"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 grat.i.tude 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 la.s.s 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 n.o.bs themselves do it when pushed to it, sc.r.a.pping 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 pa.s.sed, 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 antic.i.p.ations as to the morrow produced a feverish excitement.
Throughout the day he rehea.r.s.ed his speeches. He was still a.s.suming--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 d.a.m.nable 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.
IV
The parquetry all around the square of carpet was so smooth that Dale had slipped a foot and nearly come down when he entered the room and bowed to his judges; and now he moved with extreme caution when they told him to withdraw to the window.
There were three seated at the table, and none of the three was the Postmaster-General. Two of them were obviously bigwigs--so big, at any rate, that his fate lay in their hands; and the other one was a secretary--not the General Secretary--not even a gentleman, if one could draw any inference from his deferential tone and the casual manner in which the others addressed him. He was a sandy person--not unlike Ridgett, but rather older and much fatter.
Once a quiet young gentleman--a real gentleman, although apparently acting just as a clerk--had been in and out of the room. He had given Dale a half smile, and it had been welcome as a ray of sunlight on the darkest day of winter. Instinct told Dale that this nice young man sympathized with him, as certainly as it told him that his judges were unsympathetic.
He stood now in the deep bay window, as far as possible from the table, pretending not to listen while straining every nerve to catch the words that were being spoken over there. His blood was hurrying thickly, his heart beat laboriously, his collar stuck clammily to his perspiring neck. His sense of bodily fatigue was as great as if he had run a mile race; and yet one might say that the interview had scarcely begun. What would he be like before it was over? He summoned all his courage in order to go through with it gamely.
... "You can"t have this sort of thing." The words had reached him distinctly--spoken by the one they called Sir John; and the one that Sir John called "Colonel" said with equal distinctness, "Certainly not."
Dale"s heart beat more easily. As he hoped and believed, they must be talking of the soldier. Then the heart-beats came heavy again. Were they talking of him and not of the soldier? He caught a few other broken phrases of enigmatic import--such as "storm in teacup,"
"trouble caused," "no complaints"--and then the voices were lowered, and he heard no more of the conversation at the table.
Presently he saw that the secretary was producing a fresh file of papers, and at the same moment, quite inexplicably, his attention wandered. He had brought out a handkerchief, and while with a slow mechanical movement he rubbed the palms of his hands, he noticed and thought about the furniture and decoration of the room. Clock, map, and calendar; some busts on top of a bookless bookcase; red turkey carpet, the treacherous parquetry, and these stiff-looking chairs--really that was all. The emptiness and tidiness surprised him, and he began to wonder what the Postmaster-General"s room was like.
Surely there would be richer furniture and more litter of business there. Then, with a little nervous jerk, as of his internal machinery starting again after a breakdown, he felt how utterly absurd it was to be thinking about chairs and desks at such a moment. He must pull himself together, or he was going to make an a.s.s of himself.
"Now, if you please." They were calling him to the table. He slowly marched across to them, and stood with folded hands.
"Well now, Mr. Dale." The Colonel was speaking, while Sir John read some letters handed to him by the secretary. "We have gone into this matter very carefully, and I may tell you at once that we have come to certain conclusions."
"Yes, sir." Dale found himself obliged to clear his throat before uttering the two words. His voice had grown husky since he last spoke.
"You have caused us a lot of trouble--really an immense amount of trouble."
Dale looked at the Colonel unflinchingly, and his voice was all right this time. "Trouble, sir, is a thing we can"t none of us get away from--not even in private affairs, much less in public affairs."
"No; but there is what is called taking trouble, and there is what is called making trouble."
"And the best public servants, Mr. Dale"--this was Sir John, who had unexpectedly raised his eyes--"are those who take most and make least;" and he lowered his eyes and went on reading the doc.u.ments.
"First," said the Colonel, "there is your correspondence with the staff at Rodhaven. Here it is. We have gone through it carefully--and there"s plenty of it. Well, the plain fact is, it has not impressed us favorably--that is, so far as you are concerned."
"Sorry to hear it, sir."
"No, I must say that the tone of your letters does not appear to be quite what it should be."
"Indeed, sir. I thought I followed the usual forms."
"That may be. It is not the form, but the spirit. There is an arrogance--a determination not to brook censure."
"No censure was offered, sir."
"No, but your tone implied that you would not in any circ.u.mstances accept it."
"Only because I knew I hadn"t merited it, sir."