“Govinment! Govinment! nice sort of govinment, payin’ each other four hundred a year for followin’ Asquith and robbin’ the landowners to get the money—God lumme.”
He paused to light a filthy clay pipe. He had his eyes on Jones, and evidently considered him, for some occult reason, of the same way of political thinking as himself, and he addressed him in that impersonal way in which one addresses an audience.
“They’ve downed and outed the House o’ Lords, an’ now they’re scraggin’ the Welsh Church, after that they’ll go for the Landed Prepriotor and finish him. And who’s to blame? the Radicals—no, they ain’t to blame, no more than rats for their instincts; we’re to blame, the Conservatives is to blame, we haven’t got a fightin’ man to purtect us. The Radicals has got all the tallant—you look at the fight Bonna Lor’s been makin’ this week. Fight! A blind Tom cat with his head in an old t’marter tin would make a better fight than Bonna Lor’s put up. Look at Churchill, that chap was one of us once, he was born to lead the clarses, an’ now look at him leadin’ the marses, up to his neck in Radical dirt and pretendin’ he likes it. He doesn’t, but he’s a man with an eye in his head and he knows what we are, a boneless lot without organisation. I say it myself, I said it only larst night in this here bar, and I say it again, for two pins I’d chuck my party. I would so. For two pins I’d chuck the country, and leave the whole lot to stew in their own grease.”
He addressed himself to his beer, and Jones, greatly marvelling, lit a cigarette.
“Do you live here?” asked he.
“Sh’d think I did,” replied the other. “Born here and bred here, and been watchin’ the place going down for the last twenty years, turnin’ from a decent residential neighbourhood to a collection of schools and lodgin’ houses, losin’ clarse every year. Why the biggest house here is owned by a chap that sells patent food, there’s two socialists on the town council, and the Mayor last year was Hoover, a chap that owns a lunatic ’sylum. One of his loonies got out last March and near did for a child on the Southgate Road before he was collared; and yet they make a Mayor of him.”
“Have another drink?” said Jones.
“I don’t mind if I do.”
“Well, here’s luck,” said he, putting his nose into the new glass.
“Luck!” said Jones. “Do Hoover’s lunatics often escape?”