If you step this way, the manager will see you,” said the clerk,
lifting the flap of the counter.
Joyce rose from the cane-bottomed chair on which he had been sitting,
and followed the clerk through the busy outer office into the private
room beyond. An elderly man in gold spectacles looked up from his desk.
“What can I do for you?”
“I am seeking employment,” said Joyce, “can you give me any?”
“Employment?”
If Joyce had asked him for Prester John’s cap, or the Cham of Tartary’s
beard, his tone could not have expressed more surprise.
“Yes,” replied Joyce. “I don’t mind what it is--clerk, copyist,
handy-man, messenger--so long as it’s work.”
“Utterly impossible,” said the manager, shortly.
“Would it be of any use to leave my address?” asked Joyce.
“Not a bit. Good day to you.”
Joyce walked out apathetically on to the landing. It was a nest of city
offices in a great block of buildings in Fenchurch Street, a labyrinth
of staircases, passages, and ground-glass doors black-lettered with the
names of firms. He was going through them systematically. Often he could
not gain access to a person in authority. When he succeeded, it was the
same history of rebuff. He felt somewhat downcast at the result of this
last interview, the cheerful alacrity with which he had been received
having given him an unreasonable hope. He paused for a few moments
deciding upon what door to try next. Some names looked encouraging,
others forbidding--a futile superstition, yet one not without influence
upon his unfed mind. Why “Griffith & Swan” should have attracted and
“Willoughby Bros.” repelled him is a psychological problem that must
forever remain insoluble. It is none the less a fact that he bent his
steps along the passage to the door of the first-mentioned firm. But
there he was repulsed at the outset. The chiefs were engaged. Had he an
appointment?
What was his business? The only way to see the chiefs was by writing to
fix an interview. Joyce retired, climbed wearily up the stone staircase
to the next floor. Everywhere the same monotonous result.
At last his application was seriously entertained. His heart beat
anxiously. It was at a firm of shipping agents. Two clerks had gone on
their holiday, another one had just that morning fallen ill. They were
short-handed. The junior partner, a brisk young fellow, looked shrewdly
at Joyce, divining his education and capacity.
“I could give you some temporary work, certainly. Only too glad, for we
are in a hole. But of course we must have some references.”
“I am afraid I can give you none,” replied Joyce. “I have had a good
education and business training, and I could do your work. But I’m a
lonely man--without friends.”
“What have you been doing lately for a living.”
The matter-of-fact question turned his heart sick. He had known that he
would have to answer it before he could enter upon any employment; but
he had always shrunk from formulating a plausible reply, weakly
trusting to his mother-wit when the dreaded moment should come. Now his
mother-wit deserted him. He could think of nothing but the past reality.
“I would rather tell you nothing about myself,” he said lamely.
The young partner shrugged his shoulders good-humouredly.
“Well, that’s your affair. But you see we can’t take a stranger into our
office without his giving us some formal voucher for his honesty.”
Joyce looked at him appealingly, with glistening eyes, a new Moses on
Mount Nebo. Only then did he fully realise the utter hopelessness of his
position. The veriest office-boy needed a certificate of character. He
had none.
The partner, clean-shaven, ruddy-cheeked, was lounging against the
mantel-piece, hands in pockets, a whimsical smile playing around the
comers of his mouth. His speech, though business-like, was kindly. He
looked a gentleman. Joyce was seized with a mad, despairing impulse. He
flushed to the roots of his hair, clenched his hands by his sides and
advanced an involuntary step towards his interlocutor.
“I will tell you the truth,” he cried breathlessly. “I must find work
soon or I shall starve. Give it to me and I will work night and day
for you. I took a double first at Oxford. I practised as a solicitor. I
lived beyond my means and misappropriated trust-money. I could not pay
it back. My name was struck off the rolls and I had two years’ hard
labour. I have been looking for work every day for five months. I am not
such a fool as to risk that hell again. For God’s sake give me a chance
and set me on my feet again.” His voice rang with the agony of entreaty.
His lips quivered. When he ceased speaking he was shaking from head to
foot.
The young man shifted the crossing of his feet and put up an eyeglass
that had been dangling on his waistcoat.
“Well, you have pretty damned cheek, I must say!” he remarked, with a
drawl.
Joyce stared at him for a moment stupidly, and then turned away
without a word, crushed and humiliated to his soul. Round and round the
rectangular well-staircase he went, dizzy with the reaction. He could
knock at no more doors. The names seemed to swell large and to jeer at
him as he passed. A burst of laughter from two men, issuing from some
office above, echoed and rattled down the staircase and jarred upon
every nerve of his body. He quickened his pace to a run, and did not
stop until he reached the sweltering street. White and faint he leant
against the wall, vaguely conscious of the ceaselessly hurrying mass
that passed him by. After a minute or two he recovered self-possession
enough to move onwards with the westward stream on the pavement. His
quest of work was abandoned. He could only feel sickening regret for
having given way to his insane impulse and shrink from the echoing tones
of the other man’s cynical contempt. The last shred of his self-respect
was torn away. He seemed to be the naked gaol-bird before those thousand
eyes that glanced upon him. The idea grew into morbid exaggeration. A
man or woman making way for him to pass appeared to be shrinking from
the soil of his touch. Every policeman was identifying him. A penny-toy
man by the Mansion House, who had taken off his cap and was scratching
a closely-cropped head, grinned at him with the familiarity of an old
acquaintance.
It became unbearable. He fled into a public-house in Cheapside
and ordered a glass of whisky. The spirit ran through his veins
comfortingly. He drank another, and went out into the street. Soon the
spirit, acting on an empty stomach, dulled his senses and provoked a
vague suggestion of debauch as the only consoler. In the days of
his vanity Joyce had known the flush of wine on joyous nights, but
drunkenness had always been hateful to him. Yet now, in his morbid
state, the temptation was irresistible. He went from tavern to tavern
with dull, stupid recklessness, cognisant only of the motive to drink
and of his own mechanical personality. At last, staggering out of a
public-house in Fleet Street, he tripped at the threshold and fell
insensible on the pavement.
When he recovered consciousness it was quite dark. For a few moments he
did not seek to discover where he was. But a chance movement caused him
nearly to fall from where he lay, and he started to a sitting posture.
His feet touched the ground sooner than he expected; the slight shock
completed his awakening. Where was he? He stretched out his hand and
felt the wall. It was stone. Stone, too, was the floor, as he found
by stamping his foot. Then the truth burst upon him with indescribable
terror. It was the cell of a police station. Although his head swam and
his eyeballs ached, the flight of the discovery had thoroughly sobered
him. It was the final calamity and degradation of the day. He was in
prison again. He would again have to put on the hateful clothes and
cower beneath the warder’s glance. Once more he would have to go
through that dreadful ignominy. Exaggerating the consequences of his
misdemeanour, he conjured up all the horrors of his previous term.
A sense of utter self-loathing swelled within him like a nausea. He
crouched on the narrow bench, holding his hair in a feverish grasp. The
gaol had got him, body and soul. It was all that he was fit for.
An hour passed. Then the door opened and a policeman appeared in the
light of the passage. Joyce looked up at him haggardly.
“Oh, you’re all right now, are you? Better come up and see the
Inspector.”
Joyce staggered to his feet and clutched the policeman’s supporting arm.
“I was in great trouble,” he said hoarsely. “And then the heat--an empty
stomach--a few glasses knocked me over.”
“Explain that upstairs,” replied the other. “Bless you, it ’ll be all
square.”
Brought before the Inspector, he pulled himself together and pleaded
his cause with an intensity that amused the officials. They could see
nothing tragic in a “drunk and incapable.”
“Very well,” said the Inspector at last. “I see it was an accident. Call
it heat-apoplexy. I sha’n’t charge you. You had better get home to bed.”
Joyce grew faint with the revulsion of feeling, and steadied himself by
the iron railing. One of the men took him to the door, hailed a passing
cab and helped him in. At first, ill and dizzy as he was, he felt
the animal’s instinctive joy in suddenly regained liberty. The
non-fulfilment of his agonising forebodings filled him with a wondering
sense of relief. But this did not last long. Despair and self-abhorrence
resumed their hold upon him, causing him to shiver in the cab as with an
ague.
He crawled upstairs to his attic, and after having procured some food,
of which he ate as much as he could swallow, he went to bed and fell
into a heavy sleep. In the middle of the night he woke with a start. The
recollection of his engagement with Yvonne Latour had penetrated through
the sub-consciousness of half-awakening. He uttered a cry of dismay.
All the previous evening and all that morning he had thought of the
promised visit. To sit in a lady’s room, to live for a moment a bit of
the old life, to forget his pariahdom in Yvonne’s welcoming smile, to
have the comfort of her exquisite pity--the prospect had rendered him
almost buoyant during the early part of his round. But the pain
and fever of after-events had driven her from his mind. Now, in his
suffering state, it seemed as if he had lost an offered corner of
Paradise, rejected the one hand that was stretched out to save him
from perdition. He lay awake many hours. At last, toward dawn, he fell
asleep again and did not wake till mid-day.
He rose, rang for his breakfast, which was brought him, as usual, on
a tray, by the slatternly maid-of-all-work. He was still feeling
prostrated in mind and body. Having eaten what he could, he drew up the
blind to look at the day. The fine weather was still lasting. But he
felt no desire to go out. What was the use? Judging by the lesson of
yesterday it would be futile to continue his search for employment. As he
turned away from the window, he caught sight of his white haggard face
and bloodshot eyes in the mirror, and he shrank back, as though it
revealed to him the miserable weakness of his soul. Then he threw
himself half-dressed upon the bed, and there he remained, abandoning
himself to the hopeless inaction of defeat, and eating his heart out in
remorse for the shipwreck he had made of his life.
He did not pose before himself as a victim to circumstance. Could he
have done so, he might have found some poor consolation. His criminal
folly lay as much upon his soul as its punishment. Again, it had not
been a grand stroke of villainy requiring for its execution a masterly
coolness and genius for which he might at least have had an intellectual
admiration. But it had been of the same petty sort as that of the
shop-boy led astray by low turf associates, who pilfers day by day from
his master’s till, hoping the luck will turn and enable him to replace
the stolen shillings. The difference had been merely one of degree. His
operations had been on a larger scale, his vices more fastidious, his
circle of loose friends more aristocratic. But he had had the same
contemptible motives for his crime, and the same contemptible excuses.
He spared himself no arrow of self-scorn.
Latterly, through sheer weariness, he had grown apathetic, taking
his self-abasement as one of the conditions of life. A man is not
physiologically capable of continuous outburst. But now the iron had
entered deep into his soul, causing him to writhe in torment.
What would be the end? The question haunted him, and yet it seemed
scarcely worth consideration. There was no employment to be obtained by
such as he. He would eke out his small capital as far as possible, and
when that was exhausted, he could put an end to his worthless life. Or
would his cowardice drag him down among the class of habitual criminals,
lead him to crime as a means of livelihood? He shuddered, remembering
his short spell of agony in the cell of yesterday.
The hours passed. Towards evening he dressed himself and went out to a
dingy Italian restaurant near Victoria station, where he usually dined.
On coming out again into the street he hesitated for some time as to
what he should do next. He thought of Yvonne with wistful longing, but
had not the courage to go and seek her. The sense of degradation was
too strong upon him. He shrank with morbid sensitiveness from taking
advantage of her guilelessness by bringing his contamination into her
presence. For, paradoxical as it may seem, an instinctive pride still
remained in the man. Had he chosen to lay it aside, doubtless more than
one of his former friends would have consented to receive him on some
sort of terms of acquaintanceship. But he had sought out none, and
if chance brought him into sight of a familiar face in the street, he
effaced himself and hurried on. Yvonne was the only figure out of the
past with whom he had communicated. And now he had cut himself adrift
from her.
After a few undecided turns up and down the pavement, he directed his
steps mechanically to a customary haunt of his, the billiard-room of a
public-house in Westminster. It was better than the wearying streets
and the choking solitude of his attic. A couple of shabby men in dingy
shirt-sleeves were playing at the table. On the raised divan, in the
gloom of the walls, sat a silent company of lookers-on. With a group
of these, Joyce exchanged nods, and took his place sombrely among them.
They were a depressed, out-at-elbows crew, who came here night after
night, speaking little, drinking less, and never playing billiards at
all. They watched the game, now and then applauded, oftener condoled
with the loser than congratulated the winner. They formed an orderly
and appreciative gallery, and set, as it were, a tone of decorum in
the room; and for this reason their presence was not discouraged by the
landlord. Eight was their average number. They were mostly men in
the prime of life, and belonged, as far as one could judge by their
voluntary confidences, to the obscure fringes of journalism, the stage,
and independence. Those who occupied the last position lived chiefly on
their wives. There was a decayed medical student who did Heaven knows
what for a living, and a red-headed, vulgar man, who gave out that he
had thrown up a country rectorship, through conscientious scruples.
Differing widely as they did in personality, yet they retained one
common characteristic. Failure seemed written on each man’s face. A kind
of mutual affinity had drawn them together. To Joyce’s cynical humour it
appeared as if something more than mere chance had caused him to stumble
upon them one evening two months before.
“I’m afraid I have left my ’baccy at home,” said the man sitting next
to Joyce, who was filling his pipe. “Thank you very much. A change in
tobacco is very gratifying at times to the palate.”
He was a man of singular appearance. The bones in his face were very
large, the flesh scanty; his nose hooked, his eyebrows black and
meeting. His long upper-lip and his chin were shaven; but he wore
thick black mutton-chop whiskers which contrasted oddly with a bush of
whitening hair above his temples and at the back of his head. Whether he
was bald or not, no one ever knew, as he always retained his hat fixed
in one never-changing, respectable angle. This hat was very, very
old, an extravagantly curled silk hat of the masher days in the early
eighties. But the most striking feature of his costume consisted in a
long thick Chesterfield overcoat which he obviously wore without coat
or waistcoat beneath. In the sultry August weather the sight of him
made the beholder perspire. Although there was no trace of linen at his
wrists or down the arms as far as one could see, a dirty frayed collar
and a shirt-front adorned with a straight black tie appeared above the
tightly buttoned overcoat. Joyce knew him by the name of Noakes.
He looked at Joyce, as he spoke, out of pale-blue, unspeculative eyes,
and returned the tobacco-pouch. “You had better take another fill or
two, while you are about it,” said Joyce.
“I don’t like to trespass upon your generosity,” said Noakes. But
he helped himself plentifully, tying up the tobacco in his
pocket-handkerchief. They smoked on during a long silence, broken only
by the click of the billiard-balls, the monotonous cry of the marker,
and occasional murmurs of applause. The air was heavy with drink and
tobacco-smoke, fresh and stale.
“I must be getting back to work,” said Noakes at last.
The word roused Joyce from the lethargy into which he had fallen. He had
never associated Noakes with definite employment. For a moment he envied
him.
“I wish to heaven I could,” he said.
“A man of your attainments,” replied Noakes, respectfully, “ought never
to be at a loss. Now I should say you have been to a public school?”
Joyce nodded.
“And the university?”
Joyce did not reply, but Noakes went on: “Yes; one can see it. Somehow a
man of acute observation can always tell. I remember your correcting me
the other night when I spoke of Plato’s dramatic unities. I looked
up the matter in the British Museum, and found that you were right in
attributing them to Aristotle. As I said before, a man of your education
ought to have no difficulty.”
“You might suggest something,” said Joyce, with a shade of irony.
“Authorship.”
“Are you an author?”
“With all due modesty, I may say that I am,” returned Noakes, gravely.
“I don’t find it very remunerative, but I attribute that solely to the
deficiencies in my education.”
“What do you write?” asked Joyce, interested in spite of himself in this
odd, pathetic figure.
“I have adopted two branches of the profession--one, the literary
advertisement; the other, popular fiction.”
He drew a halfpenny evening paper from his pocket, and, designating
a half-column with his thumb, handed it to Joyce. It was headlined
“Nihilism in Russia,” opened with an account of Siberian horrors, and
ended, of course, with somebody’s pills.
“I always pride myself upon there being more literary quality in my work
than is usually given to that class of thing,” he remarked complacently,
while Joyce idly ran through the column. “And in my fiction I always try
to keep the best models before me, Stevenson and Mayne Reid. I happen
to have a copy of one of my latest works in my pocket. Perhaps it might
interest you to glance through it. In return for the tobacco,--with the
author’s compliments.”
Joyce received into his hands a thin volume in a gaudy paper wrapper. It
was entitled “The Doom of the Floating Fiend.” The printing, in packed
double-column, and the paper were execrable. The author’s name did
not figure beneath the title. From the most cursory glance through the
pages, Joyce could see they were deluged in blood.
“I shall be glad to read it,” he said, mendaciously, putting it into his
pocket.
“If you find anything noteworthy of criticism in my style, I should feel
grateful for you to tell me,” said Noakes. “My ambition is to write some
day for a more cultured public. I have a pastoral idyll that I shall
write when I have time. But, you see, there is a continuous market for
books of adventure.”
He spoke in a toneless, even voice, without a shade of enthusiasm or
regret appearing in his eyes.
“Do you think it would be of any use for an outsider to try it--one not
in the swim with the publishers?” asked Joyce, curiously.
“Certainly. But one needs the imaginative faculty. If you ’ll look at my
forehead, you will see I have it firmly developed. Allow me to look at
yours. Yes; I see it there. Once started, it is constant employment.
They pay half a crown per thousand words. I do my three thousand a day.”
Noakes rose to depart.
“Thanks for the information,” said Joyce. “I may try my hand. Won’t you
have a glass with me before you go?”
“No, thank you,” said Noakes. “I find stimulants interfere with
brain-work. Good evening.”
Noakes gone, Joyce found himself next to the red-headed ex-rector,
who was fast asleep, his dirty, pudgy fingers clasped in his lap. He
remained, therefore, solitary, and after having looked for some time
dejectedly at the three ever-clicking balls on the table, he went out
again into the street.
Noakes’s hint had taken root in his mind. If that dilapidated man could
maintain himself honestly by “popular fiction,” surely he could do so
too. Off and on during the last five months he had striven to write an
article or short story, but his mind had refused to work. The conviction
that his intellect had been shattered during those two awful years had
added to his despair. But now he told himself that this was work in
which intellectual subtlety and fastidiousness would prove a hindrance.
The one thing needful was imagination: also a terrible faculty for
continuous quill-driving. To gain a livelihood there would have to be
written daily stuff equal to three columns of the “Globe” newspaper. And
seven-and-sixpence as the reward! A noble end, he thought bitterly
to himself as he walked along, to the ambition of Stephen Chisely,
double-first of New College, Oxford--to become a writer of “penny
bloods.”
Still, the suggestion had acted as a stimulus. When he entered his room,
he did not feel so broken and purposeless as when he had left it. The
intellectual effort he had made whilst walking home in scheming out an
experimental chapter had broken the spell of morbid introspection. As
soon as he had lit the gas, he drew out writing materials, and, sitting
before his dressing-table, began the scene of slaughter he had arranged.
At the end of a couple of hours he found he had written two slips of one
hundred and fifty words each. He regarded them ruefully. At that rate
it would take him twenty hours a day to earn his seven-and-sixpence.
The idea occurred to him to look at the “Doom of the Floating Fiend.” He
read a few pages and then dropped the work hopelessly on to the floor.
The instinct of the scholar and man of culture awakened in revolt. His
mind would not be prostituted to stuff like that.
“Sooner death!” he said to himself, with whimsical bitterness. His own
carefully elaborated efforts he tore up with a sigh. Then, tired out, he
prepared to go to bed.
Suddenly, in the midst of his undressing, he caught sight, to his
immense surprise, of a letter lying on his counterpane, where the maid
of all work had carelessly thrown it. From whom could it be? Letters
were things of an almost forgotten past. It was in a woman’s hand. Then
he remembered he had given his address to Yvonne. The letter was from
her, and ran:--
“Dear Stephen,--Oh, why didn’t you come last night? I was
_so_ disappointed. You surely did n’t think I only asked you
out of politeness. I hope nothing has happened to you. My
head was running over all day with a little plan for you. Do
come and catch it before it all runs away. I shall be in to-
morrow afternoon.
You know it’s just like old times--writing a silly little
note to you.
Yours sincerely,
Yvonne Latour.”
Joyce went to bed and slept the sound sleep of a jaded man. But the
letter lay under his pillow.