“What of it?” asked Matheson impatiently.
“Nothing. It is well if you can afford it. If you can’t, it’s imprudent.”
His hearer laughed.
“You know about how well I can afford it,” he said.
“I am ready at any time to give you a chance of making good,” Holman answered quickly. “Take a day off—loaf, if you feel that way—to-morrow I will make you a proposal. I can’t win so much off a friend. I don’t like it.”
Matheson seemed about to make some reply, but, after a slight hesitation, finally answered nothing; he gave a brief nod as his sole response, and walked quickly out of the room. Holman did not immediately follow him.
“There,” he mused, looking reflectively after the retreating figure, “goes a useful man—a man who is too lazy to use his brains, and sufficiently a fool to allow others to adapt them to their own purposes. So long as there is need for a type, that type exists.”
Though such a possibility had not occurred to him at the moment of uttering them, his words had had considerable effect upon Matheson, who, stretching himself in a wicker lounge in the shade of the small stoep at the back of the hotel, farthest removed from the busy hum of the street, stared absently out upon the glaring sunlight and pondered over the implication that he was idling away the hours. It was not a new suggestion; but it had not struck him so forcibly before, perhaps because it had not before been brought so pointedly to his notice by another.
It was not Holman alone who had seemed to make this imputation of indolence. What the man had conveyed in speech, the girl’s eyes had expressed with even greater effectiveness. It was what he had read in the girl’s eyes that weighed with him now; it left him with a feeling of insufficiency and incompetence. He experienced an unaccustomed sense of shame at the thought that he was as a piece of flotsam which is set moving with the tide. He resented, but could not overcome, this unusual self-depreciation. For the first time he saw himself impartially, and recognised his limitations with surprising clearness. And all because a pair of brown, earnest eyes had seemed to accuse him of trifling with life, which was a serious problem and not the game he would have it. They were wise brown eyes, and carried persuasion. For the only time within his memory he felt dissatisfied with himself.
He looked into the past, and saw it a waste of opportunity; he looked at the present, and frowned, and dismissed it without comment; he attempted to view the future; but the future stretched vague and unsubstantial along a vista of untrodden years, years in which he foresaw waste also—always waste; unless he pulled himself together and made some appreciable endeavour to justify his existence. Life held obligations which he had not recognised before that day; perhaps because only then was born in him the consciousness that no life can be lived independently; the individual stands in responsible relationship to the race.