Then he had simply wandered on, past rustling glimmering
gardens, under the great timbers of yellowing elms, hardly thinking,
hardly aware of himself except as in a far-away vision of a sluggish
insignificant creature struggling across the tossed-up crust of an old,
incomprehensible world. The secret of his content in that long leisurely ramble had been that
repeatedly by a scarcely realised effort it had not lain in the
direction of Widderstone. And now, as he sat hungrily devouring his
breakfast on the table in the kitchen, with the daybreak comforting his
eyes, he thought with a positive mockery of that poor old night-thing
he had given inch by inch into the safe keeping of his pink and white
drawing-room. Don Quixote, Poe, Rousseau—they were familiar but not
very significant labels to a mind that had found very poor
entertainment in reading. But they were at least representative enough
to set him wondering which of their influences it was that had inflated
with such a gaseous heroism the Lawford of the night before. He thought
of Sheila with a not unkindly smile, and of the rest. ‘I wonder what
they’ll do?’ had been a question almost as much in his mind during
these last few hours as had ‘What am I to do?’ in the first bout of his
‘visitation.’

But the ‘they’ was not very precisely visualised. He saw Sheila, and
Harry, and dainty pale-blue Bettie Lovat, and cautious old Wedderburn,
and Danton, and Craik, and cheery, gossipy Dr Sutherland, and the
verger, Mr Dutton, and Critchett, and the gardener, and Ada, and the
whole vague populous host that keep one as definitely in one’s place in
the world’s economy as a firm-set pin the camphored moth. What his
place was to be only time could show. Meanwhile there was in this
loneliness at least a respite. Solitude!—he bathed his weary bones in it. He laved his eyelids in it,
as in a woodland brook after the heat of noon. He sat on in calmest
reverie till his hunger was satisfied. Then, scattering out his last
crumbs to the birds from the barred window, he climbed upstairs again,
past his usual bedroom, past his detested guest room, up into the
narrow sweetness of Alice’s, and flinging himself on her bed fell into
a long and dreamless sleep. By ten next morning Lawford had bathed and dressed. And at half-past
ten he got up from Sheila’s fat little French dictionary and his
Memoirs to answer Mrs Gull’s summons on the area bell. The little woman
stood with arms folded over an empty and capacious bag, with an air of
sustained melancholy on her friendly face. She wished him a very
nervous ‘Good morning,’ and dived down into the kitchen. The hours
dragged slowly by in a silence broken only by an occasional ring at the
bell. About three she emerged from the house and climbed the area steps
with her bag hooked over her arm. He watched the little black figure
out of sight, watched a man in a white canvas hat ascend the steps to
push a blue-printed circular through the letter-box. It had begun to
rain a little. He returned to the breakfast-room and with the window
wide open to the rustling coolness of the leaves, edged his way very
slowly across from line to line of the obscure French print. Sabathier none the less, and in spite of his unintelligible
literariness, did begin to take shape and consistency. The man himself,
breathing, and thinking, began to live for Lawford even in those few
half-articulate pages, though not in quite so formidable a fashion as
Mr Bethany had summed him up. But as the west began to lighten with the
declining sun, the same old disquietude, the same old friendless and
foreboding ennui stole over Lawford’s solitude once more. He shut his
books, placed a candlestick and two boxes of matches on the hall table,
lit a bead of gas, and went out into the rainy-sweet streets again. At a mean little barber’s with a pole above his lettered door he went
in to be shaved. And a few steps further on he sat down at the
crumb-littered counter of a little baker’s shop to have some tea. It
pleased him almost to childishness to find how easily he could listen
and even talk to the oiled and crimpy little barber, and to the pretty,
consumptive-looking, print-dressed baker’s wife. Whatever his face
might now be conniving at, the Arthur Lawford of last week could never
have hob-nobbed so affably with his social ‘inferiors.’

For no reason in the world, unless to spend a moment or two longer in
the friendly baker’s shop, he bought six-penny-worth of cakes. He
watched them as they were deposited one by one in the bag, and even
asked for one sort to be exchanged for another, flushing a little at
the pretty compliment he had ventured on. He climbed out of the shop, and paused on the wooden doorstep. ‘Do you
happen to know Mr Herbert Herbert’s?’ he said. The baker’s wife glanced up at him with clear, reflective eyes. ‘Mr
Herbert’s?—that must be some little way off, sir. I don’t know any such
name, and I know most, just round about like.’

‘Well, yes, it is,’ said Lawford, rather foolishly; ‘I hardly know why
I asked. It’s past the churchyard at Widderstone.’

‘Oh yes, sir,’ she encouraged him. ‘A big, wooden-looking house.’

‘Really, sir. Wooden?’

Lawford looked into her face, but could find nothing more to say, so he
smiled again rather absently, and ascended into the street. He sat down outside the churchyard gate on the very bank where he had
in the sourness of the nettles first opened Sabathier’s Memoirs. The
world lay still beneath the pale sky. Presently the little fat rector
walked up the hill, his wrists still showing beneath his sleeves. Lawford meditatively watched him pass by. A small boy with a switch, a
tiny nose, and a swinging gallipot, his cheeks lit with the sunset,
followed soon after. Lawford beckoned him with his finger and held out
the bag of tarts. He watched him, half incredulous of his prize, and
with many a cautious look over his shoulder, pass out of sight. For a
long while he sat alone, only the evening birds singing out of the
greenness and silence of the churchyard. What a haunting inescapable
riddle life was. Colour suddenly faded out of the light streaming between the branches. And depression, always lying in ambush of the novelty of his freedom,
began like mist to rise above his restless thoughts. It was all so
devilish empty—this raft of the world floating under evening’s shadow. How many sermons had he listened to, enriched with the simile of the
ocean of life. Here they were, come home to roost. He had fallen
asleep, ineffectual sailor that he was, and a thief out of the cloudy
deep had stolen oar and sail and compass, leaving him adrift amid the
riding of the waves. ‘Are they worth, do you think, quite a penny?’ suddenly inquired a
quiet voice in the silence. He looked up into the almost colourless
face, into the grey eyes beneath their clear narrow brows. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘what a curious thing life is, and
wondering—’

‘The first half is well worth the penny—its originality!