“Surely not merely to get out of it? It’s a dangerous thing to retire, Captain Welfare. I’ve seen a lot of men in the Services retired under the sixty-three years rule. They’ve been active, useful, young-seeming men, keenly looking forward to enjoying their pensions. But, when it’s come, they’ve grown old and boring all at once, simply tumbled headlong into old age, and very often they’ve died in a year or two. You won’t want to retire, will you, Davoren?”
“Oh, I should simply knock about in some other part of the sea,” said Edmund.
“I don’t know how it may look to gentlemen waiting for pensions,” Captain Welfare remarked with deliberation. “They’re gentlemen all the time. But it’s different in business. I don’t see how a man can help wanting to make his bit and get out of it. I hope you gentlemen won’t think the worse of me when I tell you my father was a man who got his living in his shirt sleeves.”
The bishop and I made appreciative noises. Edmund emptied his glass and threw a savage but quite ineffectual look at his partner.
“Yes. He had a dry-salter’s business in a small town in Lancashire. He always said he looked forward to putting on his coat for the last time and being a gentleman. He had his eye on a little house in Southport with two bay windows. He never managed it, poor man. It was partly my fault. I never took to the business and didn’t give him the help he had a right to expect. I was considered bright at school too, and the lessons were no trouble to me, but I couldn’t see any use in the things I learned, or in the dry-salting. So I got aboard a ship at Liverpool, as boy. It upset the old man a good deal, but it didn’t break his heart. It was kidney-trouble carried him off.”
“By the way, I’ve often wondered what a dry-salter is?” said the bishop.
“Well, I don’t rightly know. I’m not sure if anyone does nowadays. I think it’s an old-fashioned sort of name. Father sold Epsom salts, and sulphur and things, wholesale to the druggists, but he sold paint and turps and varnish and paraffin and patent medicines. Oh, and soap and candles and brushes. I think a dry-salter can sell pretty well anything he has a mind to.”
“Well, of course these things must be distributed,” the bishop said. “It’s useful necessary work. But I can understand a man not wanting to go on doing it all his life. And yet we’re all of us better, and look better, in our shirt sleeves.”
Captain Welfare looked sceptically at the bishop, as though he feared he were being mocked. I had a horrible fear that he might attempt some sarcasm about lawn sleeves. But if he thought of it his manners were too good to permit him to utter it.
“What I mean is that there ought to be more in life, for all of us, than merely ‘making a living,’ and waiting for death in more or less discomfort.”