Jeff halted a rod before the nearer entrance to the field. He had suddenly the sense of presences. The nerves on his skin told him humanity was near. He went on, with an uncalculated noiselessness, for the moment loomed important, and since what humanity was there was silent—all but that one hateful voice—he, approaching in ignorance, must be still. The voice, in its strident passion, rose again.
"The country for a man to serve is the country that serves him. The country that serves him is the one without a king. Has this country a king? It has a thousand kings and a million more that want to be. How many kings do you want to reign over you? How many are you going to accept? It is in your hands."
It ceased, and another voice, lower but full of a suppressed passion, took up the tale, though in a foreign tongue. Jeff knew the first one now: Weedon Moore's. He read at once the difference between Moore's voice and this that followed. Moore's had been imploring in its assertiveness, the desire to convince. The other, in the strange language, carried belief and sorrow even. It also longed to convince, but out of an inner passion hot as the flame of love or grief. The moon, riding superbly, and coming that minute out of her cloud, unveiled the scene. An automobile had halted on a slight elevation and in it stood Moore and a taller man gesticulating as he spoke. And about them, like a pulsing carpet lifted and stirred by a breeze of feeling, were the men Jeff's instinct had smelled out. They were packed into a mass. And they were silent. Weedon Moore began again.
"Kill out this superstition of a country. Kill it out, I say. Kill out this idea of going back to dead men for rules to live by. The dead are dead. Their Bibles and their laws are dead. There's more life in one of you men that has tasted it through living and suffering and being oppressed than there is in any ten of their kings and prophets. They are dead, I tell you. We are alive. It was their earth while they lived on it. It's our earth to-day."
Jeff was edging nearer, skirting the high fence, and while he did it, the warm voice of the other man took up the exposition, and now Jeff understood that he was Moore's interpreter. By the time he had finished, Jeff was at the thin edge of the crowd behind the car, and though one or two men turned as he moved and glanced at him, he seemed to rouse no uneasiness. Here, nearer them in the moonlight, he saw what they were: workmen, foreign evidently, with bared throats and loosely worn hair, some, their caps pushed back, others without hats at all, seeking, it seemed, coolness in this too warm adjuration.
"Their symbol," said Moore, "is the flag. They carry it into foreign lands. Why? For what they call religion? No. For money—money—money. When the flag waves in a new country, blood begins to flow, the blood of the industrial slave. Down with the flag. Our symbol is the sword."
The voice of the interpreter, in an added passion, throbbed upon the climbing period. Moore had moved him and, forgetful of himself, he was dramatically ready to pass his ardour on. Jeff also forgot himself. He clove like a wedge through the thin line before him, and leaped on the running-board.
"You fool," he heard himself yelling at Moore, who in the insecurity of his tubbiness was jarred and almost overturned, "you're robbing them of their country. You're taking away the thing that keeps them from falling down on all-fours and going back to brute beasts. My God, Moore, you're a traitor! You ought to be shot."
He had surprised them. They did not even hustle him, but there were interrogatory syllables directed to the interpreter. Moore recovered himself. He gave a sharp sound of distaste, and then, assuming his civilised habit, said to Jeff in a voice of specious courtesy, yet, Jeff knew, a voice of hate:
"These are mill operatives, Blake, labourers. They know what labour is. They know what capitalists are. Do you want me to tell 'em who you are?"