The Luminaries

say you have a share of responsibility in caring for her!’
    ‘First-name terms didn’t light her pipe.’
    ‘You would shut your door to her—because she is an inebriate?’
    ‘I’m not shutting any doors. If I’d found her in the thoroughfare I’d have done just as you did. Exactly as you did.’
    ‘Saved her life?’
    ‘Turned her in!’
    Lauderback waved this correction aside. ‘But then what?’ he said. ‘A night in the gaol-house—and then what? Who’s there to protect her, when she lights her pipe all over again?’
    ‘No one can protect a soul against themselves—against their own hand, you know!’ Balfour was vexed. He did not enjoy discussions of this kind; really, he thought, it was only marginally better than the relative merits of ship-rigged and square. (But then Lauderback had been a poor conversationalist this fortnight past: despotic in tone, by turns evasive and demanding. Balfour had chalked it up to nerves.)
    ‘Spiritual comfort, that’s what he means—spiritual protection,’ put in Jock Smith, meaning to be helpful, but Lauderback silenced him with the flat of his hand.
    ‘Forget suicide—that’s a separate argument, and a morbid one,’ he said. ‘Who’s there to give her a chance, Thomas? That’s my question. Who’s there to give that sorry girl one clean shot at a different kind of a life?’
    Balfour shrugged. ‘Some folk are dealt a bad hand. But you can’t rely on another person’s conscience to live the life you want to live. You make do with what you’re given; you struggle on.’
    In which remark the shipping agent showed his uncharitablebias, the obstinacy that hung as a weighted counterpoint beneath the lively indulgence of his outward air—for, like most enterprising souls, he held his freedoms very chary, and desired that all others would do the same.
    Lauderback sat back and appraised Balfour down the length of his nose. ‘She’s a whore,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? She’s just a whore.’
    ‘Don’t mistake me: I’ve got nothing against whores,’ Balfour said. ‘But I don’t like almshouses, and I don’t like convents. They’re dreary places.’
    ‘You are provoking me, surely!’ Lauderback said. ‘Welfare is the very proof of civilisation—it is its finest proof, indeed! If we are to civilise this place—if we are to build roads and bridges—if we are to lay a foundation for the future in this country—’
    ‘Then we may as well give our road builders something to warm their beds at night,’ Balfour finished for him. ‘It’s hard work, shovelling stones.’
    Jock and Augustus laughed at this, but Lauderback did not smile.
    ‘A whore is a moral affliction, Thomas; you must call a thing by its name,’ he said. ‘You must insist upon a standard, if you stand at a frontier!’ (This last was a direct quote from his most recent electoral address.) ‘A whore is a moral affliction. That’s the end of it. A bad drain for good wealth.’
    ‘And your remedy,’ Balfour returned, ‘is a good drain for good wealth, but it’s a drain all the same, and money’s money. Leave off the almshouses, and let’s not go turning any of our girls into nuns. That would be a d—ned shame, when they are so outnumbered as it is.’
    Lauderback snorted. ‘Outnumbered and outfoxed, I see,’ he said.
    ‘Responsibility for whores!’ said Balfour. He shook his head. ‘They’ll have a seat in Parliament next.’
    Augustus Smith made a rude joke in response to this, and they all laughed.
    When their laughter had subsided Lauderback said, ‘Let’s not talk in this vein any longer. We have discussed that day from allcorners and all sides—it makes me tired.’ He indicated with a circular sweep of his hand that he wished to return to their previous conversation. ‘With respect to the ship rig. My argument is simply that how one conceives of the advantages depends entirely on where one stands. Jock holds his perspective as a former able seaman; I hold mine as a ship owner and a gentleman. In my mind, I see the sail-plan; in his, he sees tar and oakum, and the breeze.’
    Jock Smith responded to this jibe conventionally, but with good cheer, and the argument was revived.
    Thomas Balfour’s irritation was revived just as quickly. He felt that he had spoken wittily on the subject of asylum—Lauderback had praised his rejoinder!—and he wished to persist with that topic of conversation, in order that he might seize