Thurston announced:
"Brother Crashaw will now deliver an address."Brother Crashaw, his head still lowered, very slowly got up from his seat.He moved as though it were only with the utmost difficulty and power of self-will that his reluctant body could be compelled into action.He crept rather than walked from his chair to the reading-desk, then very very painfully climbed on to the high platform.
Maggie, watching him, remembered that earlier time when he had climbed into just such another desk.She remembered also that day at her aunts' house when he had flirted with Caroline and shown himself quite another Brother Crashaw.He had aged greatly since then.He seemed now to be scarcely a man at all.Then suddenly, with a jerk, as though a string had been pulled from behind, he raised his face and looked at them all.Yes, that was alive.Monkey's mask you might call it, but the eyes behind the yellow lids flamed and blazed.No exaggeration those words.A veritable fire burned there, a fire, it might be, of mere physical irritation and savage exasperation at the too-rapid crumbling of the wilfully disobedient body, a glory, perhaps, of obstinate pride and conceit, a fire of superstition and crass ignorance, but a fire to be doubted of no man who looked upon it.
When he spoke his voice was harsher, angrier, more insulting than it had been before.He spoke, too, in a hurry, tumbling his words one upon another as though he were afraid that he had little mortal time left to him and must make the most of what he had got.
From the first he was angry, rating the men of Skeaton as they had never been rated before.And they liked it.They even revelled in it; it did them no harm and at the same time tickled their skins.