Mr. Darby woke during the small hours feeling strangely ill at ease. Where was he? What was happening? Evidently he was at sea and it was blowing up for rough weather, for now he fell through fathoms of vacuity, now his bed thrust him up, up, upwards till it seemed that he would certainly bump the top of created things. Could it be that he had taken the plunge and was actually now following in the wake of Uncle Tom Darby? He opened his eyes and the ship suddenly and distressingly stood still. Oof! Opposite him shone the faint livid glare, so unmistakably familiar, of the street lamp outside the back door shining through the dark blue bedroom blind. He must be at home. Cautiously he reached out a foot. Yes, there was Sarah. Yes, he was at home; at home, and far from well. His head felt like an india-rubber ball that alternately expanded and shrank. His eyes felt like two screws recently screwed into it. Oo … oof! The room suddenly lurched horribly away from him. Had he better get up at once, for fear. …? But perhaps if he lay quite still, perfectly still! Once more it was a case for self-control. He must take himself in hand. ‘Be calm! ’ he commanded himself. ‘Lie still! You’re in bed, at home. Everything’s perfectly still. It’s nothing but fancy.’ Ooof! Another sickening lurch. No doubt it was fancy, but what a horribly powerful fancy. It was the whisky on the top of everything else that had done it, of course. But, after all, he had to offer them something before they left the house on a special occasion like this. When he had suggested it to George Stedman, George had smiled, winked, and then accepted. ‘Well, just a drop, to settle things down comfortably.’ Settle things down indeed! Well, perhaps it had settled things down for George; but not for himself. Far from it. Whisky, after all …! But he mustn’t think of whisky. A horrible rising of the gorge had warned him that the thought was dangerous. He must lie still and think of nothing, or perhaps count slowly. Perhaps counting would keep the room still. But it would be as well, he felt, not to close his eyes. So he lay and counted, staring myopically at the livid blur of the street lamp on the blind.
But very soon the numbers trailed away and vanished from his consciousness: counting had become too great an exertion. He sank into a doze, then into sleep.
• • • • • • • •
He awoke many hours later and saw with horror that it was light. He could hear Mrs. Bricketts downstairs fighting with the kitchen grate. That meant it was just after seven o’clock. In about ten minutes Sarah would get up: in twenty-five he would have to get up himself. Appalling thought! For though he felt certainly better than when he had woken in the night, he still felt very far from well. If only he could lie and doze till eleven or twelve and let nature take her course, all, he felt, would be well. But that, of course, was out of the question. There was the office. And even if there had not been the office, there was Sarah. She would have little sympathy with a convalescence of this description. Yet, as he realized with alarm, it would be beyond his powers to hide his condition from her, for he already knew positively that he would not be capable of facing breakfast. The thought of breakfast now was like the thought of whisky in the night, a dangerous thought, a thought to be avoided. A cup of tea, perhaps. Yes, he might manage a cup of tea: that might be comforting. It might make it possible for him to face the office and get through a not too discreditable morning. For some minutes he lay quite still, his whole attention concentrated on getting as well as possible before Sarah got up. Then he tested himself by envisaging a cup of tea again. Yes, he could certainly manage a cup of tea, and perhaps a small piece of very crisp toast. But no butter. No, most undoubtedly no butter. He almost shrieked it aloud in the intensity of his feelings about butter. Sarah stirred, heaved, and a current of cold air rushed along his back. She was getting up.
Mr. Darby lay on his back, apparently asleep, for ten minutes longer: then with desperate determination he spoke. He had realized that it would be better to settle the matter now, instead of having to reveal the truth at the breakfast table. ‘Sarah,’ he said weakly, without stirring or opening his eyes, and it was as if a corpse lying in state, were speaking.
‘Well? ‘ Her voice came from over beside the dressingtable.
‘I shan’t want … very much breakfast.’
‘Humph!’ Sarah glanced sharply at the recumbent figure. ‘I don’t suppose you will,’ she said, as a result of her inspection. ‘You don’t look anything to boast of. And small wonder.’
‘A cup of tea, and a little bit of dry toast,’ Mr. Darby murmured, his eyes still closed.
Sarah again eyed him severely. ‘It’s a good thing for you,’ she remarked, ‘that you’re not fifty every day.’
‘It was the whisky,’ said Mr. Darby weakly.
Sarah opened the bedroom door. ‘I wonder you haven’t more respect for your stomach,’ she said as she went out.
• • • • • • • •
An hour later a small, compact, middle-aged gentleman with gold-rimmed spectacles, evidently out for the first time after a long and severe illness, tottered along the western edge of Osbert Road, travelling southwards. His interest in the outer world, generally so acute, was in abeyance. His thoughts were turned inwards. A distant rumble arose in the outer world, increased rapidly, grew to a roar, and a train—actually a steam train—rushed past him in the railway cutting on his right, leaving a vast convoluted serpent of white smoke that writhed its way upwards out of the cutting into the sunny air above. A smell of railway stations and travel filled the air. But Mr. Darby did not so much as turn his head. For the first time in the twenty years of his frequentation of Osbert Road the steam train brought him no intimations of good fortune. He disregarded it, as he disregarded all else of the outer world except his nose—a rather red, dyspeptic nose in striking contrast to the blotchy pallor of his cheeks—which he was assiduously following to Number Thirty Seven Ranger Street. Yes, he was telling himself, if all those midnight delusions had been real, if his bed and bedroom had been heaving and lurching in good truth and for the sufficient reason that they were a bunk and a cabin, if his appalling sensations had been due to a rough night in the Pacific, he could have borne them patiently, even gladly. As it was, what was he getting out of them? Nothing. They had come, they were already going, and they left him empty. They had not even left him as he was before, because by some abominable magic they had lifted the painted curtain and left him face to face with the real drabness, ineffectuality, vacuity of his life. The memory of the great events of the evening before and of the crowning triumph of his great speech might have restored the lost glamour, but unhappily that memory was remarkably small. When he tried now to remember what he had said, he could not recall a single phrase. He could only remember that he had had a desperate struggle with a large unwieldy word, a word that had seemed to him then of great importance, and had been beaten by it. What was the word? Quinquagesima Sunday! That had been the key to it. Quinquagenarian! It popped up at once now: the key had opened the lock. How simple, by the cold light of day. But last night he had lost the key. Probably the whole speech had been one long tissue of uncouth and discreditable noises. He remembered how he had found Sarah’s eye fixed coldly and warningly upon him. No wonder. And what had the rest of them thought? No doubt it would be the standing joke among them for years. Turning the corner into Savershill Road Mr. Darby, wrapped in these painful thoughts, collided with an old lady, blinked, apologized, disentangled himself and went on his way much shaken. He tried to reassemble his scattered reflections, to retire again into himself. What had he been thinking of? Some wound, some deep-seated grievance. Ah. Sarah! The memory of her cold scrutiny last night had stirred a whole brood of antagonistic feelings. And there was her behaviour this morning too,—her complete lack of sympathetic indulgence towards his … well, yes, call it folly; her cold silent hostility throughout breakfast. And yet, after all, Sarah was a good wife. She fed him very well: there were all sorts of delightful surprises for dinner and supper. She kept everything in the house very nice, very comfortable: her standard was high, there was a style about everything she did. Yes, it must be admitted she was a good wife. But no sooner had Mr. Darby admitted this than some querulous worm turned in him, raised a head, and annihilated the admission. ‘No,’ said the worm, ‘she is not a good wife. When you say she’s a good wife, you mean she’s a good housekeeper. A good wife gives you something more than a comfortable home and good food: she gives affection and sympathy and companionship. Does Sarah give you that?’
‘No!’ said Mr. Darby to the worm. ‘No, I’m bothered if she does. She shows me clear enough that she thinks me no better than a fool.’
‘And are you a fool?’ asked the worm.
‘Certainly not,’ replied Mr. Darby hotly. ‘I may have my feelings and I may have my ideas, but I am not a fool. Most certainly not.’
‘Do you hurry home every evening after work and does your heart leap when you open the front door?’ asked the worm.
‘No!’ said Mr. Darby. ‘No, it doesn’t. It sinks.’
‘Well, then!’ said the worm conclusively, and Mr. Darby went puffing indignantly down the Savershill Road, and as he swept down the slope of Tarras Bridge he glared aggressively at an inoffensive little man, no bigger than himself, who passed him near the post office.
As he skirted the railings of St. Thomas’s Church his anger abated. The ocular assault he had made on the inoffensive little man had done him good. And yet, he reflected, how nice she could be when she liked, when something tickled her sense of humour and her lips twisted into that half-sweet, half-acid smile and she burst out laughing; or when she recalled old memories—Do you remember this, do you remember that, Jim?—and they fell to rebuilding the past together. But these heart-warming moments came … how often? Perhaps once a month. Well—Mr. Darby’s mood stiffened again—once a month was not enough. And rebellious discontent broke out again and raged in him for the full length of Newfoundland Street. Again he reviewed his recent ordeal at the breakfast table. Could anyone have been less sympathetic? True, it was his own fault, but in the special circumstances she might have overlooked that. She knew he hadn’t done it deliberately. Now a wife—a real wife—would have made allowances and in any case she would have taken into account the fact that he was really very unwell. She would have made him stay in bed, pampered him a little, and sent word to the office that her husband was ill; and afterwards she would have chaffed him gently about it. But not Sarah! Not her ! As he reflected on her treatment of him he felt lonely, unloved, unprotected. Yes, when all was said and done he led a dog’s life. And every mortal day, except Sundays, he tramped down to Thirty Seven Ranger Street and shut himself up there for close on eight hours, purely and simply to keep that life going. He had denied, just now, that he was a fool, but he was a fool, a damned fool. Yes, Mr. Darby insisted on the word in the face of his conscience, a damned fool. The shop windows of Brackett Street and Ranger Street displayed their allurements in vain. James & Jennings presented wash-leather gloves, the latest hats, their most opulent fur-coats for his imagination to fill them, and he stared right through them. Edgington’s set ingenious snares of port-bottles, champagne-bottles, curiously shaped bottles of rare liqueurs; Milsom’s cast Comice pears, Cantelupe Melons, peaches at one and six each before his feet. Mr. Darby trampled them underfoot with as little compunction as the Juggernaut.
It was only when he had turned into the entrance of Number Thirty Seven, nearly knocking down an errand-boy as he did so, and had sounded his daily knell of servitude on the loose tread of the third step, that Mr. Darby suddenly came to himself and climbed the long flight to the office door, the obedient, efficient, and punctual little servant of Messrs. Lamb & Marston, and, as regards the world below, a totally negligible dust-mote in the swarming population of Newchester-on-Dole. The clock of St. John’s struck nine as he fished out his key-ring and opened the door. As he did so, he heard footsteps far below him. It was McNab and Pellow, the two clerks, following close upon his heels as usual.
Mr. Darby had taken the letters from the letter-box behind the door and removed his hat and coat when the footsteps reached the top landing. He hung his coat up hurriedly, for he always made a point of doing this before the clerks entered. To do so he was obliged to stand on tiptoe, and this, he felt, was a little out of keeping with his dignity as managing clerk. Not that Mr. Darby stood unduly on his dignity. He was on friendly terms with both the young men: he liked them and they liked him; in fact the general office of Messrs. Lamb & Marston was a quiet and happy family.
He opened the door of the general office and went in. Their voices in the lobby brought life to the empty office, and next moment they joined him. ‘Good morning, Mr. Darby!’ ‘Good morning, Mr. Darby!’ ‘Good morning both! ’ replied Mr. Darby. He took the letters to his desk, opened them, glanced through them, and laid them on one or another of three separate piles. The clerks collected their T squares, set squares and other paraphernalia, lifted on to their high desks heavy drawing boards on which half-finished plans were pinned, and perching themselves on their high stools set to work.
In a few minutes Mr. Darby turned on his stool. ‘Here you are, my boy!’ Pellow, a pleasant, red-faced, ginger-haired youth of nineteen, left his stool and took from Mr. Darby one of the piles of letters. It was his duty to take them to Mr. Marston’s room and lay them, ready for his arrival, on his desk, and at the same time to give an eye to the fire. Mr. Darby, when the boy’s back was turned, stretched himself and passed a hand slowly across his forehead.
‘Not feeling quite the thing, Mr. Darby?’ McNab enquired.
‘No, not exactly,’ said Mr. Darby. Then his voice dropped to a confidential tone. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he admitted, ‘I had rather a … ah … stiff night last night. A little … well … a commemoration dinner.’
‘It’s a rotten feeling,’ said McNab sympathetically, and his pale, bony, clean-shaven face crowned by the shock of dishevelled black hair, suggested that he had undergone similar sufferings far more frequently than Mr. Darby. ‘Now, if you’ll take my tip, you’ll have a small bottle of Bass at dinner-time. That’ll do the trick.’
‘Bass?’ said Mr. Darby, flinching a little.
‘Yes, a Bass,’ McNab persisted. ‘Hair of the dog, as the saying is. You may not like the idea now, but take my word for it, Mr. Darby, you’ll be as right as rain after it.’
‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Darby. ‘Really now! Well, perhaps I’ll try it, McNab. Anything to … ah …!’ Mr. Darby made gestures indicating the removal of cobwebs from his face and hair. The door opened. Young Pellow returned and put an end to the subject.
‘A Bass!’ thought Mr. Darby to himself. ‘Hair of the dog …!’ he chuckled inwardly, feeling for the first time that he really was a bit of a lad. That aspect of his misadventure had not struck him before. It put a new and romantic light on it. Yes, last night, and, for that matter, this morning, he had touched hands for a few hours with all those wild, devil-may-care, swashbuckling fellows whose careers he had read of and secretly envied. He remembered being thrilled by Martin Harvey in The Only Way. That was a life, if you like. He recalled the fine drunken tone Martin Harvey had put into the phrase: ‘Bear with a sore head,’ as he dipped a towel in a basin and tied it round his aching brow. Well he himself had been a bear with a sore head this morning. He had already forgotten that, towards Sarah at least, his tone had been rather more like that of a lamb. Yes, he would take McNab’s advice and try a Bass. In fact, he would do more, he would not go home for dinner at all. He knew that if he rang up Wilkinson’s, the Baker’s, at the end of Moseley Terrace, they would send a message along to Sarah. It was only a few yards. He glanced at the clock. Twenty-three minutes past nine. Mr. Marston would not arrive for seven minutes. He went over to the telephone, looked up Wilkinson’s number and rang them up. ‘This is Mr. Darby, W. J. Darby of Number Seven Moseley Terrace. I want you to do me a favour. Could you send along and tell my wife I shan’t be home for dinner? Yes, that’s right. Some special business to see to. Yes. Thank you. Very much obliged to you.’
So much for that. What would Sarah think? Mr. Darby’s blue eyes hardened behind his glasses. She could think what she liked. The prospect of spending the dinner hour in town, free and at large (it was an elastic hour: an hour and a quarter frequently), began to seem more and more attractive to him. He was already very much better and by that time he might perhaps be feeling like a bite of something to eat. He heard the outer door open and shut and Mr. Marston’s familiar step go down the passage to his room. Half an hour later his bell rang. That was for Mr. Darby. Mr. Marston was Lamb & Marston complete. Lamb had faded from the office and become a sleeping partner ten years ago, and six years later had faded from the world and fallen into a still deeper sleep in Hobblesfield Churchyard twelve miles west of Newchester. Mr. Darby liked and respected his employer and regarded him, besides, as the very pattern of a gentleman. It was not only his lean, aristocratic face with the close black moustache and well brushed hair grizzled at the temples, his pleasant voice and speech which conveyed this impression not only to Mr. Darby but to all who met him: it was also the quiet fastidiousness of his clothes,—the excellent cut of his suits, his immaculate collars and cuffs, his silk handkerchiefs, his inimitable ties which, though usually dark grey or black, produced in some undiscoverable way an effect of subdued richness. He looked up from the letter he was reading as Mr. Darby, important but respectful, closed the door and approached his desk, some papers in his hand.
‘Good morning, Mr. Darby. A little colder this morning.’
‘Good morning, sir. Yes, a slight frost, I think.’
‘Now what about these specifications for Colethorpe?’
Mr. Marston indicated the letter before him.
‘They’re ready, sir. I have them here, if you’d care to look over them. I’ll get Pellow to type the letter at once.’
‘Thank you!’ Mr. Marston raised his eyes to the little man who offered him the papers. ‘You’re not looking at all well, Darby. Anything wrong? ’
Mr. Darby coloured. ‘No, no, thank you, sir; nothing to speak of. A touch of indigestion.’
‘I didn’t know you suffered from indigestion.’
‘I don’t, sir. This was an unusual occasion’; and, seeing that Mr. Marston looked mystified, he added, ‘a little … ah … festivity among friends, sir, at which I was perhaps … ah … a little … ah … injudicial.’ Mr. Darby emphasized the felicitous word with a little bow at the third syllable.
Mr. Marston’s face relaxed into a smile. The quiet, correct little managing clerk whom he had known and taken for granted for over fifteen years appeared to him suddenly in a new aspect. The Mr. Darby he knew was so round, so complete both in appearance and character that he had forgotten long since that there must exist a Darby apart from the office; that, when office hours were over, his managing clerk did not, like the office desks and chairs and stools and shelves, yield to the darkness, the silence, and the dust, till roused and freshened by the caretaker in the morning; that, after hours, Mr. Darby stepped out into his own particular sphere in the world outside, indulged in a home life and all sorts of activities of which he, Marston, knew nothing, threw off the precise, correct deferential manner which he had ignorantly supposed to be the total Darby, and plunged, it seemed, into wholly unsuspected convivialities. For a brief second, a fleeting wraith of a transformed Darby, a wild-eyed, empurpled, high-stepping Darby, trolling a comic song and brandishing a tumbler flitted through Mr. Marston’s imagination. It was this that had caused him to smile.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I understand. Well, we can’t always stand on our dignity, can we, Darby? We have to let ourselves go sometimes. No doubt it will pass off in the course of the day.’
Mr. Darby, still a little red, smiled back at him. ‘I am glad to say it seems to be passing off already, sir.’
Standing by Mr. Marston’s chair he bent over the desk, like a cock-robin eyeing a worm, and began to run through the specification with him.
So the morning progressed, and so did Mr. Darby’s convalescence. He did not, even at noon, feel that he could face a normal dinner, the kind of dinner that would have confronted him if he had gone home; but he did feel, definitely, that he had now regained the upper hand and that his disorder was well in control. At dinner-time he would take McNab’s advice and try the Bass. It would be a blessing to feel, as McNab assured him he would feel, as right as rain again.
At half-past twelve, with a delightful sense of novelty and adventure, he left the office and descended the stairs. But, halfway down, a horrible doubt took hold of him. Would Sarah have believed his plea of ‘ special business,’ or would she at once have realized that he was playing truant and … well, taken steps accordingly? In other words, was she at this moment lying in wait for him outside the door of Number Thirty Seven? This, it cannot be denied, seemed to Mr. Darby extremely likely. It was, besides, extremely disquieting. However there was nothing for it: if she was there he would have to face her. He was alarmed, for he was in no state to-day to deal with awkward situations, but he was also indignant. He was indignant, righteously indignant, at her doubting his word. It was, in his eyes, no excuse for her that his word in this case was gravely open to doubt, that, in short it was a plain uncompromising lie; for even the most liberal interpretation could not bring the drinking of a Bass under the category of ‘business.’ Mr. Darby was now nearing the hall. The bottom step but three clanked beneath his heel. Even if she were waiting for him, caution might elude her, for she could hardly stand stock still against the doorpost, she would surely have to walk up and down. If he could watch her, unseen, till she was nearing the end of her beat with her back turned, he might make a successful bolt for it. And so, as he reached the doorway, Mr. Darby halted and then, cautiously protruding no more than his nose and spectacles into the street, he glanced rapidly right and left. Not a sign of her. He was gathering himself for a spring when a tall female figure standing on the opposite side of the street caught his eye. A violent shock travelled from his knees to his feet, but with the lightning resourcefulness of a soldier in peril, his glance had left her as soon as it had lighted on her. Could it be her? He critically examined the instantaneous photograph printed on his mind. It was her coat, or very like it, a long brown coat with fur round the bottom. Without moving his head he turned his eyes and glanced at her furtively. The woman was watching him, astonished no doubt by his strange behaviour; but, thank God, she was not Sarah. A warm, luxurious wave of relief broke over him. But he did not lose his head. The fact that this woman was not Sarah did not prove that Sarah was not lurking close at hand. And so, without wasting more time Mr. Darby projected himself suddenly from the doorway of Thirty Seven, clean across Ranger Street, along the railings of St. John’s Church, to the Chronicle office; then sharp right along the narrow passage, then left, and so towards the Cathedral. He had made, instinctively, for the direction of Cliff Street and the Quayside, as if to escape not merely from Ranger Street and Sarah, but from England itself, and if only his wind had held and his spectacles remained unfogged he might (who knows?) have done the whole journey from Thirty Seven to the Quayside and straight on board the nearest ship in a single spurt. In less then ten minutes he might have been on his way for the Equator. But all of us, after forty or so, have our weaknesses. Mr. Darby’s heart was going like a gas engine, he was breathless, he had positively no breath left, his spectacles were dim with steam. He slackened speed, pulled up short, and removing his spectacles began to polish them with his pocket-handkerchief. Poised upon its four flying buttresses, the lantern of the Cathedral tower surveyed him over the tops of the houses calmly and a little superciliously. Mr. Darby disregarded it: he was busy. But, unspectacled as he was, he would have disregarded it in any case, for the world, in such conditions, was a vague and foggy place.
He replaced his spectacles now, the world cleared itself and he looked about him. Where was he? And where was he going? Ah, a Bass. He was going in search of a Bass. That meant that he must visit a public-house. He looked about him more particularly. There was no public-house in sight, and anyhow he could not run the risk of being seen entering or leaving a public-house in this part of the town, where he was likely to be known. A brief but vivid scene took place in his imagination. He was leaving a public-house. He pushed open the door, it swung to with a bump behind him, he hurried out into the street and ran straight into … Mr. Marston. Mr. Marston glared at him in amazement and disgust and passed on his way without a word. And rightly so, thought Mr. Darby, shuddering at the fancy; for people in positions like his own did not frequent pubs. Certainly not. And Mr. Marston who was ready enough to condone and even sympathize with a … ah … festive occasion, would certainly not countenance that. But this time the visit must be paid, for he was in search not of pleasure but of a remedy, a remedy strongly recommended for the little trouble from which he was suffering.
Then a bright idea struck him. The Quayside! The very thing! He would go down—he had already, it seemed, been unconsciously going down—to the Quayside and visit a public-house there, for there he could do so with comparative safety. And that would kill two birds with one stone, because he loved the Quayside: among the ships and warehouses and cranes, with the river gliding by and the trains thundering across the High Level Bridge overhead, Mr. Darby tasted the romance and adventure of the unknown. The North Sea, London, the Channel, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, the Pacific. the Equator,—they were all in the air that blew along the narrow and smoky valley of the Dole. To breathe that air now would do for his heart and mind what McNab had guaranteed that the Bass would do for his body. Accordingly Mr. Darby put himself in motion once more, but his pace was now steadier and more becoming than it had been before. He was aware of himself now, aware of the town through which he moved, aware of the shop-windows which resumed their customary duty of ministering to his sense and his imagination. As he turned down the precipitous Cliff Street a cold wind blew up from below, redolent of the river, and Mr. Darby’s heart thrilled.
A few minutes later the Cathedral struck the third quarter past noon as he stepped on to the Quayside. As usual his first glance was for the shipping, the thicket of masts and rigging, deck cabins and funnels and bridges, that lined the edge of the Quay. Beyond them, in the fairway, a grimy tug, tall funnel raked as if by the force of its movement, thrust its way powerfully through the steel-bright water, drawing, as it seemed, the whole river after it. The smoke-blackened walls and roofs of Portshead, piled upon the opposite bank, the austere smoke-blackened church standing high above them, frowned across at their neighbour Newchester. High above the squat little Swing Bridge towered the black High Level on which trains and road traffic (the first above the second) rumbled across between town and town.
With a deep, satisfied sigh Mr. Darby turned his gaze from these enthralling scenes and glanced along the line of haphazard, old-fashioned shops and stores that faced the river. Not twenty yards from where he stood he caught sight of what he sought,—a public-house The Schooner. Without more ado, he made for it and, having reached it, threw a rapid glance up, then down, the street and darted in.
Mr. Darby was unaccustomed to public-houses: he had been taught, from childhood, to regard them as the homes of drunkenness and disorder. More than once, it is true, he had visited the bar in the Central Station Refreshment Room and taken a glass of port with a friend, but that was altogether a different matter. He had entered The Schooner, therefore, with a certain amount of trepidation, but he was somewhat reassured as soon as he got inside, for the low-ceilinged room in which he found himself was clean, comfortable, and inviting. The bar was rather crowded, and it took Mr. Darby some time to work his way to the front where he found himself face to face with a rather shockingly magnificent barmaid. She ignored Mr. Darby, for she was occupied in conversation with a man who stood beside him and it was not for half a minute or so that she deigned to drop a supercilious eye on him.
‘A Bass, if you please!’ said Mr. Darby with a touch of loftiness; but his loftiness was as nothing beside hers. She handled bottle, glass, and change with the aloofness of a duchess. Her cold unresponsiveness recalled Sarah’s manner at breakfast that morning and Mr. Darby felt a dumb indignation stir in him. But not for long, for the Bass stood before him, and the Bass and not the barmaid was his concern at the moment. He raised it to his lips, tasted it and, as a result of the experiment, half emptied the glass at a single draught.
How right, how absolutely right, McNab had been. This was precisely what he wanted: this clean, tonic bitter was what his jaded tongue and stomach had been crying out for all the morning. He smacked his lips and then pressed them tightly together. For a minute or so he surveyed the rows of bottles on the shelves behind the bar. They recalled his visit of the previous evening to Edgington’s, but he did not pursue that memory. Then among the bottles he noticed hats, faces, collars, sleeves: the shelves were backed with mirrors, and next moment his eye fell upon something he had never seen before,—to wit, Mr. William James Darby standing at a public-house bar toying complacently with a half-empty glass. He looked (he noted with displeasure) a little foolish and with a slight blush he averted his eyes from the spectacle. Then he raised his glass once more and lowered the second half of the Bass, glancing again at the Mr. Darby opposite him as he replaced his empty glass on the counter. No, he had been wrong: he looked all right, nothing ridiculous about him at all! And, after all, why should there be?
So much for his looks. As regards his feelings, he felt magnificent. He was cured, completely cured, as right as rain. What was more, he was extremely hungry. He glanced along the counter and his eye fell upon a glass dish covered by a glass bell, under which was a pile of sandwiches. At that moment the barmaid removed his empty glass. ‘I’ll take a sandwich, please,’ he said promptly, ‘and,’ he added by an inspired afterthought, ‘another Bass.’
‘Ham or beef?’ said the barmaid.
‘One of each,’ said Mr. Darby.
What an admirable place! How providential that he had happened upon it so casually! What excellent-looking sandwiches! His mouth was watering: he could hardly wait till the barmaid put the plate in front of him. And another Bass: that had been an inspiration, nothing less.
The barmaid seemed to regard him more favourably. ‘Mustard?’ she asked musically, pushing a mustard-pot towards him.
‘Thank you! Thank you!’ said Mr. Darby and he helped himself and, lifting the lids of his sandwiches, spread the beef and ham liberally with mustard. He was pleased to see how well the meat was cut: no gristle and not too much fat. ‘Nothing so good as a good sandwich,’ he ventured affably, ‘and nothing so bad as a bad one. Coldish, isn’t it!’
The barmaid smiled amiably. ‘Yes, but what can you expect?’
‘Exactly!’ said Mr. Darby. ‘Exactly! What can we expect? After all we shall have Christmas on us in a month.’
He said he would take another ham sandwich, ‘just to make up the half half-dozen,’ he added jocularly.
When he had finished it he felt he could have done with another, but he refrained, for, he told himself, he was one of those men who knew when to stop. With a sigh of satisfaction he finished his second Bass. ‘Really quite a pleasant young person,’ he thought to himself, as he issued from the porch of The Schooner, careless of detection now, on to the Quayside.
He glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes past one. There were still twenty-five minutes before he need be back at the office, so he turned and walked in the other direction up the Quayside, then crossed the roadway and stood at the edge of the quay to watch a cargo-boat loading. A steam-crane on a trolly, with a frantic hissing and rattling, lifted a great trayful of bales from the quay. The rattling stopped and the jib of the crane and the little cabin from which it protruded twirled round on its trolly, swung the load with it, and poised it over the open hatchway on the ship’s deck. Another pause: then with a sudden outbreak of rattling, it dropped the load neatly into the hold.
‘Where is she bound for?’ Mr. Darby asked a man in a navy blue jersey.
‘Rotterdam,’ said the sailor.
‘A strange, outlandish name,’ Mr. Darby thought to himself as he moved on. Rotterdam! Marseilles! Port Said! The Isthmus of Panama! The South Sea Islands! What a lot of strange foreign places there were in the world. Once more the old hunger for travel and adventure came over him, a hunger so intense that his heart ached at the thought that he would never be able to satisfy it. ‘To think,’ he said, ‘that I shall die, that I shall certainly die, without ever having seen the Jungle.’ There lay the Jungle—somewhere or other in Africa, was it?—it really existed, it was not a mere fairytale fancy, but an absolute, undeniable reality; and here was he, William James Darby, on the Quayside at Newchester-on-Dole, and never, by any possibility, would he see the Jungle, nor any of the other wonders of the world, for that matter. There was Vesuvius, for instance, probably belching out clouds of smoke at this very moment, and he not there to see it. The thought was intolerable. When he was younger he had always taken it for granted that some day he would see everything, experience every adventure that life can offer, and tacitly, almost unconsciously, without making the smallest effort to bring it about, he had gone on believing it. It was this, really, which had kept him going: all his hopes, all his energies, had been blindly directed by this faith. It was only quite recently that he had begun sometimes to suspect that his faith was built upon sand, and it was only to-day, only now, that he had definitely faced the fact that the world, the real world, was beyond his reach, that he was middleaged and tied by the leg to Sarah and the office. It was all very well to think of taking the plunge, as he had done while standing yesterday evening in the doorway of Thirty Seven Ranger Street and surveying the world, but actually it would be impossible to do so. For if he did so his salary would stop: there would be nothing except Uncle Tom Darby’s hundred pounds which might cease at any time, for he must be a great age now; and he couldn’t clear out and leave Sarah penniless or almost penniless. Nor—he might as well admit it—could he himself get on without money. It was all very well to dream about signing-on or going as a stowaway. …
The thought of ships recalled him to his surroundings. A ship, another cargo-boat, towered above the quay a few yards from him. His eye travelled up and down the masts, among the rigging, along the encumbered deck. Now honestly, could he see himself swarming up those masts, clinging like a spider among that tangle of rigging, running along those slippery decks? Or—he approached the ship more closely and gazed into an open hatch—or (even supposing he could get on board unnoticed, and drop himself neatly, as he had seen the crane drop that cargo just now down that dark hatchway) could he really face the stowaway method of travel? No. Mr. Darby, standing on the Quayside, solemnly assured himself of all these things, and his mind, the reasoning part of him, accepted them, admitted their truth. And yet—strange, inexplicable fact—these melancholy convictions made no difference whatever to his feelings. The depression, the despair that they ought to have produced, did not supervene. Mr. Darby still felt, as he had felt on leaving The Schooner, remarkably jolly. Was it that the heart cannot in a moment shake off a habit of forty years or so? Or was it simply that the Bass,—or, to be accurate, the Basses—and those excellent sandwiches had fortified Mr. Darby against the assaults of cold logic? It is probably truer, as it is certainly more in keeping with his character, to assume that it was a childlike faith—that purest form of faith which burns the more brightly when assailed by irrefutable logic—that kept Mr. Darby’s spirits up in this remarkable fashion. And, after all, if faith can move mountains, it might very well be that if Mr. Darby never got to Vesuvius, Vesuvius would come to him.
Whatever the reason, Mr. Darby preserved his old enthusiasms. He gave a last look to the shipping, to the troubled steel-bright water seen between the hulls, to the white gulls wheeling stormily in the narrow trough of the valley between water and clouds; he took a long breath of sharp, watery, tarry, smoky air, and then turned inland, for it was half past one. Correct, bland, with features alert yet composed, he climbed the precipitous slope of Cliff Street, and no one could have suspected that the inner Mr. Darby was trolling with head thrown back and a fine, operatic abandon, a song that had been familiar in his youth:
For I’m going far away
At the breaking of the day.
The statement was obviously untrue, but the inner Mr. Darby sang it with a whole-hearted conviction, and the outer Mr. Darby listened, approved, and indeed threw himself into the performance so zealously that his throat contracted and expanded in muscular sympathy, his lips twitched, and, to his surprise and concern, a rudimentary and quickly stifled sound escaped his lips during the closing verse.