Chapter 3

He noiselessly slipped from the bed, huddled on some clothes, washed his face in cold water at the kitchen sink, and let himself out of the house. The open air refreshed him almost as much as sleep could have done. He walked nearly five miles and back on the Manninglea Road, and would not even glance at the busy sorting-room when he came in again.

Mavis accompanied him to Rodchurch Road Station, and saw him off by the nine o'clock train. He looked very dignified in his newest bowler hat and black frock-coat, with a light overcoat on one arm and his wife's gloved hand on the other; and as he walked up and down the platform he endeavored to ignore the fact that he was an object of universal attention.

When buying his ticket he had let fall a guarded word or two about the nature of his errand, and from the booking-office the news had flown up and down both sides of the station, round the yard, and even into the signal cabins. "See Mr. Dale?" "Mr. Dale!" "There's Mr. Dale, going to London for an interview with the Postmaster-General."

Mr. Melling, the Baptist minister, took off his hat and bowed gravely; Mrs. Norton, the vicar's wife, smilingly stopped Mavis and spoke as if she had been addressing a social equal; then they received greetings from old Mr. Bates, the corn merchant, and from young Richard Bates, his swaggering good-for-nothing son. And then, as passengers gathered more thickly, it became quite like a public reception. "Ma'arnin', sir." "Good day, Mr. Dale." "I hope I see you well, sir."

Mavis got him away from all this company just before the train came in, and made a last appeal to him. Would he recollect what the deputy had said about eating that ugly dish which is commonly known as humble pie?

But at the mention of Mr. Ridgett's advice Dale displayed a slight flare of irascibility.

"Let Mr. Ridgett mind his own business," he said shortly, "and not bother himself about mine. And look here," he added. "I am not trusting that gentleman any further than I see him."

"I think you're wrong there, Will."

"I know human nature." His face had flushed, and he spoke admonitorily. "I don't need to tell you to be circumspect during my absence--but you may have a little trouble in keeping Mr. R. in his proper place. You'll be quick to twig if he supposes the chance has come to pester you. These London customers--whatever their age--think when they get along with a pretty woman--"

"Oh, Will, don't be absurd;" and she looked at him wistfully, and spoke sadly. "I'm not so attractive as you think me. I may be the same to your eyes--but not to others. It's very doubtful if anybody would want me now--except those who knew me when I was young."

Then after a moment's reflection she said that, if he consented, she proposed to relieve his mind of any silly jealous fancies about Mr. Ridgett by going over to stay with her aunt at North Ride.

"I should be anxious and miserable here, Will, while you were away--whereas with her I could occupy my thoughts."

He immediately consented to the arrangement. An excellent idea. She might go that very afternoon, and safely promise to stay three days. He would write to North Ride and keep her informed as to his movements.

"Good-by, my sweetheart. God bless you."

"Good luck, Will. Good luck, my dear one."

III

The devil's dance had begun.

They kept him waiting. Days passed; but his hour of crisis postponed itself, and all things combined to enervate him. Above all, the callous immensity of London oppressed his mind. His case, that had been so important down there in the village, was absolutely of no account up here in the city. Not a single sympathizer among these millions of hurrying human beings.

The General Post Office was itself a town within a town--a mighty labyrinth that made the imagination ache. To find one's way through a fractional block of it, to see a thronged corner of any of its yards, to hear even at a distance the stone thunder made by the smallest stampede of its red carts, irresistibly evoked a realization of one's nothingness. Never would he have believed it possible that the local should thus shrink in presence of the central.

He had taken a bedroom on the top floor of a cheap lodging-house near the Euston Road, and every night as he climbed the dimly-lit staircase he knew that he was toiling upward toward a fit of depression. The house was almost empty of lodgers; no one noticed when he went out or came in; at each flight of the stairs his sense of solitude increased.

He had never before lived in a building that contained so many stories, and at first he was troubled by the great height above the ground; but now he could stand at his open window and look down without giddiness. Wonder used to fill his mind as he stared out toward the southeast at the stupendous field of roofs, chimneys, and towers; at the sparkling powder of street-lamps; at the astounding yellow haze that extended across the horizon, illuminating the sky nearly to the zenith, and seemingly like the onset of a terrific conflagration which only he of all the thousands who were threatened had as yet observed. Even this bit of London, the comparatively small part of the overwhelming whole now visible to his eyes, must be as big as Manninglea Chase. And beyond his half circle of vision, behind him, on either hand, the forest of houses stretched away almost to infinity. The thought of it was as crushing as that of interstellar distances, of the pathless void into which God threw a handful of dust and then quietly ordained that each speck should be a sun and the pivot of a solar system.

He turned from the window to look at the dark little room, groped his way to the chest of drawers, and lighted a candle. Its flame sputtered, then settled and burned unwaveringly. Here in London the nights seemed as stuffy as the days; there was no life or freshness, no movement of the air; it was as if the warm breath of the crowd rose upward and nothing less than a balloon would allow one to escape from its taint. But he noticed that even at this slight elevation he had got free from the noise of the traffic. It would continue--a crashing roar--for hours, and yet it was now scarcely perceptible. Listening attentively he heard it--just a crackling murmur, a curious muffled rhythm, as of drums beaten by an army of drummers marching far away.

When he got into bed and blew out his candle, the rectangle of the window became brighter. After a little while he fancied that he could distinguish two or three stars shining very faintly in the patch of sky above the sashes; and again thinking of remoteness, immensity, infinity, he experienced a curious physical sensation of contracting bulk, as though all his body had grown and was steadily growing smaller. Very strong this sensation, and, unless one wrestled with it firmly, translating itself in the mental sphere as a vaguely distressful notion that one was nothing but a tiny insect at war with the entire universe.

Day after day he spent his time in the same manner at the G.P.O.--asking questions of clerks, lounging in stone corridors, sitting on wooden benches, thinking that the hour was coming and finding that it did not come. He was one of a weary regiment of people waiting for interviews. Clerks behind counters of inquiry offices hunted him up in pigeon-holes, looked for him in files and on skewers. "Oh, yes, let's see. You say you're the man from Rodchurch! That's north or midlands, isn't it? You must ask in Room 45.... What say? Down south, is it? Then you're quite right to ask here. No, we haven't heard any more about it since yesterday."

At the end of each fruitless day he emerged from the vast place of postponement feeling exhausted, dazed, stupefied. The sunlight made him blink. He stood holding his hat so as to shade his eyes.

Then after a few minutes, as he plodded along Queen Victoria Street, his confusion passed away, and he observed things with a clear understanding. It was a lovely evening really and truly, and these ponderous omnibuses were all carrying people home because the day's work was done. The streets were clean and bright; and there was plenty of gayness and joy--for them as could grab a share of it. He noticed fine private carriages drawn up round corners, waiting for prosperous tradesmen; young men with tennis-bats in their hands, taking prodigiously long strides, eager to get a game of play before dusk; girls who went by twos and threes, chattering, laughing, making funny short quick steps of it, like as if on the dance to reach sweethearts and green lanes. A man selling a mechanical toy--sort of a tin frog that jumped so soon as you put it down--made him smile indulgently.

Outside the Mansion House Station the traffic stopped dead all of a moment, and directly the wheels ceased rattling one heard the cheerful music of a soldiers' band close upon one. It was the Bank Guard--Coldstreams--marching proudly. The officer in charge seemed very proud; with drawn sword, his broad red back bulging above his sash, and the enormous bearskin narrowing to his shoulders and hiding his neck.

The wheels rolled again; the music, floating, fading, died beneath the horses' feet; and Dale stood gaping at a board over the entrance of the railway station. Places served by this District Company had pleasant-sounding suburban names--such as Kew Gardens, Richmond, Wimbledon. Reading the names, he felt a sick nostalgic yearning for the wind that blows through fir-trees, for the dust that falls on highroads, for the village street and the friendly nod--for home.

He ate some food at an eating-house near Blackfriars, and then wandered aimlessly for hours. The broad river, with its dull brown flood breaking in oily wavelets against the embankment wall, exercised a fascination. He admired the Temple, watched some shadows on a lawn, and wondered if the pigeons by the cab-rank ever went to bed, or if, changing their natural habits to suit their town-life, they had become night birds like the owls. The trains passing to and fro in the iron cage called Hungerford Bridge interested him; and as he approached the Houses of Parliament, he was stirred by memories of his historical reading.

The stately pile had become almost black against the western sky by the time that he drew near to it, and its majestic extent, with the lamplight gleaming from innumerable windows, gave him a quite personal satisfaction. It represented all that was grandest in the tale of his country. The freedom of the subject had been born on this hallowed spot; here had been thrown down those cruel barriers by which the rich and powerful penned and confined the poor and humble as cattle or slaves; by this and because of this, the people's meeting-place, men like himself had been enabled to aspire and to achieve. He was aware of a moisture in his eyes and a lump in his throat while he meditated thus; and then suddenly his eyes grew hot and dry again, and his larynx opened. His thought had taken a rapid turn from the general to the particular. It was a pity that an interfering ass like their member should have the right to come in and out here, record his vote, and spout his nonsense with the best of them.

The metal tongue of Big Ben startled him, a booming voice that might have been that of Time itself, telling the tardy sunlight and the encroaching dusk that it was nine o'clock. Under a lamp-post Dale brought out his silver watch, and carefully set it.

"I suppose they keep Greenwich," he thought, "same as we do;" and an apprehensive doubt presented itself. Would his clerk have the sense to see to it, that the clocks down there were duly wound? Ridgett, of course, could not be expected to know that they were always wound on Thursdays.

St. James' followed Westminster in his tour of inspection, and then, after that amazing street of clubs, he soon found himself in the white glare, the kaleidoscopic movement, and the concentrated excitement of Piccadilly Circus. Then he sauntered through Leicester Square and began to drift northward. The gas torches outside places of entertainment had arrested his slow progress. One of the music-halls in the Square appeared to him as iniquitously gorgeous, and he gazed through the wide entrance at the vestibule hall, and staircase. The whole thing was as fine as one might have expected inside Buckingham Palace or the Mansion House--crimson curtains, marble steps, golden balusters, and flunkeys wearing velvet breeches and silk stockings. It grieved him momentarily to discover that two giant commissionnaires were both foreigners. He heard them address each other with a rapid guttural jabber. "Should 'a' thought there's large-sized men enough in England, if you troubled to look for 'em."

To this point he had amused himself sufficiently; but each night as he turned his face toward the Euston Road, his spirits sank and the same queer mixture of bodily and mental discomfort attacked him. It began with the slightly bitter thought of being "out of it." He looked disapprovingly at pallid and puffed young swells gliding past in cabs; at the humbler folk who hurried by without seeming to be aware of his existence, who bumped into him and never said "Pardon!"; at the painted women of the narrower pavements--more foreigners half of them--who leered and murmured.

"Where's the police?" He asked himself the question indignantly and contemptuously. "Can't they see what's going on under their noses? Or don't they _wish_ to see it? Or have they been paid _not_ to see it? Funny thing if every respectable married man is to be bothered like this--three times in fifty yards!"

These incessant solicitations affected his nerves. So much so, indeed, that he cursed the impudence of one woman and called her a rude name. She did not seem to mind. While he was still in the generous afterglow produced by a bit of plain-speaking, another one had taken her place.

With head high and shoulders squared he marched on, subject for some distance to a purely nervous irritation, together with a disagreeably potent memory of powdered cheeks, reddened lips, and a searching perfume.

Then he thought of his wife, and instantly he had so vivid a presentation of her image that it obliterated all newer visual records. What a lady she looked when bidding him farewell at the station. He had watched her till the train carried him out of sight--a slender graceful figure; pale face and sad eyes; a fluttering handkerchief and a waved parasol; then nothing at all, except a sudden sense of emptiness in his heart.

And once more he mused with gratitude on the things that Mavis had done for him. He thought of how she had saved him from the ugly imaginations of his youth. How marvelously she had purified and elevated him! He used to be afraid of himself, of all the potentialities for evil that one takes with one across the threshold of manhood.

The fantastic dread which recurred to his memory now, as he turned from Dean Street into Oxford Street, had been started when he first heard the legendary tale of Hadleigh Wood. It was said that seventy or a hundred years ago some louts had caught girls bathing in the stream and violated them. The legend declared that one of the offenders was executed and the rest were sent to prison for life. Perhaps it was all a myth, but it helped to give the upper wood a bad name; and out of these fabled materials William had built his fancy--dread and desire combining--a wish that, when he pushed the branches apart, he might see a lass bathing; and a fear that he would not be able to resist an impulse to plunge into the water and carry her off. As he walked through the shade cast by summer foliage, with a hot whisper of nascent virility tormenting his senses, the fancy was almost strong enough to be a hallucination. He could imagine that he saw female garments on the bank, petticoats fallen in a circle, boots and stockings hard by; he could hear the splashing of water on the other side of the holly bushes; he could feel the weight of the nude form slung across his shoulder as he galloped into the gloom with his prey. And later, under the increasing stress of his adolescence, he used to have a dread of realities--a conviction that he could not trust himself. He thought at this period not of legends, but of facts--of things that truly happened; of the brutality of hayfields; of a man full of beer dealing roughly with a woman-laborer who unluckily came in his way alone and defenceless at nightfall.

From all this kind of vague peril his wife had saved him. When in the course of his education he read of nymphs and satyrs, and was startled by what seemed a highly elaborated version of his own crude imaginings, he had already, through the influence of Mavis, attained to states of mind that rendered such suggestions powerless to stir his pulses or warm his blood; and now, as he recognized with proud satisfaction, he had reached a stage of development wherein the improper advances of a thousand houris would evoke merely indignation and repugnance. It was not a matter that one could boast about to anybody except one's self; but he wondered if Mr. Ridgett, or several other customers who might remain nameless, could say as much.

Thanks to Mav! Yes, he ought always let himself be guided by her.

And then, by a natural transition of ideas, he thought of that other great instinct of untutored man--the fighting instinct. When a person is rising in the social scale he should learn to govern that also. Although the nobs themselves do it when pushed to it, scrapping is not respectable. It is common. Nevertheless there must be exceptions to every rule: anger when justified by its provocation is not, can not be reprehensible.

But dimly he understood that with him cerebral excitement, when it reached a certain pitch, overflowed too rapidly into action. Whereas the gentry, after their centuries of repressive training, could always control themselves. They could fight, but they could wait for the appropriate moment. If you stung them with an insult, they resolved to avenge themselves--but not necessarily then and there; and their resolve deepened in every instant of delay, so that when the fighting hour struck, their heads worked with their arms, and they fought _better_ than the hasty peasants.

And then he thought of the various advantages still possessed by gentlefolk. How unfairly easy is the struggle of life made for them, in spite of all the talk about equality; how difficult it still is for the humbly-born, in spite of Magna Chartas, habeas corpuses, and Houses of Commons! Finishing his long ramble, he remembered the biggest and grandest gentleman of his acquaintance, and wondered bitterly if the Right Honorable Everard Barradine had done so much as to raise a little finger on his behalf.

Five days had passed, and as yet not a single official at St. Martin's-le-Grand had learnt to know him by sight. Every morning he was forced to repeat the whole process of self-introduction.

"Dale? Rodchurch, Hants. Let's see. What name did you say? Dale! Superseded--eh?"

But on the sixth morning somebody knew all about him. It was quite a superior sort of clerk, who announced that Mr. Dale and all that concerned Mr. Dale had been transferred to other hands, in another part of the building. Dale gathered that something had happened to his case; it was as though, after lying dormant so long, it had unexpectedly come to life; and in less than ten minutes he was given a definite appointment. The interview would take place at noon on the day after to-morrow.

To-day was Saturday. The long quiescent Sunday must be endured--and then he would stand in the presence of supreme authority.

By the end of that Sunday his enervation was complete. The want of exercise, the want of fresh air, the want of Mavis, had been steadily weakening him, and now his anticipations as to the morrow produced a feverish excitement.

Throughout the day he rehearsed his speeches. He was still assuming--had always taken for granted--that the personage addressed would be the Postmaster-General, and he was sure of the correct mode of address. "Your Grace, I desire to respectfully state my position."... That was the start all right; but how did it go on? Again and again, before recovering the hang of it, he was confronted with a blank wall of forgetfulness.

And there was the bold flight that he had determined on for wind-up. This had come as an inspiration, down there at Rodchurch over a fortnight ago, and had been cherished ever since. "Your Grace, taking the liberty under this head of speaking as man to man, I ask: If you had been situated as I was, wouldn't you have done as I done?" That was to be the wind-up, and it had rung in his mind like a trumpet call, bold yet irresistible--"Duke you may be, but if also a man, act as a man, and see fair play." Now, however, the prime virtue of it seemed to be lessened: it was all muddled, unstimulating, and flat of tone.

How damnable if some insane nervousness should make him mix things up! Strong as his case was, it might be spoiled by ineffective argument. But was his case strong? Again the cruel twinge of doubt.

IV

The parquetry all around the square of carpet was so smooth that Dale had slipped a foot and nearly come down when he entered the room and bowed to his judges; and now he moved with extreme caution when they told him to withdraw to the window.

There were three seated at the table, and none of the three was the Postmaster-General. Two of them were obviously bigwigs--so big, at any rate, that his fate lay in their hands; and the other one was a secretary--not the General Secretary--not even a gentleman, if one could draw any inference from his deferential tone and the casual manner in which the others addressed him. He was a sandy person--not unlike Ridgett, but rather older and much fatter.

Once a quiet young gentleman--a real gentleman, although apparently acting just as a clerk--had been in and out of the room. He had given Dale a half smile, and it had been welcome as a ray of sunlight on the darkest day of winter. Instinct told Dale that this nice young man sympathized with him, as certainly as it told him that his judges were unsympathetic.

He stood now in the deep bay window, as far as possible from the table, pretending not to listen while straining every nerve to catch the words that were being spoken over there. His blood was hurrying thickly, his heart beat laboriously, his collar stuck clammily to his perspiring neck. His sense of bodily fatigue was as great as if he had run a mile race; and yet one might say that the interview had scarcely begun. What would he be like before it was over? He summoned all his courage in order to go through with it gamely.

... "You can't have this sort of thing." The words had reached him distinctly--spoken by the one they called Sir John; and the one that Sir John called "Colonel" said with equal distinctness, "Certainly not."

Dale's heart beat more easily. As he hoped and believed, they must be talking of the soldier. Then the heart-beats came heavy again. Were they talking of him and not of the soldier? He caught a few other broken phrases of enigmatic import--such as "storm in teacup," "trouble caused," "no complaints"--and then the voices were lowered, and he heard no more of the conversation at the table.