Kipps - H. G. Wells (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📗

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’ve 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 Beaupr��s.’

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 given for 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 other wise,’ 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?’

‘It was a bit that way,’ said Kipps.

‘And you found 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 so.’

‘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 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 round 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, 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 round its neck. The world is ill, my time is short, and my strength is small. I’m as happy here as anywhere.’

He coughed, was silent for a moment, then brought the index finger round to Kipps again. ‘You’ve had the opportunity of sampling two grades of society, and you don’t find the new people you’re among much better or any happier than the old?’

‘No,’ said Kipps reflectively. ‘No. I ‘aven’t seen it quite like that before, but—No. They’re not.’

‘And you might go all up the scale and down the scale and find the same thing. Man’s a gregarious beast, a gregarious beast, and no money will buy you out of your own time—any more than out of your own skin. All the way up and all the way down the scale there’s the same discontent. No one is quite sure where they stand, and every one’s fretting. The herd’s uneasy and feverish. All the old tradition goes or has gone, and there’s no one to make a new tradition. Where are your nobles now? Where are your gentlemen? They vanished directly the peasant found out he wasn’t happy and ceased to be a peasant. There’s big men and little men mixed up together, and that’s all. None of us know where we are. Your cads in a bank holiday train, and your cads on a two-thousand-pound motor, except for a difference in scale, there’s not a pin to choose between them. Your smart society is as low and vulgar and uncomfortable for a balanced soul as a gin palace, no more and no less; there’s no place or level of honour or fine living left in the world, so what’s the good of climbing?’

‘ ‘Ear, ‘ear,’ said Sid.

‘It’s true,’ said Kipps.

‘I don’t climb,’ said Masterman, and accepted Kipps’ silent offer of another cigarette.

‘No,’ he said. ‘This world is out of joint. It’s broken up, and I doubt if it’ll heal. I doubt very much if it’ll heal. We’re in the beginning of the Sickness of the World.’

He rolled his cigarette in his lean fingers and repeated with satisfaction, ‘The Sickness of the World.’

‘It’s we’ve got to make it better,’ said Sid, and looked at Kipps.

‘Ah, Sid’s an optimist,’ said Masterman.

‘So you are, most times,’ said Sid.

Kipps lit another cigarette with an air of intelligent participation.

‘Frankly,’ said Masterman, recrossing his legs and expelling a jet of smoke luxuriously, ‘frankly, I think this civilisation of ours is on the topple.’

‘There’s Socialism,’ said Sid.

‘There’s no imagination to make use of it.’

‘We’ve got to make one,’ said Sid.

‘In a couple of centuries, perhaps,’ said Masterman. ‘But meanwhile we’re going to have a pretty acute attack of universal confusion. Universal confusion. Like one of those crushes when men are killed and maimed for no reason at all, going into a meeting or crowding for a train. Commercial and Industrial Stresses. Political Exploitation. Tariff Wars. Revolutions. All the bloodshed that will come of some fools calling half the white world yellow. These things alter the attitude of everybody to everybody. Everybody’s going to feel ‘em. Every fool in the world panting and shoving. We’re all going to be as happy and comfortable as a household during a removal. What else can we expect?’

Kipps was moved to speak, but not in answer to Masterman’s inquiry. ‘I’ve never rightly got the ‘eng of this Socialism,’ he said. ‘What’s it going to do, like?’

They had been imagining that he had some elementary idea in the matter, but as soon as he had made it clear that he hadn’t Sid plunged at exposition, and in a little while Masterman, abandoning his pose of the detached man ready to die, joined in. At first he joined in only to correct Sid’s version, but afterwards he took control. His manner changed. He sat up and rested his elbow on his knees, and his cheek flushed a little. He expanded his case against property and the property class with such vigour that Kipps was completely carried away, and never thought of asking for a clear vision of the thing that would fill the void this abolition might create. For a time he quite forgot his own private opulence. And it was as if something had been lit in Masterman. His languor passed. He enforced his words by gestures of his long thin hands. And as he passed swiftly from point to point of his argument, it was evident he grew angry.

‘To-day,’ he said, ‘the world is ruled by rich men; they may do almost anything they like with the world. And what are they doing? Laying it waste!’

‘Hear, hear!’ said Sid, very sternly.

Masterman stood up, gaunt and long, thrust his hands in his pockets, and turned his back to the fireplace.

‘Collectively, the rich to-day have neither heart nor imagination. No! They own machinery, they have knowledge and instruments and powers beyond all previous dreaming, and what are they doing with them? Think what they are doing with them, Kipps, and think what they might do. God gives them a power like the motor-car, and all they can do with it is to go careering about the roads in goggled masks, killing children and making machinery hateful to the souls of men! (‘True,’ said Sid, ‘true.’) God gives them means of communication, power unparalleled of every sort, time, and absolute liberty! They waste it all in folly! Here under their feet (and Kipps’ eyes followed the direction of a lean index finger to the hearthrug), under their accursed wheels, the great mass of men festers and breeds in darkness, darkness those others make by standing in the light. The darkness breeds and breeds. It knows no better… Unless you can crawl or pander or rob you must stay in the stew you are born in. And those rich beasts above claw and clutch as though they had nothing! They grudge us our schools, they grudge us a gleam of light and air, they cheat us, and then seek to forget us… There is no rule, no guidance, only accidents and happy flukes… Our multitudes of poverty increase, and this crew of rulers makes no provision, foresees nothing, anticipates nothing!’

He paused, and made a step, and stood over Kipps in a white heat of anger. Kipps nodded in a non-committal manner, and looked hard and rather gloomily at his host’s slipper as he talked.

‘It isn’t as though they had something to show for the waste they make of us, Kipps. They haven’t. They are ugly and cowardly and mean. Look at their women! Painted, dyed, and drugged, hiding their ugly shapes under a load of dress! There isn’t a woman in the swim of society at the present time who wouldn’t sell herself body and soul, who wouldn’t lick the boots of a Jew or marry a nigger, rather than live decently on a hundred a year! On what would be wealth for you or me! They know it. They know we know it… No one believes in them. No one believes in nobility