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.
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