an and the ill man make
a great fuss about very little. I don't know about ill-health, but by
George, I know all about poverty--and I'll tell you once for all. For
twenty years I was poor, and this is what that means. To be tied hand and
foot to a piece of hideous drudgery--morning by morning, month by month,
and with the consciousness too that, if health fails you, or if you lose
your work, you will either starve or have to sponge on your friends--never
to be able to do what you like or go where you like--to know that the world
is full of beautiful places, delightful people, interesting ideas, books,
talk, art, music--to sicken for all these things, and not even to have the
time or energy to get hold of such scraps of them as can be found cheap in
London--to feel time slipping away, and all your instincts for beautiful
things unused and unsated--to live a solitary, grubby, nasty life--never
able to entertain a friend, or to go a trip with a friend, or to do a
kindness, or to help anyone generously--and yet to feel that with an income
which many people would regard as ridiculously inadequate, you could do
most of these things--the slavery, the bondage, the dreariness of it!" He
broke off, much moved.

"But," said I, "don't many quite poor people live happily and contentedly
and kindly with minute incomes?"

"Why, yes," said Father Payne, "of course they do!--and I'm willing enough
to admit that I ought to have done better than I did. But then I had been
brought up differently, and by the time I had done with Oxford, I had all
the tastes and instincts of the well-to-do man. That was the mischief, that
I had tasted freedom. Of course, if I had been cast in a stronger and
nobler mould, it would have been different--but all my senses had been
acutely developed, my faculties of interest and enjoyment and
appreciation--not gross things, mind you, nor feelings that _ought_ to
be starved, but just the wholesome delights of the well-educated man. I did
not want to be extravagant, and I knew too that there were millions of
people in the same case as myself. There was every reason why I should
behave decently about it! If I had been really interested in my work, I
could have done better--but I did not believe in the value of my work--I
taught men, not to educate them, but that they might pass an examination
and never look at the beastly stuff again. Whenever I reached the point at
which I became interested, I had to hold my hand.