"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."