"Two minutes!" said the chairman. "Refutation by the negative.
Miss D. Yocum. Two minutes."
"I waive them," said Dora, primly. "I submit that the affirmative has not refuted the argument of the negative."
"Very well." With his gavel the chairman sharply tapped the desk before him, "The question is now before the house. 'Resolved, that Germany is both morally and legally justified in her invasion of Belgium.' All those in favour of the--"
But here there was an interruption of a kind never before witnessed during any proceedings of the Lumen Society. It came from neither of the debaters, who still remained standing at their desks until the vote settling their comparative merits in argument should be taken.
The interruption was from the rear row of seats along the wall, where sat new members of the society, freshmen not upon the program for the evening. A loud voice was heard from this quarter, a loud but nasal voice, shrill as well as nasal, and full of a strange hot passion.
"Mr. Chairman!" it cried. "Look-a-here, Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman, I demand to be heard! You gotta gimme my say, Mr. Chairman! I'm a-gunna have my ~say~! You look-a-here, Mr. Chairman!"
Shocked by such a breach of order, and by the unseemly violence of the speaker, not only the chairman but everyone else looked there.
A short, strong figure was on its feet, gesticulating fiercely; and the head belonging to it was a large one with too much curly black hair, a flat, swarthy face, shiny and not immaculately shaven; there was an impression of ill-chosen clothes, too much fat red lip, too much tooth, too much eyeball. Fred Mitchell, half-sorrowing, yet struggling to conceal tears of choked mirth over his roommate's late exhibition, recognized this violent interrupter as one Linski, a fellow freshman who sat next to him in one of his classes. "What's ~that~ cuss up to?" Fred wondered, and so did others. Linski showed them.
He pressed forward, shoving himself through the two rows in front of him till he emerged upon the green carpet of the open space, and as he came, he was cyclonic with words.
"You don't put no such stuff as this over, I tell you!" he shouted in his hot, nasal voice. "This here's a free country, and you call yourself a debating society, do you? Lemme tell you ~I~ belong to a debating society in Chicago, where I come from, and them fellas up there, they'd think they'd oughta be shot fer a fake like what you people are tryin' to put over, here, to-night. I come down here to git some more education, and pay fer it, too, in good hard money I've made sweatin' in a machine shop up there in Chicago; but if ~this~ is the kind of education I'm a-gunna git, I better go on back there.
You call this a square debate, do you?"
He advanced toward the chairman's platform, shaking a frantic fist.
"Well, if you do, you got another think comin', my capitalis' frien'! you went and give out the question whether it's right fer Choimuny to go through Belgium; and what do you do fer the Choimun side? You pick out this here big stiff"--he waved his passionate hand at the paralyzed Ramsey--"you pick out a boob like that for the Choimun side, a poor fish that gits stagefright so bad he don't know whether he's talkin' or dead; or else he fakes it; because he's a speaker so bum it looks more to me like he was faking. You get this big stiff to fake the Choimun side, and then you go and stick up a goil agains' him that's got brains and makes a pacifis' argument that wins the case agains' the Choimuns like cuttin' through hog lard! But you ain't a-gunna git away with it, mister! Lemme tell you right here and now, I may be a mix blood, but I got some Choimun in me with the rest what I got, and before you vote on this here question you gotta hear a few woids from somebody that can ~talk!~ This whole war is a capitalis' war, Belgium as much as Choimuny, and the United States is sellin' its soul to the capitalis' right now, I tell you, takin' sides agains' Choimuny. Orders fer explosives and ammanition and guns and Red Cross supplies is comin' into this country by the millions, and the capitalis' United States is fat already on the blood of the workers of Europe! Yes, it is, and I'll have my ~say,~ you boorjaw faker, and you can hammer your ole gavel to pieces at me!"
He had begun to shriek; moisture fell from his brow and his mouth; the scandalized society was on its feet, nervously into groups.
Evidently the meeting was about to disintegrate. "I'll have my ~say~!" the frenzied Linski screamed. "You try to put up this capitalis' trick and work a fake to carry over this debate agains' Choimuny, but you can't work it on ~me~, lemme tell you! I'll have my ~say!~"
The outraged chairman was wholly at a loss how to deal with the "unprecedented situation"--so he defined it, quite truthfully; and he continued to pound upon the desk, while other clamours began to rival Linski's; shouts of "Put him out!" "Order!" "Shut up, Freshman!"
"Turn him over to the sophomores!"
"This meeting is ~adjourned!~" bellowed the chairman, and there was a thronging toward the doors, while the frothing Linski asseverated:
"I'm a-gunna git my say, I tell you! I'll have my say! I'll have my ~say!~"
He had more than that, before the hour was over. A moment after he emerged from the building and came out, still hot, upon the cool, dark campus, he found himself the centre of a group of his own classmates whom he at first mistook for sophomores, such was their manner.
As this group broke up, a few minutes later, a youth running to join it, scenting somewhat of interest, detained one of those who were departing.
"What's up? What was that squealing?"
"Oh, nothing. We just talked to that Linski. Nobody else touched him, but Ramsey Milholland gave him a ~peach~ of a punch on the snoot."
"Whoopee!"
Ramsey was laconic in response to inquiries upon this subject. When someone remarked: "You served him right for calling you a boob and a poor fish and so on before all the society, girls and all," Ramsey only said:
"That wasn't what I hit him for."
He declined to explain further.
