Black humor; City and town life -- Fiction; Intellectuals -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Satire
“There, Mr. Gumbril, if I may be allowed to say so, you are wrong.” Mr.
Bojanus removed his hand from his bosom and employed it to emphasize the
points of his discourse. “When the revolution comes, Mr. Gumbril—the
great and necessary revolution, as Alderman Beckford called it—it won’t
be the owning of a little money that’ll get a man into trouble. It’ll be
his class-habits, Mr. Gumbril, his class-speech, his class-education.
It’ll be Shibboleth all over again, Mr. Gumbril; mark my words. The Red
Guards will stop people in the street and ask them to say some such word
as ‘towel.’ If they call it ‘towel,’ like you and your friends, Mr.
Gumbril, why then....” Mr. Bojanus went through the gestures of pointing
a rifle and pulling the trigger; he clicked his tongue against his teeth
to symbolize the report.... “That’ll be the end of them. But if they say
‘tèaul,’ like the rest of us, Mr. Gumbril, it’ll be: ‘Pass Friend and
Long Live the Proletariat.’ Long live Tèaul.”
“I’m afraid you may be right,” said Gumbril.
“I’m convinced of it,” said Mr. Bojanus. “It’s my clients, Mr. Gumbril,
it’s the Best People that the other people resent. It’s their
confidence, their ease, it’s the habit their money and their position
give them of ordering people about, it’s the way they take their place
in the world for granted, it’s their prestige, which the other people
would like to deny, but can’t—it’s all that, Mr. Gumbril, that’s so
galling.”
Gumbril nodded. He himself had envied his securer friends their power of
ignoring the humanity of those who were not of their class. To do that
really well, one must always have lived in a large house full of
clockwork servants; one must never have been short of money, never at a
restaurant ordered the cheaper thing instead of the more delicious; one
must never have regarded a policeman as anything but one’s paid defender
against the lower orders, never for a moment have doubted one’s divine
right to do, within the accepted limits, exactly what one liked without
a further thought to anything or any one but oneself and one’s own
enjoyment. Gumbril had been brought up among these blessed beings; but
he was not one of them. Alas? or fortunately? He hardly knew which.
“And what good do you expect the revolution to do, Mr. Bojanus?” he
asked at last.
Mr. Bojanus replaced his hand in his bosom. “None whatever, Mr.
Gumbril,” he said. “None whatever.”
“But Liberty,” Gumbril suggested, “equality and all that. What about
those, Mr. Bojanus?”
Mr. Bojanus smiled up at him tolerantly and kindly, as he might have
smiled at some one who had suggested, shall we say, that evening
trousers should be turned up at the bottom. “Liberty, Mr. Gumbril?” he
said; “you don’t suppose any serious-minded person imagines a revolution
is going to bring liberty, do you?”
“The people who make the revolution always seem to ask for liberty.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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