And this very silence made Dr. Felbeck angry.
"Comrades," he began, in his most scornful manner, with an envious, nasal twang in his voice, "we do net need to ask whence the wind blows. This is one more of that obsolete little band of old-fashioned, bourgeois idealists who wish to reform the world with tracts and sermons, and to keep the toilers content in subjection and resignation. Laborers, have you not, I ask, practised patience long enough? Have you, then, no right to the pleasures of life? Must you fill the hungry stomachs of your little ones with palaver about wisdom and charity?"
"No, no!" roared the crowd, freed instantly from the spell of respect under which for a moment they had been held.
"Do not let yourselves be befogged by those tedious maunderings that would reason away the strife of the classes. Oh, true! To such the gentlemen of the safety-box listen eagerly enough, for they are, oh, so afraid of the War of the Classes! But if they were to hear this gentleman talk, they would shout their approval. Take notice, this gentleman will do much to further it. Of course, they have his medal all ready for him."
"And a pension," said Hakkema, while the audience laughed.
"He is an unfrocked priest," said he in the Manchester suit.
"Damn ye, are ye a workman?" cried a voice at the back of the hall. "And do ye mean to say it's my fault that my children perish with hunger, and not the fault of those cursed blood-suckers? You 're a God-forsaken hypocrite, no laborer!"
Markus sat very still, gazing straight before him into the flame of a gas-jet. But Johannes saw that he was deathly pale, and that his eyes seemed to sink deeper into their sockets. Beads of perspiration were standing on his temples.
Hakkema stood up.
"Now I chance to know, fellow-laborers, that this man has escaped from a madhouse. That is a mitigating circumstance. Otherwise," Hakkema went on, drawing his clenched hand from his pocket, and thrusting it out in front of him, "otherwise I would have my fist at his jaw, and ask him if he had no feeling at all in his accursed carcass, that he begrudged the laborer his pittance of the good things of life. It's an enormous amount of pleasure, isn't it—glorious pleasure—you've been able to get on two hundred cents a day!"