Oswald, when he had come to her, had fully intended to let her have money to go on with, but now he was changing his mind. He had thought of her hitherto just as a grotesque figure in his life, part of the joke of existence, but now with this worry of the Irish business in his mind he found himself regarding her as something more than an individual. She seemed now to be the accentuated voice of a whole class, the embodiment of a class tradition. He strolled back from the window and stood with his hands deep in his trouser pockets—which always annoyed her—and his head on one side, focusing the lady.
“My dear Aunt,” he said, “what right have you to any voice in politics at all? You know, you’re pretty—ungracious. The world lets you have this money—and you spend it in organizing murder.”
“The world lets me have this money!” cried Lady Charlotte, amazed and indignant. “Why!” she roared, “it’s MY money!”
In that instant the tenets of socialism, after a siege lasting a quarter of a century, took complete possession of Oswald’s mind. In that same instant she perceived it. “Any one can see you’re a Liberal and a Socialist yourself,” she cried. “You’d shake hands with Lloyd George tomorrow. Yes, you would. Why poor foolish Vincent made you trustee——! He might have known! You a sailor! A faddy invalid! Mad on blacks. I suppose you’d give your precious Baganda Home Rule next! And him always so sound on the treatment of the natives! Why! he kicked a real judge—a native judge—Inner Temple and all the rest of it—out of his railway compartment. Kicked him. Bustled him out neck and crop. Awayed with him! Oh, if he could see you now! Insulting me! Standing up for all these people, blacks, Irishmen, strikers, anything. Sneering at the dear old Union Jack they want to tear to pieces.”
“Well,” said Oswald as she paused to take breath. “You’ve got yourself into this mess and you must get along now till next quarter day as well as you can. I can’t help you and you don’t deserve to be helped.”
“You’ll not let me spend my own money?”
“You’ve fired off all the money you’re entitled to. You’ll probably kill a constable—or some decent little soldier boy from Devon or Kent.... Good God! Have you no imagination?...”
It was the most rankling encounter he had ever had with her. Either he was losing tolerance for her or she was indeed becoming more noisy and ferocious. She haunted his thoughts for a long time, and his thoughts of her, so intricate is our human composition, were all mixed up with sympathy and remorse for the petty cash troubles in which he had left her....
But what a pampered, evil soul she had always been! Never in all her life had she made or grown or got one single good thing for mankind. She had lived in great expensive houses, used up the labour of innumerable people, bullied servants, insulted poor people, made mischief. She was like some gross pet idol that mankind out of whim kept for the sake of its sheer useless ugliness. He found himself estimating the weight of food and the tanks of drink she must have consumed, the carcases of oxen and sheep, the cartloads of potatoes, the pyramids of wine bottles and stout bottles she had emptied. And she had no inkling of gratitude to the careless acquiescent fellow-creatures who had suffered her so long and so abundantly. At the merest breath upon her clumsy intolerable dignity she clamoured for violence and cruelty and killing, and would not be appeased. An old idol! And she was only one of a whole class of truculent, illiterate harridans who were stirring up bad blood in half the great houses of London, and hurrying Britain on to an Irish civil war. No! She wasn’t as funny as she seemed. Not nearly so funny. She was too like too many people for that. Too like most people?
Did that go too far?