Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/362

 "But one or the other—"

"Two!" a solid block of men's voices, like a bell.

"One or the other you'll—"

"Three!" The voice, like a tolling bell, of men counting the speaker out. It was the diggers.

A thrill went through the audience. The diggers sat mostly together, in the middle of the hall, around Jack. Their faces were lit up with a new light. And like a bell they tolled the numbers against the speaker, counting him out, by their moral unison annihilating him.

Willie Struthers, his dark-yellow face gone demonic, stood and faced them. His eyes too had suddenly leaped with a new look: big, dark, glancing eyes, like an aboriginal's, glancing strangely. Was it fear, was it a glancing, gulflike menace? He stood there, a shabby figure of a man, with undignified legs, facing the tolling enemy.

"Four!" came the sonorous, perfect rhythm. It was a strange sound, heavy, hypnotic, trance-like. Willie Struthers stood as if he were fascinated, glaring spell-bound.

"Five!" The sound was unbearable, a madness, tolling out of a certain devilish cavern in the back of the men's unconscious mind, in terrible malignancy. The Socialists began to leap to their feet in fury, turning towards the block of Diggers. But the lean, naked faces of the ex-soldiers gleamed with a smiling, demonish light, and from their narrow mouths simultaneously:

"Six!"

Struthers, looking as if he were crouching to spring, glared back at them from the platform. They did not even look at him.

"Seven!" In two syllables, Sev-en!

The sonorous gloating in the sound was unbearable. It was like hammer-strokes on the back of the brain. Everybody had started up save the Diggers. Even Somers was wildly on his feet, feeling as if he could fly, swoop like some enraged bird. But his feeling wavered. At one moment he gloated with the Diggers against the black and devilish figure of the isolated man on the platform, who half-crouched as if he were going to jump, his face black and satanic. And then, as the numbers came, unbearable in its ghastly striking:

"Eight!" like some hammer-stroke on the back of his