They've got blocked just
outside the gates."
"Are they making speeches?"
"They are talking some kind of rant, my lady."
"I'll go and hear them. Give me my black stick."
Above the velvet-dark, flat-toughed cedar trees, which rose like pagodas
of ebony on either side of the drive, the sky hung lowering in one great
purple cloud, endowed with sinister life by a single white beam striking
up into it from the horizon. Beneath this canopy of cloud a small
phalanx of dusty, dishevelled-looking men and women were drawn up in
the road, guarding, and encouraging with cheers, a tall, black-coated
orator. Before and behind this phalanx, a little mob of men and boys
kept up an accompaniment of groans and jeering.
Lady Casterley and her 'major-domo' stood six paces inside the scrolled
iron gates, and watched. The slight, steel-coloured figure with
steel-coloured hair, was more arresting in its immobility than all the
vociferations and gestures of the mob. Her eyes alone moved under their
half-drooped lids; her right hand clutched tightly the handle of
her stick. The speaker's voice rose in shrill protest against
the exploitation of 'the people'; it sank in ironical comment on
Christianity; it demanded passionately to be free from the continuous
burden of 'this insensate militarist taxation'; it threatened that the
people would take things info their own hands.
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