Wyse’s heart as she sat and looked at him. She guessed the truth, which he did not suspect; death was going to take from her the companion-mind which had made her wilderness green again. But that belief she put away from herself and him.
In other things they thought together, these two minds: his, the elemental, the slow, the encompassing; hers, the polished, the swift, the penetrating; his, like the thunder rolling, huge and formless; hers, like the music of the master’s fiddle, delicate, exact, exhaustive. Both saw their old scheme for laughter vanish like a mirage in the desert as the traveller approaches; and in its place, from the heart of all things, welled up the new thought, the greater thought, suited to the solemn grandeur of their friendship.
Dwala was at a table, coughing feebly; opposite him Huxtable, busy with ink and papers. Lady Wyse sat talking intermittently, absently, listlessly, with Lord Glendover by the empty tea-cups. She rose, and strayed over to Dwala’s table, where she stood awhile picking up papers and throwing them down again.
‘What this?... “The best hundred books.”’
‘That’s for the prospectus of Glenister’s new “Dwala Classics,”’ said Huxtable.