“He thinks of chemistry and physics not as a help to understanding but
as a help to trading. So long as he has been at Woldingstanton he has
been working furtively with our materials in the laboratories, dreaming
of some profitable patent. Oh! I know you, Farr. Do you think I didn’t
see because I didn’t choose to complain? If he could have discovered
some profitable patent he would have abandoned teaching the day he did
so. He would have been even as you are. But with a lifeless imagination
you cannot even invent patentable things. He would talk to the boys of
the empire at times, but the empire to him is no more than a trading
conspiracy fenced about with tariffs. It goes on to nothing.... And he
thinks we are fighting the Germans, he thinks my dear and precious boy
gave his life and that all these other brave lads beyond counting died,
in order that we might take the place of the Germans as the
chapman-bullies of the world. That is the measure of his mind. He has no
religion, no faith, no devotion. Why does he want my place? Because he
wants to serve as I have served? No! But because he envies my house, my
income, my headship. Whether I live or die, it is impossible that
Woldingstanton, my Woldingstanton, should live under his hand. Give it
to him, and in a little while it will be dead.”
§ 5
“Gentlemen!” Mr. Farr protested with a white perspiring face.
“I had no idea,” ejaculated Mr. Dad, “I had no idea that things had gone
so far.”
Sir Eliphaz indicated by waving his hand that his associates might allay
themselves; he recognized that the time had come for him to speak.
“It is deplorable,” Sir Eliphaz began.
He put down his hands and gripped the seat of his chair as if to hold
himself on to it very tightly, and he looked very hard at the horizon as
if he was trying to decipher some remote inscription. “You have imported
a tone into this discussion,” he tried.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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