CHAPTER XXII

THE HEART OF THE SHADOW

Ideals in the human being are as the flight of a swallow, now high, now sinking to earth, borne upwards by the bright light of air, pressed downwards by the lowering of a heavy sky.

When John had said his last good-bye to Jill, when it seemed to both of them that the Romance was finished--when the City of Beautiful Nonsense had just been seen upon the horizon, like a land of promise viewed from a height of Pisgah, and then faded into the mist of impossible things, John turned back to those rooms in Fetter Lane, with his ideal hugging close to earth and all the loneliness of life stretching out monotonously before him.

But not until he had seen the empty tea-cups in their position upon the table just as they had left them, the little piece of bread and butter she had half eaten, upon her plate; not until he had seen the empty chairs standing closely together as though repeating in whispers all the story of the City of Beautiful Nonsense which he had told her, did he come actually to realise that he had lost her--that he was alone.

The minutes ticked wearily by as he sat there, staring at it all as though it were an empty stage at the end of a play, which the players had deserted.

At the sound of footsteps mounting the stairs, he looked up. Then, as a knock fell upon the door, he started to his feet. She had come back! She could bear the parting no more than he! They were never to be parted! This loneliness was too unendurable, too awful to bear. In hurried strides, he reached the door and flung it open.

There stood the little bailiff--_the great_ Mr. Chesterton--with a smile spreading agreeably over his solemn face. In those two hours of his absence, he had thought of three clever things--three! which, having just invented, he found to be in every way as good as that famous simile of Time and Tide. He was longing to say them.

But when he saw the look on John's face, he stopped.

"Yer not expecting another young lady are yer?" he asked.

John turned back despairingly into the room, making way for him to enter. He offered no reply to the little man's remark.

Mr. Chesterton closed the door behind him.

"'Ave you 'ad a scrap?" he asked sympathetically.

Now, sympathy from a bailiff, may be a very beautiful thing, but when the mind of a man is floundering in the nethermost pit, he has no need of it. John turned on him, his face changed, his whole expression altered.

"You've come here to do your work, haven't you?" he said thickly--"you've come here to take possession of any confounded thing you like. Well--take it! Take the whole blessed show! I don't want to see a single thing in this room again." He strode to the door. The little man stood staring at him amazed. "You can rip every damned thing off the walls----" he went on wildly. "Make up your fifteen pounds whatever you do. Don't stint yourself! For God's sake don't stint yourself!--Take every damned thing!"

The door slammed. He was gone.

It was half-past six. Payne and Welcome were just beginning to put up their shutters. John hurried into the side entrance and threw his ticket down on the counter.

"I want that seventeen pounds," he said, and the ten-shilling-piece twisted a giddy dance on the counter by the side of the ticket, then sank down with a gentle ringing sound.

The pawnbroker looked at him in amazement, then went to a little pigeon-hole and produced the packet of money. John snatched it up and went.

They stared after him; then stared at one another.

"He ain't so far off it this time," said one.

"Next thing I'll do," said the high priest--"I'll cut 'is throat in a barber's shop."

But supremely unconscious of all these gentle remarks, John was hurrying on through the streets, scarcely conscious of where he was going, or why he had redeemed the money that was now gripped fiercely in his hand.

For what did anything matter now? There must be some colour of reality about the ideal, some red lamp burning before an altar to light up that utter darkness into which the mind inevitably falls, blindly and stumblingly, without such actual guiding flame as this. Where would be the wonderful reality of the Host in the Tabernacle, if it was not for the dim red lamp that burnt silently by day and night before the altar? Who could pray, who could believe in utter darkness?

And in utter darkness Jill had surely left him now. It might have been that they could not have married for some years; it might have been that they could never have married at all; but to see her no more--never to feel again the touch of understanding in her hands, the look of understanding in her eyes--that was the gale of the wind which had obliterated the red light of the lamp that burnt before his altar. And now--he was in darkness. Neither could he pray, nor believe.

For an hour, he wandered through the streets, then, as a clock struck the half-hour after seven, he turned into a fashionable restaurant and took a table in a corner alone.

A waiter came with the menu of the dinners--five shillings, seven and six, ten shillings. He chose the last as it was handed to him. The mere action of spending money needlessly seemed a part of the expression of that bitterness which was tainting all his thoughts.

The waiter handed him the wine list with a bow.

John shook his head.

"Water," he said.

This was not his way of seeking oblivion. In even the blackest moments of his mind, he must have his senses wide-eyed and awake. The man who drinks to forget, forgets Remorse as well. Remorse is a thing to be learnt of, not to drown.

This, if John had known it, was what his father meant by wishing for the sorrow in his life. By such moments as these, he was to come to learn the value of optimism; by such moments as these, he was to come to know, not that there is too much sadness in life already, but that there is too little of the contrast of real happiness to appreciate it.

All through the meal, sending away one course after another unfinished, he gave way voluntarily to the passion of bitterness, made no effort to steady the balance of his mind.

In a balcony, at the far end of the room, a band of string instruments played the worst of meanings into bad music--the music one hears without listening to. It was not long in finding its way into John's mind, not long in exerting its influence upon his mood. One by one, crowding quickly upon each other, he permitted its suggestions to take a hold upon his thoughts. What did it matter how he thought? What did it matter how low his ideal should fall? He could see nothing beyond the moment, nothing further than that he was alone, deprived of the greatest, the highest hope with which his whole being had associated itself? What did anything matter now that he had lost that.

And then, out of a stillness that had fallen since the last playing of the band, the musicians began a selection from _La Boheme_. He laid his knife and fork upon the plate. He sat back in his chair and listened.

Why did it sound so different? What had changed in it since that night when he had heard it at the Opera? Now there was sensuality in every note of it. It maddened him. The very passages that he had once found beautiful--found wonderful as he had listened to them with Jill--became charged with the vilest imaginations. Thoughts, the impurest, surged into his mind. The wildest and most incomprehensible desire beat in his brain. Was it the players? Was it their rendering of the music, or was it himself?

He called the waiter, ordered his bill, paid--thinking no loss in it--out of the seventeen pounds he had redeemed, and strode out of the place into the street.

There was nowhere to go, no friend whom he cared at such a moment to see. At last, without consciously determining upon it, he found himself making his way back to Fetter Lane.

With steps almost like those of an old man, he climbed up the stairs, passing the sandy cat without notice--not so much as a good-evening.

When he opened the door of his room, there was Mr. Chesterton, comfortably ensconced in his armchair and only saving his presumptuousness of its occupation, by reading one of John's books.

But Mr. Chesterton was a man with a certain amount of humility. He rose to his feet as John entered; because there was no doubt as to its being John's particular arm-chair. It was the only armchair in the room. The little bailiff had observed that. In fact, for that very reason, he had considerately omitted it in the making of his inventory.

"I--I just been reading one of your books, Mr. Grey," he said, "an' if yer don't mind my sayin' so, I've read many a story what was worse. I 'ave, indeed. I like this story first rate. It's no more like a thing you'd hear of in life than I'm like the photograph my son took of me last week with a five-shilling camera. 'Ow on earth you manage to do it is a marvel to me. Do you get a plot in yer 'ead like and just stick it down just as it comes to yer--what my old woman calls when the spirit moves? 'The spirit moves,' she says, and then she goes out and gets a jug of beer. But that's only figurative, of course. What I mean is, do you go on writing what's in your 'ead, or do you get bits of it out of other books? 'He threw his arms around her neck and held her in a passionate embrace.' I've read that in 'eaps of books. I suppose they get it from each other."

"Did you find it in mine?" asked John.

"Well, no--I can't say as I 'ave yet. But then, they've only just been introduced. I expect you'll 'ave to come to it sooner or later. They all do."

"That's quite right," said John--"we all do. There's something inevitable about it. Have you had a meal yet?"

"No--but I've got a little something here in a basket. I'll eat it on the landing if you like."

"Oh, no," said John--"eat it here. It makes no difference to me."

So Mr. Chesterton pulled out the basket with the little something inside. Two cold sausages and some bread and butter were the extent of his meal which he ate with evident relish, and table manners that, perhaps, a fastidious person might have objected to. You could, for example, hear him eating. Sometimes he exclaimed how excellent were sausages when they were cold. He went so far as to say he loved them. He also expanded on the way his old woman cooked tripe; but when he talked about the brains of certain animals being cheap and at the same time a great delicacy, John found that his hands wanted washing and went into the other room.

"They've had a tiff," said the little man as he bit into the second sausage--"they've 'ad a tiff. He's that down in the mouth, there's nothin' I can say as'll buck him up. Why, if I talk about sheep's brains to my old woman, she gets as chirpy as a cock-sparrer."

When John came back, Mr. Chesterton had finished; the basket was put away and he was doing things with his teeth and a bent pin in a far corner of the room.

"'Ave yer got a box of draughts, Mr. Grey?" he asked, when he was at liberty. John nodded his head.

"Then come along," said the little man--"let's have a game!"