The door opened, and Mrs. Todd entered bearing a bucket of coal-dust and damp slack.
"Oh, you here still, Mr. Rossitur," she remarked with suggestive irony. She disliked strange young men, who announced their intention of occupying the cheap back room for several nights, and who bought nothing more costly than bread and cheese and hung about as though they had eaten roast beef and Yorkshire's. Besides, he might have evil designs on Victoria, her buxom daughter. Mrs. Todd, being a person of small imagination, had divided mankind into two classes, those who had designs on Victoria, those who had designs on Beer. Last night she had come to the regrettable conclusion that David had no true appreciation of Beer.
"Yes, I'm still here, and probably will stay for a little if I'm not in the way."
Mrs. Todd by way of reply swung her bucket over the fire, smothering flames and glowing cinders in a torrent of black coal-dust.
"Oh, Mrs. Todd!" groaned David, lamenting the extinction of his brother Fire. "Must you?"
Mrs. Todd regarded him slowly and with dignity. "I don't say nothing about gentlemen coming and sitting all hours in the smoking room, and paying no more for their beer—when they gets it which is not as often as might be considering how good—than if they drank it at the bar. What I say is that this fire has to last until closing time, and there being others what comes at proper times and stays as is right and fitting, and goes away again to return when wanted, there being no call to keep a fire at all when they're not due till 7.30 if that, and mebbe later."
Having delivered this lucid exposition of economy, forethought and natural preference for regular customers, she departed. David fell on his knees before the hearth and tried with a rusty poker to rescue the fire from its smothering burden. His efforts only resulted in an avalanche of fire coal, that fell, rattling through the bars of the grate, on to the stone below. A few angry bursts of flame sputtered and hissed before they died away.
He smiled ruefully. It was all very well to start out from Manchester with a mission of prophecy, all afire to challenge the indifference of agricultural labourers to their own interests; but it was quite another matter to kneel, tealess and with a sore throat, before a choked fire in a hideous room, feeling utterly alien and unwanted.
He heard steps in the passage outside. Some one was entering the bar. In a moment, he might be faced by the magnificent opportunity of confronting the downtrodden and exploited. Surely now he should be elated and indomitable, ready with pregnant arguments to assault the calculating caution of Yorkshire stolidity!
"I'm not a genuine enthusiast really," he groaned to himself. "I want to go back to the Wold Farm, and sit in front of Mrs. Robson's fire, and drink hot whisky and eat roast chicken and tea-cakes swimming in butter! I don't want to talk to labourers about their souls."