The Master stopped a passing tramcar. 'Let us climb up to the roof,' he said. 'There we can talk and breathe and look about us, and sometimes we can listen.'
On the seat in front of them sat two young men, almost boys, talking together eagerly. Mr. Edmund Gray leaned forward and listened shamelessly. 'They are two young atheists,' he said. 'They are cursing religion. There is to be a discussion this evening at Battle Arches between a Christian and an Atheist, and they are going to assist. They should be occupied with the question of the day; they can not, because they, too, are paid defenders of Property. They are lawyers' clerks. They are poor and they are slaves: all their lives they will be slaves and they will be poor. Instead of fighting against slavery and poverty, which they know and feel, they fight against the Unknown and the Unintelligible. Pity! Pity!'
They passed two great Railway Termini, covering an immense area with immense buildings.
'Now,' said the Sage, 'there are millions of Property invested in railways. Whenever the railway servants please, they can destroy all that Property at a stroke. Perhaps you will live to see this done.'
'But,' said Elsie timidly, 'we must have things carried up and down the country.'
'Certainly. We shall go carrying things up and down the country, but not in the interests of Property.'
The tram ran past the stations and under broad railway arches, called Battle Arches—where the two young atheists got down, eager for the fray, always renewed every Sunday afternoon, with the display of much intellectual skill and much ignorance. It is a duel from which both combatants retire, breathed and flushed, proud of having displayed so much smartness, both claiming the victory, surrounded by admiring followers, and neither of them killed, neither of them hurt, neither of them a bit the worse, and both ready to begin again the following Sunday with exactly the same attack and exactly the same defence. There are some institutions—Christianity, the Church of England, the House of Lords, for instance—which invite and receive perpetual attacks, from which they emerge without the least hurt, so far as one can perceive. If they were all abolished to-morrow, what would the spouters do?
The car stopped again, and two girls mounted—two work girls of the better sort—not, that is to say, the sort which wears an ulster and a large hat with a flaming feather in it: working-girl dressed quietly and neatly. They ought to have been cheerful and even gay, for they were both young, both good-looking, both nicely dressed, and it was Sunday afternoon, warm and sunny. Yet they were not cheerful at all. One of them was in a rage royal, and the other, her friend, was in a rage sympathetic—quite a real rage. They were talking loudly on the kerb while they waited for the tram: they carried on their conversation as they climbed the stair: they continued it while they chose a seat, and before they sat down, without the least regard to those who sat near them, whether they overheard or wished not to hear—or anything. They were wholly occupied with themselves and their rage and their narrative. They neither saw nor heeded anyone else—which is the way that the angry woman has.
'So I told her—I up and told her, I did. "Yes," I sez, "you and your fifteen hours a day and overtime," I sez—"and your fines—so as to rob the poor girls of their money, and your stinkin' little room, as isn't fit for two, let alone a dozen—and your flarin' gas," I sez, "to choke us and poison us—and your dinners—yah! your dinners," I sez—"fit for pigs; and your beast of a husband comin' round with his looks and his leers"—"You let my husband alone," she sez—"His looks and his leers," I sez. "Some day the girls'll take him out and drownd him head first, in the gutter," I sez. "And a good job too!"'
'You didn't say all that, Liz?' asked the other, admiringly. 'My! What's she say to that? "Her beast of a husband"? And "his looks and his leers"? Did you really, Liz, and her that jealous?'