Mr Puddy had got a germ. Or something. It couldn’t, this time, have been anything that he’d eaten because, ever since the last bout, he’d been very careful about his food. He’d been avoiding all made‐up dishes. But the result was just the same. Whatever he ate, Mr Puddy suffered stabbing pains, fits of giddiness and a sense of profound dejection.
This had been going on for nearly a week now and he was growing morbid. He even began to fear that he might be losing weight – always a dangerous thing in a man. And his mind recoiled. It was a horrible thought dying of starvation in the midst of a world of plenty. He got so worried at last that he spent a penny at a weighing machine. The long red hand on the dial finally came to rest at 13 stone 5 lbs. But, as he couldn’t remember what it should have been, this didn’t really console him. And still the pains, the giddiness and the dejection continued.
He had tried all the patent medicines, of course. But they weren’t of any use to him. By now he was taking two or three different kinds of tablets and a tablespoonful of this and that, and six drops in water of the other every two or three hours. And he might just as well have saved himself the trouble. It looked, indeed, as though after a lifetime of serious eating he was simply going to waste away and lose himself.
So, in the end, he went along to see a doctor. It was a terrifying experience. Terrifying, because his own father – a profound, hearty eater like himself – had been carried off at about the same age by apparently the same mysterious ailment. He had dwindled away to less than ten stone before expiring. And as Mr Puddy sat in the stuffy little waiting‐room he heard in his ear ancestral voices prophesying… prophesying what his father had died from.
The doctor went over Mr Puddy slowly and carefully. There were wide pale expanses of abdomen to be thumped and prodded, and he prodded hardest where the pains hurt most. When he had finished he stepped back and Mr Puddy gripped the hard sides of the surgical couch while he was waiting for the verdict. But all that the doctor said was that Mr Puddy needed exercise. And he said it in such a callous and unfeeling kind of voice that, instead of feeling relieved, Mr Puddy was offended. He got up with as much dignity as a man can muster when his braces are down below his knees, and addressed the doctor.
‘The deed for egcercise is wud thig,’ he said coldly, ‘and these sybtobs are adother. I shan’t waste any bore tibe here. I’ll go roud to the Gederal Free. Good evedig.’
And with that he went, his pouchy heroic head carried high, and his body rumbling and protesting as he moved.
It was the five o’clock surgery that he had attended; and even now it was not yet five‐thirty. From the moment he had stripped down to the moment he had buttoned up again, it had not taken ten minutes in all. And the fee, because Mr Puddy wasn’t on the panel, was five shillings. Sixpence a minute, he told himself morosely, was what the doctor’s impertinence had cost him.
After the gloom of the dingy little surgery, the brightness of the early May evening dazzled him. He stood on the pavement outside, blinking at the sky through half‐closed eyes, like a large grounded bat. The real trouble was that he didn’t know what to do with himself. There was no point in arriving at the warehouse until seven. There was no point in climbing up all the stairs at No. 10 only to come down again. And he didn’t feel strong enough to go along to the Hospital to be thumped and prodded again this evening.
After a bit, he began to move off. Not to anywhere in particular – because he hadn’t got anywhere in particular to move off to – but simply because he couldn’t stand there any longer. And, as a doomed man, he walked slowly: he mooched. His own coroner, he passed along the street, his eyes fixed on the pavement ahead of him.
The real trouble was that something told him that his number was up. Or, if not actually up, at least due to go up shortly. The way things were, even if the doctor happened to be right about Mr Puddy’s stomach, it only meant that he was being preserved from one kind of dreadful death for another that was just as dreadful. Indeed, what was the matter with Mr Puddy was probably this haunting presentiment of disaster.
Through brooding over it for so long he knew just how it would happen. It was round two in the morning when it was going to occur. The Germans at last would have turned their furious eyes on London, and the bombs would fairly be raining down by then. He would be at the warehouse at the time, of course. Sitting in the middle of the tinder‐pile, so to speak. There would be explosions all round him as though the earth were giving way. And fires, huge unquenchable fires. And choking, asphyxiating smoke. And the lights would go out. And he would be left somewhere in the centre of the furnace with the last precious drops of water dripping from the nozzle of his stirrup‐pump, and the bucket empty… Even though it was a warm night, Mr Puddy’s teeth were chattering at the thought of it. He had only to close his eyes, and he could see the actual bomb – a big fat one shaped like a porpoise – with his name written in white letters right round the side of it.
‘High exblosive,’ he said aloud. ‘High exblosive and incediaries.’ And he shuddered.
It was a fine pearly evening, and the high upper stories of the buildings were glowing back at the retreating sun. Even the buses as they darted out from the shadows of the buildings shone with more than their own natural scarlet. A barrage balloon resting idly on its cable was pure gold.
But Mr Puddy was oblivious to it all; it might as well have been foggy. With his hands clasped despondently behind his back so that the attaché case containing his dinner bumped against his knees with every step he took, he mooched on. He had come quite a long way by now and already the fresh air had done him good. He was breathing more deeply and the spots before his eyes seemed fewer. His thoughts, too, took on a gayer tinge. After a while he began recalling better times, old meals that he had eaten, the kind of stuff that even now he had got stowed away in readiness for his recovery. In the midst of dissolution, his spirits returned to him and he remembered what a lot of firemen there were in London nowadays. Trained men – quite young men, some of them – whose whole job it was to mop up incendiaries as fast as the Germans cared to send them down. There was even an emergency water‐tank, like an elevated duck‐pond, just opposite the main entrance to the warehouse.
‘So log as I’b dear a telephode, I’b all right,’ Mr Puddy told himself. ‘It’s only if i’b cud off, I’b for it.’
He had unclasped his hands by now and was walking upright. Really walking this time, not just mooching. And suddenly an idiotic and astonishing thought came to him. He decided that he would walk all the way to the warehouse. His self‐respect depended on it. It would prove that he wasn’t the sort of man who needed any surgery doctor to tell him when to take exercise. And as he stepped out he seemed to be entering his prime again. The wraiths and spectres had been left behind in Kennington.
All the same, it was a long walk. A very long walk. Nearly four miles, in fact. And for the last half mile, Mr Puddy proceeded more slowly. Much more slowly. Finally, he stopped entirely. Stopped and raised first one foot off the ground to ease it, and then the other. Each time that he lifted his foot and the remaining one had to take all his weight, he winced. The walk had been just that much too long.
Mr Puddy’s arches had fallen.
Back in Dulcimer Street, Mr Squales was in a bad way, too. The worst possible, in fact. And that was because he was cornered. Positively cornered. There was, he realised gloomily, no other word for it. No other word. And no way out. It was appalling.
What was so awful was that it was all Mrs Vizzard’s doing. With that nagging and inhuman persistence which is one of the most irritating things about women – especially loving ones – she had been quietly and secretly plotting behind his back, apparently for weeks. It was for his sake, his good, that she had done it – he knew all about that. And, even if he hadn’t known it, she had told him so to his face. The fact remained, however, that he didn’t thank her for it. Not deep in his heart he didn’t. At the time there had been nothing for it, of course, but to smile back and say thank you. He had even added that he was quite bowled over by the news. As, indeed, he was. And to prove his gratitude he had gone so far as to kiss her hand. But this was a mistake. Because, after all the trouble that she had been to on his account, she was holding up her face for a proper sort of kiss.
The cause of his depression was that she had found a job for him. And the absurd part of it was that the job suited him perfectly. If he had found it for himself before he had given his heart away to Mrs Vizzard he would simply have wolfed it up. Not that the salary was anything. That was only four pounds a week – the sort of wage that good typists get. It was the sundries, the asides, the perquisites, that made the job worth considering.
The post was that of organizing secretary to the North Kensington Spiritualist Union. It was a new body, the Union, and its headquarters were in Portobello Road.17 The premises had been an undertaker’s before the Spiritualists had taken them over, so the clientèle hadn’t changed so very much. The place was completely re‐decorated, of course, and Mr Squales rather liked the chaste, fumed oak with which the interior was now furnished. There was a large circular table with copies of Light and The Spirit World and Beyond and The Great Divide spread out on it. And there was a sectional book‐case containing the classics of the cult – lives of famous mediums, records of scientifically controlled psychic experiments, and books on fairies. He’d seen them all when Mrs Vizzard took him over.
Not that there was any money for the Union in this side of it. The books were there more for their educational value than for anything else. The North Kensington Spiritualist Union, in fact, was really a kind of information bureau. And, as such, it kept open for deucedly long hours. From nine‐thirty in the morning until seven o’clock at night it was there to solve every kind of supernatural problem that might have presented itself suddenly to the residents of Notting Hill. The times of its own séances and those of affiliated bodies – the Tulse Hill Psychical Research Society, the Ponder’s End Spiritual Temple, the Golders Green Group and so forth – were displayed in frames around the wall. It was, as a matter of fact, because of one frame containing the names of mediums prepared to undertake private séances that Mr Squales finally accepted the post. As he stood there he saw his own name invisibly over‐printed across the lot of them.
But 9.30 to 7! He shuddered. To arrive at Portobello Road by 9.30 would mean leaving Dulcimer Street at about quarter to nine. And leaving Dulcimer Street at a quarter to nine would mean getting up at eight. Even, possibly, at five to. It would be bad enough even now with the summer coming on. In winter, in the black‐out, it would be unthinkable. He might as well be a milkman or a postman.
But that was not the worst of it. There was an additional peril attached to the job – one that he couldn’t very well talk about. At least not to Mrs Vizzard. And that was that there was now nothing, absolutely nothing, to hold up the wedding by even another day. Previously, it had been simple. He had told Mrs Vizzard outright that he wouldn’t marry her until he was self‐supporting. Now, thanks to her, he was going to be. The job was open from next Monday. And if he took it, he would be entirely vulnerable. To‐day was Thursday. Only three clear days. That was what made him so jittery.
What was more, the rooms upstairs were all ready. There wasn’t a thing more that needed doing to them. And it all happened just as Mrs Vizzard had threatened. She insisted on showing them to him in their finished state. With fingers laced romantically – it was Mrs Vizzard who thrust her hand in his – they went up and inspected them together. It had not been Mr Squales’ idea, this visit, and it had got him down. It had saddened him unutterably. The little room at the side – Percy’s room – that had been made into a dressing‐room for him, was bad enough. All Mr Squales’ clothes, the clothes that Mrs Vizzard had given him, were now arranged so neatly, so methodically, that he realised gloomily that in future even if he mislaid a sock or a tie it would be missed immediately. As for pawning anything… It was the end of all privacy and personal pride, that room.
But it was nothing to the bedroom. That was terrific. No sooner had he peered inside than he felt himself sweating. A ponderous sepulchral magnificence hung over the apartment. Standing there in the doorway, he realised that it was really the late Mr Vizzard’s bedroom that he was regarding. That peep was really a glimpse into the dead past. The furnishings had about them a genuineness, a solidity, that could only have come from within the trade itself. The big mahogany double bed with its massive claw‐feet looked cold and ominous like a converted sideboard.
‘Aren’t… aren’t you going to say anything?’ Mrs Vizzard asked softly.
Mr Squales pulled himself hurriedly together.
‘What is there left for me to say?’ he asked.
Mrs Vizzard caught her breath.
‘You might say that you’re looking forward to the day,’ she reminded him. ‘It’s not long now.’
There was a pause. An awkward pause. Then he recovered himself. ‘Looking forward to the day,’ he repeated, very low in his throat like a church organ peeling. ‘I think of nothing else.’