England -- Fiction; Imaginary wars and battles -- Fiction
"If Hare had been a married man I might have advised him otherwise. But
he was married only to the farm he had wrought so well, and it did not
seem to me part of my business to come between a man and his duty--as he
saw it. That man came Home, and took the cheapest lodging he could get
in Battersea. He had sold his farm well. Now he took to street
preaching, and what he preached was, not religion, but the prairie.
'Lord sake, young folk!' he used to say to the lads and girls when they
turned toward the public-houses. 'Hold on! Wait a minute! I want to tell
you something!' And he would tell them what four years' clean work had
given him in Canada.
"He got into touch with various emigration agencies. The money he had
lasted him, living as he did, for five years. In that time he was the
means of sending nine hundred and twenty men and five hundred and forty
women and girls to a free and independent life in Canada. Just before
his money was exhausted, England's affliction, England's chastisement,
came upon her like God's anger in a thunderbolt. Hare had meant to
return to Canada to make another start, and earn money enough to return
to his work here. Instead of that, my friends, instead of what he called
Paradise in Manitoba, God took him straight into Heaven. He left his
body beside the North London entrenchments, where, so one of his
comrades told me, he fought like ten men for England, knowing well that,
if captured, he would be shot out of hand as a civilian bearing arms.
One may say of Edward Hare, I think, that he saw his duty very
clearly--and did it.
* * * * *
"But what of us? What of you, and I, my friends? How do we stand
regarding Duty?"
I never heard such questions in my life. He had been speaking smoothly,
evenly, calmly, and without gesticulation. With the questions, his body
was bent as though for a leap; his hands flung forward. These questions
left him like bullets. It was as though that great hall had been in
blackest darkness, and with a sudden movement the speaker had switched
on ten thousand electric lights. I saw men rise to a half-erect
posture. I heard women catch their breath. The air of the place seemed
all aquiver.
"My friends, will you please pray with me?"
He leaned forward, an appeal in every line of his figure, addressed
confidentially to each soul present. Then his right hand rose:
"Please God, help me to give my Message! Please God, open London's heart
to hear my Message! Please God, give me strength to tell it--now! For
Christ's sake. Amen!"
One heard a low, emphatic, and far-carrying "Amen!" from the lips of
London's Bishop; and I think that, too, meant something to the great
congregation of Londoners assembled there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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