Part 18 (1/2)

It was the eve of the poll. There was a tingle of excitement in the air, a hushed expectancy. Only when Cynthia raised her eyes did she lose the vague feeling of suspense. Overhead a skylight in the roof was covered with a horizontal blind. One tattered corner hung down and as she looked up from the indistinguishable throng of faces, it arrested her attention as something especially individual and definite and single.

Suddenly came a buzz and a stir. The chairman was seen to rise from a flight of steps at the side of the platform. He was followed by a tall, gaunt, loose-limbed man with a bony face, a white moustache, and a high, bald head. He had the look of a soldier. Cynthia took no heed of him. He stalked before her and sank unnoticed in his place. Behind him came Harry Rames, and as he pa.s.sed along the narrow gangway between the crowded chairs, those who had seats sprang to their feet; and three thousand people broke like a wave into a flutter of handkerchiefs and a shattering thunder of applause. Above the applause a chant gradually swelled, two lines of a tune rather like a chime.

Cynthia could not hear the words, but the sound, with its rise and fall, surged backward and forward against the walls of the Exchange for a full minute.

Mr. Benoliel leaned toward Cynthia.

”They have given him their foot-ball song. In a city of artisans, keen on foot-ball, that's a good sign.”

Cynthia nodded. But she hardly heard, she could not have answered.

Here was something quite new to her, and overwhelmingly new. The thunderous outburst had taken her by the throat; for a second she felt choked; she had no part in politics, yet emotion woke in her and the tears sprang into her eyes.

”What's the matter, Cynthia?” asked Diana Royle.

Cynthia replied with a break in her voice between a laugh and a sob.

”I don't know. It's just the crowd, I think.”

”And the enthusiasm of the crowd,” added Mr. Benoliel. ”You make me feel very old, Cynthia. I can listen to it quite unmoved now. But there was a time when I couldn't without a choking in my throat. It's the splendid faith of the crowd.”

Cynthia, arrested by the phrase, looked quickly at Benoliel. Greatly as she liked him she was never quite sure of him. Kind as he had been to her she always suspected some touch of the charlatan. He had the look of a man quite in earnest.

”I wonder,” she said, ”whether mere magnetism is enough to arouse it.”

Mr. Benoliel did not answer; for the chairman rose at his table; and while he spoke the harmless necessary words, Cynthia took stock of Harry Rames, who was seated in the rostrum at the side of the table in front of her and a little to her left. The last weeks of exertion had left their marks; the flesh had worn thin upon his face; there were dark hollows beneath his eyes; he had gained a look of spirituality which did not belong to him. He was nervous; his hands, with the long fingers which never seemed to accord with the rest of him, moved uneasily and restlessly from the b.u.t.tons of his coat to the slip of notes which he had placed upon the table. Cynthia was deceived by the look of him as she had been deceived by the fervor of the gathering.

The outburst was not entirely, was not even chiefly, a tribute to the candidate. Ludsey was a political city, and by three weeks of speeches and agitation political feeling had been whipped to a climax of excitement. It sought and found its outlet to-night at this final rally before the poll.

The cheers broke out again when Harry Rames rose and leaned his hand upon the rail of the rostrum. When they died down he began to speak--first a faltering word or two of thanks. Then his voice suddenly strengthened and rang firm. His fingers ceased to twitch, and he turned over in his mind the consecutions of his thoughts as though he were turning over the pages of a book. All that he had planned to say came clearly to him in its due order, and brought the comforting a.s.surance that the rest would follow. He was master of himself, and being master of himself set his audience at ease to listen, Cynthia among the rest. Anxious as he himself, she knew now that the speech would go right on to its considered end. She leaned forward, all ears to catch the words, and all eagerness to read into them, if she could, the something more which was not there.

But she could not; yet it was a night of triumph for Harry Rames, ”Breezy Harry Rames.” She recalled her own phrase with a disappointed droop of the lips more than once during the next hour. He was going to win. She had no doubt of it. Confidence swept from his audience to him and back again in waves. And he savored the joys of the orator as he never had before. He had the arts of the platform, and more than the arts, a power to bend his audience to sympathy. He knew that night the supreme reward, the hush of a ma.s.s of people constraining themselves to silence and even to immobility while a voice, low as a whisper, sounded audibly in every nook. He played with the suspense, prolonging it to the last moment of endurance, and then, by a sudden swoop to a sharp, clever phrase, drawing the audience to its feet and coining the silence in a stormy tumult of applause.

He had the gift of speech; Cynthia gladly conceded it. An aptness of homely words, an absence of all extravagance, and a voice resonant and pleasant as a clear-toned, bell impressed her more than she had expected to be impressed. A day's rest had restored his voice for the time, even though M. Poizat's Lungatine had not contributed to the restoration.

She was surprised, too, by a certain shrewdness in the matter of the speech. It was not so much of the platform as his manner. There was very little reference to the navy. ”I don't mean to be considered a 'service member,'” he had said to her once. ”No one pays attention to the service member in the House of Commons.” But here and there came views which struck her as new and worth consideration.

”If you could teach the wives of the artisans to cook and to take an interest in cooking, you would have done a great deal more to solve the question of intemperance in this country than if you closed half the public-houses,” he cried once and developed his theme with humor and some courage. He drew a picture of a wife putting her husband's supper on the fire, ready against the time when he should come home from his factory, and then running out into the street to talk to a neighbor and leaving the meat to grill to the toughness and dryness of leather.

”The man comes home, sits down to it, and rises from it unsatisfied.

What does he do? He goes out and strolls round to the public-house.

Put a good meal, well-cooked, inside of him, and he'll not be so disposed to move. He'll be inclined to smoke his pipe by the fire in his kitchen.”

He pa.s.sed on to other topics. The whole speech was clever and was uttered on a lift of enthusiasm. But again Cynthia argued, it was the enthusiasm for the arena, not for a cause. It was ambition without ideals, power without high motive.

Diana Royle inclined toward her.

”Aren't you satisfied now?” she asked.

”Oh, he will get on,” said Cynthia; and then she suddenly sat upright in her chair, with her lips parted and the blood bright in her cheeks.

”But, after all,” Rames was saying; his voice was beginning to grow hoa.r.s.e and he raised his hand in an appeal for silence, ”here are we discussing the work to be done, and leaving out in our discussion the great necessity. I don't know what you think, but to my notion there is no greatness in any work unless it has a dream at the heart of it.