The Lord of the Sea Part 4

Frankl sipped water, and rose, amid shouts of: "Circular!"

"Caps-and-ta.s.sels!"

He made a speech of which nothing was known, except the amiable bows, for a continual noising filled the hall; and up rose Mr. Moses Max, a stout fair Jew, whose fist struck with a regular, heavy emphasis. After ten minutes, when he began to be heard, he was saying:

"...Sir Bennett Beaumont! Is _he_ the sort of man you'd send to represent you? (Cries of: "Yes!") What is he?--ask yourselves the question: a fossilized Tory, a man who's about as much idea of progress as a mummy--people actually say he's _got_ a collection of mummies in his grand fas.h.i.+onable mansion at Aylesham, and it's only what we should expect of him. (Cheers, and cries of: "Oh, oh!") And what has he ever done for East Norfolk? Gentlemen, you may say as you like about Jews--Jews this, and Jews that--and every man has a right to his opinion in this land of glorious Saxon liberty--but no one can deny that it's Jews who know how to make the money. (Cheers and hisses.) They know how to make it for themselves (hisses)--and, yes, they know how to make it for the nation! (Loud triumph of cheers.) _That's_ the point--_that_ touches the spot! (Cries of: "Oh, oh!") Righteousness, it is said, exalteth a nation: well, so do Jews--"

"That is false", said a voice--Hogarth, who had stood up.

The words were the signal for a shower of cheers swept by gusts of hisses; and immediately one region of the pit was seen to be a scrimmage of fisticuffs, mixed with policemen, sticks, savage faces, and bent backs; while the two galleries, craning to see, bellowed like Bashan.

Moses Max was leaning wildly, gesticulating, with shouts; while Loveday, who had turned pale on Hogarth's rising, touched Hogarth's coat-tail, whereupon Hogarth, stooping to his ear, shouted: "We will have some fun..."

"The paid agents of Beaumont!" now shouted Moses Max; "sent to disturb our meeting! Englishmen! will you submit to this? The nation shall hear--"

At that point Moses Max, in his gesticulation, happening to touch a switch in the platform-rail, out glowered into darkness every light at that end of the hall: at which thing the audience was thrown into a state of boisterous lawlessness, a tumult reigning in the gloom like the constant voice of Niagara, until suddenly the platform was again lit up, and the uproar lulled.

And now again Moses Max was p.r.o.ne to speak, with lifted fist; but before ever he could utter one single word, a voice was ringing through the a.s.sembly Rooms:

"_Where_ was Moses when the light went out?"

This again was Hogarth; and it ended Moses Max for that night.

Hogarth had not sat since he had called out "That is false": his tall figure was recognized; and, with that electric spontaneity of crowds, he was straightway the leader of the meeting, men darting from their seats with waving hats, sticks, arms, and vociferous mouth, the chairman half standing, with a s.h.i.+vering finger directed upon Hogarth, shrieking to the police: but too late--Hogarth had brushed past Loveday's knees--was das.h.i.+ng for the crowded platform-steps--was picking his way, stumbling, darting up them.

Crumpled in his hand was a _Pearson's Weekly_.

Now he is to the front--near Frankl.

"Friends! I have ventured to take the place of our friend, Moses, here--no ill-will to him--for with respect to the question before us, whether we elect Beaumont or Max, I care, I confess, little. I'm rather an Anti-Jew myself (hissing and cheers), but it strikes me that the Jews are the least of our trouble. To a man who said to me that the cause of all our evil days is the inability of England to feed these few million Jews I'd answer: "I don't know how you can be so silly!" Why, the whole human race, friends, can find room on the Isle of Wight--the earth laughs at the insignificant drawings upon her made by the small infantry called Man. Then, why do we suffer, friends? We _do_ suffer, I suppose?

I was once at Paris, and at a place called 'the Morgue' I saw exposed young men with wounded temples, and girls with dead mouths twisted, and innocent old women drowned; and there must be a biggish cry, you know, rising each night from the universal earth, accusing some h.o.a.ry fault in the way men live together! What is the fault? If you ask _me_, I answer that I am only a common smith: _I_ don't know: but I know this about the fault, that it is something simple, commonplace, yet deep-seated, or we should all see it; but it is hidden from us by its very ordinariness, like the sun which men seldom look at. It _must_ be so. And shall we never find the time to think of it? Or will never some grand man, mighty as a garrison, owning eyes that know the glances of Truth, arise to see for us? Friends! but, lacking him, what shall we do to be saved?--for truly this 'civilization' of ours is a blood-washed civilization, friends, a reddish Juggernaut, you know, whose wheels cease not: so we should be prying into it, provided we be not now too hide-bound: for that's the trouble--that our thoughts grow to revolve in stodgy grooves of use-and-wont, and shun to soar beyond. Look at our Parliament--a hurdy-gurdy turning out, age after age, a sing-song of pigmy regulations, accompanied for grum kettledrum by a musketry of suicides, and for pibroch by a European bleating of little children. We are still a million miles from civilization! For what is a civilized society? It can only be one in which the people are proud and happy! The people of Africa are happy, not proud; not civilized; the people of England have a certain pride, not a millionth part as superb as it might be, but are far from happy: far from civilized. The fact is, Man has never begun to live, but still sleeps a deep sleep. Well! let us do our best, we here!

I have here a paper offering a prize to the man of us who will go to the root of our troubles, and my idea in usurping the place of our friend, Mr. Max, was to ask you to form an a.s.sociation with me to enter that compet.i.tion. There is no reason why our a.s.sociation should not be large as the nation, nor why it should not spread to France and Turkey. For the thing presses, and to-morrow more of the slaughtered dead will be swarming in the mortuaries of London. Will you, then? The understanding will be this: that each man who writes his name in a note-book which will lie at Rose Cottage, Thring, or who sends his name, will devote sixty minutes each day to the problem. I happen to be in a position to use a chapel at Thring, and there I will hold a meeting--"

At this point Frankl rose: Thring was _his_, his own, own, own; and now his eyes had in them that catlike blaze which characterized his rages.

"Here, police! police!" he hissed low, "what's the use of police that don't act!" And now he raised his voice to a scream: "Jews! Shew yourselves! Don't let this man stay here...!"

About twenty Jews leapt at the challenge; at the same time Hogarth, seeing two policemen running forward from the back, folded his arms, and cried out: "Friends! I have not finished! Don't let me be removed..."

Whereupon practically every man in the pit was in motion, for or against him, the galleries two oblongs of battle.

As up the two curving stairs stormed the mob, by a sudden rush like an ocean-current he was borne off his feet toward the side, and was about to bring down his sharp-pointed little knuckles, when his eye fell upon the face of a lady who had fainted.

He had had no idea that she was there!--Rebekah Frankl.

She had quietly fainted, not at the rush--but before--during Hogarth's speech.

Hogarth managed to fight his way to a door at the platform back with her, entered a room where some chairs were, but, seeing a stair, could not let her go from his embrace, but descended, pa.s.sed along a pa.s.sage and out into a patch of green.

She, under the dark sky, whispered: "It is you", her forehead on his shoulder; and added: "My carriage, I think, is yonder".

Hogarth saw the carriage-lights at the field's edge, bore her thither, laid her with care on the cus.h.i.+ons, kissed her hand: and this act Frankl saw--with incredulity of his own eyes. As he approached, Hogarth walked away.

Frankl mastered his voice to say blandly in Spanish: "Well, how did you get through, sweet child? Who was that man--? But stay: where are those two fools?"

This meant the two familiars--the Arabs, Isaac and Mephibosheth, one of whom had come as footman, the other as coachman--and, as he went raging about the carriage, with stamps, his boot struck against a body. There was enough light to reveal to his peering that it was Mephibosheth, whom Isaac had stabbed, and fled...

Frankl lowered his ear--doubted whether he could detect a breathing; and though scared, he being a Cohen, and the presence of death defilement, yet he stayed, bending over Mephi several minutes, thinking, not of him, but of Hogarth.

"It is that fool, Isaac, has done it", he thought; "and if the man be dead--" What then? "_If_ he be dead, I've got you, Mr. Hogarth, in the hollow of this hand...."

His fingers pa.s.sed over the body: there, sticking in the breast, was a cangiar which Isaac, in his panic, had left, and Frankl's hand rested on the handle; if he did not consciously press the knife home, very heavily his hand rested on it, eyes blazing, beard shaking....

Then he drew out the knife carefully, to hide it in the carriage, listened again close, felt sure now that death was there, and now scuttled, as if from plague, guiltily hissing: "Putrid dog...!"

Presently he led his carriage to the station, and made a deposition of the murder.

Asked if he had any suspicion as to the culprit, he said: "Not the least: I left the man alone with the carriage, and who could have had any motive for killing him beats me."

VII

THE ELM

Hogarth, meantime, had made his way to the front of the room, then vomiting its throng, discovered Loveday, and, deciding to walk home, they were soon on the cliffs.

And suddenly Loveday: "To-morrow will conclude my fifth week in Westring. What, do you suppose, has made me stay?"

"I have wondered".

"I work better here...Hogarth, you inspirit me".

"Is that so?"

"It is, yes. Merely your presence is for me a freshness and an enthusiasm: I catch in the turn of your body hints of adventurous Columbuses, Drakes, nimble Achilles; and sibylline meanings in some glance of yours infect my fancy with images of Moses, blind old Homers--prophet, lawgiver, poet--"

They were pa.s.sing along a stretch of sand, with some lights of Lowestoft in sight, arm in arm; and Hogarth said: "Well, you speak some big words.

But my life, you understand, has been as simple and small as possible.

I will tell you: my father sent me to an extraordinary school--where he got the coin I could never find out--Lancing College at Sh.o.r.eham. There I did very well--only that I was continually _getting_ it! What was the matter with me when a boy I can't understand: I was the devil. One summer vacation (I was fourteen) I stole three pounds from the old man, and ran away one Sunday night. Pa.s.sed through London and soon was apprentice in a blacksmith's shop in a Kent village called Bigham. But in six months I had the forge at my fingers' ends, and was off: nothing could hold me long. One day I turned up before the Recruiting Office of Marines in Bristol--just of the right age for what they call 'second-cla.s.s boys'--and decided upon the sea--that sea there--which, from the moment I saw it at the age of four, caused me a swelling of the breast with which, to this day, it afflicts me. Well, I got the birth-certificate of another boy, sc.r.a.ped through, was entered into a District s.h.i.+p, and finally sailed in the _St. Vincent_ to the Pacific Station.

"However, my trial of His Majesty's s.h.i.+ps was not a success: twice I was in irons, once leapt into mid-ocean; nor could the battles.h.i.+p hold me when she had nothing to teach me; so I did to the King what I had done to the old man--cut and ran.

"It was at Valparaiso, and I made my way across the continent to Buenos Ayres.

"I forget now what took me to Bristol: but there I was one day when I happened to see--what do you think?--a girl--sixteen--I a stripling of nineteen, or so--but she most precocious, spoke like a woman--a grating in a wall between us. Ah, well, G.o.d is good, and His Mercy endureth for ever. But she said it could never be--she a Jewess: though that, by the way, is nonsense, for she is a Jewess, and a Parisienne, and a Hindoo, and a Negress, and a j.a.panese, and the man who marries her will have a harem. My friend, I have seen her this very night!"

He was silent. Suddenly he broke out: "I came home raving! The old man was scared out of his wits by my frenzy--I drank like ten men--in a month was the terror of Westring. One midnight, going home through the beech-wood--I don't know if you have noticed a hollow elm-tree which stands to the right of the path?"