“Don’t be humble. It’s waste of time in such a humiliating world.”
“I’m not humble”—the gardener indignantly repudiated the suggestion. “I’m proud of being what I am. I am more than worthy of the Caribbeania.”
“Then come and prove it,” said Mr. Rust, and dragged the gardener passionately down the street.
The gardener found himself placed on the door-step of an aspiring corner house. Mr. Samuel Rust stood on a lower step with his back to the door. It is part of the code of shadows to pretend, when you have rung the bell, that you do not care whether the door is opened or not.
The gardener, following the code of the socially simple, stood with his nose nearly touching the knocker, and his eyes glued to the spot where the head of the servant might be expected to appear. It therefore devolved on him to draw Mr. Rust’s attention to the eventual appearance of a black-frocked white-capped answer to his summons.
“Ah!” exclaimed Samuel, “Mr. Abel in?”
The maid, with fine dramatic feeling, stepped aside, thus opening up a vista, at the end of which could be seen Mr. Abel advancing with both hands outstretched.
When people shake hands with both their hands and both their eyes and all their teeth, and with much writhing of the lips, you at once know something fairly important about them. They have acquired the letter of enthusiasm without its spirit, and their effect on the really enthusiastic is like the effect of artificial light and heat on a flower that needs the sun.
The gardener became as though he were not there. All that he vouchsafed to leave at Mr. Rust’s side in the library of Mr. Abel was a white and sleepy-looking young man, standing on one fourteen-inch foot while the other carefully disarranged the carpet edge. The gardener was not shy, though on such occasions he looked silly. He was really encrusted in himself; loftily superior to Mr. Abel and his like he hung, levitated by the medium of his own conceit, at a level far above Mr. Abel’s house-top.
Fortunately Mr. Abel and Mr. Rust both took his aloofness for the sheepishness to be expected of one of his age.