CHAPTER I
MR. WRIFORD

I

Her hands were firm and cool, and his were trembling, trembling; but her eyes were laughing, laughing, and his own eyes burned.

Mr. Wriford had caught at her hands. For a brief moment, as one in great agony almost swoons in ecstasy of relief at sudden cessation of the pain, he had felt his brain swing, then float, in most exquisite calm at the peace, at the strength their firm, cool touch communicated to him. Then Mr. Wriford saw the laughing lightness in her eyes, and felt his own—whose dull, aching burn had for that instant been slaked—burn, burn anew; and felt beat up his brain that dreadful rush of blood that often in these days terrified him; and felt that lift and surge through all his pulses that sometimes reeled him on his feet; and knew that baffling lapse of thought which always followed, as though the surge were in fact a tide of affairs that flung him high and dry and left him out of action to pick his way back—to grope back to the thread of purpose, to the train of thought, that had been snapped—if he could!

Mr. Wriford knew that the day was coming when he could not. Every time when, in the midst of ideas, of speech, of action, the surge swept him adrift and stranded him vacant and bewildered, the effort to get back was appreciably harder—the interval appreciably of greater length. The thing to do was to hang on—hang on like death while the tide surged up your brain. That sometimes left you with a recollection—a clue—that helped you back more quickly.

Mr. Wriford hung on.

The surge took him, swept him, left him. He was with Brida in Brida's jolly little flat in Knightsbridge, holding her hands. It was a longish time since he had been to see her. She had come into the room gay as ever—

Mr. Wriford got suddenly back to the point whence he had been suddenly cut adrift; remembered the surge, realised the lapse, recalled how he had caught at her hands, how they had soothed him, how, like a mock, he had seen the laughter in her eyes. Mr. Wriford threw back her hands at her with a violent motion, and went back a step, not meaning to, and knew again the frequent desire in moments of stress such as had just passed, and in moments of recovery such as he now was in, to shout out very loudly a jumble of cries of despair, as often he cried them at night, or inwardly when not alone. "O God! Oh, I say! I say! I say! Oh, this can't go on! Oh, this must end—this must end! Oh, I say! I say!" but mastered the desire and effected instead a confusion of sentences ending with "then."

A very great effort was required. Mastery of such impulses had been undermined these ten years, slipping from him these five, altogether leaving him in recent months. To give way, and to release in clamorous cries the tumult that consumed him, would ease him, he felt sure; but it would create a scene and have him stared at and laughed at, he knew. That stopped him. Fear of the betrayal of his state, that day and night he dreaded, once again saved him; and therefore in place of the loud cries, Mr. Wriford—thirty, not bad-looking, clever, successful, held to be "one of the lucky ones"—substituted heavily: "Well then! All right then! It's no good then! Very well then!"

She was a trifle surprised by the violent action with which he released her hands. But she knew his moods (not their depth) and had no comment to make on his roughness. "Oh, Phil," she cried, and her tone matched her face in its mingling of gay banter and of tenderness, "Oh, Phil, don't twist up your forehead so—frowning like that. Phil, don't!" And when he made no answer but with working face just stood there before her, she went on: "You know that I hate to see you frowning so horribly. And I don't see why you should come and do it in my flat; I'm blessed if I do!"

He did not respond to the gay little laugh with which she poked her words at him. He had come to her for the rest, for the comfort, he had felt in that brief moment when he first caught at her hands. Instead, the laughter in her eyes informed him that here, here also, was not to be found what day and night he sought. The interview must be ended, and he must get away. He was in these days always fidgeting to end a conversation, however eagerly he had begun it.

It must be ended—conventionally.

"Well, I'm busy," he said. "I must be going."

"Now, Phil!" she exclaimed, and there was in her voice just a trace of pleading. "Now, Phil, don't be in one of your moods! It's not kind after all the ages I've never seen you." A settee was near her, and she sat down and indicated the place beside her. "Going! Why, you've scarcely come! Tell me what you've been doing. Months since you've been near me! Of course, I've heard about you. I'm always hearing your name or seeing it in the papers. Clever little beast, Phil! I hear people talking about The Week Reviewed, or about your books; and I say: 'Oh, I know the editor well'; or 'He's a friend of mine—Philip Wriford,' and I feel rather bucked when they exclaim and want to know what you're like. You must be making pots of money, Phil, old boy."

He remained standing, making no motion to accept the place beside her. "I'm making what I should have thought would be a good lot once," he said; and he added: "You ought to have married me, Brida—when you had the chance."

Just the faintest shadow flickered across her face. But she replied with a little wriggle and a little laugh indicative of a shuddering at her escape. "It would have been too awful," she said. "You, with your moods! You're getting worse, Phil, you are really!"

He had seen the shadow. Had it stayed, he had crossed to her, caught her hands again, cried: "O Brida, Brida!" and in that shadow's tenderness have found the balm which in these days he craved for, craved for, craved for. He saw it pass and took instead the mock of her light tone and words. "Worse—yes, I know I'm worse," he said violently. "You don't know how bad—nor any one."

"Tell me, old boy."

"There's nothing to tell."

"You're working too hard, Phil."

"I'm sick of hearing that. That's all rubbish."

"Poor old boy!"

She saw his face work again; but "It's our press night," was all he said. "We go to press to-night. I've the House of Commons' debate to read and an article to write—two articles. I must go, Brida."

She told him: "Well, you won't get the debate yet. It's much too early. Do sit down, Phil. Here, by my side, and talk, Phil, do!"

He shook his head and took up his hat; and she could see how his hand that held it trembled. He was at the door with no more than "Good-bye" when she sprang to her feet and called him back: "At least shake hands, rude beast!" and when he gave his hand, she held it. "What's up, old boy?"

He drew his hand away. "Nothing, Brida."

"Just now—when you first came—what did you mean by saying: 'All right then—it's no good then.' What did you mean by that, Phil?"

His face, while she waited his reply, was working as though it mirrored clumsy working of his brain. His words, when he found speech, were blurred and spasmodic, as though his brain that threw them up were a machine gone askew and leaking under intense internal stress, where it should have delivered in an amiable flow. "Why, I meant that it's no good," he said, "no good looking for what I can't find. I don't know what it is, even. Brida, I don't even know what it is that I want. Peace—rest—happiness—getting back to what I used to be. I don't know. I can't explain. I can't even explain to myself—"

"Why, old boy?"

"I can do it at night. Sometimes I can get near it at night. Sometimes I lie awake at night and call myself all the vile, vile names I can think of. Go through the alphabet and find a name for what I am with every letter. But at the back of it—at the back of it there's still—still a reservation, still an excuse for myself. I want to tell some one. I want to find some one to tell it all to—to say 'I'm This and That and This and That, and Oh! for God Almighty's sake help me—help me—'"

She knew his moods, and of their depth more at this interview than ever before, and yet still in no wise fathomed them. He stopped, twisted in mind and in face with his efforts, and she (his moods unplumbed) laughed, thinking to rally him, and said: "Why, no, it's no good calling yourself names to me, Phil."

He broke out more savagely than he had yet spoken, and he had been violent enough:

"That's what I'm telling you. No good—no good! You'd laugh. You're laughing now. Everybody laughs. I'm lucky!—so successful!—so happy!—no cares!—no ties!—no troubles! Other people have bad times!—others are ill!—breakdowns and God knows what, and responsibilities, and burdens, and misfortunes! but me!—I've all the luck—I've everything!—"

When she could stop him, she said: "I don't laugh at you, Phil. That's not fair."

"You always do. I thought I'd come to you to-day to see. I always come to you hoping. But I always go away knowing I'm a fool to have troubled. Well, I won't come again. I always say that to myself. Now I've said it to you. Now it's fixed. I won't come back again. It's done—it's over!"

She put out her hand and touched his. "Now, Phil!"

But he shook off her touch. "You don't understand me. That's what it comes to."

"Phil!"

"No one does. You least of all."

"Phil, you're ill, old boy."

"Well, laugh over that!" cried Mr. Wriford and turned with a shuffling movement of his feet; and she saw him blunder against the door-post as though he had not noticed it; and stood listening white he went heavily down the stairs; and heard him fumble with the latch below and slam the outer door behind him.

II

Now you shall picture this Mr. Wriford—thirty, youthful of face, not bad-looking, clever, successful, one of the lucky ones—walking back from Brida's little flat in Knightsbridge to the office of The Week Reviewed off Fleet Street, and as he walked, rehearsing every passage of his own contribution to the interview that had just passed, and as he rehearsed them, abusing himself in every line of it. It was not where he had been rude or unkind to Brida that gave him distress. There, on the contrary, he found brief gleams of satisfaction. There he had held his own. It was where he had made a fool of himself and exposed himself that gnawed him. It was where she had laughed at him that he was stung. He made an effort to distract his thoughts, to fix them on the work to which he was proceeding, to attach them anywhere ("Anywhere, anywhere, any infernal where!" cried Mr. Wriford to himself). Useless. They rushed back. "From here to that pillar-box," cried Mr. Wriford inwardly, "I'll fix on what I'm going to write in my first leader." He was not ten steps in the direction when he was writhing again at having made a fool of himself with Brida. It was always so in these days. "I never exchange words with a soul," cried Mr. Wriford, "not even with a cab-driver—" He was switched off on the word to recollection of a fare-dispute with a cab-driver on the previous day. He was plunged back into the humiliation he had suffered himself to endure by not taking a strong line with the man. It had occupied him, gnawing, gnawing at him right up to this afternoon with Brida, when new mortification, new example of having been a weak fool, of having been worsted in an encounter, had come to take its place.

So there was Mr. Wriford—one of the lucky ones—back with this old gnawing again; and, realising the swift transition from one to the other, able to complete his broken sentence with a bitter laugh at himself for the instance that had come to illustrate it.

"I never exchange a word with a soul, not even with a cab-driver," cried Mr. Wriford, "but I show what a weak fool I am, and then brood over it, brood over it, until the next thing comes along to take its place!" Whereupon, and with which, another next thing came immediately in further proof and in further assault upon the thin film of Mr. Wriford's self-possession that was in these days left to him. In form, this came, of a cyclist carrying a bundle of newspapers upon his back and travelling at the hazard and speed and with the dexterity that belong to his calling. Mr. Wriford stepped off the pavement to cross the road, stepped in front of this gentleman, caused him to execute a prodigious swerve to avoid collision, ejaculated very genuinely a "Sorry—I'm awfully sorry," and was addressed in raucous bawl of obscene abuse that added new terms to the names which, as he had told Brida, he often lay awake at night and called himself.

Mr. Wriford gained the other side of the road badly jarred as to his nerves but conscious only of this fresh outrage to his sensibilities. Was it that he looked a fool that he was treated with such contempt? Yes, that was it! Would that coarse brute have dared abuse in that way a man who looked as if he could hold his own? No, not he! Would a man who was a man and not a soft, contemptible beast have cried "Sorry. I'm awfully sorry"? No, no! A man who was a man had damned the fellow's eyes, shouted him down, threatened him for his blundering carelessness. He was hateful. He was vile. Now this—now this indignity, this new exhibition of his weakness, was going to rankle, gnaw him, gnaw him. There surged over Mr. Wriford again, standing on the kerb, the desire to wave his arms and cry aloud, as he had desired to wave and cry with Brida a few minutes before: "Oh! I say! I say! I say! This can't go on! This can't go on! This has got to stop! This has got to stop!" Habit checked the impulse. People were passing. People were staring at him. They had seen the incident, perhaps. They had witnessed his humiliation and were laughing at him. There was wrung out of Mr. Wriford's lips a bitter cry, a groan, that was articulate sound of his inward agony at himself. He turned in his own direction and began a swift walk that was the slowest pace to which habit could control the desire that consumed him to run, to run—by running to escape his thoughts, by running to shake off the inward mocking that mocked him as though with mocking all the street resounded. It appeared indeed to Mr. Wriford, as often in these days it appeared, that passers-by looked at him longer than commonly one meets a casual glance, and had in their eyes a grin as though they knew him for what he was and needs must grin at the sight of it. Mr. Wriford often turned to look after such folk to see if they were turned to laugh at him. He had not now gone a dozen furious paces, yet twice had wavered beneath glances directed at him, when there greeted him cheerily with "Hullo, Wriford! How goes it?" a healthy-looking gentleman who stopped before him and caused him to halt.

III

Mr. Wriford, desperate to be alone and to run, to run, said: "Hullo, I'm late getting to the office. I'm in a tearing hurry," and stared at the man, aware of another frequent symptom of these days: he could not recollect his name! He knew the man well. Scarcely a day passed but Mr. Wriford saw him. This was the literary editor of The Intelligence, the great daily newspaper with which The Week Reviewed was connected and in whose office it was housed. A nice man, and of congenial tastes; but a man whom at that moment Mr. Wriford felt himself hating venomously, and while he struggled, struggled for his name, experienced the conscious wish that the man might fall down dead and so let him be free, and so close those eyes of his that seemed to Mr. Wriford to be looking right inside him and to be grinning at what they saw. And Mr. Wriford found himself gone miles adrift among pictures of the scenes that would occur if the man did suddenly drop dead; found himself shaping the sentences that he would speak to the policeman who would come up, shaping the words with which, as he supposed would be his duty, he would go and break the news to the man's wife, whom he knew well, and whose shocked grief he found himself picturing—but whose name! Mr. Wriford came back to the original horror, to the fact of standing before this familiar—daily familiar—friend and having not the remotest glimmering of what his name might be....

"I'm off to-morrow for a month's holiday," the man was saying. "A rest cure. I've been needing it, my doctor says. You're looking fit, Wriford."

Habit helped Mr. Wriford to work up a smile. Just what he had been saying to Brida: "I'm so lucky! Other people have bad times!—others are ill!—breakdowns and God knows what!—but me!—I've all the luck!" Mr. Wriford worked up a smile. "Oh, good Lord, yes. I'm always fit. Sorry you're bad." What was his name?—his name! his name!

And the man went on: "You are so!—lucky beggar! When's your new book coming out? What, must you cut? Well, I'll see you again before I go. I'm looking in at the office to-night. I've left you a revised proof of that article of mine. That was a good suggestion of yours. One of the bright ones, you! So long!"

Mr. Wriford—one of the bright ones—shook hands with him; and knew as he did so, and from the man's slight surprise, that it was a stupid thing to do with a man he met every day of his life; and leaving him, became for some moments occupied with this new example of his stupidity; and then back to the distress that he could not, could not recollect his name; and furiously, then, to the agony of the cyclist humiliation; and in all the chaos of it got to a quiet street, and, hurrying at frantic pace, frantically at last did cry aloud: "Oh, I say! I say! I say! I say! This can't go on. This has got to stop! This has got to stop!" and found himself somehow arrived at the vast building of The Intelligence, and at the sight by habit called upon himself and steadied himself to enter.

IV

Called upon himself.... Steadied himself.... He would encounter here men whom he knew.... He must not let them see.... Called upon himself and passed up the stairs towards the landing that held the offices of his paper. There was a lift, but he did not use it. It would have entailed exchange of greeting with the lift-boy, and in these days Mr. Wriford had come to the pitch of shrinking from even the amount of conversation which that would have entailed. For the same reason he paused a full three minutes on his landing before turning along the corridor that approached his office. There were bantering voices which he recognised for those of friends, and he waited till the group dispersed and doors slammed. He hated meeting people, shrank from eyes that looked, not at him, but, as he felt, into him, and, as he believed, had a grin in the tail of them.

Doors slammed. Silence in the corridor. Mr. Wriford went swiftly to his room. The table was littered with proofs and letters. Mr. Wriford sat down heavily in his chair and took up the office telephone. There was one thing to straighten up before he got to work, and he spoke to the voice that answered him: "Do you know if the literary editor is in his room? The literary editor—Mr.—Mr.—?"

"Mr. Haig, sir," said the voice. "No, sir, Mr. Haig won't be back till late. He left word that he'd put his proof on your table, sir."

"Thanks," said Mr. Wriford. "Get through to the sub-editors' room and ask Mr. Hatchard if I may have the Commons' debate report."

Then Mr. Wriford put down the telephone and leaned his head on his hands. "Haig! Of course that was his name! Oh, I say! I say! I say!"

CHAPTER II
YOUNG WRIFORD

I

Come back with Mr. Wriford a little. Come back with him a little to scenes where often his mind, not wanders, but hunts—hunts desperately, as hunts for safety, running in panic to and fro, one trapped by the sea on whom the tide advances. There are nights—not occasional nights, but night after night, night after night—when Mr. Wriford cannot sleep and when, in madness against the sleep that will not come, he visions sleep as some actual presence that is in his room mocking him, and springs from his bed to grapple it and seize it and drag it to his pillow. There is a moment then—or longer, he does not know how long—of dreadful loss of identity, in which in the darkness Mr. Wriford flounders and smashes about his room, thinking he wrestles with sleep: and then he realises, and trembling gets back to bed, and cries aloud to know how in God's name to get out of this pass to which he has come, and how in pity's name he has come to it.

Come back with him a little. Look how his life as he hunts through it falls into periods. Look how these bring him from Young Wriford that he was—Young Wriford fresh, ardent, keen, happy, to whom across the years he stretches trembling hands—to this Mr. Wriford, one of the lucky ones, that he has become.

II

Here is Young Wriford of ten years before who has just taken the tremendous plunge into what he calls literature. Here he is, just battling ardently with its fearful hopes and hazards when there comes to him news of Bill and Freda, his brother and sister-in-law, killed by sudden accident in Canada where with their children and Alice, Freda's elder sister, they had made their home. Here he is at the Liverpool docks, meeting Alice and the three little boys to take them to her mother's house in Surbiton. He is the only surviving near relative of Bill's family, and here he is, for old Bill's sake, with every impulse concentrated on playing the game by old Bill's poor little kids and by Alice who, unhappy at home, has always lived with them and been their "deputy-mother," and is now, as she says, their own mother: here is Alice, with Harold aged nine, Dicky aged eight, and Freddie aged seven; Alice, who dreads coming to her home, who tells Young Wriford in the train:

"I'm not crying for Freda and Bill. I can't—I simply can't realise that even yet. It's not them, Philip. It's the future I'm thinking of. Phil, what's going to happen to my darlings? They've got nothing—nothing. Father's got four hundred a year—less; and I dread that. I tell you I dread meeting mother and father more than anything. Mother means to be kind—it's kind of her to take the children for Freda's sake; but you know what she is and what father is. And I've nothing—nothing!"

Young Wriford knows well enough what Mrs. Filmer is. Dragon Mrs. Filmer he has privately called her to old Bill when writing of duty calls paid to the stuffy little house at Surbiton, where the Dragon dragons it over her establishment and over Mr. Filmer, who has "retired" from business and who calls himself an "inventor." Young Wriford knows, and he has thought it all out, and he has had an amazing piece of success only a fortnight before, and he answers Alice bravely: "Look here, old girl, I've simply colossal news for you. You've not got to worry about all that a damn—sorry, Alice, but not a damn, really. You know I've chucked the office and gone in for literature? Well, what do you think? Whatever do you think? I'm dashed if I haven't got a place on the staff of Gamber's! Gamber's, mind you! You know—Gamber's Magazine and Gamber's Weekly and slats of other papers. They'd been accepting stuff of mine, and they wrote and asked me to call, and—well, I'm on the staff! I've got a roll-top desk of my own and no end of an important position and—what do you think?—three guineas a week! Well, this is how it stands; I've figured it all out. I can live like a prince on twenty-five bob a week, and you're going to have the other one pound eighteen. No, it's no good saying you won't. You've got to. Good Lord, it's for old Bill I'm doing it. Well, look at that now! Nothing! Why, you can tell Mrs. Filmer you've got practically a hundred a year! Ninety-eight pounds sixteen. That's not bad, is it? and twice as much before long. I tell you I'm going to make a fortune at this. I simply love the work, you know. No, don't call it generous, old girl, or any rot like that. It's not generous. I don't want the money. I mean, I don't care for anything except the work. There, now you feel better, don't you? It's fixed. I tell you it's fixed."

III

Here is Young Wriford with this fixed, and with it working, as he believes, splendidly. Here he is living in a bed-sitting-room at Battersea, and revelling day and night and always in the thrill of being what he calls a literary man, and in the pride and glory of being on the staff at Gamber's. He loves the work. He cares for nothing else but the work. That is why the shrewd men at Gamber's spotted him and brought him in and shoved him into Gamber's machine; and that is why he never breaks or crumples but springs and comes again when the hammers, the furnaces, and the grindstones of Gamber's machine work him and rattle him and mould him.

A Mr. Occshott controls Gamber's machine. Mr. Occshott in appearance and in tastes is much more like a cricket professional than Young Wriford's early ideas of an editor. Literary young men on Gamber's staff call Mr. Occshott a soulless ox and rave aloud against him, and being found worthless by him, are flung raving out of Gamber's machine, which he relentlessly drives. In Young Wriford, Mr. Occshott tells himself that he has found a real red-hot 'un, and for the ultimate benefit of Gamber's he puts the red-hot 'un through the machine at all its fiercest; sighs and groans at Young Wriford, and checks him here and checks him there, and badgers him and drives him all the time—slashes his manuscripts to pieces; comes down with contemptuous blue pencil and a cutting sneer whenever in them Young Wriford gets away from facts and tries a flight of fancy; hunts for missed errors through proofs that Young Wriford has read, and finds them and sends for Young Wriford, and asks if it is his eyesight or his education that is at fault, and if it is of the faintest use to hope that he can ever be trusted to pass a proof for himself; puts Young Wriford on to "making-up" pages of Gamber's illustrated periodicals for press, and pulls them all to pieces after they are done, and sends Young Wriford himself to face the infuriated printer and to suffer dismay and mortification in all his soul as he hears the printer say: "Well, that's the limit! Take my oath, that's the limit! 'Bout time, Mr. Wriford, you give my compliments to Mr. Occshott and tell him I wish to God Almighty he'd put any gentleman on to make up the pages except you. It's waste labour—it's sheer waste labour—doing anything you tell us. Take my oath it is."

Young Wriford assures himself that he hates Mr. Occshott, but steadily learns, steadily benefits; finds that he really likes Mr. Occshott and is liked by him; steadily, ardently sticks to it—earns his reward.

"Well, there it is," says Mr. Occshott one day, throwing aside the manuscript over which Young Wriford had taken infinite pains only to have it horribly mangled. "There it is. Have another shot at it, Wriford. And, by the way, you're not doing badly—not badly. You're awfully careless, you know, but I think you're picking it up. We're starting a new magazine, a kind of popular monthly review, and I'm going to put you in nominal charge of it—charge of the make-up and seeing to press and all that. And your salary—you've been here six months, haven't you? Three guineas, you're getting? Well, it'll be four now. Make a real effort with this new idea, Wriford. I'll tell you more about it to-morrow. A real effort—you really must, you know. Well, there it is."

IV

Here is Young Wriford not quite so youthful as a few months before. He has lost his keen interest in games and recreation. He thinks nothing but work, breathes nothing but work; most significant symptom of all, sometimes dreams work or lies awake at night a little because his mind is occupied with work. That in itself, though, is nothing: he likes it, he relishes every moment of it. What accounts more directly for the slight loss of youthfulness, what increasingly interferes with his relish of his work, is what comes up from the Filmer household at Surbiton in form of frequent letters from Alice; is what greets him there when he fulfils Alice's entreaties by giving up his every week-end to spending it as Dragon Mrs. Filmer's guest.

The letters begin to worry him, to get on his nerves, to give him for some reason that he cannot quite determine a harassing feeling of self-reproach. They are inordinately long; they consist from beginning to end of a recital of passages-at-arms between Alice and her parents; they seem to hint, when in replies to them he tries to reason away the troubles, that it is all very well for Young Wriford, who is out of it all and free and comfortable and happy, but that if he were here—!

"Well, but what more can I do than I am doing?" Young Wriford cries aloud to himself on receipt of such a letter; and thenceforward that question and alternate fits of impatience and of self-reproach over it, and letters expressive first of one frame of mind and then, in remorse, of the other—thenceforward these occupy more and more of his thoughts, and more and more mix with his work and disturb his peace of mind. Why is all this put upon him? Why can't he be left alone?

V

Here is Young Wriford in love. She is eighteen. Her name is Brida. She is working for the stage at a school of dramatic art quite close to Gamber's. He gets to know her through a friend at Gamber's whose sister is also at the school. Young Wriford and Brida happen to lunch every day—meeting without arrangement—at the same tea-shop off the Strand. She leaves her school at the same hour he leaves Gamber's in the evening, and they happen to meet every evening—without arrangement—and he walks home with her across St. James's Park to a Belgravia flat where she lives with her married sister. Young Wriford thinks of her face, day and night, as like a flower—radiant and fresh and fragrant as a flower at dawn; and of her spirit as a flower—gay as a posy, fragrant as apple-blossom, fresh as a rose, a rose!

And so one Friday evening as they cross the Park together, when suddenly she challenges his unusual silence with: "I say, you're jolly glum to-night," he replies with a plump: "I'm going to call you Brida."

"Oh, goodness!" says Brida and begins to walk very fast.

"Do you mind?"

She shakes her head.

"Don't let's hurry. Stop here a moment."

It is dusk. It is October. There is no one near them. He begins to speak. His eyes tell her what he can scarcely say: her eyes and that which tides in deepest colour across her face inform him what her answer is. He takes her in his arms. He tells her: "I love you, darling. Brida, I love you." She whispers: "Phil!"

He goes home exalted in his every pulse by what he has drunk from her lips: plumed, armed, caparisoned by that ethereal draught for any marvels, challenging the future to bring out its costliest, mightiest, bravest, best—he'd have it, he'd wrest it for his sweet, his darling! He goes home—and there is Alice waiting for him. Can't he, oh, can't he come down to Surbiton to-night, Friday, instead of waiting till to-morrow? She simply cannot bear it down there without him. It's all right when he is there. When she's alone with her mother, her mother goes on and on and on about the expenses, and about the children, and seems to throw the blame on Bill, and she answers back, and her father joins in, and there they are—at it! There's been a worse scene than ever to-day. She can't face meeting them at supper without Phil. "Phil, you'll come, won't you?"

Here is Young Wriford twisting his hands and twisting his brows, as often in later years he comes to twist them. He had planned to spend all to-morrow and Sunday with Brida—not go to Surbiton at all this week-end. Now he must go to-night. Why? Why on earth should this kind of thing be put on him? He tries to explain to Alice that he cannot come—either to-day or to-morrow. She cries. He lets her cry and lets her go—doing his best to make her think him not wilfully unkind. Here he is left alone in torment of self-reproach and of anger at the position he is placed in. Here he is with the self-reproach mastering him, and writing excuses to Brida, and hurrying to catch a train that will get him down to Surbiton in time for supper. Here is Dragon Mrs. Filmer greeting him with: "Well, this is unexpected! You couldn't of course have sent a line saying you were coming to-night instead of to-morrow! Oh, no, I mustn't expect that! My convenience goes for nothing in my own house nowadays. I call it rather hard on me." Here is Mr. Filmer, with his face exactly like a sheep, who replies at supper when Young Wriford lets out that he has been to a theatre-gallery during the week: "Well, I must say some people are very lucky to be able to afford such things. I'm afraid they don't come our way. We have a good many mouths to feed in this household, haven't we, Alice, h'm, ha?"

Here is Young Wriford in bed, pitying himself, reproaching himself, thinking of Brida, thinking of the Filmers, thinking of old Bill, thinking of Alice, thinking of his work ... pitying himself; hating himself for doing it; in a tangle; in a torment....

VI

Here is Young Wriford beginning to chafe at Gamber's. Here he is beginning to find himself—wanting to do better work than the heavy hand of Mr. Occshott will admit to the popular pages of Gamber periodicals; and beginning to lose himself—feeling the effect of many different strains; growing what Brida calls "nervy"; slowly changing from ardent Young Wriford to "nervy" Mr. Wriford.

The different strains all clash. There is no rest between them nor relief in any one of them. They all involve "scenes"—scenes with Brida, who has left the dramatic school and is on the London stage, who thinks that if Young Wriford really cared tuppence about her he would give up an occasional Sunday to her—but no, he spends them all at Surbiton and when he does come near her is "nervy" and seems to expect her to be sentimental and sorry for him; scenes with the Filmers and even with Alice because now when he comes down to them he doesn't, as they tell him, "seem to think of their dull lives" but wants to shut himself up and work at the novel or whatever it is that he is writing; scenes with Mr. Occshott when he brings Mr. Occshott the "better work" that he tries to do during the week-ends and at night and is told that he is wasting his time doing that sort of thing.

Is he wasting his time? Yes, he is wasting it at Gamber's, he tells himself. He can do better work. He wants to do better work. No scope for it at Gamber's, and one day he has it out with Mr. Occshott. Mr. Occshott hands back to him, kindly but rather vexedly, a series of short stories which is of the "better work" he feels he can do. Young Wriford sends the stories to a rival magazine of considerably higher standard than Gamber's, purposely putting upon them what seems to him an outrageous price. They are accepted.

That settles it. Young Wriford goes to Mr. Occshott. "I'm sorry, sir—awfully sorry. I've been very happy here. You've been awfully good to me. But I want to do bet—other work. I'm going to resign."

Mr. Occshott is extraordinarily kind. Young Wriford finds himself quite affected by all that Mr. Occshott says. Mr. Occshott is not going to let Gamber's lose Young Wriford at any price. "Is it money?" he asks at last.

"Yes, it's money—partly," Young Wriford tells him. "But I don't want you to think I'm trying to bounce a rise out of you."

"My dear chap, of course I don't think so," says Mr. Occshott. "You're getting five pounds a week. What's your idea?"

"I think I ought to be making four hundred a year," says Wriford.

"So do I," says Mr. Occshott and laughs. "All right. You are. Is that all right?"

Young Wriford is overwhelmed. He had never expected this. He hesitates. He almost agrees. But it is only, as he had said, "partly" a question of money. It is the better work that really he wants. It is the constant chafing against the Gamber limitations that really actuates him. He knows what it will be if he stays on. He is quite confident of himself if he resists this temptation and leaves. He says: "No. It's awfully good of you—awfully good. But it's not only the question of money"; and then he fires at Mr. Occshott a bombshell which blows Mr. Occshott to blazes.

"I'm writing a novel," says Young Wriford.

"Oh, my God!" says Mr. Occshott and covers his face with his hands.

There is no room in any well-regulated popular periodical office for a young man who is writing a novel. It is over. It is done. Good-bye to Gamber's!

VII

And immediately the catastrophe, the crash; the springing upon Young Wriford of that which finally and definitely is to catch him and hunt him and drive him from the Young Wriford that he is to the Mr. Wriford that he is to be; the scene that follows when he tells Alice and the Filmers what he has done.

He tells them enthusiastically. In this moment of his first release from Gamber's to pursue the better work that he has planned, he forgets the depression that always settles upon him in the Surbiton establishment, and speaks out of the ardour and zest of successes soon to be won that, apart from the joy of telling it all to some one, makes him more than ever grudge this weekend visit when work is impossible. He finishes and then for the first time notices the look upon the faces of his listeners. He finishes, and there is silence, and he stares from one to the other and has sudden foreboding at what he sees but no foreboding of that which comes to pass.

Alice is first to speak. "Oh, Phil," says Alice—trembling voice and trembling lips. "Oh, Phil! Left Gamber's!"

Then Mr. Filmer. "Well, really!" says Mr. Filmer. "Well, really—h'm, ha!"

Then Mrs. Filmer. "This I did not expect. This I refuse to believe. Left Gamber's! I cannot believe anything so hard on me as that. I cannot."

Young Wriford manages to say: "Well, why not?" and at once there is released upon him by Mr. and Mrs. Filmer the torrent that seems to him to last for hours and hours.

Why not! Is he aware that they were awaiting his arrival this very week-end to tell him what it had become useless to suppose he would ever see for himself? Why not! Does he realise that the expenses of feeding and clothing and above all of educating Bill's children are increasing beyond endurance month by month as they grow up? Why not! Has he ever taken the trouble to look at the boys' clothes, at their boots, and to realise how his brother's children have to be dressed in rags while he lives in luxury in London? Has he ever taken the trouble to do that? Perhaps his lordship who can afford to throw up a good position will condescend to do so now; and Mrs. Filmer takes breath from her raving and rushes to the door and bawls up the stairs: "Harold! Fred! Dicky! Come and show your clothes to your kind uncle! Come and hear what your kind uncle has done! Harold! Freddie—!"

Young Wriford, seated at the table, his head in his hands: "Oh, don't! Oh, for God's sake, don't!"

"Don't!" cries Mrs. Filmer. "No, don't let you be troubled by it! It's what our poor devoted Alice has to see day after day. It's what Mr. Filmer and I have to screw ourselves to death to try to prevent."

"And their schooling," says Mr. Filmer. "And their schooling, h'm, ha."

Schooling! This settles their schooling, Mrs. Filmer cries. They'll have to leave their day-schools now. He'll have the pleasure of seeing his brother's children attending the board-school. Three miserable guineas a week he's been contributing to the expenses, and was to be told to-day it was insufficient, and here he is with the news that he has left Gamber's! Here he is—

"Good God!" cries Young Wriford. "Good God, why didn't you tell me all this before?" and then, as at this the storm breaks upon him again, gets to his feet and cries distractedly: "Stop it! Stop it!" and then breaks down and says: "I'm sorry—I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. It's come all of a blow at me, all this. I never knew. I never dreamt it. It'll be all right. If you'll let me alone, I swear it'll be all right. The three guineas won't stop. I've arranged to do two weekly articles for Gamber's for three guineas on purpose to keep Alice going. I can get other work. There's other work I've heard of—only I wanted to do better—of course that doesn't matter now. Look here, if the worst comes to the worst, I'll go back to Gamber's. They'll take me back if I promise to give up the work I want to do. I'm sorry. I never realised. I never thought about all that. I'm sorry."

He is sorry. That, both now and for the years that are to come, is his chief thought—his daily, desperate anxiety: sorry to think how he has let his selfish ideas of better work, his thoughts of marrying Brida, blind him to his duty to devoted Alice and to old Bill's kids. Think of her life here! Think of those poor little beggars growing up and the education they ought to have, the careers old Bill would have wished them to enter! He is so sorry that only for one sharp moment does he cry out in utter dread at the proposal which now Mrs. Filmer, a little mollified, fixes upon him.

"In any case," says Mrs. Filmer, "whatever you manage to do or decide to do, you'd better come and live here. You can live far more cheaply here than letting a London landlady have part of your income."

Only for one sharp moment he protests. "I couldn't!" Young Wriford cries. "I couldn't work here. I simply couldn't."

"You can have a nice table put in your bedroom," says Mrs. Filmer. "If you're really sorry, if you really intend to do your duty by your brother's children—"

"All right," says Young Wriford. "It's very kind of you. All right."

VIII

He does not return to Gamber's. He is one of the lucky ones. The great daily newspaper, the Intelligence, has a particular fame for its column of leaderettes and latterly is forever throwing out those who write them in search of one who shall restore them to their old reputation (recently a little clouded). Young Wriford puts in for the post and gets it and holds it and soon couples with it much work on the literary side of the paper. There is a change in the proprietorship of the penny evening paper, the Piccadilly Gazette, bringing in one who turns the paper upside down to fill it with new features. Young Wriford puts in specimens of a column of facetious humour—"Hit or Miss"—and it is established forthwith, and every morning he is early at the Piccadilly Gazette office to produce it.

Thus within a very few weeks of leaving Gamber's and of coming to live at Surbiton, he is earning more than twice as much as he had relinquished—proving himself most manifestly one of the lucky ones, and earning the money and the reputation at cost to himself of which only himself is aware.

He is from the house at seven each morning to reach the Piccadilly Gazette by eight, hunting through the newspapers as the train takes him up for paragraphs wherewith to be funny in "Hit or Miss." There are days, and gradually they become more frequent, when nothing funny will come to his mind; when his mind is hopelessly tired; when his column is flogged out amid furious protests, and expostulations informing him that he is keeping the whole damned paper waiting; when he leaves the office badly shaken, cursing it, hating it, dreading that this day's work will earn him dismissal from it, and hurries back to the "nice table" in his bedroom at Surbiton, there desperately to attack the two weekly articles for Gamber's, the book-reviewing for the Intelligence and the work upon his novel: that "better work," opportunity for which had caused him to leave Mr. Occshott and now is immeasurably harder to find.

He gets into the habit of trying to enter the house noiselessly and noiselessly to get to his room. He comes back to the house trying to forget his misgiving about his "Hit or Miss" column and to force his mind to concentrate on the work he now has to do: above all, trying to avoid meeting any one in the house, which means, if he succeeds, avoiding "a scene" caused by his overwrought nerves. He never does succeed. There is always a scene. It is either irritation with Alice or with one of the boys who delay him or interrupt him, and then regret and remorse at having shown his temper; or it is a scene of wilder nature with Dragon Mrs. Filmer or with Mr. Filmer. Whatever the scene, the result is the same—inability for an hour, for two hours, for all the morning, properly to concentrate upon his work.

It will be perhaps the matter of his room. The servant is making the bed, or it isn't made, and he knows he will be interrupted directly he starts.

Pounce comes Dragon Mrs. Filmer.

"Well, goodness knows I leave the house early enough," says Young Wriford.

"Goodness knows you do," says Mrs. Filmer. "Breakfast at half-past six!"

"I never get it."

"You're never down for it."

Young Wriford, face all twisted: "Oh, what's the good! We're not talking about that. It's about my room."

Mrs. Filmer, lips compressed: "Certainly it's about your room, and perhaps you'll tell me how the servants—"

Young Wriford: "All I'm saying is that I don't see why my room shouldn't be done first."

Mr. Filmer (attracted to the battle): "I'm sure if as much were done for me as is done for you in this establishment—h'm, ha."

Alice (come to the rescue): "You know, Philip, you said you thought you wouldn't get back till lunch this morning."

Young Wriford, staring at them all, feeling incoherent, furious ravings working within him, with a despairing gesture: "Oh, all right, all right, all right! I'm sorry. Don't go on about it. Just let me alone. I'm all behindhand. I'm—"

In this mood he begins his work. This is the mood that has to be fought down before any of the work can be successfully done. Often a day will reward him virtually nothing. He is always behindhand, always trying to catch up. At six he rushes from the house to get to the Intelligence office. He is rarely back again to bed by one o'clock: from the house again at seven.

IX

Now the thing has Young Wriford and rushes him: now grips him and drives him, now marks him and drops him as he takes it. Now the years run. Now to the last drop the Young Wriford is squeezed out of him: Mr. Wriford now. Now men name him for one of the lucky ones. Now, as he lies awake at night, and as he trembles as he walks by day, he hates himself and pities himself and dreads himself.

Now the years run—flash by Mr. Wriford—bringing him much and losing him all; flash and are gone. Now he might leave the Filmer household and live again by himself. But there is no leaving it, once he is of it. Alice wants him, and he tells himself it is his duty to stay by her. His money is wanted, and there never leaves him the dread of suddenly losing his work and bringing them all to poverty. Now he gives up other work and is of the Intelligence alone, handsomely paid, one of the lucky ones. It gives him no satisfaction. It would have thrilled Young Wriford, but Young Wriford is dead. Now there is no pinching in the Surbiton establishment, decided comfort rather. The boys are put to good schools and shaped for good careers. The establishment itself is moved to larger and pleasanter accommodation. Alice is grateful, the boys are happy, even the Filmers are grateful. That Young Wriford who sat in the train with Alice coming down from Liverpool eight years before and planned so enthusiastically and schemed so generously would have been happy, proud, delighted to have done it all. But that Young Wriford is dead. Mr. Wriford spends nothing on himself because he wants nothing—interests, tastes other than work, are coffined in Young Wriford's grave. Mr. Wriford just produces the money and begs—nervily as ever, nay, more nervily than before—to be let alone to work; he is always behindhand.

Now the novel is at last written and is published and flames into success. Imagine Young Wriford's amazed delight! But Young Wriford is dead. Mr. Wriford, one of the lucky ones, lucky in this as in all the rest, contracts handsomely for others and at once is in the rush of fulfilling a contract; that is all.

Now Alice is taken sick—mortally sick. Lingers a long while, wants Mr. Wriford badly to sit with her and wants him always, is only upset by her mother. Young Wriford would have nursed her and wept for her. Mr. Wriford nurses her very devotedly, as she says, but in long hours grudged from his work, as he knows. And has no tears. What, are even tears buried with Young Wriford? Mr. Wriford believes they are and hates himself anew and thousandfold that he has no sympathy, and often in remorse rushes home from the nightly fight with the Intelligence to go to Alice's bedside and make amends—not for active neglects, for there have been none—but for the secret dryness of his heart while he is with her and his thoughts are with his work. These are stirrings of Young Wriford, but of what avail stirrings within the tomb?

Alice dies. Here is Mr. Wriford by her death caught anew and caught worse in the meshes that entangle him. Remorse oppresses him at every thought of neglect of her and unkindness to her through these years. It can only be assuaged by new devotion to her boys and to her parents, much changed and stricken by her loss. He might leave this household now. He feels it is his duty to remain in it. They want him.

The thing goes on—swifter, fiercer, dizzier, and more dizzily yet. No one notices it. He's young, that's all they notice, not yet thirty, very youthful in the face, one of the lucky ones: that's all they notice. It goes on. He hides it, has to hide it. Can't bear that any of its baser manifestations—nerves, nervousness, shrinking—should be noticed. This is the stage of shunning people—of avoiding people's eyes that look, not at him, but into him and laugh at him. It goes on. He surprises himself by the work he does—always believes that this which has brought him merit, that which has named him one of the lucky ones anew, never can be equalled again; yet somehow is equalled; yet ever, as looking back he believes, at cost of greater effort, with touch less sure. This is the stage of beginning to expect that one day there will be an end, an explosion, all the fabric of his life and his success cant on its rotten foundations and come crashing.

Now the years run. The Intelligence people conceive The Week Reviewed: Mr. Wriford forms it, executes it, launches it, carries it to success, and the more energy he devotes to it the less has to resist the crumbling of his foundations. One of the lucky ones—one that has reached the stage of conscious effort to perform a task, drives himself through it, finishes it trembling, and only wants to get away from everybody to hide how he trembles, and only wants to get to bed where it is dark and quiet, and only lies there turning from tangle to tangle of his preoccupations, counting the hours that refuse him sleep, crying to himself as he has been heard to cry: "Oh, I say, I say, I say! This can't go on! This must end! This must end!"

Thus, thus with Mr. Wriford, and worse and worse, and worse and worse. Thus through the years and thus arrived where first we found him. Behold him now, ten years from when Young Wriford, just twenty, met Alice and the children at Liverpool and ardently and eagerly and fearlessly planned his tremendous plans. That boy is dead. Return to him, little over thirty, everywhere successful, one of the lucky ones, that is come out of the grave where Young Wriford lies. Worse and worse! There is nothing he touches but brings him success; there is no one he meets or who speaks of him but envies him; and successful, lucky, it is only by throwing himself desperately into his work that he can forget the intolerable misery that presses upon him, the desire to wave his arms and scream aloud: "You call me lucky! Oh, my God! Oh, can't anybody see I'm going out of my mind with all this? Oh, isn't there anybody who can understand me and help me? Oh, I say, I say, I say, this can't go on. This must stop. This must end."

X

You see, he can't get out of it. In these years his unceasing work, his harassing work, his fears of it breaking down and bringing all who are dependent upon him to misery, and all his distresses of mind between the one and the other—all this has killed outlets by which now he might escape from it and has chained him hand and foot and heart and mind in the midst of it. His nephews leave him one by one to go out into the world, successfully equipped and started by his efforts. He is always promising himself, as first Harold goes, and then Fred and then Dick, who has chosen for the Army and enters Sandhurst, that now he will be able to change his mode of life and seek the rest and peace he craves for. He never does. He never can.

He never can. There is always a point in his work on his paper or with his books first to be reached: and when it is reached, there is always another. Now, surely, with Dick soon going out to India, he might leave the Filmers. They are comfortably circumstanced on their own means; the house is his and costs them nothing. Surely now, he tells himself, he might break away and leave them: but he cries to himself that for this reason and for that he cannot—yet: and he cries to himself that if he could, he knows not how he could. Everything in life that might have attracted him is buried ten years' deep in Young Wriford's grave. Brida could rescue him, he believes, and he tries Brida on that afternoon which has been seen: ah, like all the rest, she laughs at him—one of the lucky ones!

He is chained to himself, to that poor, shrinking, hideous devil of a Mr. Wriford that he has been made: and this is the period of furious hatred of that self, of burying himself in his work to avoid it, of sitting and staring before him and imagining he sees it, of threatening it aloud with cries of: "Curse you! Curse you!" of scheming to lay violent hands upon it.

CHAPTER III
FIGURE OF WRIFORD

I

There comes that day when Mr. Wriford went to Brida in desperate search of some one who should understand him and give him peace. It is a week after Dick has been shipped to join his regiment in India, and after a week alone with the Filmers, and of knowing not, even now that his responsibilities are finally ended, how to get out of it all—yet. It was his press-night with The Week Reviewed, as he had told Brida, and Mr. Wriford, with two articles to write, called upon himself for the effort to write them and to get his paper away by midnight—the weekly effort to "pull through"—and somehow made it.

Press-nights nowadays were one long, desperate grip upon himself to keep himself going until, far distant in the night and through a hundred stresses of his brain, the goal of "pulled through" should be reached. A hundred stresses! He always told himself, as the contingencies of the night heaped before him, that this time he would shirk this one, delegate that one to a subordinate. He never did. Fleet Street said of The Week Reviewed—a new thing in journalism—that Mr. Wriford was "IT." Unique among politico-literary weeklies in that it went to press in one piece in one day, and thus from first page to last presented a balance of contents based upon the affairs of the immediate moment, unique in that it was illustrated, in that it had at its command all the resources of the Intelligence, in that its price was two-pence—unique in all this, it was said by those who knew that The Week Reviewed's very great success was more directly due to the fact that it was saturated and polished in every article, every headline, every caption, by Mr. Wriford's touch. He would never admit how much of it he actually wrote himself; it only was known to all who had a hand in the making of it that nothing of which they had knowledge went into the paper precisely in the form in which it first came beneath Mr. Wriford's consideration. Sometimes, in the case of articles written by outside contributors of standing, members of his staff would remonstrate with him in some apprehension at this mangling of a well-known writer's work.

"Well, what does it matter whom he is?" Mr. Wriford would cry. "I don't mind people thinking things in the paper are rotten, if I've passed them and thought them good. But I'm damned if I let things go in that I know are rotten, just because they're written by some big man. I don't mind my own judgment being blamed. But I'm not going to hear criticism of anything in my paper and know that I made the same criticism myself but let it go. Satisfy yourself! That's the only rule to go by."

Therefore on this press-night as on every press-night—but somehow with worse effect this night than any—behold Mr. Wriford satisfying himself, and in the process whirling along towards the state that finds him sick and dizzy and trembling when at last the paper has gone to press and once more he has pulled through. Behold him shrinking lower in his chair as the night proceeds, smoking cigarettes in the way of six or seven puffs at each, then giddiness, and then hurling it from him with an exclamation, and then the craving for another if another line is to be written, and then the same process again; stopping in his work in the midst of a sentence, in the midst of a word, to examine a page sent down from the composing-room; twisting himself over it to satisfy himself with it; rushing up-stairs with it to where, amid heat and atmosphere that are vile and intolerable to him, the linotype machines are rattling with din that is maddening to him, to satisfy himself that the page has not been rushed to the foundry without his emendations; there, a hundred times, sharp argument that is infuriating to him with head-printer and machine-manager who battle with time and are always behind time because advertisements and blocks are late, and now, as they say, he must needs come and pull a page to pieces; down to his room again, and more and worse interruptions that a thousand times he tells himself he is a fool not to leave in other hands and yet will attend to to satisfy himself; time wasted with superior members of his staff who come to write the final leaders on the last of the night's news and who are affected by no thought of need for haste but must wait and gossip till this comes from Reuter's or that from The Intelligence's own correspondent; time wasted over the line they think should be taken and the line to which Mr. Wriford, to satisfy himself, must induce them. Sometimes, thus occupied with one of these men, Mr. Wriford—a part of his mind striving to concentrate on the article he was himself in the midst of writing, part concentrating on the page that lay before him waiting to be examined, part on the jump in expectation of a frantic printer's boy rushing in for the page at any moment, and the whole striving to force itself from these distractions and fix on the subject under discussion—sometimes in these tumults Mr. Wriford would have the impulse to let the man go and write what he would and be damned to him, or the page go as it stood and be damned to it, or his own article be cancelled and something—anything to fill—take its place. But that would not be satisfying himself, and that would be present relief at the cost of future dissatisfaction, and somehow Mr. Wriford would make the necessary separate efforts—somehow pull through.

II

Somehow pull through! In the midst of the worst nights, Mr. Wriford would strive to steady himself by looking at the clock and assuring himself that in three hours—two hours—one hour—by some miracle the tangle would straighten itself, and he would have pulled through and the paper be gone to press, as he had pulled through and the paper been got away before. So it would be to-night—but to-night! "If I dropped dead," said Mr. Wriford to himself, standing in his room on return from a rush up-stairs to the composing-room, and striving to remember in which of his tasks he had been interrupted, "if I dropped dead here where I am and left it all unfinished, we should get to press just the same somehow. Well, let me, for God's sake, fix on that and go leisurely and steadily as if it didn't matter. I shall go mad else; I shall go mad." But in a moment he was caught up in the storm again and satisfying himself—and somehow pulling through. At shortly before midnight he was rushing up-stairs with the last page of his own article, and remaining then in the composing-room that sickened him and dazed him, himself to make up the last two forms—correcting proofs on wet paper that would not show the corrections and maddened him; turning aside to cut down articles to fit columns; turning aside to scribble new titles or to shout them to the compositors who stood waiting to set them; turning aside to use tact with the publisher's assistant who was up in distraction to know what time they were ever likely to get the machines going; turning aside to send a messenger to ask if that last block was ever coming; calculating all the time against the clock to the last fraction of a second how much longer he could delay—forever turning aside, forever calculating; deciding at last that the late block must not be waited for; peering in the galley racks to decide what should fill the space that had been left for it; selecting an article and cutting it to fit; at highest effort of concentration scanning the pages that at last were in proof—then to the printer: "All right; let her go!" Pulled through! And the heavy mallets flattening down the type no more than echoes of the smashing pulses in his brain....

Pulled through! dizzily down-stairs. Pulled through! and too sick, too spent, too nerveless, to exchange words with those of his staff who had been up-stairs with him and were come down, thanking heaven it was over. Pulled through! and too spent, too finished, to clear up the litter of his room as he had intended—capable only of dropping into his chair and then, realising his state, of calling upon himself in actual whispers: "Wriford! Wriford! Wriford!" but no responding energy.

III

He began to think of going home and began to think of the task of taking down his coat from behind the door and of the task of getting into it. He began to think of the paper that had just gone to press and began in his mind to go slowly through it from the first page, enumerating the title of each article and of each picture. Somewhere after half-a-dozen pages he would lose the thread and find himself miles away, occupied with some other matter; then he would start again.

It was towards one o'clock when he realised that if he did not move, he would miss a good train at Waterloo and have a long wait before the next. He decided against the effort of taking down and getting into his coat. He took up his hat and stick and left the building by the trade entrance at the back, meeting no one. He followed his usual habit of walking to Waterloo along the Embankment, and it was nothing new to him—for a press-night—that occasionally he found he could not keep a straight course on the pavement. Too many cigarettes, he thought. He crossed to the river side, and when he was a little way from Waterloo Bridge, a more violent swerve of his unsteady legs scraped him roughly against the wall. He had no control then, even over his limbs! and at that realisation he stopped and laid his hands on the wall and looked across the river and cried to himself that frequent cry of these days: "Wriford! Wriford! Wriford!"

The wall was rough to his hands, and that produced the thought of how soft his hands were—how contemptibly soft he was all over and all through. "Wriford! Wriford! Wriford!" cried Mr. Wriford to himself and had a great surge through all his pulses that seemed—as frequently in these days but now more violently, more completely than ever before—to wash him asunder from himself, so that he was two persons: one within his body that was the Wriford he knew and hated, the other that was himself, his own, real self, and that cried to his vile, his hateful body: "Wriford! Wriford! Wriford!"

Intolerable—past enduring! Mr. Wriford jumped upwards, suspending his weight on his arms on the wall, and by the action was dispossessed of other thought than sudden recollection of exercises on the horizontal bar at school; seemed to be in the gymnasium, and saw the faces of forgotten school-fellows who were in his gym set waiting their turn. Then the Embankment again and realisation. Should he drop back to the pavement? "Wriford! Wriford! Wriford!" He mastered that vile, damned, craven body and threw up his right leg and scrambled and pitched himself forward; was conscious of striking his thigh violently against the wall, and at the pain and as he fell, thought: "Ha, that's one for you, damn you! I've got you this time! Got you!" And then was in the river, and then instinctively swimming, and then "Drown, damn you! Drown!" cried Mr. Wriford and stopped the action of his arms, and went down swallowing and struggling, and came up struggling and choking, and instinctively struck out again.

Shouts and running feet on the Embankment. "Drown, damn you! Drown, drown!" cried Mr. Wriford; went down again, came up facing the wall, and in the lamplight and in the tumult of his senses, saw quite clearly a bedraggled-looking individual peering down at him and quite clearly heard him call: "Nah, then. Nah, then. Wot yer up to dahn there?"

Shouts and running feet on the police pier not thirty yards away; sounds of feet in a boat; and then to Mr. Wriford's whirling, smashing intelligence, the sight of a boat—and what that meant.

Mr. Wriford thrust his hands that he could not stop from swimming into the tops of his trousers and twisted his wrists about his braces. "Drown, damn you! Drown!" cried Mr. Wriford, and the whirling, smashing scenes and noises lost coherence and only whirled and smashed, and then a hand was clutching him, and coherence returned, and Mr. Wriford screamed: "Let me go! Let me go!" and freed an arm from the entanglement of his braces and dashed it into the face bending over him and with his fist struck the face hard.

"Shove him under," said the man at the oars. "Shove him under. He'll 'ave us over else...."

Mr. Wriford was lying in the boat. "Let me go," cried Mr. Wriford. "Let me go. You're hurting me."

"You've hurt me, you pleader," said the man, but relaxed the knuckles that were digging into Mr. Wriford's neck.

Mr. Wriford moaned: "Well, why couldn't you let me drown? Why, in God's name, couldn't you let me drown?"

"Not arf grateful, you beggars ain't," said the man; and presently Mr. Wriford found himself pulled up from the bottom of the boat and handed out on to the police landing-stage to a constable with: "'Old 'im fast, Three-Four-One. Suicide, he is. 'Old 'im fast."

Three-Four-One responded with heavy hand ... conversation.... Mr. Wriford standing dripping, sick, cold, beyond thought, presently walking across the Embankment and up a street leading to the Strand in Three-Four-One's strong grasp.

"Where are you taking me?" said Mr. Wriford.

"Bow Street," said Three-Four-One.

"Let me go!" sobbed Mr. Wriford.

"Not arf," said Three-Four-One.

Then a police whistle, shouts, running feet. Round the corner two men racing at top speed into Mr. Wriford and Three-Four-One, and Mr. Wriford and Three-Four-One sent spinning. All to earth, and the two runners atop, and a pursuing constable, unable to stop, upon the four of them. Blows, oaths, struggles.

Mr. Wriford rolled free of the pack and got to his feet, viewed a moment the struggle in progress before him, then turned down the side-street whence the pursuit had come, and ran; doubled up to the Strand and across the Strand and ran and ran and ran; glanced over his shoulder and saw one running, not after him, but with him—wet as himself and very like himself. "What do you want?" gasped Mr. Wriford. The figure made no reply but steadily ran with Mr. Wriford, and Mr. Wriford recognised him and stopped. "You're Wriford, aren't you?" cried Mr. Wriford, and in sudden paroxysm screamed: "Why didn't you drown? Why didn't you drown when I tried to drown you, curse you?" and in paroxysm of hate struck the man across his face. He felt his own face struck but felt hurt no more than when he had bruised his thigh in leaping from the Embankment wall. "Come on, then!" cried Mr. Wriford. "Come on, then, if you can! I'll make you sorry for it, Wriford. Come on, then!"

And Mr. Wriford turned again, and with the figure steadily beside him, ran and ran and ran and ran and ran.

CHAPTER IV
ONE RUNS: ONE FOLLOWS

I

Most dreadful pains of distressed breathing, of bursting heart and of throbbing head, afflicted Mr. Wriford as he ran. He laboured on despite them. He forgot, too, that he had started running to escape arrest and had run on—across the Strand, up Kingsway, through Russell Square, across the Euston road and still on—in terror of pursuit. All that possessed him now was fear and hatred of the one that ran steadily at his elbow, whom constantly he looked at across his shoulder and then would try to run faster, whom presently he faced, halting in his run and at first unable to speak for the agonies of his exertions.

Then Mr. Wriford said gaspingly: "Look here—you're not to follow me. Do you understand?" and then cried, with sobbing breaths: "Go away! Go away, I tell you!"

In the rays that came from an electric-light standard near which they stood, Figure of Wriford seemed only to grin in mock of these commands.

Mr. Wriford waited to recover more regular breathing. Then he said fiercely: "Look here! Look across the road. There's a policeman there watching us. D'you see him? Well, are you going to leave me, or am I going to give you in charge? Now, then!"

Figure of Wriford only looked mockingly at him; and first there came to Mr. Wriford a raging impulse to strike him again, and then the knowledge that the policeman was watching; and then Mr. Wriford stepped swiftly across the road to carry out his threat; and then, as he approached the policeman, had a sudden realisation of the spectacle he must present—clothes dripping, hat gone, collar ripped away—and for fear of creating a scene, changed his intention. But his first impulse had brought him right up to the policeman. He must say something. He knew he was in the direction of Camden Town. He said nervously, trying to control his laboured breathing: "Can you tell us the way to Camden Town, please?"

II

This chanced to be a constable much used to the oddities of London life and, by many years of senior officer bullying and magisterial correction, cautious of interference with the public unless supported by direct Act of Parliament. He awaited with complete unconcern the bedraggled figure whose antics he had watched across the road, and in reply to Mr. Wriford's hesitating: "We want to get to Camden Town. Can you tell us the way, please," remarked over Mr. Wriford's head and without bending his own: "Well, you've got what you want. It's all round you," and added, indulging the humour for which he had some reputation: "That's a bit of it you're holding down with your feet."

Mr. Wriford looked at Figure of Wriford standing by his side. He looked so long with hating eyes, and was so long occupied with the struggle to brave fear of a scene and give the man in charge for following him, that he felt some further explanation was due to the policeman before he could move away.

"Thanks," said Mr. Wriford. "Thank you, we rather thought we'd lost our way."

The policeman unbent a little and exercised his humour afresh. "Well, we've found it right enough," said he. "What are us, by any chance? King of Proosia or Imperial Hemperor of Wot O She Bumps?"

The constable's facetiousness was of a part with those slights to his dignity from inferiors which always caused Mr. Wriford insufferable humiliation. It angered him and gave him courage. "Take that man in charge," cried Mr. Wriford sharply. "He's following me. I'm afraid of him. Take him in charge."

"What man?" said the constable. "Don't talk so stupid. There's no man there."

"That man," cried Mr. Wriford. "Are you drunk or what? Where's your Inspector?"

The constable, roused by this behaviour: "My Inspector's where you'll be pretty sharp, if I have much more of it—at the station! Now, then! Coming to me with your us-es and your we-es! 'Op off out of it, d'ye see? 'Op it an' quick."

Mr. Wriford stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment and then screamed out: "I tell you that man's following me. What's he following me for? He's followed me miles. I'm afraid of him. Send him off. Send him away."

The constable tucked his gloves in his belt and caught Mr. Wriford strongly by the shoulder. "Now, look here," said the constable, "there's no man there, and if you go on with your nonsense, you're Found Wandering whilst of Unsound Mind, that's what you are. You're asking for it, that's what you're doing, and in less than a minute you'll get it, if you ain't careful. Why don't you behave sensible? What's the matter with you? Now, then, are you going to 'op it quiet, or am I going to take you along?"

All manner of confusing ideas whirled in Mr. Wriford's brain while the constable thus addressed him. How, if he went to the Police Station, was he going to explain who this man was that was following him? The man was himself—that hated Wriford. Then who was he? Very bewildering. Very difficult to explain. Best get out of this and somehow give the man the slip. He addressed the constable quietly and with a catch at his breath: "All right. It's all right. Never mind."

The constable released him. "Now do you know where you live?"

"Yes, I know; oh, I know," Mr. Wriford said.

"Got some one to look after you, waiting up for you?"

"Yes—yes."

"Goin' to 'op it quiet?"

"Yes—yes. It's all right."

"Not goin' to give nobody in charge?"

Mr. Wriford stood away and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He said miserably: "No, it's all right. Only a bit of a quarrel. It's nothing. We'll go on. We're all right."

"Well, let me see you 'op it," said the policeman.

"All right," said Mr. Wriford. "All right," and he walked on, still just catching his breath a little, and puzzling, and watching out of the corner of his eyes Figure of Wriford who came on beside him.

III

He walked on through Camden Town and through Kentish Town, Figure of Wriford at his elbow. Sometimes he would glance at Figure of Wriford and then would begin to run. Figure of Wriford ran with him. Sometimes he would stop and stand still. Figure of Wriford also stopped, halting a little behind him. Once as he looked back at Figure of Wriford, he saw a newspaper cart overtaking them, piled high with morning papers, driving fast. Mr. Wriford stepped off the pavement and began to cross the road. He judged very exactly the distance at which Figure of Wriford followed him. When Figure of Wriford was right in the cart's way, and he a pace or two beyond it, he suddenly turned back and rushed for the pavement again.

"Now you're done for!" he shouted in Figure of Wriford's face; but it was himself that the shaft struck a glancing blow, staggering him to the path as the horse was wrenched aside; and he was dizzied and scarcely heard the shouts of abuse cursed at him by the driver, as the cart went on and he was left groaning at the violent hurt and shock he had suffered, Figure of Wriford beside him.

IV

Mr. Wriford walked on and on, planning schemes of escape as he walked, and presently thought of one. He was by now at Highgate Archway, and following the way he had pursued, came upon the road that runs through Finchley to Barnet and so in a great highway to the country beyond. Now early morning and early morning's solitude had given place to the warmth and opening activities of five o'clock—labourers passed to their work, occasional tram-cars, scraping on their overhead wires, came from Barnet or ran towards it. Mr. Wriford was glad of the sun. His running until he met the policeman had overcome the chill of his immersion in the river. Since then, he had felt his soaked clothing clinging about him, and his teeth chattered and he shivered, very cold. His exertions had run the water off him. Now the strong sun began to dry him. Gradually, as he went on, the shivering ceased to mingle with his breathing and only came to shake him in spasmodic convulsions, very violent. But his breathing remained in catching sobs, and that was because of his fear and hate of the one that trod at his elbow, and of effort and resolution on the plan that should escape him.

He began, as he approached the signs that indicated halting-stations for the tram-cars, to hurry past them, and when he was beyond a post, to dally and look behind him for an overtaking car. Several he allowed to pass. They were travelling too slowly for his purpose, and Figure of Wriford was watching him very closely. He came presently to a point where the road began to descend gently in a long and straight decline.

Here cars passed very swiftly, and as one came speeding while he was between halting-stations, Mr. Wriford bound up his purpose and launched it. The car whizzed up to them; Mr. Wriford, looking unconcernedly ahead, let it almost pass him, then he struck a savage blow at Figure of Wriford and made a sudden and a wild dash to scramble aboard. The pole on the conductor's platform was torn through his hands that clutched at it; he grasped desperately at the back rail, stumbled, was dragged, clung on, got a foot on the step, almost fell, grabbed at the pole, drew himself aboard, and threw himself against the conductor who had rushed down from the top and, with one hand clutched at Mr. Wriford, with the other was about to ring the bell.

Mr. Wriford's onset threw him violently against the door, and Mr. Wriford, collapsed against him, cried: "Don't ring! Don't stop!" and then turned and at what he saw, screamed: "Don't let that man get on! Don't let him! Throw him off! Throw him off! I tell you, throw him—" But the conductor, very angry, shaken in the nerves and bruised against the door, hustled Mr. Wriford within the car, and Mr. Wriford saw Figure of Wriford following on the heels of their scuffle; collapsed upon a seat and saw Figure of Wriford take a place opposite him; began to moan softly to himself and could not pay any attention to the conductor's abuse.

"Serve you right," said the conductor very heatedly, "if you'd broke your neck. Jumpin' on my car like that. Serve you to rights if you'd broke your neck. Nice thing for me if you had, I reckon. I reckon it's your sort what gets us poor chaps into trouble." He held on to an overhead strap, swayed indignantly above Mr. Wriford, and obtaining no satisfaction from him—sitting there very dejectedly, twisting his hands together, little moans escaping him, tears standing in his eyes—directed his remarks towards the single other passenger in the car, who was a very stout workman and who, responding with a refrain of: "Ah. That's right," induced the conductor to reiterate his charge in order to earn a full measure of the comfort which "Ah. That's right" evidently gave him.

"Serve you right if you'd broke your neck," declared the conductor.

"Ah. That's right," agreed the stout workman.

"Your sort what gets us chaps into trouble, I reckon."

"Ah. That's right," the stout workman affirmed.

"Nice thing for me an' my mate," declared the conductor, "to go before the Coroner. Lose a day's work and not 'arf lucky if we get off with that."

"Ah. That's right," said the stout workman and spat on the floor and rubbed it in with a stout boot, and as if intellectually enlivened by this discharge, varied his agreement to: "That's right, that is. Ah."

"Serve you right—" began the conductor again, and Mr. Wriford, acted upon by his persistence, said wearily: "Well, never mind. Never mind. I'm all right now."

"Well, I reckon you didn't ought to be," declared the conductor. "Not if I hadn't come down them steps pretty sharp, you didn't ought."

The stout workman: "Ah. That's right."

Now the conductor suddenly produced his tickets and sharply demanded of Mr. Wriford: "Penny one? Reckon you ought to pay double, you ought."

Mr. Wriford as suddenly roused himself, looked across at Figure of Wriford seated opposite, and as sharply replied: "I'm not going to pay for him! I won't pay for him, mind you!"

The conductor followed the direction of Mr. Wriford's eyes, looked thence towards the stout workman, and then turned upon Mr. Wriford with: "Pay for yourself. That's what you've got to do."

"Ah. That's right," agreed the workman.

Mr. Wriford, breathing very hard, paid a penny, and receiving his ticket, watched the conductor very feverishly while he said: "Takes you to Barnet," and while at last he turned away and stood against the entrance. Then Mr. Wriford pointed to where Figure of Wriford sat and cried: "Where's that man's ticket?"

The conductor looked at the stout workman and tapped himself twice upon the forehead.

"Ah. That's right," said the stout workman; and thus supported, the conductor, no less a humourist than the policeman of an hour before, informed Mr. Wriford, with a wink at the stout workman: "He don't want no ticket."

Mr. Wriford appealed miserably: "Oh, why not? Why not?"

"He rides free," said the conductor. "That's what he does," and while the stout workman agreed to this with his usual formula, Mr. Wriford rocked himself to and fro in his corner and said: "Oh, why did you let him on? Why did you let him on? I asked you not to. Oh, I asked you."

This caused much amusement to the conductor and the stout workman, and at Barnet the conductor very successfully launched two shafts of wit which he had elaborated with much care. As Mr. Wriford alighted, "Wait for your friend," the conductor said, and as Mr. Wriford paused with twisting face and then set off up the road, turned for the stout workman's appreciation and discharged his second brand. "Reckon he ought to ha' bin on a 'Anwell[1] car," said the conductor.

[1] Hanwell is the great lunatic asylum of London.

"Ah. That's right," said the stout workman.

V

Mr. Wriford passed through Barnet and walked on to the open country beyond, and still on and on throughout the day. He halted neither for rest nor refreshment. Night came, and still he walked. He had no thought of sleep, but sleep stole upon his limbs. He stumbled on a grassy roadside, fell, did not rise again, and slept. The hours marched and brought him to new day. He awoke, looked at Figure of Wriford who sat wide-eyed beside him, said "Oh—oh!" and walking all day long, said no other word.

Dusk of the second evening stole across the fields and massed ahead of him. Mr. Wriford's progression was now no more than a laboured dragging of one foot and a slow placing it before the other. He came at this gait over the brow of a hill, and it revealed to him one at whose arresting appearance and at whose greeting Mr. Wriford for the first time stopped of his own will and stood and stared, swaying upon his feet.

CHAPTER V
ONE IS MET

This was a somewhat tattered gentleman, very tall, seated comfortably against the hedge, long legs stretched before him, one terminating in a brown boot of good shape, the other in a black, through which a toe protruded. This gentleman was shaped from the waist upwards like a pear, in that his girth was considerable, his shoulders very narrow, and his head and face like a little round ball. He ate, as he reclined there, from a large piece of bread in one hand and a portion of cold sausage in the other; and he appeared to be no little incommoded as he did so, and as Mr. Wriford watched him, by a distressing affliction of the hiccoughs which, as they rent him, he pronounced hup!

"Hup!" said this gentleman with his mouth full; and then again "hup!" He then cleared his mouth, and regarding Mr. Wriford with a jolly smile, upraised the sausage in greeting and trolled forth in a very deep voice and in the familiar chant:

"'O all ye tired strangers of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise Him and magnify Him for ever'—hup!

"But you can't do that," continued the pear-shaped gentleman, "when the famine has you in the vitals and the soreness in the legs, as it has you, unless you've practised it as much as I have. Then it is both food and rest. In this wise—

"Hup!—O all ye hungry of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise Him and hup-nify Him for ever.

"Hunger, I assure you," said the pear-shaped gentleman, "flee-eth before that shout as the wild goat before the hunter. Hunger or any ill. I have known every ill and defeated them all. Selah!" There was about this unusual gentleman that which doubly attracted Mr. Wriford. The Mr. Wriford of a very few days ago, who avoided eyes, who shrank from strangers, would hurriedly and self-consciously have passed him by. The Mr. Wriford with whom Figure of Wriford walked was attracted by the pear-shaped gentleman's careless happiness and attracted much more by his last words. He came a slow step nearer the pear-shaped gentleman, looked at Figure of Wriford, and from him with eyes that signalled secrecy to the pear-shaped gentleman, and in a low voice demanded: "You have known every ill? Have you ever been followed?"

The pear-shaped gentleman stared curiously at Mr. Wriford for a moment. Then he said: "Not so much followed, which implies interest or curiosity, as chased—which betokens vengeance or heat. With me that is a common lot. By dogs often and frequently bitten of them. By farmers a score time and twice assaulted. By—"

"Have you ever been followed by yourself?" Mr. Wriford interrupted him.

The pear-shaped gentleman inclined his head to one side and examined Mr. Wriford more curiously than before. "Have you come far?" he inquired.

"From Barnet," said Mr. Wriford.

"Spare us!" said the pear-shaped gentleman with much piety. "Long on the road?"

Mr. Wriford looked at Figure of Wriford, and for the first time since the event on the Embankment cast his mind back along their companionship. It seemed immensely long ago; and at the thought of it, there overcame Mr. Wriford a full and a sudden sense of his misery that somehow unmanned him the more by virtue of this, the first sympathetic soul he had met since he had fled—since, as somehow it seemed to him, very long before his flight. He said, with a break in his voice and his voice very weak: "I don't know how long we've been. We've been a long time."

The pear-shaped gentleman inclined his head with a jerk to the opposite side and took a long gaze at Mr. Wriford from that position. He then said: "How many of you?"

Mr. Wriford, a little surprise in his tone: "Why, just we two."

"Hup!" said the pear-shaped gentleman, said it with the violence of one caught unawares and considerably startled, and then, recovering himself, directed upon Mr. Wriford the same jolly smile with which he had first greeted him, and again upraising the sausage, trolled forth very deeply:

"O all ye loonies of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise Him and magnify Him for ever."

The pear-shaped gentleman then jumped to his feet with an agility very conspicuous in one of his girth, and of considerable purpose, in that he had no sooner obtained his balance on his feet than Mr. Wriford lost his balance upon his feet, swayed towards the arms outstretched to him, was assisted to the hedgeside, and there collapsed with a groan of very great fatigue.

The pear-shaped gentleman on his knees, busying himself with a long bottle and a tin can taken from the grass, with a clasp knife, the cold sausage, and the portion of bread: "I will have that groan into a shout of praise before I am an hour nearer the grave or I am no man. Furthermore," continued the pear-shaped gentleman, filling the can very generously and assisting it very gently to Mr. Wriford's lips, "furthermore, I will have no man groan other than myself, who groaneth often and with full cause. Your groan and your countenance betokeneth much misery, and I will not be bested by any man either in misery or in any other thing. I will run you, jump you, wrestle you, drink you, eat you, whistle you, sing you, dance you—I will take you or any man at any challenge; and this I will do with you or any man for—win or lose—three fingers of whisky, the which, hup! is at once my curse and my sole delight. Selah!"

As he delivered himself of these remarkable sentiments, the pear-shaped gentleman cut from the sausage and the bread the portions to which his teeth had attended, conveyed these to his own mouth, which again became as full as when Mr. Wriford had first seen it, and pressed the remainders upon Mr. Wriford with a cordiality much aided by his jolly speech and by the tin can of whisky which now ran very warmly through Mr. Wriford's veins. These combinations, indeed, and the sight and then the taste of food awakened very ferociously in Mr. Wriford the hunger which had now for two days been gathering within him. He ate hungrily, and, in proportion as his faintness became satisfied, something of an irresponsible light-headedness came to him; he began to give little spurts of laughter at the whimsicality of the pear-shaped gentleman and for the first time to forget the presence of Figure of Wriford; he accepted with no more reluctance than the same nervous humour a final absurdity which, as night closed about them, and as his meal was finished, the pear-shaped gentleman pressed upon him.

"I can hardly keep awake," said Mr. Wriford and lay back against the hedge.

The pear-shaped gentleman answered him from the darkness: "Well, this is where we sleep—a softer couch than any of your beds, and I have experienced every sort. The painful eructations which, to my great though lawful punishment, my proneness for the whisky puts upon me, are now, hup! almost abated, and I, too, incline to slumber."

Mr. Wriford said sleepily: "You've been awfully kind."

"I have conceived a fancy for you," said the pear-shaped gentleman. "I like your face, boy. I call you boy because you are youthful, and I am older than you: in sin, curse me, as old as any man. I also call you loony, which it appears to me you are, and for which I like you none the worse. As an offset to the liberty, you shall call me by any term you please."

Mr. Wriford scarcely heard him. "Well, I'd like to know your name," said he.

"Puddlebox," said the pear-shaped gentleman; and to Mr. Wriford's little spurt of sleepy laughter replied: "A name that I claim to be all my own, for I will not be beat at a name, nor at any thing, as I have told you, by any man."

To this there was but a dreamy sigh from Mr. Wriford, and Mr. Puddlebox inquired of him: "Sleepy?"

"Dog-tired," said Mr. Wriford.

"Happy?"

"I'm all right," said Mr. Wriford.

"Well, then, you are much better, loony," said Mr. Puddlebox. He then put out a hand in the darkness, and touching Mr. Wriford's ribs, obtained his fuller attention. "You are much better," repeated Mr. Puddlebox, "and if you will give me your interest for a last moment, we will continue in praise the cure which we have begun very satisfactorily in good whisky, cold sausage, and new bread. A nightly custom of mine which I suit according to the circumstances and in which, being suited to you, you shall now accompany me."

"Well?" said Mr. Wriford, aroused, and laughed again in light-hearted content. "Well?"

"Well," said Mr. Puddlebox, "thusly," and trolled forth very deeply into the darkness:

"O all ye loonies of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise Him and magnify Him for ever."

"Now you," said Mr. Puddlebox.

Mr. Wriford protested with nervous laughter: "It's too ridiculous!"

"It's wonderfully comforting," said Mr. Puddlebox; and Mr. Wriford laughed again and in a voice that contrasted very thinly with the volume of Mr. Puddlebox's gave forth as requested:

"O all ye loonies of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise Him and magnify Him for ever."

"Scarcely body enough," adjudged Mr. Puddlebox, "but that will come with appreciation of its value. Now one other, and this time touching that friend of yours whom I name Spook. We have starved him to his great undoing, for you have fed while he has hungered, and his bowels are already weakened upon you. We will now further discomfort him with praise. This time together—O all ye Spooks. Now, then."

"It's absurd," said Mr. Wriford. "It's too ridiculous"; but in the midst of his laughter at it had a sudden return to Figure of Wriford who was the subject of it and cried out: "Oh, what shall I do? Oh, what shall I do?"

"Why, there you go!" cried Mr. Puddlebox. "There's the necessity of it. Fight against him, boy. Let him not beat you, nor any such. Quick now—O all ye—"

And Mr. Wriford groaned, then laughed in a nervous little spurt, then groaned again, then weakly quavered while Mr. Puddlebox strongly belled:

"O all ye spooks of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise Him and magnify Him for ever."

"Feel better?" questioned Mr. Puddlebox.

In the darkness only some stifled sounds answered him.

"Crying, loony?"

Only those sounds.

Mr. Puddlebox put out a large hand, felt for Mr. Wriford's hands and clasped it upon them. "Hold my hand, boy."

Sleep came to them.

CHAPTER VI
FIGHTING IT: TELLING IT

This was a large, fat, kindly and protective hand in whose comfort Mr. Wriford slept, beneath which he awoke, and whose aid he was often to enjoy in immediate days to come. Yet its influence over him was by no means always apparent. Increasing acquaintance with Mr. Puddlebox was needed for its development, and this had illustration in the manner of his first sleep by Mr. Puddlebox's side.

Thus at first Mr. Wriford, clutching like a child at the hand which came to him in the darkness, and no little operated upon by intense fatigue, by the whisky, and by the meal of cold sausage and bread, slept for some hours very soundly and without dreams. Next his state became troubled. His mind grew active while yet his body slept. Very disturbing visions were presented to him, and beneath them he often moaned. They rode him hard, and ridden by them he began to find his unaccustomed couch first comfortless and then distressing. A continuous, tremendous, and rasping sound began to mingle with and to be employed by his visions. He sat up suddenly, threw off Mr. Puddlebox's hand in bewildered fear of it, then saw that the enormous raspings proceeded from Mr. Puddlebox's nose and open mouth, and then remembered, and then saw Figure of Wriford seated before him.

Mr. Wriford caught terribly at his breath and with the action drew up his knees. He placed his elbows on them and covered his face with his hands. He pressed his fingers together, but through their very flesh he yet could see Figure of Wriford quite plainly, grinning at him. Hatred and fear gathered in Mr. Wriford amain. With them he drew up all the fibres of his body, drew his heels closer beneath him, prepared to spring fiercely at the intolerable presence, then suddenly threw his hands from him and at the other's throat, and cried aloud and sprung.

He struggled. He fought. Figure of Wriford was screaming at him, and in that din, and in the din of bursting blood within his brain, he heard Mr. Puddlebox also shouting at him strangely. "Glumph him, boy," Mr. Puddlebox shouted. "Glumph him, glumph him!" And there was Mr. Puddlebox hopping bulkily about him as he fought and struggled and staggered, and desperately sickened, and desperately strove to keep his feet.

"Help me!" choked Mr. Wriford. "Help me! Help me! Kill him! Kill! Kill!"

"Kill yourself!" came Mr. Puddlebox's voice. "You're killing yourself! You're killing yourself! Why, what the devil? You're fighting yourself, boy. You're fighting yourself. Loose him, boy! Loose him! You've got him beat! Loose him now, loose him—Ooop!"

This bitter cry of "Ooop!" unheeded by Mr. Wriford, was shot out of agony to Mr. Puddlebox's black-booted foot, upon the emerging toes of which Mr. Wriford's heel came with grinding force. "Ooop!" bawled Mr. Puddlebox and hopped away upon the shapely brown boot, the other foot clutched in his hands, and then "Ooop!" again—"Ooop! Erp! Blink!" For there crashed upon his nose a smashing fist of Mr. Wriford's arm, and down he went, blood streaming, and Mr. Wriford atop of him, and Mr. Wriford's head with stunning force against a telegraph pole, thence to an ugly stone.

Stillness then of movement; and of sounds only immense gurgling and snuffling from Mr. Puddlebox, lamentably engaged upon his battered nose.

Mr. Wriford sat up. He pressed a hand to his head and presently, his chest heaving, spoke with sobbing breaths. "You might have helped me," he sobbed. "You might have helped me."

From above his dripping nose, Mr. Puddlebox regarded him dolorously. He had no speech.

"You might have helped me," Mr. Wriford moaned.

"Glug," said Mr. Puddlebox thickly. "Glug. Blink!"

"When you saw me—" Mr. Wriford cried.

"Glug," said Mr. Puddlebox. "Blink! Helped you!" he then cried. "Why, look what the devil I have helped you! Glug. If I have bled a pint, I have bled a quart, and at this flood I shall ungallon myself to death. Glug. Blink. Why, I was no less than a fool ever to come near you. Might have helped you! Glug!"

Mr. Wriford's common politeness came to him. With some apology in his tone, "I don't know how you got that," he said. "I only—"

Mr. Puddlebox, very woefully from behind a blood-red cloth: "I don't know how I shall ever get over it." But he was by now a little better of it, the flow somewhat staunched, and he said with a vexation that he justified by glances at the soaking cloth between dabs of it at his nose: "Why, I helped you in all I could. You fought like four devils. I was in the very heart of it.

"I heard you," said Mr. Wriford, "shouting 'Glumph him!' or some such word. It was no help to—"

Mr. Puddlebox returned crossly. "Glumph him! Certainly I—glug. Blink! There it is off again. Glug. Certainly I shouted glumph him. A glumph is a fat hit—a hit without art or science, and the only sort of which I am capable, or you, either, as I saw at a glance. Glug."

"I was fighting," said Mr. Wriford. "I was being killed, and you—"

"Why, I was being killed also," returned Mr. Puddlebox. "Look at my foot. Look at my nose. Fighting! Why, there never was such senseless fighting—never. Glug. Blink! Why, beyond that you fought with me whenever I came near you, who to the devil do you think you were fighting with?"

Mr. Wriford looked at him with very troubled eyes. After a little while, "Why, tell me whom," he said. "I want to know." His voice ran up and he cried: "It's not right! I want to know."

"Why, loony," said Mr. Puddlebox kindly, suddenly losing his heat and his vexation, "why, loony, you were fighting yourself."

"Yes," Mr. Wriford answered him hopelessly. "Yes. That's it. Myself that follows me," and he moaned and wrung his hands, rocking himself where he sat.

Mr. Puddlebox supported his nose with his blood-red cloth and waddled to Mr. Wriford on his knees. He sat himself on his heels and wagged a grave finger before Mr. Wriford's face. "Now look here, boy," said Mr. Puddlebox. "When I say you, I mean you—that you," and he dug the finger at Mr. Wriford's chest. "When I say fought yourself, I mean your own hands—those hands, at your own throat—that throat."

Mr. Puddlebox spoke so impressively, looking so strongly and yet so kindly at Mr. Wriford, that great wonder and trouble came into Mr. Wriford's eyes, and he put his fingers to his throat, that was red and scarred and tender, and said wonderingly, doubtfully, pitifully: "Do you mean that I did this to myself—with my own hands?"

"Why, certainly I do," returned Mr. Puddlebox, "and with your own hands this to my nose. Why, I awoke with a kick that you gave me, and there you were, dancing over there with sometimes your hands squeezing the life out of yourself, black in the face, and your eyes like to drop out, and sometimes your hands smashing at nothing except when they smashed me, and screaming at the top of your voice, and your feet staggering and plunging—why, you were like to have torn yourself to bits, but that you fell, and the pole here knocked sense into you. Like this you had yourself," and Mr. Puddlebox took his throat in his hands in illustration, "and shook yourself so," and shook his head violently and ended "Glug. Curse me. I've started it again. Glug," and mopped his nose anew.

Mr. Wriford said in horror, more to himself than aloud: "Why, that's madness!"

"Why—glug, blink!" said Mr. Puddlebox. "Why, that's what it will be if you let it run, boy. That's what will be, if you are by yourself, which you shall not be, for I like your face, and I will teach you to glumph it out of you. This is a spook that you think you see, and that is why I call you loony, and it is no more a real thing than the several things I see when the whisky is in me, as I have taught myself—glug, I shall bleed to death—as I have taught myself to know, and as I shall teach you. Wherefore we are henceforward comrades, for you are not fit to take care of yourself till this thing is out of you. We shall now breakfast," continued Mr. Puddlebox, beginning with one hand, the other kept very gingerly to his nose, to feel towards his bundle on the grass, "and you shall tell me who you are, and why you are spooked, first unspooking yourself, as last night, with praise. Come now, we will have them both together—O ye loonies and spooks—"

"I won't!" said Mr. Wriford. He sat with his hands to his chin, his knees drawn up, wrestling in a fevered mind with what facts came out of Mr. Puddlebox's jargon. "I won't!"

"It is very comforting," said Mr. Puddlebox, not at all offended. "Try breakfast first, then."

"Oh, let me alone," cried Mr. Wriford. "I don't want breakfast."

"I do," returned Mr. Puddlebox. "The more so that I have lost vast blood. There is enough whisky here to invigorate me, yet, under Providence, not to plague me with the hiccoughs. Also good cold bacon. Come, boy, cold bacon."

"I don't want it," Mr. Wriford said.

"More for me," said Mr. Puddlebox, "and I want much. While I eat, you shall tell me how you come to be loony, and I will then tell you how I come to be what I am. And I will tell a better story than you or than any man. Come now!"

An immense bite of the cold bacon then went to Mr. Puddlebox's mouth, and Mr. Wriford, looking up, found himself so jovially and affectionately beamed upon through the bite, that he suddenly turned towards Mr. Puddlebox and said: "I'll tell you. I'd like to tell you. You've been very kind to me. I've never said thank you. I'm ill. I don't know what I am."

Gratified sounds from Mr. Puddlebox's distended mouth—inarticulate for the cold bacon that impeded them, but sufficiently interpreted by quick nods of the funny little round head and by smiles.

"It's very strange to me," said Mr. Wriford in a low voice, "to be sitting here like this and talking to you. I don't know how I do it. A little while ago I was in London, and I couldn't have done it then. I never spoke to anybody that I could help—I remember that. I say I can remember that, because there are a lot of things I can't remember. I've been like that a long time. I've never told anybody before. I don't know how I tell you now—I said that just now, didn't I?" and Mr. Wriford stopped and looked at Mr. Puddlebox in a puzzled way.

Mr. Puddlebox, cheeks much distended, first shook his head very vigorously and then as vigorously nodded it. This thoughtfully left it to Mr. Wriford to choose whichever distressed him less, and he said: "In the middle of thinking of a thing it goes." There was a rather pitiful note in Mr. Wriford's voice, and he sat dejectedly in silence. When next he spoke, he shook himself, and as though the action shook off his former mood, he said excitedly, bending forward towards Mr. Puddlebox: "Look here, I've never done things! I've been shut up. I've had things to look after. I've never been able to rest. I've never been able to be quiet. There's always been something else. There's always been something all round me, like walls—oh, like walls! Always getting closer. I've never been able to stop. No peace. There's always been some trouble—something to think about that grinds me up, and in the middle of it something else. There's always been something hunting me. Always something, and always something else waiting behind that. Like walls, closer and closer. I never could get away. I tell you, every one I ever met had something for me that kept me. I wanted to scream at them to let me alone. I never could get away. I was shut up. I'm a writer. I write newspapers and books. People know me—people who write. I hate them all. I've often looked at people and hated everybody. They look at me and see what I am and laugh at me. They know I'm frightened of them. I'm frightened because I've been shut up, and that's made me different from other people. I'm a writer. I've made much more money than I want. I've looked at people in trains and places and known I could have bought them all up ten times over. And the money's never been any use to me—not when you're shut up, not when there's always something else, not when you're always trembling. I never can make people understand. They don't know I'm shut up. They don't see that there's always something else. They think—"

Mr. Wriford stopped and looked again in a puzzled way at Mr. Puddlebox and then said apologetically: "I don't know how I've come here. I don't understand it just at present. I'll think of it in a minute;" and then broke out suddenly and very fiercely: "But I tell you, although you say it isn't, and God only knows why you should interfere or what it's got to do with you, I tell you that I've had myself walking with me and want to kill it. And I will kill it! It's done things to me. It's kept me down. I hate it. It's been me for a long time. But it isn't me! I'm different. I can look back when you never knew me, and God knows how different I've been—young and happy! I want to die. If you want to know, though what the devil it's got to do with—I want to die, die, die! I want to get out of it all. Yes, now I remember. That's it. I want to get out of it all. Everything's all round me, close to me. I can scarcely breathe. I want to get out of it. I've been in it long enough. I want to smash it all up. Smash it with my hands to blazes. My name's Wriford. If you don't believe it, you can ask any one in London who knows about newspapers and books, and they'll tell you. I'm Wriford, and I want to get out of it all. I want to kill myself and get away alone. I won't have myself with me any longer! Damn him, he's a vile devil, and he isn't me at all. I'm Wriford! Good Lord, before I began all this, I used to be— He's a vile, cowardly devil. I want to get away from him and get away by myself. I want to smash it all up. With my hands I want to smash it and get away alone—alone;" and then Mr. Wriford stopped with chest heaving and with burning eyes, and then tore open his coat and then his shirt, as though his body burned and he would have the air upon it.

All this time Mr. Puddlebox had been champing steadily with mouth prodigiously filled. Now he washed down last fragments of cold bacon with last dregs of good whisky and, with no sort of comment upon Mr. Wriford's story or condition, announced: "Now I will tell you my story. That's fair. Then we shall know each other as comrades should; which, as I have said, we are to be henceforward and until I have unspooked you. Furthermore, as I also said, I will tell a better story than you—yes, or than any man, for I will take you or any man at any thing and give best to none. Selah."

CHAPTER VII
HEARING IT

"My name is Puddlebox," said Mr. Puddlebox. He settled his back comfortably against the hedge and looked with a very bright eye at Mr. Wriford, who sat bowed before him and who at this beginning, and catching Mr. Puddlebox's merry look, shook himself impatiently and averted his eyes, that were pained and troubled, to the ground, as though he would hear nothing of it and wished to be wrapped in his own concerns.

Not at all discouraged, "My name is Puddlebox," Mr. Puddlebox continued. "I was born many highly virtuous years ago in the ancient town of Hitchin, which lies not far from us as we sit. My father was an ironmonger, of good business and held in high esteem by all who knew him. My mother was an ironer, and love, which, as I have marked, will make use of any bond, perhaps attracted these two by medium of the iron upon which each depended for livelihood. My mother sang in the choir of her chapel, and my father, who sometimes preached there, has told me that she presented a very holy and beautiful picture as the sun streamed through the window and fell upon her while she hymned. Here again," continued Mr. Puddlebox, "the ingenuity of love is to be observed, for this same sunlight, though it adorned my mother, also incommoded her, and my father, in his capacity as ironmonger, was called upon to fit a blind for her greater convenience. This led to their acquaintance and, in process of lawful time, to me whom they named Eric. Little Eric. Five followed me. I was the eldest, and the most dutiful, of six. Offspring of God-fearing parents, I was brought up in the paths of diligence and rectitude—trained in the way I should go and from my earliest years pursued that way without giving my parents one single moment's heart-burning or doubt. I was, and I have ever been, a little ray of sunshine in their lives."

"You're a tramp, aren't you?" said Mr. Wriford.

On the previous evening Mr. Puddlebox had induced in Mr. Wriford a mood in which his griefs had disappeared before little spurts of involuntary laughter. The same, arising out of Mr. Puddlebox's whimsical narration of his grotesque story, threatened him now, and he resisted it. He resisted it as a vexed child, made to laugh despite himself, seeks by cross yet half-laughing rejoinders to preserve his ill-humour and not be wheedled out of it.

"You're a tramp, aren't you?" said Mr. Wriford; but Mr. Puddlebox, with no notice of the interruption, continued: "A little ray of sunshine. My dear parents in time sent me to school. Here, by my diligence and aptitude, I brought at once great shame upon my elder classmates and great pride to the little parlour behind the ironmonger's shop. It became furnished, that pleasant parlour, with my prize-books, and decorated with my medals and certificates of punctuality and good conduct. As I grew older, so the ray of sunshine which I effulged waxed brighter and warmer. My father, encouraged and advised by my teachers, offered me the choice of many lucrative and gentlemanly professions. It was suggested that I should embrace a few of the many scholarships that were at the easy command of my abilities and my industry, proceed to the University, and become pedagogue, pastor, or lawyer. I well remember, and I remember it with pride and happiness, the grateful mingling of my parents' tears when I announced that I spurned these attractions, desiring only to be apprenticed to my dear father's business, perpetuate the grand old name of Puddlebox, ironmonger, Hitchin, and become the prop and comfort of the evening of my parents' years.

"This was the time," proceeded Mr. Puddlebox, "when, in common with all youth, I was subjected to the temptations of gross and idle companions. As I had shamed my classmates at school, so I shamed my would-be betrayers in the street. They called me to the pleasures of the public-house. I pointed to the blue-ribbon badge of my pledges against intoxicating liquors. They enticed me to ribaldry, to card-playing, to laughter with dangerous women. I openly rebuked them and besought them for their own good instead to sit with me of an evening, while I read aloud from devotional works to my dear parents. My spare time I devoted to my Sunday-school class, to the instruction of my younger brothers and sisters, and to profitable reading. My recreation took the form of adorning our chapel with the arts of turnery and joinery which I had learnt together with that of pure ironmongery."

All this was more and more punctuated with spurts of laughter from Mr. Wriford, and now, laughing openly, "Well, when did all this stop?" he said.

"It never stopped," returned Mr. Puddlebox. "A calamitous incident diverted it to another train; that is all. Five sovereigns, nine shillings, and fourpence were one day found to be missing from the till. It was in the till when the shop was shut at seven o'clock one Saturday night, and it was out of the till when my father went to transfer it to the cash-box at eight o'clock. We kept no servant. No stranger had entered the house. The theft lay with one of my brothers and sisters. My father's passion was terrible to witness. That a child of his should rob his own father produced in him a paroxysm of wrath such as even I, well knowing his sternly religious nature, did not believe him capable of. With shaking voice he demanded of my brothers and sisters severally and collectively who had brought this shame upon him. All denied it. I was in an adjoining room—as horrified and as trembling as my father. I knew the culprit. I had seen a Puddlebox—a Puddlebox!—with his hand in his father's till. My long discipline in virtue and in filial and fraternal devotion told me at once what I must do. I must shield the culprit; I must take the blame upon myself."

"Why?" said Mr. Wriford.

"I did not hesitate a moment," said Mr. Puddlebox, disregarding the question. "Breathing a rapid prayer for my dear ones' protection and for the forgiveness of the culprit, I turned instantly and fled from the house. I have never seen my parents since. I have never again revisited the ancestral home of the Puddleboxes. Yet am I content and would not have it otherwise, for I am happy in the knowledge that I have saved the culprit. Since then, I have devoted my life over a wider area to the good works which formerly I practised within the municipal boundaries of beloved Hitchin. I tour the countryside in a series of carefully planned ambits, seeking, by ministration to the sick and needy, to shed light and happiness wherever I go, supporting myself by those habits of diligence and sobriety which became rooted in me in my childhood's years. You say your name is Wriford, and that you are of repute in London. My name is Puddlebox, and I am known, respected, and welcomed in a hundred villages, boroughs, and urban districts. Now that is my story," concluded Mr. Puddlebox, "and I challenge you to say that yours is a better."

Mr. Wriford was by this time completely won out of the fierce and tumultuous thoughts that had possessed him when Mr. Puddlebox began. His little spurts of involuntary laughter had become more frequent and more openly daring as Mr. Puddlebox proceeded, and now, quite given over to a nervously light-headed state such as may be produced in one by incessant tickling, he laughed outright and declared: "I don't believe a word of it!"

"Well," said Mr. Puddlebox, merrier than ever in the eye, and speaking with a curious note of triumph as though this were precisely what he had been aiming at, "Well, I don't believe a word of yours!"

"Mine's true," cried Mr. Wriford, quick and sharp, and got indignantly to his feet. Habit of thought of the kind that had helped work his destruction in him jumped at him at this, as he took it, flat insult to his face, and in the old way set him surging in head and heart at the slight to his dignity. "Mine's true!" he cried and looked down hotly at Mr. Puddlebox.

"And mine's as true," said Mr. Puddlebox equably and giving him only the same merry eye.

Mr. Wriford, heaving: "Why, you said yourself—only last night—that whisky was your curse. You've told me a lot of rubbish; you couldn't have meant it for anything else. I've told you facts. What don't you believe?"

"I don't believe any of it," said Mr. Puddlebox, and at Mr. Wriford's start and choke, added quickly: "as you tell it."

One of those sudden blanks, one of those sudden snappings of the train of thought—click! like an actual snapping in the brain—came to Mr. Wriford. One of those floodings about his mind of immense and whirling darkness in which desperately his mental eye sought to peer, and desperately his mental hands to grope. He tried to remember what it was that he had told Mr. Puddlebox. He tried to search back among recent moments that he could remember—or thought he remembered—for words he must have spoken but could not recollect. His indignation at Mr. Puddlebox's refusal to believe him disappeared before this anguish and the trembling that it gave. He made an effort to hold his own, not to betray himself, and with it cried indignantly: "Well, what did I say?" then, unable to sustain it, abandoned himself to the misery and the helplessness, and used again the same words, but pitiably. "Well, what did I say?" Mr. Wriford asked and caught his breath in a sob.

Mr. Puddlebox put that large, soft, fat, kindly and protective hand against Mr. Wriford's leg that stood over him and pulled on the trouser. "Now, look here, boy," said Mr. Puddlebox very soothingly, "sit here by me, and I will tell you what you said, and we will put this to the rights of it."

Very dejectedly Mr. Wriford sat down; very protectively Mr. Puddlebox put the large hand on his knee and patted it. "Now, look here, my loony," said Mr. Puddlebox, "I'll tell you what you said, and what I mean by saying I don't believe a word of it as you tell it. What I mean, my loony, is that there's one thing the same in your story and in mine, and it is the same in every story that I hear from folks along the road, and I challenge you or any man to hear as many as I have heard. It is that we've both been glumphed, boy. We've both led beautiful, virtuous lives and ought to be angels with beautiful wings—'stead of which, here we are: glumphed; folks have got up and given us fat hits and glumphed us.

"Well, there's two ways," continued Mr. Puddlebox with great good humour, "there's two ways of telling a glumphed story, my loony: the way of the glumphed, which I have told to you, and the way of the glumpher, which I now shall tell you. Take my story first, boy. Glumphed, which is me, tells you of a child and a boy and a youth which was the pride and the comfort and the support of his parents; glumphers, which is they, would tell you I was their shame and their despair. Glumphed: diligent, shaming his classmates, adorning the parlour with prize-books; glumphers: never learning but beneath the strap, idle, disobedient. Glumphed: spurning companions who would entice him; glumphers: leading companions astray. Glumphed: putting away nobler callings and desirous only to serve his father in the shop; glumphers: wasting his parents' savings that would educate him for the ministry, and of the shop sick and ashamed. Glumphed: reading devotional books to his mother; glumphers: breaking her heart. Glumphed: knowing the culprit who robbed his father and fleeing to save him; glumphers: himself the thief and running away from home. Glumphed: journeying the countryside in good works and everywhere respected; glumphers: a tramp and a vagabond, plagued with whisky and everywhere known to the police.

"There's a difference for you, boy," concluded Mr. Puddlebox; and he had recited it all so comically as once again to bring Mr. Wriford out of dejection and set him to the mood of little spurts of laughter. "Glumphed," Mr. Puddlebox had said, raising one fat hand to represent that individual and speaking for him in a very high squeak; and then "glumphers" with the other fat hand brought forward and his voice a very sepulchral bass. Now he turned his merry eyes full upon Mr. Wriford: and Mr. Wriford met them laughingly and laughed aloud.

"I see what you're driving at," Mr. Wriford laughed; "but it doesn't apply to me, you know. You don't suppose I've—er—robbed tills, or—well—done your kind of thing, do you?"

"I don't know what you've done," said Mr. Puddlebox. "But this I do know, that your story is the same as my story, and the same as everybody's story, in this way that you've never done anything wrong in your life, and that all your troubles are what other folks—glumphers—have done to you. Well, whoa, my loony, whoa!" cried Mr. Puddlebox, observing protest and indignation blackening again on Mr. Wriford's face. "The difference in your case is that what you've done and think you haven't done has spooked you, boy, and now I will tell you how you are spooked; and how I will unspook you. You think too much about yourself, boy. That's what is spooking you. You think about yourself until you've come to see yourself and to be followed by yourself. Well, you've got to get away from yourself. That's what you want, boy—you know that?"

"Yes, I'm followed," Mr. Wriford cried. He clutched at Mr. Puddlebox's last words; and, at the understanding that seemed to be in them, forgot all else that had been said and cried entreatingly: "I'm followed, followed!"

"I will shake him off," said Mr. Puddlebox. "You want to get away?"

"I must!" said Mr. Wriford. "I must!"

"And you don't mind what happens to you?"

"I don't mind anything."

"Why, then, cheer up," cried Mr. Puddlebox with a sudden infectious burst of spirits, "for I don't, either; and so there are two of us, and the world is full of fun for those who mind nothing. I will teach you to sing, and I will teach you to find in everything measure for my song, which is of praise and which is:

"O ye world of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise Him and magnify Him for ever.

"Up, my loony, and I will teach you to forget yourself, which is what is the matter with you and with most of us."

Mr. Puddlebox with these words got very nimbly to his feet, and there took Mr. Wriford a sudden infection of Mr. Puddlebox's spirits, which made him also jump up and stand with this jolly and pear-shaped figure who minded nothing, and look at him and laugh in irresponsible glee. Mr. Puddlebox wore a very long and very large tail-coat, in the pockets of which he now began to stuff his empty bottle, a spare boot, what appeared to be a shirt in which other articles were rolled, and sundry other packets which he picked up from the grass about him. Upon his head he wore a hard felt hat whose rim was gone, so that it sat upon him like an inverted basin; and about his considerable waist he now proceeded to wind a great length of string. He presented, when his preparations were done, so completely odd and so jolly a figure that Mr. Wriford laughed aloud again and felt run through him a surge of reckless irresponsibility; and Mr. Puddlebox laughed in return, loud and long, and looking down the hill observed: "We will now leave this place of blood and wounds and almost of unseemly quarrel. Ascending towards us I observe a wagon, stoutly horsed. We will attach ourselves to the back of it and place ourselves entirely at its disposal; first greeting the wagoner in song, for the very juice of life is to be extracted by finding matter for praise in all things. Now, then, when he reaches us—'O ye wagoners—'"

The wagon reached them. Piled high with sacks, it was drawn by three straining horses and driven by a very burly gentleman who sat on a seat above his team and midway up the sacks and scowled very blackly at the pair who awaited him and who, as he drew abreast, gave him, Mr. Puddlebox with immense volume and Mr. Wriford with gleeful irresponsibility:

"O ye wagoners of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise Him and magnify Him for ever!"

The wagoner's reply was to spit upon the ground for the singers' benefit and very brutally to lash his team for his own. The horses strained into a frightened and ungainly plunging, and the wagon lumbered ahead. Mr. Puddlebox plunged after it, and Mr. Wriford, with light-headed squirms of laughter, after Mr. Puddlebox. The tail-board of the wagon was not high above the road. In a very short space Mr. Wriford was seated upon it and then clutching and hauling in assistance of the prodigious bounds and scrambles with which, at last, Mr. Puddlebox also effected the climb.

And so away, with dangling legs.