Her face had been warm and eager during these last few minutes, but now her eyes clouded again. “I don’t know whether any of that would help, though. I suppose some folk might say I wouldn’t have had the light up if I hadn’t had reason, and they wouldn’t believe mine. But I wanted to know, sir, if there’s anything I can do.”
Miles asked if Brand had been fully dressed as he stood at the window, and Field said confidently, yes, in a blue suit. He had stopped there for some time; because, even after she was undressed, she had not at once been able to sleep; she had been too happy in her tranquil solitude, and it had been some time before he left the window and prepared for the night.
3
Miles left the office, his brain in a turmoil of excitement and dismay. This sudden new light cast on the proceedings disturbed him, even angered him. For he had no desire to play any prominent part in the coming trial. He walked along the river-bank towards Westminster. He had an engagement to dine with a client to-night, but he felt so much disturbed and bewildered that he paid no heed to clocks. The oily water moved sluggishly, with a slow, deliberate swell that set all the moored boats and barges rocking. A German trading-vessel, with coloured bands round her funnel, sailed by, with a squat dignity; some time later came a trail of barges, linked together by ropes, in a long straggling line. On the first sat a man, smoking idly, and staring into the early February dusk; the second flew the pennon of a line of washing, pink shirts and a blue pinafore, elongated vests, socks, and a shapeless nightgown, ballooning a little in the cool breeze; on the third, a girl in a pink flannel blouse and bare legs boiled a kettle on a small stove; in the fourth, an enormous blowsy woman was combing her hair. Miles stood still to watch them go slowly by. Other elbows beside his own rested on the worn parapet; some of their owners were watching the blazing electric signs of whiskey, flour, and cigarettes on the opposite bank. The sturdy outline of cranes and dredgers stood out smoke-grey against a pearl-coloured sky, one of those dark pearls, he thought inconsequently, that Ruth admired so much. Shy lovers stood close together, whispering and touching hands; girls carrying attaché-cases went briskly past; astounding, the nervous capacity of these trim slender bodies, that they should look so fresh at the end of a day’s work in warm, noisy, ill-ventilated rooms. Young men, looking less alert, moved along the crowded pavements, talking of electricity and speed, the age’s God. At the kerbstone a woman was offering jaded bouquets of chrysanthemums; further down an old man peddled studs and bootlaces. The long array of Green Line buses was rapidly filling. Miles overheard snatches of talk, fragments of indecipherable conversations, confessions, doubts. They were far too inadequate ever to present a complete situation, yet they aroused in him the instinctive curiosity that made all life a rich and brilliant pageant, and this affair of Brand, after all, only an incident in a crowded canvas.
“And if there’s no room in the pit, we’ll have to go to a movie. I can’t run to five-and-nine to-night.”
“What about the Croon at Victoria Station? I know they’re not quick, but they do you a good Welsh rarebit for a shilling and it’s not so noisy as most.”
“What he wants is an automatic machine. Put in a shilling and you get so many letters. You can kick it, too, and it can’t kick back, so you’re quite safe. That’s what he wants for a secretary.”
“My dear, you never saw anything like it—pyjamas and a vest and the most awful toothbrush.”
“Peter’s offered to lend me fifteen pounds, if I can rustle the other ten. Of course, it isn’t what you’d call smart, but who cares? We’re not going to take a lot of girls about in it. But, I say, think of Sundays, going off when you please and where you please, no crowding for the hikers’ train, or standing in a queue for a bus—and going where they damn well like to take you.”
“And evenings in the summer, old man—there’s a bathing-pool near Leatherhead…”
The young excited male group passed on. The air all about Miles was heavy with the fumes of petrol, of cheap cigarettes, of face powder and the scented artificial bouquets the women wore pinned into their coats; but it was vibrant, too, with life. Miles re-experienced a familiar sense of being part of some tremendous circus, full of lights, voices, adventure, risk, and enchantment. That thought brought another, inevitable, in its wake. Eustace—who, in his own calculating way, enjoyed life, though he saw little enough of its colour and shifting, elusive beauty. For the lawyer in Miles prevented his accepting Ruth’s passionate, “But he’s a murderer a dozen times over,” or Isobel’s candid, “What right has a man like that to live?” Eustace had, by the law of the land, as much right to live, provided he was not Adrian Gray’s murderer, as the most ardent of his traducers.
“The point is,” argued Miles restlessly, walking towards Westminster Bridge, where the laden omnibuses passed and repassed one another, and bicycles, carts, motors, lorries, and trams clattered and rang and flashed against a background of the Houses of Parliament and the darkening night sky, “the point is, am I compelled to come forward? I can prove nothing, except that Brand didn’t stick entirely to the facts. I can’t prove that he had anything to do with his father’s death. I can’t clear
