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Therewas a very stimulating meeting in the parish room. The squire of Grayfield, the vicar’s Magdalen friend, Whymper, was by divine right in the chair. He was a dry, melancholy, exanimate sort of creature; a man of few words and very pronounced dislikes, not without force in a narrow way, but locally of more account as the husband of Lady Jane than from any native quality. Still, he made an excellent chairman. Brief, concise, self-effacing, he loathed his job; anything in the nature of speechifying bored him extremely, and he had a rooted objection “to making an ass of himself in public,” but natural grit and a high sense of duty pulled him through. In fact he did his job so well that it would have been hard for any man to improve on his performance.
There were only two speakers. One was the vicar of Penfold, but he was not the person who had filled the parish room to overflowing. A famous member of Parliament, a reputed master of the forensic arts, was spending a week-end at the manor house, and hehad kindly consented to rouse the young men of the district.
This paladin, who spoke before the vicar, was a tall thin-faced man of forty-five, who hardly looked his age. George Speke by name, he was the kind of man no British government is ever without, and he discoursed the commonest of common sense with an air of ease and authenticity. He put the case for Britain and her allies with a force and a cogency that none could gainsay. And in that room at any rate, there was not the slightest wish to gainsay it. Even the group of young men at the back of the room, upon whom the local constable and two specials kept a vigilant eye, and to whom Mr. Speke’s remarks were addressed officially, showed no inclination to traverse his clear statement of historical fact. It was a very finished effort, and somehow it moved his audience.
Mr. Perry-Hennington came rather in the nature of an anticlimax. He had no pretensions to be considered an orator, as he was careful to warn his hearers at the outset; he had nothing to say that had not already been said far better in print, yet he felt it to be his duty to stand on a public platform and declaim obvious truths which the newspapers of the realm had weeks ago made banal and threadbare. But somehow there was a driving force, a contained ferocityabout Mr. Perry-Hennington’s sincerity, trite and ill-phrased as it was, which, with the aid of copious “hear, hear’s” from Mr. Speke and his old Magdalen friend, Whymper, first staved off an epidemic of coughing and then of feet-shuffling, and then of coughing again. At last he got fairly into his stride, a strong, unmusical voice increasing in violence as he did so. And as the more violent he grew the more his audience approved, they soon began to march together toward a thrilling climax. Finally he swung into his fine peroration: “We shall not lay down the sword, etc.,” which belonged to another, and ended stronger than he began amidst quite a storm of cheering.
It was a mediocre performance, well within the range of any member of the educated classes, yet all who heard it seemed greatly impressed. Even Mr. Whymper and Mr. Speke seemed greatly impressed, and what was of still more importance it went home to a number of young men at the back of the room. When the meeting was over these came forward to the table at the side of the platform, at which a recruiting officer sat, and gave in their names. Nowhere else could such a scene have been enacted. To the ordinary intelligence, it was almost unbelievable that magnificent fellows in the pride of manhood could be moved to the supreme sacrifice by the jejune luciditiesof Mr. Speke, and the brand of spirituality that the vicar of Penfold had to offer. Something must have been in the air of that overheated room. Behind the trite phrases, behind the rather otiose pomposities of the one, the deliberately quiet, over-varnished style of the other, must have been that spirit which, by hardly more than the breadth of a single hair, had temporarily saved civilization for mankind.