§4
But you must not imagine that the national ideal of a gentleman, as Coote developed it, was all a matter of deportment and selectness, a mere isolation from debasing associations. There is a Serious Side, a deeper aspect of the true, True Gentleman. The True Gentleman does not wear his heart on his sleeve. He is a polished surface above deeps. For example, he is deeply religious, as Coote was, as Mrs. Walshingham was, but outside the walls of a church it never appears, except perhaps now and then in a pause, in a profound look, in a sudden avoidance. In quite a little while Kipps also had learnt the pause, the profound look, the sudden avoidance, that final refinement of spirituality, impressionistic piety.
And the True Gentleman is patriotic also. When one saw Coote lifting his hat to the National Anthem, then perhaps one got a glimpse of what patriotic emotions, what worship, the polish of a gentleman may hide. Or singing out his deep notes against the Hosts of Midian, in the St. Stylites choir; then indeed you plumbed his spiritual side.
But these were but gleams. For the rest, Religion, Nationality, Passion, Money, Politics; much more so those cardinal issues, Birth and Death, the True Gentleman skirted about, and became facially rigid towards and ceased to speak and panted and blew.
"One doesn't talk of that sort of thing," Coote would say with a gesture of the knuckly hand.
"O' course," Kipps would reply, with an equal significance.
Profundities. Deep as it were, blowing to deep.
One does not talk, but on the other hand one is punctilious to do. Actions speak. Kipps—in spite of the fact that the Walshinghams were more than a little lax—Kipps, who had formerly flitted Sunday after Sunday from one Folkestone church to another, had now a sitting of his own, paid for duly at Saint Stylites. There he was to be seen, always at the surplice evening service, and sometimes of a morning, dressed with a sober precision, and with an eye on Coote in the chancel. No difficulties now about finding the place in his book. He became a communicant again—he had lapsed soon after his confirmation when the young lady in the costume-room, who was his adopted sister, left the Emporium—and he would sometimes go around to the Vestry for Coote after the service. One evening he was introduced to the Hon. and Rev. Densemore. He was much too confused to say anything, and the noble cleric had nothing to say, but indisputably they were introduced....
No! you must not imagine our national ideal of a gentleman is without its "serious side," without even its stern and uncompromising side. The imagination no doubt refuses to see Coote displaying extraordinary refinements of courage upon the stricken field, but in the walks of peace there is sometimes sore need of sternness. Charitable as one may be, one must admit there are people who do things, impossible things; people who place themselves "out of it" in countless ways; people, moreover, who are by a sort of predestination out of it from the beginning, and against these Society has invented a terrible protection for its Cootery, the Cut. The cut is no joke for anyone. It is excommunication. You may be cut by an individual, you may be cut by a set or you may be—and this is so tragic that beautiful romances have been written about it—"Cut by the County." One figures Coote discharging this last duty and cutting somebody—Coote, erect and pale, never speaking, going past with eyes of pitiless slate, lower jaw protruding a little, face pursed up and cold and stiff....
It never dawned upon Kipps that he would one day have to face this terrible front, to be to Coote not only as one dead, but as one gone more than a stage or so in decay, cut and passed, banned and outcast for ever.
Yet so it was to be!
One cannot hide any longer that all this fine progress of Kipps is doomed to end in collapse. So far indeed you have seen him ascend. You have seen him becoming more refined and careful day by day, more carefully dressed, less clumsy in the ways and methods of social life. You have seen the gulf widening between himself and his former low associates. I have brought you at last to the vision of him, faultlessly dressed and posed, in an atmosphere of candlelight and chanting, in his own sitting in one of the most fashionable churches in Folkestone.... All the time I have refrained from the lightest touch upon the tragic note that must now creep into my tale. Yet the net of his low connections has been about his feet, and moreover there was something interwoven in his being....
CHAPTER VI DISCORDS
§1
One day Kipps set out upon his newly-mastered bicycle to New Romney to break the news of his engagement to his Uncle and Aunt—this time positively. He was now a finished cyclist, but as yet an unseasoned one; the southwest wind, even in its summer guise, as one meets it in the Marsh, is the equivalent of a reasonable hill, and ever and again he got off and refreshed himself by a spell of walking. He was walking just outside New Romney preparatory to his triumphal entry (one hand off) when abruptly he came upon Ann Pornick.
It chanced he was thinking about her at the time. He had been thinking curious things; whether, after all, the atmosphere of New Romney and the Marsh had not some difference, some faint impalpable quality that was missing in the great and fashionable world of Folkestone behind there on the hill. Here there was a homeliness, a familiarity. He had noted as he passed that old Mr. Cliffordown's gate had been mended with a fresh piece of string. In Folkestone he didn't take notice and he didn't care if they built three hundred houses. Come to think of it, that was odd. It was fine and grand to have twelve hundred a year; it was fine to go about on trams and omnibuses and think not a person aboard was as rich as oneself; it was fine to buy and order this and that and never have any work to do and to be engaged to a girl distantly related to the Earl of Beauprés, but yet there had been a zest in the old time out here, a rare zest in the holidays, in sunlight, on the sea beach and in the High Street, that failed from these new things. He thought of those bright windows of holiday that had seemed so glorious to him in the retrospect from his apprentice days. It was strange that now, amidst his present splendours, they were glorious still!
All those things were over now—perhaps that was it! Something had happened to the world and the old light had been turned out. He himself was changed, and Sid was changed, terribly changed, and Ann no doubt was changed.
He thought of her with the hair blown about her flushed cheeks as they stood together after their race....
Certainly she must be changed, and all the magic she had been fraught with to the very hem of her short petticoats gone no doubt for ever. And as he thought that, or before and while he thought it, for he came to all these things in his own vague and stumbling way, he looked up, and there was Ann!
She was seven years older and greatly altered; yet for the moment it seemed to him that she had not changed at all. "Ann!" he said, and she, with a lifting note, "It's Art Kipps!"
Then he became aware of changes—improvements. She was as pretty as she had promised to be, her blue eyes as dark as his memory of them, and with a quick, high colour, but now Kipps by several inches was the taller again. She was dressed in a simple grey dress that showed her very clearly as a straight and healthy little woman, and her hat was Sundayfied with pink flowers. She looked soft and warm and welcoming. Her face was alight to Kipps with her artless gladness at their encounter.
"It's Art Kipps!" she said.
"Rather," said Kipps.
"You got your holidays?"
It flashed upon Kipps that Sid had not told her of his great fortune. Much regretful meditation upon Sid's behaviour had convinced him that he himself was to blame for exasperating boastfulness in that affair, and this time he took care not to err in that direction. He erred in the other.
"I'm taking a bit of a 'oliday," he said.
"So'm I," said Ann.
"You been for a walk?" asked Kipps.
Ann showed him a bunch of wayside flowers.
"It's a long time since I seen you, Ann. Why, 'ow long must it be? Seven—eight years nearly."
"It don't do to count," said Ann.
"It don't look like it," said Kipps, with the slightest emphasis.
"You got a moustache," said Ann, smelling her flowers and looking at him over them, not without admiration.
Kipps blushed....
Presently they came to the bifurcation of the roads.
"I'm going down this way to mother's cottage," said Ann.
"I'll come a bit your way if I may."
In New Romney social distinctions that are primary realities in Folkestone are absolutely non-existent, and it seemed quite permissible for him to walk with Ann, for all that she was no more than a servant. They talked with remarkable ease to one another, they slipped into a vein of intimate reminiscence in the easiest manner. In a little while Kipps was amazed to find Ann and himself at this:
"You r'ember that half sixpence? What you cut for me?"
"Yes."
"I got it still."
She hesitated. "Funny, wasn't it?" she said, and then, "you got yours, Artie?"
"Rather," said Kipps. "What do you think?" and wondered in his heart of hearts why he had never looked at that sixpence for so long.
Ann smiled at him frankly.
"I didn't expect you'd keep it," she said. "I thought often—it was silly to keep mine. Besides," she reflected, "it didn't mean anything really."
She glanced at him as she spoke and met his eye.
"Oh, didn't it!" said Kipps, a little late with his response, and realising his infidelity to Helen even as he spoke.
"It didn't mean much anyhow," said Ann. "You still in the drapery?"
"I'm living at Folkestone," began Kipps and decided that that sufficed. "Didn't Sid tell you he met me?"
"No! Here?"
"Yes. The other day. 'Bout a week or more ago."
"That was before I came."
"Ah! that was it," said Kipps.
"'E's got on," said Ann. "Got 'is own shop now, Artie."
"'E tole me."
They found themselves outside Muggett's cottages. "You going in?" said Kipps.
"I s'pose so," said Ann.
They both hung upon the pause. Ann took a plunge.
"D'you often come to New Romney?" she said.
"I ride over a bit at times," said Kipps.
Another pause. Ann held out her hand.
"I'm glad I seen you," she said.
Extraordinary impulses arose in neglected parts of Kipps' being. "Ann," he said and stopped.
"Yes," said she, and was bright to him.
They looked at one another.
All and more than all of those first emotions of his adolescence had come back to him. Her presence banished a multitude of countervaling considerations. It was Ann more than ever. She stood breathing close to him, with her soft-looking lips a little apart and gladness in her eyes.
"I'm awful glad to see you again," he said; "it brings back old times."
"Doesn't it?"
Another pause. He would have liked to have had a long talk to her, to have gone for a walk with her or something, to have drawn nearer to her in any conceivable way, and, above all, to have had some more of the appreciation that shone in her eyes, but a vestige of Folkestone still clinging to him told him it "wouldn't do." "Well," he said, "I must be getting on," and turned away reluctantly, with a will under compulsion....
When he looked back from the corner she was still at the gate. She was perhaps a little disconcerted by his retreat. He felt that. He hesitated for a moment, half turned, stood and suddenly did great things with his hat. That hat! The wonderful hat of our civilisation!...
In another minute he was engaged in a singularly absent-minded conversation with his Uncle about the usual topics.
His Uncle was very anxious to buy him a few upright clocks as an investment for subsequent sale. And there were also some very nice globes, one terrestrial and the other celestial, in a shop at Lydd that would look well in a drawing-room and inevitably increase in value.... Kipps either did or did not agree to this purchase; he was unable to recollect.
The southwest wind perhaps helped him back, at any rate he found himself through Dymchurch without having noticed the place. There came an odd effect as he drew near Hythe. The hills on the left and the trees on the right seemed to draw together and close in upon him until his way was straight and narrow. He could not turn around on that treacherous, half-tamed machine, but he knew that behind him, he knew so well, spread the wide, vast flatness of the Marsh shining under the afternoon sky. In some way this was material to his thoughts. And as he rode through Hythe he came upon the idea that there was a considerable amount of incompatibility between the existence of one who was practically a gentleman and of Ann.
In the neighbourhood of Seabrook he began to think he had, in some subtle way, lowered himself by walking along by the side of Ann.... After all, she was only a servant.
Ann!
She called out all the least gentlemanly instincts of his nature. There had been a moment in their conversation when he had quite distinctly thought it would really be an extremely nice thing for someone to kiss her lips.... There was something warming about Ann—at least for Kipps. She impressed him as having somewhen during their vast interval of separation contrived to make herself in some distinctive way his.
Fancy keeping that half sixpence all this time!
It was the most flattering thing that had ever happened to Kipps.
§2
He found himself presently sitting over "The Art of Conversing," lost in the strangest musings. He got up, walked about, became stagnant at the window for a space, roused himself and by way of something lighter tried "Sesame and Lilies." From that, too, his attention wandered. He sat back. Anon he smiled, anon sighed. He arose, pulled his keys from his pocket, looked at them, decided and went upstairs. He opened the little yellow box that had been the nucleus of all his possessions in the world, and took out a small "Escritoire," the very humblest sort of present, and opened it—kneeling. And there, in the corner, was a little packet of paper, sealed as a last defence against any prying invader, with red sealing wax. It had gone untouched for years. He held this little packet between finger and thumb for a moment, regarding it, and then put down the escritoire and broke the seal....
As he was getting into bed that night he remembered something for the first time!
"Dash it!" he said. "Dashed if I told 'em this time.... Well! I shall 'ave to go over to New Romney again!"
He got into bed and remained sitting pensively on the pillow for a space.
"It's a rum world," he reflected after a vast interval.
Then he recalled that she had noticed his moustache and embarked upon a sea of egotistical musings.
He imagined himself telling Ann how rich he was. What a surprise that would be for her!
Finally he sighed profoundly, blew out his candle and snuggled down, and in a little while he was asleep....
But the next morning and at intervals afterwards he found himself thinking of Ann—Ann, the bright, the desirable, the welcoming, and with an extraordinary streakiness he wanted quite badly to go and then as badly not to go over to New Romney again.
Sitting on the Leas in the afternoon, he had an idea. "I ought to 'ave told 'er, I suppose, about my being engaged.
"Ann!"
All sorts of dreams and impressions that had gone clean out of his mental existence came back to him, changed and brought up to date to fit her altered presence. He thought of how he had gone back to New Romney for his Christmas holidays, determined to kiss her, and of the awful blankness of the discovery that she had gone away.
It seemed incredible now, and yet not wholly incredible, that he had cried real tears for her—how many years was it ago?
§3
Daily I should thank my Maker that He did not appoint me Censor of the world of men. I should temper a fierce injustice with a spasmodic indecision that would prolong rather than mitigate the bitterness of the Day. For human dignity, for all conscious human superiority I should lack the beginnings of charity, for bishops, prosperous schoolmasters, judges and all large respect-pampered souls. And more especially bishops, towards whom I bear an atavistic, Viking grudge, dreaming not infrequently and with invariable zest of galleys and landings and well known living ornaments of the episcopal bench sprinting inland on twinkling gaiters before my thirsty blade—all these people, I say, should treat below their deserts, but, on the other hand, for such as Kipps——. There the exasperating indecisions would come in. The Judgment would be arrested at Kipps. Everyone and everything would wait. You would wait. The balance would sway and sway, and whenever it heeled towards an adverse decision, my finger would set it swaying again. Kings, warriors, statesmen, brilliant women of our first families, personalities, gallants, panting with indignation, headline humanity in general, would stand undamned, unheeded, or be damned in the most casual manner for their importunity, while my eye went about for anything possible that could be said on behalf of Kipps.... Albeit I fear nothing can save him from condemnation upon this present score, that within two days he was talking to Ann again.
One seeks excuses. Overnight there had been an encounter of Chitterlow and young Walshingham in his presence, that had certainly warped his standards. They had called within a few minutes of each other, and the two swayed by virile attentions to Old Methuselah Four Stars, had talked against each other, over and at the hospitable presence of Kipps. Walshingham had seemed to win at the beginning, but finally Chitterlow had made a magnificent display of vociferation and swept him out of existence. At the beginning Chitterlow had opened upon the great profits of playwrights and young Walshingham had capped him at once with a cynical, but impressive, display of knowledge of the High Finance. If Chitterlow boasted his thousands, young Walshingham boasted his hundreds of thousands, and was for a space left in sole possession of the stage, juggling with the wealth of nations. He was going on by way of Financial Politics to the Overman, before Chitterlow recovered from his first check, and came back to victory. "Talking of Women," said Chitterlow, coming in abruptly upon some things not generally known, beyond Walshingham's more immediate circle, about a recently departed Empire-builder; "Talking of Women and the way they Get at a man——"
[Though as a matter of fact they had been talking of the Corruption of Society by Speculation.]
Upon this new topic Chitterlow was soon manifestly invincible. He knew so much, he had known so many. Young Walshingham did his best with epigrams and reservations, but even to Kipps it was evident that this was a book-learned depravity. One felt Walshingham had never known the inner realities of passion. But Chitterlow convinced and amazed. He had run away with girls, he had been run away with by girls, he had been in love with several at a time—"not counting Bessie"—he had loved and lost, he had loved and refrained, and he had loved and failed. He threw remarkable lights upon the moral state of America—in which country he had toured with great success. He set his talk to the tune of one of Mr. Kipling's best known songs. He told an incident of simple, romantic passion, a delirious dream of love and beauty in a Saturday to Monday steamboat trip up the Hudson, and tagged his end with, "I learnt about women from 'er!" After that he adopted the refrain and then lapsed into the praises of Kipling. "Little Kipling," said Chitterlow, with the familiarity of affection, "he knows," and broke into quotation:
(These things, I say, affect the moral standards of the best of us.)
"I'd have liked to have written that," said Chitterlow. "That's Life, that is! But go and put it on the Stage, put even a bit of the Realities of Life on the Stage, and see what they'll do to you! Only Kipling could venture on a job like that. That Poem KNOCKED me! I don't say Kipling hasn't knocked me before and since, but that was a Fair Knock Out. And yet—you know—there's one thing in it ... this:
Well. In my case anyhow—I don't know how much that proves, seeing I'm exceptional in so many things and there's no good denying it—but so far as I'm concerned—I tell you two, but of course you needn't let it go any farther—I've been perfectly faithful to Muriel ever since I married her—ever since.... Not once. Not even by accident have I ever said or done anything in the slightest——." His little, brown eye became pensive after this flattering intimacy and the gorgeous draperies of his abundant voice fell into graver folds. "I learnt about women from 'er," he said impressively.
"Yes," said Walshingham, getting into the hinder spaces of that splendid pause, "a man must know about women. And the only sound way of learning is the experimental method."
"If you want to know about the experimental method, my boy," said Chitterlow, resuming....
So they talked. Ex pede Herculem, as Coote, that cultivated polyglot, would have put it. And in the small hours Kipps went to bed, with his brain whirling with words and whiskey, and sat for an unconscionable time upon his bed edge, musing sadly upon the unmanly monogamy of soul that had cast its shadow upon his career, musing with his thoughts pointing around more and more certainly to the possibility of at least duplicity with Ann.
§4
For some days he had been refraining with some insistence from going off to New Romney again....
I do not know if this may count in palliation of his misconduct. Men, real Strong-Souled, Healthy Men, should be, I suppose, impervious to conversational atmospheres, but I have never claimed for Kipps a place at these high levels. The unquenchable fact remains that the next day he spent the afternoon with Ann and found no scruple in displaying himself a budding lover.
He had met her in the High Street, had stopped her, and almost on the spur of the moment had boldly proposed a walk, "for the sake of old times."
"I don't mind," said Ann.
Her consent almost frightened Kipps. His imagination had not carried him to that. "It would be a lark," said Kipps, and looked up the street and down. "Now?" he said.
"I don't mind a bit, Artie. I was just going for a walk along towards St. Mary's."
"Let's go that way be'ind the church," said Kipps, and presently they found themselves drifting seaward in a mood of pleasant commonplace. For a while they talked of Sid. It went clean out of Kipps' head at that early stage even that Ann was a "girl" according to the exposition of Chitterlow, and for a time he remembered only that she was Ann. But afterwards, with the reek of that talk in his head, he lapsed a little from that personal relation. They came out upon the beach and sat down in a tumbled, pebbly place, where a meagre grass and patches of sea poppy were growing, and Kipps reclined on his elbow and tossed pebbles in his hand, and Ann sat up, sunlit, regarding him. They talked in fragments. They exhausted Sid, they exhausted Ann, and Kipps was chary of his riches.
He declined to a faint love-making. "I got that 'arf sixpence still," he said.
"Reely?"
That changed the key. "I always kept mine, some'ow," said Ann, and there was a pause.
They spoke of how often they had thought of each other during those intervening years. Kipps may have been untruthful, but Ann perhaps was not. "I met people here and there," said Ann; "but I never met anyone quite like you, Artie."
"It's jolly our meeting again, anyhow," said Kipps. "Look at that ship out there. She's pretty close in...."
He had a dull period, became indeed almost pensive, and then he was enterprising for a while. He tossed up his pebbles so that as if by accident they fell on Ann's hand. Then, very penitently, he stroked the place. That would have led to all sorts of coquetries on the part of Flo Banks, for example, but it disconcerted and checked Kipps to find Ann made no objection, smiled pleasantly down on him, with eyes half shut because of the sun. She was taking things very much for granted.
He began to talk, and Chitterlow standards resuming possession of him he said he had never forgotten her.
"I never forgotten you either, Artie," she said. "Funny, isn't it?"
It impressed Kipps also as funny.
He became reminiscent, and suddenly a warm summer's evening came back to him. "Remember them cockchafers, Ann?" he said. But the reality of the evening he recalled was not the chase of cockchafers. The great reality that had suddenly arisen between them was that he had never kissed Ann in his life. He looked up and there were her lips.
He had wanted to very badly, and his memory leaped and annihilated an interval. That old resolution came back to him and all sorts of new resolutions passed out of mind. And he had learnt something since those boyish days. This time he did not ask. He went on talking, his nerves began very faintly to quiver and his mind grew bright.
Presently, having satisfied himself that there was no one to see, he sat up beside her and remarked upon the clearness of the air, and how close Dungeness seemed to them. Then they came upon a pause again.
"Ann," he whispered, and put an arm that quivered about her.
She was mute and unresisting, and, as he was to remember, solemn.
He turned her face towards him, and kissed her lips, and she kissed him back again—kisses frank and tender as a child's.
§5
It was curious that in the retrospect he did not find nearly the satisfaction in this infidelity he had imagined was there. It was no doubt desperately doggish, doggish to an almost Chitterlowesque degree to recline on the beach at Littlestone with a "girl," to make love to her and to achieve the triumph of kissing her, when he was engaged to another "girl" at Folkestone, but somehow these two people were not "girls," they were Ann and Helen. Particularly Helen declined to be considered as a "girl." And there was something in Ann's quietly friendly eyes, in her frank smile, in the naïve pressure of her hand, there was something undefended and welcoming that imparted a flavour to the business upon which he had not counted. He had learnt about women from her. That refrain ran through his mind and deflected his thoughts, but as a matter of fact he had learnt about nothing but himself.
He wanted very much to see Ann some more and explain. He did not clearly know what it was he wanted to explain.
He did not clearly know anything. It is the last achievement of the intelligence to get all of one's life into one coherent scheme, and Kipps was only in a measure more aware of himself as a whole than is a tree. His existence was an affair of dissolving and recurring moods. When he thought of Helen or Ann or any of his friends, he thought sometimes of this aspect and sometimes of that—and often one aspect was finally incongruous with another. He loved Helen, he revered Helen. He was also beginning to hate her with some intensity. When he thought of that expedition to Lympne, profound, vague, beautiful emotions flooded his being; when he thought of paying calls with her perforce, or of her latest comment on his bearing, he found himself rebelliously composing fierce and pungent insults, couched in the vernacular. But Ann, whom he had seen so much less of, was a simpler memory. She was pretty, she was almost softly feminine, and she was possible to his imagination just exactly where Helen was impossible. More than anything else, she carried the charm of respect for him, the slightest glance of her eyes was balm for his perpetually wounded self-conceit.
Chance suggestions it was set the tune of his thoughts, and his state of health and repletion gave the colour. Yet somehow he had this at least almost clear in his mind, that to have gone to see Ann a second time, to have implied that she had been in possession of his thoughts through all this interval, and, above all, to have kissed her, was shabby and wrong. Only unhappily this much of lucidity had come now just a few hours after it was needed.
§6
Four days after this it was that Kipps got up so late. He got up late, cut his chin while shaving, kicked a slipper into his sponge bath and said, "Desh!"
Perhaps you know those intolerable mornings, dear Reader, when you seem to have neither the heart nor the strength to rise, and your nervous adjustments are all wrong and your fingers thumbs, and you hate the very birds for singing. You feel inadequate to any demand whatever. Often such awakenings follow a poor night's rest, and commonly they mean indiscriminate eating, or those subtle mental influences old Kipps ascribed to "Foozle Ile" in the system, or worry. And with Kipps—albeit Chitterlow had again been his guest overnight—assuredly worry had played a leading rôle. Troubles had been gathering upon him for days, there had been a sort of concentration of these hosts of Midian overnight, and in the grey small hours Kipps had held his review.
The predominating trouble marched under this banner:
a banner that was the fac-simile of a card upon his looking glass in the room below. And in relation to this terribly significant document things had come to a pass with Helen that he could only describe in his own expressive idiom as "words."
It had long been a smouldering issue between them that Kipps was not availing himself with any energy or freedom of the opportunities he had of social exercises, much less was he seeking additional opportunities. He had, it was evident, a peculiar dread of that universal afternoon enjoyment, the Call, and Helen made it unambiguously evident that this dread was "silly" and had to be overcome. His first display of this unmanly weakness occurred at the Coote's on the day before he kissed Ann. They were all there, chatting very pleasantly, when the little servant with the big cap announced the younger Miss Wace.
Whereupon Kipps manifested a lively horror and rose partially from his chair. "O Gum!" he protested. "Carn't I go upstairs?"
Then he sank back, for it was too late. Very probably the younger Miss Wace had heard him as she came in.
Helen said nothing of that, though her manner may have shown her surprise, but afterwards she told Kipps he must get used to seeing people, and suggested that he should pay a series of calls with Mrs. Walshingham and herself. Kipps gave a reluctant assent at the time and afterwards displayed a talent for evasion that she had not suspected in him. At last she did succeed in securing him for a call upon Miss Punchafer, of Radnor Park—a particularly easy call because Miss Punchafer being so deaf one could say practically what one liked—and then outside the gate he shirked again. "I can't go in," he said in a faded voice.
"You must," said Helen, beautiful as ever, but even more than a little hard and forbidding.
"I can't."
He produced his handkerchief hastily, thrust it to his face, and regarded her over it with rounded, hostile eyes.
"'Possible," he said in a hoarse, strange voice out of the handkerchief. "Nozzez bleedin'."
But that was the end of his power of resistance, and when the rally for the Anagram Tea occurred she bore down his feeble protests altogether. She insisted. She said frankly, "I am going to give you a good talking to about this," and she did....
From Coote he gathered something of the nature of Anagrams and Anagram parties. An anagram, Coote explained, was a word spelt the same way as another, only differently arranged, as, for instance, T. O. C. O. E. would be an anagram for his own name, Coote.
"T. O. C. O. E.," repeated Kipps very carefully.
"Or T. O. E. C. O.," said Coote.
"Or T. O. E. C. O.," said Kipps, assisting his poor head by nodding it at each letter.
"Toe Company like," he said in his efforts to comprehend.
When Kipps was clear what an anagram meant, Coote came to the second heading, the Tea. Kipps gathered there might be from thirty to sixty people present, and that each one would have an anagram pinned on. "They give you a card to put your guesses on, rather like a dance programme, and then, you know, you go around and guess," said Coote. "It's rather good fun."
"Oo rather!" said Kipps, with simulated gusto.
"It shakes everybody up together," said Coote.
Kipps smiled and nodded....
In the small hours all his painful meditations were threaded by the vision of that Anagram Tea; it kept marching to and fro and in and out of all his other troubles, from thirty to sixty people, mostly ladies and callers, and a great number of the letters of the alphabet, and more particularly P. I. K. P. S. and T. O. E. C. O., and he was trying to make one word out of the whole interminable procession....
This word, as he finally gave it with some emphasis to the silence of the night, was "Demn!"
Then, wreathed as it were in this lettered procession, was the figure of Helen as she had appeared at the moment of "words"; her face a little hard, a little irritated, a little disappointed. He imagined himself going around and guessing under her eye....
He tried to think of other things, without lapsing upon a still deeper uneasiness that was wreathed with yellow sea poppies, and the figures of Buggins, Pierce and Carshot, three murdered Friendships, rose reproachfully in the stillness and changed horrible apprehensions into unspeakable remorse. Last night had been their customary night for the banjo, and Kipps, with a certain tremulous uncertainty, had put old Methuselah amidst a retinue of glasses on the table and opened a box of choice cigars. In vain. They were in no need, it seemed, of his society. But instead Chitterlow had come, anxious to know if it was all right about that syndicate plan. He had declined anything but a very weak whiskey and soda, "just to drink," at least until business was settled, and had then opened the whole affair with an effect of great orderliness to Kipps. Soon he was taking another whiskey by sheer inadvertency, and the complex fabric of his conversation was running more easily from the broad loom of his mind. Into that pattern had interwoven a narrative of extensive alterations in the Pestered Butterfly—the neck and beetle business was to be restored—the story of a grave difference of opinion with Mrs. Chitterlow, where and how to live after the play had succeeded, the reasons why the Hon. Thomas Norgate had never financed a syndicate, and much matter also about the syndicate now under discussion. But if the current of their conversation had been vortical and crowded, the outcome was perfectly clear. Kipps was to be the chief participator in the syndicate, and his contribution was to be two thousand pounds. Kipps groaned and rolled over and found Helen, as it were, on the other side. "Promise me," she had said, "you won't do anything without consulting me."
Kipps at once rolled back to his former position, and for a space lay quite still. He felt like a very young rabbit in a trap.
Then suddenly, with extraordinary distinctness, his heart cried out for Ann, and he saw her as he had seen her at New Romney, sitting amidst the yellow sea poppies with the sunlight on her face. His heart called out for her in the darkness as one calls for rescue. He knew, as though he had known it always, that he loved Helen no more. He wanted Ann, he wanted to hold her and be held by her, to kiss her again and again, to turn his back forever on all these other things....
He rose late, but this terrible discovery was still there, undispelled by cockcrow or the day. He rose in a shattered condition, and he cut himself while shaving, but at last he got into his dining-room and could pull the bell for the hot constituents of his multifarious breakfast. And then he turned to his letters. There were two real letters in addition to the customary electric belt advertisement, continental lottery circular and betting tout's card. One was in a slight mourning envelope and addressed in an unfamiliar hand. This he opened first and discovered a note:
With a hasty movement Kipps turned his mind to the second letter. It was an unusually long one from his Uncle, and ran as follows:
"My Dear Nephew:
"We are considerably startled by your letter though expecting something of the sort and disposed to hope for the best. If the young lady is a relation to the Earl of Beauprés well and good but take care you are not being imposed upon for there are many who will be glad enough to snap you up now your circumstances are altered—I waited on the old Earl once while in service and he was remarkably close with his tips and suffered from corns. A hasty old gent and hard to please—I daresay he has forgotten me altogether—and anyhow there is no need to rake up bygones. To-morrow is bus day and as you say the young lady is living near by we shall shut up shop for there is really nothing doing now what with all the visitors bringing everything with them down to their very children's pails and say how de do to her and give her a bit of a kiss and encouragement if we think her suitable—she will be pleased to see your old uncle—We wish we could have had a look at her first but still there is not much mischief done and hoping that all will turn out well yet I am
"Your affectionate Uncle
"Edward George Kipps.
"My heartburn still very bad. I shall bring over a few bits of rhubub I picked up, a sort you won't get in Folkestone and if possible a good bunch of flowers for the young lady."
"Comin' over to-day," said Kipps, standing helplessly with the letter in his hand.
"'Ow, the Juice——?
"I carn't.
"Kiss 'er!"
"I carn't even face 'er——!"
A terrible anticipation of that gathering framed itself in his mind—a hideous, impossible disaster.
His voice went up to a note of despair, "And it's too late to telegrarf and stop 'em!"
About twenty minutes after this, an outporter in Castle Hill Avenue was accosted by a young man, with a pale, desperate face, an exquisitely rolled umbrella and a heavy Gladstone bag.
"Carry this to the station, will you?" said the young man. "I want to ketch the nex' train to London.... You'll 'ave to look sharp—I 'aven't very much time."
CHAPTER VII LONDON
§1
London was Kipps' third world. There were no doubt other worlds, but Kipps knew only these three; firstly, New Romney and the Emporium, constituting his primary world, his world of origin, which also contained Ann; secondly, the world of culture and refinement, the world of which Coote was chaperon, and into which Kipps was presently to marry, a world it was fast becoming evident absolutely incompatible with the first, and, thirdly, a world still to a large extent unexplored, London. London presented itself as a place of great, grey spaces and incredible multitudes of people, centring about Charing Cross station and the Royal Grand Hotel, and containing at unexpected arbitrary points shops of the most amazing sort, statuary, Squares, Restaurants—where it was possible for clever people like Walshingham to order a lunch item by item, to the waiters' evident respect and sympathy—exhibitions of incredible things—the Walshinghams had taken him to the Arts and Crafts and to a picture gallery—and theatres. London, moreover, is rendered habitable by hansom cabs. Young Walshingham was a natural cab taker, he was an all-round large minded young man, and he had in the course of their two days' stay taken Kipps into no less than nine, so that Kipps was singularly not afraid of these vehicles. He knew that whereever you were, so soon as you were thoroughly lost you said "Hi!" to a cab, and then "Royal Grand Hotel." Day and night these trusty conveyances are returning the strayed Londoner back to his point of departure, and were it not for their activity in a little while the whole population, so vast and incomprehensible is the intricate complexity of this great city, would be hopelessly lost forever. At any rate, that is how the thing presented itself to Kipps, and I have heard much the same from visitors from America.
His train was composed of corridor carriages, and he forgot his trouble for a time in the wonders of this modern substitute for railway compartments. He went from the non-smoking to the smoking carriage and smoked a cigarette, and strayed from his second-class carriage to a first and back. But presently Black Care got aboard the train and came and sat beside him. The exhilaration of escape had evaporated now, and he was presented with a terrible picture of his Aunt and Uncle arriving at his lodgings and finding him fled. He had left a hasty message that he was called away suddenly on business, "ver' important business," and they were to be sumptuously entertained. His immediate motive had been his passionate dread of an encounter between these excellent but unrefined old people and the Walshinghams, but now that end was secured, he could see how thwarted and exasperated they would be.
How to explain to them?
He ought never to have written to tell them!
He ought to have got married and told them afterwards.
He ought to have consulted Helen.
"Promise me," she had said.
"Oh, desh!" said Kipps, and got up and walked back into the smoking car and began to consume cigarettes.
Suppose, after all, they found out the Walshingham's address and went there!
At Charing Cross, however, there were distractions again. He took a cab in an entirely Walshingham manner, and was pleased to note the enhanced respect of the cabman when he mentioned the Royal Grand. He followed Walshingham's routine on their previous visit with perfect success. They were very nice in the office, and gave him an excellent room at fourteen shillings the night.
He went up and spent a considerable time in examining the furniture of his room, scrutinising himself in its various mirrors and sitting on the edge of the bed whistling. It was a vast and splendid apartment, and cheap at fourteen shillings. But, finding the figure of Ann inclined to resume possession of his mind, he roused himself and descended by the staircase after a momentary hesitation before the lift. He had thought of lunch, but he drifted into the great drawing-room and read a guide to the Hotels of Europe for a space, until a doubt whether he was entitled to use this palatial apartment without extra charge arose in his mind. He would have liked something to eat very much now, but his inbred terror of the table was very strong. He did at last get by a porter in uniform towards the dining-room, but at the sight of a number of waiters and tables, with remarkable complications of knives and glasses, terror seized him, and he backed out again, with a mumbled remark to the waiter in the doorway about this not being the way.
He hovered in the hall and lounge until he thought the presiding porter regarded him with suspicion, and then went up to his room again by the staircase, got his hat and umbrella and struck boldly across the courtyard. He would go to a restaurant instead.
He had a moment of elation in the gateway. He felt all the Strand must notice him as he emerged through the great gate of the Hotel. "One of these here rich swells," they would say. "Don't they do it just!" A cabman touched his hat. "No fear," said Kipps, pleasantly.
Then he remembered he was hungry again.
Yet he decided he was in no great hurry for lunch, in spite of an internal protest, and turned eastward along the Strand in a leisurely manner. He tried to find a place to suit him soon enough. He tried to remember the sort of things Walshingham had ordered. Before all things he didn't want to go into a place and look like a fool. Some of these places rook you dreadful, besides making fun of you. There was a place near Essex Street where there was a window brightly full of chops, tomatoes and lettuce. He stopped at this and reflected for a time, and then it occurred to him that you were expected to buy these things raw and cook them at home. Anyhow, there was sufficient doubt in the matter to stop him. He drifted on to a neat window with champagne bottles, a dish of asparagus and a framed menu of a two shilling lunch. He was about to enter, when fortunately he perceived two waiters looking at him over the back screen of the window with a most ironical expression, and he sheered off at once. There was a wonderful smell of hot food half way down Fleet Street and a nice looking Tavern with several doors, but he could not decide which door. His nerve was going under the strain.
He hesitated at Farringdon Street and drifted up to St. Paul's and round the church yard, full chiefly of dead bargains in the shop windows, to Cheapside. But now Kipps was getting demoralised, and each house of refreshment seemed to promise still more complicated obstacles to food. He didn't know how you went in and what was the correct thing to do with your hat, he didn't know what you said to the waiter or what you called the different things; he was convinced absolutely he would "fumble," as Shalford would have said, and look like a fool. Somebody might laugh at him! The hungrier he got the more unendurable was the thought that anyone should laugh at him. For a time he considered an extraordinary expedient to account for his ignorance. He would go in and pretend to be a foreigner and not know English. Then they might understand.... Presently he had drifted into a part of London where there did not seem to be any refreshment places at all.
"Oh, desh!" said Kipps, in a sort of agony of indecisiveness. "The very nex' place I see, in I go."
The next place was a fried fish shop in a little side street, where there were also sausages on a gas-lit grill.
He would have gone in, but suddenly a new scruple came to him, that he was too well dressed for the company he could see dimly through the steam sitting at the counter and eating with a sort of nonchalant speed.
§2
He was half minded to resort to a hansom and brave the terrors of the dining-room of the Royal Grand—they wouldn't know why he had gone out really—when the only person he knew in London appeared (as the only person one does know will do in London) and slapped him on the shoulder. Kipps was hovering at a window at a few yards from the fish shop, pretending to examine some really strikingly cheap pink baby linen, and trying to settle finally about those sausages.
"Hullo, Kipps!" cried Sid; "spending the millions?"
Kipps turned, and was glad to perceive no lingering vestige of the chagrin that had been so painful at New Romney. Sid looked grave and important, and he wore a quite new silk hat that gave a commercial touch to a generally socialistic costume. For a moment the sight of Sid uplifted Kipps wonderfully. He saw him as a friend and helper, and only presently did it come clearly into his mind that this was the brother of Ann.
He made amiable noises.
"I've just been up this way," Sid explained, "buying a second-hand 'namelling stove.... I'm going to 'namel myself."
"Lor'!" said Kipps.
"Yes. Do me a lot of good. Let the customer choose his colour. See? What brings you up?"
Kipps had a momentary vision of his foiled Uncle and Aunt. "Jest a bit of a change," he said.
Sid came to a swift decision. "Come down to my little show. I got someone I'd like to see talking to you."
Even then Kipps did not think of Ann in this connection.
"Well," he said, trying to invent an excuse on the spur of the moment. "Fact is," he explained, "I was jest looking 'round to get a bit of lunch."
"Dinner, we call it," said Sid. "But that's all right. You can't get anything to eat hereabout. If you're not too haughty to do a bit of slumming, there's some mutton spoiling for me now——"
The word "mutton" affected Kipps greatly.
"It won't take us 'arf an hour," said Sid, and Kipps was carried.
He discovered another means of London locomotion in the Underground Railway, and recovered his self-possession in that interest. "You don't mind going third?" asked Sid, and Kipps said, "Nort a bit of it." They were silent in the train for a time, on account of strangers in the carriage, and then Sid began to explain who it was that he wanted Kipps to meet. "It's a chap named Masterman—do you no end of good.
"He occupies our first floor front room, you know. It isn't so much for gain I let as company. We don't want the whole 'ouse, and another, I knew the man before. Met him at our Sociological, and after a bit he said he wasn't comfortable where he was. That's how it came about. He's a first-class chap—first-class. Science! You should see his books!
"Properly he's a sort of journalist. He's written a lot of things, but he's been too ill lately to do very much. Poetry he's written, all sorts. He writes for the Commonweal sometimes, and sometimes he reviews books. 'E's got 'eaps of books—'eaps. Besides selling a lot.
"He knows a regular lot of people, and all sorts of things. He's been a dentist, and he's a qualified chemist, an' I seen him often reading German and French. Taught 'imself. He was here——"
Sid indicated South Kensington, which had come opportunely outside the carriage windows, with a nod of his head, "—three years. Studying science. But you'll see 'im. When he really gets to talking—he pours it out."
"Ah!" said Kipps, nodding sympathetically, with his two hands on his umbrella knob.
"He'll do big things some day," said Sid. "He's written a book on science already. 'Physiography,' it's called. 'Elementary Physiography'! Some day he'll write an Advanced—when he gets time."
He let this soak into Kipps.
"I can't introduce you to Lords and swells," he went on, "but I can show you a Famous Man, that's going to be. I can do that. Leastways—unless——"
Sid hesitated.
"He's got a frightful cough," he said.
"He won't care to talk with me," weighed Kipps.
"That's all right; he won't mind. He's fond of talking. He'd talk to anyone," said Sid, reassuringly, and added a perplexing bit of Londonized Latin. "He doesn't pute anything, non alienum. You know."
"I know," said Kipps, intelligently, over his umbrella knob, though of course that was altogether untrue.
§3
Kipps found Sid's shop a practical looking establishment, stocked with the most remarkable collection of bicycles and pieces of bicycle that he had ever beheld. "My hiring stock," said Sid, with a wave to this ironmongery, "and there's the best machine at a democratic price in London, The Red-Flag, built by me. See?"
He indicated a graceful, grey-brown framework in the window. "And there's my stock of accessories—store prices.
"Go in for motors a bit," added Sid.
"Mutton?" said Kipps, not hearing him distinctly.
"Motors, I said.... 'Owever, Mutton Department 'ere," and he opened a door that had a curtain guarded window in its upper panel, to reveal a little room with red walls and green furniture, with a white clothed table and the generous promise of a meal. "Fanny!" he shouted. "Here's Art Kipps."
A bright-eyed young woman of five or six and twenty in a pink print appeared, a little flushed from cooking, and wiped a hand on an apron and shook hands and smiled, and said it would all be ready in a minute. She went on to say she had heard of Kipps and his luck, and meanwhile Sid vanished to draw the beer, and returned with two glasses for himself and Kipps.
"Drink that," said Sid, and Kipps felt all the better for it.
"I give Mr. Masterman 'is upstairs a hour ago," said Mrs. Sid. "I didn't think 'e ought to wait."
A rapid succession of brisk movements on the part of everyone, and they were all four at dinner—the fourth person being Master Walt Whitman Pornick, a cheerful young gentleman of one and a half, who was given a spoon to hammer on the table with to keep him quiet, and who got "Kipps" right at the first effort and kept it all through the meal, combining it first with this previous acquisition, and then that. "Peacock Kipps" said Master Walt, at which there was great laughter, and also "More Mutton, Kipps."
"He's a regular oner," said Mrs. Sid, "for catching up words. You can't say a word but what 'e's on to it."
There were no serviettes and less ceremony, and Kipps thought he had never enjoyed a meal so much. Everyone was a little excited by the meeting and chatting, and disposed to laugh, and things went off easily from the very beginning. If there was a pause Master Walt filled it in. Mrs. Sid, who tempered her enormous admiration for Sid's intellect and his socialism and his severe business methods by a motherly sense of her sex and seniority, spoke of them both as "you boys," and dilated—when she was not urging Kipps to have some more of this or that—on the disparity between herself and her husband.
"Shouldn't ha' thought there was a year between you," said Kipps; "you seem jest a match."
"I'm his match, anyhow," said Mrs. Sid, and no epigram of young Walshingham's was ever better received.
"Match," said young Walt, coming in on the trail of the joke and getting a round for himself.
Any sense of superior fortune had long vanished from Kipps' mind, and he found himself looking at host and hostess with enormous respect. Really, old Sid was a wonderful chap, here in his own house at two and twenty, carving his own mutton and lording it over wife and child. No legacies needed by him! And Mrs. Sid, so kind and bright and hearty! And the child, old Sid's child! Old Sid had jumped round a bit. It needed the sense of his fortune at the back of his mind to keep Kipps from feeling abject. He resolved he'd buy young Walt something tremendous in toys at the first opportunity.
"Drop more beer, Art?"
"Right you are, old man."
"Cut Mr. Kipps a bit more bread, Sid."
"Can't I pass you a bit?"
Sid was all right, Sid was, and there was no mistake about that.
It was growing up in his mind that Sid was the brother of Ann, but he said nothing about her for excellent reasons. After all, because he remembered Sid's irritation at her name when they had met in New Romney seemed to show a certain separation. They didn't tell each other much.... He didn't know how things might be between Ann and Sid, either.
Still, for all that, Sid was Ann's brother.
The furniture of the room did not assert itself very much above the cheerful business at the table, but Kipps was impressed with the idea that it was pretty. There was a dresser at the end with a number of gay plates and a mug or so, a Labour Day poster, by Walter Crane, on the wall, and through the glass and over the blind of the shop door one had a glimpse of the bright coloured advertisement cards of bicycle dealers, and a shelfful of boxes labelled, The Paragon Bell, The Scarum Bell, and The Patent Omi! Horn....
It seemed incredible that he had been in Folkestone that morning, and even now his Aunt and Uncle——!
Brrr. It didn't do to think of his Aunt and Uncle.
§4
When Sid repeated his invitation to come and see Masterman, Kipps, now flushed with beer and Irish stew, said he didn't mind if he did, and after a preliminary shout from Sid that was answered by a voice and a cough, the two went upstairs.
"Masterman's a rare one," said Sid over his arm and in an undertone. "You should hear him speak at a meeting.... If he's in form, that is."
He rapped and went into a large, untidy room.
"This is Kipps," he said. "You know. The chap I told you of. With twelve 'undred a year."
Masterman sat gnawing at an empty pipe and as close to the fire as though it was alight and the season midwinter. Kipps concentrated upon him for a space, and only later took in something of the frowsy furniture, the little bed half behind, and evidently supposed to be wholly behind, a careless screen, the spittoon by the fender, the remains of a dinner on the chest of drawers and the scattered books and papers. Masterman's face showed him a man of forty or more, with curious hollows at the side of his forehead and about his eyes. His eyes were very bright; there was a spot of red in his cheeks, and the wiry black moustache under his short, red nose had been trimmed with scissors into a sort of brush along his upper lip. His teeth were darkened ruins. His jacket collar was turned up about a knitted white neck wrap, and his sleeves betrayed no cuffs. He did not rise to greet Kipps, but held out a thin wristed hand and pointed with the other to a bedroom arm chair.
"Glad to see you," he said. "Sit down and make yourself at home. Will you smoke?"
Kipps said he would, and produced his store. He was about to take one, and then, with a civil afterthought, handed the packet first to Masterman and Sid. Masterman pretended surprise to find his pipe out before he took one. There was an interlude of matches. Sid pushed the end of the screen out of his way, sat down on the bed thus frankly admitted, and prepared, with a certain quiet satisfaction of manner, to witness Masterman's treatment of Kipps.
"And how does it feel to have twelve hundred a year?" asked Masterman, holding his cigarette to his nose tip in a curious manner.
"It's rum," confided Kipps, after a reflective interval. "It feels juiced rum."
"I never felt it," said Masterman.
"It takes a bit of getting into," said Kipps. "I can tell you that."
Masterman smoked and regarded Kipps with curious eyes.
"I expect it does," he said presently.
"And has it made you perfectly happy?" he asked, abruptly.
"I couldn't 'ardly say that," said Kipps.
Masterman smiled. "No," he said. "Has it made you much happier?"
"It did at first."
"Yes. But you got used to it. How long, for example, did the real delirious excitement last?"
"Oo, that! Perhaps a week," said Kipps.
Masterman nodded his head. "That's what discourages me from amassing wealth," he said to Sid. "You adjust yourself. It doesn't last. I've always had an inkling of that, and it's interesting to get it confirmed. I shall go on sponging for a bit longer on you, I think."
"You don't," said Sid. "No fear."
"Twenty-four thousand pounds," said Masterman, and blew a cloud of smoke. "Lord! Doesn't it worry you?"
"It is a bit worrying at times.... Things 'appen."
"Going to marry?"
"Yes."
"H'm. Lady, I guess, of a superior social position?"
"Rather," said Kipps. "Cousin to the Earl of Beauprés."
Masterman readjusted his long body with an air of having accumulated all the facts he needed. He snuggled his shoulder-blades down into the chair and raised his angular knees. "I doubt," he said, flicking cigarette ash into the atmosphere, "if any great gain or loss of money does—as things are at present—make more than the slightest difference in one's happiness. It ought to—if money was what it ought to be, the token for given service; one ought to get an increase in power and happiness for every pound one got. But the plain fact is the times are out of joint, and money—money, like everything else, is a deception and a disappointment."
He turned his face to Kipps and enforced his next words with the index finger of his lean, lank hand. "If I thought otherwise," he said, "I should exert myself to get some. But, if one sees things clearly, one is so discouraged. So confoundedly discouraged.... When you first got your money, you thought that it meant you might buy just anything you fancied?"
"I was a bit that way," said Kipps.
"And you found that you couldn't. You found that for all sorts of things it was a question of where to buy and how to buy, and what you didn't know how to buy with your money, straight away this world planted something else upon you——"
"I got rather done over a banjo first day," said Kipps. "Leastways, my Uncle says."
"Exactly," said Masterman.
Sid began to speak from the bed. "That's all very well, Masterman," he said, "but, after all, money is Power, you know. You can do all sorts of things——"
"I'm talking of happiness," said Masterman. "You can do all sorts of things with a loaded gun in the Hammersmith Broadway, but nothing—practically—that will make you or any one else very happy. Nothing. Power's a different matter altogether. As for happiness, you want a world in order before money or property, or any of those things that have any real value, and this world, I tell you, is hopelessly out of joint. Man is a social animal with a mind nowadays that goes around the globe, and a community cannot be happy in one part and unhappy in another. It's all or nothing, no patching any more for ever. It is the standing mistake of the world not to understand that. Consequently people think there is a class or order somewhere, just above them or just below them, or a country or place somewhere, that is really safe and happy. The fact is, Society is one body, and it is either well or ill. That's the law. This society we live in is ill. It's a fractious, feverish invalid, gouty, greedy and ill-nourished. You can't have a happy left leg with neuralgia, or a happy throat with a broken leg. That's my position, and that's the knowledge you'll come to. I'm so satisfied of it that I sit here and wait for my end quite calmly, sure that I can't better things by bothering—in my time, and so far as I am concerned, that is. I'm not even greedy any more—my egotism's at the bottom of a pond, with a philosophical brick around its neck. The world is ill, my time is short and my strength is small. I'm as happy here as anywhere."