"If I had all the lawbooks in the world," said Weedon, "I'd pile them up
here on this ground we've made free ground because we have free speech
on it, and I'd touch a match to them, and by the light they made we'd
sit down here and frame our own laws. And they would be laws for the
rich as well as the poor. Columbus did one good thing for us. He
discovered a new world. The capitalists have done their best to spoil
it, and turn it into a world as rotten as the old ones. But Columbus
showed us you can find a new world if you try. And we're going to have a
new world out of this one yet. New laws, new laws, I tell you, new
laws!"
He screamed it at the end, this passion for new laws, and the
interpreter, though he had too just an instinct to take so high a key,
followed him with an able crescendo. Weedie thought he had his audience
in hand, though it was the interpreter who really had it, and he
ventured another stroke:
"I don't want them to tell me what some man taught in Bible days. I want
to know what a man thinks right here in Addington. I don't want them to
tell me what they thought in Greece and Rome. Greece and Rome are dead.
The only part of them that's alive is the Greece and Rome of to-day."
When the interpreter passed this on, he stopped at a dissentient murmur.
There were those who knew the bright history of their natal country and
adored it.
"Oh, the man's a fool," said Madame Beattie again. "I'm going in there."
She took up the tail of her gown, put her feather-crowned head through
the gap in the fence and drew her august person after, and Jeffrey
followed her. He had a gay sense of irresponsibility, of seeking the
event. He was grateful to Madame Beattie. They went on, and as it was
that other night, some withdrew to leave a pathway and others stared,
but, finding no specific reason, did not hinder them. Madame Beattie
spoke once or twice, a brief mandate in a foreign tongue, and that, Jeff
noted, was effective. She stepped up on the running-board of the car and
laid her hand on the interpreter's arm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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