"Take th' squab, mester," he said, pointing to the sofa. I took it.
He picked up the candle; then dropped it, and lighted a lamp which was
on the mantelpiece between his vases of blue glass. His movements were
very slow, hesitating and clumsy. Blowing out the candle, which smoked
for a long time, he went with the lamp to the bookcase. As the key of
the bookcase was in his right pocket and the lamp in his right hand he
had to change the lamp, cautiously, from hand to hand. When he opened
the cupboard I saw a rich gleam of silver from every shelf of it except
the lowest, and I could distinguish the forms of ceremonial cups with
pedestals and immense handles.
"I suppose these are your pots?" I said.
"Ay!"
He displayed to me the fruits of his manifold victories. I could see him
straining along endless cinder-paths and highroads under hot suns, his
great knees going up and down like treadles amid the plaudits and howls
of vast populations. And all that now remained of that glory was these
debased and vicious shapes, magnificently useless, grossly ugly, with
their inscriptions lost in a mess of flourishes.
"Ay!" he said again, when I had fingered the last of them.
"A very fine show indeed!" I said, resuming the sofa.
He took a penny bottle of ink and a pen out of the bookcase, and also,
from the lowest shelf, a bag of money and a long narrow account book.
Then he sat down at the table and commenced accountancy. It was clear
that he regarded his task as formidable and complex. To see him
reckoning the coins, manipulating the pen, splashing the ink, scratching
the page; to hear him whispering consecutive numbers aloud, and
muttering mysterious anathemas against the untamable naughtiness of
figures--all this was painful, and with the painfulness of a simple
exercise rendered difficult by inaptitude and incompetence. I wanted to
jump up and cry to him: "Get out of the way, man, and let me do it for
you! I can do it while you are wiping hairs from your pen on your
sleeve." I was sorry for him because he was ridiculous--and even more
grotesque than ridiculous. I felt, quite acutely, that it was a shame
that he could not be for ever the central figure of a field of mud,
kicking a ball into long and grandiose parabolas higher than gasometers,
or breaking an occasional leg, surrounded by the violent affection of
hearts whose melting-point was the exclamation, "Good old Jos!" I felt
that if he must repose his existence ought to have been so contrived
that he could repose in impassive and senseless dignity, like a mountain
watching the flight of time. The conception of him tracing symbols in a
ledger, counting shillings and sixpences, descending to arithmetic, and
suffering those humiliations which are the invariable preliminaries to
legitimate fatherhood, was shocking to a nice taste for harmonious
fitness.... What, this precious and terrific organism, this slave with a
specialty--whom distant towns had once been anxious to buy at the
prodigious figure of five hundred pounds--obliged to sit in a mean
chamber and wait silently while the woman of his choice encountered the
supreme peril! And he would "soon be past football!" He was "thirty-four
if a day!" It was the verge of senility! He was no longer worth five
hundred pounds. Perhaps even now this jointed merchandise was only worth
two hundred pounds! And "they"--the shadowy directors, who could not
kick a ball fifty feet and who would probably turn sick if they broke a
leg--"they" paid him four pounds a week for being the hero of a quarter
of a million of people! He was the chief magnet to draw fifteen thousand
sixpences and shillings of a Saturday afternoon into a company's cash
box, and here he sat splitting his head over fewer sixpences and
shillings than would fill a half-pint pot! Jos, you ought in justice to
have been José, with a thin red necktie down your breast (instead of a
line of mud up your back), and embroidered breeches on those miraculous
legs, and an income of a quarter of a million pesetas, and the
languishing acquiescence of innumerable mantillas. Every moment you were
getting older and stiffer; every moment was bringing nearer the moment
when young men would reply curtly to their doddering elders: "Jos
Myatt--who was '_e?_"
The putting away of the ledger, the ink, the pen and the money was as
exasperating as their taking out had been. Then Jos, always too large
for the room, crossed the tiled floor and mended the fire. A poker was
more suited to his capacity than a pen. He glanced about him, uncertain
and anxious, and then crept to the door near the foot of the stairs and
listened. There was no sound; and that was curious. The woman who was
bringing into the world the hero's child made no cry that reached us
below. Once or twice I had heard muffled movements not quite
overhead--somewhere above--but naught else. The doctor and Jos's sister
seemed to have retired into a sinister and dangerous mystery. I could
not dispel from my mind pictures of what they were watching and what
they were doing. The vast, cruel, fumbling clumsiness of Nature, her
lack of majesty in crises that ought to be majestic, her incurable
indignity, disgusted me, aroused my disdain, I wanted, as a philosopher
of all the cultures, to feel that the present was indeed a majestic
crisis, to be so esteemed by a superior man. I could not. Though the
crisis possibly intimidated me somewhat, yet, on behalf of Jos Myatt, I
was ashamed of it. This may be reprehensible, but it is true.
He sat down by the fire and looked at the fire. I could not attempt to
carry on a conversation with him, and to avoid the necessity for any
talk at all, I extended myself on the sofa and averted my face,
wondering once again why I had accompanied the doctor to Toft End. The
doctor was now in another, an inaccessible world. I dozed, and from my
doze I was roused by Jos Myatt going to the door on the stairs.
"Jos," said a voice. "It's a girl."
Then a silence.
I admit there was a flutter in my heart. Another soul, another formed
and unchangeable temperament, tumbled into the world! Whence?
Whither?... As for the quality of majesty--yes, if silver trumpets had
announced the advent, instead of a stout, aproned woman, the moment
could not have been more majestic in its sadness. I say "sadness," which
is the inevitable and sole effect of these eternal and banal questions,
"Whence? Whither?"
"Is her bad?" Jos whispered.
"Her's pretty bad," said the voice, but cheerily. "Bring me up another
scuttle o' coal."
When he returned to the parlour, after being again dismissed, I said to
him:
"Well, I congratulate you."
"I thank ye!" he said, and sat down. Presently I could hear him
muttering to himself, mildly: "Hell! Hell! Hell!"
I thought: "Stirling will not be very long now, and we can depart
home." I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to two. But Stirling did
not appear, nor was there any message from him or sign. I had to submit
to the predicament. As a faint chilliness from the window affected my
back I drew my overcoat up to my shoulders as a counterpane. Through a
gap between the red curtains of the window I could see a star blazing.
It passed behind the curtain with disconcerting rapidity. The universe
was swinging and whirling as usual.