“We’ve heard a lot of you, Mr. Maraton,” he declared, “of your fine fighting methods and of your gift of speech.  We’ll hear more of that, I hope, at Manchester.  We are, so to speak, strangers as yet, but there’s one thing I will say for you, and that is that you’re a good listener.  You’ve heard all that we’ve got to say and you’ve scarcely made a remark.  You won’t object to my saying that we’re expecting something from you in the way of initiative, not to say leadership?”

Maraton glanced down the table.  There were five men seated there, and, a little apart from all of them, David Ross, who had refused to be shaken off.  Excepting him only, they were well-fed and substantial looking men.  Maraton had studied them carefully through half-closed eyes during all the time of their meeting, and the more he had studied them, the more disappointed he had become.  There was not one of them with the eyes of a dreamer.  There was not one of them who appeared capable of dealing with any subject save from his own absolutely material and practical point of view.

Maraton from the first had felt a seal laid upon his lips.  Now, when the time had come for him to speak, he did so with hesitation, almost with reluctance.

“As yet,” he began, “there is very little for me to talk about.  You are, I understand, you five, a committee appointed by the Labour Party to confer with me as to the best means of promulgating our beliefs.  You have each told me your views.  You would each, apparently, like me to devote myself to your particular district for the purpose of propagating a strike which shall result in a trifling increase of wages.”

“And a coal strike, I say,” Peter Dale interrupted, “is the logical first course.  We’ve been threatening it for two years and it’s time we brought it off.  I can answer for the miners of the north country.  We have two hundred and seventy thousand pounds laid by and the Unions are spoiling for a fight.  Another eighteen-pence would make life a different thing for some of our pitmen.  And the masters can afford it, too.  Sixteen and a half per cent is the average dividend on the largest collieries around us.”

A small man, with gimlet-like black eyes and a heavy moustache, at which he had been tugging nervously during Peter Dale’s remarks, plunged into the discussion.  His name was Abraham Weavel and he came from Sheffield.

“Coal’s all very well,” he declared, “but I speak for the ironfounders.  There’s orders enough in Leeds and Sheffield to keep the furnaces ablaze for two years, and the masters minting money at it.  Our wages ain’t to be compared with the miners.  We’ve twenty thousand in Sheffield that aren’t drawing twenty-five shillings a week and they’re about fed up with it.  We’ve our Unions, too, and money to spare, and I tell you they’re beginning to ask what’s the use of sending a Labour Member to Parliament and having nothing come of it.”

A grey-whiskered man, who had the look of a preacher, struck the table before him with a sudden vigour.