“Yes.”
“A case of half and half-division of profits.”
“Half and half?” said the young farmer slowly. “What do you take me for? Half and half, when I provide ten of the stories and you only four?”
“I—I—” stammered Mr. Pembroke.
“I consider you did me over the long story, and I’m damned if you do me over the short ones!”
“Hush! if you please, hush!—if only for your little girl’s sake.”
He lifted a clerical palm.
“You did me,” his voice drove, “and all the thirty-nine Articles won’t stop me saying so. That long story was meant to be mine. I got it written. You’ve done me out of every penny it fetched. It’s dedicated to me—flat out—and you even crossed out the dedication and tidied me out of the introduction. Listen to me, Pembroke. You’ve done people all your life—I think without knowing it, but that won’t comfort us. A wretched devil at your school once wrote to me, and he’d been done. Sham food, sham religion, sham straight talks—and when he broke down, you said it was the world in miniature.” He snatched at him roughly. “But I’ll show you the world.” He twisted him round like a baby, and through the open door they saw only the quiet valley, but in it a rivulet that would in time bring its waters to the sea. “Look even at that—and up behind where the Plain begins and you get on the solid chalk—think of us riding some night when you’re ordering your hot bottle—that’s the world, and there’s no miniature world. There’s one world, Pembroke, and you can’t tidy men out of it. They answer you back do you hear?—they answer back if you do them. If you tell a man this way that four sheep equal ten, he answers back you’re a liar.”
Mr. Pembroke was speechless, and—such is human nature—he chiefly resented the allusion to the hot bottle; an unmanly luxury in which he never indulged; contenting himself with nightsocks. “Enough—there is no witness present—as you have doubtless observed.” But there was. For a little voice cried, “Oh, mummy, they’re fighting—such fun—” and feet went pattering up the stairs. “Enough. You talk of ‘doing,’ but what about the money out of which you ‘did’ my sister? What about this picture”—he pointed to a faded photograph of Stockholm—“which you caused to be filched from the walls of my house? What about—enough! Let us conclude this disheartening scene. You object to my terms. Name yours. I shall accept them. It is futile to reason with one who is the worse for drink.”
Stephen was quiet at once. “Steady on!” he said gently. “Steady on in that direction. Take one-third for your four stories and the introduction, and I will keep two-thirds for myself.” Then he went to harness the horse, while Mr. Pembroke, watching his broad back, desired to bury a knife in it. The desire passed, partly because it was unclerical, partly because he had no knife, and partly because he soon blurred over what had happened. To him all criticism was “rudeness”: he never heeded it, for he never needed it: he was never wrong. All his life he had ordered little human beings about, and now he was equally magisterial to big ones: Stephen was a fifth-form lout whom, owing to some flaw in the regulations, he could not send up to the headmaster to be caned.