CHAPTER XIV.
THE BURSTING OF THE STORM.
An Indian summer.
There is a striking description in one of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's stories of a night in an Indian city when the dog star rages. Luridly, but vigorously, the author brings home to you the odious discomfort, the awful suffering, and, finally, the morose anger and almost homicidal fury, which the sweltering light produces in the waking soldiers. This would have been something like the temper of the House of Commons on June 18th, if that assembly had not recently discovered methods of saving its temper and pleasantly spending its vacant hours. For the dog star—raging, merciless, sweltering—ruled everywhere within Westminster Palace. On the floor of the House itself, men sweltered and mopped their foreheads; in even the recesses of the still library they groaned aloud; then down on the Terrace, and with the river sweeping by, there was not a particle of air; and the heat of all the day had made even the stony floor of that beautiful walk almost like the tiles of a red-hot oven. In short, it was a day when one felt one's own poor tenement of clay a misery, a nuisance, and a burden; and the mind, morose, black, and despondent, had distracting visions of distant mirages by the seashore or under green trees. It was natural, under such circumstances, that everybody who could should desert the House of Commons. And this sudden desertion of the House will be always remembered as one of the many peculiarities of the Annus Mirabilis through which we are passing. It has not been unusual for some years for members to take a turn on the Terrace now and then. I have paced its floor at every hour of the night and the day—from the still midnight to the delightful moments before breaking day; and I still remember the beautiful summery morning when, after a hard night's fight, an Irish member rushed down to the Terrace to tell Mr. Sexton and myself that we were just being suspended—an operation not yet grown customary. But this Session the majority of the House of Commons is always on the Terrace; and woman—that sleuth-hound of every new pleasure—has discovered this great fact, and utilised it accordingly.
Tea on the Terrace.
The afternoon tea—the strawberries and cream which make a coolness and delight in the midst of the raging day—has been erected by woman into one of London's daily social events; and though the novelist has not discovered the fact up to this moment—Mr. McCarthy has made a very pretty love scene on the Terrace, but it is at the witching hour of night—though this discovery has yet to come, the respite is brief, and in a short time we shall have the hero and the heroine passing through all the agonies of three-volume suffering, to the accompaniment of the division bell and the small tea-table of the Terrace. But though woman has many slaves she has her watchful enemies. The great order of curmudgeon is wide and vigilant and crusty, and the curmudgeon has found that the vast crowds of ladies who have invaded the Terrace have at last begun to interfere with that daily constitutional along its stretching length, which is the only exercise most members of Parliament are able to take in these fierce days. Accordingly, there appeared an ominous notice-board with the words, "For members only," at a particular point in the Terrace. Within the space, before which this notice stood as a fiery sword, woman was not allowed to intrude; and from out its sacred enclosure—guarded by nothing but the line of the notice and the Speaker's wrath—the confirmed bachelor, the married cynic, smoked his cigarette, and looked lazily through at the chattering, tea-drinking, bright-coloured crowd immediately beyond.
Demos and dinner.
I regret to say that the great Demos had an opportunity of seeing the legislator at work and play, and that the remarks of that extremely irreverent person were not complimentary. Reading, doubtless, in the papers something of the fatiguing labours—of the stern attention to business—of the long and dreary hours which the patriots of the House of Commons were devoting to the work of the country, Demos was shocked and scandalised to behold this giddy, fashionable, and modish crowd. Demos, sweltering on the passing steamboat—able to see, and, at the same time, free from interference on his watery kingdom—jeered aloud as he passed close to the Terrace, and mocked with loud laughter that betokened not only the vacant but the insulting mind. The skippers of the steamboats—hardened Cockneys with an eye to business—knew what a delight this baiting of the august assembly would be to the most democratic and most sarcastic crowd in Europe; and accordingly it became the "mot d'ordre" with the steamboat skipper, when the tide was full, to bring his vessel almost to the very walls of the Terrace, and thus to give the tripper the opportunity of gazing from very near at the lions at food and play. If Demos could have come and seen as plainly at night in those days as during the afternoon, his shocked feelings would have been even more poignant and his language more irreverent. Tea is, after all, a simple drink that makes the whole world akin; and even strawberries in this great year were within reach of the most modest purse. But at night, entertainment is more costly. Along the Terrace there is now, as everybody knows, a series of small dining-rooms; and here every night you might have listened to the pleasant music of woman's laughter, punctuated by the pop of the champagne bottle. Time was—I remember it well—when a member of Parliament who knew that there was any place where a lady could get something to eat was pointed to as a Parliamentary marvel, who knew his way about in an uncanny fashion; when the room in which a lady could dine had been seen by but few eyes and, indeed, was little better than a coalhole, low-roofed, dimly lit, buried in dark and deep recesses of an underworld of the House of Commons, as little known to the general member as the sewage catacombs of London to the ordinary citizen. But all this has been changed; and now the dinner to ladies at the House of Commons has become, like the afternoon tea, one of the best recognized of London's social festivities. And so great is the run on these dinners that it takes a week's—or even two weeks'—notice to secure a table. Mr. Cobbe—a stern and unbending Radical, with a hot temper and unsparing tongue—might have been seen one of those June days with a menacing frown upon his rugged Radical forehead, and by-and-bye in serious converse with the Speaker. And the cause of his anger was that he had found all the dining-tables ordered for two weeks ahead.