The Dawn of Reckoning (21 page)

In the silence that followed, they could hear the rain falling heavily on
the roof above; in a few seconds it had swollen from a gentle drizzle to a
fierce slanting storm. The seconds seemed hours in length; her head was again
swimming and her heart pounding away tumultuously. There came a curious
crashing sound from outside; she started violently, and then realized that it
was only the closing of the windows in the wards. The rain beat down in a
furious crescendo.

“Just one question,” she said quietly. She paused a little and then added,
with hardly the least change of voice: “Do—do you love me?”

He faced her like one suddenly fighting for his life. He stared at her
without speaking for a moment, and then moved near to her in two enormous
strides. She was less frightened now; indeed, his angry looks gave her almost
a sensation of relief.

He seized her by the shoulders and shook her. “You’re trying to tempt me,”
he cried, gritting his teeth. “You’ve got a devil in you to-night.”

“And if I have, you put it there,” she answered boldly. “Won’t you give me
a plain answer to my plain question?”

His hands on her shoulders gripped her till she winced with pain. “Very
well, you can have your plain answer. I
do
love you. Now sit
down.”

But she did not obey him. A strange transfiguring light came into her
eyes, and she stood on tiptoe and flung both her arms round him. “Oh, you
man,” she gasped, half-choking with emotion, “you try to take away the joy by
talking as if it were business—just business—not love. But you
can’t—you shan’t—I won’t let you!—Oh, kiss me—kiss
me—kiss me as you did a little while ago when you were tired and weary
and worn out—when you wanted me and you found me waiting for you…”
She gave him her red glowing lips and he crushed them wildly to his. All her
words were quenched by the fire that ran down her limbs; the room grew dark
about them till they saw nothing but each other’s eyes; he kissed her again
and again and again, till she almost fainted from delicious weariness.

“Oh, my strong, lovely man,” she whispered, trembling vitally as he held
her. “I have been tame for so long…but now you have made me wild
again…”

The clock outside began the chiming of ten. He almost flung
her away from him. “Your train,” he cried sharply. “Your train.”

“Oh, damn my train.”

“No…No, no. It’s the last train to-night. You must catch it. Hurry up.
Thank goodness it’s not foggy.”

“I wish it were.”

“Nonsense. Get yourself ready quickly while I ‘phone for a cab.”

“Suppose I refuse to go?”

“You won’t refuse. You will do as I tell you.”

“And after Wednesday?”

“Then you will also do as I tell you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am quite sure. After Wednesday we will settle everything.”

“And then?”

“We will decide when the time comes…Your train—you
must
hurry. One thing I want you to promise.”

“What is it?”

“I want you to help Philip all you can in his election. It’s only for a
few more days. You must, oh, you
must
promise that.”

She looked at him at first defiantly, and then replied: “Yes, I promise.
And you—what will you promise?”

“I promise you that—as I said before—you can count on
me…I—I am very—very tired to-night and—-and—” He
put his hand to his head as if to defend himself from a blow. “Tired, yes,
and—and, oh, anyway, I must go and telephone.”

He dashed out of the room. It was only as the light shone on his face near
the doorway that she noticed how suddenly pale he had grown.

Five minutes later she was racing through the greasy garbage-littered
streets in a taxi. She reached the courtyard of Liverpool Street Station at
eleven minutes past the hour, and jumped into the last compartment of the
train just as it began to move out of the platform.

By the evening post on the next day she received this
letter

“
Dear Stella
,—I’ve thought
it all out, darling, and I know it’s all impossible. I’d better tell you
frankly, to save you all sorts of worries and anxieties. I love you very,
very much, but I cannot—I cannot steal the wife of my friend. Don’t
think me priggish—it isn’t that.

“I spent all last night after you had gone, thinking it all
out, and I must be honest with you and with myself, Stella. I think that
Philip loves and always has loved you very deeply, perhaps even as deeply as
I do. I think also that all his queernesses lately have been due to
jealousy.

“He wants you and he thinks you are slipping away from him.
Even the things you most hate him for have been done, I am convinced, because
he loves you so much. And I think it would be treachery to do what we
contemplated. I
cannot
do it. It isn’t mere convention—if you
and Philip were tired
of each other
I would run off with you to-night.
But he loves you, and he is my friend, and I think that to lose you would
kill him. We
must
remember that.

“Help him all you can, both in the election and afterwards.
Give him another big chance, for my sake, Stella.

“I am going to sign on for another trip to the South, and I
leave for Norway on Thursday morning to make certain arrangements. I hope by
then I shall know that Philip is M.P. for Chassingford.

“Darling, it will be hard for both of us—it is hard,
infernally hard, but for the present it’s the only honest thing we can
do.”

“Good-bye till we meet again. Be brave.

“
Aubrey Ward
.

“P.S.—Before I go away finally I will call round to
say good-bye to you and Philip.”

She replied by return as follows:

“
My Dear,
Dear
Man
,—Your letter has made me the most miserable woman on earth.
I only read it once hastily, because I heard Philip’s footsteps outside the
room, and I got in such a panic that I threw the whole letter into the fire.
Oh, why,
why
are you going to do this dreadful thing? Is there no
other way at all? I feel blind, deaf, and dumb with misery, now that I know
what you are going to do. Oh, my man, think of the danger. It frightens
me—I’m too absolutely scared to write any more. If you do come here,
don’t, for God’s sake, have anything to do with me, for at the first sight of
you I should go raving mad and give the whole game away. I shall help Philip
till the polling is over, but after that—God help me, and you too! I
feel disaster all about you, but then, you won’t take heed of my warning. Oh,
if I had known
you
when I was a girl, all these terrible things would
never have happened. Good-bye, dearest—good-bye.—Your own always,
whatever you do—

“
Stella
.”

As the polling-day drew nearer, Chassingford became vastly
more excited that it had ever been in its life before. By the almost fatuous
caprice of the English electoral system, it had been chosen to express the
opinion of the country upon a Government that was suffering primarily from
the fatigue and sterility of long office. Chassingford was aware of its
sudden importance in the scheme of things; it received retinues of newspaper
correspondents and bevies of ex-Cabinet Ministers with the coy air of a
middle-aged woman accepting flatteries.

Let us hear Mr. Jefferson Milner-White, special correspondent of the
Manchester Sentinel
.

“There is no doubt,” he wrote two days before the election, “that Mr.
Monsell’s chances are improving hour by hour, one had almost said minute by
minute. Nor is this due entirely to the trend of events that has overwhelmed
even this lethargic rural constituency…” and here follow a few sentences
expressing in choice well-modulated phrases the
Sentinel’s
choice
well-modulated politics. “It is rather, I believe, a personal—perhaps
even a psychological matter. Mr. Monsell is a curious man, almost the exact
opposite of the typical Parliamentary candidate. He is always very nervous;
he has absolutely no sense of humour; his platform manner is unattractive and
even disconcerting; nor can it be said that he is especially popular in the
locality. Yet for all that there is a certain sombre unanalyzable power about
him; this and his persistence are assuredly winning votes. Every night he
addresses half-a-dozen meetings, delivering at each one long and exceeding
dull speeches. Is there such a thing as being unconsciously hypnotized? If
so, I should say that a large proportion of Mr. Monsell’s audience go home to
their beds in such a condition. His eyes are of an intense blue, the eyes of
a dreamer rather than of a practical man; yet his speeches are crammed full
of unwieldy and singularly unilluminating Blue-Book statistics. What can one
make of such a man? I do not profess to know, but I am rather afraid that the
electors of Chassingford will make an M.P. of him.”

Evidently Mr. Milner-White’s report aroused keen interest in Withington
and Fallowfield, for he returned to the subject the next day in somewhat the
same strain. “I cannot help writing mysteriously about Mr. Monsell. I do not
understand him. People here to whom I have spoken seem to treat him as a sort
of joke. And yet, on inquiry, I find that they are most of them are going to
vote for him ‘Why vote for a joke?’ I ask, and the reply is generally
vague…A curious in rent took place at one of Mr. Monsell’s meetings last
evening. The Chairman, a local licensed victualler of rubicund countenance
and Falstaffian proportions, had just made the usual optimistic remarks about
the candidate’s chances of success, when the candidate himself suddenly
echoed it, with clenched fists and uplifted eyes. ‘I
will
succeed,’ he
declared, with death-like solemnity. ‘I
shall
succeed.’ The strange
thing was that nobody laughed. On the contrary, the effect was electric. I
myself distinctly felt a tense prickling of the skin. Whether Mr. Monsell was
carried away by his own sombre enthusiasm, or whether it was a mere piece of
consummate play-acting, I cannot say, but I confess that it was curiously
impressive.

“The candidate’s humourless intensity is well and aptly balanced by the
high spirits of his wife, who has suddenly at almost the eleventh hour thrown
herself into the combat. She combines great personal charm with an entire
ignorance of political matters. Her assistance is, to say the least, timely,
for Mr. Monsell has been working at such a high pressure that I am not
surprised to hear rumours of his ill-health. The town, however, is full of
rumours…etc., etc…”

They were thrown together more during those few final days
of the campaign than they had been for many months. They had to attend
meetings together, to drive in motor-cars from village to village, to smile
at each other on platforms with ostentatious affection. They hid the truth
from the crowd by tacit agreement, but from each other they could not hide
it.

“I am grateful to you for your help,” he said once, rather coldly, as they
were motoring from one evening meeting to another through the dark
country-side. “Oh, yes, I am very grateful. You make an excellent candidate’s
wife. If only I were half so good a candidate…By the way, have you seen
what that fellow Milner-White says about me in the
Manchester
Sentinel
?

“No, I haven’t read any of the papers.”

He pulled out a sheaf of cuttings from his pocket.

“This,” he answered, holding one of them beneath the dim roof-light of the
limousine. “Listen…” He read out the passage beginning: ‘Mr. Monsell is a
curious man…’ When he came to the phrase ‘sombre unanalyzable power’ he
stopped and glanced at her intently. “Do
you
think I have this sombre
unanalyzable power?”

His strange eyes were upon her and something in them was making her
suddenly frightened. “I—I haven’t noticed,” she said haltingly.

“You haven’t noticed, eh? What
have
you noticed?” He checked
himself sharply and went on, with more suavity: “Anyway, I should like to
know this Mr. Milner-White. I rather fancy we should get on well together. I
wonder if he’s a Cambridge man…”

He seemed obsessed with Mr. Milner-White. When there were opportunities of
private conversation with her (there were not many), he rarely seized them
except to speculate upon the character and personality of the
Sentinel
correspondent.

“I wish I knew him,” he kept saying. “I think I should find him remarkably
sympathetic. I imagine him rather as an elderly scholarly type of man, by no
means strong physically…None of the sweeping intolerance of youth…He
would listen quietly and understand. The sort of friend who would stand by
you through thick and thin…”

And on the very morning of the poll he said to her: “That fellow
Milner-White’s got something else in to-day. He says I am like a man who,
after many failures, is at last staking his all. Now what do you suppose he
means by that?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“I wish I knew…It is so rarely that one feels a certain sense of
spiritual kinship breaking through the cold lines of print—”

And so on.

Philip, however, was wrong in his estimate of Mr. Milner-
White. That gentleman was not elderly, nor was he either particularly
scholarly or particularly sympathetic. He was a youngster almost fresh from
Oxford, sent out to try his spurs on the somewhat arid adventure of
bye-election reporting. Being perfectly well aware of his own brilliant
gifts, he was determined from the first to make the Chassing ford contest a
subtle, not to say sinister business. His dispatch to the
Sentinel
concerning the events of the polling-day, and culminating in a declaration of
the result, was a final
tour de force
.