“Most of the texts tell you your only duty is to the man next door,” said Mr. Tring, blushing.
“I entirely disagree with you,” said Mrs. Rust.
Soon after this discussion Mr. Tring, inspired by his wife, produced a plan for the benefit of the gardener.
“When this business is over we shall—I mean I shall be a rich man and a busy man. I need somebody young around. I’d like fine to buy your youth (his wife’s words). What about being my secretary for the present? It might give you a start in Island business.”
“This is not a time for paid work,” said the gardener, “with half the money on the Island gone to dust.”
“I take your meaning,” said Mr. Tring. “But in my opinion the time’s all right. Good work’s good work, whether it’s honorary or not. I never liked the idea that there’s something heroic in refusing money, making out that there’s something mean in accepting it. If you help you help, and the help’s none the worse if it makes you self-supporting.”
The word “self-supporting” was a sharp and accusing word to the gardener. Most of us privately possess certain words that search out the tender parts in our spiritual anatomy. The words “absolute impossibility,” for instance, angered the suffragette to militant protest; the mention of “narrow-mindedness” ruffled the priest’s sensibilities; as for me, the expression “physical disability” hurts me like a knife. It may or may not be out of place to add that the effect on Courtesy—that practical girl—of an allusion to “banana fritters” was to make her feel sick. You may know people better by their weaknesses than by their strength.
The word self-supporting, therefore, goaded the gardener into accepting Mr. Tring’s offer.
His stock of poses, though very wide in range, had not as yet extended as far as practical business, in black and white, hours ten to five daily. He had—I report it with disgust—a contempt for the pen as a business implement. He was himself an artist without expression, a poet caged; a musician in desire, he suffered from a mute worship of all art. And he believed that the pen was as sacred an instrument as the violin, or the palette. To make money by the pen in business was equal to fiddling on a kerb-stone, or designing picture post cards. These theories are pose-theories, of course, and untenable by the practical man. But some of the gardener’s poses had crystallised into belief. He was, as you may have noticed, anything but a practical man.
“Perhaps,” said Mr. Tring, “you might be what my wife calls an ‘out-of-doors secretary.’ I have been officially asked to organise the distributing of the flour. Enquiries will have to be made. The niggers are awfully sly, you know; you’d have thought they’d be too silly to be sly.”