George Chard, leaning over a ledger in his box of an office by the river bank, the galvanised roof above him crackling under the awful heat, considered the general injustice of things with a sore heart.
But when the pig was more hoggish than usual, he forced up before his mind a picture. It was a homely enough picture of a cottage with a pepper-tree growing in front and a grapevine trailing over the porch, and it was a long way off, but it steadied him.
Now the average bank clerk in the average country town is an insipid animal who plays tennis and says “Haw!”
As a rule he belongs to the “inner set,” in which revolve a dozen or so of social suns, very much dazzled by their own individual and mutual splendour.
The bank clerk is regarded as a catch by country young ladies, and as his commercial training stands him in good stead, he frequently manages to matrimonially annex a good banking account.
The minor bank official, whose wife can transfer a big account at pleasure, is a greater man than the major bank official whose wife like the little pig in the nursery rhyme, “got none.” The Pig’s wife under whom George had been sent to serve was lean and yellow and rich, in her own right, and in the right and light of a tribe of money makers with whom she was related and connected by marriage, which comes to the same thing.
The Pig’s wife’s people were the people of the place; in fact, the place pretty well belonged to the people of the wife of the Pig.
Hence the Pig, in spite of his delinquencies, was a desirable manager for that branch on the Bulk and Bullion.
Now, the Pig’s wife had several lean, yellow sisters, and a host of yellow-lean cousins of the feminine gender, and George Chard, who accepted social evenings as a painful duty, and loathed tennis, found himself tangled in the meshes of a family cobweb, wherein the spider in the multiplex personality of the Pig’s people by marriage threatened to extract the substance from him.
In such a situation, to succeed, a man must be either a born diplomatist or a born fool—George Chard was neither. For preference he ought to have been a fool. A fool who could ape city fashions, talk idiocies, and affect the manners of a cheesemonger who has unexpectedly won a Tattersall’s Sweep (which is the manner of the little shoddy aristocrats of country villages), would have been accepted as a social Pygmalion, before whom the plaster Galateas might decently become flesh and blood at the first invocation. Nineteen out of every twenty bank clerks would have fitted such a position naturally, but George belonged to the twentieth section, which is rare and unpopular—unpopular because rare.