H. G. Wells

“ Perhaps he might hurt that dismal farceur upon the landing! No doubt it was Douglas sneaking back to his own room after the night’s efforts.
The Lord Chancellor slipped on his dressing-gown of purple silk. Very softly indeed did he open his bedroom door and very warily peep out. He heard the soft pad of feet upon the staircase.
He crept across the broad passage to the beautiful old balustrading. Down below he saw Mergleson—Mergleson again!—in a shameful deshabille—going like a snake, like a slinking cat, like an assassin, into the door of the study. Rage filled the great man’s soul. ”

“ There is a joy in the mere fact of hunting, the sight of a scarlet coat and a hound will brighten a whole village, and now Crayminster was rousing itself like a sleeper who wakes to sunshine and gay music. People were looking out of windows and coming out of shops, a policeman appeared and heard the baker’s simple story, a brisk hatless young man in a white apron and with a pencil behind his ear became prominent. Bealby, peeping over the ridge of the roof, looked a thoroughly dirty and unpleasant little creature to all these people. ”

“ Bealby had a disconcerting sense of retreating footsteps behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Miss Philips standing at the foot of the steps that led up to the fastnesses of the caravan. “Dick,” she cried with a sharp note of alarm in her voice, “get rid of that man.”
A moment after Bealby heard the door shut and a sound of a key in its lock. He concealed his true feelings by putting his arms akimbo, sticking his legs wider apart and contemplating the task before him with his head a little on one side. ”

“ The Lord Chancellor turned upon him with a face that he sought to keep calm, though the eyebrows waved and streamed like black smoke in a gale. “Captain Douglas,” he said, “you are probably not aware of the demands upon the time and patience of a public servant in such a position as mine. You see the world no doubt as a vastly entertaining fabric upon which you can embroider your—your facetious arrangements. Well, it is not so. It is real. It is earnest. You may sneer at the simplicity of an old man, but what I tell you of life is true. Comic effect is not, believe me, its goal. ”

“ She suffered, she felt, from repressed heroism. If ever she was to shine in disaster that disaster, she felt, must come to her, she might not go to meet it, and so you realize how deeply it stirred her, how it brightened her and uplifted her to learn from Mr. Mergleson’s halting statements that perhaps, that probably, that almost certainly, a painful and tragical thing was happening even now within the walls of Shonts, that there was urgent necessity for action—if anguish was to be witnessed before it had ended, and life saved. ”

“ Geedge did not appear to observe Bealby. He was a man of the super-aquiline type with a nose like a rudder, he held his face as if it was a hatchet in a procession, and walked with the dignity of a man of honour. You could see at once he was a man of honour. Inflexibly, invincibly, he was a man of honour. You felt that anywhen, in a fire, in an earthquake, in a railway accident when other people would be running 107about and doing things he would have remained—a man of honour. ”

“ Here he was pitted against a formidable hoe-wielding man, who for some inscrutable reason was resolved to cover the retreat of Bealby. And all the world, it seemed, was with the tramp and against this hoe-wielder. All the tremendous forces of human society, against which the tramp had struggled for so many years, whose power he knew and feared as only the outlaw can, had suddenly come into line with him. Across the strawberries to the right there was even a policeman hastening to join the majority, a policeman closely followed by a tradesman of the blackest, most respectable quality. ”

“ The dog bit, desisted and then finding itself confronted by two men retreated. Bealby and the tramp rolled and scrambled over the other side of the collapsed netting into a parallel track and were halfway to the hedge before the dog,—but this time in a less vehement fashion,—resumed his attack.
He did not close with them again and at the hedge he halted altogether and remained hacking the gloaming with his rage. ”

“ And when he saw Madeleine standing in the sunlight, pleased and proud and glorious, with a smile in her eyes and trembling on her lips, with a strand or so of her beautiful hair and a streamer or so of delightful blue fluttering in the wind about her gracious form, it seemed to him for the moment that leaving the manœuvres and coming back to England was quite a right and almost a magnificent thing to do. ”

“ A beautiful woman may be the inspiration of a great career. This, however, he was beginning to find was not the case with himself. He had believed it at first and written as much and said as much, and said it very variously and gracefully. But becoming more and more distinctly clear to his intelligence was the fact that the very reverse was the case. Miss Madeleine Philips was making it very manifest to Captain Douglas that she herself was a career; that a lover with any other career in view need not—as the advertisements say—apply. ”

“ He perceived that love is the supreme thing in life. He perceived that he who divides his purposes scatters his life to the four winds of heaven. A vehement resolve to cut the whole of this Bealby business pounced upon him. In that moment he ceased to care for reputation, for appearances, for the resentment of Lord Moggeridge or the good intentions of Uncle Chickney. ”

“ Ahead of everyone else and running with wild wavings of the arms across his strawberries was a small and very dirty little boy. He impressed Mr. Benshaw merely as a pioneer. Some thirty yards behind him was a little collarless, short-sleeved man in red slippers running with great effrontery and behind him another still more denuded lunatic, also in list slippers and with braces—braces of inconceivable levity. And then Wiggs, the policeman, hotly followed by Mr. Maccullum. Then more distraught tailors and Schocks the butcher. ”

“ The dog was quick. But Bealby was quicker. He went up the netting of a hen run and gave the dog no more than an ineffectual snap at his heels. And then dashing from the cottage door came the tramp. Under one arm was a brass-bound workbox and in the other was a candlestick and some smaller articles. He did not instantly grasp the situation of his treed companion, he was too anxious to escape the tall woman, and then with a yelp of dismay he discovered himself between woman and dog. All too late he sought to emulate Bealby. ”

“ It was a splendid chance for any boy to begin his knowledge of service in so great an establishment, and only the natural perversity of human nature can explain the violent objection young Bealby took to anything of the sort. He did. He said he did not want to be a servant, and that he would not go and be a good boy and try his very best in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him at Shonts. On the contrary.
He communicated these views suddenly to his mother as she was preparing a steak and kidney pie in the bright little kitchen of the gardener’s cottage. ”

“ William was of a grosser clay, slave of his appetites, a materialist. Such men as William drive one to believe in born inferiors, in the existence of a lower sort, in the natural inequality of men.
While Bealby was busy at his little gentle task of reparation, a task foolish perhaps and not too ably conceived, but at any rate morally gracious, William had no thought in the world but the satisfaction of those appetites that the consensus of all mankind has definitely relegated to the lower category. ”

“ At first there were nearly a dozen lighted windows in Crayminster. They went out one by one. He hung for a long time with a passionate earnestness on the sole surviving one, but that too went at last. He could have wept when at last it winked out. He came down into the marshy flats by the river, but he did not like the way in which the water sucked and swirled in the vague moonlight; also he suddenly discovered a great white horse standing quite still in the misty grass not thirty yards away ”

“ How swift are the changes of the human soul! At the moment of his thrust young Bealby was a primordial savage; so soon as he saw this incredible piercing of Thomas’s chin—for all the care that Bealby had taken it might just as well have been Thomas’s eye—he moved swiftly through the ages and became a simple Christian child. ”

“ In one Captain Douglas, as Mrs. Rampound Pilby told the Lord Chancellor, the suppressed ingenuity broke out in disconcerting mystifications and practical jokes that led to a severance from Portsmouth, in the other the pent-up passions came out before the other ingredients in an uncontrollable devotion to the obvious and challenging femininity of Miss Madeleine Philips.... His training had made him proof against ordinary women, deaf as it were to their charms, but she—she had penetrated. And impulsive forces that have been pent up—go with a bang when they go.... ”

“ The roof of the shed was the merest tarred touchwood, it had perished as felt long ago, it collapsed under Bealby, he went down into a confusion of mushrooms and mushroom-bed, he blundered out trailing mushrooms and spawn and rich matter, he had a nine-foot wall to negotiate and only escaped by a hair’s-breadth from the clutch of a little red-slippered man who came dashing out from the workroom. ”

“ Mr. Mergleson reflected and decided upon his line. He came up the service staircase, lifted his chin and with an air of meek officiousness went through the green door. There was no one now on the landing, there was nothing remarkable on the landing except a broken tumbler, but half-way up the grand staircase stood the Lord Chancellor. Under one arm the great jurist carried a soda water syphon and he grasped a decanter of whisky in his hand. He turned sharply at the sound of the green baize door and bent upon Mr. Mergleson the most terrible eyebrows that ever, surely! adorned a legal visage. ”

“ A soldier’s wife has to be a soldier’s wife and nothing else.... Your business is to serve the king, not—not some celebrity. Lovely, no doubt. I don’t deny the charm of her—but on the hoardings, my boy.... Now don’t you think—don’t you think?—there’s some nice pure girl somewhere, sweet as violets, new as the dawn, and ready to be yours; a girl, I mean, a maiden fancy free, not—how shall I put it?—a woman of the world. ”

“ Not in front of the whole rotten hotel. And there was a beastly looking man in a green apron coming out of the house,—the sort of man who looks at you. He might come up and watch; these fellows are equal to anything of that sort. Captain Douglas replaced his scissors and scraps in his pockets, leaned back with an affectation of boredom, got up, lit a cigarette—sort of thing the man in the green apron would think all right—and strolled off towards a clump of beech trees, beyond which were bushes and a depression. There perhaps one might be free from observation. ”

“ It was a head,—a ruffled human head. It remained still for a moment contemplating the calm spaciousness of terrace and garden and countryside. Then it emerged further and rotated and surveyed the 57house above it. Its expression was one of alert caution. Its natural freshness and innocence were a little marred by an enormous transverse smudge, a bar-sinister of smut, and the elfin delicacy of the left ear was festooned with a cobweb—probably a genuine antique. It was the face of Bealby.
He was considering the advisability of leaving Shonts—for good. ”

“ You should never let anyone see a revolver ever before they hear it—see? You let fly at the ground first off, and the concussion stuns them. It doesn’t stun you. You expect it, they don’t. See? There you are—five shots left, master of the situation.”
“I think, Sir Peter, I’ll bid you good-night,” said the Lord Chancellor, allowing his eye to rest for one covetous moment on the decanter, and struggling with the devil of pride.
Sir Peter made a gesture of extreme friendliness from his chair, expressive of the Lord Chancellor’s freedom to do whatever he pleased at Shonts. ”

“ Bealby hadn’t much time to attend, though the laughter that followed various sallies from Judy Bowles was very tantalizing, and it had come to the pears before his attention wasn’t so much caught as felled by the word “Shonts.”... It was as if the sky had suddenly changed to vermilion. All these people were talking of Shonts!...
“Went there,” said Captain Douglas, “in perfect good faith. Wanted to fill up Lucy’s little party. One doesn’t go to Shonts nowadays for idle pleasure. ”

“ Bealby probably had no money or very little money. Therefore he would have to beg or steal. He wouldn’t go to the workhouse because he wouldn’t know about the workhouse, respectable poor people never know anything about the workhouse, and the chances were he would be both too honest and too timid to steal. He’d beg. He’d beg at front doors because of dogs and things, and he’d probably go along a high road. He’d be more likely to beg from houses than from passers-by, because a door is at first glance less formidable than a pedestrian and more accustomed to being addressed. ”

“ Always hitherto something or someone had come to his help when the world grew dark and cold, and given him supper and put him or sent him to bed. Even when he had passed a night in the interstices of Shonts he had known there was a bed at quite a little distance under the stairs. If only that loud Voice hadn’t shouted curses whenever he moved he would have gone to it. But as he went across this common in the gloaming it became apparent that this amiable routine was to be broken. For the first time he realized the world could be a homeless world. ”