“Question! Question! Question!” they called—not here and there and otherwhere, but in a great wave of hoarse shouting, like a pulse.
The Chairman rose to put the motion, and as silence fell for him to speak, a youth of twenty, lithe, dark, with a face of the fineness of some race more like to all peoples than peoples now are like to one another, hurled himself before him, and shouted into the quiet:
“Comrades! Comrades! In the name of God—of the hope of the International....”
A yell went up from the hall. A dozen hands drew the youth away. He waved his arms toward the hall. From above and below, came voices—some of men, some of women, hoarse or clear or passionate:
But in that moment’s breath of another meaning, the speaker who first had fired them stood beside the chairman, and held up a telegram. They let him read:
“Resolution almost unanimously passed by Metropolitan mass meeting and by two overflow meetings....”
If there was more to the telegram, no one but the reader knew. The clamor was like a stretching of hands across the miles to New York, to clasp those other hands in their brother-lust. The youth of twenty flung himself free of those who had held him, and dropped to the floor, and sat hugging his knees and staring out over the hall as if death sat there, infinitely repeated, and naked.
The Chairman lifted his hand. “You have heard the motion. Does any one desire to hear it re-read?”
Again that amazing, pulsing, unanimity of the cry:
“All those in favor—” the Chairman’s bent head was raised so that he peered at them from under his lids—“will make it manifest by saying ‘ay.’”
Out of the depth of their experience and practice at meetings for charity, for philanthropy, for church, for state, for home, they voted, so that it was like One Great Thing with a voice of its own.
In this “ay” the Inger’s voice boomed out so that some remembered and wondered, and even in that moment, a few turned to see him.
“Those opposed will make it manifest by saying ‘no.’”
The boy sprang to his feet, and with the clear call of a few hundred no’s, his own voice rang out in agony:
There must have been a thousand who laughed at him and called him a name. But the others were gone wild again. And with them the Inger was shouting his wildest, so that for a moment he did not hear Lory. Then he realized that she was standing beside him crying with the few hundred their ‘No!’”