Burlap shook his head. “We must begin mildly,” he said. He didn’t believe in Life to the point of taking any risks with the circulation.
“Mildly, mildly,” the other mockingly repeated. “You’re all the same, all you newspaper men. No jolts. Safety first. Painless literature. No prejudices extracted or ideas hammered in except under an anaesthetic. Readers kept permanently in a state of twilight sleep. You’re hopeless, all of you.”
“Hopeless,” repeated Burlap penitently, “I know. But, alas, one simply must compromise a little with the world, the flesh, and the devil.”
“I don’t mind your doing that,” Rampion answered. “What I resent is the disgusting way you compromise with heaven, respectability, and Jehovah. Still, I suppose in the circumstances you can’t help it. Take what you want.”
Burlap made his selection. “I’ll take these,” he said at last, holding up three of the least polemical and scandalous of the drawings. “Is that all right?”
Rampion glanced at them. “If you’d waited another week,” he grumbled, “I’d have had that copy of Ary Scheffer ready for you.”
“I’m afraid,” said Burlap with that wistfully spiritual expression which always came over his face when he began to speak about money. “I’m afraid I shan’t be able to pay much for them.”
“Ah, well, I’m used to it.” Rampion shrugged his shoulders. Burlap was glad he took it like that. And after all, he reflected, it was true. Rampion wasn’t used to being paid much. And with his way of living he did not need much. No car, no servants …
“One wishes one could,” he said aloud, drifting away into impersonality. “But the paper …” He shook his head. “Trying to persuade people to love the highest when they see it doesn’t pay. One might manage four guineas a drawing.”
Rampion laughed. “Not exactly princely. But take them. Take them for nothing if you like.”
“No, no,” protested Burlap. “I wouldn’t do that. The World doesn’t live on charity. It pays for what it uses—not much, alas, but something; it pays something. I make a point of that,” he went on, wagging his head, “even if I have to pay out of my own pocket. It’s a question of principle. Absolutely of principle,” he insisted, contemplating with a thrill of justifiable satisfaction the upright and self-sacrificing Denis Burlap who paid contributors out of his own pocket and in whose existence he was beginning, as he talked, almost genuinely to believe. He talked on, and with every word the outlines of this beautifully poor but honest Burlap became clearer before his inward eyes; and at the same time the World crept closer and closer to the brink of insolvency, while the bill for lunch grew momently larger and larger, and his income correspondingly decreased.
Rampion eyed him curiously. “What the devil is he lashing himself up into a fury about this time?” he wondered. A possible explanation suddenly occurred to him. When Burlap next paused for breath, he nodded sympathetically. “What you need is a capitalist,” he said. “If I had a few hundreds or thousands to spare, I’d put them into the World. But alas, I haven’t. Not sixpence,” he concluded, almost triumphantly, and the sympathetic expression turned suddenly into a grin.
That evening Burlap addressed himself to the question of Franciscan poverty. “Barefooted through the Umbrian hills she goes, the Lady Poverty.” It was thus that he began his chapter. His prose, in moments of exaltations, was apt to turn into blank verse. “Her feet are set on the white dusty roads that seem, to one who gazes from the walls of the little cities, taut-stretched white ribbons in the plain below.”
There followed references to the gnarled olive trees, the vineyards, the terraced fields, “the great white oxen with their curving horns,” the little asses patiently carrying their burdens up the stony paths, the blue mountains, the hill towns in the distance—each like a little New Jerusalem in a picture book—the classical waters of Clitumnus and the yet more classical waters of Trasimene. “That was a land,” continued Burlap, “and that a time when poverty was a practical, workable ideal. The land supplied all the needs of those who lived on it; there was little functional specialization; every peasant was, to a great extent, his own manufacturer as well as his own butcher, baker, greengrocer, and vintner. It was a society in which money was still comparatively unimportant. The majority lived in an almost moneyless condition. They dealt directly in things—household stuff of their own making and the kindly fruits of the earth—and so had no need of the precious metals which buy things. St. Francis’s ideal of poverty was practicable then, because it held up for admiration a way of life not so enormously unlike the actual way of his humbler contemporaries. He was inviting the leisured and the functionally specialized members of society—those who were living mainly in terms of money—to live as their inferiors were living, in terms of things. How different is the state of things today!” Burlap relapsed once more into blank verse, moved this time by indignation, not by lyrical tenderness. “We are all specialists, living in terms only of money, not of real things, inhabiting remote abstractions, not the actual world of growth and making.” He rumbled on a little about “the great machines that having been man’s slaves are now his masters,” about standardization, about industrial and commercial life and its withering effect on the human soul (for which last he borrowed a few of Rampion’s favourite phrases).
Money, he concluded, was the root of the whole evil; the fatal necessity under which man now labours of living in terms of money, not of real things. “To modern eyes St. Francis’s ideal appears fantastic, utterly insane. The Lady Poverty has been degraded by modern circumstances into the semblance of a sack-aproned, leaky-booted charwoman. …
