It was a very hot day in August, and Lionel found the trip from the city
to his home suburb far from agreeable. He was in one of his moods for
despising everything in his adopted country, a mood familiar to every
alien in every country under the sun. He hated the way the people made
themselves comfortable on the train, men with handkerchiefs in their
collars and women in what he savagely called “ball dresses.” Personally
he accepted hot weather in the proper British spirit, as one of the
afflictions of the country, and he scorned to notice it by any extreme
change of costume or of habit. He sat by an open window, but he kept his
hat on, and his coat, and maintained at least a cool expression.
Three years of trouble had changed his appearance very little. He was as
slim, as elegant, as supercilious as ever, in spite of increasing
shabbiness. He had come from an interview with a corset manufacturer
who had advertised for salesmen, and who had instantaneously and
violently rejected Lionel. He really couldn’t find anything to do. He
wanted to work, and to succeed, but it was a bit too hard. What
advantages he had were unmarketable. He was bored with sitting about at
home, and he wanted very much to be independent of Horace and free from
debt and worry, and he wanted new clothes. Poverty was beginning to
disagree with him acutely.
“No use!” he said gloomily, as he came up the steps and sat down on the
tiny front porch where Minnie was sewing, and keeping an eye on their
child, digging in the sunny gutter. “What about a cup of tea?”
Then he noticed that she looked “queer.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Heat too much for you, old girl?”
“No,” she said, and was silent for a moment. Then: “telegram from ...
I’m so sorry ... poor Horace is dead.”
He had an odd feeling of deliberately putting off his grief until a more
fitting time. He discussed the thing with Minnie as if it concerned a
stranger. Apoplexy. Not to be wondered at. The funeral was to be on
Thursday.
“I don’t suppose Julie will be heart-broken,” said Minnie. “She’ll be
very well off, won’t she, Lionel?”
He was aware that she longed to discuss his own prospects; how “well
off” he was to be, but he refused to open the subject. It wasn’t decent.
No doubt Horace had done the proper thing.
That evening, after the child was in bed and Minnie in the kitchen
washing the dishes, he went out on the porch with his pipe and
consecrated an hour to Horace. Recalled his unfailing kindness, his
justice, his melancholy, saw, for an instant, and in a vague way, the
tragedy of the man who is only a means of supplying others with money.
Childless, friendless, the most exploited creature under the sun.
He knew what a loss he had suffered! And still had that wretched feeling
that the real pain was coming later, that now only his brain knew it,
not yet his heart.
He had a sudden vision of that tea with Horace and Frankie, something
more vivid than a memory. It brought an awful, blinding realisation of
his present solitude. His two friends gone, and he left alone with a
stranger. Minnie _was_ a stranger. He couldn’t talk to her about Horace.
“Poor old man!” he said, with a sigh for that kindly lost spirit.