XII
A MINOR PROPHET
The city sweltered in the August heat. No breath of air lifted the pall of haze that wrapped the streets, the houses, and the dark group of Græco-Roman buildings that stands up like a rock in the dull tide-way of the brick-built tenements that compose the town.
Bells pealed at intervals, summoning the fractioned faithful to their various centres of belief.
When they had ceased and all the congregations were assembled listening to the exhortations of their spiritual advisers, and were employed fumbling inside their purses, as they listened, for the destined “threepenny,” that obolus which gives respectability to alms, the silence was complete. Whitey-brown paper bags, dropped overnight, just stirred occasionally as the air swelled their bellies, making them seem alive, or as alive as is a jelly-fish left stranded by the tide.
Just as the faithful were assembled in their conventicles adoring the same Deity, all filled with rancour against one another because their methods of interpretation of the Creator’s will were different, so did the politicians and the cranks of every sort and sect turn out to push their methods of salvation for mankind. In groups they gathered round the various speakers who discoursed from chairs and carts and points of vantage on the streets.
Above the speakers’ heads, banners, held up between two poles, called on the audiences to vote for Liberal or for Tory, for Poor Law Reform, for Social Purity, and for Temperance. Orators, varying from well-dressed and glibly-educated hacks from party centres, to red-faced working-men, held forth perspiring, and occasionally bedewing those who listened to them with saliva, after an emphatic burst.
It seemed so easy after listening to them to redress all wrongs, smooth out all wrinkles, and instate each citizen in his own shop where he could sell his sweated goods, with the best advantage to himself and with the greatest modicum of disadvantage to his neighbour, that one was left amazed at the dense apathy of those who did not fall in with the nostrums they had heard. Again, at other platforms, sleek men in broadcloth, who had never seen a plough except at Agricultural Exhibitions, nor had got on closer terms of friendship with a horse than to be bitten by him as they passed along a street, discoursed upon the land.
“My friends, I say, the land is a fixed quantity, you can’t increase it, and without it, it’s impossible to live. ’Ow is it, then, that all the land of England is in so few hands?” He paused and mopped his face, and looking round, began again: “Friends—you’ll allow me to style you Friends, I know, Friends in the sycred cause of Liberty—the landed aristocracy is our enemy.
“I am not out for confiscation, why should I? I ’ave my ’ome purchased with the fruits of my own hhonest toil . . .”
Before he could conclude his sentence, a dock labourer, dressed in his Sunday suit of shoddy serge, check shirt, and black silk handkerchief knotted loosely round his neck, looked up, and interjected: “’Ard work, too, mate, that ’ere talkin’ in the sun is, that built your ’ome. Beats coal whippin’.”