“I don’t play,” said Frithiof. “In Norway we are not great at those games, or indeed at any kind of exercise for the mere sake of exercise. That is an idea that one only finds among Englishmen.”
“Possibly; but living in our climate you would do well to follow our habits. Come, let me persuade you to join the club. You look to me as if you needed greater variety.”
“I will think about it for next year; but just now I have work for Herr Sivertsen on hand which I can’t put aside,” said Frithiof.
“Well, then, things must go on as they are for the present,” said Mr. Boniface; “but at least you can bring your translating down to Rowan Tree House, and spend your holiday with us.”
“You are very kind,” said Frithiof, the boyish expression returning to his face just for a minute. “I shall be only too delighted.”
And the interview seemed somehow to have done him good, for during the next few days he was less irritable, and found his work in consequence less irksome.
But the change for the better did not last long, for Frithiof was without the motive which “makes drudgery divine.” And there was no denying that the work he had to do was really drudgery.
It has been the fashion of late years to dwell much on the misery of the slums, and most of us are quite ready to be stirred into active sympathy with the abjectly poor, the hungry, or the destitute. It is to be feared, however, that very few of us have much consideration for the less romantic, less sensational lives of the middle class, the thousands who toil for us day after day behind the counter or at the desk. And yet are their lives one whit less worthy of sympathy? Are they not educated to a point which makes them infinitely more sensitive? Hood has given us a magnificent poem on the sorrows of a shirt-maker; but who will take trouble to find poetry in the sorrows and weariness of shop assistants? It has been said that the very atmosphere of trade kills romance, that no poet or novelist would dare to take up such a theme; and yet everywhere the human heart is the same, and shop-life does not interfere with the loves and hatreds, the joys and sorrows which make up the life of every human being, and out of which are woven all the romances which were ever written. No one would dispute the saying that labor is worship, yet nevertheless we know well enough that while some work of itself ennobles the worker, there is other work which has to be ennobled by the way in which it is done. An artist and a coal-heaver both toil for the general good, but most people will admit that the coal-heaver is heavily handicapped. If in the actual work of shop assistants there is a prosaic monotony, then it is all the more probable that they need our warmest sympathy, our most thoughtful considerateness, since they themselves are no machines, but men and women with exactly the same hopes and desires as the rest of us. It is because we consider them of a different order that we tolerate the long hours, that we allow women to stand all day long to serve us, though it has been proved that terrible diseases are the consequence. It is because we do not in our hearts believe that they are of the same flesh and blood, that we think with a sort of contempt of the very people who are brought most directly into contact with us, and whose hard-working lives often put ours to shame.