“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 I don'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 administrative 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.”