“Bread and ‘movies.’ They don’t like dry bread; and the ‘movies’ serve to fill them with envy for all they haven’t got.” Then, in a different tone, with a queer astringent cynicism, he added: “I didn’t exercise my privileges.”
“I’m sure you did,” she affirmed with conviction.
“No—I bolted. I couldn’t stick it. My own impotence maddened me. Perhaps——” His voice died away. He began again: “It’s not what we do that counts, but the way we do it. Talking to them is waste of time. Words! Words! How one hates them after a time! I’ve waded through all the dreary stuff that’s written about the poor. Most of it makes one sick. I don’t believe that conditions can be bettered anywhere by talk, not even when the talk is buried in the Statute Book. Something more is needed. Some—some tremendous discipline that will change the point of view of the classes and the masses so that they can see each other in truer perspective. Do the waves wonder why they batter themselves into spray against the rocks? But there is attrition all the time. Tremendous forces win in the end.”
“Do you mean that we are the rocks?”
“We stand on the rocks, blandly looking at the waves, impressed by their fury, but not attempting to control it and use it. Perhaps the biggest rock on which we stand is class loyalty. I’m sure your mother prides herself on that.”
“Of course she does.”
“Have you ever tried to analyse class loyalty?”
“No.”
“Self-preservation is behind and beneath it. At core lies a selfish, primitive instinct—to hold on tight to what we have regardless of how we came by it. Above this is a reticulation, a spider’s web, of inherited prejudices and predilections, so tangled up that one despairs of untangling them. On the surface, like a soft moss, love of ease spreads itself. I feel that here in all my bones. I try to fight against it. The lure of comfort——! What a bait——! Satan’s tit-bit——!”
His vehemence, the more insistent because he spoke so quietly, almost in a whisper, made a profound impression. She had never heard any man talk like this. The abysmal conviction in his tone amazed her. Wilverley, as she knew, preached in and out of season a doctrine of reconstruction and reform. But he did it with the air of a man who was grinding his own axe, putting a finer edge upon a weapon which he intended to use to better his own large fortune. He never lost sight of the fact that what he did on his domains paid, brought grist to his mill. All his excellent schemes for housing labourers comfortably, for paying them a higher wage, for nourishing them adequately, for developing in them capacities and potentialities, were really inspired by the force which had raised his father from the lower middle class to the nobility. Obviously, Grimshaw was actuated by no such essentially selfish motive. He thought of others before himself; he seemed to behold a travailing world with the detachment of a physician pledged, if need be, to sacrifice his own comfort and advancement in the practice of his hard profession. She said hesitatingly, groping her way towards his conclusions: