“How d’you mean—‘leaning’?” Kirkby questioned him a second time, and Machell wriggled again.
“Well, sir, you haven’t been like yourself for a bit now, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Absent-minded and such-like, and not hearing when folks spoke.... And, begging your pardon again, sir,” he finished, with a nervous burst, “but you’re getting on. It’s only in reason you should be thinking of retiring before so long....”
He found himself presently on the further side of the greenhouse, without quite knowing how he had got there, or what he had said to Machell before he went. He felt pretty sure, however, that he must have promised him his support, for he could still see the smile on the man’s face, though distorted by panes of glass. But he had got away quickly because he had not felt equal to smiling at him in return. Indeed, never in his life had he come so near to experiencing the emotion of positive hate.
He understood now that he had never known how much he had valued his position until he was on the point of losing it. He had done well at his job, of course, arriving early, and achieving a horticultural reputation, not only in his own immediate neighbourhood, but in a wider district. Visitors to the Hall treated him with deference, and consulted him as an authority. He was invited to lecture, to judge at flower-shows, to sit on the committees of various societies. He had also written pamphlets,—one, upon an Alpine plant which nobody else in England had been able to grow, but which grew quite simply and easily for Kirkby, merely, as far as one could make out, because he wished it to do so.
Successful, however, as he had been in his own little world, he had never allowed it to upset him. He had never been over-elated about his doings, or tried to create an impression. Indeed, he had hardly ever thought about himself at all. He had taken the rewards of life, when they came, as simply as he took the fact of the pollen in the ripened flower.
But he had grown used to the situation, all the same. He had grown to expect the deference and the recognition, without knowing that he expected them. They had ended by creating a special atmosphere of his own in which he moved and breathed as naturally as in the air around him.
That atmosphere would be one of the things which he would have to leave behind him when he went to Canada. He would be nobody,—out there. People might be kind to him, of course, might even like him, but they would know nothing about him. If they thought of him at all, it would probably be only as somebody’s father, old-fashioned and rather a nuisance. They would never know that he had done anything or been anything,—out there.
He felt ashamed of himself at first for caring so much about the loss of a thing like that, but as he pondered the question further, he saw deeper. It was not just conceit and vanity that made people want recognition when they were old. What they were looking for when they asked for it was a definite confirmation of their personality,—a vital necessity, without which they were apt to wither away. They were like cut flowers, he thought, once they had lost their special identity. That was why so many lingered on in the place where they had lived and worked, feeling that they would die if they were taken away from it. Even those who had been neither pleasant nor useful in their lives received some sort of recognition in the place where they had lived. The new folks whom you met when you were old often seemed tacitly to deny that you had ever lived at all. You fought against it, at first, but you could do nothing about it. Presently, perhaps, you even came to see yourself through their eyes as a sort of ghost,—a ghost who would never have any future, and who had never had any past....
And along with your life, of course, they denied your work,—that work which was part of you and yet was so much bigger than you, and which you had fondly imagined would still live on in people’s minds, even after you, who mattered so much less than the work, were dead and crumbled away....
One of the several garden-cats appeared at that moment around a corner of the greenhouse, and twined itself lovingly about his legs. He could see another inside the greenhouse, sitting on one of the stages, and still another sunning itself happily inside one of the frames. They were an old breed now, which had been in the gardens for years—so old, indeed, that he had ceased to distinguish between the generations. For the same reason, and because of their puzzling likeness to one another, they had no individual names, but were known collectively as The Cat.