Bingham, like the practical man he was, pinned himself to the railway. He knew the Out and Out; not that he’d ever been there,—no white man had,—but he had talked to several of the Kawanga in Mutchi-time, and he shook his head despondently. There was one continuous line of precipice 3000 feet deep; there was a river which was now a stream five miles broad, now a marsh and now again dry—, sometimes for years on end. There was a dense mass of forest; there was that much more difficult thing, a belt of shifting sand dunes; there were nearly 300 miles without water through these. He was prepared to speak all day upon the difficulties of building a railway which none but the least intelligent had ever designed to build.
Sir Charles Repton could ride himself on the curb, and more than anything else this mastery had given him his present great position; but that day he had to exercise his will to the full, and in that exercise he felt slight twinges behind the ear where the barber’s rest had struck him. It was all he could do to prevent himself from drumming on the table or from making those interruptions which only serve as fuel to the slow criticisms of the dull.
At last—and heaven knows with what subtlety and patience—he conquered. There was a vote (a thing he had wished to avoid), but he carried it by two; and it was agreed that the issue of new capital should be made, that a General Meeting of the shareholders should be called for Tuesday the 2nd of June, and that he, Repton, should have the task of laying the scheme before them. The new prospectus, which he had already drafted, was passed round and with a very few emendations accepted. Then, after as heavy a bit of work as had ever been undertaken in the way of persuasion, the principal brain in that company was at last free for other things.
It was half-past one. He had just time to meet and to convince yet another fool upon another matter: the foreigner acting as agent for his Government, on the matter of the bridge: a bridge which the Foreign Government might or might not build, and, if they built, might or might not order from a firm which Repton had reason to befriend. Repton must lunch with that foreigner: he must persuade him to build: he must get the order—then he must be in his place in the House in time for questions.
The foreigner was as wax in his hands: not as good warm wax, adulterated wax, candle wax, but rather as beeswax, very ancient and hard. It was a full hour before that wax was pliable, but once again the unceasing, managed, strict watchfulness, the set face which had always in it something stern but never anything aggressive, the balance of judgment, conquered. Down to the smallest detail of that conversation Repton was the artist, his host at the lunch was the public, accepting and gradually convinced, and the bridge was ordered for the Foreign Government, though it was a useless bridge leading from nowhere to nowhere, and though it could have been built much more solidly and much better by the people of the place than by the English firm.
Then Repton went on to the House of Commons, and there, as in every duty of the day, the weight of his character told.
The questions were slight, there were not half a dozen that concerned his Department, but he answered them all with that curious restraint of tone which somehow made it difficult to cross-examine his Department. And he faced the House with such a poise and expression that one almost wondered, as one looked at him, upon which side he was sitting, or whether indeed the mere game of In’s and Out’s entered into his brain at all.
He seemed to be quite above the divisions of party. He seemed a sort of Ambassador from the permanent officials and to carry into the House of Commons an atmosphere at once judicial and experienced which no one could resist. When he had first accepted the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry it had been wondered that he should take so secondary a post. Now, after these four years, it was rather wondered why no one had seen till then the possibilities that lay in the position.
After that typical and decisive day, Repton, for more than a month, refrained from debate.
He was ever in his seat on those two days in each week when it was his business to answer questions: he never let his understrapper appear for him; for one full fortnight he was permanently in attendance, watching the fortunes before a select committee of a certain Bill, for which the public cared nothing but which he knew might change in a very important particular the public fortune—but in general he seemed to be in retirement. He was planning hard.