Part 36 (1/2)

There was a hasty whisper among some of the men round him, as they glanced over their shoulders at the two ladies on the back bench. One or two of them half rose, and tried to pull him down. Wharton looked at Marcella; it seemed to him he saw a sort of pa.s.sionate satisfaction on her pale face, and in the erect carriage of her head. Then she stooped to the side and whispered to her mother. Mrs. Boyce shook her head and sat on, immovable. All this took but a second or two.

”Ah, well,” said Wharton, ”we won't have names; that'll do us no good.

It's not the _men_ you've got to go for so much--though we shall go for them too before long when we've got the law more on our side. It's the system. It's the whole way of dividing the wealth that _you_ made, you and your children--by your work, your hard, slavish, incessant work--between you and those who _don't_ work, who live on your labour and grow fat on your poverty! What we want is _a fair division_. There _ought_ to be wealth enough--there _is_ wealth enough for all in this blessed country. The earth gives it; the sun gives it: labour extracts and piles it up. Why should one cla.s.s take three-fourths of it and leave you and your fellow-workers in the cities the miserable pittance which is all you have to starve and breed on? Why?--_why_? I say.

Why!--because you are a set of dull, jealous, poor-spirited _cowards_, unable to pull together, to trust each other, to give up so much as a pot of beer a week for the sake of your children and your liberties and your cla.s.s--there, _that's_ why it is, and I tell it you straight out!”

He drew himself up, folded his arms across his chest, and looked at them--scorn and denunciation in every line of his young frame, and the blaze of his blue eye. A murmur ran through the room. Some of the men laughed excitedly. Darwin sprang up again.

”You keep the perlice off us, an' gie us the cuttin' up o' their bloomin' parks an' we'll do it fast enough,” he cried.

”Much good that'll do you, just at present,” said Wharton, contemptuously. ”Now, you just listen to me.”

And, leaning forward over the desk again, his finger pointed at the room, he went through the regular Socialist programme as it affects the country districts--the transference of authority within the villages from the few to the many, the landlords taxed more and more heavily during the transition time for the provision of house room, water, light, education and amus.e.m.e.nt for the labourer; and ultimately land and capital at the free disposal of the State, to be supplied to the worker on demand at the most moderate terms, while the annexed rent and interest of the capitalist cla.s.s relieves him of taxes, and the disappearance of squire, State parson, and plutocrat leaves him master in his own house, the slave of no man, the equal of all. And, as a first step to this new Jerusalem--_organisation_!--self-sacrifice enough to form and maintain a union, to vote for Radical and Socialist candidates in the teeth of the people who have coals and blankets to give away.

”Then I suppose you think you'd be turned out of your cottages, dismissed your work, made to smart for it somehow. Just you try! There are people all over the country ready to back you, if you'd only back yourselves. But you _won't_. You won't fight--that's the worst of you; that's what makes all of us _sick_ when we come down to talk to you. You won't spare twopence halfpenny a week from boozing--not you!--to subscribe to a union, and take the first little step towards filling your stomachs and holding your heads up as free men. What's the good of your grumbling? I suppose you'll go on like that--grumbling and starving and cringing--and talking big of the things you could do if you would:--and all the time not one honest effort--not one!--to better yourselves, to pull the yoke off your necks! By the Lord! I tell you it's a _d.a.m.ned_ sort of business talking to fellows like you!”

Marcella started as he flung the words out with a bitter, nay, a brutal, emphasis. The smooth-faced minister coughed loudly with a sudden movement, half got up to remonstrate, and then thought better of it.

Mrs. Boyce for the first time showed some animation under her veil. Her eyes followed the speaker with a quick attention.

As for the men, as they turned clumsily to stare at, to laugh, or talk to each other, Marcella could hardly make out whether they were angered or fascinated. Whichever it was, Wharton cared for none of them. His blood was up; his fatigue thrown off. Standing there in front of them, his hands in his pockets, pale with the excitement of speaking, his curly head thrown out against the whitened wall of the chapel, he lashed into the men before him, talking their language, their dialect even; laying bare their weaknesses, sensualities, indecisions; painting in the sombrest colours the grim truths of their melancholy lives.

Marcella could hardly breathe. It seemed to her that, among these cottagers, she had never lived till now--under the blaze of these eyes--within the vibration of this voice. Never had she so realised the power of this singular being. He was scourging, dissecting, the weather-beaten men before him, as, with a difference, he had scourged, dissected her. She found herself exulting in his powers of tyranny, in the naked thrust of his words, so nervous, so pitiless. And then by a sudden flash she thought of him by Mrs. Hurd's fire, the dying child on his knee, against his breast. ”Here,” she thought, while her pulses leapt, ”is the leader for me--for these. Let him call, I will follow.”

It was as though he followed the ranging of her thought, for suddenly, when she and his hearers least expected it, his tone changed, his storm of speech sank. He fell into a strain of quiet sympathy, encouragement, hope; dwelt with a good deal of homely iteration on the immediate practical steps which each man before him could, if he would, take towards the common end; spoke of the help and support lying ready for the country labourers throughout democratic England if they would but put forward their own energies and quit themselves like men; pointed forward to a time of plenty, education, social peace; and so--with some good-tempered banter of his opponent, old Dodgson, and some precise instructions as to how and where they were to record their votes on the day of election--came to an end. Two or three other speeches followed, and among them a few stumbling words from Hurd. Marcella approved herself and applauded him, as she recognised a sentence or two taken bodily from the _Labour Clarion_ of the preceding week. Then a resolution pledging the meeting to support the Liberal candidate was pa.s.sed unanimously amid evident excitement. It was the first time that such a thing had ever happened in Mellor.

Mrs. Boyce treated her visitor on their way home with a new respect, mixed, however, as usual, with her prevailing irony. For one who knew her, her manner implied, not that she liked him any more, but that a man so well trained to his own profession must always hold his own.

As for Marcella, she said little or nothing. But Wharton, in the dark of the carriage, had a strange sense that her eye was often on him, that her mood marched with his, and that if he could have spoken her response would have been electric.

When he had helped her out of the carriage, and they stood in the vestibule--Mrs. Boyce having walked on into the hall--he said to her, his voice hoa.r.s.e with fatigue:

”Did I do your bidding, did I rouse them?”

Marcella was seized with sudden shyness.

”You rated them enough.”

”Well, did you disapprove?”

”Oh, no! it seems to be your way.”

”My proof of friends.h.i.+p? Well, can there be a greater? Will you show me some to-morrow?”

”How can I?”

”Will you criticise?--tell me where you thought I was a fool to-night, or a hypocrite? Your mother would.”

”I dare say!” said Marcella, her breath quickening; ”but don't expect it from me.”