by James Hilton
“Oh, yes, if you’re keen on it. But do you dislike him so much as that?”
After a long pause she answered thoughtfully: “When I come to think about it I don’t know that I dislike him—him personally—at all. But I dislike the—the feeling I have—inside me—when he’s near…Perhaps that’s it. Or perhaps not. Any way, what does it matter? You’re conquering your nervousness, you’ll soon get into Parliament, then you’ll marry me, and then—” Her eyes sparkled deliciously, and she whispered: “Would you mind very much if I kissed you, Philip?”
She sprang forward and kissed him very prettily on the lips. He started back, flushing slightly, and then smiled at her with that strange, half-puzzled smile she knew so well.
“Would you rather I hadn’t done that, Philip?” she asked, not contritely, but with the utmost defiance.
He answered: “Stella, of course not…I don’t mind at all, but but—”
“But what?” Her voice was sharp, almost acid. “You—you startle me so much.”
She burst into a sudden ripple of laughter. “Oh you poor old Philip—startled because I kiss you Well, you must never be startled like that any more, because I’m going to do it again—often and often—just when I want, in fact. See?”
And she did it again. A strange daring infected her. Her fear of him, and of that curious puzzled look that came into his eyes, was gone—for the time being at any rate. Something had driven it away.
V
Aubrey Ward came to Chassingford a fortnight afterwards, and within a week he was the talk of the little market town. It seemed incomprehensible that the old and respected Doctor Challis could have chosen such a wild and romantic-looking youth to be his second in command. For Doctor Challis, on the one hand, was all that a doctor should be. He had silver-grey hair, a wistful smile, a perfect bedside manner, and a tendency to tell people exactly what they delighted to hear about themselves. He never visited except in immaculate morning-coat and top-hat, and still preferred a carriage and pair to the smartest limousine. Add to that an excellent taste in wines and a disposition to treat the smallest illness as gravely as if it were an affair of state, and you complete the picture of the man.
Doctor Ward, on the other hand, was young, hand some, and possessed manners that were more natural on the rugger field than at the bedside. Doctor Challis paid visits like an ambassador; his assistant “blinded” through the countryside on a high-powered motor-cycle, with an incredibly dirty motor-oilskin covering a suit of light-coloured plus-fours; he was, as Mrs. Monsell nicknamed him, the Human Tornado. There was, however, no doubt about his ability. What he lacked in experience he made up for in knowledge and earnestness, and before he had been in Chassingford many months he had staunch partisans. Curiously, perhaps, a majority of these were to be found in the small but very compact working-class district in the town.
When the Monsells returned after their usual foreign tour they found that Ward had immensely consolidated his position. He was popular with all classes, and even his curious habit of telling people frankly that they had nothing at all the matter with them did not antagonise so much as it fascinated.
Stella alone refused to join in the general chorus of adulation. “It’s no good questioning me about it,” she said to Philip, almost crossly. “I just don’t like him, and perhaps there isn’t the least reason at all why I don’t.”
* * *
CHAPTER VI
I
Chassingford seemed bent on losing its reputation for being unexciting. Not only had Ward come into it, but a few months after his arrival, Colonel Dumbleby, its aged and respected representative in Parliament, passed away in a nursing-home at Brighton. Colonel Dumbleby had been, like the place he represented, unexciting. Only once had he spoken in the House, and that was when, to his own great surprise and alarm, he had interjected the word “Why?” at a moment when nobody else was interjecting anything. Hansard reported it, the Chassingford Advertiser reported it; but after wards the Colonel allowed his quickly-won fame to slip away from him. He never spoke in the House again, and a few years later he became too old and ill to speak much anywhere.
After the funeral it became necessary for the Chassingford Association to seek another candidate. Philip’s name was put forward, along with those of several other men; and at the Association meeting he made an excellent speech in which he was not in the least nervous. Of course it was a small and comparatively select gathering; nevertheless, he had improved immensely since the Loamport fiasco, and had actually, by taking thought, added cubits to his political stature, In the end the Association adopted him unanimously, and since Chassingford was considered a safe seat, it looked as if one great barrier was at last surmounted.
Indeed, for several days it seemed even possible that there might be no contest at all, and that Philip would be returned to Parliament unopposed. Then at the last minute, a few hours before the time for nominations, an opponent appeared, went through the necessary formalities, and was officially listed for the Chassingford election stakes. He was a Mr. James Grainger, a local estate agent. Stella was furious. She had, as Philip often told her severely, an absolutely unpolitical mind.
“The man has a perfect right to oppose me,” Philip said, though the expensive prospect of a contest was no doubt a disappointment to him. “And I shall fight him fairly.”
“Then you’ll lose,” put in Mrs. Monsell.
Philip’s face hardened. “That’s cynical, mother, and you don’t mean it. I shall fight fairly, any how.”
Stella cried: “Oh, Philip, I shall be able to help you, shan’t I?—I can post bills and things, and canvass, and drive cars about for you.”
“I shall want all the help I can get,” Philip answered quickly.
That was a few hours after the nominations. About four in the afternoon the telephone-bell rang and Stella answered it. A man’s voice was speak ing—a sharp gruff bark of a voice that made the instrument sing in her ears.
“I’m Ward…I’ve just come back from a holiday…Is it true that Philip is going to stand in the bye-election?”
She felt herself going uncomfortable from the mere sound of his voice over the telephone.
“Yes, it’s quite true…”
“Well, I’d like to help him .. I’m no good at speaking, you know, but I can use what influence I’ve got, which isn’t much…And I can drive a car and canvass and post bills and do any old thing there is…”
“Yes…” She did not know what to reply. “By the way, what is he?”
“What is he?—What do you mean?”
“What party does he belong to?”
“Oh…” She told him, and then something made her add: “Do you mean you’d support him whatever he was?”
“Rather. Wouldn’t you?”
She laughed, half with pleasure, half with the same curious embarrassment magnified now tenfold. “I’m afraid you have an unpolitical mind. That’s what Philip tells me I have.”
She did not wait for him to reply, but added abruptly: “All right, I’ll tell him of your offer. I’m sure he’ll be very pleased. Good-bye.”
She hung up the receiver with a strange inward perturbation.
II
Almost immediately Philip was immersed in the storm and tempest of his first electoral contest. At least it seemed to him to be storm and tempest enough, though Kemp, his agent, declared that it was “by far the tamest show he’d ever struck in his life.” The fact was, Philip was not made for flurry and excitement. His brain functioned best when it functioned calmly and slowly; and Kemp, whose idea of heaven was a perpetual whirlwind election campaign, merely worried him into doing and saying things he afterwards regretted. Above all, Philip detested the high lights of electoral propaganda, the unrelieved blacks mad whites that Kemp infused into all the frenzied literature he sent out. “Anybody would think Grainger was the Devil himself, from the way you expect me to talk about him,” he protested, to which Kemp replied: “Perhaps it wouldn’t do you
any harm if you thought so as well, Mr. Monsell.”
Kemp was a wiry little man, aged forty-five or thereabouts, with an incessant bustling activity and a comprehension of the merely combative side of electioneering that was not touched in any way by genuine political enthusiasm. To Philip he seemed a fierce, soulless automaton, scheming victory with out desiring it and without any knowledge of what to do with it if he got it. Above all, he was un scrupulous. He discovered somehow or other that Grainger had been divorced, and he wanted to circulate a special leaflet hinting (but not directly stating) that he was unsound in the matter of the marriage laws. Philip would not allow it, and the two had a fierce quarrel in the committee-rooms in Chassingford High Street. “I believe my opponent is an entirely decent and virtuous man,” declared Philip doggedly, “and I’m not going to pretend anywhere that I don’t.”—“Then you’ll lose the election,” snapped Kemp angrily.—“Very well then, I’ll lose it,” retorted Philip.
Long before polling-day he was heartily miserable about the whole business. His opponent had had bills pasted all over Chassingford: “Vote for Grainger and Keep The Home Fires Burning.” Kemp had them all pasted over with “Vote for Monsell and Make Sure You Have a Fire to Burn.” He seemed to think it was an extraordinary witty riposte. “To my mind it is both unintelligible and stupid,” said Philip, but as it was no worse than that he allowed it to be done.
To Stella, on the contrary, the election campaign was a sheer joy, though the shadow of Philip’s possible disapproval lay over everything she did. She loved the struggle for its own sake, and she was the only person who could quell Kemp adequately and succinctly. “One might think you were the candidate himself, the way you order Mr. Monsell about,” she told him bluntly. To which Kemp retorted: “Your brother ought to have been a parson, not a parliamentary candidate. He’s too mild—too—”
“Too honest, eh?”
“Honest? Well, I wouldn’t say that. But still even honesty you can have too much of. It may be the best policy, but it isn’t always the best politics.”
III
One thing she learned, without being able to help it, and that was the extent to which Ward was popular, especially in the working-class district of Chassingford, and also in the country villages round about. Here she found an intensely personal enthusiasm for him, an enthusiasm which, however much she might pretend not to understand it, was nevertheless quick to evoke an answering chord within her. After empty and wind-blown political partisanship, it was a relief to find a human and strictly personal keenness. In many a workman’s and farm-labourer’s cottage that she canvassed, the name Ward was mentioned inevitably, always with respect, sometimes with a feeling akin to reverence. “We shall vote for your brother, miss,” was a quite usual remark, “because Doctor Ward put in a good word for him the last time he was here.”
She tried to ignore these repeated testimonials to Ward’s influence; she did not care to think that Philip, if successful, would owe everything to his friend. But there were certain things which she could not ignore. Ward, she discovered, had become almost a local hero, a patron saint; he had done deeds in those tiny houses that their occupants could never forget; the detailed stories of them came to her continually as she canvassed from door to door; she did not ask for them; she did not want to hear them, for they wasted her time and were almost endless in the telling.
When she told Philip of Ward’s energetic and valuable canvassing on his behalf he seemed partly pleased and partly troubled. “It’s splendid of him, Stella…But—but I want people to vote for me because they think I’m worth it, not—not because other people tell them to.”
“I think Kemp is right,” she answered, “and you ought to have been a parson.”
As the polling-day came nearer Ward’s partisan ship developed on more active lines. He plunged into the thick of the campaign with all the zest of the young and irresponsible medical student; he drove a lorry round the town, packed to the brim with shouting children; he festooned his motor-cycle with “Vote for Monsell” bills; the whole affair might have been a great and gorgeous “rag.” Stella could not decide whether she liked him for it or not. But there was a careless rapture in his adventures that she could not help but admire; she felt sometimes that he was no more than a huge boy, running wild with infectious excitement. Once, whilst canvassing in a crowded alley, she met him as he suddenly swung round the corner on his flamboyantly decorated motor-cycle. He stopped and smiled at her. His smile, like his enthusiasm, was infectious. For the first time in her life she did not feel acutely un comfortable because he was near to her. She was not even perturbed. On the contrary she laughed in his face and exclaimed: “Well, enjoying yourself, eh? I believe you’re having the time of your life with all this business, aren’t you?”
“It’s great fun,” he answered boyishly. “I hope Philip’s enjoying it half as much as I am.”
“I don’t think he is,” she replied.
“Well, of course”—he shrugged his shoulders—“it’s more serious to him than to me. Frankly, I don’t care a jot for politics, one side or another, but I want to see Philip in, that’s all…”
“Don’t you think politics are important?”
“Oh, maybe…But to me my own job’s more important, naturally…After all, it doesn’t seem to make much difference which side gets in. You still have this sort of thing, don’t you?” And he swung his arm round to indicate the dejected slum property that surrounded them. He added musingly: “If I ever went in for Parliament I think I should stand as an Anti-Tuberculosis candidate.”
She made no answer, and after a short pause he gave a jerk to his self-starter and went on: “Ah, well, we’re doing our best, aren’t we?—I’ve got eleven more votes for you this morning. What’s your bag?”
“None so far,” she replied, “I’ve only just started. As soon as you’ve gone I shall—”
“That’s a hint,” he cried, laughing. “I’ll go. Ever such good luck to you…”
And with a series of terrific explosions he rode off, waving to her at the corner.
IV
As the campaign drew to a close it became clear that Philip would win no easy victory. “Times have changed,” as Kemp put it, “since old Dumbleby used to get a four-figure majority with out opening his mouth.” Unfortunately, it was by no means certain that Philip had done himself any good by opening his mouth. It was not exactly that he had said or done tactless things; it was just that his whole platform manner gave somehow the appearance of being cold and remote. “You’re too dignified,” Kemp said. “You ought to let your self go and put a bit of pep into it.” By way of contrast, Grainger was an excellent speaker, with a pleasant if somewhat meretricious personal charm.
From eight o’clock on the morning of the polling-day until twelve hours later, Stella was working indefatigably, driving Philip from village to village and from committee-room to committee-room, and finding time for no more than hastily-consumed meals of sandwiches and cups of cocoa. Rather to her surprise, Ward did not put in an appearance, but she remembered that the day before he had mentioned a bad case of pneumonia that he was attending in one of the smaller villages.
At eight in the evening, when the polling-booths closed, she went back with Philip to the Hall and had a good meal. By half-past nine or thereabouts, the ballot-boxes would be brought in from the neighbouring villages, and the count would begin. She was limp and tired after the exertions of the day; Philip was exactly as he had been outside the Senate-House at Cambridge years before—nervous and full of hardly-suppressed excitement. They ate their meal alone, and, for the most part, in silence. Towards the end, however, Philip said: “If I win, Stella, I shall t-tell mother about our engagement.”
Stella’s answer, characteristic of her, was: “And if you lose I shall tell her.”
He looked at her queerly, almost frightenedly, and then suddenly reached forward across the table and squeezed her outstretched arm. “I am very f-fond of you, Stella,�
� he said softly.
Almost at that moment the sound came of an exceedingly noisy motor-cycle tearing along the main highway towards the town.
“That’s Ward,” she said vaguely. “I can tell the sound of his machine.” Then fierceness came into her voice as she went on: “Oh, Philip, Philip—I’m so glad you’re fond of me. Because I’m fonder of you than of anybody else on earth…You’re a darling, and won’t it be splendid if you get in!—We shall know in a couple of hours from now, shan’t we?”
He smiled and nodded.
V
Midnight in the small, excessively-ornate council-chamber of the Chassingford Town Hall. In the High Street outside it was raining fast, and a large part of the crowd had already gone home. The rain had, indeed, begun almost as soon as the polling stopped, and a heavy storm had delayed the trans port of some of the ballot-boxes. The postponement was dreadfully unsettling to Philip. He stood by the window, looking out into the street through the slits in the Venetian blinds, and hardly daring to watch the actual counting of the votes and the stack ing of them into hundreds. Kemp stood by the tables, observing everything with keen, ferret-like eyes. Now and again he made some objection, consulted with the opposing agent, and lit cigarette after cigarette as the night wore on. Stella, in her official capacity as scrutineer, moved about in the crowded, smoke-hazy room, always with one eye on Philip and the other on the trestle-tables with their growing pile of voting-papers.
The parish clock struck the hour of midnight, and a few seconds later the clock in the Town Hall belfry followed suit. A few cheers came upwards from the crowd waiting outside, eager, anxious cheers, for none but the eager and the anxious were waiting on such a night…Mr. James Grainger, smart and spruce, was obviously one of those people whom excitement makes even smarter and sprucer. “Allow me to express the hope that the best man may win,” he said, touching Philip on the elbow and offering his well-manicured hand.
