‘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. Whenever Mrs Caffyn talked about the labourers at Great Oakhurst, whom she knew so well, Clara always felt as if all her reading had been a farce, and, indeed, if we come into close contact with actual life, art, poetry and philosophy seem little better than trifling. When the mist hangs over the heavy clay land in January, and men and women shiver in the bitter cold and eat raw turnips, to indulge in fireside ecstasies over the divine Plato or Shakespeare is surely not such a virtue as we imagine it to be. CHAPTER XXVII