It must be admitted that Tom agreed with him. He had no longing to go to war. Europe was far away while life was near. Education, Maisie, the future, had the first claim on him. It began to occur to him that even Honey had a claim on him, now that he was not so vigorous as he used to be.
There were other interests to make war remote. On returning to town, after a summer amid the spaciousness, beauty, and comfort which the few could give themselves, he was oppressed by the privations of the many. Never before had he thought of them. He had taken Grove Street for granted. He had taken it for granted that life was hard and crowded and bitter and cold and ugly, and couldn't be anything else. Now he had seen for himself that it could be easy and beautiful and healthy. True, he had always known that there were rich people as well as poor people; but never before had he been close enough to the rich to see their luxuries in detail. The contrasts in the human scheme of things having thus come home to him he was moved to a distressed wondering.
What brought these differences about? If all the rich were industrious and good, while all the poor were idle and extravagant, he could have understood it better. But it wasn't so. The rich were often idle and extravagant, and didn't suffer. The poor were nearly always industrious—they couldn't be anything else—and were as good as they had leisure to be, but suffered from something all the time. How could this injustice be endured? What was to be done about it? Wasn't it everybody's duty to try to right such a wrong?
Because he had only now become aware of it he supposed that nobody but the Slav and Jewish agitators had been aware of it before. Louisburg Square, and all that element in the world which Louisburg Square represented, could never have thought of it. If it had, it couldn't have slept at night in its bed. That it should lie snug and soft and warm while all the rest of the world—at least a good three-fourths—lay cold and hard and hungry, must be out of the question. If the rich people only knew! It was strange that someone hadn't told them. What were the newspapers and the governments and the churches doing that they weren't ringing with protests against this fundamental evil?
More than ever Honey's rebellion against the lor of proputty seemed to him based on some principle he couldn't trace. Honey was doubtless all wrong; and yet the other thing was just as wrong as Honey. He started him talking on the subject as they strolled to their dinner that evening.
"Seems as if this 'ere old human race didn't have no spunk. Yer can put anything over on them, and they'll 'ardly lift a kick. It's like as if they was hypnertized. Them as has got everything is hypnertized into thinkin' they've a right to it; and them as have got nothink'll let theirselves believe as nothink is all that belongs to 'em. Comes o' most o' the world bein' orthodocks. Lord love yer, I'd rather think for meself if it landed me ten months out'n every twelve in jail, than have two thousand a year and yet be an old tabby-orthodock what never had a mind."
They were seated at the table in Mrs. Turtle's basement dining-room, when, looking up and down the double row of guests, Honey whispered, "Tabby-orthodocks—all of 'em."
At his sixteen or eighteen fellow-mealers Tom looked with a new vision. With the aid of Honey's epithet he could class them. Mostly men, they sat bowed, silent, futile, gulping down their coarse food with no pretense at softening the animal processes of eating. These, too, he had hitherto taken for granted. In all the months they had "mealed" at Mrs. Turtle's—in the years they had "mealed" at similar establishments in Grove Street—he had looked on them, and on others of their kind, as the norm of humanity. Now he saw something wrong in them, without knowing what it was.
"What's the matter with them?" he asked of Honey, as they went back across Grove Street to Mrs. Danker's.
Honey's reply was standardized. "Bein' orthodocks. Not thinkin' for theirselves. Not usin' the mind as Gord give 'em. Believin' what other blokes told 'em, and stoppin' at that. I say, Kiddy! Don't yer never go for to forget that yer'll get farther in the world by bein' wrong the way yer thinks yerself than by bein' right the way some other feller tells yer."