He waited with the thick crowd at the ticket gate, fumbling for his ticket in his waistcoat pocket. That was where he had put it—he always did. Always in the same place—as a methodical man should do. But it was not there. It was not in the other waistcoat pocket—nor in his right-hand trouser pocket. “Now, then,” said an aggressive voice behind, and he stepped aside. Lost his place in the queue, now! He put down his dispatch-case and felt furiously in his pockets with both hands. The passengers dwindled down the stairs; he was left alone, regarded indifferently by the bored official. This was a fitting climax to an abominable journey.
He found it at last, lurking in the flap of a tobacco-pouch, and because he had come too far he was forced to pay another penny. There was a preposterous argument. “Putting a premium on inconvenience!”
He walked home at last, cursing foolishly, and adding new periods to his letter to the Company. All over London men and women walked back to their homes that evening through the hot streets, bitter and irritated and physically distressed, ruminating on the problem of overpopulation and the difficulties of movement in the hub of the world—only a small proportion, it is true, as bitter and irritated as John, but every night the same proportion, every night a thousand or two. Historians, it is to be hoped, and scientists and statisticians, when they write up their estimates of that year, will not fail to record the mental and physical fatigue, the waste of tissue and nervous energy, imposed upon the citizens of our great Metropolis by the simple necessity of proceeding daily from their places of work to their places of residence. Small things, these irritations, an odd penny here, an odd ten minutes there, the difference between just catching and just missing a train, the difference between just standing for twenty minutes, and just sitting down—but they mounted up! They mounted up into vast excrescences of discourtesy and crossness; they made calm and equable and polite persons suddenly and amazingly abrupt and unkind.
John Egerton was seldom so seriously ruffled; but then it was seldom that so peculiarly unfortunate a journey concluded so peculiarly painful a day. A sticky and intolerable day. A “rushed” and ineffectual day. “Things” had shown a deliberate perversity at the office, papers had surprisingly lost themselves and thereafter surprisingly discovered themselves at the most awkward moments; telephone girls had been pert, telephone numbers permanently engaged. The Board of Trade had behaved execrably. John’s own Minister had been unusually curt—jumpy.
And hovering at the back of it all, a kind of master-irritation, which governed and stimulated every other one, was the unpleasant memory of Emily Gaunt.
So that he walked down the Square in a dark and melancholy temper. And Emily Gaunt met him on the doorstep. The skinny successor of Emily Gaunt in the household of the Byrnes stood at the doorway of his house, talking timidly to Mrs. Bantam. She had come for “some sack or other,” Mrs. Bantam explained. “And there’s no sack in this house—that I will swear.” She spoke with the violent emphasis of all Mrs. Bantams, as if the presence of a sack in a gentleman’s house would have been an almost unspeakable offence against chastity and good taste. The skinny maid turned from her with relief to the less formidable presence of John.
“If you please, sir, Cook says as the missus says as Mrs. Byrne says as—as”—the skinny maid faltered in this interminable forest of “as’s”—“as you ’as the big sack that was in the scullery, sir, and if you’ve done with it, sir, could we ’ave it back, sir, as the man’s come for the bottles?”
The sack! Emily’s sack! John had no need of the young woman’s exposition. He remembered vividly. He remembered now what Stephen had said about it—in the boat—under the wall. John had “borrowed” it. He remembered now. But what the devil had he borrowed it for? And why—why should he have to stand on his own doorstep this terrible day and invent lies for a couple of women?
And what had the man coming for the bottles to do with it, he wondered?
But a lie must be invented—and quickly. He said, “Will you tell Mrs. Byrne, I’m very sorry—I took the sack out in my boat—to—to collect firewood—and—and—lost it—overboard, you know? Tell her I’m very sorry, will you, and I’ll get her another sack?” He tried to smile nicely at the young woman; a painful smirk revealed itself.
“Thank you, sir.”
The young woman melted away, and he walked indoors, feeling sullied and ashamed. He hated telling lies. He was one of those uncommon members of the modern world who genuinely object to the small insincerities of daily life, lying excuses over the telephone for not going out to dinner, manufactured “engagements,” and so on. And the fact that this lie was part of a grand conspiracy to protect a man from an indictment for murder did not commend it. On the contrary, it enhanced that feeling of “identification” with the end of Emily which he had been trying for two weeks to shake off. Oh, it was damnable!
For his solitary dinner he opened a bottle of white wine—a rare indulgence. He hoped earnestly that Mrs. Bantam would be less communicative than usual. Mrs. Bantam had cooked and kept house for him for six months. She was one of that invaluable body of semi-decayed but capable middle-aged females who move through the world scorning and avoiding the company
