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Sabre said slowly, "What do you mean you 'above the line'?" Twyning indicated the short line with a forefinger. "That line, my boy. Jonah's going to take me into partnership. Just told me." He had released the paper into Sabre's hand. Sabre handed it back with a single word, "Good." Twyning's face darkened again and darkened worse.
He struck his hand down on the desk: "Well, damn the Scotch. What's it got to do with the Scotch? This book isn't about Scotland. It's about England. England. I'll tell you another thing. You say if 'we' put out a book like that. It isn't 'we. Excuse me saying so, but it certainly isn't you. It's I." He stopped, and then laughed. "Sorry, Twyning." Twyning's face had gone very dark.
To hear Twyning's laugh and his "My dear old chap, as if I should think such a thing!" He passed into his room. The thought he had had which had arrested his anger at Mr. Fortune's hints, revealing this incident in another light, was, "They want to get rid of me."
Fortune said salaries of married men." "Ah, yes, old man, but between you and me he's going to do it for unmarried men as well, as the cases come up." "Why didn't he tell them so?" Twyning's genial expression hardened under these questions, but he said, still on his first note of confidential affection, "Ah, because he thinks they ought to do their duty without being bribed. Quite right, too.
Well, like Cassius out of a job or Judas Iscariot in the middle of one, anyway. That's Twyning's sort. Chap I never cottoned on to a bit. They'd precious little to say about Sabre. Sort of handed out the impression that he'd been out of the business so long that really they weren't much in touch with his doings.
Sabre was trying to retain his thoughts. He felt them slipping away before Twyning's presence. He could hear Twyning breathing through his nose and felt incensed that Twyning should come and breathe through his nose by his chair when he wanted to write. But Twyning continued to stand by the chair and to breathe through his nose. He was reading over Sabre's shoulder.
He stopped his swinging arm, holding his hand above the flames. "He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him; for God is love." He opened his fingers, and the crumpled letter fell and was consumed. He pushed himself up from the mantlepiece and turned and went over to Twyning and stood over him again. He patted Twyning's heaving shoulders. "There, there, Twyning. Bad luck. Bad luck.
There was Twyning's neck, that brown strip between his collar and his head, that in a minute he would catch him by.... No, seated thus he would catch his hair and wrench him back and cram his meal upon him. Knock, knock, knock. Curse the thing! He said heavily, "Twyning. Twyning, I've come to speak to you about your son." Twyning slightly twisted his face in his hands so as to glance up at Sabre.
I feel it most frightfully.... I've let down the books. They'll take a back place in the business now. Twyning's always been jealous of them. Fortune's never really liked my success with them. They'll begin interfering with the books now.... My books.... It was rottenly done. Behind my back. Plotted against me, or they wouldn't have sprung it on me like that.
An astonishing rasp came into Twyning's voice. "How old are you?" "Thirty-six. Why?" Twyning laughed away the rasp. "Ah, I'm older. I daresay you'll have a chance later on, if the Times and the Morning Post and those class papers have their way. And you've got no family, have you, old man?" That was in the third month of the war. But by June, 1915, the position on these little points had hardened.
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