Part 5
It was about the middle of May that the publisher assured him of this. In June the solicitors of a Professor at Yale acting for the learned man in this country, threatened an action concerning a passage in the book which was based entirely upon the Professor's copyright work. Mr. Foley admitted his high indebtedness to the Professor, and wore a troubled look for days. He had always thought it quite legitimate in the world of art to use another person's work if one acknowledged it. At last the thing was settled out of court for quite a small sum, £150 or £200, or something like that.
Then everything was quiet and the sales went very slowly. He only sold a half-dozen all the rest of the summer.
In the autumn the publisher wrote him a note asking whether he might act upon Clause 15 of the contract. Mr. Foley was a business man. He looked up the contract and there he saw these words:
"If after due time has elapsed in the opinion of the publisher, a book shall not be warrantable at its existing price, change of price shall be made in it at the discretion of the publisher or of the author, or both, or each, subject to the conditions of Clause 9."
Turning to Clause 9, Mr. Foley discovered the words:
"All questions of price, advertisements, binding, paper, printing, etc., shall be vested in Messrs. Towkem Bingo and Platt, hereinafter called the Publishers."
He puzzled a great deal about these two clauses, and at last he thought, "Oh, well, they know more than I do about it," so he just telegraphed back, "Yes."
On the first of the New Year Mr. Foley got a most astonishing document. It was a printed sheet with a lot of lines written in red ink and an account. On the one side there was "By sales £18," then there was a long red line drawn down like a Z, and at the bottom, "£241 17s. 4½d.," and in front of this the word "Balance," then the two were added together and made £259 17s. 4½d. Under this sum there were two lines drawn.
On the other side of the document there was a whole regiment of items, one treading upon another's heels. There was paper, and printing, and corrections, binding, warehousing, storage, cataloguing, advertising, travelling, circularizing, packing, and what I may call with due respect to the reader, "the devil and all." The whole of which added up to no less than the monstrous sum of £519 14s. 9d. Under this was written in small letters in red ink, "Less 50% as per agreement," and then at the bottom that nasty figure, "£259 17s. 4½d.," and there was a little request in a round hand that the balance of £241 17s. 4½d. should be paid at Mr. Foley's convenience.
Mr. Foley, white with rage, acted as a business man always should. He wrote a short note refusing to pay a penny, and demanding the rest of the unsold copies. He got a lengthier and stronger note from Messrs. Towkem and Thingummebob, referring to his letter, to Clause 9 and to Clause 15, informing him that the remainder of the stock had been sold at a penny each to a firm of papermakers in the North of England, and respectfully pressing for immediate payment.
Mr. Foley put the matter in the hands of his solicitors and they ran him up a bill for £37 odd, but it was well worth it because they persuaded him not to go into court, so in the long run he had to pay no more than £278 17s. 4½d., unless you count the postage and the travelling.
Now you know what happened to Mr. Foley and his book, and what will happen to _you_ if you are a rich man and poach on my preserves.
XII
THE SERVANTS OF THE RICH
Do you mark there, down in the lowest point and innermost funnel of Hell Fire Pit, souls writhing in smoke, themselves like glowing smoke and tortured in the flame? You ask me what they are. These are the Servants of the Rich: the men who in their mortal life opened the doors of the Great Houses and drove the carriages and sneered at the unhappy guests.
Those larger souls that bear the greatest doom and manifest the more dreadful suffering, they are the Butlers boiling in molten gold.
"What!" you cry, "is there then, indeed, as I once heard in childhood, justice for men and an equal balance, and a final doom for evil deeds?" There is! Look down into the murky hollow and revere the awful accomplishment of human things.
These are the men who would stand with powder on their heads like clowns, dressed in fantastic suits of gold and plush, with an ugly scorn upon their faces, and whose pleasure it was (while yet their time of probation lasted) to forget every human bond and to cast down the nobler things in man: treating the artist as dirt and the poet as a clown; and beautiful women, if they were governesses or poor relations or in any way dependents, as a meet object for silent mockery. But now their time is over and they have reaped the harvest which they sowed. Look and take comfort, all you who may have suffered at their hands.
Come closer. See how each separate sort suffers its peculiar penalty. There go a hopeless shoal through the reek: their doom is an eternal sleeplessness and a nakedness in the gloom. There is nothing to comfort them, not even memory: and they know that for ever and for ever they must plunge and swirl, driven before the blasts, now hot, now icy, of their everlasting pain. These are those men who were wont to come into the room of the Poor Guest at early morning with a steadfast and assured step and a look of insult. These are those who would take the tattered garments and hold them at arm's length as much as to say: "What rags these scribblers wear!" and then, casting them over the arm with a gesture that meant: "Well, they must be brushed, but Heaven knows if they will stand it without coming to pieces!" would next discover in the pockets a great quantity of middle-class things, and notably loose tobacco.
These are they that would then take out with the utmost patience, private letters, money, pocket-books, knives, dirty crumpled stamps, scraps of newspapers, broken cigarettes, pawn tickets, keys, and much else, muttering within themselves so that one could almost hear it with their lips: "What a jumble these paupers stuff their shoddy with! They do not even know that in the Houses of the Great it is not customary to fill the pockets! They do not know that the Great remove at night from their pockets such few trinkets of diamonded gold as they may contain. Where were they born or bred? To think that _I_ should have to serve such cattle! No matter! He has brought money with him I am glad to see--borrowed, no doubt--and I will bleed him well."
Such thoughts one almost heard as one lay in the Beds of the Great despairing. Then one would see him turn one's socks inside out, which is a ritual with the horrid tribe. Then a great bath would be trundled in and he would set beside it a great can and silently pronounce the judgment that whatever else was forgiven the middle-class one thing would not be forgiven them--the neglect of the bath, of the splashing about of the water and of the adequate wetting of the towel.
All these things we have suffered, you and I, at their hands. But be comforted. They writhe in Hell with their fellows.
That man who looked us up and down so insolently when the great doors were opened in St. James' Square and who thought one's boots so comic. He too, and all his like, burn separately. So does that fellow with the wine that poured it out ungenerously, and clearly thought that we were in luck's way to get the bubbly stuff at all in any measure. He that conveyed his master's messages with a pomp that was instinct with scorn and he that drove you to the station, hardly deigning to reply to your timid sentences and knowing well your tremors and your abject ill-ease. Be comforted. He too burns.
It is the custom in Hell when this last batch of scoundrels, the horsey ones, come up in batches to be dealt with by the authorities thereof, for them first to be asked in awful tones how many pieces of silver they have taken from men below the rank of a squire, or whose income was less than a thousand pounds a year, and the truth on this they are compelled by Fate to declare, whereupon, before their tortures begin, they receive as many stripes as they took florins: nor is there any defect in the arrangement of divine justice in their regard, save that the money is not refunded to us.
Cooks, housemaids, poor little scullery-maids, under-gardeners, estate carpenters of all kinds, small stable lads, and in general all those humble Servants of the Rich who are debarred by their insolent superiors from approaching the guests and neither wound them with contemptuous looks, nor follow these up by brigandish demands for money, _these_ you will not see in this Pit of Fire. For them is reserved a high place in Paradise, only a little lower than that supreme and cloudy height of bliss wherein repose the happy souls of all who on this earth have been Journalists.
But Game-Keepers, more particularly those who make a distinction and will take nothing less than gold (nay _Paper_!), and Grooms of the Chamber, and all such, these suffer torments for ever and for ever. So has Immutable Justice decreed and thus is the offended majesty of man avenged.
And what, you will ask me perhaps at last, what of the dear old family servants, who are _so_ good, _so_ kind, _so_ attached to Master Arthur and to Lady Jane?
Ah!... Of these the infernal plight is such that I dare not set it down!
There is a special secret room in Hell where their villainous hypocrisy and that accursed mixture of yielding and of false independence wherewith they flattered and be-fooled their masters; their thefts, their bullying of beggarmen, have at last a full reward. Their eyes are no longer sly and cautious, lit with the pretence of affection, nor are they here rewarded with good fires and an excess of food, and perquisites and pensions. But they sit hearthless, jibbering with cold, and they stare broken at the prospect of a dark Eternity. And now and then one or another, an aged serving-man or a white-haired housekeeper, will wring their hands and say: "Oh, that I had once, only once, shown in my mortal life some momentary gleam of honour, independence, or dignity! Oh, that I had but once stood up in my freedom and spoken to the Rich as I should! Then it would have been remembered for me and I should now have been spared this place--but it is too late!"
For there is no repentance known among the Servants of the Rich, nor any exception to their vileness; they are hated by men when they live, and when they die they must for all eternity consort with demons.
XIII
THE JOKE
There are two kinds of jokes, those jokes that are funny because they are true, and those jokes that would be funny anyhow. Think it out and you will find that that is a great truth. Now the joke I have here for the delectation of the broken-hearted is of the first sort. It is funny because it is true. It is about a man whom I really saw and really knew and touched, and on occasions treated ill. He was. The sunlight played upon his form. Perhaps he may still flounder under the light of the sun, and not yet have gone down into that kingdom whose kings are less happy than the poorest hind upon the upper fields.
It was at College that I knew him and I retained my acquaintance with him--Oh, I retained it in a loving and cherishing manner--until he was grown to young manhood. I would keep it still did Fate permit me so to do, for he was a treasure. I have never met anything so complete for the purposes of laughter, though I am told there are many such in the society which bred his oafish form.
He was a noble in his own country, which was somewhere in the pine-forests of the Germanies, and his views of social rank were far, far too simple for the silent subtlety of the English Rich. In his poor turnip of a mind he ordered all men thus:
First, reigning sovereigns and their families.
Secondly, mediatized people.
Third, Princes.
Fourth, Dukes.
Fifth, Nobles.
Then came a little gap, and after that little gap The Others.
Most of us in our College were The Others. But he, as I have said, was a noble in his distant land.
He had not long been among the young Englishmen when he discovered that a difficult tangle of titles ran hither and thither among them like random briars through an undergrowth. There were Honourables, and there were Lords, and Heaven knows what, and there were two Sirs, and altogether it puzzled him.
He couldn't understand why a man should be called Mr. Jinks, and his brother Lord Blefauscu, and then if a man could be called Lord Blefauscu while his father Lord Brobdignag was alive, how was it that quite a Fresher should be called Sir Howkey--no--he was Sir John Howkey: and when the Devil did one put in the Christian name and when didn't one, and why should one, and what was the order of precedence among all these?
I think that last point puzzled him more than the rest, for in his own far distant land in the pine-woods, where peasants uglier than sin grovelled over the potato crop and called him "Baron," there were no such devilish contraptions, but black was black and white was white. Here in this hypocritical England, to which his father had sent him as an exile, everything was so wrapped up in deceiving masks! There was the Captain of the Eleven, or the President of the Boat Club. By the time he had mastered that there might be great men not only without the actual title (he had long ago despaired of that), but without so much as cousinship to one, he would stumble upon a fellow with nothing whatsoever to distinguish him, not even the High Jump, and yet "in" with the highest. It tortured him I can tell you! After he had sat upon several Fourth Year men (he himself a Fresher), from an error as to their rank, after he had been duly thrown into the water, blackened as to his face with blacking, sentenced to death in a court-martial and duly shot with a blank cartridge (an unpleasant thing by the way looking down a barrel); after he had had his boots, of which there were seven pair, packed with earth, and in each one a large geranium planted; after all these things had happened to him in his pursuit of an Anglo-German understanding, he approached a lanky, pot-bellied youth whom he had discovered with certitude to be the cousin of a Duke, and begged him secretly to befriend him in a certain matter, which was this:
The Baron out of the Germanies proposed to give a dinner to no less than thirty people and he begged the pot-bellied youth in all secrecy to collect for him an assembly worthy of his rank and to give him privately not only their names but their actual precedence according to which he would arrange them at the table upon his right and upon his left.
But what did the pot-bellied youth do? Why he went out and finding all his friends one after the other he said:
"You know Sausage?"
"Yes," said they, for all the University knew Sausage.
"Well, he is going to give a dinner," said the pot-bellied one, who was also slow of speech, "and you have to come, but I'm going to say you are the Duke of Rochester" (or whatever title he might have chosen). And so speaking, and so giving the date and place he would go on to the next. Then, when he had collected not thirty but sixty of all his friends and acquaintances, he sought out the noble Teuton again and told him that he could not possibly ask only thirty men without lifelong jealousies and hatreds, so sixty were coming, and the Teuton with some hesitation (for he was fond of money) agreed.
Never shall I forget the day when those sixty were ushered solemnly into a large Reception Room in the Hotel, blameless youths of varying aspect, most of them quite sober--since it was but 7 o'clock--presented one by one to the host of the evening, each with his title and style.
To those whom he recognized as equals the Aristocrat spoke with charming simplicity. Those who were somewhat his inferiors (the lords by courtesy and the simple baronets) he put immediately at their ease; and even the Honourables saw at a glance that he was a man of the world, for he said a few kind words to each. As for a man with no handle to his name, there was not one of the sixty so low, except a Mr. Poopsibah of whom the gatherer of that feast whispered to the host that he could not but ask him because, though only a second cousin, he was the heir to the Marquis of Quirk--hence his Norman name.
It was a bewilderment to the Baron, for he might have to meet the man later in life as the Marquis of Quirk, whereas for the moment he was only Mr. Poopsibah, but anyhow he was put at the bottom of the table--and that was how the trouble began.
In my time--I am talking of the nineties--young men drank wine: it was before the Bishop of London had noted the Great Change. And Mr. Poopsibah and his neighbour--Lord Henry Job--were quite early in the Feast occupied in a playful contest which ended in Mr. Poopsibah's losing his end seat and going to grass. He rose, not unruffled, with a burst collar, and glared a little uncertainly over the assembled wealth and lineage of the evening. Lord Benin (the son of our great General Lord Ashantee of Benin--his real name was Mitcham, God Rest His Soul) addressed to the unreal Poopsibah an epithet then fashionable, now almost forgotten, but always unprintable. Mr. Poopsibah, forgetting what nobility imposes, immediately hurled at him an as yet half-emptied bottle of Champagne.
Then it was that the bewildered Baron learnt for the last time--and for that matter for the first time--to what the Island Race can rise when it really lets itself go.
I remember (I was a nephew if I remember right) above the din and confusion of light (for candles also were thrown) loud appeals as in a tone of command, and then as in a tone of supplication, both in the unmistakable accents of the Cousins overseas, and I even remember what I may call the Great Sacrilege of that evening when Lord Gogmagog seizing our host affectionately round the neck, and pressing the back of his head with his large and red left hand, attempted to grind his face into the tablecloth, after a fashion wholly unknown to the haughty lords of the Teufelwald.
During the march homewards--an adventure enlightened with a sharp skirmish and two losses at the hands of the police--I know not what passed through the mind of the youth who had hitherto kept so careful a distinction between blood and blood: whether like Hannibal he swore eternal hatred to the English, or whether in his patient German mind he noted it all down as a piece of historical evidence to be used in his diplomatic career, we shall not be told. I think in the main he was simply bewildered: bewildered to madness.
Of the many other things we made him do before Eights Week I have no space to tell: How he asked us what was the fashionable sport and how we told him Polo and made him buy a Polo pony sixteen hands high, with huge great bones and a broken nose, explaining to him that it was stamina and not appearance that the bluff Englishman loved in a horse. How we made him wear his arms embroidered upon his handkerchief (producing several for a pattern and taking the thing as a commonplace by sly allusion for many preparatory days). How we told him that it was the custom to call every Sunday afternoon for half an hour upon the wife of every married Don of one's College: How we challenged him to the Great College feat of throwing himself into the river at midnight: How finally we persuaded him that the ancient custom of the University demanded the presentation to one's Tutor at the end of term of an elaborate thesis one hundred pages long upon some subject of Theology: How he was carefully warned that surprise was the essence of this charming tradition and not a word of it must be breathed to the august recipient of the favour: How he sucked in the knowledge that the more curious and strange the matter the higher would be his place in the schools, and how the poor fool elaborately wasted what God gives such men for brains in the construction of a damning refutation against the Monophysites: How his tutor, a humble little nervous fool, thought he was having his leg pulled--all these things I have no space to tell you now.
But he was rich! Doubtless by the custom of his country he is now in some great position plotting the ruin of Britannia and certainly she deserves it in his case. He was most unmercifully ragged.
XIV
THE SPY
One day as I was walking along the beach at Southsea, I saw a little man sitting upon a camp-stool and very carefully drawing the Old Round Stone Fort which stands in the middle of the shallow water, one of the four that so stand, and which looks from Southsea as though it were about half-way across to the Island.
I said to him: "Sir, why are you drawing that old Fort?"
He answered: "I am a German Spy, and the reason I draw that Fort is to provide information for my Government which may be useful to it in case of war with this country."
When the gentleman sitting upon the camp-stool, who was drawing the Old Round Stone Fort in the middle of the water, talked like this he annoyed me very much.
"You merely waste your time," said I. "These Forts were put up nearly sixty years ago, and they are quite useless."
"I know nothing about that," said the little man--he had hair like hemp and prominent weak blue eyes of a glazed sort, and altogether he struck me as a fool of no insignificant calibre--"I know nothing about that. I obey orders. I was told to draw this Fort, and that I am now doing."
"You do not draw well," said I, "but that is neither here nor there. I mean that what you draw is not beautiful. What I really want to know is why in thunder you were told to draw that round stone barrel, for which no one in Europe would give a five-pound note."
"I have nothing to do with all that," said the little man again, still industriously drawing. "I was told to draw that Fort, and that Fort I draw." And he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.
"Can you not tell me for whom you are drawing it?" said I at last.
"Yes," said he, "with great pleasure. I am drawing it for his King-like and Kaiser-like Majesty By the Grace of God and the Authority of the Holy See, William, King of Prussia, Margrave of Brandenburg, Duke of Romshall, Count Hohenzollern and of the Great German Empire, Emperor."
With that he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.
"I do assure you most solemnly," said I again, "that you can be of no use whatever to your master in this matter. There are no guns upon that ridiculous thing; it has even been turned into a hotel."
But the little man paid no attention to what I said. He went on obeying orders. He had often heard that this was the strength of his race.
"How could there conceivably be any guns on it?" said I imploringly. "Do think what you are at! Do look at the range between you and Ryde! Do consider what modern gunnery is! Do wake up, do!"
But the little man with hair like hemp said again: "I know nothing about all that. I am a lieutenant in the High Spy Corps, and I have been told to draw this Fort and I must draw it." And he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.
Then gloom settled upon my spirit, for I thought that civilization was in peril if men such as he really existed and really went on in this fashion.
However, I went back into Southsea, into the town, and there I bought a chart. Then I struck off ranges upon the chart and marked them in pencil, and I also marked the Fairway through Spithead into Portsmouth Harbour. Then I came back to the little man, and I said: "Do look at this!"