At the railway station the next afternoon he found most of the company
already assembled on the platform. Curious glances were cast upon him as
he appeared; there were nudgings and whisperings; some giggling on the
part of the chorus girls standing round Annie Stevens, who was looking
paler and more defiant than usual. A group of his colleagues melted away
at his approach. He saw at once what had happened. The fears that had
haunted him all the night and all that day were realised. He felt his
face and lips grow white, and his limbs trembled. With an instinctive
remnant of self-assertion, he went up to Blake, who was standing by one
of the reserved carriages. It seemed a long time before he could speak.
At last he asked him stupidly at what time the train started.
“Four-forty,” said Blake, curtly.
“And when do we get to Leeds?”
“How the devil should I know? If you want to know, there’s the guard.
Ask him.”
With which he moved away and joined two or three others a few steps
off. Joyce felt too sick with misery to resent the rudeness. He walked
a short distance along the train, and seeing one of his colleagues in a
compartment, concluded that it was reserved for the chorus-men and crept
into the far corner, where he sat down, holding a newspaper before his
face.
The compartment filled and the train started. At first there was a
general constraint in the talk. Then a game at nap was instituted; but
no one spoke to Joyce. At Selby there was over an hour’s wait. With a
feeling that he must be alone at any cost, he rushed out of the station,
and, avoiding the town, wandered aimlessly through lanes and fields
until it was time to return. He was too dazed and overwhelmed by this
sudden blow to think coherently. Now it was the girl’s deliberate
cruelty that passed his comprehension; now the sickening shame at being
known in his true colours to a whole society burned into his flesh.
Only one thought stood out from the rest in lurid clearness--the
impossibility of his continuing the tour. Even if the management took
no notice of the discovery, he felt he would rather starve to death in
a hole than live through that hell of daily aversion and contempt. To
return to the company and travel with them as far as Leeds was pain
enough. He would face that, however, and then--
It was gathering dusk when he arrived at the station, just in time
to see the guard about to wave the green flag. The handle of the
compartment was in his grasp when he heard McKay say:--
“Well, because a fellow’s happened to be in quod, that doesn’t mean he’s
likely to sneak your watches out of the dressing-room!”
He opened the door and entered amid a dead silence, which lasted, with
few interruptions, all the rest of the journey. Joyce looked round
at his seven companions, with an awful sense of isolation. Only
four-and-twenty hours before he had loved them for their warm
good-fellowship. He was wrung with the pity of it. McKay’s words still
sounded in his ear. They were horrible enough, but it was evident they
were meant in his defence. Once he met his glance, and read in it a
signal of kind intent. But the others steadily looked another way when
his eye fell upon them.
When they left the train at Leeds, McKay touched him on the shoulder and
drew him apart from the hurrying stream of passengers and porters.
“What’s all this yarn that Annie Stevens has been telling us?”
“Oh, it’s true enough,” replied Joyce, wearily.
“The damned little hell-cat,” said McKay. “I told you to keep clear of
women.”
“It was bound to come out. One of you fellows might just as well have
been with me in the pub last night.”
“Do you think a man would have given you away like this?” asked McKay,
with great scorn.
“I ’ve come to the conclusion that anything’s possible in this infernal
world,” said Joyce, bitterly. “I suppose the whole crowd are against
me.”
“Well, there is a bit of feeling, certainly,” replied McKay, in an
embarrassed tone. “And maybe it won’t be very pleasant for you. They all
talk as if they were plaster of Paris saints,--and, dash it all--they
made me sick; so I thought I’d come and say I’d stand by you.”
“Thank you, McKay,” said Joyce, touched. “You are a good sort. But I
sha’n’t ask you. I am not going on with the tour.”
“I think you’re just as well out of it, to tell you the truth,” said
McKay. Then his anger against Annie Stevens broke out again in an
unequivocal epithet.
“The little--------,” he said.
“I suppose it is horrible in a woman’s eyes,” said Joyce, moving with
McKay toward the crowd round the luggage-van. “But I can’t see why she
should hate me like this, all of a sudden, and wish to ruin me.”
“Can’t you? It’s pretty plain.”
“No,” said Joyce. “We have always been the best of friends.”
“Friends? You don’t mean to say you did n’t know she was gone on
you--clean gone, all off her chump? No one liked to chaff you about it,
because you have an infernal sarcastic way of scoring off fellows. But,
Gawd! The way she used to look at you was enough to make a man sick!”
“Do you mean she was in love with me?” asked Joyce, falteringly, as the
whole situation of affairs, past and present, began to dawn upon him.
“Well, rather,” said McKay, with a chuckle. “What do you think?”
Several of the company were still around the pile of luggage by the van,
claiming their things and waiting for porters. Standing on one side was
Annie Stevens, and, as it happened, Joyce recognised his Gladstone bag
lying at her feet He went and picked it up, and was going off silently
with it, when he felt her touch on his arm. Dim as the light was, he
could see that her face was haggard and drawn. She met his stern gaze
beseechingly.
“For God’s sake, forgive me,” she whispered.
“You have played too much havoc with my life,” replied Joyce coldly.
“I shall kill myself,” said the girl.
“Some people are better dead,” said Joyce, turning away, bag in hand.
On the platform beyond the barriers he met McKay again.
“Good-bye, McKay,” he said. “I have only two friends in the world who
know my story, and you are one.”
“Good-bye, old man,” said McKay. “Better luck next time.”
They shook hands and parted, McKay to join his friend Blake at the
lodgings they had secured already, Joyce to put up for the night at the
first cheap hotel he could find.
The next day he was in London again, in his old room in Pimlico--a
broken-hearted, broken-spirited man. For two days he remained in a state
of stupid misery, yearning for the life he had just abandoned; tortured,
too, by reproaches for his cowardice. Why had he not faced the ignominy,
and tried to live it down? Then the conviction of the hopelessness
of the attempt was forced upon him. Even if he had continued in the
profession, his name would soon have been known throughout it as the
ex-convict,--and he had been in it long enough to perceive how narrow
the theatrical circle is,--and all hope of advancement would have been
worse than futile. On the third day he went to see Yvonne, but she had
just gone out of town. The porter at the flat did not know how long she
would be away. She was at Fulminster. Her letters were forwarded there.
So Joyce wrote her a short note, explaining his situation, and set
himself to wait patiently for her coming.
But on that evening, out of sheer weariness and longing for human
companionship, he turned into his old haunt, the billiard-room in
Westminster. It seemed just the same as on the last evening he had been
there. The occupants of the divan might never have moved from that night
to this. His appearance was greeted with incurious, uninterested nods.
The only one that offered his hand was Noakes, who was sitting at the
end, still in his Chesterfield overcoat and old curly silk hat, but
looking more woe-begone and pallid than ever. There was a touch of pain,
too, in his usually expressionless pale-blue eyes. Joyce took his seat
next to him and bent forward, elbows on knees and chin resting in his
hands.
“You have been absent from town?” asked Noakes, in his precise, toneless
way.
Joyce nodded, with a murmur of assent.
“I, too, have not been here lately.”
“Press of literary work?” asked Joyce, without looking up.
The other did not notice the shade of sarcasm. He passed his hand across
his eyes and sighed.
“I have given it up.”
“Have you come into a fortune?”
“No. I have had the deadliest misfortune that can befall a man.”
Something genuinely tragic in his tone made Joyce start up from his
dejected attitude and look at his neighbour.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I did not know.”
“Of course not; no one does. At least, no one I can repose any
confidence in.”
There was an air of dignity in this oddly attired figure, with the
ludicrous silk hat above the black mutton-chop whiskers and bushy white
hair, and yet a mute appeal for sympathy which Joyce could not but
perceive.
“I, too, have been hard hit lately,” he said, in a low voice.
“Ah, not like me,” said the other, turning round in his seat, so that
his words should reach only Joyce’s ear. “Until three weeks ago I had
a wife and child. No man ever loved as I did. I worked for them till
my brain almost gave way--fifteen hours a day, week after week, starved
myself for them, denied myself the clothes on my back. Now I have them
no longer. Life is valueless to me.”
“Are they--dead?” asked Joyce.
“No. Gone off with the lodger on the first floor,” replied Noakes,
solemnly.
Joyce remained silent. What could he say? He looked sympathetic. Noakes
blew his nose in a dirty piece of calico with frayed edges that courtesy
called a pocket-handkerchief, and continued:--
“So my life is wrecked. My imagination is darkened and I can write
no more. I have given up my literary ambitions. It is not worth while
writing penny bloods at half a crown a thousand for one’s own support.”
“What are you going to do then?” asked Joyce, interested in the quaint
creature.
“I am going abroad. I have come here perhaps for the last time. On the
day after to-morrow I sail for South Africa.”
Was it a sudden inspiration? Was it the coming to a head of vague
resolutions, despairs, workings, the final word of a destiny driving him
from England? Was it a sudden sense of protecting brotherhood towards
this forlorn, tragic scarecrow of a man? Joyce never knew. Possibly it
was all bursting upon his soul at once. Springing to his feet, he held
out his hand to Noakes.
“By all that’s holy, I ’ll come with you!” he cried, in a strange voice.
The other, after some hesitation, took his hand and looked at him
pathetically.
“Are you in earnest?”
“In dead earnest.”
“I am going in the very cheapest possible manner.”
“So am I.”
“I am going, with a few pounds I have scraped together, to try my luck.”
“The same with me. It can’t be worse than England; starvation is
certain here. Come, say, honour bright--will you be glad of me as a
companion--as a friend if you like? I am a lonely bit of driftwood like
yourself.”
Then Noakes rose to his feet and this time squeezed Joyce’s hand and his
pale eyes glistened.
“I ’ll swear to be your friend in peace and in danger,” he said, in his
quaint phraseology. “And I thank the God of all mercies for sending you
to me in my hour of need.”
“All right,” said Joyce. “And now let us have some whisky, and talk over
details.”
And so, in that dingy billiard-room, unknown to the moulting Bohemians
huddled up in somnolent attitudes close by on the divan and unheeded by
the shirt-sleeved men passing around the table intent on their game,
was struck the strangest bargain of a friendship ever made between two
outcast men; a friendship that was to last through want and sickness
and despair and hope, and to leave behind it the ineffaceable stamp of
nobler feeling.
But at first there was much admixture of cynicism on Joyce’s side. He
laughed aloud, in the bitterness of his heart, at the object he had
taken for his bosom friend. It was only later, when he learned the
patient, dog-like devotion of the man, that he felt humbled and ashamed
at these beginnings.
With a draft on a Cape Town bank for the remainder of his capital, and
a last regretful letter from Yvonne in his pocket, he left Southampton.
And as they steamed down Channel, in the mizzling rain of a grey
November day, he leaned over the taffrail and stared at the land of
his brilliant hopes, his crime, his punishment, his struggles and his
dishonour, with a man’s agony of unshed tears.
He was going to begin life anew in a strange undesired country;
hopeless, aimless, friendless save for that useless creature who
was pacing up and down the deck behind him, still in his ridiculous
headgear. He had made no plans. The future to him when he should land at
Cape Town was as unknown--as it is to any of the sons of men, did we but
realise it.