Part 6

The man was ragged, poor, outcast. Clearly it was a begging episode; and yet he trembled violently, while in his veins ran fire. The caller refused a seat, but moved over to the curtains by the window, drawing them slightly aside so that he could see out. And the window was high above old smoky London--open. It felt cold. Jones bent down, always keeping his caller in view, and lit the gas-stove. “You wish to see me,” he said, rising again to an upright position. Then he added more hurriedly, stepping back a little towards the rack where the walking-sticks were, “Please let me know what I can do for you!”

Bearded, unkempt, with massive shoulders and huge neck, the caller stood a moment and stared. “Your name and address,” he said at length, “were given to me”--he hesitated a moment, then added--“you know by whom.” His voice was deep and windy and echoing. It made the stretched cords of the upright piano ring against the wall. “He told me to call,” the man concluded.

“Ah yes; of course,” Jones stammered, forgetting for the moment who or where he was. “Let me see--where are you”--the word did not want to come out--“staying?” The caller made an awful and curious movement; it seemed so much bigger than his body. “In what way--er--can I be of assistance?” Jones hardly knew what he said. The other volunteered so little. He was frightened. Then, before the man could answer, he caught a dreadful glimpse, as of something behind the outline. It moved. Was it shadow that thus extended his form? Was it the glare of that ugly gas-stove that played tricks with the folds of the curtain, driving bodily outline forth into mere vacancy? For the figure of his strange caller seemed to carry with it the idea of projections, extensions, growths, in themselves not monstrous, fine and comely, rather--yet awful.

The man left the window and moved towards him. It was a movement both swift and enormous. It was instantaneous.

“Who are you--_really_?” asked Jones, his breath catching, while he went pluckily out to meet him, irresistibly drawn. “And what is it you _really_ want of me?” He went very close to the shrouded form, caught the keen air from the open window behind, sniffed a wind that was not London’s stale and weary wind, then stopped abruptly, frozen with terror and delight. The man facing him was splendid and terrific, exhaling something that overwhelmed.

“What can I ... do ... for ... you?” whispered Jones, shaking like a leaf. A delight of racing clouds was in him.

The answer came in a singular roaring voice that yet sounded far away, as though among mountains. Wind might have brought it down.

“There is nothing you can do for me! But, by Chiron, there is something I can do for you!”

“And that is?” asked Jones faintly, feeling something sweep against his feet and legs like the current of a river in flood.

The man eyed him appallingly a moment.

“Let you see me!” he roared, while his voice set the piano singing again, and his outline seemed to swim over the chairs and tables like a fluid mass. “Show myself to you!”

The figure stretched out what looked like arms, reared gigantically aloft towards the ceiling, and swept towards him. Jones saw the great visage close to his own. He smelt the odour of caves, river-beds, hillsides--space. In another second he would have been lost----

His brother made a great rattling as he opened the door. The atmosphere of rice and sugar and office desks came in with him.

“Why, Billy, old man, you look as if you’d seen a ghost. You’re white!”

William Jones mopped his forehead. “I’ve been working rather hard,” he answered. “Feel tired. Fact is--I got stuck in a story for a bit.”

“Too bad. Got it straightened out at last, I hope?”

“Yes, thanks. _It came to me_--in the end.”

The other looked at him. “Good,” he said shortly. “Rum thing, imagination, isn’t it?” And then he began talking about his day’s business--in tons and tons of food.

XI

THE INVITATION

They bumped into one another by the swinging doors of the little Soho restaurant, and, recoiling sharply, each made a half-hearted pretence of lifting his hat (it was French manners, of course, _inside_). Then, discovering that they were English, and not strangers, they exclaimed, “Sorry!” and laughed.

“Hulloa! It’s Smith!” cried the man with the breezy manner; “and when did _you_ get back?” It sounded as though “Smith” and “_you_” were different persons. “I haven’t seen you for months!” They shook hands cordially.

“Only last Saturday--on the _Rollitania_,” answered the man with the pince-nez. They were acquaintances of some standing. Neither was aware of anything in the other he disliked. More positive cause for friendship there was none. They met, however, not infrequently.

“Last Saturday! Did you really?” exclaimed the breezy one; and, after an imperceptible pause which suggested nothing more vital, he added, “And had a good time in America, eh?”

“Oh! not bad, thanks--not bad at all.” He likewise was conscious of a rather barren pause. “Awful crossing, though,” he threw in a few seconds later with a slight grimace.

“Ah! At this time of year, you know----” said Breezy, shaking his head knowingly; “though _sometimes_, of course, one has better trips in winter than in summer. I crossed once in December when it was like a mill-pond the whole blessed way.”

They moved a little to one side to let a group of Frenchmen enter the swinging doors.

“It’s a good line,” he added, in a voice that settled the reputation of the steamship company for ever. “By Jove, it’s a good line.”

“Oh! it’s a good line, yes,” agreed Pince-nez, gratified to find his choice approved. He shifted his glasses modestly. The discovery reflected glory upon his judgment. “_And_ such an excellent table!”

Breezy agreed heartily. “I’d never cross now on any other,” he declared, as though he meant the table. “You’re right.”

This happy little agreement about the food pleased them both; it showed their judgment to be sound; also it established a ground of common interest--a link--something that gave point to their little chat, and made it seem worth while to have stopped and spoken. They rose in one another’s estimation. The chance meeting ought to lead to something, perhaps. Yet neither found the expected inspiration; for neither _au fond_ had anything to say to the other beyond passing the time of day.

“Well,” said Pince-nez, lingeringly but very pleasantly, making a movement towards the doors; “I suppose I must be going in. You--er--you’ve had lunch, of course?”

“Thanks, yes, I have,” Breezy replied with a certain air of disappointment, as though the question had been an invitation. He moved a few steps backwards down the pavement. “But, now you’re back,” he added more cheerfully, “we must try and see something of one another.”

“By all means. Do let’s,” said Pince-nez. His manner somehow suggested that he too expected an invitation, perhaps. He hesitated a moment, as though about to add something, but in the end said nothing.

“We must lunch together one day,” observed Breezy, with his jolly smile. He glanced up at the restaurant.

“By all means--let’s,” agreed the other again, with one foot on the steps. “Any day you like. Next week, perhaps. You let me know.” He nodded cordially, and half turned to enter.

“Lemme see, where are you staying?” called Breezy by way of after-thought.

“Oh! I’m at the X----,” mentioning an obscure hostel in the W.C. district.

“Of course; yes, I remember. That’s where you stopped before, isn’t it? Up in Bloomsbury somewhere----?”

“Rooms ain’t up to much, but the cooking’s _quite_ decent.”

“Good. Then we’ll lunch one day soon. What sort of time, by the bye, suits you?” The breezy one, for some obscure reason, looked vigorously at his watch.

“Oh! any time; one o’clock onwards, sort of thing, I suppose?” with an air of “just let me know and I’ll be there.”

“Same here, yes,” agreed the other, with slightly less enthusiasm.

“That’s capital, then,” from Pince-nez. He paused a moment, not finding precisely the suitable farewell phrase. Then, to his own undoing, he added carelessly, “There are one or two things--er--I should like to tell you about----”

“And luncheon _is_ the best time,” Breezy suggested at once, “for busy men like us. You might bespeak a table, in fact.” He jerked his head towards the restaurant.

The two acquaintances, one on the pavement, the other on the steps, stood and stared at each other. The onus of invitation had somehow shifted insensibly from Breezy to Pince-nez. The next remark would be vital. Neither thought it worth while to incur the slight expense of a luncheon that involved an hour in each other’s company. Yet it was nothing stronger than a dread of possible boredom that dictated the hesitancy.

“Not a bad idea,” agreed Pince-nez vaguely. “But I doubt if they’ll keep a table after one o’clock, you know.”

“Never mind, then. You’re on the telephone, I suppose, aren’t you?” called Breezy down the pavement, still moving slowly backwards.

“Yes, you’ll find it under the name of the hotel,” replied the other, putting his head back round the door-post in the act of going in.

“My number’s not in the book!” Breezy cried back; “but it’s 0417 Westminster. Then you’ll ring me up one day? That’ll be very jolly indeed. _Don’t forget the number!_” This shifting of telephonic responsibility, he felt, was a master-stroke.

“Right-O. I’ll remember. So long, then, for the present,” Pince-nez answered more faintly, disappearing into the restaurant.

“Decent fellow, that. I shall go to lunch if he asks me,” was the thought in the mind of each. It lasted for perhaps half a minute, and then--oblivion.

Ten days later they ran across one another again about luncheon-time in Piccadilly; nodded, smiled, hesitated a second too long--and turned back to shake hands.

“How’s everything?” asked the breezy one with gusto.

“First-rate, thanks. And how are _you_?”

“Jolly weather, isn’t it?” Breezy said, looking about him generally, “this sunshine--by Jove----!”

“Nothing like it,” declared Pince-nez, shifting his glasses to look at the sun, and concealing his lack of something to say by catching at the hearty manner.

“Nothing,” agreed Breezy.

“In the world,” echoed Pince-nez.

Again the topic was a link. The stream of pedestrians jostled them. They moved a few yards up Dover Street. Each was really on his way to luncheon. A pause followed the move.

“Still at--er--that hotel up there?” The name had escaped him. He jerked his head vaguely northwards.

“Yes; I thought you’d be looking in for lunch one day,” a faint memory stirring in his brain.

“Delighted! Or--you’d better come to my Club, eh? Less out of the way, you know,” declared Breezy.

“Very jolly. Thanks; that’d be first-rate.” Both paused a moment. Breezy looked down the street as though expecting someone or something. They ignored that it was luncheon hour.

“You’ll find me in the telephone book,” observed Pince-nez presently.

“Under X---- Hotel, I suppose?” from Breezy. “All right.”

“0995 Northern’s the number, yes.”

“And mine,” said Breezy, “is 0417 Westminster; or the Club”--with an air of imparting valuable private information--“is 0866 Mayfair. Any day you like. Don’t forget!”

“Rather not. Somewhere about one o’clock, eh?”

“Yes--or one-thirty.” And off they went again--each to his solitary luncheon.

A fortnight passed, and once more they came together--this time in an A.B.C. shop.

“Hulloa! There’s Smith,” thought Breezy “By Jove, I’ll ask him to lunch with me.”

“Why, there’s that chap again,” thought Pince-nez. “I’ll invite him, I think.”

They sat down at the same table. “But this is capital,” exclaimed both; “you must lunch with me, of course!” And they laughed pleasantly. They talked of food and weather. They compared Soho with A.B.C. Each offered light excuses for being found in the latter.

“I was in a hurry to-day, and looked in by the merest chance for a cup of coffee,” observed Breezy, ordering quite a lot of things at once, absent-mindedly, as it were.

“I like the butter here so awfully,” mentioned Pince-nez later. “It’s _quite_ the best in London, and the freshest, I always think.” As this was not _the_ luncheon, they felt that only commonplace things were in order. The special things they had to discuss must wait, of course.

The waitress got their paper checks muddled somehow. “I’ve put a ’alfpenny of yours on ’is,” she explained cryptically to Pince-nez.

“Oh,” laughed Breezy, “that’s nothing. This gentleman is lunching with me, anyhow.”

“You’ll ’ave to make it all right when you get outside, then,” said the girl gravely.

They laughed over her reply. At the paydesk both made vigorous search for money. Pince-nez, being nimbler, produced a florin first. “This is _my_ lunch, of course. I asked you, remember,” he said. Breezy demurred with a good grace.

“You can be host another time, if you insist,” added Pince-nez, pocketing twopence change.

“Rather,” said the other heartily. “You must come to the Club--any day you like, you know.”

“I’ll come to-morrow, then,” said Pince-nez, quick as a flash. “I’ve got the telephone number.”

“Do,” cried Breezy, very, very heartily indeed. “I shall be delighted! One o’clock, remember.”

XII

THE IMPULSE

“My dear chap,” cried Jones, throwing his hands out in a gesture of distress he thought was quite real, “nothing would give me greater pleasure--if only I could manage it. But the fact is I’m as hard up as yourself!”

The little pale-faced man of uncertain age opposite shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly.

“In a month or so, perhaps----” Jones added, hedging instinctively, “If it’s not too late then--I should be delighted----”

The other interrupted quickly, a swift flush emphasising momentarily the pallor of his strained and tired face. Overworked, overweary he looked.

“Oh, thanks, but it’s really of no consequence. I felt sure you wouldn’t mind my asking, though.” And Jones replied heartily that he only wished he were “flush” enough to lend it. They talked weather and politics then--after a pause, finished their drinks, Jones refusing the offer of another, and, presently, the elder man said good-night and left the Club. Jones, with a slight sigh of boredom, as though life went hard with him, passed upstairs to the card-room to find partners for a game.

Jones was not a bad fellow really; he was untaught. Experience had neglected him a little, so that his sympathies knew not those sweet though difficult routes by which interest travels away from self--towards others. He entirely lacked that acuter sense of life which only comes to those who have known genuine want and hardship. A fat income had always tumbled into his bank without effort on his part, the harvest of another’s sweat; yet, as with many such, he imagined that he earned his thousand a year, and figured somehow to himself that he deserved it. He was neither evil-liver nor extravagant; he knew not values, that was all--least of all money values; and at the moment when his cousin asked for twenty pounds to help his family to a holiday, he found that debts pressed a bit hard, that he owed still on his motor-car, and that some recent speculations seemed suddenly very doubtful. He was hard up, yes.... Perhaps, if the cards were lucky, he might do it after all. But the cards were not lucky. Soon after midnight he took a taxi home to his rooms in St. James’s Street. And then it was he found a letter marked “Urgent” placed by his man upon the table by the door so that he could not miss it.

The letter kept him awake most of the night in keen distress--for himself. It was anonymous, signed “Your Well-wisher.” It warned him, in words that proved the writer to be well informed, that the speculation in which he, Jones, had plunged so recklessly a week before would mean a total loss unless he instantly took certain steps to retrieve himself. Such steps, moreover, were just possible, provided he acted immediately.

Jones, as he read it, turned pale, if such a thing were possible, all over his body; then he turned hot and cold. He sweated, groaned, sighed, raged; sat down and wrote urgent instructions to solicitors and others; tore the letters up and wrote others. The loss of that money would reduce his income by at least half, alter his whole plan and scale of living, make him poor. He tried to reflect, but the calmness necessary to sound reflection lay far from him. Action was what he needed, but action was just then out of the question, for all the machinery of the world slept--solicitors, company secretaries, influential friends, lawcourts. The telephone on the wall merely grinned at him uselessly. Sleep was as vain a remedy as the closed and silent banks. There was absolutely nothing he could do till the morning; and he realised that the letters he wrote were futile even while he wrote them--and tore them up the next minute. Personal interviews the first thing in the morning, energetic talk and action based upon the best possible advice, were the only form relief could take, and these personal interviews he could obtain even before the letters would be delivered, or as soon. For him that money seemed as good as already lost ... and tossing upon his sleepless bed he faced the change of life the loss involved--bitterly, savagely, with keen pain: the lowered scale of self-indulgence, the clipped selfishness, restricted pleasures, fewer clothes, cheaper rooms, difficult and closely calculated travelling, and all the rest. It bit him hard--this first grinding of the little wheels of possible development in an ordinary selfish, though not evil, heart....

And then it was, as the grey dawn-light crept past the blinds, that the sharpness of his pain and the keen flight of his stirred imagination, projecting itself as by these forced marches into new, untried conditions, produced a slight reaction. The swing of the weary pendulum went a little beyond himself. He fell to wondering vaguely, and with poor insight, yet genuinely, what other men might feel, and how they managed on smaller incomes than his own--smaller than his would be even with the loss. Gingerly, tentatively, he snatched fearful glimpses (fearful, they seemed, to him, at least) into the enclosures of these more restricted lives of others. He knew a mild and weak extension of himself, as it were, that fringed the little maps of lives less happy and indulgent than his own. And the novel sensation brought a faint relief. The small, clogged wheels of sympathy acquired faster movement, almost impetus. It seemed as though the heat and fire of his pain, though selfish pain, generated some new energy that made them turn.

Jones, in all his useless life, had never _thought_; his mind had reflected images perhaps, but had never taken hold of a real idea and followed it by logical process to an end. His mind was heavy and confused, for his nature, as with so many, only moved to calculated action when a strong enough desire instinctively showed the quickest, easiest way by which two and two could be made into four. His reflections upon comparative poverty--the poverty he was convinced now faced him cruelly--were therefore obscure and trivial enough, while wholly honest. Wealth, he divined dimly, was relative, and money represented the value of what is wanted, perhaps of what is needed rather, and usually of what cannot be obtained. Some folk are poor because they cannot afford a second motor-car, or spend more than £100 upon a trip abroad; others because the moors and sea are out of reach; others, again, because they are glad of cast-off clothing and only dare “the gods” one night a week or take the free standing-room at Sunday concerts.... He suddenly recalled the story of some little penniless, elderly governess in Switzerland who made her underskirts from the silk of old umbrellas because she liked the frou-frou sound. Again and again this thought for others slipped past the network of his own distress, making his own selfish pain spread wider and therefore less acutely. For even with a mere £500 his life, perhaps, need not be too hard and unhappy.... The little wheels moved faster. His pain struck sparks. He saw strange glimpses of a new, far country, a fairer land than he had ever dreamed of, with endless horizons, and flowers, small and very simple, yet so lovely that he would have liked to pick them for their perfume. A sense of joy came for a moment on some soft wind of beauty, fugitive, but sweet. It vanished instantly again, but the vision caught for a moment, too tiny to be measured even by a fraction of a second, had flamed like summer lightning through his heart. It almost seemed as though his grinding selfish pain had burned the dense barriers that hid another world, bringing a light that just flamed above those huge horizons before they died. For they did die--and quickly, yet left behind a touch of singular joy and peace that somehow glowed on through all his subsequent self-pity....

And then, abruptly, with a vividness of detail that shocked him, he saw the Club smoking-room, and the worn face of his cousin close before him--the overworked hack-writer, who had asked a temporary £20, a little sum he would assuredly have paid back before the end of the year, a sum he asked, not for himself, but that he might send his wife and children to the sea.

Impulse, usually deplored as weakness, may prove first seed of habit. Whether Jones afterwards regretted his unconsidered action may be left unrecorded--whether he _would_ have regretted it, rather, if the saving of his dreaded loss had not subsequently been effected. As matters stand, he only knew a sense or flattering self-congratulation that he had slipped that letter--the only one he left untorn--into the pillar-box at the corner before the sun rose, and that it contained a pink bit of paper that should bring to another the relief he himself had, for the first time in his life, known imaginatively upon that sleepless bed. Before the day was over the letter reached its destination, and his own affairs had been put right. And two days later, when they met in the Club, and Jones noticed the obvious happiness in the other’s eyes and manner, he only answered to his words of thanks:

“I wish I could have given it at once. The fact is I found letters on getting home that night which--er--made it possible, you see ...!”

But in his heart, as he said it, flamed again quite suddenly the memory of that fair land with endless horizons he had sighted for a second, and the sentence that ran unspoken through his mind was: “By Jove, that’s something I must do again. It’s worth it ...!”

XIII

HER BIRTHDAY

It was her birthday on the morrow, and I set forth to find a suitable and worthy present. My means, judged by the standards of the big merchants, seemed trivial; yet, could I but discover the right gift, no matter how insignificant, I felt sure that it would please her, and so make me doubly happy. And the kind of gift I already knew, for I had a specimen of it in my humble lodgings; only of so poor a type that I was ashamed to offer it. I must find somewhere a much, much better one, if possible, perfect and without a single flaw. I went, therefore, into the great shops and saw a thousand wonderful and lovely things....