"And I doubt if I shall ever have the chance. I didn't go up there to-day because I doubted if I should ever be able to sit there again. After all, that's only one platform, and Wesley, Newman, Tolstoi got on without it. If the fire's inside you——"
"And how do you start?" I interrupted.
"On the simplest things. I've got a commonplace mind, George, with no subtlety or cleverness, but it's frightfully hard to shake. From experience I know that hunger and physical pain and disease and indignity are terrible things—the whole world knows it—and we must put an end to them. I've only learned two lessons in life, and they came to me on the same day—I've told you about it before—when I fainted from want of food, and a prostitute, dying of consumption, fed me. I don't aim higher than that, old man—to put an end to human suffering. There's little a man can't do by example and teaching, if he knows how to touch primitive imagination.... I'm quite commonplace; I've got the temperament of a Salvation Army man—and like him I can make people shout, or laugh, or tremble, or cry."
Once again I put a question that I had asked him years before in Ireland.
"What can you do with me, Raney, or a hundred thousand other low-flying, unimaginative, class-conscious souls, steeped in materialism and taught from childhood to repress emotion? To get rid of selfishness and muddle, to make us alert and sympathetic, you must change human nature—set the world in the path of one of Wells' comets——"
"And can't you see the comet approaching?" He stood still, with hands outstretched, appealing, and in his eye shone the light of a visionary. "We shall fight to preserve an ideal, side by side, with disregard of class-consciousness. We shall fight to maintain our toleration and justice, and so that no man may ever have to fight again. Do you think we can come back with the scream of a shell in our ears to take up the old narrowness and futility? Shall we re-establish a social barrier between men who've undertaken the same charge? Shall we save this country from invasion so that sweated labour may be perpetuated?" His voice had grown quicker and quicker until he stopped suddenly, panting for breath. "George, you don't know the soul of a people."
"I knew it before the comet."
"You don't know its capabilities."
"I hope you will prove me wrong, Raney."
On the following morning Arden, O'Rane, Loring and I returned to town. That Tuesday was the last of the Five Days since Germany declared herself in a state of war, the twelfth—only the twelfth—since the Austrian ultimatum. We all of us felt that we should at least get our news some hours earlier than at Chepstow, and for my own part I had to see what policy Bertrand proposed to adopt with "Peace." Also, I had wired at length to the Whips' Office, telling young Jellaby to take a note of my name in case any overworked Minister came in search of volunteers for his department.