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A People's Man, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Chapter 26 |
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_ CHAPTER XXVI Eight days later, Maraton delivered his preliminary address to the ironworkers of Sheffield, and at six o'clock the next morning the strike had been unanimously proclaimed. The columns of the daily newspapers, still hopelessly bound over to the interests of the capitalist, were full of solemn warnings against this new and disturbing force in English sociology. The _Daily Oracle_ alone paused to present a few words of appreciation of the splendid dramatic force wielded by this revolutionary. "If this man is sincere," the Oracle declared, "the country needs him. If he is a charlatan, then for heaven's sake, even at the expense of all the laws that were ever framed, away with him! There is no man breathing to-day who is developing a more potent, a more wide-reaching influence upon the destinies of our country." Maraton's first address had been delivered to a great multitude, but there was no building whose roof could cover the hordes of men who had made up their minds to hear his last words at Sheffield. From far and wide, the people came that night in countless streams. A platform had been arranged in the middle of the principal pleasure park of the town, and around this, from early in the afternoon, they began to take up their places. When night fell, so far as the eye could see, the ground was covered with a black mass of humanity. The multitude filled the park and crowded up the encircling streets. As the darkness deepened, they lit torches. Beyond, down in the valley and up on the hillside, were rows of lights and the flare of furnaces soon to be quenched. Even that little group of hard, unimaginative men who stood with Maraton upon the platform felt the strange thrill of the tense and swelling throng gathered together with this inspiring background. It seemed to Maraton himself, as he stood there listening to the roar of welcoming voices, as though all their white faces were gathered into one, the prototype of suffering humanity, the sad, hollow-checked, hollow-eyed victim of birth and heritage. His voice seemed to swell that night to something greater than its usual volume; some peculiar gift of penetration seemed to have been accorded him. A hundred thousand men heard his passionate prayer to them. They were hard-featured, hard-minded Yorkshiremen, most of them, but they never forgot. "You will get the half a crown a week which your leaders demand," Maraton told them. "Your masters--may God forgive me for using the word!--will pay to that extent. But--if there is any justice beyond this world, how, indeed, will they meet the debt built upon your sufferings, your cramped lives, and the graves of your little children. That half a crown a week, I say, will come to you. Don't dare, any of you, to be satisfied when it does come. It isn't a few shillings only that are owing to you. It's another social system, a rearrangement of your whole scheme of life, under which you and your children, and your children's children, may live with the dignity and freedom due to that strange and common gift of life which beats in your pulses and in mine. I am here to-night to show you the way to that extra half-crown, but I don't want you for one moment to think that these small increases in wages represent the end and aim of myself and those who share my beliefs. Your day may not see it, nor mine, but history for the last thousand years has shown us the slow emancipation of the peoples of the world. There are many rungs in the ladder yet to be climbed. Your children may have to take up the burden where you have left it. A revolution may be necessary, sorrows innumerable may lie between you and the goal of your class. And yet I bid you hope. I plead with each one of you to remember that he is not only an individual; that he is a unit of humanity, that he is the progenitor of unborn children, a force from which will spring the happier and the freer generation, if not in our time, in the days to come." He passed on to speak for a few moments about the reconstituted state of Society, which was his favourite theme, and from that to a peroration unprepared--fiercely, passionately eloquent. When he had finished speaking, the air seemed curiously dull and lifeless; an extraordinary silence, like the silence before a thunderstorm, brooded over the place. Then the human sea broke its bounds. The smut-blackened trees quivered with the thunder of their voices. Showers of sparks rose into the air from the torches they waved. It was a pandemonium of sound. They came on like a mighty flood, before whose force the dam has suddenly yielded. The platform was crushed like a nutshell before their onslaught. They were mad with a great enthusiasm, beside themselves with a passion stirred only in such men once or twice in a lifetime. The roar of their voices, as they shouted his name, reached even to the station, to which Maraton had been smuggled secretly in a fast motor-car--a disappearance which a great journalist on the next morning alluded to as the one supremely dramatic touch in a night of wonders. The roar of voices indeed was still in his ears as he stood before the window of his compartment, looking out over the fire-hung city with its vaporous flames, its huge furnaces, its glare which was already becoming fainter. A myriad lights still twinkled upon the hillsides; the smoke-stained sky was red with the reflection of those thousand torches. Even as the train rushed on into the darkness, he could hear the echo of their cry as they sought for him. "Maraton! Maraton!" He threw himself at last into a corner seat of his compartment, and conscious of a somewhat rare physical exhaustion, he rang the bell for the attendant and ordered refreshments. The evening papers were by his side, but he had no fancy to read. The thrill of the last few hours was still upon him. He sat with folded arms, looking idly through the window at the chaotic prospect. Suddenly he was aware that the door of his compartment had been opened. A man had entered and was taking the seat opposite to him, a man whose appearance struck Maraton at once as being vaguely familiar, a man who smiled at him almost with the air of an old acquaintance. "You don't recognise me, I can see," the newcomer said, smiling slightly, "yet we ought to know one another." Maraton looked at the intruder curiously. It was, in many respects, a remarkable face; a low, heavy forehead; eyes in which shone the unmistakable light; broad, firm mouth; fair hair, left unusually long. In figure the man was short and stout. His collar had parted, and a black bow of unusual size was drooping from his shoulder. He was slightly out of breath, too, as though he had but recently recovered from some strenuous exercise. "I will save you from speculations--I am Henry Selingman," he pronounced. Maraton held out his hand. "Selingman!" he exclaimed. "It is your photographs, of course, then. We have never met." "Never until to-night," Selingman admitted. "When I heard that you were in England, I made up my mind to come over. To-night seemed to me propitious. I wanted to understand this marvellous power of yours of which so many people have written. Nothing has been exaggerated. The message which I have struggled to deliver to the world through my poetry, my plays, such prose as I have ventured upon, you yourself can tear from your heart and throw to the people's own ears. . . . Forgive me--I, too, will smoke. I will drink wine, also," he added, ringing the bell. "I had a dozen friends to help me, but every bone in my body aches with the struggle to escape. You maddened them, those people. It was magnificent." He ordered champagne from the attendant and began to smoke a long black cigar, nervously and quickly. "To-night I shall write of this," he went on. "I have lived for forty-five years and I have hunted all over the world, and in my study I have conjured up all the visions a man may, but never yet has there been anything like this. The black hillside a mass of soft black velvet, jewelled like a woman's gown, the red fires from the blasting furnaces, the shower of sparks from a thousand torches, the glow upon the fog poisoned sky, those faces--God, how white! Never in my life have I seen the writing of the finger of the Messiah as I saw it to-night! It has been the hour of a lifetime. Maraton, over there, man, our toilers are toilers indeed, but not like that. It isn't stamped into them. No, they're not branded." "Over there?" Maraton repeated. "Belgium, Germany," Selingman continued, "Germany chiefly. Our Socialism has done better for us than that. It has kindled a little fire in the heart of the men, and from its warmth has sprung something of that self-respect which will be the seed of the new humanity. I want you over there, Maraton. I want to show you. Your heart will warm with joy. God, what food for hell are your manufacturers here! How they'll burn!" "The curse of England is its terrible middle class," Maraton said slowly. "The present generation is the first even to dimly realise it. Our aristocracy is no better nor any worse than the aristocracy of other nations; rather better, perhaps, than worse. But our middle class rules the land. They represent the voting power. They conceal their real sentiments under the name of Liberalism, they keep their heel upon the neck of Labour. I tell you, when the revolution comes, it will be Hampstead and Kensington the mob will sack and burn, not Park Lane and Grosvenor Square." "You're right," Selingman agreed; "of course you're right. You and I make no mistakes. We are of the order of those whose eyes were touched in the cradle. Maraton, sometimes I am sorry I'm an artist, sometimes I loathe this sense of beauty which drives my pen into the pleasanter ways. There's only one thing in the world for you and me to work for. The world to-day doesn't deserve the offerings of the artist until it has purged itself. I waste my time writing plays, but then, after all, I am not English. If those were my people, Maraton, I doubt whether my pen could ever have wandered even for a moment into the pleasant ways." Maraton sighed. "There is America, too," he groaned. "A conglomeration," Selingman declared hastily, "not to be reckoned with yet as a nation. What is born amongst the older peoples must find its way there by natural law. It is not a country for commencements. England--it is England where the harvest is ripe. What are you doing, man?" Maraton looked thoughtfully out of the window. The train was gathering speed; they were travelling now at a great pace. Outside, the twilight was fading. A black cloud had passed across the rising moon. The electric light illuminated the carriage. It was almost as though they were passing through a tunnel. "You ask me almost the saddest question one could ask," he replied gently. "I am working for posterity. There is no other course. I called those people together to-night at Sheffield for the sake of half a crown a week extra wages. It will make life a little easier for them, and I suppose every atom of prosperity must count in the sum of their future and their children's future." "Spent in beer, most likely," Selingman muttered. "Why not?" Maraton exclaimed. "The possession of money to spend in luxuries of any sort must add something, at least, to their dignity. It means a lightening of the heart for a moment, an impulse of gladness. Why should we judge? Beer is only a prototype of other things. Then, Selingman, mark this. I brought the men of Lancashire out on strike some few weeks ago, and Sheffield now is following suit. It is a matter of a few shillings a week only, it is true, but I am very careful to tell them always that it is simply a compromise which I am advocating. These small increases are nothing. The operatives have a nature-given right to a share in the product of their labour. In these days their slave hire is thrown at them by an interloping person who calls himself an employer. In the days to come it will be different." "You beat time, then!" Selingman cried. "You head the waves! My friend Maraton, they are right, those who turned me out of my villa at Versailles and sent me over to you. They were right, indeed! I have business with you, man--an inspiration to share. Ours is a great meeting. You know Maxendorf?" "By name," Maraton admitted, a little startled. "A profound thinker," Selingman declared, "a mighty thinker, a giant, a pioneer. I tell you that he sees, Maraton. He has pitched his tent upon the hill-top. What do you know of him?" "Chiefly," Maraton replied, "that he is an aristocrat, a diplomatist, and the future ambassador here of a country I do not love." Selingman drained a glass of champagne before he answered. He lit another of his long, thin cigars and smoked furiously. "Aristocrat--yes," he assented, "but you do not know Maxendorf. He will be a joy to you, man. Oh, he sees! The day of the millions is coming, and he knows it. On the Continent our middle class isn't like yours. The conflict will never be so terrible. Thank God, our Labour stands already with its feet upon the ground. With us, development is all that is necessary. But you--you are up against a cul-de-sac, a black mountain of prejudice and custom. Nothing can save you but an earthquake or a revolution, and you know it. You came to England with those ideas, Maraton. You have turned opportunist. It was the only thing left for you. You didn't happen to see the one way out. To-morrow it will be a new day with you. To-morrow we will show you." They were rushing into London now. Selingman rose to his feet. "At seven o'clock to-morrow I shall fetch you," he announced, "that is, if I do not come in the morning. I may come before--I may give you the whole day for your own. I make no promise. Your address--write it down. I have no memory." Maraton wrote it and passed it over. Selingman thrust it into his pocket. "I go to work," he cried. "Some part of the genius of your voice shall tremble to-morrow in the genius of my prose. I promise you that. 'Listen,' our friend Maxendorf would say, 'to the vainest man in Europe!' But I know. No man knows himself save himself. Adieu!" _ |
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