Dead silence greeted this retort, and a grim smile relaxed the grave faces of the members. No personality is too gross to tickle this most democratic race, and anything that levels the proud man delights them. The Right Honourable Samuel Warren, M. P., upstairs, decided to take the light of his illustrious presence from such a shocking scene, wavered, and remembering mythology, bethought himself of the laughter of the gods. He was abroad in the pursuit of knowledge, and this was certainly experience.
Stavros was frantically adjured to withdraw and apologise, and as frantically refused to do any such thing. His colleague and imagined leader stood up in his defence and the obstructionist became riotous to the verge of hysterics, until the Right Honourable Samuel Warren, looking down upon the spectacle from a safe distance, really believed he had been dropped into Bedlam instead of Parliament. Uproar succeeded angry protest in deafening succession; with the rapidity of thought mere speech was rejected as inadequate to the occasion. The generals, almost as numerous as soldiers, jumped upon their seats and brandished their hats terrifically. The hapless president made his escape, leaving the chair to one of the vice-presidents, and Constantine Selaka with an agile bound cleared the space intervening between the members’ seats and the tribune, installed himself therein, and shouted his intention of keeping the Chamber sitting until the demands of his party were complied with.
“And would Kyrios Selaka be good enough to state categorically the demands of his party?” the Prime Minister asked, standing to go, holding his hat in his hand, with an officially negative look.
This was a rash invitation. Selaka burst into an interminable, involved and idiotic speech, which Stavros followed from his seat with one much more involved and personal, and much less idiotic.
Evening descended, the dinner-hour passed, and still the unfortunate vice-president held the chair, and exercised his authority by a furious and inappropriate ringing of the bell, and calls for attention. Exhausted and famished deputies dropped out of representative life in search of animal food; others clamoured for cessation of the strife, and pathetically referred to the solace of the domestic circle. But Stavros and Selaka were adamant. The clamours of nature were unheeded by them; when one shouted and orated, the other sought comfort in cigarette and coffee. Night came, and found Selaka still in the tribune, gloomy, ravenous, and resolute. Meanwhile Stavros had refreshed himself with a snatch of food outside. He returned to the charge while his leader shot into the corridors, and collared excited and admiring attendants in the pursuit of food.
“We are as good as the Parnellistoi over in London,” Selaka remarked, and rubbed his hands with joy, as he and his friend walked home at the end of the protracted sitting.
“That is so, Constantine,” said Stavros, who dearly loved a row of any sort, and who since he could not fight the European powers in person, solaced himself by fighting a temporising president and a tame party. “You’ll be mayor to a certainty.”
“Mayor indeed!” ejaculated Constantine, keenly measuring his own sudden charge for notoriety. “It’s minister at least I ought to be. I have tackled them, Stavros, eh?”
His friend thought so, and went home to express his opinion in three columns of laudatory prose and twelve satirical verses describing the great Homeric fray.