There are Pariahs in every village. It might be said that there are Pariahs in every family. The Pariah is one who is born with an innate inability to deal vigorously and effectively with his fellow animals. One sees these unfortunates every day—on the street, in the office, at the domestic hearth. One knows them by the queer look in their eyes; the look of animals who have been crushed rather than tamed.
It is not only that they are weaker than the rest and less effectual. They are different. It is in their difference that the tragedy of their fate lies. Commonplace weaklings, who are not born Pariahs, have in their hearts the same standards, the same ambitions, the same prejudices, as those who rule the world. Such weaklings venerate, admire, and even love the strong unscrupulous hands, the crafty unscrupulous brains, who push them to and fro like pawns.
But the Pariah does not venerate the Power that oppresses him. He despises it and hates it. Long-accumulated loathing rankles in his heart. He is crushed but not won. He is penned, like a shorn sheep; but his thoughts “wander through Eternity.”
And it is this difference, separating him from the rest, that excites such fury in those who oppress him. The healthy-minded prosperous man is irritated beyond endurance by this stranger within the gate—this incorrigible, ineffectual critic, cumbering his road. The mob, too, always ready, like spiteful, cawing rooks, to fall upon a wounded comrade, howl remorselessly for his destruction. The Pariah is seldom able to retain the sweetness of his natural affections.
Buffeted by the unconscious brutality of those about him, he retorts with conscious and unfathomable hatred. His soul festers and gangrenes within him, and the loneliness of his place among his fellows leads him to turn upon them all—like a rat in a gin. The pure-minded capable man, perceiving the rancorous misanthropy of this sick spirit, longs to trample him into the mud, to obliterate him, to forget him. But the man whose strength and cunning is associated with lascivious perversity, wishes to have him by his side, to humiliate, to degrade, to outrage. A taste to be surrounded by Pariahs is an interesting peculiarity of a certain successful class. Such companionship is to them a perpetual and pleasing reminder of their own power.
Mr. Quincunx was a true Pariah in his miserable combination of inability to strike back at the people who injured him, and inability to forget their injuries. He propitiated their tastes, bent to their will, conciliated their pride, agreed with their opinions, and hated them with demoniacal hatred.
As he pulled up his weeds in the hot sun, this particular morning, Maurice Quincunx fantastically consoled himself by imagining all manner of disasters to his enemies. Every time he touched with his hands the soft-crumbling earth, he uttered a kind of half-conscious prayer that, in precisely such a way, the foundations of Nevilton House should crumble and yield. Under his hat—for he was hypochondriacally apprehensive about sunstrokes—flapped and waved in the wind a large cabbage leaf, placed carefully at the back of his head to protect his neck as he bent down. The shadow of this cabbage leaf, as it was thrown across the dusty path, assumed singular and sinister shapes, giving the impression sometimes that the head of Mr. Quincunx was gnome-like or goblin-like in its proportions.
Perhaps the most unfortunate characteristic of Pariahs is that though they cling instinctively to one another they are irritated and provoked by each other’s peculiarities.