"My dear Inskip. Guess what I could have got that wood for ten years
ago! But I refused. Guess why."
We could not guess why.
"Because the transaction would not have been straight." A most becoming
blush spread over his face as he uttered the noble word. "Not straight.
Straight legally. But not morally straight. We were to force the hands
of the man who owned it. I refused. The others--decent fellows in their
way--told me I was squeamish. I said, 'Yes. Perhaps I am. My name is
plain Harcourt Worters--not a well-known name if you go outside the City
and my own country, but a name which, where it is known, carries, I
flatter myself, some weight. And I will not sign my name to this. That
is all. Call me squeamish if you like. But I will not sign. It is just a
fad of mine. Let us call it a fad.'" He blushed again. Ford believes
that his guardian blushes all over--if you could strip him and make him
talk nobly he would look like a boiled lobster. There is a picture of
him in this condition in the note-book.
"So the man who owned it then didn't own it now?" said Miss Beaumont,
who had followed the narrative with some interest.
"Oh, no!" said Mr. Worters.
"Why no!" said Mrs. Worters absently, as she hunted in the grass for her
knitting-needle. "Of course not. It belongs to the widow."
"Tea!" cried her son, springing vivaciously to his feet. "I see tea and
I want it. Come, mother. Come along, Evelyn. I can tell you it's no
joke, a hard day in the battle of life. For life is practically a
battle. To all intents and purposes a battle. Except for a few lucky
fellows who can read books, and so avoid the realities. But I----"
His voice died away as he escorted the two ladies over the smooth lawn
and up the stone steps to the terrace, on which the footman was placing
tables and little chairs and a silver kettle-stand. More ladies came out
of the house. We could just hear their shouts of excitement as they also
were told of the purchase of Other Kingdom.
I like Ford. The boy has the makings of a scholar and--though for some
reason he objects to the word--of a gentleman. It amused me now to see
his lip curl with the vague cynicism of youth. He cannot understand the
footman and the solid silver kettle-stand. They make him cross. For he
has dreams--not exactly spiritual dreams: Mr. Worters is the man for
those--but dreams of the tangible and the actual robust dreams, which
take him, not to heaven, but to another earth. There are no footmen in
this other earth, and the kettle-stands, I suppose, will not be made of
silver, and I know that everything is to be itself, and not practically
something else. But what this means, and, if it means anything, what the
good of it is, I am not prepared to say. For though I have just said
"there is value in dreams," I only said it to silence old Mrs. Worters.
"Go ahead, man! We can't have tea till we've got through something."
He turned his chair away from the terrace, so that he could sit looking
at the meadows and at the stream that runs through the meadows, and at
the beech-trees of Other Kingdom that rise beyond the stream. Then, most
gravely and admirably, he began to construe the Eclogues of Virgil.