Milligan had evidently just began his discourse. I had not listened to
him for five minutes when I found myself caught in the grip which he was
famous for fastening on his audience. With his subject--Nationalisation
of the Land--and his arguments I had been perfectly familiar for years.
As a boy I had read Henry George's “Progress and Poverty” with the
superciliousness of the young believer in the divine right of Britain's
landed gentry, and before the Eton Debating Society I had demolished the
whole theory to my own and every one else's satisfaction. Later, as
a practical politician, I had kept myself abreast of the Socialist
movement. I did not need Mr. John Milligan, whom my lingering flippancy
had called a son of thunder, to teach me the elements of the matter. But
at this peculiar crisis of my life I felt that, in a queer, unknown way,
Milligan had a message for me. It was uncanny. I sat and listened to
the exposition of Utopia with the rapt intensity of any cheesemonger's
assistant there before whose captured spirit floated the vision of days
to come when the land should so flow with milk and money that golden
cheeses would be like buttercups for the plucking. It was not the man's
gospel that fascinated me nor his illuminated prophecy of the millennium
that produced the vibrations in my soul, but the surging passion of his
faith, the tempest of his enthusiasm. I had enough experience of public
speaking to distinguish between the theatrical and the genuine in
oratory. Here was no tub-thumping soothsayer, but an inspired zealot. He
lived his impassioned creed in every fibre of his frame and faculties.
He was Titanic, this rough miner, in his unconquerable hope, divine in
his yearning love of humanity.
When he ended there was a dead silence for a second, and then a roar of
applause from the pale, earnest, city-stamped faces. A lump rose in my
throat. Campion clutched my knee. A light burned in his eyes.
“Well? What about Boanerges?”
“Only one thing,” said I, “I wish I were as alive as that man.”
A negligible person proposed a vote of thanks to Milligan, after which
the hall began to empty. Campion, caught by a group of his proletariat
friends, signalled to me to wait for him. And as I waited I saw Eleanor
Faversham come slowly from the platform down the central gangway. Her
eyes fixed themselves on me at once--for standing there alone I must
have been a conspicuous figure, an intruder from the gorgeous West--and
with a little start of pleasure she hurried her pace. I made my way past
the chattering loiterers in my row, and met her. We shook hands.
“Well? Saul among the prophets? Who would have thought of seeing you
here!”
I waved my hand towards Campion. “We have the same sponsor.” She glanced
at him for a swift instant and then at me.
“Did you like it?”
“Have you seen Niagara?”
“Yes.”
“Did you like it?”
“I'm so glad,” she cried. “I thought perhaps----” she broke off. “Why
haven't you tried to see me?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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