I am bored--I am horribly bored--by my work.I am bored by every sort of renunciation.I want to live with the woman Ilove and I want to work within the limits of my capacity.
Curse all Hullo! Damn his eyes!--Steady, ah! The spark!...
Good! No skid."
He had come round a corner at five and twenty miles an hour and had stopped his spark and pulled up neatly within a yard of the fore-wheel of a waggon that was turning in the road so as to block the way completely.
"That almost had me....
"And now you feel better?" said Miss Grammont.
"Ever so much," said Sir Richmond and chuckled.
The waggoner cleared the road and the car started up again.
For a minute or so neither spoke.
"You ought to be smacked hard for that outbreak,--my dear,"said Miss Grammont.
"I ought--MY dear.I have no right to be ill-tempered.We two are among the supremely fortunate ones of our time.We have no excuse for misbehaviour.Got nothing to grumble at.Always I am lucky.THAT--with the waggon--was a very near thing.God spoils us.
"We two," he went on, after a pause, "are among the most fortunate people alive.We are both rich and easily rich.
That gives us freedoms few people have.We have a vision of the whole world in which we live.It's in a mess--but that is by the way.The mass of mankind never gets enough education to have even a glimpse of the world as a whole.They never get a chance to get the hang of it.It is really possible for us to do things that will matter in the world.All our time is our own; all our abilities we are free to use.Most people, most intelligent and educated people, are caught in cages of pecuniary necessity; they are tied to tasks they can't leave, they are driven and compelled and limited by circumstances they can never master.But we, if we have tasks, have tasks of our own choosing.We may not like the world, but anyhow we are free to do our best to alter it.If I were a clerk in Hoxton and you were a city typist, then we MIGHT swear.""It was you who swore," smiled Miss Grammont.
"It's the thought of that clerk in Hoxton and that city typist who really keep me at my work.Any smacking ought to come from them.I couldn't do less than I do in the face of their helplessness.Nevertheless a day will come--through what we do and what we refrain from doing when there will be no bound and limited clerks in Hoxton and no captive typists in the city.And nobody at all to consider.""According to the prophet Martineau," said Miss Grammont.
"And then you and I must contrive to be born again.""Heighho!" cried Miss Grammont."A thousand years ahead! When fathers are civilized.When all these phanton people who intervene on your side--no! I don't want to know anything about them, but I know of them by instinct--when they also don't matter.""Then you and I can have things out with each other--THOROUGHLY," said Sir Richmond, with a surprising ferocity in his voice, charging the little hill before him as though he charged at Time.
Section 6
They had to wait at Nailsworth for a telegram from Mr.
Grammont's agents; they lunched there and drove on to Bath in the afternoon.They came into the town through unattractive and unworthy outskirts, and only realized the charm of the place after they had garaged their car at the Pulteney Hotel and walked back over the Pulteney Bridge to see the Avon with the Pump Room and the Roman Baths.The Pulteney they found hung with pictures and adorned with sculpture to an astonishing extent; some former proprietor must have had a mania for replicas and the place is eventful with white marble fauns and sylphs and lions and Caesars and Queen Victorias and packed like an exhibition with memories of Rome, Florence, Milan, Paris, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy, amidst which splendours a competent staff administers modern comforts with an old-fashioned civility.
But round and about the Pulteney one has still the scenery of Georgian England, the white, faintly classical terraces and houses of the days of Fielding, Smollett, Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, the graceful bridge with the bright little shops full of "presents from Bath"; the Pump Room with its water drinkers and a fine array of the original Bath chairs.
Down below the Pump Room our travellers explored the memories of the days when the world was Latin from York to the Tigris, and the Corinthian capital flourished like a weed from Bath to Baalbek.And they considered a little doubtfully the seventeenth century statue of Bladud, who is said to have been healed by the Bath waters and to have founded the city in the days when Stonehenge still flourished, eight hundred years before the Romans came.
In the afternoon Miss Seyffert came with Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont and was very enthusiastic about everything, but in the evening after dinner it was clear that her role was to remain in the hotel.Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont went out into the moonlit gloaming; they crossed the bridge again and followed the road beside the river towards the old Abbey Church, that Lantern of the West.Away in some sunken gardens ahead of them a band was playing, and a cluster of little lights about the bandstand showed a crowd of people down below dancing on the grass.These little lights, these bobbing black heads and the lilting music, this little inflamed Centre of throbbing sounds and ruddy illumination, made the dome of the moonlit world about it seem very vast and cool and silent.Our visitors began to realize that Bath could be very beautiful.They went to the parapet above the river and stood there, leaning over it elbow to elbow and smoking cigarettes.Miss Grammont was moved to declare the Pulteney Bridge, with its noble arch, its effect of height over the swirling river, and the cluster of houses above, more beautiful than the Ponte Vecchio at Florence.Down below was a man in waders with a fishing-rod going to and fro along the foaming weir, and a couple of boys paddled a boat against the rush of the water lower down the stream.
