At these repeated signs of decadence in a society which had once been the object of his envy and his highest ambition, Webber’s face had begun to take on a look of scorn. Then he saw Mr. Jack moving suavely among his guests, and suddenly, with a rush of blood to his face, he thought about himself. Who was he to feel so superior? Did they not all know who be was, and why he was here?
Yes, all these people looked at one another with untelling eyes. Their speech was casual, quick, and witty. But they did not say the things they knew. And they knew everything. They had seen everything. They had accepted everything. And they received every new intelligence now with a cynical and amused look in their untelling eyes. Nothing shocked them any more. It was the way things were. It was what they had come to expect of life.
Ah, there he had it! That was part of the answer. It was not so much what they did, for in this there was no appreciable difference between themselves and him. It was their attitude of acceptance, the things they thought and felt about what they did, their complaisance about themselves and about their life, their loss of faith in anything better. He himself had not yet come to that, he did not want to come to it. This was one of the reasons, he now knew, why he did not want to be sealed to this world that Esther belonged to.
Still, there could be no question that these people were an honoured group. They had stolen no man’s ox or ass. Their gifts were valuable and many, and had won for them the world’s grateful applause.
Was not the great captain of finance and industry, Lawrence Hirsch, a patron of the arts as well, and a leader of advanced opinion? Yes. His views on child labour, share-cropping, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, and other questions that had stirred the indignation of the intellectual world were justly celebrated for their enlightenment and their liberalism. Who should cavil, then, at the fact that a banker might derive a portion of his income from the work of children in the textile factories of the South?—that another part of it might be derived from the labour of share-croppers in the tobacco fields?—that still another might come from steel mills in the Middle West where armed thugs had been employed to shoot into the ranks of striking workers? A banker’s business was to invest his money wherever he could get the best return. Business was business, and to say that a man’s social views ought to come between him and his profits was cavilling, indeed! As for Mr. Hirsch himself, he had his devoted champions even among the comrades of the left, who were quick to point out that theoretical criticism of this sort was childish. The sources of Mr. Hirsch’s wealth and power, whatever they might be, were quite accidental and beside the point. His position as a liberal, “a friend of Russia”, a leader of advanced social opinion, a searching critic, indeed, of the very capitalist class to which he belonged, was so well known as to place him in the very brain and forehead of enlightened thought.
As for these others in the illustrious company that Webber now saw on every side, not one of them had ever said: “Let them eat cake!” When the poor had starved, these had suffered. When the children toiled, these had bled. When the oppressed, the weak, the stricken and betrayed men had been falsely accused and put to death, these tongues had been lifted in indignant protest—if only the issue had been fashionable! These had written letters to the press, carried placards upon Beacon Hill, joined parades, made contributions, lent the prestige of their names to form committees of defence.
All this was indubitably true. But as he thought about it now, Webber also felt that such as these might lift their voices and parade their placards till the crack of doom, but that in the secret and entrenched resources of their lives they had all battened on the blood of common man, and wrung their profits from the sweat of slaves, like any common overseer of money and of privilege that ever lived. The whole tissue of these princely lives, he felt, these lesbic and pederastic loves, these adulterous intrigues, sustained in mid-air now, floating on the face of night like a starred veil, had none the less been spun from man’s common dust of sweated clay, unwound out of the entrails of man’s agony.