IV
The hats were taken to the box-office and emptied, and the
collection-takers and the Liederkranz singers resumed their seats.
An expectant hush fell--and then at last there strode out on the
stage the Candidate. What a storm broke out! Men cheered and clapped
and shouted. He took his seat modestly; but as the noise continued,
he was justified in assuming that it was meant for him, and he rose
and bowed; as it still continued, he bowed again, and then again. It
had been the expectation of Comrade Dr. Service to come forward and
say that, of course, it was not necessary for anyone to introduce
the speaker of the evening; but the audience, as if it had read the
worthy doctor's intention, kept on applauding, until the Candidate
himself advanced, and raised his hand, and began his speech.
He did not stop for any oratorical preliminaries. This, he said--and
his voice trembled with emotion--was the solemnest hour that men had
ever faced on earth. That day on the bulletin-board of their local
newspaper he had read tidings which had moved him as he had never
been moved in his life, which had almost deprived him of the power
to walk upon a stage and address an audience. Perhaps they had not
heard the news; he told it to them, and there sprang from the
audience a cry of indignation.
Yes, they might well protest, said the speaker; nowhere on all the
bloody pages of history could you find a crime more revolting than
this! The masters of Europe had gone mad in their lust for power;
they had called down the vengeance of mankind upon their crowned and
coronetted heads. Here to-night he would tell them--and the
speaker's hoarse and raucous voice mounted to a shout of rage--he
would tell them that in signing the death-warrant of those heroic
martyrs, they had sealed the doom of their own order, they had torn
out the foundation-stones from the structure of capitalist society!
The speaker's voice seemed to lift the audience from its seats, and
the last words of the sentence were drowned in a tumult of applause.
Silence fell again, and the man went on. He had peculiar mannerisms
on the platform. His lanky form was never still for an instant. He
hurried from one end of the stage to the other; he would crouch and
bend as if he were going to spring upon the audience, a long, skinny
finger would be shaken before their faces, or pointed as if to drive
his words into their hearts. His speech was a torrent of epigram,
sarcasm, invective. He was bitter; if you knew nothing about the man
or his cause, you would find this repellent and shocking. You had to
know what his life had been--an unceasing conflict with oppression;
he had got his Socialist education in jail, where he had been sent
for trying to organize the wage-slaves of a gigantic corporation.
His rage was the rage of a tender-hearted poet, a lover of children
and of Nature, driven mad by the sight of torment wantonly
inflicted. And if ever he had seemed to you an extremist, too angry
to be excused, here to-night he had his vindication, here to-night
you saw him as a prophet. For now the master-class had torn the mask
from its face, and revealed to the whole world what were its moral
standards! At last men saw their rulers face to face!
They have plunged mankind into a pit of lunacy. "They call it war,"
cried the speaker; "but I call it murder." And he went on to picture
to them what was happening in Europe at that hour--he brought the
awful nightmare before their eyes, he showed them homes blown to
pieces, cities given to the flames, the bodies of men pierced by
bullets or torn to fragments by shells. He pictured a bayonet
plunged into the abdomen of a man; he made you see the ghastly deed,
and feel its shuddering wickedness. Men and women and children sat
spellbound; and for once no man could say aloud or feel in his heart
that the pictures of a Socialist agitator were overdrawn--no, not
even Ashton Chalmers, president of the First National Bank of
Leesville, or old Abel Granitch, proprietor of the Empire Machine
Shops!
