"You cads! You brutes!" he shouted, trampling on the fragments. "Can't
you fight like Englishmen?"
The young men, realizing the identity of the wrathful apparition,
stared open-mouthed, turned red, and said nothing. Paul strode out,
looking very fierce, and drove off in his car amid the cheers of the
crowd, to which he paid no notice.
"It makes me sick!" he cried passionately to Wilson, who was with him.
"I hope to God he wins in spite, of it!"
"What about the party?" asked Wilson.
Paul damned the party. He was in the overwrought mood in which a man
damns everything. Quagmire and bramble and the derision of Olympus-that
was the end of his vanity of an existence. Suppose he was elected--what
then? He would be a failure-the high gods in their mirth would see to
that--a puppet in Frank Ayres' hands until the next general election,
when he would have ignominiously to retire. Awakener of England indeed!
He could not even awaken Hickney Heath. As he dashed through the
streets in his triumphal car, he hated Hickney Heath, hated the wild
"hoorays" of waggon-loads of his supporters on their way to the polls,
hated the smug smiles of his committee-men at polling stations. He
forgot that he did not hate England. A little black disk an inch or two
in diameter if cunningly focussed can obscure the sun in heaven from
human eye. There was England still behind the little black disk, though
Paul for the moment saw it not.
Wilson pulled his scrubby moustache and made no retort to Paul's
anathema. To him Paul was one of the fine flower of the Upper Classes
to which lower middle-class England still, with considerable
justification, believes to be imbued with incomprehensible and
unalterable principles of conduct. The grand old name of gentleman
still has its magic in this country--and is, by the way, not without
its influence in one or two mighty republics wherein the equality of
man is very loudly proclaimed. Wilson, therefore, gladly suffered
Paul's lunatic Quixotry. For himself he approved hugely of the cartoon.
If he could have had his way, Hickney Heath would have flamed with
poster reproductions of it. But he had a dim appreciation of, and a
sneaking admiration for, the aristocrat's point of view, and, being a
practical man, evaded a discussion on the ethics of the situation.
The situation was rendered more extraordinary because the Liberal
candidate made no appearance in the constituency. Paul inquired
anxiously. No one had seen him. After lunch he drove alone to his
father's house. The parlour-maid showed him into the hideously
furnished and daub-hung dining-room. The Viennese horrors of plaster
stags, gnomes and rabbits stared fatuously on the hearth. No fire was
in the grate. Very soon Jane entered, tidy, almost matronly in buxom
primness, her hair as faultless as if it had come out of a convoluted
mould, her grave eyes full of light. She gave him her capable hand.
"It's like you to come, Paul."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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