The Dawn of Reckoning

by James Hilton

  “Look—look!” cried Stella, in ecstasy. She was like a child when she saw swiftly moving things.

  Her eyes kindled as she watched the approaching figures, and Philip smiled calmly, seeing nothing extraordinary in the spectacle. Then as the two men came nearer he exclaimed: “Why, one of them’s Ward—a fellow I’ve asked in for to-morrow. Awfully nice chap—I’m sure you’ll like him He’s turning now—perhaps he’ll see us.”

  As the skiffs curved back Philip shouted, and one of the men looked up, smiled shyly, and drew in at the bank. Then, as he clambered out (a somewhat risky business where the bank was steep) a not un usual accident occurred. A tuft of grass by which he was hauling himself on to the bank gave way, and with a mighty splash and a not too polite ejaculation he fell backwards into the water.

  Philip turned very pale and looked first this way and then that, as if uncertain whether to attempt a rescue himself or to summon aid from the inn near by. “It’s dangerous—” he cried excitedly. “The current is swift and there are reeds.”

  Stella, meanwhile, was roaring with laughter. It was the sort of thing that always amused her in kinema pictures. She was helpless with merriment.

  Before she had finished laughing and before Philip had decided what, if anything, he should do, the victim had swum to an easy landing-place and was climbing to land. Voices from within the Pike and Eel gave an uproarious and ironical cheer.

  The victim advanced towards Philip, shaking himself and smiling. “That’s saved me a bath when I get home,” he said. His smile was winsome and rather shy, and he laughingly declined to shake hands with them because he was both wet and muddy.

  “It was very—very funny,” said Stella, looking at him.

  He laughed again, a laugh that was rather like the bark of a happy dog. “Here’s my friend coming along. He’s got a motor-bike. I’d better get home and change, I think.”

  “Then we shall see you again to-morrow?” said Mrs. Monsell.

  “I shall be very pleased to come.”

  He smiled apologetically and then, bidding them good-bye, went off to join his friend.

  Over tea in the Pike and Eel he was discussed: “Did you notice, Stella,” said Mrs. Monsell, “how shy he was?—Really, to be embarrassed so charmingly is almost an accomplishment. It puts you at your ease.”

  Stella said: “He’s like a Hungarian. He’s big and he swims and he—he laughs at danger. I told you I’d tell you when I met an Englishman like a Hungarian. Well, he is.”

  Philip smiled. “You seem to have summed him up very quickly.”

  “Yes, I always do. And I know he’s like a Hungarian. But I don’t know whether I like him or not.”

  VI

  The lunch-party was neither a success nor a failure, but a phenomenon. Mrs. Monsell, discussing the matter afterwards, declared that she had never been so completely bored in her life. The men whom Philip had invited were clever and interesting, but somehow they mixed badly. Ward, especially, was rather grimly silent, though he became charming as soon as the demand for coffee gave him a chance to be up and doing something.

  Philip, leaning back in his chair, looked from face to face and wondered what was the matter. Was his mother over-aweing them? It did not seem probable, for Stella, whom nobody could over-awe, was just as silent as the others. Then what was it? There was certainly a queer something in the atmosphere—a something, moreover, that had to do with Stella.

  While they sat over their coffee Stella went to the piano and sang. She seemed strangely nervous or else uninterested, and accompanied herself very badly. After singing two verses of an old Danubian folk-tune that Philip knew to possess many more than two, she stopped, swung round suddenly on the stool, and exclaimed: “Sorry, but I don’t feel much like singing.. But I’ll recite you a little Hungarian poem about springtime. You won’t understand the words, but perhaps the sound of them will give you the sense.” She began to recite very beautifully and softly, but she rather spoilt the effect by a laugh and a shrug of the shoulders at the end.

  VII

  Philip had another year at Cambridge. It became his ambition to console himself for a third-class degree by taking one of the big University prizes. Work for this, in the form of a thesis, could be done at leisure, and without the nerve-racking tension of the examination-room. He entered for the Albert Historical Prize, and was asked to submit the subject on which he proposed to write a thesis. He chose “The Political Aspects of the Industrial Revolution.” After a year of careful work he sent in his thesis and waited eagerly for the result.

  It came, and he learned that he had got an “honourable mention.” “Your work was very sound and painstaking,” he was told privately, “but several of the examiners found it a little tedious. It would have been a good thing if you had compelled yourself to compress it to two-thirds of its length. The winning thesis was very short—and also very brilliant.”

  Stella, of course, understood nothing of all this. Neither degrees nor University Prizes meant anything to her. And in a way, this was a slight—a very slight consolation.

  * * *

  CHAPTER IV

  I

  At one of his mother’s dinner-parties Philip met a certain Sir Charles Maddison, M.P., and this gentle man listened to him with a patience and sympathy unusual in Mrs. Monsell’s guests, most of whom were bent on exploding their own carefully prepared bombs of brilliance.

  Sir Charles, however, had a special reason for taking notice of Philip. He was chairman of the Northern Political Association, and as such was responsible for providing party candidates for some of the less promising industrial constituencies between the Irwell and the Tyne. When he heard that Philip hankered after a political career, and above all, when he learned that Philip was prepared to put up a thousand pounds at the service of any local association that chose him as their candidate, he immediately asked him if he would care to become Member of Parliament for Loamport.

  True there were difficulties, chief among which was a hostile majority of some eleven thousand votes. “But you have youth,” said Sir Charles, optimistically, “and Loamport folks like young ‘uns. There’s no knowing what you might do if you had a try.”

  Philip, torn betwixt the fires of his ambition and his doubts as to his own capabilities, promised that he would give the matter his earnest consideration.

  II

  Philip had never been to Loamport until the day on which he delivered his first speech there. Sir Charles Maddison, the local magnate of those parts had asked him, his mother, and Stella to Loamport Hall for the week-end, and on the Saturday night of their arrival there was to be a “monster” political rally at which Sir Charles had arranged for Philip to speak. It was to be his “début,” as Sir Charles optimistically put it, before his future constituents. And, since Loamport politics were apt to be turbulent, the sooner he got into the swing of them the better.

  The huge industrial city, grim enough at any time, was especially grim upon the first Saturday in December. The train brought them in four hours from Euston, and as they stepped out on to the platform Sir Charles’s chauffeur was waiting to drive them through the darkening streets to the Hall. Even the country-side when they reached it was dour and unbeautiful, with gaunt chimney-stacks and mining-gear disfiguring the landscape and blur ring the horizon with smoke. Loamport Hall was a house in sympathy with its surroundings—gloomy and forbidding, with vast empty gardens and smoke-stained conservatories.

  “If you get in Parliament for Loamport will you have to live there?” asked Stella, as they drove up to the porch.

  Philip laughed. “Don’t you trouble about that. I’ve got to get elected first, and I don’t think I’ve a dog’s chance. Loamport’s one of the hardest constituencies in England.”

  “Then why bother with it? Why not try an easy one?—Chassingford would be rather nice, and everybody would vote for you there.”

  “Very possibly. But you see, Colonel Dumbleby mightn’t like being turned out to ma
ke room for me. Otherwise, it’s a splendid idea.”

  She made a grimace and then, deliberately imitating her famous remark of years before, added: “It is a joke, eh?—Ah, well, Philip, it seems to me you’ve been given Loamport because nobody else will have it.”

  “Exactly. In politics they have the curious habit of giving you the most difficult job right at the beginning.”

  The meeting was to be held in the Town Hall at eight o’clock, with Sir Charles Maddison in the chair. Other speakers were to be neighbouring M.P.‘s, but whereas they were restricted to a time-limit, Sir Charles gave Philip to understand that he could go on as long as he liked. “And I’ve no doubt that if you manage pretty well our Association will be pleased to have you. I’ve given them excellent reports of you, so they’re anticipating something good.”

  Philip said quietly: “You oughtn’t to have told me that. If will make me nervous.”

  Sir Charles laughed. “Oh, you needn’t be afraid. A Loamport audience may be a bit rough, but they’re decent fellows—even the other side. Once when a heckler kept worrying me I ran down off the platform to him, hauled him up by the scruff of the neck, and made him address the meeting himself. I’ve always had decent hearings since then…Good old Loamport—they keep on voting the wrong man in, but still, I don’t care what you say—there’s not a fairer, decenter set of people in all England.”

  He spoke of them affectionately, as an indulgent father might speak of his children.

  “Anyhow, Sir Charles,” remarked Mrs. Monsell, decisively. “Nothing will induce me to go to the meeting. I hate politics. I shall stay here and play billiards with your butler, if he’ll give me a game…”

  III

  The Town Hall was the only building in Loamport that had any pretensions to art. It had been built about the middle of the nineteenth century, in a style which its architect had imagined to be Gothic and at various times since then a succession of borough surveyors had added a doorway here, an extension there, and so on. If the result was a trifle chaotic, at least the chaos had been given a certain purposeful grimness by half a century of Loamport smoke, which had mercifully obliterated the features of the female Justice, with scales complete, who balanced herself acrobatically in a niche above the main entrance. Further along the side of the building were the twin-sisters Science and Art, with their corners encrusted with dirt and only their breasts washed streaky by fifty years of Loamport rain.

  The interior was, if that were possible, less pre possessing than the exterior. Round the painted walls of the public hall were ranged huge gilt-framed full-length portraits of all the mayors that Loamport had ever had—a fearsome and almost terrible array, resplendent in robes of office and complete with the usual scroll. Through windows in the roof a pungent, sinister-looking fog floated in and downwards; it hung over the mayoral portraits like a dim, im palpable shroud; it swayed in languid melancholy in front of the blazing, hissing arc-lights that hung from the roof; it even descended on to the platform and heaped itself against a three-manual organ of incredible and devastating ugliness. This organ, on which anything besides “God Save the King” was very rarely played, was painted like a roundabout, and had immense pipes—chiefly dummy ones—on each of which was inscribed in ornate letters the name of some composer—Gounod, Beethoven, etc.

  The scene, however, was quite animated at five minutes past eight on the evening of the political rally. The notables had just seated themselves at the green-baize trestle-tables on the platform, and Philip was among them, looking rather pale under the dazzling incandescent roof-lights. Floor and gallery were packed, and the space at the back of the hall was crowded with men and women standing three and four deep. Sir Charles was obviously pleased. “A much bigger audience than I had ever expected,” he whispered with enthusiasm, leaning across to Philip. Philip smiled wanly.

  Stella was in one of the shilling reserved seats in the front of the hall. He followed along the rows with his eyes until he saw her, and saw that she was watching him. She smiled, and he smiled back very faintly, not knowing quite whether he ought to or not. Curiously, perhaps, he could not take his eyes off her for long, now that he knew where she was. He kept looking at the red-robed mayors on the walls, at a certain shabby-looking wild-eyed man who leaned forward in the gallery with his head resting on his hands, at the stewards forming a phalanx at the doors, and then, inevitably, his eyes would be on Stella again, and he would see her smiling…Sir Charles rose. What a fat, bloated little man he looked when he stood up and you looked at him sideways! But he was evidently popular. The huge audience cheered for moments on end, and then only desisted when, with smiling face, he held up his hand in protest. But when the sound died down, another could be heard, faint yet sinister, the sound of hissing. Philip looked around trying to locate it. It seemed to come at once from everywhere and from nowhere, from the shilling rows in front (this was unlikely), from the crowd at the back of the hall, from the side-galleries, even (most unlikely of all) from the little group of dazzlingly rosetted stewards by the doorways. And at last when he looked at Stella he could almost imagine that she too had set her teeth together to produce that sibilant, menacing murmur.

  Sir Charles was speaking. He seemed to be holding the audience fairly well. Sometimes there were cheers, mutterings of approval, isolated “hear hear’s!” Once the wild-eyed man in the gallery opened his mouth and shouted shatteringly “Liar.” Philip almost expected the roof to fall. But no—Sir Charles did not seem to be in the least perturbed. “I wish my friend in the gallery would not keep shouting out his name,” he said. Roars of laughter…

  What a stupid little joke, thought Philip. Did people really think it funny?—What did the man in the gallery think?—What did Stella—why, Stella was laughing also. Then he looked round and saw that everybody on the platform was laughing. Perhaps he had better laugh himself—it would look strange if he were the only one not to laugh. He laughed—suddenly—but by that time everybody else had stopped laughing, and now they looked at him. His laugh had sounded ridiculously like a guffaw…Stella, too, was looking at him, but she was not laughing any more; she was dreadfully serious.

  The clock at the back of the hall crawled to the half-hour, and a muffled chime boomed in the belfry somewhere above them. The mayors all stared at him, one behind the other, like men in picture-posters that follow you with their eyes wherever you go. One of them close to the platform looked almost venomous; he had cold, fishy eyes, and must have been a very terrible mayor indeed. “Sir Samuel Blatherwick, M.P., K.C.V.O., thrice Mayor of Loamport.”…Thrice, indeed!

  Suddenly Sir Charles sat down, and there was another deafening, roof-raising burst of applause. And in the midst of it Sir Charles leaned over and whispered loudly: “Now then, Philip, do your best and take your time. They’re an easy lot to night…”

  The cheering died away and he felt himself rising from his chair and leaning his knuckles on the table. He felt a cold spot on his hand; he looked down curiously: somebody, it seemed, had upset the ink-bottle, and the funny little black liquid was spreading all over the cloth. Stupid of somebody…The lady next to him moved backward, away from the threatening tide…“Never mind,” somebody said close to him. “Don’t let it worry you.”

  “Ladies and Gentlemen…” he shouted, clear ing his throat. He shouted, because he knew that in a large hall you must shout, even if you seem to be deafening everybody.

  The river of ink toppled over the edge and dripped on to the floor of the platform. Somebody in the gallery tittered. He looked up, and saw the wild-eyed man wilder-eyed than ever, crouching there with his chin sunk on his hands like an animal meditating a spring. Then he looked at Stella; and for the first time caught her when she was not look ing at him.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen…It gives me very great pleasure to be here this evening…visiting Loamport for the first time in my life…”

  A voice, a woman’s shrill voice with its menacing northern accent, screamed at him from som
ewhere: “Speak up, young man…”

  Loud laughter.

  The man in the gallery suddenly sat up with eyes blazing…

  IV

  As soon as Philip began to speak Stella thought with a sort of calm horror: Oh, Philip, Philip, this will never do…Somehow, right from his first words, she knew that he was going to fail. He was nervous, and after upsetting the ink-bottle his nervousness seemed to increase to panic. Then, also he simply had no idea how to talk to a Loamport audience. He was not speaking to them; he was lecturing, coldly, unfeelingly, as he might have done to a classroom of tired undergraduates. Oh, for some fire in his voice, something, however untrue or ridiculous, that the audience could cheer or laugh at!—She moved uneasily in her seat, every second making her feel more uncomfortable. Others round about her were moving similarly; she could feel a wave of uneasiness passing over the entire audience, not due to anything Philip was saying, but to the mere way in which he was saying it. He was—the metaphor occurred to her spontaneously—he was stroking them the wrong way. And her inmost being was crying out protestingly: Oh, Philip, why are you talking like this?—If only I were talking, I, with all my ignorance, could do far better! I would make them laugh, and then make them cry (if I could), and then make them cheer the roof off…But you, you are so cold, so distant, so austere…