Kipps, H. G. Wells [uplifting book club books TXT] 📗

buy you out of your own time⁠—any more than out of your own skill. 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 everyone’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, 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 will 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 are you, 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 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 enquiry. “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.

“Today,” 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 today 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 soul of man!” (“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-commital 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