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.He walked across the road again and picked up the small cask, which he put on the other side of the cheese and from which he filled, in his own manner, the little cup he carried in his pocket.But at the sight of this the cockney’s eyes lit at once with terror and desire.“But yer cawnt do it,” he whispered hoarsely, “its the pleece.It’s gile for that, with no doctor’s letter nor sign-board nor nothink.”Mr.Humphrey Pump made yet another march back into the road.When he got there he hesitated for the first time, but it was quite clear from the attitude of the two insane aristocrats who were arguing and posturing in the road that they would notice nothing except each other.He picked the loose post off the road and brought it to the car, humorously propping it erect in the aperture between keg and cheese.The little glass of rum was wavering in the poor chauffeur’s hand exactly as the big knife had done, but when he looked up and actually saw the wooden sign above him, he seemed not so much to pluck up his courage, but rather to drag up some forgotten courage from the foundations of some unfathomable sea.It was indeed the forgotten courage of the people.He looked once at the bleak, black pinewoods around him and took the mouthful of golden liquid at a gulp, as if it were a fairy potion.He sat silent; and then, very slowly, a sort of stony glitter began to come into his eyes.The brown and vigilant eyes of Humphrey Pump were studying him with some anxiety or even fear.He did look rather like a man enchanted or turned to stone.But he spoke very suddenly.“The blighter!” he said.“I’ll give ’im ’ell.I’ll give ’im bleeding ’ell.I’ll give ’im somethink wot ’e don’t expect.”“What do you mean?” asked the inn-keeper.“Why,” answered the chauffeur, with abrupt composure, “I’ll give ’im a little dornkey.”Mr.Pump looked troubled.“Do you think,” he observed, affecting to speak lightly, “that he’s fit to be trusted even with a little donkey?”“Ow, yes,” said the man.“He’s very amiable with donkeys, and donkeys we is to be amiable with ’im.”Pump still looked at him doubtfully, appearing or affecting not to follow his meaning.Then he looked equally anxiously across at the other two men; but they were still talking.Different as they were in every other way, they were of the sort who forget everything, class, quarrel, time, place and physical facts in front of them, in the lust of lucid explanation and equal argument.Thus, when the Captain began by lightly alluding to the fact that after all it was his donkey, since he had bought it from a tinker for a just price, the police station practically vanished from Wimpole’s mind–and I fear the donkey-cart also.Nothing remained but the necessity of dissipating the superstition of personal property.“I own nothing,” said the poet, waving his hands outward, “I own nothing save in the sense that I own everything.All depends whether wealth or power be used for or against the higher purposes of the cosmos.”“Indeed,” replied Dalroy, “and how does your motor car serve the higher purposes of the cosmos?”“It helps me,” said Mr.Wimpole, with honourable simplicity, “to produce my poems.”“And if it could be used for some higher purpose (if such a thing could be), if some new purpose had come into the cosmos’s head by accident,” inquired the other, “I suppose it would cease to be your property.”“Certainly,” replied the dignified Dorian.“I should not complain.Nor have you any title to complain when the donkey ceases to be yours when you depress it in the cosmic scale.”“What makes you think,” asked Dalroy, “that I wanted to depress it?”“It is my firm belief,” replied Dorian Wimpole, sternly, “that you wanted to ride on it” (for indeed the Captain had once repeated his playful gesture of putting his large leg across).“Is not that so?”“No,” answered the Captain, innocently, “I never ride on a donkey.I’m afraid of it.”“Afraid of a donkey!” cried Wimpole, incredulously
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