She had warned him that she might be talking business. He mentioned a pretty considerable sum.
“All earned by the sweat of other people’s brows,” she commented with a smile.
“You give away a pretty good deal of it,” he reminded her consolingly.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I am very good. I take from them with one hand and give them back thirty per cent. of it with the other; that’s what our charity means. And it doesn’t really help, that’s the irritating part of it. It’s just the pouring out of a libation to the God-of-Things-as-they-are. ‘The poor always ye have with you.’”
“I sometimes think,” he said, “that Christ, when he told the young man to sell all he had and give it to the poor, was thinking rather of the young man than of the poor. It would have done them but such fleeting good. But to the young man it meant the difference between slavery and freedom. To be quit of it all. His horses and his chariots. His fine houses and his countless herds. His army of cringing servants. His horde of fawning clients. How could he win life, bound hand and foot to earth? Not even his soul was his own. It belonged to his great possessions.”
She was going into central Russia. She had passed through there some years ago and had happened upon one of its ever recurring famines. There was talk of another in the coming winter.
“The granary of Europe,” she continued. “I believe we import one-third of our grain from Russia. And every year the peasants die there of starvation by the thousands. That year I was there they reckoned a hundred thousand perished in one valley. They were eating the corpses of the children. And on my way to St. Petersburg I passed stations where the corn was rotting by the roadside. The price had fallen and it wasn’t worth transporting. The devil must get some fun looking down upon the world.”
He had been standing by the window with his hands in his pockets. It was still twilight. He swung round suddenly.
“I believe in the Devil,” he said. “I don’t mean the devil that we sing about—the discontented angel that God has let out at the end of a chain, that is finally to be destroyed when he has served God’s purpose. But the eternal spirit of evil that is a part of all things—that brooded over chaos before God came. He also must be our father. Hate, cruelty, lust, greed: how else were we born with them? Would they have come to us from God. Evil also claims us for his children—is fighting for possession of us, is calling to us to labour with him, to turn the world into hell. Hate one another. Do ill to one another. That is his commandment. Which does the world obey: God or the Devil? Does hate or love rule the world? Whom does the world honour? The greedy man, the selfish man, the man who ‘gets on’ by trampling on his fellows. Who are the world’s leaders? The makers of war, the preachers of hate. Who dares to follow Christ—to fight for God. How many? That’s the trouble of it. ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross.’ Poverty, self-denial, contempt, loneliness. We are afraid.”