A busy man always has time to spare; it is only your lazy person who can never place a minute at anyone’s disposal. Thus it was that Erb tacked on to his other duties, the work of making known the Society for Anglicising Foreign Manufactures, pressing into the service all the young orators of his acquaintance, and furnishing them with short and easy arguments. Our import trade was so many millions in excess of our outgoing trade: why should this be so? Our villages were becoming deserted, and country manufactories dwindled day by day: this must be stopped. Vague talk about technical education; praise for the English working man, and adulation of his extraordinary, but sometimes dormant brain power; necessity of providing tasks for the rising generation that they might not push men of forty out of berths. An agreeable programme, one that could be promulgated without those submissive inquiries addressed to the labour leaders in the House, which always had a suggestion of servility. Erb, the following Sunday, spoke at Southwark Park in the morning, at Peckham Rye in the afternoon, and Deptford Broadway in the evening, and, the subject being new, he found himself invited to address several working men’s clubs during the week. Paragraphs, slipped into the newspapers, sometimes contained his name: Lady Frances wrote that her uncle was delighted, and had asked to be especially remembered. A later note mentioned that it was intended to hold a mass meeting at St. James’s Hall, to bring the subject well before the people of London: her uncle would not be able to be present, but he had begged her to request Mr. Barnes to speak on this occasion: there would be a Duchess of philanthropic tendencies in the chair, and several members of Parliament had promised to speak. “Don’t disappoint us!” said the postscript appealingly. Erb sent an agreeable postcard in reply, and a friend of his, an assistant-librarian in the Free Library, promised to devote himself to work of research and ascertain how one addressed a lady of such distinguished rank as the wife of a Duke. The assistant-librarian urged that evening-dress was the correct thing, and offered to lend a suit which he and his brother wore when they went out into society, patronising dances at the Surrey Masonic Hall but here Erb’s commonsense interfered. The meeting was advertised in the daily papers and on hoardings, his name given as Herbert Barnes, Esquire, with full qualifications set out: he never saw one of the posters without stopping to enjoy the sight, and it pained him extremely to find that on one or two in the neighbourhood of home some friend had erased the affix. Louisa went boldly one evening to the offices of the new society, in College Street, Westminster, and obtained a copy of the poster; this she would have exhibited in the front window, but compromised by sticking it at its four corners on the wall of the sitting room.
St. James’s Hall was not over-crowded on the evening, and a wealthy member of the committee went about telling everybody that a smaller room would have been cheaper, but it was full enough to please Erb as he took a view of it from the stairs leading to the platform. The platform was fringed with palms; on the walls were hung banners, with quotations from Shakespeare down to the newest poet; quotations, that appeared to give vague support to the movement. Lady Frances, hovering about in the manner of an anxious butterfly, introduced Erb to the Duchess, and the Duchess, without using her lorgnon, said beamingly that she had read all of Mr. Barnes’s works, and felt quite too delighted to meet the author; Erb protested nervously that he had never written a book, but the Duchess waved this aside as ineffective badinage, and went on talking the while she looked away through her glasses at arriving people. So delighted, said the Duchess absently, to mingle with men of talent; it took one into another atmosphere. The Duchess, for her part, claimed to have powers of observation, and trusted piously that she was not altogether without a sense of humour, but these exceptional qualities, she said, had never availed her when she took pen in hand. Erb, perceiving the futility of contradiction, suggested that she should one day, when a spare moment arrived, have another dash at it, and the Duchess, bringing her gaze by a process of exhaustion round to him, stared at him wonderingly for a moment, and then promised to act upon his advice. A shy little man of letters being submitted just then to her consideration, the Duchess dropped Erb, and engaged in animated monologue on the subject of labour and how to conciliate it: her own method seemed to be to treat it as an elephant and give it buns. Erb stood about the room, whilst well-dressed people flew one to the other with every sign of gratification; he felt all his usual difficulty of not knowing what to do with his hands. The people had a manner of speech that he could understand with difficulty, they talked of things that for him were a sealed book. Three clergymen who came in a bunch and seemed similarly out of the movement, gave him a feeling of companionship. When they all formed in a line and marched up on the platform to a mild, whispered cheering from the Hall, Erb’s interest quickened, and the slight feeling of nervousness came which always affected him when he was going to speak.
“And I do think,” said the Duchess, with shrill endeavour to make her voice reach the back of the hall, “I do think that the more we consider such matters the more likely we are to understand them and to realise what they mean, and to gain a better and a wider and a truer knowledge.” The three clergymen said, “Good, good,” in a burst of respectful approbation, as men suddenly illuminated by a new thought. “I am tempted to go further,” said the Duchess, waving her notes threateningly at the audience, “to go further, and express myself, if I may so say, that having put our hands to the plough—” She looked round at the straight line of folk behind her, and they endeavoured to convey by their looks that if a Duchess could not be allowed the use of daring metaphor, then it would have to be denied to everybody. “Having put our hands to the plough, we shall not turn back—(slight cheering)—we shall not falter—(renewed slight cheering)—we shall not loiter by the roadside, but we shall go steadily on, knowing well that—that—” Here the Duchess found her notes and read the last words of her peroration carefully, “knowing well that our goal is none other than the rising sun, which symbolises so happily the renaissance—” Here she looked down at the reporters’ table, and seemed about to spell the word, but refraining contented herself by saying it again with great distinctness. “The renaissance of British Trade and British Supremacy!”
A service member of Parliament proposed the first resolution, and did so in a speech that would have suited any and every occasion on sea or land, in that it was made up entirely of platitudes, and included not one argument that could be seized by the most contentious; the whole brightened by what the member of Parliament himself described as a most amusing discussion which he had held with a man of the labouring classes not many years since (on which occasion the member had travelled second, this being notoriously the only way of discovering the true aspirations of the lower classes), and the member had subjected the man to a rigid cross-examination of the most preposterous and useless nature which he now repeated with many an “Ah, but I said—” and “Now listen to me, my good fellow—” and “Permit me to explain what I mean in simple words so that even you can understand,” the labouring man eventually giving in (so, at any rate, the Member declared), admitting that the gallant Member had won the game at every point—the probability being that the poor fellow, bullied and harried by a talkative bore, had done so in the interests of peace and with a desire to be let alone and allowed to read his evening paper. The service Member clearly prided himself not only on the acuteness which he had displayed in the argument, but also on the wonderful imitative faculty which enabled him to reproduce the dialect of his opponent, a dialect which seemed to have been somewhat mixed, for in one instance he spoke Lancashire with, “Aye, ah niver thowt o’ that,” and the next broad Somerset, “There be zummat in what yew zay, zir,” and anon in a strange blend of Irish and Scotch.
“‘That this meeting calls upon the working classes to put aside all differences and to contribute their indispensable assistance to the new movement, from which they themselves have so much to gain.’ Will Mr. Herbert Barnes please second?”
This was written on the slip of paper, and passed along to Erb at a moment when the grisly fear had begun to possess him that he might not be called upon at all. He nodded to the secretary, and felt that the audience, now tired of listening to spoken words, looked at him doubtfully. One of the three clergymen being selected to move the resolution, the other two looked at their shoes with a pained interest, and presently tugged at their black watch-guards, ascertained the time, and, just before the chosen man arose, slipped quietly out. Fortunately for Erb, the remaining clergyman started on a line of reasoning excellently calculated to annoy and to stimulate. Began by pointing out that everybody nowadays worked excepting the working man, doubted whether it was of much use offering to him help, but declaring himself, in doleful tones, an optimist, congratulated the new movement on its courage, its altruism, its high nobility of purpose, and managed, before sitting down, to intimate very defiantly that unless labour seized this unique opportunity, then labour must be left to shift for itself and could no longer expect any assistance from him.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” said Erb distinctly. The promise of listening to a voice that could be heard without difficulty aroused the Hall. “I should be glad if the gentleman who spoke last could spare just three minutes of his time, and refrain for that space from making a hurried and somewhat undignified departure from the Hall.” The clergyman who had adopted the crouching attitude of those who desire to escape furtively from close confinement, returned and sat, his back straightened. “He has spoke—I should say, he has spoken—in a patronising way of labour, and I want to tell him that we resent very strongly his condescending and almost contemptuous words.”
His predecessor rose and said, “May it please your—”
“No, no, no!” said Erb, with but a slight modification of his Southwark Park manner, “I didn’t interrupt the reverend gentleman, and I’m not going to allow him to interrupt me. Or to assume the duties, your Grace,” with a nod to the chair, “which you perform with such conspicuous charm and ability.”
The Duchess, who, fearing a row, had been anxiously consulting those around her in order to gain hints as to procedure, recovered confidence on receiving this compliment, and gave a smile of relief. Men at the table below adjusted their black leaves of carbonic paper and began to write.