He looked with blind eyes towards the southern sky, where pennons of smoke followed the locomotive that crossed and re-crossed the little subway bridge. Winter had been industrious during the past months and seemed loath, even now, to relinquish her supremacy to Spring. Tall pyramids of snow still clung to the corners of the Museum where abutments of the building shut off the warmth of a pale gold sun. The ground was black and spongy, and in every gutter, rivulets of water stirred the urge of the sea in the minds of swarms of children.
But Dilling saw none of these things. He was fighting the oppression of this curious lassitude and striving to recapture his ardour for work. The effect was not noticeably successful. He felt tired, stupid, drugged, as though some vital part of him was imprisoned and inert. He longed to be free, to abandon himself to a riot of emotion, to feel as acutely with his body as with his mind. He longed to overcome this numbness, this nostalgia of the senses, and to taste the fruits that gave to life its pungent tang and flavour. For the first time he saw himself emotionally shrivelled, inappetent of joy, and he veered away from the knowledge, wishing that he could remodel himself to love and suffer and hunger like other men.
He forced himself to a perception of the panorama at which he had been staring, the clumps of bushes heavy with uncurled buds, the gay costumes of the children playing in the icy gutters opposite, a sharp red tulip bravely facing the frosty air. He knew now that never had he taken into account the vital force behind living objects—cattle, flowers, trees, even the wheat itself, and he began to feel that all these and even inanimate things, such as the chair and desk in the desolate outer office, were instinct with life; Azalea’s life! How pitiful his limitations!
He loved her. He wanted her. He needed her. Life was without form and void lacking the stimulation, the inspiration of her presence. She was his alter ego, upon whom his mind and spirit depended as did his frail body upon food. Thinking upon her made him free of the hitherto remote pleasance of comradeship between the sexes.
“What torment,” he muttered, repeatedly. “What torment to know this joy and be unable to possess it!”
The telephone rang. He turned impatiently to the instrument.
“Sullivan?” he echoed. “No—not too busy. I’ll be up there shortly.”
During the week preceding his conversation with Marjorie, the Hon. Member for Morroway had busied himself in a cautious testing of the extent of his influence. He found that a majority of the Western Members needed no incentive from him to support Raymond Dilling, and from them he withheld all mention of the proposed change in policy he had suggested to Dilling’s wife. With the Maritime Members, however, he employed slightly different tactics, approaching them as one entrusted with confidential information, and hinting that in exchange for the premiership, Dilling would be willing to foreswear his platform, betray his original sponsors, and stand forth as a defender of Eastern interests, with especial emphasis upon those concerned in the annihilation of the Freight Bill, the abandonment of the Elevator project, and the indefinite postponement of the Eastlake and Donahue railway measures.
With but an odd exception or two, his self-imposed mission was entirely successful. He called on Marjorie. He arranged for an interview with Dilling.
Five men rose as the youthful Minister entered the room: Howarth, Turner, young Gilbert, the Radical, the Hon. Gordon Blaine, who administered his Ministerial office—without portfolio—with unbroken suavity and bonhomie, and Mr. Sullivan, himself.