David looked gravely towards him. They sat on opposite sides of the fire-place; Waite on the settle, one hand on the empty mug, staring suspiciously at David to see if any guile lay behind his intent questioning. David sitting forward in his chair, his lean hands clasped round his knees, his grey eyes dancing now with excitement, sympathy and indignation, his lips a little parted, his bright hair flaming in the lamplight.
Waite spat into the hearth.
"Who done it? Ay, who does owt in this village? Who turned Schoolmaster out o' his better job, and keeps him here kicking his heels up o' top o' Church Hill? Who pays starvation wages, and then takes coals an' Christmas cake round to stop our mouths so that we shan't grumble? Who goes about preaching and lying and telling tales to our wives, and making men fairly sick with her bits o' sermons an' patronizing ways? You ask Wilson here if Willerbys weren't going to pay him three pound a year more till they heard tell what Robsons give'd their men, so they'd go no higher?"
"Ay," Wilson spoke with his usual deliberation. "It's all right for Robson's lads, an' it's all right fer Robsons noo, but one o' these fine days Missus'll sicken of playing providence an' then Anderby will know a bit o' which way its hens were laying."
"Robsons?" asked David. "Not the Robsons at the Wold Farm?"
An hour later, Mike O'Flynn and Ezra Dawson opened the door of the smoking room at the Flying Fox. There were about a dozen habitués of the tavern gathered round a generous fire; but to-night they no longer wore that air of independent exclusiveness which most Yorkshire men assume while drinking, just to show that they need no support from their fellows in their progress through life or through a pint of Guinness's stout.
Instead every face was turned in one direction, and the smoking lamps illuminated varying expressions of incredulity, bewilderment or vacuous attention. At one side of the fire-place, opposite the high backed settle, stood one of the thinnest people the shepherd had ever seen, his arms waving in grotesque gesticulations, his hair standing from his head in a fiery halo, a torrent of words pouring from his impassioned lips.
"Wages!" he cried. "The wages of sin is death and the wages of labour, of lifelong labour honestly given and painfully wraught out by the sweat of the labourer—that, too, is death! Death to social competence—when a man labours from daybreak to nightfall for a miserable pittance, which stands in no proportion to the service he has rendered—Death to initiative and enterprise! When it's no use ever trying to do anything better than it was done yesterday, because the only person who will profit is the capitalist. Death to progress! Since how should men progress, who have become machines, bodies and hands—not brains. Those were dead long ago.
"They say in the Bible which some of you may have read when you were at Sunday School, 'Ye are gods.' I say 'You are beasts,' animals who rise to labour for another man, who sell your souls and bodies, and all the fine things of which your growing manhood once was capable for eighteen shillings a week, and a dole of beef at Christmas. To labour till your backs ache and your hands stiffen and your brains decay, until when the day's work is done you are fit for nothing but to feed grossly like beasts round a sordid table and to swill down beer in a public house before you roll to your dens and fall into a sodden sleep. Beasts, beasts, beasts!" he cried. "And you were born to be gods!"