The New Collected Short Stories by E.M. Forster Page B

why.
    ‘Because the transaction would not have been straight.’ A most becoming blush spread over his face as he uttered the noble word. ‘Not straight. Straight legally. But not morally straight. We were to force the hands of the man who owned it. I refused. The others – decent fellows in their way – told me I was squeamish. I said, “Yes. Perhaps I am. My name is plain Harcourt Worters – not a well-known name if you go outside the City and my own country, but a name which, where it is known, carries, I flatter myself, some weight. And I will not sign my name to this. That is all. Call me squeamish if you like. But I will not sign. It is just a fad of mine. Let us call it a fad.”’ He blushed again. Ford believes that his guardian blushes all over – that if you could strip him and make him talk nobly he would look like a boiled lobster. There is a picture of him in this condition in the notebook.
    ‘So the man who owned it then didn’t own it now?’ said Miss Beaumont, who had followed the narrative with some interest.
    ‘Oh, no!’ said Mr Worters.
    ‘Why no!’ said Mrs Worters absently, as she hunted in the grass for her knitting-needle. ‘Of course not. It belongs to the widow.’
    ‘Tea!’ cried her son, springing vivaciously to his feet. ‘I see tea and I want it. Come mother. Come along, Evelyn. I can tell you it’s no joke, a hard day in the battle of life. For life is practically a battle. To all intents and purposes a battle. Except for a few lucky fellows who can read books, and so avoid realities. But I——’
    His voice died away as he escorted the two ladies over the smooth lawn and up the stone steps to the terrace, on which the footman was placing tables and little chairs and a silver kettle-stand. More ladies came out of the house. We could just hear their shouts of excitement as they also were told of the purchase of Other Kingdom.
    I like Ford. The boy has the makings of a scholar and – though for some reason he objects to the word – of a gentleman. It amused me now to see his lip curl with the vague cynicism of youth. He cannot understand the footman and the solid silver kettle-stand. They make him cross. For he has dreams – not exactly spiritual dreams: Mr Worters is the man for those – but dreams of the tangible and the actual: robust dreams, which take him, not to heaven, but to another earth. There are no footmen in this other earth, and the kettle-stands I suppose, will not be made of silver, and I know that everything is to be itself, and not practically something else. But what this means, and, if it means anything, what the good of it is, I am not prepared to say. For though I have just said ‘there is value in dreams,’ I only said it to silence old Mrs Worters.
    ‘Go ahead, man! We can’t have tea till we’ve got through something.’
    He turned his chair away from the terrace, so that he could sit looking at the meadows and at the stream that runs through the meadows, and at the beech-trees of Other Kingdom that rise beyond the stream. Then, most gravely and admirably, he began to construe the Eclogues of Virgil.
     
    II
     
    Other Kingdom Copse is just like any other beech copse, and I am therefore spared the fatigue of describing it. And the stream in front of it, like many other streams, is not crossed by a bridge in the right place, and you must either walk round a mile or else you must paddle. Miss Beaumont suggested that we should paddle.
    Mr Worters accepted the suggestion tumultuously. It only became evident gradually that he was not going to adopt it.
    ‘What fun! what fun! We will paddle to your kingdom. If only – if only it wasn’t for the tea-things.’
    ‘But you can carry the tea-things on your back.’
    ‘Why, yes! so I can. Or the servants could.’
    ‘Harcourt – no servants. This is my picnic, and my wood. I’m going to settle everything. I didn’t tell you: I’ve got all the food. I’ve been in the village with Mr