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Nobody's Man, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Book Two - Chapter 16 |
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_ BOOK TWO CHAPTER XVI "We have achieved a triumph," Jane declared, when the last of the servants had disappeared and the little party of four were left to their own devices. "We have sat through the whole of dinner and not once mentioned politics." "You made us forget them," Tallente murmured. "A left-handed compliment," Jane laughed. "You should pay your tribute to my cook. Mr. Dartrey, I have told you all about my farms and your wife has explained all that I could not understand of her last article in the National. Now I am going to seek for further enlightenment. Tell my why the publication of an article written years ago is likely to affect Mr. Tallente's present position so much?" "Because," Dartrey explained, "it is an attack upon the most sensitive, the most difficult, and the section of our party furthest removed from us--the great trades unions. Some years ago, Lady Jane, since the war, one of our shrewdest thinkers declared that the greatest danger overshadowing this country was the power wielded by the representatives of these various unions, a power which amounted almost to a dictatorship. We have drawn them into our party through detaching the units. We have never been able to capture them as a whole. Even to-day their leaders are in a curiously anomalous position. They see their power going in the dawn of a more socialistic age. They cannot refuse to accept our principles but in their hearts they know that our triumph sounds the death knell to their power. This article of Tallente's would give them a wonderful chance. Out of very desperation they will seize upon it." "Have you read the article?" Jane enquired. "This evening, just before I came," Dartrey replied gravely. "I can understand," Tallente intervened, "that you feel bound to take this seriously, Dartrey, but after all there is nothing traitorous to our cause in what I wrote. I attacked the trades unions for their colossal and fiendish selfishness when the Empire was tottering. I would do it again under the same circumstances. Remember I was fresh from Ypres. I had seen Englishmen, not soldiers but just hastily trained citizens--bakers, commercial travellers, clerks, small tradesmen--butchered like rabbits but fighting for their country, dying for it--and all the time those blackguardly stump orators at home turned their backs to France and thought the time opportune to wrangle for a rise in wages and bring the country to the very verge of a universal strike. It didn't come off, I know, but there were very few people who really understood how near we were to it. Dartrey, we sacrifice too much of our real feelings to political necessity. I won't apologize for my article; I'll defend it." Dartrey sighed. "It will be a difficult task, Tallente. The spirit has gone. People have forgotten already the danger which we so narrowly escaped--forgotten before the grass has grown on the graves of our saviours." "Still, you wouldn't have Mr. Tallente give in without a struggle?" Jane asked. "I hope that Tallente will fight," Dartrey replied, "but I must warn you, Lady Jane, that I am the guardian of a cause, and for that reason I am an opportunist. If the division of our party which consists of the trades unionists refuses to listen to any explanation and threatens severance if Tallente remains, then he will have to go." "So far as your personal view is concerned," Tallente asked, "you could do without Miller, couldn't you?" "I could thrive without him," Dartrey declared heartily. "Then you shall," Tallente asserted. "We'll show the world what his local trades unionism stands for. He has belittled the whole principle of cooperation. He twangs all the time one brazen chord instead of seeking to give expression to the clear voices of the millions. Miller would impoverish the country with his accursed limited production, his threatened strikes, his parochial outlook. Englishmen are brimful of common sense, Dartrey, if you know where to dig for it. We'll materialise your own dream. We'll bring the principles of socialism into our human and daily life and those octopus trades unions shall feel the knife." Jane laid her hand for a moment upon his arm. "Why aren't you oftener enthusiastic?" He glanced at her swiftly. Their eyes met. Fearlessly she held his fingers for a moment,--a long, wonderful moment. "I was getting past enthusiasms," he said; "I was dropping into the dry-as-dust school--the argumentative, logical, cold, ineffectual school. The last few months have changed that. I feel young again. If Dartrey will give me a free hand, I'll deliver up to him Miller's bones." Dartrey had come to the dinner in an uncertain frame of mind. No one knew better than he the sinister power behind Miller. Yet before Tallente had finished speaking he had made up his mind. "I'll stand by you, Tallente," he declared, "even if it puts us back a year or so. Miller carries with him always an atmosphere of unwholesome things. He has got the Bolshevist filth in his blood and I don't trust him. No one trusts him. He shall take his following where he will, and if we are not strong enough to rule without them, we'll wait." It was a compact of curious importance which the two men sealed impulsively with a grip of the hands across the table, and down at Woolhanger, through some dreary months, it was Jane's greatest pleasure to remember that it was at her table it had been made.
"I can't part with you just yet, Mr. Tallente," she said. "You are not in a hurry, I hope, and you are so close to your rooms that the matter of taxies need not worry you. And, Mr. Dartrey, next time you come down to my county you must bring your wife over to see me. Woolhanger is so typically Devonshire, I really think you would be interested." "I shall make Stephen bring me in the spring," Nora promised. "I shall never forget how fascinated we were with the whole place this last summer. Don't forget that you are coming to the House with me tomorrow afternoon." Jane smiled. "I am looking forward to it," she declared. "The only annoying part is that that stupid man won't promise to speak." "I shall have so much to say within the next week or so," Tallente observed, a little grimly, "that I think I had better keep quiet as long as I can." The moment for which Tallente had been longing came then. The front door closed behind the departing guests. Jane motioned to him to come and sit by her side on the couch. "I love your friends," she said. "I think Mrs. Dartrey is perfectly sweet and Dartrey is just as wonderful as I had pictured him. They are so strangely unusual," she went on. "I can scarcely believe, even now, that our dinner actually took place in my little room here--Stephen Dartrey, the man I have read about all my life, and this brilliant young wife of his. Thank you so much, dear friend, for bringing them." "And thank you, dear perfect hostess," he answered. "Do you know what you did? You created an atmosphere in which it was possible to think and talk and see things clearly. Do you realise what has happened? Dartrey has done a great thing. He has thrown over the one menacing power in the advancing cause of the people. He is going to back me against Miller." "What exactly is Miller's position?" she asked. "Let me tell you another time," he begged. "I have looked forward so to these few minutes with you. Tell me how much time you are going to spare me this next week?" She looked at him with the slight, indulgent smile of a woman realising and glad to realise her power. To Tallente she had never seemed more utterly and entirely desirable. It was not for him to know that a French modiste had woven all the cunning and diablerie of the sex lure into the elegant shape, the apparent simplicity of the black velvet which draped her limbs. In some mysterious way, the same spirit seemed to have entered into Jane herself. The evening had been one of unalloyed pleasure. She felt the charm of her companion more than ever before. The pleasant light in her eyes, the courteous, half-mocking phrases with which, as a rule, she fenced herself about in those moments when he sought to draw her closer to him, were gone. Her eyes were as bright as ever, but softer. Her mouth was firm, yet somehow with a faint, womanly voluptuousness in its sweet curves. The fingers which lay unresistingly in his hand were soft and warm. "As much time as you can spare," she promised him. "I thought, though, that you would be busy tearing Miller bone from bone." "The game of politics is played slowly," he answered, "sometimes so slowly that one chafes. Dear Jane, I want to see you all the time. So much of what is best in me, best and most effective, comes from you." "If I can help, I am proud," she whispered. "You help more than you will ever know, more than my lips can tell you. It is you who have lit the lamp again in my life, you from whom come the fire and strength which make me feel that I shall triumph, that I shall achieve the one thing I have set my heart upon." "The one thing?" she murmured rashly. "The one thing outside," he answered, "the desire of my brain. The desire of my heart is here." She lay in his arms, her lips moved to his and the moments passed uncounted. Then, with a queer little cry, she stood up, covered her face for a moment with her hands and then held them both out to him. "Dear man," she begged, "dearest of all men--will you go now? To-morrow--whenever you have time--let your servant ring up. I will free myself from any engagement--but please!" He kissed her fingers and passed out with a murmured word. He knew so little of women and yet some wonderful instinct kept him always in the right path. Perhaps, too, he feared speech himself, lest the ecstasy of those few moments might be broken. _ |
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