do you mark there, down in the lowest point and innermost funnel of hell fire pit, souls writhing in smoke, themselves like glowing smoke and tortured in the flame? you ask me what they are. these are the servants of the rich: the men who in their mortal life opened the doors of the great houses and drove the carriages and sneered at the unhappy guests.
those larger souls that bear the greatest doom and manifest the more dreadful suffering, they are the butlers boiling in molten gold.
"what!" you cry, "is there then, indeed, as i once heard in childhood, justice for men and an equal balance, and a final doom for evil deeds?" there is! look down into the murky hollow and revere the awful accomplishment of human things.
[pg 104]
these are the men who would stand with powder on their heads like clowns, dressed in fantastic suits of gold and plush, with an ugly scorn upon their faces, and whose pleasure it was (while yet their time of probation lasted) to forget every human bond and to cast down the nobler things in man: treating the artist as dirt and the poet as a clown; and beautiful women, if they were governesses or poor relations or in any way dependents, as a meet object for silent mockery. but now their time is over and they have reaped the harvest which they sowed. look and take comfort, all you who may have suffered at their hands.
come closer. see how each separate sort suffers its peculiar penalty. there go a hopeless shoal through the reek: their doom is an eternal sleeplessness and a nakedness in the gloom. there is nothing to comfort them, not even memory: and they know that for ever and for ever they must plunge and swirl, driven before the blasts, now hot, now icy, of their [pg 105]everlasting pain. these are those men who were wont to come into the room of the poor guest at early morning with a steadfast and assured step and a look of insult. these are those who would take the tattered garments and hold them at arm's length as much as to say: "what rags these scribblers wear!" and then, casting them over the arm with a gesture that meant: "well, they must be brushed, but heaven knows if they will stand it without coming to pieces!" would next discover in the pockets a great quantity of middle-class things, and notably loose tobacco.
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[pg 106] 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[pg 107] 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 [pg 108]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,[pg 109] 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[pg 110] 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!"
for there is no repentance known among the servants of the rich, nor any exception to their vileness; they are hated by men when they live, and when they die they must for all eternity consort with demons.
