Clara Hopgood Part 16

There was certainly nothing in it particularly adapted to Baruch's condition at that moment, but an antidote may be none the less efficacious because it is not direct. It removed him to another region. It was like the sight and sound of the sea to the man who has been in trouble in an inland city. His self-confidence was restored, for he to whom an idea is revealed becomes the idea, and is no longer personal and consequently poor.

His room seemed too small for him; he shut his book and went to Great Ormond Street. He found there Marshall, Mrs Caffyn, Clara and a friend of Marshall's named Dennis.

'Where is your wife?' said Baruch to Marshall.

'Gone with Miss Madge to the Catholic chapel to hear a ma.s.s of Mozart's.'

'Yes,' said Mrs Caffyn. 'I tell them they'll turn Papists if they do not mind. They are always going to that place, and there's no knowing, so I've hear'd, what them priests can do. They aren't like our parsons. Catch that man at Great Oakhurst a-turnin' anybody.'

'I suppose,' said Baruch to Clara, 'it is the music takes your sister there?'

'Mainly, I believe, but perhaps not entirely.'

'What other attraction can there be?'

'I am not in the least disposed to become a convert. Once for all, Catholicism is incredible and that is sufficient, but there is much in its ritual which suits me. There is no such intrusion of the person of the minister as there is in the Church of England, and still worse amongst dissenters. In the Catholic service the priest is nothing; it is his office which is everything; he is a mere means of communication. The ma.s.s, in so far as it proclaims that miracle is not dead, is also very impressive to me.'

'I do not quite understand you,' said Marshall, 'but if you once chuck your reason overboard, you may just as well be Catholic as Protestant. Nothing can be more ridiculous than the Protestant objection, on the ground of absurdity, to the story of the saint walking about with his head under his arm.'

The tea things had been cleared away, and Marshall was smoking. Both he and Dennis were Chartists, and Baruch had interrupted a debate upon a speech delivered at a Chartist meeting that morning by Henry Vincent.

Frederick Dennis was about thirty, tall and rather loose-limbed. He wore loose clothes, his neck-cloth was tied in a big, loose knot, his feet were large and his boots were heavy. His face was quite smooth, and his hair, which was very thick and light brown, fell across his forehead in a heavy wave with just two complete undulations in it from the parting at the side to the opposite ear. It had a trick of tumbling over his eyes, so that his fingers were continually pa.s.sed through it to brush it away. He was a wood engraver, or, as he preferred to call himself, an artist, but he also wrote for the newspapers, and had been a contributor to the Northern Star. He was well brought up and was intended for the University, but he did not stick to his Latin and Greek, and as he showed some talent for drawing he was permitted to follow his bent. His work, however, was not of first-rate quality, and consequently orders were not abundant.

This was the reason why he had turned to literature. When he had any books to ill.u.s.trate he lived upon what they brought him, and when there were no books he renewed his acquaintance with politics. If books and newspapers both failed, he subsisted on a little money which had been left him, stayed with friends as long as he could, and amused himself by writing verses which showed much command over rhyme.

'I cannot stand Vincent,' said Marshall, 'he is too flowery for me, and he does not belong to the people. He is middle-cla.s.s to the backbone.'

'He is deficient in ideas,' said Dennis.

'It is odd,' continued Marshall, turning to Cohen, 'that your race never takes any interest in politics.'

'My race is not a nation, or, if a nation, has no national home. It took an interest in politics when it was in its own country, and produced some rather remarkable political writing.'

'But why do you care so little for what is going on now?'

'I do care, but all people are not born to be agitators, and, furthermore, I have doubts if the Charter will accomplish all you expect.'

'I know what is coming'--Marshall took the pipe out of his mouth and spoke with perceptible sarcasm--'the inefficiency of merely external remedies, the folly of any attempt at improvement which does not begin with the improvement of individual character, and that those to whom we intend to give power are no better than those from whom we intend to take it away. All very well, Mr Cohen. My answer is that at the present moment the stockingers in Leicester are earning four shillings and sixpence a week. It is not a question whether they are better or worse than their rulers. They want something to eat, they have nothing, and their masters have more than they can eat.'

'Apart altogether from purely material reasons,' said Dennis, 'we have rights; we are born into this planet without our consent, and, therefore, we may make certain demands.'

'Do you not think,' said Clara, 'that the repeal of the corn laws will help you?'

Dennis smiled and was about to reply, but Marshall broke out savagely, -

'Repeal of the corn laws is a contemptible device of manufacturing selfishness. It means low wages. Do you suppose the great Manchester cotton lords care one straw for their hands? Not they!

They will face a revolution for repeal because it will enable them to grind an extra profit out of us.'

'I agree with you entirely,' said Dennis, turning to Clara, 'that a tax upon food is wrong; it is wrong in the abstract. The notion of taxing bread, the fruit of the earth, is most repulsive; but the point is--what is our policy to be? If a certain end is to be achieved, we must neglect subordinate ends, and, at times, even contradict what our own principles would appear to dictate. That is the secret of successful leadership.'

He took up the poker and stirred the fire.

'That will do, Dennis,' said Marshall, who was evidently fidgety.

'The room is rather warm. There's nothing in Vincent which irritates me more than those bits of poetry with which he winds up.

"G.o.d made the man--man made the slave,"

and all that stuff. If G.o.d made the man, G.o.d made the slave. I know what Vincent's little game is, and it is the same game with all his set. They want to keep Chartism religious, but we shall see. Let us once get the six points, and the Established Church will go, and we shall have secular education, and in a generation there will not be one superst.i.tion left.'

'Theological superst.i.tion, you mean?' said Clara.

'Yes, of course, what others are there worth notice?'

'A few. The superst.i.tion of the ordinary newspaper reader is just as profound, and the tyranny of the majority may be just as injurious as the superst.i.tion of a Spanish peasant, or the tyranny of the Inquisition.'

'Newspapers will not burn people as the priests did and would do again if they had the power, and they do not insult us with fables and a h.e.l.l and a heaven.'

'I maintain,' said Clara with emphasis, 'that if a man declines to examine, and takes for granted what a party leader or a newspaper tells him, he has no case against the man who declines to examine, or takes for granted what the priest tells him. Besides, although, as you know, I am not a convert myself, I do lose a little patience when I hear it preached as a gospel to every poor conceited creature who goes to your Sunday evening atheist lecture, that he is to believe nothing on one particular subject which his own precious intellect cannot verify, and the next morning he finds it to be his duty to swallow wholesale anything you please to put into his mouth. As to the tyranny, the day may come, and I believe is approaching, when the majority will be found to be more dangerous than any ecclesiastical establishment which ever existed.'

Baruch's lips moved, but he was silent. He was not strong in argument. He was thinking about Marshall's triumphant inquiry whether G.o.d is not responsible for slavery. He would have liked to say something on that subject, but he had nothing ready.

'Practical people,' said Dennis, who had not quite recovered from the rebuke as to the warmth of the room, 'are often most unpractical and injudicious. Nothing can be more unwise than to mix up politics and religion. If you DO,' Dennis waved his hand, 'you will have all the religious people against you. My friend Marshall, Miss Hopgood, is under the illusion that the Church in this country is tottering to its fall. Now, although I myself belong to no sect, I do not share his illusion; nay, more, I am not sure'--Mr Dennis spoke slowly, rubbed his chin and looked up at the ceiling--'I am not sure that there is not something to be said in favour of State endowment--at least, in a country like Ireland.'

'Come along, Dennis, we shall be late,' said Marshall, and the two forthwith took their departure in order to attend another meeting.

'Much either of 'em knows about it,' said Mrs Caffyn when they had gone. 'There's Marshall getting two pounds a week reg'lar, and goes on talking about people at Leicester, and he has never been in Leicester in his life; and, as for that Dennis, he knows less than Marshall, for he does nothing but write for newspapers and draw for picture-books, never nothing what you may call work, and he does worrit me so whenever he begins about poor people that I can't sit still. _I_ do know what the poor is, having lived at Great Oakhurst all these years.'

'You are not a Chartist, then?' said Baruch.

'Me--me a Chartist? No, I ain't, and yet, maybe, I'm something worse. What would be the use of giving them poor creatures votes?

Why, there isn't one of them as wouldn't hold up his hand for anybody as would give him a shilling. Quite right of 'em, too, for the one thing they have to think about from morning to night is how to get a bit of something to fill their bellies, and they won't fill them by voting.'

'But what would you do for them?'

'Ah! that beats me! Hang somebody, but I don't know who it ought to be. There's a family by the name of Longwood, they live just on the slope of the hill nigh the Dower Farm, and there's nine of them, and the youngest when I left was a baby six months old, and their living- room faces the road so that the north wind blows in right under the door, and I've seen the snow lie in heaps inside. As reg'lar as winter comes Longwood is knocked off--no work. I've knowed them not have a bit of meat for weeks together, and him a-loungin' about at the corner of the street. Wasn't that enough to make him feel as if somebody ought to be killed? And Marshall and Dennis say as the proper thing to do is to give him a vote, and prove to him there was never no Abraham nor Isaac, and that Jonah never was in a whale's belly, and that n.o.body had no business to have more children than he could feed. And what goes on, and what must go on, inside such a place as Longwood's, with him and his wife, and with them boys and gals all huddled together--But I'd better hold my tongue. We'll let the smoke out of this room, I think, and air it a little.'

She opened the window, and Baruch rose and went home.

Whenever Mrs Caffyn talked about the labourers at Great Oakhurst, whom she knew so well, Clara always felt as if all her reading had been a farce, and, indeed, if we come into close contact with actual life, art, poetry and philosophy seem little better than trifling.

When the mist hangs over the heavy clay land in January, and men and women shiver in the bitter cold and eat raw turnips, to indulge in fireside ecstasies over the divine Plato or Shakespeare is surely not such a virtue as we imagine it to be.

CHAPTER XXVII

Baruch sat and mused before he went to bed. He had gone out stirred by an idea, but it was already dead. Then he began to think about Clara. Who was this Dennis who visited the Marshalls and the Hopgoods? Oh! for an hour of his youth! Fifteen years ago the word would have come unbidden if he had seen Clara, but now, in place of the word, there was hesitation, shame. He must make up his mind to renounce for ever. But, although this conclusion had forced itself upon him overnight as inevitable, he could not resist the temptation when he rose the next morning of plotting to meet Clara, and he walked up and down the street opposite the shop door that evening nearly a quarter of an hour, just before closing time, hoping that she might come out and that he might have the opportunity of overtaking her apparently by accident. At last, fearing he might miss her, he went in and found she had a companion whom he instantly knew, before any induction, to be her sister. Madge was not now the Madge whom we knew at Fenmarket. She was thinner in the face and paler. Nevertheless, she was not careless; she was even more particular in her costume, but it was simpler. If anything, perhaps, she was a little prouder. She was more attractive, certainly, than she had ever been, although her face could not be said to be handsomer. The slight prominence of the cheek-bone, the slight hollow underneath, the loss of colour, were perhaps defects, but they said something which had a meaning in it superior to that of the tint of the peach. She had been reading a book while Clara was balancing her cash, and she attempted to replace it. The shelf was a little too high, and the volume fell upon the ground. It contained Sh.e.l.ley's Revolt of Islam.