Next to Irish landlords Gorman disliked financiers more than any other people in the world. He did not, by his own confession, know anything about them; but he had got into touch with a group of journalists in London which specialises in abuse of the class. Gorman repeated all the stock arguments to me and illuminated the subject with some very well worn apologues.
“A financier,” he said, “is a bloated spider, which sits in a murky den spinning webs and sucks the life-blood of its victims.”
I wondered how Ascher would like this kind of talk if he ever joined our party.
There was not, of course, the same note of personal bitterness in Gorman’s condemnation of financiers which I noticed in his attacks on landlords. He had learned to hate my class during the impressionable years of childhood. He had only found out about financiers when he was a grown man. And no one, not even a convert to a new faith, ever believes anything with real intensity except what he was taught before he was eight years old. But it was not to be expected that Ascher would be as patient as I was, even if the abuse with which Gorman assailed his class lacked something of the conviction with which he attacked me.
I asked Gorman one evening why, holding the opinions he did, he had chosen as his table mates a banker and an unrepentant landlord. He had a whole shipload of passengers to choose from, most of them, no doubt believers in democracy, some of them perhaps even socialists, the kind of socialists who travel first class on crack Cunard steamers. He seemed surprised at the question and did not answer me at once. An hour or so after we had passed away from the subject he returned to it suddenly and explained that it was necessary to distinguish between individuals and the classes to which they belong. A class, so I understood, may be objectionable and dangerous in every way though the men who form it are delightful.
“Take the Irish priests, for instance,” he said. “The minute we get Home Rule, we’ll——”
He paused significantly.
“Deal with them?” I suggested.
He nodded with an emphasis which was positively vicious.
“All the same,” he said, “there are lots of priests whom I really like, capital fellows that I’d be glad to dine with every day in the week—except Friday.”