A Tragedy of Twopence

My relations with the readers of this page have been
long and pleasant, but--perhaps for that very reason--
I feel that the time has come when I ought to confess
the one great crime of my life. It happened a long time ago;
but it is not uncommon for a belated burst of remorse
to reveal such dark episodes long after they have occurred.
It has nothing to do with the orgies of the Anti-Puritan League.
That body is so offensively respectable that a newspaper,
in describing it the other day, referred to my friend
Mr. Edgar Jepson as Canon Edgar Jepson; and it is believed
that similar titles are intended for all of us. No; it is
not by the conduct of Archbishop Crane, of Dean Chesterton,
of the Rev. James Douglas, of Monsignor Bland, and even of that
fine and virile old ecclesiastic, Cardinal Nesbit, that I wish
(or rather, am driven by my conscience) to make this declaration.
The crime was committed in solitude and without accomplices.
Alone I did it. Let me, with the characteristic thirst
of penitents to get the worst of the confession over, state it
first of all in its most dreadful and indefensible form.
There is at the present moment in a town in Germany (unless he
has died of rage on discovering his wrong), a restaurant-keeper
to whom I still owe twopence. I last left his open-air restaurant
knowing that I owed him twopence. I carried it away under his
nose, despite the fact that the nose was a decidedly Jewish one.
I have never paid him, and it is highly improbable that I ever shall.
How did this villainy come to occur in a life which has been,
generally speaking, deficient in the dexterity necessary for fraud?
The story is as follows--and it has a moral, though there
may not be room for that.

. . . . .

It is a fair general rule for those travelling on the Continent that
the easiest way of talking in a foreign language is to talk philosophy.
The most difficult kind of talking is to talk about common necessities.
The reason is obvious. The names of common necessities vary completely
with each nation and are generally somewhat odd and quaint.
How, for instance, could a Frenchman suppose that a coalbox would
be called a "scuttle"? If he has ever seen the word scuttle
it has been in the Jingo Press, where the "policy of scuttle"
is used whenever we give up something to a small Power like Liberals,
instead of giving up everything to a great Power, like Imperialists.
What Englishman in Germany would be poet enough to guess that the Germans
call a glove a "hand-shoe." Nations name their necessities by nicknames,
so to speak. They call their tubs and stools by quaint, elvish,
and almost affectionate names, as if they were their own children!
But any one