“I am afraid you rather rubbed it into poor old Jimmie about the Academy. The little girl looked as if she would like to fly at you. She is a spoiled little cat.”
“I have noticed she does n't seem to like you,” answered Norma, sourly.
The drive as far as Grosvenor Place, where Norma proposed to pay a solitary call, was not as pleasant as he had anticipated. He parted from her somewhat resentful of an irritable mood, and walked back towards Sussex Gardens through the Park, reviling the capriciousness of woman.
Chapter VII—A MAD PROPHET
A VIOLENT man, pallid and perspiring, with crazy dark eyes and a voice hoarse from the effort to make himself heard above the noise of a hymn-singing group a few yards to the right and of a brazen-throated atheist on the left, was delivering his soul of its message to mankind—a confused, disconnected, oft-delivered message, so inconsequent as to suggest that it had been worn into shreds and tatters of catch-phrases by process of over-delivery, yet uttered with the passion of one inspired with a new and amazing gospel.
“I am speaking to you, the working-men, the proletariat, the downtrodden slaves of the plutocracy, the creators in darkness of the wealth that the idlers enjoy in dazzling halls of brightness. I do not address the bourgeoisie rotting in sloth and apathy. They are the parasites of the rich. They sweat the workers in order to pander to the vices of the rich. They despise the poor and grovel before the rich. They shrink from touching the poor man's hand, but they offer their bodies slavishly to the kick of the rich man's foot. It is not in their hands, but in yours, brother toilers and brother sufferers, that lies the glorious work of the great social revolution whose sun just rising is tipping the mountain-tops with its radiant promise of an immortal day. It is against them and not with them that you have to struggle. In that day of Armageddon you will find all tailordom, all grocerdom, all apothecarydom, all attorneydom arrayed in serried ranks around the accursed standards of plutocracy, of aristocracy, of bureaucracy. Beware of them. Have naught to do with them on peril of your salvation. The great social revolution will come not from above, but from below, from the depths. De profundis clamavi! “From the depths have I cried, O Lord!”
He paused, wiped his forehead, cleared his throat, and went on in the same strain, indifferent to ribald interjections and the Sunday apathy of his casual audience. The mere size of the crowd he was addressing seemed to satisfy him. The number was above the average. A few working-men in the inner ring drank in the wild utterances with pathetic thirst. The majority listened, half amused, half attracted by the personality of the speaker. A great many were captivated by the sonority of the words, the unfaltering roll of the sentences, the vague associations and impressions called up by the successive images. It is astonishing what little account our sociological writers take of the elementary nature of the minds of the masses; how easily they are amused; how readily they are imposed upon; how little they are capable of analytical thought; at the same time, how intellectually vain they are, which is their undoing. The ineptitudes of the music hall which make the judicious grieve—the satirical presentment, for instance, of the modern fop, which does not contain one single salient characteristic of the type, which is the blatant convention of fifty years back—are greeted with roars of unintelligent laughter. Books are written, vulgar, fallacious, with a specious semblance of philosophical profundity, and sell by the hundred thousand. The masses read them without thought, without even common intelligence. It is too great an intellectual effort to grasp the ideas so disingenuously presented; but the readers can understand just enough to perceive vaguely that they are in touch with the deeper questions of philosophy, and through sheer vanity delude themselves into the belief that they are vastly superior people in being able to find pleasure in literature of such high quality. And the word Mesopotamia is still blessed in their ears. Nothing but considerations such as these can explain the popularity of some of the well-known Sunday orators in Hyde Park. The conductors of the various properly organised mission services belong naturally to a different category. It is the socialist, the revivalist, the atheist, the man whose blood and breath seem to have turned into inexhaustible verbiage, that present the problem.
Some such reflections forced themselves into the not uncharitable mind of Jimmie as he stood on the outer fringe of the pallid man's audience and listened wonderingly to the inspired nonsense. He had left a delighted Aline to be taken by Colonel Pawley to the Zoological Gardens, and had strolled down from Bryanston Square to the north side of the Park. To lounge pleasantly on a Sunday afternoon from group to group had always been a favourite Sunday pastime, and the pallid man was a familiar figure. Jimmie had often thought of painting him as the central character of some historical picture—an expectorated Jonah crying to Nineveh, or a Flagellant in the time of the plague, with foaming mouth and bleeding body, calling upon the stricken city to repent. His artist's vision could see the hairy, haggard, muscular anatomy beneath the man's rusty black garments. He could make a capital picture out of him.