Religionists of various sects, all with long hair and dressed in shabby black, the Book either before them on a campaigning lectern or tucked beneath one arm, called upon Christian men to dip their hands into the precious blood and drink from the eternal fountain of pure water that is to be found in the Apocalypse. “Come to ’Im, come to ’Im, I say, my friends, come straight; oh, it is joyful to belong to Jesus. Don’t stop for anything, come to ’Im now like little children. . . . Let us sing a ’ymn. You know it, most of you; but brother ’ere,” and as he spoke he turned towards a pale-faced youth who held a bag to take the offertory, that sacrament that makes the whole world kin, “will lead it for you.”
The acolyte cleared his throat raucously, and to a popular air struck up the refrain of “Let us jump joyful on the road.” Flat-breasted girls and pale-faced boys took up the strain, and as it floated through the heavy air, reverberating from the pile of public buildings, gradually all the crowd joined in; shyly at first and then whole-heartedly, and by degrees the vulgar tune and doggerel verses took on an air of power and dignity, and when the hymn was finished, the tears stood in the eyes of grimy-looking women and of red-faced men. Then, with his bag, the pale-faced hymn-leader went through the crowd, reaping a plenteous harvest, all in copper, from those whose hearts had felt, but for a moment, the full force of sympathy.
Suffragist ladies discussed upon “the Question,” shocking their hearers as they touched on prostitution and divorce, and making even stolid policemen, who stood sweating in their thick blue uniforms, turn their eyes upon the ground.
After them, Suffragette girls bounded upon the cart, consigning fathers, brothers, and the whole male section of mankind straight to perdition as they held forth upon the Vote, that all-heal of the female politician, who thinks by means of it to wipe out all those disabilities imposed upon her by an unreasonable Nature and a male Deity, who must have worked alone up in the Empyrean without the humanising influence of a wife.
Little by little the various groups dissolved, the speakers and their friends forcing their “literatoor” upon the passers-by, who generally appeared to look into the air a foot or two above their heads, as they went homewards through the streets.
The Anarchists were the last to leave, a faithful few still congregating around a youth in a red necktie who denounced the other speakers with impartiality, averring that they were “humbugs every one of them,” and, for his part, he believed only in dynamite, by means of which he hoped some day to be able to devote “all the blood-suckers to destruction, and thus to bring about the reign of brotherhood.”
The little knot of the elect applauded loudly, and the youth, catching the policeman’s eye fixed on him, descended hurriedly from off the chair on which he had been perorating, remarking that “it was time to be going home to have a bit of dinner, as he was due to speak at Salford in the evening.”
Slowly the square was emptied, the last group or two of people disappearing into the mouths of the incoming streets just as a Roman crowd must have been swallowed up in the vomitoria of an amphitheatre, after a show of gladiators.
Torn newspapers and ends of cigarettes were the sole result of all the rhetoric that had been poured out so liberally upon the assembled thousands in the square.
Two or three street boys in their shirt-sleeves, bare-footed and bare-headed, their trousers held up by a piece of string, played about listlessly, after the fashion of their kind on Sunday in a manufacturing town, when the life of the streets is dead, and when men’s minds are fixed either upon the mysteries of the faith or upon beer, things in which children have but little share.