“Did you know Mrs. Price has become a vegetarian?” said Emma. “But not the duck-made-of-peas kind; just lettuce and peaches and cheese; except when she goes to London by herself, she told me. Oh dear, I must go but I am so sleepy,” she yawned and got up.
“Did you sleep well, darling?” asked her mother anxiously.
“There was a row going on in Millard Street and it woke me up.”
“I’d have all those people turned out,” said the Principal. “When there’s a revolution the houses round here won’t be fit to live in. And there’s that Cranston next door, throwing out literature that is so much rank poison by its stupidity. It is bad enough to harm even educated idiots, for they take it all in, but at least they are not likely to burn down——”
“If you please, Sir, Mr. Fisk wants to know if he can see you for a moment. He is in the library,” said Annie at the door.
Emma escaped, and as she passed the open door of the library she saw a young man with hair à la Kropotkin and immense spectacles whom she knew to be the secretary of the students’ debating society and the son of good Mr. Fisk, plumber and decorator in the neighbourhood.
CHAPTER X
Mr. Fisk was a good son at home and a pleasant fellow among his friends. Emma, who was liked by the students and went to their gatherings, had often met him. He kept dormice in his bedroom and tended them with care, but if the Communist society he belonged to had called him to do murder in the cause of incomes for all he would have summoned his courage to smite some bald-headed director of a company with a bloody axe. His errand to the Principal that morning was, I am glad to say, of a most peaceful nature, connected with the degree he hoped to take. He met Emma and Teresa the same afternoon at a tea given by some of the students after the meeting of the debating society. Teresa took the cup he offered her, and became fascinated by his withered little face, his immense spectacles and his Kropotkin hair. Her instinct scented suffering and the cage, and she led him on to talk. It must be understood that this was her first experience of his kind and she never forgot it. He began explaining to her, earnestly at first, then excitedly; he struck his knobbly little hands one against the other. “Blood!” he concluded, “blood! there’s nothing else for it. We shall give our blood when the time comes and we shall take it ruthlessly—without remorse.” Teresa looked at him fixedly, questioning. “I think that is very wicked,” she said, when she had made up her mind. “You have no business at all to decide that one person shall live and another shan’t; it is much too serious. Suppose that another lot of people decided that you must be killed because you got a degree and they didn’t?”
“I shan’t have been born into my degree when I get it,” he said proudly. “I shall have earned it by my own endeavours. The rich have been born into their property for generations. They come into the world nourished on the blood of my fathers. Show me the signs of toil on your hands, if you please,” he looked down with a bitter expression at her little hands that held the cup.
“I know,” she said humbly, “I often think of it. You needn’t point it out. But still you oughtn’t to murder anybody. It is not their fault; and anyhow, suppose you burgled my father’s house, he would have no right to kill you except in self-defence. I know that is so; a lawyer told me.”