Free The Dawn of Reckoning by James Hilton

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