the page; to hear him whispering consecutive numbers aloud, and
muttering mysterious anathemas against the untamable naughtiness of
figures--all this was painful, and with the painfulness of a simple
exercise rendered difficult by inaptitude and incompetence. I wanted to
jump up and cry to him: "Get out of the way, man, and let me do it for
you! I can do it while you are wiping hairs from your pen on your
sleeve." I was sorry for him because he was ridiculous--and even more
grotesque than ridiculous. I felt, quite acutely, that it was a shame
that he could not be for ever the central figure of a field of mud,
kicking a ball into long and grandiose parabolas higher than gasometers,
or breaking an occasional leg, surrounded by the violent affection of
hearts whose melting-point was the exclamation, "Good old Jos!" I felt
that if he must repose his existence ought to have been so contrived
that he could repose in impassive and senseless dignity, like a mountain
watching the flight of time. The conception of him tracing symbols in a
ledger, counting shillings and sixpences, descending to arithmetic, and
suffering those humiliations which are the invariable preliminaries to
legitimate fatherhood, was shocking to a nice taste for harmonious
fitness.... What, this precious and terrific organism, this slave with a
specialty--whom distant towns had once been anxious to buy at the
prodigious figure of five hundred pounds--obliged to sit in a mean
chamber and wait silently while the woman of his choice encountered the
supreme peril! And he would "soon be past football!" He was "thirty-four
if a day!" It was the verge of senility! He was no longer worth five
hundred pounds. Perhaps even now this jointed merchandise was only worth
two hundred pounds! And "they"--the shadowy directors, who could not
kick a ball fifty feet and who would probably turn sick if they broke a
leg--"they" paid him four pounds a week for being the hero of a quarter
of a million of people! He was the chief magnet to draw fifteen thousand
sixpences and shillings of a Saturday afternoon into a company's cash