Kipps H. G. Wells (best thriller novels to read .txt) 📖

had been trimmed with scissors into a sort of brush along his upper lip. His teeth were darkened ruins. His jacket collar was turned up about a knitted white neck wrap, and his sleeves betrayed no cuffs. He did not rise to greet Kipps, but held out a thin wristed hand and pointed with the other to a bedroom arm chair.

“Glad to see you,” he said. “Sit down and make yourself at home. Will you smoke?”

Kipps said he would, and produced his store. He was about to take one, and then, with a civil afterthought, handed the packet first to Masterman and Sid. Masterman pretended surprise to find his pipe out before he took one. 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 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 Beauprés.”

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 for given 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 otherwise,” 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?”

“I was a bit that way,” said Kipps.

“And you found that 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.”

“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 anyone 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 that 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 around the globe, and a community cannot be happy in one part and unhappy in another. It’s all or nothing, no patching any more forever. 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 and 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 around its neck. The world is ill, my time is short and my strength is small. I’m as happy here as anywhere.”

He coughed and was silent for a moment, then brought the index finger around 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