The youth repeated the word.
"Once again."
On the second repet.i.tion light began to creep in. A boyhood spent in the place, added to this ten days" stay, had made Owen something of a linguist.
"Father says would I like grandma to do what?"
"Tell yer forch"n by ther cards."
"Where is she?"
"Backyarnder."
Owen followed him into the kitchen, where he found Mr Dorman, the farmer, and, seated at the table, fumbling with a pack of cards, an old woman, whom he remembered well.
"Mother wants to tell your fortune," said Mr Dorman, in a hoa.r.s.e aside.
"She always will tell visitors" fortunes. She told Mr Prosser"s, and he didn"t half like it, because she said he"d be engaged in two months and married inside the year. He said wild horses wouldn"t make him do it."
"She can tell me that if she likes. I shan"t object."
"Mother, here"s Mr Owen."
"I seed him fast enough," said the old woman, briskly. "Shuffle, an" cut three times."
She then performed mysterious manoeuvres with the cards.
"I see pots o" money," announced the sibyl.
"If she says it, it"s there right enough," said her son.
"She means my bonus," said Owen. "But that"s only ten pounds. And I lose it if I"m late twice more before Christmas."
"It"ll come sure enough."
"Pots," said the old woman, and she was still mumbling the encouraging word when Owen left the kitchen and returned to the sitting-room.
He laughed rather ruefully. At that moment he could have found a use for pots o" money.
He walked to the window, and looked out. It was a glorious morning. The heat-mist was dancing over the meadow beyond the brook, and from the farmyard came the liquid charawks of care-free fowls. It seemed wicked to leave these haunts of peace for London on such a day.
An acute melancholy seized him. Absently, he sat down at the piano. The prejudices of literary Mr Prosser had slipped from his mind. Softly at first, then gathering volume as the spirit of the song gripped him, he began to sing "Asth.o.r.e". He became absorbed.
He had just, for the sixth time, won through to "Iyam-ah waiting for-er theeee-ya.s.s-thorre," and was doing some intricate three-chord work preparatory to starting over again, when a loaf of bread whizzed past his ear. It missed him by an inch, and crashed against a plaster statuette of the Infant Samuel on the top of the piano.
It was a standard loaf, containing eighty per cent of semolina, and it practically wiped the Infant Samuel out of existence. At the same moment, at his back, there sounded a loud, wrathful snort.
He spun round. The door was open, and at the other side of the table was standing a large, black-bearded, shirt-sleeved man, in an att.i.tude rather reminiscent of Ajax defying the lightning. His hands trembled.
His beard bristled. His eyes gleamed ferociously beneath enormous eyebrows. As Owen turned, he gave tongue in a voice like the discharge of a broadside.
"Stop it!"
Owen"s mind, wrenched too suddenly from the dreamy future to the vivid present, was not yet completely under control. He gaped.
"Stop--that--infernal--noise!" roared the man.
He shot through the door, banging it after him, and pounded up the stairs.
Owen was annoyed. The artistic temperament was all very well, but there were limits. It was absurd that obscure authors should behave in this way. Prosser! Who on earth was Prosser? Had anyone ever heard of him? No! Yet here he was going about the country clipping small boys over the ear-hole, and flinging loaves of bread at bank-clerks as if he were Henry James or Marie Corelli. Owen reproached himself bitterly for his momentary loss of presence of mind. If he had only kept his head, he could have taken a flying shot at the man with the marmalade-pot. It had been within easy reach. Instead of which, he had merely stood and gaped. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, "It might have been."
His manly regret was interrupted by the entrance of Mr Dorman with the information that the dog-cart was at the door.
Audrey was out of town when Owen arrived in London, but she returned a week later. The sound of her voice through the telephone did much to cure the restlessness from which he had been suffering since the conclusion of his holiday. But the thought that she was so near yet so inaccessible produced in him a meditative melancholy which enveloped him like a cloud that would not lift. His manner became distrait. He lost weight.
If customers were not vaguely pained by his sad, pale face, it was only because the fierce rush of modern commercial life leaves your business man little leisure for observing pallor in bank-clerks. What did pain them was the gentle dreaminess with which he performed his duties. He was in the Inward Bills Department, one of the features of which was the sudden inrush, towards the end of each afternoon, of hatless, energetic young men with leather bags strapped to their left arms, clamouring for mysterious crackling doc.u.ments, much fastened with pins.
Owen had never quite understood what it was that these young men did want, and now his detached mind refused even more emphatically to grapple with the problem. He distributed the doc.u.ments at random with the air of a preoccupied monarch scattering largess to the mob, and the subsequent chaos had to be handled by a wrathful head of the department in person.
Man"s power of endurance is limited. At the end of the second week the overwrought head appealed pa.s.sionately for relief, and Owen was removed to the Postage Department, where, when he had leisure from answering Audrey"s telephone calls, he entered the addresses of letters in a large book and took them to the post. He was supposed also to stamp them, but a man in love cannot think of everything, and he was apt at times to overlook this formality.
One morning, receiving from one of the bank messengers the usual intimation that a lady wished to speak to him on the telephone, he went to the box and took up the receiver.
"Is that you, Owen? Owen, I went to _White Roses_ last night. Have you been yet?"
"Not yet."
"Then you must go tonight. Owen, I"m _certain_ you wrote it. It"s perfectly lovely. I cried my eyes out. If you don"t go tonight, I"ll never speak to you again, even on the telephone. Promise."
"Must I?"
"Yes, you must. Why, suppose it _is_ yours! It may mean a fortune.
The stalls were simply packed. I"m going to ring up the theatre now and engage a seat for you, and pay for it myself."
"No--I say--" protested Owen.
"Yes, I shall. I can"t trust you to go if I don"t. And I"ll ring up early tomorrow to hear all about it. Good-bye."
Owen left the box somewhat depressed. Life was quite gloomy enough as it was, without going out of one"s way to cry one"s eyes out over sentimental plays.
His depression was increased by the receipt, on his return to his department, of a message from the manager, stating that he would like to see Mr Bentley in his private room for a moment. Owen never enjoyed these little chats with Authority. Out of office hours, in the circle of his friends, he had no doubt the manager was a delightful and entertaining companion; but in his private room his conversation was less enjoyable.
The manager was seated at his table, thoughtfully regarding the ceiling. His resemblance to a stuffed trout, always striking, was subtly accentuated, and Owen, an expert in these matters, felt that his fears had been well founded--there was trouble in the air. Somebody had been complaining of him, and he was now about, as the phrase went, to be "run-in".
A large man, seated with his back to the door, turned as he entered, and Owen recognized the well-remembered features of Mr Prosser, the literary loaf-slinger.
Owen regarded him without resentment. Since returning to London he had taken the trouble of looking up his name in _Who"s Who_ and had found that he was not so undistinguished as he had supposed. He was, it appeared, a Regius Professor and the author of some half-dozen works on sociology--a record, Owen felt, that almost justified loaf-slinging and ear-hole clipping in moments of irritation.
The manager started to speak, but the man of letters antic.i.p.ated him.