AT THE SOURCE.
"Oh," said Francesca, coming into the library, "I see you're busy with your papers. Don't let me disturb you."
"If," I said, "it depended on me I wouldn't. I'd take you at your word and have you out of the room in two-twos. But you wouldn't like that, now, would you?"
"I'm afraid I should have to enter a protest. That's right, isn't it? Protests are things that have to be entered, aren't they?"
"Yes," I said, "they're like candidates for examinations, or rooms, only some rooms oughtn't to be entered, but are."
"Jocose?" said Francesca.
"No," I said; "I was thinking of Blue Beard. I daresay you remember about him. He was a very uxorious man, you know, and most domestic. Something of a traveller, and when"—
"We won't worry about Blue Beard," she said. "I think I know the outlines of his family history."
"Well then," I said, "why can't you leave me alone? You see I'm busy and yet you insist on staying here and interrupting me. Do you call that being a helpmeet?"
"Well," she said, "I call it joining myself unto you, and that's what we were told to do to one another in the marriage service."
"You're wrong," I said. "I was told to do that unto you, but you were told to submit yourself unto me and to reverence me."
"It's all the same," she said. "All I'm doing is to help you to obey the Prayer-Book."
"Anyhow," I said, "you've sat down and you mean to stay here. Is that what it comes to?"
"It is," she said. "You're in tremendous guessing form to-day."
"All I know," I said gloomily, "is that if my return for Income Tax contains many mistakes it'll be your fault, not mine; and I shall take care so to inform the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I shall put down in the Exemptions and Abatements, 'Interrupted by wife. Abatement claimed, £100.' The Chancellor will understand. He's a married man himself."
"So you're doing your Income Tax," she said dreamily. "I've often wondered how that was done. Do you like it?"
"No, Francesca," I said, "I do not like it. To be quite frank with you I detest it."
"But you're helping the War," she said. "That ought to buck you up like anything. Every extra penny you pay is a smack in the eye for the Kaiser, so cheer up and make a good big return."
"I will do," I said, "what is strictly fair between myself and the Government. I can afford to be just to the Chancellor, but, by Heaven, I cannot afford to be generous. Generosity has no place in an Income Tax return."
"Go ahead with it then," she said. "I don't know what's stopping you."
"You," I said, "are stopping me—you and that part of my income from which the tax is not deducted at the source."
"That sounds quite poetical," she said. "It runs into metre directly. Listen:—
No man can well be rude or even coarse
Who has his tax deducted at the source.
But I wish you'd tell me what it means."
"Francesca," I said bitterly, "you are pleased to be a rhymer. You are, in fact, rhyming while the exchequer is burning; and then you add insult to injury by asking me the meaning of an elementary financial phrase."
"Well, what does it mean?"
"It means," I said, "that if your money is invested in public companies or things of that nature, then when your half-yearly dividend—You know what a dividend is?"
"Rather," she said. "It comes in on blue paper or pink, and you say, 'That's something to be thankful for;' and you write your name on one half of it and you send that half to the bank, and you tear off the other half and lose it in the next spring-cleaning. I know what a dividend is all right."
"Francesca," I said, "your knowledge is very wonderful. But if you suppose that that is the whole dividend, you are much mistaken. It is the dividend minus the tax. The company saves you trouble by deducting the tax and pays it to the Chancellor for you."
"Bravo the company!" said Francesca.
"And so say I. You see you never get that part of your money, so there's no temptation to spend it—in fact you don't spend it."
"That," she said, "sounds highly plausible."
"Yes, but listen. Suppose you've got some little job at, say, two hundred and fifty pounds a year"—
"Like the little job you were so pleased to get a few years ago."
"Yes," I said, "more or less like that."
"Not so honourable, of course," said Francesca.
"No, of course not, but similar as to emoluments. Well, in that case you get the whole amount, and you spend it in perfectly useless things and forget all about it after you've put it down in your return; and then suddenly some Surveyor of Taxes writes and demands Income Tax on those two hundred and fifty pounds, actually demands something like forty pounds. I tell you, it goes through you like a knife."
"Haven't you any remedy?"
"Of course I could chuck the job," I said, "or do it for nothing. Yes, I think I'll chuck it. It'll be a lesson to them."
"Yes," she said, "it would probably make the Government sit up—but, on the whole, I don't think I should go so far if I were you. You see"—
"Go on," I said, for she was hesitating. "Let us strip ourselves of everything at once and throw ourselves on the charity of our neighbours."
"Well," she said, "I'd go on for a bit. A job's a job even if it does make you pay. You've had £210 on balance, and you ought to be thankful to have been allowed to pay forty pounds for munitions."
"And now," I said, "perhaps you'll let me get on with my work."
R. C. L.