This Mortal Coil | Page 7

Nore. You ought to have gone straight to bed when you left the club with me fast evening."
"I know I ought," the poet responded with affected cheerfulness. "The path of duty's as plain as a pikestaff. But the things I ought to do I mostly leave undone; and the things I ought not to do I find, on the contrary, vastly attractive. I may as well make a clean breast of it. I strolled round to Pallavicini's after you vacated the Row last night, and found them having a turn or two at lansquenet. Now, lansquenet's an amusement I never can resist. The consequence was, in three hours I was pretty well cleaned out of ready cash, and shall have to keep my nose to the grindstone accordingly all through what ought by rights to have been my summer holiday. This conclusively shows the evils of high play, and the moral superiority of the wise man who goes home to bed and is sound asleep when the clock strikes eleven."
Relfs face fell several tones. "I wish, Massinger," he said very gravely, "you'd make up your mind never to touch those hateful cards again. You'll ruin your health, your mind, and your pocket with them. If you spent the time you spend upon play in writing some really great book now, you'd make in the end ten times as much by it."
The poet smiled a calm smile of superior wisdom. "Good boy!" he cried, patting Relf on the back in mock approbation of his moral advice. "You talk for all the world like a Sunday-school prize-book. Honest industry has its due reward; while pitch-and-toss and wicked improper games land one at last in prison or the workhouse. The industrious apprentice rises in time to be Lord Mayor (and to appropriate the public funds ad libitum'); whereas, the idle apprentice, degraded by the evil influences of ha'penny loo, ends his days with a collar of hemp round his naughty neck in an equally exalted but perhaps less dignified position in life on a platform at Newgate. My dear Relf, how on earth can you, who are a sensible man, believe all that antiquated nursery rubbish? Cast your eyes for a moment on the world around you, here in the central hub of London, within sight of all the wealth and squalor of England, and ask yourself candidly whether what you see in it at all corresponds with the idyllic picture of the little-Jack-Horner school of moralists. As a matter of fact, is it always the good boys who pull the plums with self-appreciated smile out of the world's pudding? Far from it: quite the other way. I have seen the wicked flourishing in my time like a green bay-tree. Honest industry breaks stones on the road, while successful robbery or successful gambling rolls by at its ease, cigar in mouth, lolling on the cushions of its luxurious carriage. If you stick to honest industry all your life long, you may go on breaking stones contentedly for the whole term of your natural existence. But if you speculate boldly with your week's earnings and land a haul, you may set another fellow to break stones for you in time, and then you become at once a respectable man, a capitalist, and a baronet. All the great fortunes we see in the world have been piled up in the last resort, if you'll only believe it, by successful gambling."
Every man has a right to his own opinion," Warren Relf answered with a more serious air, as he turned aside to look after the rigging. "I admit there's a great deal of gambling in business; but anyhow, honest industry's a simple necessary on board the 'Mud-Turtle.' Come from your topsy-turvy moral philosophy, and help me out with this sheet and the mainsail. Before we reach the German Ocean, you'll have the whole of navigation at your finger's ends for I mean to while YOU manage the ship and be in a position write an ode in a Catalonian metre on the Pleasures of Luffing, and the True Delight of the Thames Waterway."
Massinger turned to do as he was directed, and to inspect the temporary floating hotel in which he was to make his way contentedly down to the coast of Suffolk. The "Mud-Turtle" was indeed as odd-looking and original a little craft as her owner and skipper had proclaimed her to be. A center-board yawl, of seventeen tons registered burden, she ranked as a yacht only by courtesy, on the general principle of what the logicians call excluded middle. If she wasn't that, why, then, pray what in the world was she? The "Mud-Turtle" measured almost as broad across the beam as she reckoned -feet in length from stem to stern; and her skipper maintained