Part 51 (1/2)

Mary clenched her hands.

'It's this awful New York!' she cried. 'Eddy was never like that in Dunsterville.'

'Dunsterville does not offer quite the same scope,' said Joe.

'New York changes everything,' Mary returned. 'It has changed Eddy--it has changed you.'

He bent towards her and lowered his voice.

'Not altogether,' he said. 'I'm just the same in one way. I've tried to pretend I had altered, but it's no use. I give it up. I'm still just the same poor fool who used to hang round staring at you in Dunsterville.'

A waiter was approaching the table with the air, which waiters cultivate, of just happening by chance to be going in that direction.

Joe leaned farther forward, speaking quickly.

'And for whom,' he said, 'you didn't care a single, solitary snap of your fingers, Mary.'

She looked up at him. The waiter hovered, poising for his swoop.

Suddenly she smiled.

'New York has changed me too, Joe,' she said.

'Mary!' he cried.

'Ze pill, sare,' observed the waiter.

Joe turned.

'Ze what!' he exclaimed. 'Well, I'm hanged! Eddy's gone off and left me to pay for his lunch! That man's a wonder! When it comes to brain-work, he's in a cla.s.s by himself.' He paused. 'But I have the luck,' he said.

THE TUPPENNY MILLIONAIRE

In the crowd that strolled on the Promenade des Etrangers, enjoying the morning suns.h.i.+ne, there were some who had come to Roville for their health, others who wished to avoid the rigours of the English spring, and many more who liked the place because it was cheap and close to Monte Carlo.

None of these motives had brought George Albert Balmer. He was there because, three weeks before, Harold Flower had called him a vegetable.

What is it that makes men do perilous deeds? Why does a man go over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Not for his health. Half an hour with a skipping-rope would be equally beneficial to his liver. No; in nine cases out of ten he does it to prove to his friends and relations that he is not the mild, steady-going person they have always thought him.

Observe the music-hall acrobat as he prepares to swing from the roof by his eyelids. His gaze sweeps the house. 'It isn't true,' it seems to say. 'I'm not a jelly-fish.'

It was so with George Balmer.

In London at the present moment there exist some thousands of respectable, neatly-dressed, mechanical, unenterprising young men, employed at modest salaries by various banks, corporations, stores, shops, and business firms. They are put to work when young, and they stay put. They are mussels. Each has his special place on the rock, and remains glued to it all his life.

To these thousands George Albert Balmer belonged. He differed in no detail from the rest of the great army. He was as respectable, as neatly-dressed, as mechanical, and as unenterprising. His life was bounded, east, west, north, and south, by the Planet Insurance Company, which employed him; and that there were other ways in which a man might fulfil himself than by giving daily imitations behind a counter of a mechanical figure walking in its sleep had never seriously crossed his mind.

On George, at the age of twenty-four, there descended, out of a dear sky, a legacy of a thousand pounds.

Physically, he remained unchanged beneath the shock. No trace of hauteur crept into his bearing. When the head of his department, calling his attention to a technical flaw in his work of the previous afternoon, addressed him as 'Here, you--young what's-your-confounded-name!' he did not point out that this was no way to speak to a gentleman of property. You would have said that the sudden smile of Fortune had failed to unsettle him.

But all the while his mind, knocked head over heels, was lying in a limp heap, wondering what had struck it.