‘I maintain,’ said Clara with emphasis, ‘that if a man declines to examine, and takes for granted what a party leader or a newspaper tells him, he has no case against the man who declines to examine, or takes for granted what the priest tells him. Besides, although, as you know, I am not a convert myself, I do lose a little patience when I hear it preached as a gospel to every poor conceited creature who goes to your Sunday evening atheist lecture, that he is to believe nothing on one particular subject which his own precious intellect cannot verify, and the next morning he finds it to be his duty to swallow wholesale anything you please to put into his mouth. As to the tyranny, the day may come, and I believe is approaching, when the majority will be found to be more dangerous than any ecclesiastical establishment which ever existed.’
Baruch’s lips moved, but he was silent. He was not strong in argument. He was thinking about Marshall’s triumphant inquiry whether God is not responsible for slavery. He would have liked to say something on that subject, but he had nothing ready.
‘Practical people,’ said Dennis, who had not quite recovered from the rebuke as to the warmth of the room, ‘are often most unpractical and injudicious. Nothing can be more unwise than to mix up politics and religion. If you do,’ Dennis waved his hand, ‘you will have all the religious people against you. My friend Marshall, Miss Hopgood, is under the illusion that the Church in this country is tottering to its fall. Now, although I myself belong to no sect, I do not share his illusion; nay, more, I am not sure’—Mr Dennis spoke slowly, rubbed his chin and looked up at the ceiling—‘I am not sure that there is not something to be said in favour of State endowment—at least, in a country like Ireland.’
‘Come along, Dennis, we shall be late,’ said Marshall, and the two forthwith took their departure in order to attend another meeting.
‘Much either of ’em knows about it,’ said Mrs Caffyn when they had gone. ‘There’s Marshall getting two pounds a week reg’lar, and goes on talking about people at Leicester, and he has never been in Leicester in his life; and, as for that Dennis, he knows less than Marshall, for he does nothing but write for newspapers and draw for picture-books, never nothing what you may call work, and he does worrit me so whenever he begins about poor people that I can’t sit still. I do know what the poor is, having lived at Great Oakhurst all these years.’
‘You are not a Chartist, then?’ said Baruch.
‘Me—me a Chartist? No, I ain’t, and yet, maybe, I’m something worse. What would be the use of giving them poor creatures votes? Why, there isn’t one of them as wouldn’t hold up his hand for anybody as would give him a shilling. Quite right of ’em, too, for the one thing they have to think about from morning to night is how to get a bit of something to fill their bellies, and they won’t fill them by voting.’
‘But what would you do for them?’
‘Ah! that beats me! Hang somebody, but I don’t know who it ought to be. There’s a family by the name of Longwood, they live just on the slope of the hill nigh the Dower Farm, and there’s nine of them, and the youngest when I left was a baby six months old, and their living-room faces the road so that the north wind blows in right under the door, and I’ve seen the snow lie in heaps inside. As reg’lar as winter comes Longwood is knocked off—no work. I’ve knowed them not have a bit of meat for weeks together, and him a-loungin’ about at the corner of the street. Wasn’t that enough to make him feel as if somebody ought to be killed? And Marshall and Dennis say as the proper thing to do is to give him a vote, and prove to him there was never no Abraham nor Isaac, and that Jonah never was in a whale’s belly, and that nobody had no business to have more children than he could feed. And what goes on, and what must go on, inside such a place as Longwood’s, with him and his wife, and with them boys and gals all huddled together—But I’d better hold my tongue. We’ll let the smoke out of this room, I think, and air it a little.’
She opened the window, and Baruch rose and went home.