I looked hard at him. His grave, reflective expression turned suddenly to a grin.
“Or do you prefer Shelley?” he asked.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Come on, let’s find some food.”
“Coker,” I said as we completed the meal sitting on a store counter and spreading marmalade on crackers, “you beat me. What are you? The first time I meet you I find you ranting—if you will forgive the appropriate word—in a kind of dockside lingo. Now you quote Marvell to me. It doesn’t make sense.”
He grinned. “It never did to me, either,” he said. “It comes of being a hybrid—you never really know what you are. My mother never really knew what I was, either—at least she never could prove it, and she always held it against me that on account of that she could not get an allowance for me. It made me kind of sour about things when I was a kid, and when I left school I used to go to meetings—more or less any kind of meetings as long as they were protesting against something. And that led to me getting mixed up with the lot that used to come to them. I suppose they found me kind of amusing. Anyway, they used to take me along to arty-political sorts of parties. After a bit I got tired of being amusing and seeing them give a kind of double laugh, half with me and half at me, whenever I said what I thought. I reckoned I needed some of the background knowledge they had, and then I’d be able to laugh at them a bit, maybe, so I started going to evening classes, and I practiced talking the way they did, for use when necessary. There’s a whole lot of people don’t seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he’ll take you seriously. If you talk tough and quote Shelley they think you’re cute, like a performing monkey or something, but they don’t pay any attention to what you say. You have to talk the kind of lingo they’re accustomed to taking seriously. And it works the other way too. Half the political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don’t get the value of their stuff across—not so much because they’re over their audience’s heads, as because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they knock a big discount off what they do hear because it’s all a bit fancy, and not like ordinary, normal talk. So I reckoned the thing to do was to make myself bilingual, and use the right one in the right place—and occasionally the wrong one in the wrong place, unexpectedly. Surprising how that jolts ’em. Wonderful thing, the English caste system. Since then I’ve made out quite nicely in the orating business. Not what you’d call a steady job, but full of interest and variety… Wilfred Coker. Meetings addressed. Subject no object. That’s me.”
“How do you mean—subject no object?” I inquired.
“Well, I kind of supply the spoken word just like a printer supplies the printed word. He doesn’t have to believe everything he prints.”
I left that for the moment. “How’s it happen you’re not like the rest?” I asked. “You weren’t in hospital, were you?”
“Me? No. It just so happened that I was addressing a meeting that was protesting over police partiality in a little matter of a strike. We began about six o’clock and about half-past the police themselves arrived to break it up. I found a handy trap door and went down into the cellar. They came down, too, to have a look, but they didn’t find me where I had gone to earth, in a pile of shavings. They went on tramping around up above for a bit, then it was quiet. But I stayed put. I wasn’t walking out into any nice little trap. It was quite comfortable there, so I went to sleep. In the morning, when I took a careful nose around, I found all this had happened.” He paused thoughtfully. “Well, that racket’s finished; it certainly doesn’t look as if there’s going to be much call for my particular gifts from now on,” he added.
I did not dispute it. We finished our meal. He slid himself off the counter.
“Come on. We’d better be shifting. ‘Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new’—if you’d care for a really hackneyed quotation this time.”