第37章 THE FOURTH(10)

And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made clothes, with watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent and invincible air of being out of his element.He sat with his stout boots tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer and looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on tables and chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except upon chairs after the manner of young men.The only other chair whose seat was occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen comforter and his picturesque old beach-photographer's hat.We were all shy and didn't know how to take hold of him now we had got him, and, which was disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly having the same difficulty with us.We had expected to be gripped.

"I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps," he repeated with a north-country quality in his speech.

We made reassuring noises.

The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an uncomfortable pause.

"I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what with the new machines and all that," he speculated at last with red reflections in his thoughtful eyes.

We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the meeting.

But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a different man.He declared he would explain to us just exactly what socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of social conditions."You young men," he said "come from homes of luxury; every need you feel is supplied--"We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we listened to him and thought him over.He was the voice of wrongs that made us indignant and eager.We forgot for a time that he had been shy and seemed not a little incompetent, his provincial accent became a beauty of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his indignations.We looked with shining eyes at one another and at the various dons who had dropped in and were striving to maintain a front of judicious severity.We felt more and more that social injustice must cease, and cease forthwith.We felt we could not sleep upon it.At the end we clapped and murmured our applause and wanted badly to cheer.

Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling.Denson, that indolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning.

He lay contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs crossed and his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with a long thin hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable glasses that hid his watery eyes."I don't want to carp," he began."The present system, I admit, stands condemned.Every present system always HAS stood condemned in the minds of intelligent men.But where it seems to me you get thin, is just where everybody has been thin, and that's when you come to the remedy.""Socialism," said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and Hatherleigh said "Hear! Hear!" very resolutely.

"I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer," said Denson, getting his shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; "but Idon't.I don't, you know.It's rather a shame to cross-examine you after this fine address of yours"--Chris Robinson on the hearthrug made acquiescent and inviting noises--"but the real question remains how exactly are you going to end all these wrongs? There are the admimstrative questions.If you abolish the private owner, I admit you abolish a very complex and clumsy way of getting businesses run, land controlled and things in general administered, but you don't get rid of the need of administration, you know.""Democracy," said Chris Robinson.

"Organised somehow," said Denson."And it's just the How perplexes me.I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a sort of scrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have got now.

"Nothing could be worse than things are now," said Chris Robinson.

"I have seen little children--"

"I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily be worse--or life in a beleagured town."Murmurs.

They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming out from the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold daylight of late afternoon.Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict with Denson; he was an orator and not a dialectician, and he missed Denson's points and displayed a disposition to plunge into untimely pathos and indignation.And Denson hit me curiously hard with one of his shafts."Suppose," he said, "you found yourself prime minister--"I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little ruffled and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the huge machine of government muddled and mysterious.Oh! but I was perplexed!

And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive talk with him.

"Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" he said.

Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and again he came back to that discussion."It's all very easy for your learned men to sit and pick holes," he said, "while the children suffer and die.They don't pick holes up north.They mean business."He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his going to work in a factory when he was twelve--" when you Chaps were all with your mammies "--and how he had educated himself of nights until he would fall asleep at his reading.