‘I should be very grateful,’ said Dick. ‘Only let me make it worth his while.’
‘We wasn’t thinking of that, sir, but of course it’s in your own ’ands; but only to ’ear Alf sing “A Boy’s best Friend is ’is Mother!” Ah!’
‘I’ll hear him sing that too. Let him come this evening with the newspapers.’
Alf was not a nice child, being puffed up with many school-board certificates for good conduct, and inordinately proud of his singing. Mr. Beeton remained, beaming, while the child wailed his way through a song of some eight eight-line verses in the usual whine of a young Cockney, and, after compliments, left him to read Dick the foreign telegrams. Ten minutes later Alf returned to his parents rather pale and scared.
‘’E said ’e couldn’t stand it no more,’ he explained.
‘He never said you read badly, Alf?’ Mrs. Beeton spoke.
‘No. ’E said I read beautiful. Said ’e never ’eard any one read like that, but ’e said ’e couldn’t abide the stuff in the papers.’
‘P’raps he’s lost some money in the Stocks. Were you readin’ him about Stocks, Alf?’
‘No; it was all about fightin’ out there where the soldiers is gone—a great long piece with all the lines close together and very hard words in it. ’E give me ’arf a crown because I read so well. And ’e says the next time there’s anything ’e wants read ’e’ll send for me.’
‘That’s good hearing, but I do think for all the half-crown—put it into the kicking-donkey money-box, Alf, and let me see you do it—he might have kept you longer. Why, he couldn’t have begun to understand how beautiful you read.’
‘He’s best left to hisself—gentlemen always are when they’re downhearted,’ said Mr. Beeton.
Alf’s rigorously limited powers of comprehending Torpenhow’s special correspondence had waked the devil of unrest in Dick. He could hear, through the boy’s nasal chant, the camels grunting in the squares behind the soldiers outside Suakin; could hear the men swearing and chaffing across the cooking pots, and could smell the acrid wood-smoke as it drifted over camp before the wind of the desert.
That night he prayed to God that his mind might be taken from him, offering for proof that he was worthy of this favour the fact that he had not shot himself long ago. That prayer was not answered, and indeed Dick knew in his heart of hearts that only a lingering sense of humour and no special virtue had kept him alive. Suicide, he had persuaded himself, would be a ludicrous insult to the gravity of the situation as well as a weak-kneed confession of fear.
‘Just for the fun of the thing,’ he said to the cat, who had taken Binkie’s place in his establishment, ‘I should like to know how long this is going to last. I can live for a year on the hundred pounds Torp cashed for me. I must have two or three thousand at least in the Bank—twenty or thirty years more provided for, that is to say. Then I fall back on my hundred and twenty a year, which will be more by that time. Let’s consider. Twenty-five—thirty-five—a man’s in his prime then, they say—forty-five—a middle-aged man just entering politics—fifty-five—“died at the comparatively early age of fifty-five,” according to the newspapers. Bah! How these Christians funk death! Sixty-five—we’re only getting on in years. Seventy-five is just possible, though. Great hell, cat O! fifty years more of solitary confinement in the dark! You’ll die, and Beeton will die, and Torp will die, and Mai—everybody else will die, but I shall be alive and kicking with nothing to do. I’m very sorry for myself. I should like some one else to be sorry for me. Evidently I’m not going mad before I die, but the pain’s just as bad as ever. Some day when you’re vivisected, cat O! they’ll tie you down on a little table and cut you open—but don’t be afraid; they’ll take precious good care that you don’t die. You’ll live, and you’ll be very sorry then that you weren’t sorry for me. Perhaps Torp will come back or … I wish I could go to Torp and the Nilghai, even though I were in their way.’
Pussy left the room before the speech was ended, and Alf, as he entered, found Dick addressing the empty hearth-rug.
‘There’s a letter for you, sir,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’d like me to read it.’
‘Lend it to me for a minute and I’ll tell you.’
The outstretched hand shook just a little and the voice was not over-steady. It was within the limits of human possibility that—that was no letter from Maisie. He knew the heft of three closed envelopes only too well. It was a foolish hope that the girl should write to him, for he did not realise that there is a wrong which admits of no reparation though the evildoer may with tears and the heart’s best love strive to mend all. It is best to forget that wrong whether it be caused or endured, since it is as remediless as bad work once put forward.
‘Read it, then,’ said Dick, and Alf began intoning according to the rules of the Board School—
‘”I could have given you love, I could have given you loyalty, such as you never dreamed of. Do you suppose I cared what you were? But you chose to whistle everything down the wind for nothing. My only excuse for you is that you are so young.”
‘That’s all,’ he said, returning the paper to be dropped into the fire.
‘What was in the letter?’ asked Mrs. Beeton, when Alf returned.
‘I don’t know. I think it was a circular or a tract about not whistlin’ at everything when you’re young.’
‘I must have stepped on something when I was alive and walking about and it has bounced up and hit me. God help it, whatever it is—unless it was all a joke. But I don’t know any one who’d take the trouble to play a joke on me…. Love and loyalty for nothing. It sounds tempting enough. I wonder whether I have lost anything really?’
Dick considered for a long time but could not remember when or how he had put himself in the way of winning these trifles at a woman’s hands.
Still, the letter as touching on matters that he preferred not to think about stung him into a fit of frenzy that lasted for a day and night. When his heart was so full of despair that it would hold no more, body and soul together seemed to be dropping without check through the darkness. Then came fear of darkness and desperate attempts to reach the light again. But there was no light to be reached. When that agony had left him sweating and breathless, the downward flight would recommence till the gathering torture of it spurred him into another fight as hopeless as the first. Followed some few minutes of sleep in which he dreamed that he saw. Then the procession of events would repeat itself till he was utterly worn out and the brain took up its everlasting consideration of Maisie and might-have-beens.
At the end of everything Mr. Beeton came to his room and volunteered to take him out. ‘Not marketing this time, but we’ll go into the Parks if you like.’
‘Be damned if I do,’ quoth Dick. ‘Keep to the streets and walk up and down. I like to hear the people round me.’
This was not altogether true. The blind in the first stages of their infirmity dislike those who can move with a free stride and unlifted arms—but Dick had no earthly desire to go to the Parks. Once and only once since Maisie had shut her door he had gone there under Alf’s charge. Alf forgot him and fished for minnows in the Serpentine with some companions. After half an hour’s waiting Dick, almost weeping with rage and wrath, caught a passer-by, who introduced him to a friendly policeman, who led him to a four-wheeler opposite the Albert Hall. He never told Mr. Beeton of Alf’s forgetfulness, but … this was not the manner in which he was used to walk the Parks aforetime.
‘What streets would you like to walk down, then?’ said Mr. Beeton, sympathetically. His own ideas of a riotous holiday meant picnicking on the grass of Green Park with his family, and half a dozen paper bags full of food.
‘Keep to the river,’