“Yes,” agreed Edmund. “It’s not everyone could have done it. But I must say for Welfare he’s a worker. Nothing will stop him when he’s fairly on a job.”
I am myself naturally very deficient in energy, and so perhaps have an exaggerated respect for it in other people. I detest the photographs one sometimes sees of raucous politicians declaiming with wide-open mouths, uplifted fists, and over-developed facial muscles. To many, I know, such men are the type of energy and what they call “efficiency.” The men whom I have worshipped, whose names I have seldom known, are those who have made great roads and bridges in remote places, who have conceived ships and mighty engines, and the few god-like ones who have written the great books of the world.
Between such men and myself there is a great gulf fixed; but between me and the loud-voiced politician there is only my own fastidiousness.
Some of this nobler energy Captain Welfare possessed in his degree. His intelligence was of quite a high order; he had the face and aspect of a man intended for doing things on a large scale; he had the simplicity and lovableness of a great man, and he was unhampered by what we call “higher education.”
Yet beyond escaping from the dry-salter’s shop he had done nothing with his life. He had seen men and cities, but he had not known them; he had certainly not commanded them. Had he succeeded in his first primitive ambition of making money, it might have been replaced by a nobler one, and in that he would have succeeded too. But he had failed. Poking about amid adversity he had done “shady” things; he had done this one blindly dishonourable thing. But successful men, who have the choice of avoiding dishonour, have done far worse things, and I believed that as a successful, happy man, Welfare would have done nothing base.
What is the flaw in such men as this, these many men who ought to bequeath something to their race? Is it all the bishop’s “want of opportunity”? Was Edmund also to become one of them? That was to me the most poignant question.
As there was no chance of Brogden’s returning we ventured to lock the door of our room and dine together downstairs. But it was not a festive meal.
The cloud of anxiety for the enterprise in hand was dark over us, and beyond that the sky of the future looked gloomy enough. There was the threat of Jakoub’s malevolence and, more serious to me, the question of Edmund’s eventual future.
I tried to get him to talk of this, but it was as though he could not see himself apart from the associations of his past.
“How can I get rid of it?” he asked. “I am only avoiding exposure now for your sake—and the family name. Otherwise I believe I should feel better if I went through the mill and took what I have earned; prison for a bit, and then the fo’c’sle for the rest of my time. It would be a way of disappearing, and that’s all I want now.”