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.