"I thought you would."
"I've thought things over. I'm going to give up my professorship—and science generally, and come into business—if that is what you are meaning."
Solomonson turned his paper-weight round very carefully before replying. Then he said: "You mustn't give up your professorship yet, Trafford. For the rest—I'm glad."
He reflected, and then his bright eyes glanced up at Trafford. "I knew," he said, "you would."
"I didn't," said Trafford. "Things have happened since."
"Something was bound to happen. You're too good—for what it gave you. I didn't talk to you out there for nothing. I saw things.... Let's go into the other room, and smoke and talk it over." He stood up as he spoke.
"I thought you would," he repeated, leading the way. "I knew you would. You see,—one has to. You can't get out of it."
"It was all very well before you were married," said Solomonson, stopping short to say it, "but when a man's married he's got to think. He can't go on devoting himself to his art and his science and all that—not if he's married anything worth having. No. Oh, I understand. He's got to look about him, and forget the distant prospect for a bit. I saw you'd come to it. I came to it. Had to. I had ambitions—just as you have. I've always had an inclination to do a bit of research on my own. I like it, you know. Oh! I could have done things. I'm sure I could have done things. I'm not a born money-maker. But——." He became very close and confidential. "It's——them. You said good-bye to science for a bit when you flopped me down on that old croquet-lawn, Trafford." He went off to reminiscences. "Lord, how we went over! No more aviation for me, Trafford!"
He arranged chairs, and produced cigars. "After all—this of course—it's interesting. Once you get into the movement of it, it takes hold of you. It's a game."
"I've thought over all you said," Trafford began, using premeditated phrases. "Bluntly—I want three thousand a year, and I don't make eight hundred. It's come home to me. I'm going to have another child."
Solomonson gesticulated a congratulation.
"All the same, I hate dropping research. It's stuff I'm made to do. About that, Solomonson, I'm almost superstitious. I could say I had a call.... It's the maddest state of affairs! Now that I'm doing absolutely my best work for mankind, work I firmly believe no one else can do, I just manage to get six hundred—nearly two hundred of my eight hundred is my own. What does the world think I could do better—that would be worth four times as much."
"The world doesn't think anything at all about it," said Solomonson.
"Suppose it did!"
The thought struck Sir Rupert. He knitted his brows and looked hard obliquely at the smoke of his cigar. "Oh, it won't," he said, rejecting a disagreeable idea. "There isn't any world—not in that sense. That's the mistake you make, Trafford."
"It's not what your work is worth," he explained. "It's what your advantages can get for you. People are always going about supposing—just what you suppose—that people ought to get paid in proportion to the good they do. It's forgetting what the world is, to do that. Very likely some day civilization will get to that, but it hasn't got to it yet. It isn't going to get to it for hundreds and hundreds of years."
His manner became confidential. "Civilization's just a fight, Trafford—just as savagery is a fight, and being a wild beast is a fight,—only you have paddeder gloves on and there's more rules. We aren't out for everybody, we're out for ourselves—and a few friends perhaps—within limits. It's no good hurrying ahead and pretending civilization's something else, when it isn't. That's where all these socialists and people come a howler. Oh, I know the Socialists. I see 'em at my wife's At Homes. They come along with the literary people and the artists' wives and the actors and actresses, and none of them take much account of me because I'm just a business man and rather dark and short, and so I get a chance of looking at them from the side that isn't on show while the other's turned to the women, and they're just as fighting as the rest of us, only they humbug more and they don't seem to me to have a decent respect for any of the common rules. And that's about what it all comes to, Trafford."
Sir Rupert paused, and Trafford was about to speak when the former resumed again, his voice very earnest, his eyes shining with purpose. He liked Trafford, and he was doing his utmost to make a convincing confession of the faith that was in him. "It's when it comes to the women," said Sir Rupert, "that one finds it out. That's where you've found it out. You say, I'm going to devote my life to the service of Humanity in general. You'll find Humanity in particular, in the shape of all the fine, beautiful, delightful and desirable women you come across, preferring a narrower turn of devotion. See? That's all. Caeteris paribus, of course. That's what I found out, and that's what you've found out, and that's what everybody with any sense in his head finds out, and there you are."
"You put it—graphically," said Trafford.
"I feel it graphically. I may be all sorts of things, but I do know a fact when I see it. I'm here with a few things I want and a woman or so I have and want to keep, and the kids upstairs, bless 'em! and I'm in league with all the others who want the same sort of things. Against any one or anything that upsets us. We stand by the law and each other, and that's what it all amounts to. That's as far as my patch of Humanity goes. Humanity at large! Humanity be blowed! Look at it! It isn't that I'm hostile to Humanity, mind you, but that I'm not disposed to go under as I should do if I didn't say that. So I say it. And that's about all it is, and there you are."
He regarded Trafford over his cigar, drawing fiercely at it for some moments. Then seeing Trafford on the point of speaking, he snatched it from his lips, demanded silence by waving it at his hearer, and went on.
"I say all this in order to dispose of any idea that you can keep up the open-minded tell-everybody-every-thing scientific attitude if you come into business. You can't. Put business in two words and what is it? Keeping something from somebody else, and making him pay for it—"
"Oh, look here!" protested Trafford. "That's not the whole of business."
"There's making him want it, of course, advertisement and all that, but that falls under making him pay for it, really."
"But a business man organizes public services, consolidates, economizes."
Sir Rupert made his mouth look very wide by sucking in the corners. "Incidentally," he said, and added after a judicious pause: "Sometimes... I thought we were talking of making money."
"Go on," said Trafford.
"You set me thinking," said Solomonson. "It's the thing I always like about you. I tell you, Trafford, I don't believe that the majority of people who make money help civilization forward any more than the smoke that comes out of the engine helps the train forward. If you put it to me, I don't. I've got no illusions of that sort. They're about as much help as—fat. They accumulate because things happen to be arranged so."
"Things will be arranged better some day."
"They aren't arranged better now. Grip that! Now, it's a sort of paradox. If you've got big gifts and you choose to help forward the world, if you choose to tell all you know and give away everything you can do in the way of work, you've got to give up the ideas of wealth and security, and that means fine women and children. You've got to be a deprived sort of man. 'All right,' you say, 'That's me!' But how about your wife being a deprived sort of woman? Eh? That's where it gets you! And meanwhile, you know, while you make your sacrifices and do your researches, there'll be little mean sharp active beasts making money all over you like maggots on a cheese. And if everybody who'd got gifts and altruistic ideas gave themselves up to it, then evidently only the mean and greedy lot would breed and have the glory. They'd get everything. Every blessed thing. There wouldn't be an option they didn't hold. And the other chaps would produce the art and the science and the literature, as far as the men who'd got hold of things would let 'em, and perish out of the earth altogether.... There you are! Still, that's how things are made...."