For a moment, finding nothing to say, he gazed at her. His brown eyes, so strong and full of meaning, looked into hers gravely; and hers were blue and tender. But the silence grew unendurable, and flushing, the girl looked down.
“Why don’t you speak?”
“I think I’m afraid,” he answered, and there was a tremor in his voice.
She felt that his heart was beating as quickly as her own.
“Who am I that you should be afraid?” she whispered.
He gave a sigh that was half joy, half sorrow; and clenched his hands in the effort to master himself. But the girl’s sweet freshness rose to his nostrils like the scent of the earth in the morning after the rain, and his poor wits were all aflame.
“If I’ve done anything for you,” he said at last, “you’ve done a thousand times more for me. When first I met you I was utterly discouraged. The way seemed so hard. It was so difficult to make any progress. And then you filled me with hope.”
He began to speak hurriedly, and Winnie listened to his words as though they were some new evangel. He told her of his plans and of his enthusiastic ambition to get the people the power that was theirs by right. When he spoke of wages and of labour, of Co-operative Associations and of Trades Unions, it sounded like music in her ears. He told her of Lassalle’s fevered life, of Marx’ ceaseless struggle, of the pitying anguish of Carl Marlo. He spoke so earnestly, with such a vehemence of phrase, that Winnie, used to the sonorous platitudes of her father, was carried out as it were into the bottomless sea of life. After the artificiality wherein she had lived, these new doctrines, so boldly regardless of consequence, eager only for justice, were like the fresh air of heaven: her pulse beat more rapidly, and she knew that beyond her narrow sphere was a freer world. Railing spoke of the people; and the human beings whom she had classed disdainfully as the lower orders, gained flesh and blood in her imagination. He spoke of their passions and their misery, of their strength, their vice and squalor. The many-headed crowd grew picturesque and coloured. Winnie was seized on a sudden with the desire to go into their midst; and gaining a new strength of purpose, she felt already a greater self-reliance. Then more slowly, as though her presence were almost forgotten, but with the same intense conviction, the young Socialist spoke of the Nazarene who was the friend of the poor, the outcast, and the leper. Winnie had known Him only as the mainstay of an opulent and established Church. In her mind He was strangely connected with pews of pitch-pine, a fashionable congregation in Sabbath garments, and the imposing presence of her father. She learned now, as though it were a new thing, that the Christ was a ragged labourer, one with the carpenter who worked at St. Gregory’s Vicarage, the mason carrying a hod, and the scavenger who swept the streets. In these simple words she found a reality that had never appeared in her father’s rhetoric.
“And that’s why I call myself a Christian Socialist,” he said, “because I believe that to these two belong the future—to Christ and to the people.”
Winnie did not answer, and they walked again in silence.