“Right-o,” said my host, while I thanked Providence for the devious ways I had

been brought to safety. After that he spoke no more, for his mind began to

labour heavily with his coming speech. His lips kept muttering, his eye

wandered, and I began to prepare myself for a second catastrophe. I tried to

think of something to say myself, but my mind was dry as a stone. The next thing

I knew we had drawn up outside a door in a street, and were being welcomed by

some noisy gentlemen with rosettes.

 

The hall had about five hundred in it, women mostly, a lot of bald heads, and a

dozen or two young men. The chairman, a weaselly minister with a reddish nose,

lamented Crumpleton’s absence, soliloquized on his influenza, and gave me a

certificate as a “trusted leader of Australian thought”. There were two

policemen at the door, and I hoped they took note of that testimonial. Then Sir

Harry started.

 

I never heard anything like it. He didn’t begin to know how to talk. He had

about a bushel of notes from which he read, and when he let go of them he fell

into one prolonged stutter. Every now and then he remembered a phrase he had

learned by heart, straightened his back, and gave it off like Henry Irving, and

the next moment he was bent double and crooning over his papers. It was the most

appalling rot, too. He talked about the “German menace”, and said it was all a

Tory invention to cheat the poor of their rights and keep back the great flood

of social reform, but that “organized labour” realized this and laughed the

Tories to scorn. He was all for reducing our Navy as a proof of our good faith,

and then sending Germany an ultimatum telling her to do the same or we would