These are they that would then take out with the utmost patience, private letters, money, pocket-books, knives, dirty crumpled stamps, scraps of newspapers, broken cigarettes, pawn tickets, keys, and much else, muttering within themselves so that one could almost hear it with their lips: "What a jumble these paupers stuff their shoddy with! They do not even know that in the Houses of the Great it is not customary to fill the pockets! They do not know that the Great remove at night from their pockets such few trinkets of diamonded gold as they may contain. Where were they born or bred? To think that I should have to serve such cattle! No matter! He has brought money with him I am glad to see—borrowed, no doubt—and I will bleed him well."
Such thoughts one almost heard as one lay in the Beds of the Great despairing. Then one would see him turn one's socks inside out, which is a ritual with the horrid tribe. Then a great bath would be trundled in and he would set beside it a great can and silently pronounce the judgment that whatever else was forgiven the middle-class one thing would not be forgiven them—the neglect of the bath, of the splashing about of the water and of the adequate wetting of the towel.
All these things we have suffered, you and I, at their hands. But be comforted. They writhe in Hell with their fellows.
That man who looked us up and down so insolently when the great doors were opened in St. James' Square and who thought one's boots so comic. He too, and all his like, burn separately. So does that fellow with the wine that poured it out ungenerously, and clearly thought that we were in luck's way to get the bubbly stuff at all in any measure. He that conveyed his master's messages with a pomp that was instinct with scorn and he that drove you to the station, hardly deigning to reply to your timid sentences and knowing well your tremors and your abject ill-ease. Be comforted. He too burns.
It is the custom in Hell when this last batch of scoundrels, the horsey ones, come up in batches to be dealt with by the authorities thereof, for them first to be asked in awful tones how many pieces of silver they have taken from men below the rank of a squire, or whose income was less than a thousand pounds a year, and the truth on this they are compelled by Fate to declare, whereupon, before their tortures begin, they receive as many stripes as they took florins: nor is there any defect in the arrangement of divine justice in their regard, save that the money is not refunded to us.
Cooks, housemaids, poor little scullery-maids, under-gardeners, estate carpenters of all kinds, small stable lads, and in general all those humble Servants of the Rich who are debarred by their insolent superiors from approaching the guests and neither wound them with contemptuous looks, nor follow these up by brigandish demands for money, these you will not see in this Pit of Fire. For them is reserved a high place in Paradise, only a little lower than that supreme and cloudy height of bliss wherein repose the happy souls of all who on this earth have been Journalists.
But Game-Keepers, more particularly those who make a distinction and will take nothing less than gold (nay Paper!), and Grooms of the Chamber, and all such, these suffer torments for ever and for ever. So has Immutable Justice decreed and thus is the offended majesty of man avenged.
And what, you will ask me perhaps at last, what of the dear old family servants, who are so good, so kind, so attached to Master Arthur and to Lady Jane?
Ah!... Of these the infernal plight is such that I dare not set it down!
There is a special secret room in Hell where their villainous hypocrisy and that accursed mixture of yielding and of false independence wherewith they flattered and be-fooled their masters; their thefts, their bullying of beggarmen, have at last a full reward. Their eyes are no longer sly and cautious, lit with the pretence of affection, nor are they here rewarded with good fires and an excess of food, and perquisites and pensions. But they sit hearthless, jibbering with cold, and they stare broken at the prospect of a dark Eternity. And now and then one or another, an aged serving-man or a white-haired housekeeper, will wring their hands and say: "Oh, that I had once, only once, shown in my mortal life some momentary gleam of honour, independence, or dignity! Oh, that I had but once stood up in my freedom and spoken to the Rich as I should! Then it would have been remembered for me and I should now have been spared this place—but it is too late!"