"I hope," she said, "that some day, after all this is over, we may be able to have you visit us, when George can thank you for the inestimable service you have rendered him."
"I should be delighted," Merriam murmured, though he had no great mind to be thanked by George Norman.
Then he shook hands with Mollie June and met her eyes for a moment, but, under the gaze of Aunt Mary and Rockwell and Alicia, "Good-bye," was all he could say.
"Good-bye. Thank you for--everything," she replied, and her eyes followed his figure as Rockwell swept him from the room.
The closing of the door of the Senator's sitting room upon Merriam marked the beginning of a period of a dozen hours or more that was utterly phantasmal and unreal to him both at the time and in his recollection afterwards. He seemed to move and speak and act without volition and without any clear realisation of what he was doing or why he was doing it.
After dinner with Rockwell and Mr. Wayward--an excellent meal served in the private car by an amiable gentleman of colour, Merriam read the speech which he was to deliver at Cairo in the morning, and then had to pull himself together and commit that speech, but he did even this mechanically. And finally to bed in his compartment, at first to a long, uneasy dream, in which he appeared to be making an interminable speech to an audience consisting of Mollie June, Jennie, an inattentive floor clerk, Aunt Mary, and Simpson, and then to a heavy slumber, from which he was roused with difficulty the next morning.
In the morning it was the same way with him--everything dully unreal. Breakfast. Going over the speech again. Then it was nine o'clock, and the train was running into Cairo. A crowd at the station. A cheer or two. He was being assisted into an automobile. A sort of procession with a band through several blocks of streets to a small park.
Merriam found himself sitting with Rockwell and Mr. Wayward and several local notables in a band stand, with a considerable concourse of people sitting and standing about on the grass below. Some native orator made a short speech. A number by the band. Then the Mayor of Cairo was effusively introducing Senator Norman. The Mayor sat down amid applause.
Merriam rose, advanced to the rail, and began on his speech. He felt himself to be a sort of animated phonograph. The words which he had learned the night before and reviewed that morning ran trippingly off his tongue. His collegiate training and subsequent experience in public speaking came to the aid of his subconscious self, which seemed to be functioning with practically no direction from his higher centers. He turned pleasantly as he spoke to face now one part of his circle of auditors and now another. He suited his tone to the words in different parts of the speech. He even achieved an occasional appropriate gesture.
At last he came to the end of what he had learned and stopped as the phonograph stops when the end of a record is reached. And for a moment he stood there by the rail, blank, at a loss--as a phonograph would have stood. He had to rouse himself with a jerk of conscious attention before he perceived that what he had to do next was to step back and sit down.