"A pretty good deal, mum," answered Amenda, "when you're thinking of marrying a man as can't make a sausage fit to eat."
"But, surely," exclaimed Ethelbertha, "you don't mean to say you're breaking off the match because you don't like his sausages!"
"Well, I suppose that's what it comes to," agreed Amenda, unconcernedly.
"What an awful idea!" sighed poor Ethelbertha, after a long pause. "Do you think you ever really loved him?"
"Oh yes," said Amenda, "I loved him right enough, but it's no good loving a man that wants you to live on sausages that keep you awake all night."
"But does he want you to live on sausages?" persisted Ethelbertha.
"Oh, he doesn't say anything about it," explained Amenda; "but you know what it is, mum, when you marry a pork butcher; you're expected to eat what's left over. That's the mistake my poor cousin Eliza made. She married a muffin man. Of course, what he didn't sell they had to finish up themselves. Why, one winter, when he had a run of bad luck, they lived for two months on nothing but muffins. I never saw a girl so changed in all my life. One has to think of these things, you know."
But the most shamefully mercenary engagement that I think Amenda ever entered into, was one with a 'bus conductor. We were living in the north of London then, and she had a young man, a cheesemonger, who kept a shop in Lupus Street, Chelsea. He could not come up to her because of the shop, so once a week she used to go down to him. One did not ride ten miles for a penny in those days, and she found the fare from Holloway to Victoria and back a severe tax upon her purse. The same 'bus that took her down at six brought her back at ten. During the first journey the 'bus conductor stared at Amenda; during the second he talked to her, during the third he gave her a cocoanut, during the fourth he proposed to her, and was promptly accepted. After that, Amenda was enabled to visit her cheesemonger without expense.
He was a quaint character himself, this 'bus conductor. I often rode with him to Fleet Street. He knew me quite well (I suppose Amenda must have pointed me out to him), and would always ask me after her―aloud, before all the other passengers, which was trying―and give me messages to take back to her. Where women were concerned he had what is called "a way" with him, and from the extent and variety of his female acquaintance, and the evident tenderness with which the majority of them regarded him, I am inclined to hope that Amenda's desertion of him (which happened contemporaneously with her jilting of the cheesemonger) caused him less prolonged suffering than might otherwise have been the case.
He was a man from whom I derived a good deal of amusement one way and another. Thinking of him brings back to my mind a somewhat odd incident.
One afternoon, I jumped upon his 'bus in the Seven Sisters Road. An elderly Frenchman was the only other occupant of the vehicle. "You vil not forget me," the Frenchman was saying as I entered, "I desire Sharing Cross."
"I won't forget yer," answered the conductor, "you shall 'ave yer Sharing Cross. Don't make a fuss about it."
"That's the third time 'ee's arst me not to forget 'im," he remarked to me in a stentorian aside; "'ee don't giv' yer much chance of doin' it, does 'ee?"
At the corner of the Holloway Road we drew up, and our conductor began to shout after the manner of his species: "Charing Cross―Charing Cross―'ere yer are―Come along, lady―Charing Cross."
The little Frenchman jumped up, and prepared to exit; the conductor pushed him back.
"Sit down and don't be silly," he said; "this ain't Charing Cross."
The Frenchman looked puzzled, but collapsed meekly. We picked up a few passengers, and proceeded on our way. Half a mile up the Liverpool Road a lady stood on the kerb regarding us as we passed with that pathetic mingling of desire and distrust which is the average woman's attitude towards conveyances of all kinds. Our conductor stopped.
"Where d'yer want to go to?" he asked her severely―"Strand―Charing Cross?"
The Frenchman did not hear or did not understand the first part of the speech, but he caught the words "Charing Cross," and bounced up and out on to the step. The conductor collared him as he was getting off, and jerked him back savagely.
"Carn't yer keep still a minute," he cried indignantly; "blessed if you don't want lookin' after like a bloomin' kid."
"I vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," answered the Frenchman, humbly.
"You vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," repeated the other bitterly, as he led him back to his seat. "I shall put yer down in the middle of the road if I 'ave much more of yer. You stop there till I come and sling yer out. I ain't likely to let yer go much past yer Sharing Cross, I shall be too jolly glad to get rid o' yer."
The poor Frenchman subsided, and we jolted on. At "The Angel" we, of course, stopped. "Charing Cross," shouted the conductor, and up sprang the Frenchman.
"Oh, my Gawd," said the conductor, taking him by the shoulders and forcing him down into the corner seat, "wot am I to do? Carn't somebody sit on 'im?"
He held him firmly down until the 'bus started, and then released him. At the top of Chancery Lane the same scene took place, and the poor little Frenchman became exasperated.
"He keep saying Sharing Cross, Sharing Cross," he exclaimed, turning to the other passengers; "and it is NO Sharing Cross. He is fool."
"Carn't yer understand," retorted the conductor, equally indignant; "of course I say Sharing Cross―I mean Charing Cross, but that don't mean that it IS Charing Cross. That means―" and then perceiving from the blank look on the Frenchman's face the utter impossibility of ever making the matter clear to him, he turned to us with an appealing gesture, and asked:
"Does any gentleman know the French for 'bloomin' idiot'?"
A day or two afterwards, I happened to enter his omnibus again.
"Well," I asked him, "did you get your French friend to Charing Cross all right?"
"No, sir," he replied, "you'll 'ardly believe it, but I 'ad a bit of a row with a policeman just before I got to the corner, and it put 'im clean out o' my 'ead. Blessed if I didn't run 'im on to Victoria."
CHAPTER XI
Said Brown one evening, "There is but one vice, and that is selfishness."
Jephson was standing before the fire lighting his pipe. He puffed the tobacco into a glow, threw the match into the embers, and then said:
"And the seed of all virtue also."
"Sit down and get on with your work," said MacShaughnassy from the sofa where he lay at full length with his heels on a chair; "we're discussing the novel. Paradoxes not admitted during business hours."
Jephson, however, was in an argumentative mood.
"Selfishness," he continued, "is merely another name for Will. Every deed, good or bad, that we do is prompted by selfishness. We are charitable to secure ourselves a good place in the next world, to make ourselves respected in this, to ease our own distress at the knowledge of suffering. One man is kind because it gives him pleasure to be kind, just as another is cruel because cruelty pleases him. A great man does his duty because to him the sense of duty done is a deeper delight than would be the case resulting from avoidance of duty. The religious man is religious because he finds a joy in religion; the moral man moral because with his strong self-respect, viciousness would mean wretchedness. Self-sacrifice itself is only a subtle selfishness: we prefer the mental exaltation gained thereby to the sensual gratification which is the alternative reward. Man cannot be anything else but selfish. Selfishness is the law of all life. Each thing, from the farthest fixed star to the smallest insect crawling on the earth, fighting for itself according to its strength; and brooding over all, the Eternal, working for HIMSELF: that is the universe."