Part 2 (1/2)

IV

I do not know but what I might still have retained control of myself when I got out into the street again; I do not know, because I didn't try. Instead, no sooner had I got away from him than I went temporarily all to pieces. I remember I pa.s.sed up Charlotte Street and turned into Mecklenburgh Square; and there I leaned against the railings of the garden that occupies the middle of the Square. I stood with my shoulder against them, looking stupidly down at my feet. There was a thin and melancholy mist; the lights of the boarding-houses and nursing-homes of the east side of the Square struggled through it with difficulty, and presently I found that my foot was playing absently with a few sodden plane-tree leaves that had drifted against the kerb.

Slowly, as I stood there, my stupidity gave place to a dull anger. I don't think it was anger against anybody in particular; it was as objectless as it was useless and exhausting. But if you have had that gall in your mouth that makes all the world taste bitter, you will understand my miserable rage. This changed presently to a s.h.i.+vering, weeping rage The wide portalled door of a house opposite opened, and a servant-girl came down the shallow steps to post a letter; I daresay she supposed I was unwell or a drunkard; and a pa.s.ser-by might have concluded that I had an a.s.signation with her, or had just had a quarrel.

Then, when I had had a little ease of my anger, I pulled myself together and banished it again. Now that I had come, tardily enough, out of my fool's paradise of the past weeks, I had other things than purposeless anger to think of. I moved away from the railings; the maid, returning from the posting of her letter, quickened her steps to avoid me; and I walked slowly northeastward through the Square.

Quickly I became calmer still. Soon I was calm enough to recognise that I needed this. ”What,” I said ironically to myself, thunder-struck at a thing so very surprising! ”Did you think that because your head was in the clouds ... come, come, you'd better look at the thing; you mayn't have any too much time, you know; if I were you I'd take a walk and think it out.”

I turned into Grays Inn Road, and began to take my own advice.

While I had no reason to suppose that she had fallen in love with him, I knew almost for a certainty that he had not with her. He was not at that stage yet. Already he was nibbling at other pleasures, and with a youngster of his kind one or two nibbles mean three or four. They may even mean ten or twelve. So far so good. I was still in time. I was, in fact, so far beforehand that, of the three of us, I was probably the only one who knew, not what had happened (which was nothing) but what might happen--which was everything. That I took for the starting-point of my consideration.

And I saw that that, at the outset, was an enormous advantage to me. Not only could I watch events, but I could watch them to infinitely better purpose that I knew what to look for. They, when it came--the ”it” I had in my mind--(I ought rather to say did I suffer it to come) would not, in the bewildering wonder of it, know what had overtaken them; while I, by a timely use of care and skill, might even turn to advantage those disadvantages of mine which, huge as a church, might have been deemed to outweigh everything else. No more perfect cover for hidden motion could have been devised than I already possessed. Who suspects, of anything, one whom to suspect would on the face of it be absurd? I could, did I find this necessary, use practically the whole of my conspicuous life and narrow circ.u.mstances as a screen.

I reached the top of Gray's Inn Road, crossed to St Pancras Station, and, following the line of coal merchants' offices on the left side of the road, plunged into the shadows of the Somers Town arches. It was there that I thought of another thing that I must interrupt my meditation to acquaint you with.

You may have wondered why, if all young Merridew said about my brains was true, I had still, after some years as an agency clerk at Rixon Tebb & Masters', not been able to get away from the place. Well, the answer to that is involved in a hundred other things that have ended, after fifteen years, in my now being able to write this chapter of my personal history at a great square mahogany and leather writing-table, with two softly-shaded electric standards upon it, and, containing it, a lofty panelled study, rich and quiet, with a carpet soft as thymy turf and my pictures and carvings and cabinets mirrored in floor-borders, brown and deep as the pools of my Irish trout stream. You do not want the whole of that long story. I will tell you as much as is necessary here. The rest I may tell at some other time.

The truth was that I _had_ left Rixon Tebb & Masters'--had left the place, and had achieved the seeming miracle of being permitted to return. Such a marvel was without precedent, and I cannot say that it had been accomplished altogether by my own contrivance. I said a little while ago that there were eight of us, had over in a lump from the agency; I also said that only by way of the junior clerks.h.i.+p was any advancement possible from that slavery of addressing envelopes that might have been for company circularisation or might have been sent over in s.h.i.+ploads to the Flus.h.i.+ng and Middleburg book-makers for all we knew; and I had had the signal luck--I forgot this when I said that luck had always pa.s.sed me by on the other side--to present myself for reappointment, without any hope whatever of getting it, at the very moment when Polwhele had succeeded to this post.

How Polwhele had chanced to be occupied as he had been occupied when I had presented myself I understand only too well. Sneaking, prying, slandering, peaching--you didn't become Rixon Tebb & Masters' junior clerk without having been through the mill of all this and more. Poor worm, he had got so used to it that he couldn't help it. Having attained to the junior clerks.h.i.+p, he was going to work up through the seniors by the same means, I suppose, and the means he had been making use of, at the moment of my coming upon him, had been the furtive rummaging of a waste-paper basket that had come--I knew this by the pattern of it--from Mr Masters' private office.

It had been, of course, the perfect opportunity for me, who was subdued to sneaking and peaching also. I had leaned my elbow on the bra.s.s rail of a tall desk and stood looking down on him--such a long way down it seemed--he was on his knees.

”Hallo, Polwhele!” I had suddenly said. ”Going to put Samson Evitt out of business?” And then I waited to see how he took it.

I don't suppose you've ever heard of Samson Evitt. He has been a solicitor; at that time he described himself as a waste-paper dealer; and what he really did, and for all I know does still, was to buy up, through a hundred miserable agents, and on the chance of coming upon some private letter or secret draft, the contents of such receptacles as Polwhele's fingers had been deep in at that moment.

”Going to start in Samson's line, are you, Polwhele?”

The colour of his face had changed as swiftly as that of the electric advertis.e.m.e.nt opposite my bedroom at King's Cross. He had gone as white as chalk. I had known perfectly well that he wasn't going to sell anything to Samson Evitt, but was merely playing his own hand with the firm; but he'd had no business at all with Mr Masters' waste-paper basket, and knew it. It had been rather horrible, but I had known I was as good as reinstated already.

”I'm coming back, Polwhele,” I had said.

He had not spoken--only looked at me with eyes full of terror.

”You're going to see that I come back, Polwhele,” I had informed him.

”My G.o.d, Jeffries, you wouldn't have the heart.”

”Oh no--not as long as I come back.”

Then swiftly he had seen his years of s.h.i.+fts and meannesses all wasted unless....

”Oh my G.o.d! How can I do it?” he had groaned.

”I don't know, Polwhele.”

I did not know, nor do I know now how he did it. Men do impossible things when they've got to. That had been on a Friday evening, at a quarter to seven (the zeal of a new junior clerk always kept him after the others had gone). I had given him Monday in which to see to it. On the Tuesday morning, at nine o'clock, I had been back at my envelope addressing again. These things have to be done sometimes. And I need hardly add that now Polwhele would have turned up at my funeral with a smile on his lips and a nosegay in his b.u.t.tonhole.