“I suppose these are your pots?” I said.

“Ay!”

He displayed to me the fruits of his manifold victories.  I could see him straining along endless cinder-paths and highroads under hot suns, his great knees going up and down like treadles amid the plaudits and howls of vast populations.  And all that now remained of that glory was these debased and vicious shapes, magnificently useless, grossly ugly, with their inscriptions lost in a mess of flourishes.

“Ay!” he said again, when I had fingered the last of them.

“A very fine show indeed!” I said, resuming the sofa.

He took a penny bottle of ink and a pen out of the bookcase, and also, from the lowest shelf, a bag of money and a long narrow account book.  Then he sat down at the table and commenced accountancy.  It was clear that he regarded his task as formidable and complex.  To see him reckoning the coins, manipulating the pen, splashing the ink, scratching 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