Free The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl by Brigid Brophy Page B

on you as a deadly amateur, just as a brewer or a baker would if you told him you collected yeast not in order to brew or bake with it but just to get fun out of it.’
    ‘All this rhetoric is quite pointless,’ the surgeon said. ‘It’s high time I got back to my selfish if socially useful job.’
    ‘I’m offering you the chance to do something extra socially useful by helping me plug the holes through which my efficiency goes to waste. And you arrogantly reply that I don’t need to save ten pence a day, so the job’s beneath you. Suppose I did need to? Suppose I was a pauper? Would the operation suddenly become ethical?’
    ‘A pauper has never made me such a monstrous proposition.’
    ‘It wouldn’t be worth his while. He’d never save enough by it to cover his expenditure on your fee. His saving would be in proportion to his tiny outgoings. My outgoings, on the other hand, are enormous. Look at the gadgetry and hardware in this office. It’s all worth it, because it multiplies my efficiency.’
    ‘I advise you to have one gadget fewer and keep your arm.’
    ‘Your advice is uneconomic. I would gain the cost of the gadget but lose the efficiency it gives me, which multiplies in geometric progression. You constantly overlook the factor of progression. You estimate I might save ten pence a day on food. Now if you saved ten pence a day, your ten pences would merely mount up in an old jam jar on a shelf in your kitchen. If I save ten pence a day, each ten pence will be put to work to make more pence. If you and I each save ten pence a day, I will end up with a great deal more money than you will. My saving will be in terms of compound interest. You think of coins and notes as things. I know they are processes. You think of my office equipment as a collection of things. I know they are processes – and, what’s more, I know they are processes of two opposite kinds, going in opposite directions. They’re processes that multiply my efficiency. But at the same time they represent an investment of my capital, and as such they are processes of deterioration . Now food intake, you pointed out, is not directly related to body weight. But wear and tear on, for instance, this fitted carpet and these office chairs is. If I reduce wear and tear on them, I postpone the moment when I shall have to invest a capital sum in their replacement. If I postpone it by, let us say, a year, I gain a year’s usufruct of the capital sum involved. Do you begin to see? With your professional-class habit of thinking of money in static terms, you underestimated both the extent of the saving I shall make and the value of making the saving.’
    ‘You’re very plausible,’ the surgeon said. ‘But I’m not going to be talked into anything.’
    ‘I’ve given you enough to think about. To say any more now would be a waste of my energy. There comes a point in all negotiations where the person who is going to yield closes his ears: in order to concentrate on how, and how far, he’s going to yield. My assistant will phone you tomorrow about the fee.’
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    ‘It’s not too late to change your mind.’
    ‘If you make it up in accordance with clear principles in the first place,’ the businessman replied from the operating trolley,‘you don’t need to waste energy changing it.’
    ‘I still think it’s one of the morbidest, unnaturallest ideas I’ve ever heard.’
    ‘“Unnatural,”’ the businessman mocked. ‘All your medical expertise rests on the biology of myth. What’s “natural” for human beings? You’re not natural. Natural human beings don’t perform skilled surgery.’
    ‘Yours is an idea that could only occur to an abnormal mentality .’
    ‘If I had a normal mentality I’d have a normal income. And if I had a normal income, you wouldn’t be getting the fee you are.’
    The surgeon had arranged the matter furtively, concealing from his assistants and the nursing staff the circumstances of the operation. He was