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A People's Man, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Chapter 38 |
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_ CHAPTER XXXVIII From town to town, travelling for the most part on the platform of an engine, Maraton sped on his splendid mission. It was Ernshaw himself who drove, with the help of an assistant, but as they passed from place to place the veto was lifted. The men in some districts were a little querulous, but at Maraton's coming they were subdued. It was peace, a peace how splendid they were soon to know. By mid-day, trains laden with coal were rushing to several of the Channel ports. Maraton found his task with the miners more difficult, and yet in a way his triumph here was still more complete. He travelled down the backbone of England, preaching peace where war had reigned, promising great things in the name of the new Government. Although he had been absent barely forty-eight hours, it was a new London into which he travelled on his return. The streets were crowded once more with taxicabs, the evening papers were being sold, the shops were all open, the policemen were once more in the streets. Selingman, who had scarcely once left Maraton's side, gazed about him with wonder. "It is a miracle, this," he declared. "There is no aftermath." "The people are waiting," Maraton said. "We have given them serious pledges. Their day is to come." "You believe that Foley will keep his word?" Selingman asked. "I know that he will," Maraton replied. "As soon as the Bills are drafted, he will go to the country. It will be a new Party--the National Party. Stay and see it, Selingman--a new era in the politics of the world, a very wonderful era. The country is going to be governed for the people that are worth while." "If one could but live long enough!" Selingman sighed. "All over the universe it comes. Where was it one read of footsteps that sounded amongst the hills like footsteps upon wool? In the night-watches you can hear those footsteps. The world trembles with them." "And after all," Maraton continued, "the sun of the world's happiness is made up of the happiness of units. Presently we shall have time to think of those things." "It is true," Selingman said disconsolately. "I find myself rejoicing in the good which is coming to humanity and forgetting personal sorrows. There is that wonderful, that adorable secretary of your--Julia. What should you say to me, my friend Maraton, if I were indeed to rob you of her? For once I am in earnest." Maraton started for a moment. The idea at first was ludicrous. "I suppose," he admitted, "I should reconcile myself to the inevitable. Times are going to be different. I dare say that Aaron will be the only secretary I shall need. But will she go? Remember, she is a woman of the people. I think that she will never settle down, even with your splendid work to control. She is less a poet than a humanitarian." "What am I, man," Selingman retorted, striking himself on the chest, "but a humanitarian? Listen to the wonderful proof--it is not a secretary I require; it is a wife!" Maraton was staggered. "Have you told her?" "What is the use?" Selingman growled. "She is yours, body and soul. You have but to lift up your finger, and she would follow you to the end of the world. I don't idealize women, you know, Maraton, and virtue isn't a fetish with me. But I know that girl. If you hold out your hands, she is yours, but if you withhold them, she is the most virginal creature that ever breathed." "She is a splendid character," Maraton said softly. "Why don't you marry her yourself?" Selingman asked abruptly. "How can you look at her, hear her speak, watch her, without wanting to marry her? What are you made of?" Maraton sighed. "I am one of the victims, I suppose, of that curious instinct of selection. I care for some one else; I have cared for some one else ever since the first night I set foot in England." "Then I'll get her," Selingman declared. "In time I'll get her." They all dined together at the little restaurant on the borders of Soho. Selingman was the giver of the feast and his spirits were both wonderful and infectious. The roar of London was recommencing. Newspapers were being sold on the streets. The strange cruisers seemed mysteriously to have disappeared from the Atlantic. The fleet, imprisoned no longer, was on its way to the North Sea. There was none of the foolish, over-exuberant rejoicing of bibulous jingoism, but a genuine, deep spirit of thankfulness abroad. Men and women were glad but thoughtful. There were new times to come, great promises had been made. There were rumours everywhere of a new political Party. "We pause to-night," Selingman declared, "at the end of the first chapter. Almost I am tempted to linger in this wonderful country--at any rate until the headlines of the next are in type. You go down to the House tonight?" "At nine o'clock," Maraton replied, glancing at the clock. "Will they remember," Selingman continued thoughtfully, "that you were the Samson who pulled down the pillars, or will they merely hail you as the deliverer? Will they think of that ghostly ride of yours on the locomotive, I wonder, when you tore screaming through the darkness, with the risk of a buffer on the line at every mile; stepped from the engine, grimy, with your breath sucked out of--you by the wind, and the roar of the locomotive still throbbing in your ears--stepped out to deliver your message to the waiting throngs? Magnificent! A subject worthy of me and my prose! I shall write of it, Maraton. I shall sing the glory of it in verse or script, when your fame as a politician of the moment has passed. You will live because of the garland that I shall weave." Maraton sipped his wine thoughtfully. "But for your overweening humility, Selingman," he began-- Selingman struck the table with his fist. "It is a night for rejoicings, this," he thundered. "I will not have my weaknesses exposed. Let us, for to-night, at any rate, see the best in each other. Glance, for instance, at Miss Julia. Admire the exquisite pink of my carnations which she has condescended to wear; see how well they become her." "I feel like a flower shop," Julia laughed. "And you look like the spirit of the flowers herself," Selingman declared, "the wonderful Power on the other side of the sun, who draws them out of the ground and touches their petals with colour, shakes perfume into their blossoms and makes this England of yours, in springtime, like a beautiful, sweet-smelling carpet." "Don't listen to him, Julia," Maraton warned her. "It was only a month ago that he told me that no civilised man should live in this country because of the women and the beer." "A man changes," Selingman insisted fiercely. "Your beer I will never drink, but Miss Julia knows that she hasn't in the world a slave so abject as I." Maraton rose to his feet. "I must go," he announced. "I have to talk with Mr. Foley for a few minutes. You had better come with me, Aaron. Selingman will see Julia back." They watched him depart. Julia sighed as he passed through the door. "I can read your thoughts," Selingman said quickly. "You are feeling, are you not, that to-night his leaving us has in it something allegorical. He was made for the storms of life, to fight in them and rejoice in them, and Fate has taken him by the hand and is leading him now towards the quieter places." "It is not his choice," Julia murmured. "It is destiny." "Can't you look a little way into the future?" Selingman continued, peering through half-closed eyes into his wine glass. "He represents the only possible link between the only possible political party of this country and the people. He will win for them in twelve months what they might have waited for through many weary years. He will sit in the high places. History will speak well of him. I will wager you half a dozen pairs of gloves that within a week the _Daily Oracle_ will call him the modern Rienzi. And yet, with the end of the struggle, with the end of the fierce fighting, comes something--what is it?--disappointment? We have no right to be disappointed, and yet, somehow, one feels that it is the cold and the storm and the wind which keep the best in us--the fighting best--alive." Julia's eyes were soft, for a moment, with tears. She, too, was following him a little way into the future. "They will make a politician of him," she sighed. "So much the better for politics. But there is one thing which I do not think that he will ever forget. So long as he lives he will be a people's man." Selingman became curiously silent. Soon he paid the bill. "Will you put me in a cab?" she asked him outside. He shook his head. "I shall ride home with you." "It is rather a long way," she reminded him. "I am down at my old rooms again. The house in Russell Square is full of workmen, after the fire." "It does not matter how far," he said simply. His fit of silence continued. When at last they arrived at their destination, she held out her hand. Again he shook his head. "I am coming in," he announced. She hesitated. "My rooms are very tiny." "I am coming in," he repeated. He followed her up the stairs. Her little sitting-room was in darkness. She struck a match and lit the lamp. She would have pulled down the blind, but he checked her. "No," he objected, "let us stand and look down together upon this wilderness. So!" They were high up and they looked upon a treeless waste--rows of houses, tall factories, the line of the river beyond, the murky glow westwards. "Here I can talk to you," he said. "Here it is silent. Soon I go back to my life and my life's work. You, Julia, must go with me." She drew a little away from him, speechless with a queer sort of surprise, and a little indignant. He held her wrist firmly. "I am a man who has written much of love," he continued, "of love and life and all the tangled skein of emotions which make of it a complex thing. And yet so few of us know what love is, so few of us know what companionship is, so few of us know the world in which those others dwell. You have looked at me with your great eyes, Julia, and at first you saw nothing but a fat, plain old man, with plenty of conceit and a humour for idle speeches. And today you think a little differently, and as the days go on you will think more differently still, for I am going to take you with me, Julia, and I am going to keep you with me, and I am going to keep the light in your eyes and the laughter at your lips, in the only way that counts. You will sit with me in my study, you shall see my work come and hear it grow. I shall take you into the world where the music is born, and your eyes will be closed there, and you will only know that there is another soul there who is your guide, and in whom you trust, and for whom you have a strange feeling. That is how love comes, Julia--the only sort of love which lasts. It isn't born in this land, it doesn't even flourish in this universe. If you don't come up in the clouds to find it, it isn't the sort that lasts. You are going to find it with me, dear." She had begun to tremble a little, the tears were in her eyes. "Oh, I know!" he faltered, with a break in his own voice. "But you'll leave your sorrows behind in my world."
"You must come home with me for a minute or two, Maraton," Mr. Foley urged. "It is on your way." The coupe, however, was already occupied. Elisabeth leaned out of the window. She held the door open. "I am going to take Mr. Maraton back with me," she insisted. "The car is there for you, uncle." Mr. Foley smiled. "Quite right," he assented. "Get in, Maraton. I shall be home before you." Maraton obeyed, and they glided out of the Palace yard. "I was there all the time," Elisabeth told him quietly. "I heard everything. I was so glad, so proud. Even your Labour Members had to come and shake hands with you." "I don't think Mr. Dale liked it," he remarked, smiling. "They are not bad fellows at heart, but they've got the poison in their systems which seems, somehow or other, to become part of the equipment of the politician--self-interest, over-egotism, contraction of interest. It makes one almost afraid." She leaned a little towards him. "You will not fear anything," she whispered confidently. "To-night, as I looked down, it seemed to me that as a looker-on I saw more, perhaps, of the real significance of it all than you who were there. It is a new force, you know, which has come into politics, a new Party. I suppose historians will call to-night, the fusion of Parties which is going to happen, an extraordinary triumph for Mr. Foley. Perhaps he deserves it--in my heart I believe that he does--but not in the way they would try to make out." "His heart is right," Maraton declared. "He has wide sympathies and splendid understanding." "It is a new chapter which begins to-night," she repeated. "You will have many disappointments to face, both of you." "But isn't it a glorious fight!" he exclaimed enthusiastically. "A great cause at one's back, a future filled with magnificent possibilities! Lady Elisabeth," he went on, "you can't imagine what this hour means. Sometimes I have had moments of horrible depression. It is so easy to feel the sorrows of the people in one's heart, so easy to stir them into a passionate apprehension of their position. And then comes the dull, sickening doubt whether, after all, it had not been better to leave them as they were. Of what use are words--that is what I have felt so often. And now there has come the power to do great things for them. Life couldn't hold anything more splendid." Her hand touched his. She had withdrawn her glove. "You will let me help?" she begged. He turned towards her then, and she saw the light in his face for which she had longed. With a little cry her head sank upon his shoulder, and his arms closed around her. "I am almost jealous of the people," she murmured. "Only I want you to teach me to love them and feel for them as you do. I want to feel that the same thing in our lives is bringing us always closer together." [THE END] _ |
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