So into the booth they turned; and as soon as Lancelot’s eyes were accustomed to the reeking atmosphere, he saw seated at two long temporary tables of board, fifty or sixty of ‘My Brethren,’ as clergymen call them in their sermons, wrangling, stupid, beery, with sodden eyes and drooping lips—interspersed with more girls and brazen-faced women, with dirty flowers in their caps, whose whole business seemed to be to cast jealous looks at each other, and defend themselves from the coarse overtures of their swains.
Lancelot had been already perfectly astonished at the foulness of language which prevailed; and the utter absence of anything like chivalrous respect, almost of common decency, towards women. But lo! the language of the elder women was quite as disgusting as that of the men, if not worse. He whispered a remark on the point to Tregarva, who shook his head.
‘It’s the field-work, sir—the field-work, that does it all. They get accustomed there from their childhood to hear words whose very meanings they shouldn’t know; and the older teach the younger ones, and the married ones are worst of all. It wears them out in body, sir, that field-work, and makes them brutes in soul and in manners.’
‘Why don’t they give it up? Why don’t the respectable ones set their faces against it?’
‘They can’t afford it, sir. They must go a-field, or go hungered, most of them. And they get to like the gossip and scandal, and coarse fun of it, while their children are left at home to play in the roads, or fall into the fire, as plenty do every year.’
‘Why not at school?’
‘The big ones are kept at home, sir, to play at nursing those little ones who are too young to go. Oh, sir,’ he added, in a tone of deep feeling, ‘it is very little of a father’s care, or a mother’s love, that a labourer’s child knows in these days!’
Lancelot looked round the booth with a hopeless feeling. There was awkward dancing going on at the upper end. He was too much sickened to go and look at it. He began examining the faces and foreheads of the company, and was astonished at the first glance by the lofty and ample development of brain in at least one half. There were intellects there—or rather capacities of intellect, capable, surely, of anything, had not the promise of the brow been almost always belied by the loose and sensual lower features. They were evidently rather a degraded than an undeveloped race. ‘The low forehead of the Kabyle and Koord,’ thought Lancelot, ‘is compensated by the grim sharp lip, and glittering eye, which prove that all the small capabilities of the man have been called out into clear and vigorous action: but here the very features themselves, both by what they have and what they want, testify against that society which carelessly wastes her most precious wealth, the manhood of her masses! Tregarva! you have observed a good many things—did you ever observe whether the men with the large foreheads were better than the men with the small ones?’
‘Ay, sir, I know what you are driving at. I’ve heard of that new-fangled notion of scholars, which, if you’ll forgive my plain speaking, expects man’s brains to do the work of God’s grace.’
‘But what have you remarked?’