Do you ever go to lectures, public meetings and what-not?

When I go to one myself, there’s always a moment during the evening when I find myself thinking the same thought. Why the hell are we doing this? Why is it that people will turn out on a winter night for this kind of thing? I looked round the hall. I was sitting in the back row. I don’t ever remember going to any kind of public meeting when I didn’t sit in the back row if I could manage it. Hilda and the others had planked themselves in front, as usual. It was rather a gloomy little hall. You know the kind of place. Pitch-pine walls, corrugated iron roof and enough draughts to make you want to keep your overcoat on. The little knot of us were sitting in the light round the platform, with about thirty rows of empty chairs behind us. And the seats of all the chairs were dusty. On the platform behind the lecturer there was a huge square thing draped in dust-cloths which might have been an enormous coffin under a pall. Actually it was a piano.

At the beginning I wasn’t exactly listening. The lecturer was rather a mean-looking little chap, but a good speaker. White face, very mobile mouth, and the rather grating voice that they get from constant speaking. Of course he was pitching into Hitler and the Nazis. I wasn’t particularly keen to hear what he was saying—get the same stuff in the News Chronicle every morning—but his voice camé across to me as a kind of burr-burr-burr, with now and again a phrase that stuck out and caught my attention.

“Bestial atrocities…. Hideous outbursts of sadism…. Rubber truncheons…. Concentration camps…. Iniquitous persecution of the Jews…. Back to the Dark Ages…. European civilisation…. Act before it is too late…. Indignation of all decent peoples…. Alliance of the democratic nations…. Firm stand…. Defence of democracy…. Democracy….Fascism…. Democracy…. Fascism…. Democracy…

You know the line of talk. These chaps can churn it out by the hour. Just like a gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button and it starts. Democracy, Fascism, Democracy. But somehow it interested me to watch him. A rather mean little man, with a white face and a bald head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans. What’s he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he’s stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists. It’s a queer thing, I thought, to be known as “Mr. So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist.” A queer trade, anti-Fascism. This fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do before Hitler came along? And what’ll he do if Hitler ever disappears? Same question applies to doctors, detectives, rat-catchers and so forth, of course. But the grating voice went on and on, and another thought struck me. He means it. Not faking at all—feels every word he’s saying. He’s trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that’s nothing to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan’s gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all you’d find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy. Interesting to know a chap like that in private life. But does he have a private life? Or does he only go round from platform to platform, working up hatred? Perhaps even his dreams are slogans.