"Where's the young 'un? Give him a chance!"
But Philip had withdrawn, having tasted blood. A sweet music was jingling in his ears. He had heard his own voice lifted in the presence of a crowd and the crowd had responded generously. He abandoned momentarily his ambition to become Poet Laureate and determined to shape his course towards the Premiership of the United Kingdom.
Now and again during this period Philip went to have a few words with an old Bridgeway School friend of his who worked in one of the coat and mantle factories bordering the Mitchen. It was an experience which lifted his Socialism from a theory and a somewhat sentimental abstraction to a clamant and immediate need. "Sweated labour" became a phrase which he could endow with the actual physical associations it was intended to conjure. He saw the men in their filthy shirts spitting upon their pressing-irons and the floor indiscriminately. Their sweat fell unregarded on the material below them. The tailors sitting about on the littered tables seemed to be more perversions of men, grotesques, than men actually. The windows were fouled with an opaque mist of dirt and sweat. Little boys shuffled uneasily about like subterranean gnomes. Girls cackled hideously after him, and when the men started an obscene catch which lifted his gorge, girl after girl in the adjoining rooms accepted the sexual challenge and cackled in return. He saw a thick-nosed foreman whose waistcoat glimmered evilly with countless soup droppings fuddling his fingers in the bosom of a girl. He saw another girl, a recent recruit, leaning, ivory-yellow, through a window which looked down on the Mitchen slime. There was no reason why her body should not follow where her eyes looked down so stupidly. What else was there? Nothing but the reeking room and the dirty songs and the swinish waistcoat of the foreman! The picture of this sick girl remained abidingly with him. When Harry turned suddenly to him one evening and announced that he had given Philip's name to the Longton secretary as a speaker for next Sunday evening, at the very moment of dismay and revolt her image came back to him and filled him with a blind fury against the ordinances of men.
"All right, I'll come!" he said thickly. "You know I'll make a filthy mess of it, but that's your fault. I've got nothing to say and I don't know how to say it and I'll just get up and open my mouth and shut it and fall off. Good God, Harry Sewelson, you're a pig!"
"And you're a good Socialist! There's two first-rate lies. It's on the croft outside Longton Park. But don't worry, Philip, old man, you've got the stuff, never fear! Sunday, May the something-or-other, is the date. Anyhow, that doesn't matter, it's next Sunday, at half-past six! So that's all right!"
Philip carefully prepared a little speech. He repeated it several times before his mother, assuring her that it was one of Antony's many orations over the corpse of Cæsar. So long as Philip did not declaim loud enough to wake Reb Monash she was happy enough to listen obediently to Antony's denunciation of the House of Lords.
Next Sunday Philip turned up and sat below the oratorial cart biting his nails nervously and recapitulating his speech. He was called upon immediately after an emancipated coal-heaver, whose jocosity had tickled the crowd into unrest.
When Philip rose blinking and with a heart full of the most unmitigated hatred for Harry, a gentleman adorned with a muffler and a slant Tweed hat exclaimed ribaldly, "Crikey! Look what's come! Johnny, go back to your mummy's titty-bottle!"
There was a prompt evanescence from Philip's brain of his carefully prepared speech. He was at that stage of nervousness which endows its victims with a degree of courage no ordinary frame of mind could conceivably induce. He turned fiercely towards the humorous gentleman and forgetting completely his brothers in the cause who were round him on the cart, forgetting the upturned, sceptical faces of his audience, he vented upon the humorous gentleman so turbid a stream of denunciation, dazzled his head with such a storm of rapiers furnished as much from his own shrill temper as from the prose of Blatchford and the poetry of Shelley, convinced him so thoroughly that both the continuance of the House of Lords along its bloody path of rapacity and the putrefaction of the factories along the Mitchen River were due to his criminal indifference and abysmal stupidity, that the humorous gentleman straightened his Tweed hat, tied his muffler into a different knot, buttoned all the buttons in his jacket, in the vain effort to present as different an appearance as possible from the humorist who had twitted the firebrand on his first appearance upon the platform.
Philip was sweating and shivering when he descended; he was, moreover, consumed with a secret dread lest the object of his denunciations should wait for him in a dark corner to conclude the episode in Philip's disfavour. The Longton secretary shook Philip's hand respectfully as if the limb were made of a clay slightly superior to his own. He checked himself when he found he was addressing Philip as "sir" and substituted "comrade." And Philip, when he descended the Blenheim Road, found himself booked to speak at a meeting on the Longton croft some time ahead.