Philip and Tim moved on. Philip felt hot and angry that women—apparently young women—should be subjected to such treatment as this. At the same time he remembered Miss Jennings's dictum upon the subject of asking for trouble, and wondered what on earth the parents of the youthful orators were thinking about.
Presently they came to a group near the Marble Arch. It was being addressed by two speakers simultaneously. The first was an angry-looking old gentleman with a long white beard. He was engaged in expounding some peculiar and (to judge from his apparent temperature) highly contentious point of doctrine to a facetious audience; but it was impossible to ascertain from his discourse whether he was a superheated heresy-hunter, an evangelical revivalist, or an out-and-out atheist. This is a peculiarity of the Hyde Park orator. Set him on his legs, and in ten minutes he has wandered so far from the point—usually through chasing an interrupter down some irrelevant byway—that it is difficult to tell what his subject is and quite impossible to discover which side he is on. As Philip and Timothy strolled up, the bearded one parted company with the last shreds of his temper, chiefly owing to the remorseless hecklings of a muscular Christian (or atheist) who was discharging a steady stream of criticism and obloquy into his left ear at a range of about eighteen inches; and partly by reason of the distraction caused by the voice of the other speaker, a pock-marked gentleman in a frock-coat and bowler hat, who, with glassy eyes fixed upon some invisible textbook suspended in mid-air before him, was thundering forth a philippic in favour of (or against) Tariff Reform.
With gleaming spectacles and waving arms, the old gentleman turned suddenly upon the heckler.
"Out upon you!" he shrieked. "I despise you; I scorn you; I spit upon you! Plague-spot!"
"What abaht the Erpostle Paul?" enquired the Plague-Spot steadily, evidently for the hundredth time.
This naturally induced a fresh paroxysm.
"Miserable creature!" stormed the old gentleman. "Having eyes, you see not! Having ears, you hear not! What did Charles Darwin say in eighteen-seventy-six?"
The crowd turned to the heckler, anxious to see how this thrust would be parried. The heckler pondered a moment, and then enquired in his turn: "What did the Erpostle Paul say in one-oh-one?"
The crowd, evidently regarding this as a good point, laughed approvingly.
"I'll read you what Charles Darwin said," spluttered the old gentleman, producing quite a library from his coat-tail. He selected a volume, and turned over the leaves with trembling fingers.