Roll-Call — Part 1, Chapter 6, part 1
I
Early on the morning of a Tuesday in the second half of June 1903, George Cannon was moving fast on a motor-bicycle westwards down the slope of Piccadilly.
At any rate he had the sensation of earliness, and was indeed thereby quite invigorated; it almost served instead of the breakfast which he had not yet taken.
But thousands of people travelling in the opposite direction in horse-omnibuses and in a few motor-buses seemed to regard the fact of their being abroad at that hour as dully normal.
They had fought, men and girls, for places in the crammed vehicles; they had travelled from far lands such as Putney; they had been up for hours, and the morning, which was so new to George, had lost its freshness for them; they were well used to the lustrous summer glories of the Green Park; what they chiefly beheld in the Green Park was the endless lines of wayfarers, radiating from Victoria along the various avenues, on the way, like themselves, to offices, ware-houses, and shops.
Of the stablemen, bus-washers, drivers, mechanics, chauffeurs, and conductors, who had left their beds much in advance even of the travellers, let us not speak--even they had begun the day later than their wives, mothers, or daughters.
All this flying population, urged and preoccupied by pitiless time, gazed down upon George and saw a gay young swell without a care in the world rushing on 'one of those motor-bikes' to freedom.
George was well aware of the popular gaze, and he supported it with negligent pride.
He had the air of having been born to greatness;
cigarette smoke and the fumes of exploded petrol and the rattle of explosions made a fine wake behind his greatness.
In two years, since he had walked into Mr. Haim's parlour, his body had broadened, his eyes had slightly hardened, and his complexion and hair had darkened.
And there was his moustache, very sprightly, and there was a glint of gold in his teeth.
He had poor teeth, but luxuriant hair, ruthlessly cut and disciplined and subjugated.
His trousers were clipped tightly at the ankles, and his jacket loosely buttoned by the correct button; his soft felt hat achieved the architect's ideal of combining the perfectly artistic with the perfectly modish.
But the most remarkable and envy-raising portion of his attire was the loose, washable, yellow gloves, with large gauntlets, designed to protect the delicately tended hands when they had to explore among machinery.
He had obtained the motor-bicycle in a peculiar way.
On arriving at Axe Station for the previous Christmas holidays, he had seen two low-hung lamps brilliantly flashing instead of the higher and less powerful lamps of the dogcart, and there had been no light-reflecting flanks of a horse in front of the lamps.
The dark figure sitting behind the lamps proved to be his mother.
His mother herself had driven him home.
He noted calmly that as a chauffeur she had the same faults as the contemned Lois Ingram.
Still, she did drive, and they reached Ladderedge Hall in safety.
He admired, and he was a little frightened by, his mother's terrific volition to widen her existence.
She would insist on doing everything that might be done, and nobody could stop her.
Who would have dreamt that she, with her narrow, troubled past, and her passionate temperament rendered somewhat harsh by strange experiences, would at the age of forty-six or so be careering about the country at the wheel of a motor-car?
Ah!
But she would!
She would be a girl.
And by her individual force she successfully carried it off!
Those two plotters, she and his stepfather, had conspired to buy a motor-car in secret from him.
No letter from home had breathed a word of the motor-car.
He was thunder-struck, and jealous.
He had spent the whole of the Christmas holidays in that car, and in four days could drive better than his mother, and also--what was more difficult--could convince her obstinate self-assurance that he knew far more about the mechanism than she did.
As a fact, her notions of the mechanism, though she was convinced of their rightness, were mainly fantastic.
George of course had had to punish his parents.
He had considered it his duty to do so.
"The _least_ you can do," he had said discontentedly and menacingly, "the _least_ you can do is to give me a decent motor-bike!"
The guilty pair had made amends in the manner thus indicated for them.
George gathered from various signs that his stepfather was steadily and rapidly growing richer.
George had acted accordingly--not only in the matter of the motor-bicycle, but in other matters.
Now, on this June morning he had just begun to breast the slope rising from the hollow to Hyde Park Corner when a boy shot out from behind a huge, stationary dust-cart on the left and dashed unregarding towards him.
George shouted.
The boy, faced with sudden death, was happily so paralysed that he fell down, thus checking his momentum by the severest form of friction.
George swerved aside, missing the small, outstretched hands by an inch or two, but missing also by an inch or two the front wheel of a tremendous motor-bus on his right.
He gave a nervous giggle as he flashed by the high red side of the motor-bus; and then he deliberately looked back at the murderous boy, who had jumped up.
At the same moment George was brought to a sense of his own foolishness in looking back by a heavy jolt.
He had gone over half a creosoted wood block which had somehow escaped from a lozenge-shaped oasis in the road where two workmen were indolently using picks under the magic protection of a tiny, dirty red flag.
Secure in the guardianship of the bit of bunting, which for them was as powerful and sacred as the flag of an empire, the two workmen gazed with indifference at George and at the deafening traffic which swirled affronting but harmless around them.
George slackened speed, afraid lest the jar might have snapped the plates of his accumulator.
The motor-bicycle was a wondrous thing, but as capricious and delicate as a horse.
For a trifle, for nothing at all, it would cease to function.
The high-tension magneto and the float-feed carburetter, whose invention was to transform the motor-bicycle from an everlasting harassment into a means of loco-motion, were yet years away in the future.
However, the jar had done no harm.
The episode, having occupied less than ten seconds, was closed.
George felt his heart thumping.
He thought suddenly of the recent Paris-Madrid automobile race, in which the elite of the world had perished.
He saw himself beneath the motor-bus, and a futile staring crowd round about.
Simply by a miracle was he alive.
But this miracle was only one of a score of miracles.
He believed strongly in luck.
He had always believed in it.
The smoke of the cigarette displayed his confidence to all Piccadilly.
Still, his heart was thumping.
And it had not ceased to thump when a few minutes later he turned into Manresa Road.
Opposite the entrance to the alley of Romney Studios, there happened to be a small hiatus in the kerbstone.
George curved the machine largely round and, mounting the pavement through this hiatus, rode gingerly up the alley, in defiance of the regulations of a great city, and stopped precisely at the door of No. 6. It was a matter of honour with him to arrive thus.
Not for a million would he have walked the machine up the alley.
He got off, sounded a peremptory call on the horn, and tattooed with the knocker.
No answer came.
An apprehension visited him.
By the last post on the previous night he had received a special invitation to breakfast from Marguerite.
Never had he been kept waiting at the door.
He knocked again.
Then he heard a voice from the side of the studio: "Come round here, George."
In the side of the studio was a very small window from which the girls, when unpresentable, would parley with early tradesmen.
Agg was at the window.
He could see only her head and neck, framed by the window.
Her short hair was tousled, and she held a dressing-gown tight about her neck.
For the first time she seemed to him like a real feminine girl, and her tones were soft as they never were when Marguerite was present with her.
"I'm very sorry," she said.
"You woke me.
I was fast asleep.
You can't come in."
"Anything up?"
he questioned, rather anxiously.
"Where's Marguerite?"
"Oh, George!
A dreadful night!"
she answered, almost plaintively, almost demanding sympathy from the male--she, Agg!
"We were wakened up at two o'clock.
Mr. Prince came round to fetch Marguerite to go to No. 8." "To go to No. 8?"
he repeated, frightened, and wondered why he should be frightened.
"What on earth for?"
"Mrs. Haim very ill!"
Agg paused.
"Something about a baby."
"And did she go?"
"Yes; she put on her things and went off at once."
He was silent.
He felt the rough grip of destiny, of some strange power irresistible and unescapable, just as he had momentarily felt it in the basement of No. 8 more than eighteen months before, when the outraged Mr. Haim had quarrelled with him.
The mere idea of Marguerite being at No. 8 made him feel sick.
He no longer believed in his luck.
"How soon d'ye think she'll be back?"
"I--I don't know, George.
I should have thought she'd have been back before this."
"I'll run round there," he said curtly.
Agg was disconcertingly, astoundingly sympathetic.
Her attitude increased his disturbance.
II
When George rang the bell at No. 8 Alexandra Grove his mysterious qualms were intensified.
He dreaded the moment when the door should open, even though it should be opened by Marguerite herself.
And yet he had a tremendous desire to see Marguerite--merely to look at her face, to examine it, to read it.
His summons was not answered.
He glanced about.
The steps were dirty.
The brass knob and the letter-flap had not been polished.
After a time he pushed up the flap and gazed within, and saw the interior which he knew so well and which he had not entered for so many months.
Nothing was changed in it, but it also had a dusty and neglected air.
Every detail roused his memory.
The door of what had once been his room was shut; he wondered what the room was now.
This house held the greatest part of his history.
It lived in his mind as vitally as even the boarding-house kept by his mother in a side-street in Brighton, romantic and miserable scene of his sensitive childhood.
It was a solemn house for him.
Through the basement window on a dark night he had first glimpsed Marguerite.
Unforgettable event!
Unlike anything else that had ever happened to anybody!...
He heard a creak, and caught sight through the letter-aperture of a pair of red slippers, and then the lower half of a pair of trousers, descending the stairs.
And he dropped the flap hurriedly.
Mr. Haim was coming to open the door.
Mr. Haim did open the door, started at the apparition of George, and stood defensively and forbiddingly in the very centre of the doorway.
"Oh!"
said George nervously.
"How is Mrs. Haim?"
"Mrs. Haim is very ill indeed."
The reply was emphatic and inimical.
"I'm sorry."
Mr. Haim said nothing further.
George had not seen him since the previous Saturday, having been excused by Mr. Enwright from the office on Monday on account of examination work.
He did not know that Mr. Haim had not been to the office on Monday either.
In the interval the man had shockingly changed.
He seemed much older, and weaker too; he seemed worn out by acute anxiety.
Nevertheless he so evidently resented sympathy that George was not sympathetic, and regarded him coldly as a tiresome old man.
The official relations between the two had been rigorously polite and formal.
No reference had ever been made by either to the quarrel in the basement or to the cause of it.
And for the world in general George's engagement had remained as secret as before.
Marguerite had not seen her father in the long interval, and George had seen only the factotum of Lucas & Enwright.
But he now saw Marguerite's father again--a quite different person from the factotum....
Strange, how the house seemed forlorn!
'Something about a baby,' Agg had said vaguely.
And it was as though something that Mr. Haim and his wife had concealed had burst from its concealment and horrified and put a curse on the whole Grove.
Something not at all nice!
What in the name of decent propriety was that slippered old man doing with a baby?
George would not picture to himself Mrs. Haim lying upstairs.
He did not care to think of Marguerite secretly active somewhere in one of those rooms.
But she was there; she was initiated.
He did not criticize her.
"I should like to see Marguerite," he said at length.
Despite himself he had a guilty feeling.
"My daughter!"
Mr. Haim took up the heavy rôle.
"Only for a minute," said George boyishly, and irritated by his own boyishness.
"You can't see her, sir."
"But if she knows I'm here, she'll come to me," George insisted.
He saw that the old man's hatred of him was undiminished.
Indeed, time had probably strengthened it.
"You can't see her, sir.
This is my house."
George considered himself infinitely more mature than in the November of 1901 when the old man had worsted him.
And yet he was no more equal to this situation than he had been to the former one.
"But what am I to do, then?"
he demanded, not fiercely, but crossly.
"What are you to do?
Don't ask me, sir.
My wife is very ill indeed, and you come down the Grove making noise enough to wake the dead"--he indicated the motor-bicycle, of which the silencer was admittedly defective--"and you want to see my daughter.
My daughter has more important work to do than to see you.
I never heard of such callousness.
If you want to communicate with my daughter you had better write--so long as she stays in this house."
Mr. Haim shut the door, which rendered his advantage over George complete.
From the post office nearly opposite the end of the Grove George dispatched a reply-paid telegram to Marguerite: "Where and when can I see you?
--GEORGE.
Russell Square."
It seemed a feeble retort to Mr. Haim, but he could think of nothing better.
On the way up town he suddenly felt, not hungry, but empty, and he called in at a tea-shop.
He was the only customer, in a great expanse of marble-topped tables.
He sat down at a marble-topped table.
On the marble-topped table next to him were twenty-four sugar-basins, and on the next to that a large number of brass bells, and on another one an infinity of cruets.
A very slatternly woman was washing the linoleum in a corner of the floor.
Two thin, wrinkled girls in shabby black were whispering together behind the counter.
The cash-den was empty.
Through the open door he could keep an eye on his motor-bicycle, which was being surreptitiously regarded by a boy theoretically engaged in cleaning the window.
A big van drove up, and a man entered with pastry on a wooden tray and bantered one of the girls in black.
She made no reply, being preoccupied with the responsibility of counting cakes.
The man departed and the van disappeared.
Nobody took the least notice of George.
He might have been a customer invisible and inaudible.
After the fiasco of his interview with Mr. Haim, he had not the courage to protest.
He framed withering sentences to the girls in black, such as: "Is this place supposed to be open for business, or isn't it?"
but they were not uttered.
Then a girl in black with a plain, ugly white apron and a dowdy white cap appeared on the stairs leading from the basement, and removed for her passage a bar of stained wood lettered in gilt: 'Closed,' and she halted at George's table.
She spoke no word.
She just stood over him, unsmiling, placid, flaccid, immensely indifferent.
She was pale, a poor sort of a girl, without vigour.
But she had a decent, honest face.
She was not aware that she ought to be bright, welcoming, provocative, for a penny farthing an hour.
She had never heard of Hebe.
George thought of the long, desolating day that lay before her.
He looked at her seriously.
His eyes did not challenge hers as they were accustomed to challenge Hebe's. He said in a friendly, matter-of-fact tone: "A meat-pie, please, and a large coffee."
And she repeated in a thin voice: "Meat-pie.
Large coffee."
A minute later she dropped the order on the table, as it might have been refuse, and with it a bit of white paper.
The sadness of the city, and the inexplicable sadness of June mornings, overwhelmed George as he munched at the meat-pie and drank the coffee, and reached over for the sugar and reached over for the mustard.
And he kept saying to himself: "She doesn't see her father at all for nearly two years, and then she goes off to him like that in the middle of the night--at a word."
III
The office was not at its normal.
The empty cubicle of the factotum looked strange enough.
But there was more than that in the abnormality.
There were currents of excitement in the office.
The door of the principals' room was open, and George saw John Orgreave and Everard Lucas within, leaning over one of the great flat desks.
The hour was early for Lucas, and self-satisfaction was on Lucas's face as he raised it to look at the entering of George.
"I say," he remarked quietly through the doorway, "that town hall scheme is on again."
"Oh!"
said George, depositing his hat and gloves and strolling into the principals' room.
"Good morning, Mr. Orgreave.
Got the conditions there?"
For a moment his attitude of interest was a pose, but very quickly it became sincere.
Astonishing how at sight of a drawing-board and a problem he could forget all that lay beyond them!
He was genuinely and extremely disturbed by the course of affairs at Chelsea;
nevertheless he now approached Mr. Orgreave and Lucas with eagerness, and Chelsea slipped away into another dimension.
"No," said John Orgreave, "the conditions aren't out yet.
But it's all right this time.
I know for a fact."
The offices of all the regular architectural competitors in London were excited that morning.
For the conception of the northern town hall was a vast one.
Indeed, journalists had announced, from their mysterious founts of information, that the town hall would be the largest public building erected in England during half a century.
The scheme had been the sport of municipal politics for many months, for years.
Apparently it could not get itself definitely born.
And now the Town Clerk's wife had brought about the august parturition.
It is true that her agency was unintentional.
The Town Clerk had belonged to a powerful provincial dynasty of town clerks.
He had the illusion that without him a great town would cease to exist.
There was nothing uncommon in this illusion, which indeed is rife among town clerks; but the Town Clerk in question had the precious faculty of being able to communicate it to mayors, aldermen, and councillors.
He was a force in the municipal council.
Voteless, he exercised a moral influence over votes.
And he happened to be opposed to the scheme for the new town hall.
He gave various admirable reasons for the postponement of the scheme, but he never gave the true reasons, even to himself.
The true reasons were, first, that he hated and detested the idea of moving office, and, second, that he wanted acutely to be able to say in the fullness of years that he had completed half a century of municipal work in one and the same room.
If the pro-scheme party had had the wit to invent a pretext for allowing the Town Clerk to remain in the old municipal buildings, the scheme would instantly have taken life.
The Town Clerk, being widowed, had consoled himself with a young second wife.
This girl adored dancing; the Town Clerk adored her; and therefore where she danced he deemed it prudent to attend.
Driving home from a January ball at 4 a. m.
the Town Clerk had caught pneumonia.
In a week he was dead, and his dynasty with him.
In a couple of months the pro-scheme party had carried the council off its feet.
Such are the realities, never printed in newspapers, of municipal politics in the grim north.
Sketches of the site had appeared in the architectural press.
John Orgreave and Lucas were pencilling in turn upon one of these, a page torn out of a weekly.
George inserted himself between them, roughly towards Lucas and deferentially towards Mr. John.
"But you've got the main axis wrong!"
he exclaimed.
"How, wrong?"
John Orgreave demanded.
"See here--give me the pencil, Looc."
George felt with a little thrill of satisfaction the respect for him which underlay John Orgreave's curt tone of a principal--and a principal from the Midlands.
He did not miss, either, Lucas's quick, obedient, expectant gesture in surrendering the pencil.
Ideas for the plan of the building sprang up multitudinously in his mind.
He called; they came.
He snatched towards him a blank sheet of tracing-paper, and scrawled it over with significant lines.
"That's my notion.
I thought of it long ago," he said.
"Or if you prefer--" The other two were impressed.
He himself was impressed.
His notion, which he was modifying and improving every moment, seemed to him perfect and ever more perfect.
He was intensely and happily stimulated in the act of creation; and they were all three absorbed.
"Why hasn't my desk been arranged?"
said a discontented voice behind them.
Mr. Enwright had arrived by the farther door from the corridor.
Lucas glanced up.
"I expect Haim hasn't come again to-day," he answered urbanely, placatingly.
"Why hasn't he come?"
"I hear his wife's very ill," said George.
"Who told you?"
"I happened to be round that way this morning."
"Oh!
I thought all was over between you two."
George flushed.
Nothing had ever been said in the office as to his relations with Haim, though it was of course known that George no longer lodged with the factotum.
Mr. Enwright, however, often had disconcerting intuitions concerning matters to which Mr. Orgreave and Lucas were utterly insensible.
"Oh no!"
George haltingly murmured.
"Well, this is all very well, this is----!"
Mr. Enwright ruthlessly proceeded, beginning to marshal the instruments on his desk.
He had been a somewhat spectacular martyr for some time past.
A
mysterious facial neuralgia had harried his nights and days.
For the greater part of a week he had dozed in an arm-chair in the office under the spell of eight tabloids of aspirin per diem.
Then a specialist had decided that seven of his side teeth, already studded with gold, must leave him.
Those teeth were not like any other person's teeth, and in Mr. Enwright's mind the extracting of them had become a major operation, as, for example, the taking off of a limb.
He had spent three days in a nursing home in Welbeck Street.
His life was now saved, and he was a convalescent, and passed several hours daily in giving to friends tragi-farcical accounts of existence in a nursing home.
Mr. Enwright's career was one unending romance.
