Читать книгу The Land of Afternoon: A Satire - Gilbert Knox - Страница 7

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Dilling adapted himself to his new environment much more readily than did his wife. He had not anticipated that the House of Commons would be a glorified Municipal Council such as he had left in Pinto Plains, and that his associations and activities would be virtually the same save on a magnificent scale; whereas Marjorie had deluded herself—subconsciously, it may be—with the thought that Ottawa would be an idealised prairie town, and that she would live a beatified extension of her old life, there. Differences in customs, in social and moral codes, ever remained for her a hopeless enigma, just as Euclid’s problems evade solution for some people. She never could master them because she never could understand them. Black was black and white was white, and neither sunshine nor shadow could convert either into gray. No leopard ever possessed more changeless spots.

While, therefore, her husband was joyously engrossed in his work, finding novelty and stimulation in every smallest detail, remodelling himself to fit the mantle he had been called upon to adorn, Marjorie was confronted with unexpected obstacles, bewildered by inexplicable ways, homesick for familiar standards and people, and groping for something stable to which she could cling and upon which she could build her present life.

Of the nature of Dilling’s work, she had but the sketchiest idea. His conversation was becoming almost unintelligible to her, try as she would to follow it. When, in the old days, they sat at the table or drew their chairs around the fire, and he told her of Jimmy Woodside’s stupidity or Elvira Mumford’s high average, she could take a vital interest in his daily pursuits, but now, when he referred to Motions, and Amendments, and Divisions, she had no idea of what he was talking about. He was seldom at home, and upon those rare occasions he fortressed himself behind a palisade of Blue Books and Financial Returns.

He abandoned himself to reading almost as a man abandons himself to physical debauch, and Marjorie, furtively watching him, could scarcely believe that the stranger occupying that frail, familiar shell was, in reality, her husband. There was about him a suggestion of emotional pleasure, an expression of ecstacy, as when a man gazes deep into his beloved’s eyes.

“Ah,” he would murmur, “three thousand, six hundred and forty-two ... annually! Seventy-nine thousand less than ... well, well!”

His cheeks would flush, his breathing would thicken, his forehead would gleam with a crown of moisture, and he would lose his temper shockingly if the children spoke to him or played noisily in the room.

Long afterwards, a rural wag observed that Prohibition touched few persons less than Raymond Dilling, who could get drunk on Blue Books and Trade Journals, any day in the year!

Marjorie got into the way of keeping the little ones shut up in the kitchen with her. The house was too small to allow Dilling the privacy of a library or study, and the three bedrooms were cold and cheerless. So he appropriated the tiny drawing-room and converted it into what seemed to her, a literary rubbish heap. Books, pamphlets, Hansards, and more books ... she was nearly crazy with them!

She had never been to the House of Commons save once, when Raymond took the entire family on a tour of inspection. She had never seen Parliament in Session, and had no idea that many of the women who accompanied their husbands to Ottawa, spent all the time they could spare from bridge, in the Gallery; not profiting by the progress of the Debates, but carrying on mimic battles amongst themselves. Here was the cockpit, from which arose the causes of bitter though bloodless conflicts—conflicts which embroiled both the innocent and the guilty, and formed the base of continuous social warfare.

However, on the afternoon that Dilling was expected to deliver his maiden speech, she found her way to the Ladies’ Gallery with the aid of a courteous official, and ingenuously presented her card of admission. Without appearing to glance at it, the doorkeeper grasped the information it bore.

“This way, please, Mrs. Dilling,” he said, with just the proper shade of cordiality tempering his authority. “Here’s a seat—in the second row. They are just clearing the Orders for your husband’s speech,” he added, in an officious whisper.

Marjorie sank unobtrusively into the place he indicated and thanked him. She wondered how he knew her name, not realising that he had held his position for forty years by the exercise of that very faculty which so amazed her. It was his duty to know not only all those who sought an entrance through the particular portal that he guarded, but also to know where to place them. Should he fail to recognise an applicant, he never betrayed himself. She was presently to learn that as her husband progressed nearer the front benches downstairs, she would be advanced to the front, upstairs.

Her first sensation—could she have singled one out of the medley that overwhelmed her—was not of exaltation at having entered into the sanctuary of the Canadian Temple of Politics, and being in a position to look down upon one of the clumsiest and most complex institutions that ever failed to maintain the delusion of democracy, but of the immensity of the place. The Green Chamber was at least four times as large as the Arena in Pinto Plains! Its sombreness discomfited her. Although she had read descriptions of the Commons, she never visualised the dullness of the green with which it was carpeted and upholstered; she had rather taken clusters of glittering candelabra for granted; indeed, it would not have surprised her to find golden festoons catching dust from the whirlwind of oratory which rose from the floor beneath. The unregality of the place made her want to cry. She felt like a child standing before a fairy king without his crown.

Directly opposite her sat the Speaker on his Throne—the chair which the late King Edward had used when visiting the Colonies in 1860. Above the Speaker, in a shallow gallery suspended below that reserved for the Proletariat, several men were languidly trailing their pencils across the stationery provided them by the generous taxpayers of the country. These were the scribes of the Press, profundite scriveners, whose golden words she had absorbed so often in her far-away prairie home.

On the floor of the House, at a long table in front of the Speaker, sat the Clerk. At the other end of the table lay the Mace, the massive bauble that aroused Oliver Cromwell’s choler, and which symbolises, by its position, the functioning of the House. In splendid isolation sat the Sergeant-at-Arms, an incumbent of the office for forty-three years, during which time, it is said, he never changed the colour of his overcoat, or his dog.

On the Speaker’s left sat His Majesty’s loyal Opposition, led by that illustrious tribune of the people, the Right Honourable Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Facing him, across the table, was the Right Honourable Sir Robert Borden and the Members of his Cabinet, prominent among whom was Sir Eric Denby, who dreamed of a Saharan drought for Canada, and affirmed his stand on the Temperance question with the zeal of a Hebrew prophet. Then, as a counterpoise to Sir Eric, there was the Honourable Godfrey Gough, who sought to mould a policy for his Party that would have made Machiavelli blush!

These were the notables; the rest were a jumble of tailenders.

Marjorie could not locate her husband, immediately, but after a little she recognised the top of his head. He was sitting in a dim corner, in the very last row under the Gallery that was devoted to the accommodation of the ruck of our splendid democracy.

Then, before she was quite prepared for it, she saw him rise to his feet. Her eyes filled with tears of terror, and for a moment he seemed to stand alone—like a splendid column, islanded in a rolling sea. Marjorie could not resist the impulse to inform the impassive lady sitting beside her, that the speaker was her husband.

The lady looked surprised at being addressed.

“Indeed?” she replied, and her eyebrows added, “Well, what of it?”

Marjorie kept her hand pressed tightly over her heart. It thumped so heavily, she could scarcely hear what Raymond was saying. If he should forget his speech! If he should fail!

Gradually, the blur before her cleared, and she saw that he was standing quite at ease, one hand resting on his hip—a favourite and familiar attitude—and the other negligently grasping the back of his chair. His flat voice, carrying well for all its lack of resonancy, was perfectly steady, and his words were unhurried, clear; in fine, she realised that Raymond had no dread of what to her, was a scarifying experience, and, unimaginative though she was, there was borne upon her a strange, new consciousness of her husband’s power.

For the formal test of his ability to command the attention of the House, he had seized upon the Motion of a Representative from the West, calling upon the Government to adopt a vigourous policy in the construction of grain elevators and facilities for the transportation of wheat—Canada’s prime commodity in the markets of the world.

“... As I stand here, enveloped by the traditions of the past,” she heard him say, “listening to the echoes in this Chamber of the noble words and sound policies that have builded this great structure that is our Country, I am awed by the privilege that has come to me of taking a part, however small, in directing the national welfare of this Dominion. I seek not at this moment, Mr. Speaker, merely the glory of the Party to which I have the honour to belong, but I am ambitious to maintain a principle, to be worthy of the men who fashioned a nation out of chaos, out of a wilderness of local and parochial interests. I shall strive to be the force for good that such men would wish to see in every member in this legislative body to-day ...”

Although he had known that Marjorie would be in the Gallery that afternoon, it was typical of Dilling to ignore the fact. Small acts of pretty gallantry were utterly foreign to his nature. He could no more have raised a woman’s glove to his lips before returning it to her, than he could have manicured his fingernails. To himself he termed such graces “la-di-da”, by which he probably meant foppish. If his personal vanity revealed itself in any one direction it was that he might appear superlatively masculine—even to the verge of brutality.

“... The cause I plead,” he continued, “is that which must appeal to every thinking man, to-day. I plead an economical policy for the guarding of our grain ...”

“... Wheat!” she heard him say. “The West is crying for elevators, and for freighting facilities in order that she may distribute her vast resources. The East is crying for food. The world needs wheat. Wheat! The very word rings with a strange magic, flares with a golden gleam of prosperity.”

His eyes were fixed on his Chief’s profile, save when they leaped across the aisle to the “White Plume” of the grand Old Man who bent over his desk and scribbled with a slender yellow pencil, apparently quite oblivious to Dilling’s existence. Marjorie saw him through brimming eyes. She did not know that in the corridor men were saying, “Come on in! Dilling’s got the floor. He’s talking a good deal of rhetorical rot—as must be expected from an amateur—but the making of an orator is there... Come on in!” She was too nervous to notice that the empty benches which comprise the flattering audience usually accorded to a new speaker, were rapidly filling, that Members who discovered some trifling business to keep them in the Chamber, had stopped sorting the collection of visiting cards, forgotten appointments, and notes with which their pockets were stuffed. Laryngitical gentlemen forbore to snap their fingers at the bob-tailed pages for glasses of water—in short, Raymond was making an impression. He was receiving the attention of the House.

His concluding words were,

“I have come amongst you, a stranger, unversed in the ways of this great assembly of a young, ardent and democratic people—of members whose experience has been so much richer than my own. I trust that none of you—even those whose views may be at variance with mine—will have cause to resent my coming. I realise that a profound responsibility devolves upon each and every one of us who steps across the threshold of this Chamber, and that although our creeds may be translated differently, their actuating principles are identical.

“I know, Mr. Speaker, that life lies in the struggle, that work—and not its wage—brings us joy. The game is the important thing, not the score. To gain the peak of the mountain is the climber’s ambition. If he be a true man, a man who rejoices in service for others, he has no wish to possess the summit. To serve the Empire at the cost of ease and leisure, to expend one’s strength in the solving of her myriad problems, is the sum total of an honest man’s desire.

“I submit that it is possible to spread peace and plenty throughout our Dominion. The Government has but to build treasure-houses for the grain, and lend assistance in the way of subsidies for transportation. A hungry people make poor citizens, and will inevitably bring desolation to any land, for, as Ruskin has said, ‘There is no wealth but life, and that nation is the richest that breeds the greatest number of noble and happy homes and beings’.”

His speech was short and admirably delivered. It hit the temper of the House, and Dilling sat down amid a storm of applause.

Through a mist of tears Marjorie noted that Sir Robert was bending over her husband with an air that was more than perfunctorily gracious. Several other men also left their desks and offered him congratulations. She felt a little faint with pride and the reaction of it all.

“A real triumph,” said the voice of the lady sitting next to her, suddenly. “Your husband’s quite a speaker, isn’t he?” and Marjorie was too grateful for these words of friendliness to sense that the lady (who was Mrs. Bedford, wife of the Whip of the Liberal Party) would have been much more gratified had Raymond Dilling made of his speech a bleak failure.