The sentiment met with approval. There were sympathetic murmurs. He was not the only hungry man in that audience.
'I'm in trouble--had the influenza, or whatever they call it, and lost my job. Never had one since. Jobs ain't easy found by blokes what seems dotty on their pins. My wife's in gaol--as honest a woman as ever lived; she'd have wore herself to the bone for me. Landlord wanted his rent; we hadn't a brown; I was down on my back; she didn't want me turned out into the street while I was like that, so she went and pawned some shirts what she'd got to iron. They gave her three months for it. She'd done two of 'em last Monday. Kid died last week and was buried by the parish. Gawd knows what she'll say when she hears of it when she comes out. Altogether I seem fairly off my level. So I say what the lady afore me says: Let's all go to him in the morning, and get him to understand how it is with us, and get him to say a word as'll do us good. And if he won't, why, as she says, we'll make him! That's all.'
There was no chance of choosing a successor from among the numerous volunteers. A man who seemed just insane enough to be dangerous chose himself. He broke into a vehement flood of objurgation, writhing and gesticulating as if desirous of working himself into a greater frenzy than he was in already. He had not been on his feet a minute before he had brought a large portion of his audience into a similar condition to himself.
'Make him, make him! That's the keynote. Share and share alike, that's our motto. No favouritism! The world stinks of favouritism; we'll have no more of it from him. We'll let him know it. What he does for one he must do for all. If he were to come into this room this minute, and were to help half of us, it would be the duty of all of us to go for him because he'd left the other half unhelped. He's been healing, has he? Who? Somebody. Not us. Why not us as well as them? He's got to give us what we want just as he gave them what they want, if we have to take him by the throat to take it out of him!'
'We will that!'
'Only got to say a word, has he, and the trick's done? Then he shall say that word for us, as he has for others, if we have to drag his tongue out by the roots to get at it!'
'That's it--that's the way to talk!'
'Work a miracle, can he, every time he opens his mouth? Then he shall work the miracles we want, or, by the living God, he shall never work another!'
The words were greeted with a chorus of approving shouts. The fellow screamed on. As his ravings grew worse, the excitement of his auditors waxed greater. Buffeted all their lives, as it seemed to them, by adverse winds, they were incapable of realising that they were in any way the victims of their own bad seamanship. For that incapacity, perhaps, they were not entirely to blame. They did not make themselves. That they should have been fashioned out of such poor materials was not the least of their misfortunes.
And their pains and griefs, humiliations and defeats, had been so various and so many that it was not strange that their wit had been abraded to the snapping-point; the more especially since it had been of such poor quality at first.