However, on the afternoon that Dilling was expected to deliver his maiden speech, she found her way to the Ladies’ Gallery with the aid of a courteous official, and ingenuously presented her card of admission. Without appearing to glance at it, the doorkeeper grasped the information it bore.
“This way, please, Mrs. Dilling,” he said, with just the proper shade of cordiality tempering his authority. “Here’s a seat—in the second row. They are just clearing the Orders for your husband’s speech,” he added, in an officious whisper.
Marjorie sank unobtrusively into the place he indicated and thanked him. She wondered how he knew her name, not realising that he had held his position for forty years by the exercise of that very faculty which so amazed her. It was his duty to know not only all those who sought an entrance through the particular portal that he guarded, but also to know where to place them. Should he fail to recognise an applicant, he never betrayed himself. She was presently to learn that as her husband progressed nearer the front benches downstairs, she would be advanced to the front, upstairs.
Her first sensation—could she have singled one out of the medley that overwhelmed her—was not of exaltation at having entered into the sanctuary of the Canadian Temple of Politics, and being in a position to look down upon one of the clumsiest and most complex institutions that ever failed to maintain the delusion of democracy, but of the immensity of the place. The Green Chamber was at least four times as large as the Arena in Pinto Plains! Its sombreness discomfited her. Although she had read descriptions of the Commons, she never visualised the dullness of the green with which it was carpeted and upholstered; she had rather taken clusters of glittering candelabra for granted; indeed, it would not have surprised her to find golden festoons catching dust from the whirlwind of oratory which rose from the floor beneath. The unregality of the place made her want to cry. She felt like a child standing before a fairy king without his crown.
Directly opposite her sat the Speaker on his Throne—the chair which the late King Edward had used when visiting the Colonies in 1860. Above the Speaker, in a shallow gallery suspended below that reserved for the Proletariat, several men were languidly trailing their pencils across the stationery provided them by the generous taxpayers of the country. These were the scribes of the Press, profundite scriveners, whose golden words she had absorbed so often in her far-away prairie home.
On the floor of the House, at a long table in front of the Speaker, sat the Clerk. At the other end of the table lay the Mace, the massive bauble that aroused Oliver Cromwell’s choler, and which symbolises, by its position, the functioning of the House. In splendid isolation sat the Sergeant-at-Arms, an incumbent of the office for forty-three years, during which time, it is said, he never changed the colour of his overcoat, or his dog.
On the Speaker’s left sat His Majesty’s loyal Opposition, led by that illustrious tribune of the people, the Right Honourable Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Facing him, across the table, was the Right Honourable Sir Robert Borden and the Members of his Cabinet, prominent among whom was Sir Eric Denby, who dreamed of a Saharan drought for Canada, and affirmed his stand on the Temperance question with the zeal of a Hebrew prophet. Then, as a counterpoise to Sir Eric, there was the Honourable Godfrey Gough, who sought to mould a policy for his Party that would have made Machiavelli blush!
These were the notables; the rest were a jumble of tailenders.
Marjorie could not locate her husband, immediately, but after a little she recognised the top of his head. He was sitting in a dim corner, in the very last row under the Gallery that was devoted to the accommodation of the ruck of our splendid democracy.
Then, before she was quite prepared for it, she saw him rise to his feet. Her eyes filled with tears of terror, and for a moment he seemed to stand alone—like a splendid column, islanded in a rolling sea. Marjorie could not resist the impulse to inform the impassive lady sitting beside her, that the speaker was her husband.