The Turnstile Part 35

"I shall put up as big a fight as I can, Cynthia, on this question."

"Against Mr. Devenish?"

"Yes."

Cynthia was silent, and Harry Rames turned to her swiftly with a question upon his lips. "You think it rash?" he was going to ask, but he never did. He saw her eyes shining at him out of the darkness, and in a low tone she said:

"You feel very strongly about it, strongly enough to risk your future.

Oh, I am so glad!"

There was a throb of joy in her voice. She was still a girl. Though she professed to laugh at the enchanted garden of her dreams, there was still some yearning for it at her heart. The men with ideas had peopled it. It seemed that after all her husband, since at all costs he meant to stand up against Mr. Devenish for an idea, must be one of them. But a slight, almost an uneasy gesture, which Harry made, stopped her on the threshold of a great happiness. She lay back, chilled with disappointment.

If Harry had spoken, he would have said: "No, I don't feel strongly about it. I don't feel about it, at all. I simply recognize that it is my opportunity." And thus he would have spoken before their marriage, perhaps, too, during the first few weeks after it. But a change had inevitably come for both of them. The frankness which Rames had deliberately used, so that she might know him for what he was, no longer served. Always it had hurt Cynthia, even though she had welcomed it. More than once he had seen her flinch from it as from a blow. But now that they were so much together, a hint or silence had to take its place. Blunt honesty was all very well twice a week or so, but repeated every hour, it bruised too heavily. So, too, with Cynthia. Her business as a wife was to help, not chide. Their year of marriage had taught them the little diplomacies and managements which made life together possible for them. Frankness was to save them--so they had planned. What was saving them was reticence.

This time, however, Cynthia was told the truth by her husband's gesture. He was going to follow the old historic, dangerous road, the road of the third parties, the short cut to power which has lured so many ambitious men to disappointment, and advanced a very few before their time. And he had chosen William Devenish to tilt against, a man supple and quick in debate, sharp of tongue, with a gift of ridicule and a wealth of language; a speaker who hit with a nice discrimination just above the belt in the House, and just a little bit lower outside of it. To Cynthia it seemed that Harry must be gambling on his success; that he had cast his prudence from him like a cloak. Harry Rames answered some part of her thought.

"It's not so mad as it appears to be," he said. "In the first place the question of tenancy against ownership is an open one. You are not breaking away from your party whatever view you take. You may be breaking away from a minister, but that's a different thing."

Cynthia's fears were a.s.suaged. In her relief she turned eagerly to Rames.

"But your minister is Mr. Devenish," she cried.

"I know," he returned. "A hard fighter. All the more gain then, if I can stand square to him, and remain standing. Besides, Devenish has a peculiar weakness."

"Yes?" cried Cynthia. "You can make use of it?" and she stopped, wondering at herself. She was startled to realize that for the first time she herself was keeping his eyes from lifting to the high path above.

"I have noticed it," Rames continued. "He can stand any amount of opposition from his opponents. If he gets heated, he remains master of his wit and tongue. But he cannot endure criticism from the benches behind him. It strikes some hidden string of arrogance in him. He loses his control. He says foolish things. He hands himself over a victim, if his critic has courage and skill enough to use his chance."

"I see," said Cynthia. "And the third point?"

"Oh," said Harry carelessly. "The question is an important one for the country. It must provoke discussion. Yes, I shall move the rejection of Fanshawe's bill if I get the chance."

He put down on the notice paper, with some twenty members on the opposition side, a motion for rejection. He rose on the Friday, immediately after Fanshawe had sat down, and was called upon by the Speaker. He was content with two objections. But either of them, if established, was fatal to the bill. He argued against the small holding, which he regarded as the pastime of the well-to-do tradesman in the neighboring town, rather than as a serious method of settling a genuine peasantry on the land; and he pleaded for the farm of sixty or seventy acres. It is a matter nowadays of ancient dispute, yet he managed to say a new thing about it, not parading his knowledge--for there were too many in that House who had made land the study of their lives--but suggesting it with a deference, which took his audience.

The great farm, he maintained, was a modern product, due to quite other causes than natural development. It came from the vanity of the eighteenth century, its love of s.p.a.ciousness and show. The monstrous porticoed houses and the huge farms were the symbols of its parade.

But in the seventeenth century, when agriculture really prospered, the small farm of seventy acres was the rule. It was at a return to this condition that policy and legislation ought to aim.

He pa.s.sed to his second argument. Tenancy under the State was bad. For the State was a hard landlord, and could be nothing else. It took no account of bad seasons or the shortness of money. It had to collect its revenues and rents within the year. Moreover, the idea was petty in its conception. (Here Mr. Devenish turned an outraged head toward the orator.) Legislation should aim at something beyond the immediate benefit it conferred. Otherwise let them commit the fortunes of the country to a parish council, and themselves go home.

"There is to my mind one question by which all legislation can be tested," said Rames, "and that question is not: 'Does it supply an immediate need?' but 'Does it help to strengthen the character of the race?'"

The bill failed according to that test. For it meant no more than the subst.i.tution of one landlord for another, and left the tenant pretty much where he was. If Mr. Fanshawe had taken a bold course and produced a just measure, with the object of creating owners, then the bill would not have failed. For the desire to possess land was the surest sign of a sound and healthy race. It was that desire in men which good legislation would try to keep alive. This bill merely fobbed them off with a miserable makeshift, and shut the door against ownership. Ownership with its obligations and its responsibility, and its response to the most primal and most durable of all ambitions, was the only policy worthy of a great Parliament.

Mr. Devenish replied later in the afternoon, and quite briefly, He did not, he said, propose to enter into the discussion, but simply to state the intention of the government. It would give the bill a second reading, accepting thus the two principles of small holdings and tenancies under the State; and next year it would introduce a measure of its own, based upon those principles, and press it through until it was placed upon the statute-book. Mr. Devenish studiously refrained from any reference to Captain Rames, and as soon as he sat down, the hands of the clock then pointing within a minute of five, Mr. Fanshawe moved the closure, and the Speaker accepted the motion. The closure was accepted without a division, and the main question was put.

In the interval, while the division bells were ringing, a slim, middle-aged man, with a moustache which was beginning to grow gray, and a handsome, ineffective face, pa.s.sed into the House from the lobby, and took a seat on the bench by Rames's side.

"What are you going to do, Rames?" he asked.

"Vote as I spoke," said Harry.

"Then I'll go with you," said his companion. "I didn't hear your speech, or indeed anything of the debate. But I am sure Devenish is wrong."

Harry Rames laughed.

"That sounds like a good working rule. Thank you, Brook. Let us go and vote."

The two men, alone of their party, strolled into the opposition lobby, and that was the beginning of the great cave. It was a Friday afternoon in summer, the weather was very hot, the House very thin and Mr. Devenish and his under-secretary the only men present on the treasury bench. No one paid any attention to the revolt; the newspapers next day had the briefest reports of the debate. Cynthia herself, who had come to the House to listen to a fierce and tingling discussion, was disappointed at the gentle apathy which overlay the proceedings of that afternoon.

But Harry said: "Wait a little, Cynthia"; and Mr. Brook, who from that time began to drop in frequently at their house in Curzon Street, chuckled like a man with secret knowledge.

"Eight men on our side," Harry explained, "had met several times in one of the committee rooms before Friday, to decide what course they should take to resist this bill. I did not know of their meetings at the time, and they agreed to do nothing until they were sure of the line the government was going to take. Had they suspected that I was going to move the rejection of the bill, they would have attended and voted with me."

CHAPTER XXV

COLONEL CHALLONER'S REVOLT

"We will have to make a great stand next year, Rames," said Robert Brook. "We must organize. We have time, thank goodness. There are ten of us now. A lot more will join us."

"But will they vote? That's the point," returned Rames. "Will they vote against the government's bill on its second reading?"

"Oh, yes," Mr. Brook replied enthusiastically. "There are a lot of discontented people in our majority. We'll have voters--Challoner, for instance. Besides, you have friends."

Rames laughed.

"Yes, I know the kind of friends--fellows who come to you in your seat after you have spoken, pat you on the back, whisper that they are with you, and then troop like tame mice into the government lobby against you. I've watched them."

Brook, however, was not to be damped. He threw himself for the rest of that session into the work of organization. A halting speaker and an ineffectual personage, he had sat for twenty years in the House of Commons and was not tired of it. He was without distinction, he was the confidant of no minister, he was never caricatured, he was never the chairman of a committee, he rarely spoke. The recruits of each new Parliament took almost its duration before they a.s.signed individuality to his features or honored him with a name. He was mediocrity's last word. But he had charming manners and won to a kind of friendly pity those whose acquaintance he gently made. He was born for private life, but the House of Commons had caught him as in a net. He had no other interests, he had no wife, he did not any longer even aspire to office. To be busy in the House of Commons--that was lifeblood to him and a renewal of youth. His chance had come now. He hurried from man to man, discreet and furtive. He arranged private meetings. He hooked his little wagon to Rames's star. He approached Colonel Challoner.

Challoner, the party hack, was instinctively outraged. Was the list of ministers closed forever? No! But as he was about to repel Robert Brook's advances, the very holder of the office which he coveted stung him into revolt.

It was quite toward the end of the session. Colonel Challoner was walking through the division lobby late at night when he saw the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Charles Bradley, in front of him.

There was some stir at the time because certain Indian emigrants had suffered in one of the disturbances of southern Persia. Colonel Challoner hurried officiously to Mr. Bradley's side.

"Bradley," he said, "don't you think it would be good policy to repatriate those Indians at our expense. What?"

Mr. Bradley, a florid gentleman, youthfully middle-aged, with a sweet voice, a pompous manner, and perhaps a bare sufficiency of brains, turned to the colonel with condescending kindness.

"As a member of the government," he said importantly, "I can no longer speak freely. Ah, my dear Challoner, I tell you I regret day after day that corner seat on the front bench below the gangway, and the opportunity of supplementary questions. But that happy time has gone.

You might, if you like, raise the question on the adjournment or the Appropriation Bill next week. I could then reply to you."

Mr. Bradley smiled benignantly upon Colonel Challoner as from heights of sunrise, and pa.s.sed on. He had grown very lordly since his elevation to office. Still, a few paces further on it seemed worth his while to stop until Challoner rejoined him. He did not notice that the colonel had grown rather red in the face.

"If you do raise the question, Colonel Challoner, could you introduce into your speech 'Civis Roma.n.u.s sum'? I should like to hang my speech upon that. Thank you."