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
box, and here he sat splitting his head over fewer sixpences and
shillings than would fill a half-pint pot! Jos, you ought in justice to
have been Jose, with a thin red necktie down your breast (instead of a
line of mud up your back), and embroidered breeches on those miraculous
legs, and an income of a quarter of a million pesetas, and the
languishing acquiescence of innumerable mantillas. Every moment you were
getting older and stiffer; every moment was bringing nearer the moment
when young men would reply curtly to their doddering elders: "Jos
Myatt--who was '_e?_"

The putting away of the ledger, the ink, the pen and the money was as
exasperating as their taking out had been. Then Jos, always too large
for the room, crossed the tiled floor and mended the fire. A poker was
more suited to his capacity than a pen. He glanced about him, uncertain
and anxious, and then crept to the door near the foot of the stairs and
listened. There was no sound; and that was curious. The woman who was
bringing into the world the hero's child made no cry that reached us
below. Once or twice I had heard muffled movements not quite
overhead--somewhere above--but naught else. The doctor and Jos's sister
seemed to have retired into a sinister and dangerous mystery. I could
not dispel from my mind pictures of what they were watching and what
they were doing. The vast, cruel, fumbling clumsiness of Nature, her
lack of majesty in crises that ought to be majestic, her incurable
indignity, disgusted me, aroused my disdain, I wanted, as a philosopher
of all the cultures, to feel that the present was indeed a majestic
crisis, to be so esteemed by a superior man. I could not. Though the
crisis possibly intimidated me somewhat, yet, on behalf of Jos Myatt, I
was ashamed of it. This may be reprehensible, but it is true.

He sat down by the fire and looked at the fire. I could not attempt to
carry on a conversation with him, and to avoid the necessity for any
talk at all, I extended myself on the sofa and averted my face,
wondering once again why I had accompanied th