Perhaps it was a sense of homelessness that drove him to its open doors—for it was not until well towards evening that he had summoned up courage to enter his own dwelling, the little flat he had not yet lived in, made ready for himself and Griselda. If there had been anywhere else to go perhaps he never would have entered it; but his bachelor lodging, he knew, was let to a new tenant, and he had not money enough in his pocket to pay for a lodging elsewhere. His day had been spent on foot; after his refusal at the recruiting station he had walked he knew not whither—here, there, through street after street, that he might not stop and think; and when, in the late afternoon, he found himself sitting on the turf of Primrose Hill, he could not, for the life of him, remember the route by which he had reached it. Sheer weariness of body drove him to shelter, and half an hour later he was dragging his feet up the stairs that led to the flat.
The woman who was to “do” for himself and Griselda had been installed on the premises for some days past; since the outbreak of war she had been in hourly expectation of the arrival of her master and mistress and in some perturbation at the continued lack of news from them. As William was about to walk past the door she had opened to him she stayed him with an inquisitive question—he could not remember the form it took but knew that it must have referred to Griselda’s absence, for he told her abruptly that his wife had died in France. She threw up her hands with a screaming exclamation as he hurried past her to shut himself into the bedroom.
There, afraid of her curious sympathy and questions, he shut and locked himself in; with the poignant loneliness of the brand-new furniture that he and Griselda had chosen and lovingly admired; with the poignant company of Griselda’s photograph, smiling self-consciously from the centre of the mantelpiece and set in an ornate silver frame that was one of her wedding presents. He held it in his hands till the tears blinded him, kissed it sobbing and laid it face downwards.
The “general,” burning with inquisitive sympathy, induced him, after one or two unsuccessful attempts, to open the door to her knocking; pressed on him, in spite of denials, a scratch meal of tea and poached eggs, and hovered round while he ate it. As befitted the occasion she held her apron to her eyes while she extracted as much as she could in the way of information. Later, as she washed up in the kitchen, she heard him moving from one tiny room to another—consumed with a restless misery and a restless wonder as to what he should do with his life. Still later she heard him go out again; though he had hidden away the self-conscious photograph, thrusting it out of sight into a drawer, the brand-new furniture was always there and always waiting for Griselda. The moment came when he could no longer suffer its company and went out into the street to avoid it. Other purpose in walking he had none—and thus it happened that, mechanically and without intent, he drifted into the Bloomsbury side-street where Faraday held his meeting.
The important doorkeeper would have greeted him with more than a nod—would gladly, in fact, have detained him after his four weeks’ absence to exchange comments and views on the European situation; but William, in entering, made no response to his “Hallo, back again!” which it may be he did not even hear. He walked straight past the sentinel and into the bare familiar room—where everything, from the seats to their occupants, was just as it had been and where every face was known to him. Time, for a moment, turned back in its traces and yesterday unrolled before his eyes. He gazed at it and sat down slowly—by himself in the last row of chairs. … Edwardes, the Central London secretary, was hugging his ankle as he always hugged it, and Mrs. Jay-Blenkinsop, the formidable treasurer of the Golder’s Green branch, frowned through her pince-nez at the speaker with her chin uplifted as of old, wore the same capacious sandals—her crossed knees showed them—and the same cold-gravy-coloured robe. And her son, young Jay-Blenkinsop, as his habit was, sprawled sideways on one chair and curled his long limbs round another. It was all as it had been; and Faraday, on the platform, was speaking with the accents of yesterday.
The important doorkeeper was not the only comrade who had noticed William’s return: one or two heads were turned as he came in, but for the most part the audience was intent on the words of the speaker. The heads that turned made some sign of pleased recognition to which William responded automatically, unknowing that he did so. From his seat near the door his eyes wandered slowly over the platform, the hall and its occupants—slowly and with a dull and detached curiosity. What he saw there and heard was unreal, like a scene in an unconvincing play; he had a sense of looking at these people from a great way off, of hearing their voices from a distance. Something separated and held him removed from them. … He had great difficulty in giving his attention to what the speaker was saying; yet in the old days Faraday had always stirred him and tonight he was speaking well.
From thirty to forty convinced adherents assembled at a private conference are not the material upon which a public orator usually throws away his best endeavours; but Faraday that night was
