It was well we arrived early, as there was not sitting room for half the audience, though more than half the hall being reserved for the ladies, we got a front seat, and long before the time for the speakers to appear every corner was packed, and women as well as men were standing in rows fronting the stage. A great buzz of conversation at the front, and stampeding and cat-calling among the youths at the back, was terminated by the arrival of the three speakers of the evening, who were received amid deafening cock-a-doodling, cheering, stamping, and clapping. An old warrior of the class dressed up to the position of M.P. sat to one side, and next him was the barrister type so prolific in parliament, who had himself dressed down to the vulgar crowd, while third sat Leslie Walker.
Surely not the first Leslie Walker who had appeared a week or two previously! His bright, restless eye, though too sensitive for that of an old campaigner, now took in the crowd with complete assurance, and there was no hint of hesitation discernible. Having once smelt powder he was ready for the fray.
"By Jove! hasn't Les. bucked up!" whispered Ernest, who sat on one side of me, where he had landed after an ineffectual attempt to sit beside Dawn.
"Yes; if he can only roar and blow and wave his arms sufficiently he may have a chance."
"But he's still nervous," said the observant Andrew from the rear. "You watch him go for that flea in the leg of his pants!"
Sitting in full view of a "chyacking" audience is a severe ordeal to an inexperienced campaigner with a sensitive temperament, and this action, indeed peculiarly like an attempt to detain an annoying insect in a fold of his lower garment, was one of those little mannerisms adopted to give an appearance of ease.
Behind the speakers came, as chairman, one of the swell class almost extinct in this region, and he, too, had rather an effete attitude and physique, as he took up his position behind the spindley table weighted by the smeared tumblers and water-bottle. He rose with the intention of flattering the speakers and audience in the orthodox way, but the electors, among whom a spirit of overflowing hilarity was at large, took his duties out of his mouth.
"Don't smoodge, old cockroach, let the other blokes blaze away, as we (the taxpayers) are paying dear for this spouting."
The barrister man M.P. burst upon them first with the latest trumpet blare with which speeches were being opened. Having been primed as to the magnitude of the railway vote in Noonoon, first move was to throw a bone to it, and, metaphorically speaking, he got down on his knees to this section of the electors, and howled and squealed that all civil servants' wages would be left as they were.
He took another canter to flatter the ladies regarding the remarkably intelligent vote they had cast in the Federal elections, and asserted his belief that they would do likewise in the present crisis, and introduce a nobler element into political life.