Shortly after eight o'clock Edwin was walking down Trafalgar Road on his
way to the shop. He had bathed, and drunk some tea, and under the
stimulation he felt the factitious vivacity of excessive fatigue. Rain
had fallen quietly and perseveringly during the night, and though the
weather was now fine the streets were thick with black mire.
Paintresses with their neat gloves and their dinner-baskets and their
thin shoes were trudging to work, and young clerks and shop-assistants
and the upper classes of labour generally. Everybody was in a hurry.
The humbler mass had gone long ago. Miners had been in the earth for
hours. Later, and more leisurely, the magnates would pass by.
There were carriages about. An elegant wagonette, streaming with red
favours, dashed down the road behind two horses. Its cargo was a
handful of clay-soiled artisans, gleeful in the naive pride of their
situation, wearing red and shouting red, and hurrahing for the
Conservative candidate.
"Asses!" murmured Edwin, with acrid and savage disdain. "Do you think
he'd drive you anywhere to-morrow?" He walked on a little, and broke
forth again, all to himself: "Of course he's doing it solely in your
interest, isn't he? Why doesn't he pick some of these paintresses out
of the mud and give them a drive?"
He cultivated an unreasoning anger against the men who had so impressed
him at the banquet. He did not try to find answers to their arguments.
He accused them stoutly of wilful blindness, of cowardice, of bullying,
of Pharisaism, and of other sins. He had no wish to hear their defence.
He condemned them, and as it were ordered them to be taken away and
executed. He had a profound conviction that argument was futile, and
that nothing would serve but a pitched battle, in which each fighting
man should go to the poll and put a cross against a name in grim
silence. Argue with these gross self-satisfied fellows about the
turpitude of the artisans! Why, there was scarcely one of them whose
grandfather had not been an artisan! Curse their patriotism! Then he
would begin bits of argument to himself, and stop them, too impatient to
continue... The shilling cigars of those feasters disgusted him... In
such wise his mind ran. And he was not much kinder to the artisan. If
scorn could have annihilated, there would have been no proletariat left
in the division... Men? Sheep rather! Letting themselves be driven up
and down like that, and believing all the yarns that were spun to them!
Gaping idiots, they would swallow any mortal thing! There was simply
naught that they were not stupid enough to swallow with a glass of beer.
It would serve them right if--However, that could not happen. Idiocy
had limits. At least he presumed it had.
Early as it was, the number of carriages was already considerable. But
he did not see one with the blue of the Labour candidate. Blue rosettes
there were, but the red rosettes bore them down easily. Even dogs had
been adorned with red rosettes, and nice clean infants! And on all the
hoardings were enormous red posters exhorting the shrewd common-sense
potter not to be misled by paid agitators, but to plump for his true
friend, for the man who was anxious to devote his entire career and
goods to the welfare of the potter and the integrity of the Empire.
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