"No! you're right. I'm a bit sick when I think of it, too, it's rather sickening. I've got a model upstairs of an engine that would make any man's fortune, and I can't get the fools to take it up. I think I shall have to break away for the States."
They were all silent for some minutes till the old vicar rose. "Shall we go to bed?" he said, and they proceeded upstairs, solemnly, silently, in single file.
The weeks passed away and Jack's uncle went back to sea, and his brothers returned to London, and another brother came and went. The winter changed to spring, the days lengthened out and grew brighter, and still Jack Carstairs could get nothing to do, nor get any one to take up his patent. Then one morning amongst the two or three letters awaiting him was one with a penny stamp: the ha'penny ones he knew were the stereotyped replies of the various municipalities to the effect that they "regretted" his application had not been successful; it was a way they had, they sent these things with a sort of grim humour about a month after he had seen by the papers that some one else had been appointed; it wasn't very often they went to the extravagance of a penny stamp for a refusal, so he opened that first, glancing casually at the city arms emblazoned on the flap of the envelope; enclosed was a typewritten letter, he was appointed switchboard attendant at £1 per week.
Carstairs gazed at it sternly with bitter hatred of all the world in his heart. "A blasted quid," he said, aloud. "Ye gods! a quid a week! And Darwen, the cheat, is getting £750." He hadn't fully realized when he was writing his applications for these small appointments, exactly the extent of his fall; but now, as he had it in typewritten form before his eyes, and signed, he looked again, signed by a man who had served his time with him.
Mrs Carstairs was humbly thankful for small mercies, but the old vicar, whom Jack found alone in his study, looked into his son's eyes and read the bitterness of soul there. "Do you think it would be wise to refuse and wait for something better. This is your home you know. You can work on your patent."
"I thought of all that before I applied," Jack answered. "The patent! The path of the inventor seems the most difficult and thorny path of all."
The old man's eyes brightened; he liked the stern definiteness of his youngest son. "It does seem hard," he said. "I don't understand these things, but I think you are wise to take this appointment."
"Oh, yes! I have no idea of refusing, but when I think that that lying cheat, Darwen, is getting £750 a year, it makes me feel pretty sick."
"I know, Jack; we see these things in the Church the same as everywhere else; the cheat seems sometimes to prosper. Why it should be so, I cannot comprehend; the cheat must inevitably cheat himself as the liar lies to himself, so that they both live in a sort of fool's paradise; they both unaccountably get hold of the wrong end of the stick; they imagine that they are successful if they satisfy others that they have done well, while the only really profitable results ensue when one satisfies oneself that one has done well; then and only then, can real intellectual, moral, and physical, progress follow. It is possible to imagine a being of such a low order of morality that he could feel a real intellectual pleasure in outwitting his fellow-men by cheating; such an one, it seems to me, must be very near the monkey stage of development. As man progresses intellectually he sets his intellect harder and harder tasks to perform, else he declines. It is possible that the cheat may occasionally reap very material and worldly advantages by his cheating. Some few apparently do, though the number must be extremely small and the intellectual capacity exceedingly great, for they are constantly pitted, not against one, but against the whole intellect of the world, including their brother cheats. The rewards and the punishments alike, in the great scheme of the Universe, are spread out unto the third and the fourth generation; the progeny of the cheat, in my experience, decline in intellect and moral force till probably the lowest depths of insanity and idiocy are reached. This great law of punishment for the sins of the fathers is beyond my mental grasp, but that it is so I cannot doubt; it is in fact, to me, the greatest proof that there must be something beyond the grave. You understand, Jack, I'm not in the pulpit, this is worldly wisdom, but I want to set these things before you as they appear to me. You must forget Darwen; you reap no profit from his success or failure, but you expend a large amount of valuable energy in brooding over it. 'Play up, and play the game,' Jack. Don't cheat because others are cheating, if you do you are bound to become less skilful in the real game. Think it over, Jack, 'Keep your eyes in the boat,' don't think about the other crew or the prize, simply 'play the game.' Have you told your mother you're going?"
"Yes."