XV: SUCCOUR
With a moderate but assured income the Fattish are humane, that is to say, they grope like shadows through life and shun the impenetrable shadow of death. They shuddered to think of the very poor dying with their eyes gazing forward for the miracle that never came, and they said:
“To think of their finding no miracle but death! It is too horrible. Can such things be in Fatland? Why don’t we do something?”
So they formed committees and wrote to the newspapers and started various funds; and they invited Mr. Bly to lecture in aid of them.
He came to Bondon, lectured, and became the fashion. He discovered to his amazement that there were rich people in Fatland, and these rich people formed Anti-Jah societies. Enormous sums of money were collected for the strikers, because the rich were so delighted to be amused. Mr. Bly amused them enormously. Mr. Nicodemus gave a course of lectures on the Kingdom from which Jah had deposed him, and Mrs. Martin held meetings for women only, to expound her views of men. For years the rich people had not been so vastly entertained, and they poured out money for the strikers.
Unfortunately their subscriptions could buy little else for the very poor but coffins, and of them the supply soon came to an end.
Famine and pestilence stalked abroad, but only the more fiercely did Mr. Bly urge the destruction of Jah, and the more blindly and desperately did the starving poor of Fatland look for the miracle.
But soon not only were the poor starving, but the comfortable, the tradespeople, the professional classes, the humane persons with moderate but assured incomes were faced with want. Rats were now five shillings a brace, and a nest of baby mice was known to fetch four shillings.
When the rich found their meals were costing them more than a pound a head then they forgot their craze and Mr. Bly, and Mr. Nicodemus and the widow Martin withdrew from Bondon. Mr. Bly was no longer reported in the newspapers. His name had become offensive, the bloom had gone from his novelty, the varnish from his reputation, and the sting out of his power.
In all the towns gaunt spectre-like men began to sneak back to work, and Mr. Bly was nigh frenzied with rage, disgust and despair.
“It is Jah!” he said. “It is Jah. He has crept into the hearts of men. He has stirred their minds against me. Oh! my grief. He has used me to bring men lower yet, so that they will live in viler dwellings, and eat of fouler food, and be more meanly clad, more verminous than ever. The women will be lower sluts and shrews than they have ever been, and of their children it will be hard to see how they can ever grow into men and women. Deeper and deeper into the pit has Jah brought us, and there is now no hope.”
And in his agony he remembered how in his childhood he had been taught to pray to Jah, and he knelt and prayed that he might come face to face with Jah, to tell Him what He had done, and to implore Him to make an end of His cruelty and to destroy all at once.
Hearing him pray Mr. Nicodemus fled from his side and left him alone with the Widow Martin. Said she:
“Don’t take on so, dearie. A man’s no call to take on so when he has a woman by his side. There’s nothing else in the nature of things, but men and women only. If we starve, we starve: and if we die, we die, it’s all one. Have done, I say, there’s always room for a bit o’ fun.”
“Fun!” cried Mr. Bly.
And the comfortable creature took his head to her bosom, and there he sobbed out his grief.