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Title: Sorrell and Son (1925)
Author: Warwick Deeping (1877-1950)
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Language:   English
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Title: Sorrell and Son (1925)
Author: Warwick Deeping (1877-1950)







CHAPTER I


1


Sorrell was trying to fasten the straps of the little brown
portmanteau, but since the portmanteau was old and also very full,
he had to deal with it tenderly.

"Come and sit on this thing, Kit."

The boy had been straddling a chair by the window, his interest
divided between his father's operations upon the portmanteau and a
game of football that was being played in Lavender Street by a
number of very dirty and very noisy small boys.

Christopher went and sat.  He was a brown child of eleven, with a
grave face and a sudden pleasant smile.  His bent knees showed the
shininess of his trousers.

"Have to be careful, you know," said Sorrell.

The father's dark head was close to the boy's brown one.  He too
was shiny in a suit of blue serge.  His long figure seemed to curve
over the portmanteau with anxiously rounded shoulders and sallow
and intent face.  The child beside him made him look dusty and
frail.

"Now, the other one, old chap.  Can't afford to be rough.  Gently
does it."

He was a little out of breath, and he talked in short jerky
sentences as he pulled carefully at the straps.  A broken strap
would be a disaster, for the clasp of the lock did not function,
and this dread of a trivial disaster seemed to show in the
carefulness of the man's long and intelligent hands.  They were
cautious yet flurried.  His breathing was audible in the room.

"That's it."

The words expressed relief.  He was kneeling, and as he looked up
towards the window and saw the strip of sky and the grimy cornice
of grey slates of the house across the way, his poise suggested the
crouch of a creature escaping from under some huge upraised foot.
For the last three years, ever since his demobilization, life had
been to Sorrell like some huge trampling beast, and he--a furtive
thing down in the mud, panting, dodging, bewildered, resentful and
afraid.  Now he had succeeded in strapping that portmanteau.  They
were slipping away from under the shadow of the great beast.
Something had turned up to help the man to save his last made-to-
measure suit, his boy, and the remnant of his gentility.

Horrible word!  He stroked his little black moustache, and
considered the portmanteau.

"Well,--that's that, son."

He smiled faintly, and Kit's more radiant smile broke out in
response.  To the boy the leaving of this beastly room in a beastly
street was a glorious adventure, for they were going into the
country.

"It will want a label, pater."

"It will.  'Sorrell and son, passengers, Staunton'!"

"How's it going to the station?"

Sorrell rose, dusting the knees of his trousers.  Each night he
folded them carefully and put them under the mattress.

"I've arranged with Mr. Sawkins.  He'll take it early and leave it
in the cloak-room."

For Sorrell still kept his trousers creased, nor had he reached
that state of mind when a man can contemplate with unaffected
naturalness the handling of his own luggage.  There were still
things he did and did not do.  He was a gentleman.  True, society
had come near to pushing him off the shelf of his class-
consciousness into the welter of the casual and the unemployed,
but, though hanging by his hands, he had refused to drop.  Hence
Mr. Sawkins and Mr. Sawkins' coster's barrow, transport for the
Sorrell baggage.

"What time is the train, pater?"

"Ten twenty."

"And what time do we get to Staunton?"

"About three."

"And where are we going to stay?"

"Oh,--I shall get a room before fixing up with Mr. Verity.  He may
want us to live over--over the shop."

There were times when Sorrell felt very self-conscious in the
presence of the boy.  The pose he had adopted before Christopher
dated from the war, and it had survived various humiliations,
hunger, shabbiness, and the melodramatic disappearance of
Christopher's mother.  Sorrell turned and looked at himself in the
mirror on the dressing table.  He patted his dark hair.  "Over--the
shop."  Yes, the word had cost him an effort.  "Captain Sorrell,
M.C."  To Christopher he wished to remain Captain Sorrell, M.C.  He
felt moved to explain to the boy that Mr. Verity's shop at Staunton
was not an ordinary shop.  Mr. Verity dealt in antiques; the
business had flavour, perfume; it smelt of lavender and old rose-
leaves and not of cheese or meat.  Mr. Verity--too--appeared to be
something of a character, an old bachelor, with a preference for a
man of some breeding as a possible assistant.  Also, Mr. Verity was
a sentimentalist--a patriotic sentimentalist.  He had been in
correspondence with the Ex-Officers' Association, and Stephen
Sorrell had been offered the job.

He was going down to Staunton to discover whether he and Mr. Verity
would harmonize.

Sorrell adjusted the wings of his bow tie, and considered the
problem of Christopher and Mr Verity's shop.  Should he be frank
with the boy, or keep up the illusion of their separateness from
the common world?  He could say that he was going into business
with Mr. Verity, and that in these days a shop--especially an
antique shop--was quite a la mode.

Yells from the Street broke in upon his meditations.  Someone had
scored a goal, and someone else had refused to accept the validity
of the goal.

"Damn those kids!" said the man.

He looked at his own boy.

"Pater."

"Yes."

"Shall I go to school at Staunton?"

"Of course.  I expect there will be a Grammar School at Staunton.
I shall arrange it when I have settled things with Mr. Verity."

"Will it be a gentleman's school, pater?"

"O, yes; we must see to that."

There was a pause in the adventure, for on this last evening in
London there was nothing left for them to do, and on warm evenings
Lavender Street did not smell of herbs.  Its smells were very
various and unoriginal.  It combined the domestic perfumes of
boiled cabbage and fried fish with an aroma of horse-dung and
rancid grease.  It was a stuffy street.  The clothes and bodies of
most of its inhabitants exuded a perfume of stale sweat.

The boy had the imagined scent of the country in his nostrils.

"Let's go out."

"Where to?"

"Let's go and look at the river."

They went, becoming involved for a moment in a mob of small boys
who were all yelling at once and trying to kick a piece of sacking
stuffed with paper.  Kit was pushed against his father, but
reacting with sensitive sturdiness, upset one of the vociferous
crew into the gutter where he forgot Kit's shove in the business of
eluding other feet.

Sorrell noticed that the boy was flushed.  He was conscious of
himself as of something other than those Lavender Street children.
He did not want to be touched by them.

"We'll be out of it to-morrow, son."

"I'm glad," said the boy.

Sorrell was thinking of Christopher's schooling, and he was still
thinking of it when they paused half-way across Hungerford Bridge
and stood leaning on the iron rail.  The boy had had to go to a
Council school.  He had hated it, and so had Sorrell, but for quite
different reasons.  With the man it had been a matter of resentful
pride, but for the boy it had meant contact with common children,
and Kit was not a common child.  He had all the fastidious nauseas
of a boy who has learnt to wash and to use a handkerchief, and not
yell "cheat" at everybody in the heat of a game.

Sorrell stood and dreamed, and yet remained aware of the kindling
face of the boy who was watching the life of the river, a pleasure
steamer going up-stream, a man straining at a sweep upon a barge, a
police-boat heading for the grey arches of Waterloo Bridge.  To
Sorrell the scene was infinitely familiar yet bitterly strange.
The soft grey atmosphere shot through with pale sunlight was the
atmosphere of other evenings, and yet how different!  His inward
eyes looked through the eyes of the flesh.  To him London had
always seemed most beautiful here, a city of civic stateliness,
mellow, floating upon the curve of the river.  He had loved the
blue black dusk and the lights, the dim dome of St. Paul's like the
half of a magic bubble, the old "shot" towers, the battered redness
of the Lion brewery, the opulence of the Cecil and the Savoy, the
green of the trees in Charing Cross Gardens.

He remembered that he had dined and danced at the Savoy.

Spacious days!  Khaki, and women who had seemed more than women on
those life-thirsty nights when he had been home on leave.
Odalisques!

Women!  How through he was with women!

He remembered a night when he had taken his wife to the Savoy.  Two
years ago his wife had left him, and her leaving him had labelled
him a shabby failure.  She had had no need to utter the words.  And
all that scramble after the war, the disillusionment of it, the
drying up of the fine and foolish enthusiasms, the women going to
the rich fellows who had stayed at home, the bewilderment, the
sense of bitter wrong, of blood poured out to be sucked up by the
lips of a money-mad materialism.

He looked at the face of his boy.

"Yes, it's just a scramble," he thought, "but an organized
scramble.  The thing is to keep on your feet and fight, and not to
get trampled on in the crush.  Thank God I have got only one kid."

Kit, head up, his cap in his hand, was smiling at something, the
eager and vital boy with the clear eyes and fresh skin.  To him
life was beginning its adventure.  He saw the river and the city in
the splendour of their strength and their mystery.  The Savoy and
the Cecil were still palaces of the great and adventurous unknown,
and Sorrell, full of the grim business of existence, felt a sudden
deep tenderness towards the boy.

"I suppose it's egotism," he thought, "but I'll try to give him a
better chance in the scramble than I have had.  After all we are
more honest in our egotism,--these days, the thing is not to love
your neighbour, but to be able to make it unsafe for him to try and
down you.  Co-operation in bargaining, organized grab.  But you
have to bargain with some sort of weapon in your hand."

Standing there beside his boy and watching the light and the life
upon the river, Sorrell felt himself to be weaponless.  What was he
but a pair of hands, and a rather frail body in a shabby suit of
clothes?  He thought of his wounds, wounds of the flesh and of the
spirit.

He met Kit's smile.

"I say, pater, is there a river at Staunton?"

"A small one."

He was realizing that the niche at Mr. Verity's might also be a
very small one, but at least it was a niche in the social
precipice.



2


Sorrell and son arrived at Staunton about three in the afternoon.
Amid the clatter of empty milk cans Sorrell addressed himself to
the porter who was removing the brown portmanteau from the luggage
van, but the porter either did not or would not trouble to hear
him.

"Do you mind being careful with that?  The straps--"

The porter swung the portmanteau out of the van and let it fall
with a full flop upon the platform, and like Judas it burst
asunder, and extruded a portion of its contents upon the asphalt.

Sorrell looked sad.

"You shouldn't have done that, you know."

It was a bad omen, and he bent down to recover a boot, a clothes
brush and a tobacco tin, and to stuff the crumpled nakedness of an
unwashed shirt back into the gaping interior.  The porter, full of
sudden compunction, bent down to help him.

"I'll find you a bit of cord.  The stitching of the straps must
have been rotten."

Christopher stood and looked on while Sorrell and the porter
applied first aid to their piece of luggage.  The incident had
touched the boy; he had seen that look in his father's eyes, and he
felt--somehow--that it was not the portmanteau but his father who
had gaped and betrayed a whole clutter of painful and shabby
problems.  Poor old pater!  But his boy's tenderness was touched
with pride.

Sorrell was putting the porter's contrition to other uses.  Before
reaching Staunton he had counted the ready money that remained to
him, and it amounted to thirteen shillings and five-pence.

"Do you know of any lodgings; clean, but not too dear?"

The porter was knotting a length of cord round the body of the
portmanteau.

"Staying here?  What sort of lodgings?"

"I am taking up a post in the town.  A bed-sitting-room for me and
the boy.  I don't mind how plain it is--"

"I've got an aunt," said the porter, "who lets lodgings.  There's a
room up at the top.  Fletcher's Lane.  Not a hundred yards off."

"Would she board us?"

"Feed you?"

"Yes."

"She might.  Look here,--I'm going off duty in ten minutes or so.
I'll show you the way."

"I'm very much obliged to you."

Sorrell gave him the five pennies.

"Thank you, sir.  I'll pop this round for you on my shoulder."

No. 7, Fletcher's Lane, accepted the Sorrells and packed them away
in a big attic-like room under the roof.  It had a dormer window
with a view of the cathedral towers and the trees of the Close, and
between the cathedral and the dormer window of No. 7 every sort of
roof and chimney ran in broken reds and greys and browns.  The room
was clean, and with a white coverlet on the bed, a square of
linoleum in the centre of the floor, and a smaller piece in front
of the yellow washstand.  The chest of drawers had lost a leg and
most of its paint, and when you opened a top drawer it was
necessary to put a knee against one of the lower drawers to prevent
the whole chest from toppling forward.

The landlady asked Sorrell if he would like tea, and he glanced at
his wrist watch.

"I have to go out first.  Would half-past five do?"

"Nicely.  Will you take an egg to it?"

"Yes, an egg each, please.  And could I have a little hot water?"

The hot water was forthcoming in a battered tin jug, and Sorrell
washed himself, brushed his clothes and hair, wiped the dust from
his boots, and glanced at himself in the little mirror.  First
impressions were important, and he wanted to make a good impression
upon Mr. Verity.  His blue suit was old and shiny, but it was well
cut, and the trousers were creased.

"I'm just going round to see Mr. Verity.  You might unpack, old
chap."

Christopher was leaning out of the window and inhaling the newness
and the freshness of Staunton.

"Yes,--I will, pater."

"We'll have some tea when I come back, and a stroll round.  This is
only a temporary roost."

"It's better than Lavender Street," said the boy.

Mr. Verity's shop was in the Market Square, and Sorrell, on turning
out of Fletcher's Lane found himself in Canon's Row.  A passing
postman, questioned as to the whereabouts of the Market Square,
jerked a thumb and said "Straight on."  Sorrell did not hurry.  He
was pleasurably excited, and as he strolled up Canon's Row he saw
the short, broad High Street opening out before him.  It was all
red and white and grey.  The Angel Inn thrust out a floating golden
figure.  Higher up, a clock projected from the Market Hall with its
stone pillars and Dutch roof, and its statue of William of Orange
in a niche in the centre of the south wall.  The Market Square
spread itself, a great sunny space into which the more shadowy High
Street flowed.  It was surrounded by old houses that had been built
when Anne and the Georges reigned.  In the centre the market cross
carried time back to the Tudors.  A vine covered one little low
house, and another was a smother of wistaria.  There were queer bay
windows, white porches, leaded hoods, and at the end the chequered
Close threw a massive and emphatic shadow.  Above and beyond, the
towers caught the sunlight, rising from the green cushion of old
limes and elms, and backed by brilliant white clouds in a sky of
brilliant blue.

Sorrell paused outside the Angel Inn, for the old town pleased him.
Not a bad spot to settle in, to listen to the bells, and to feel
that life was less of a hectic scramble.  And dabbling in old
things, handling old china and glass and Sheffield plate, the
creations of dead craftsmen who had not hurried.  No doubt old
Verity had absorbed the atmosphere of oak and mahogany, maple and
walnut.  He might have a richly brocaded soul.

Sorrell strolled on into the Market Square.  He looked about him,
and then crossed the cobbles and questioned a policeman who was on
traffic duty.

"Mr. Verity's shop?"

"Over there,--near the gate."

Sorrell was half-way across the Market Place when he realized that
there was something queer about Mr. Verity's shop.  He saw it as a
red house with a white cornice and white window sashes, and painted
in white letters on a black fascia-board "John Verity--Dealer in
Antiques."  But the shop was shut, the windows were screened by
black shutters.

Sorrell glanced at the other shops.  No, it was not early closing
day; the other shops were open.

He crossed the rest of the space more quickly, and sighting a black
door beside the shop, with a brass bell handle in the white door-
jamb, he pulled the bell.  He was puzzled, aware of a sudden
suspense, and when the door opened he found himself staring at the
face of a woman who had been weeping.

"Is Mr. Verity in?"

The woman's eyelids flickered.

"Mr. Verity died this morning."

Sorrell's mouth hung open.

"What--!"

"Yes--sudden--.  It must have been his heart.  He fell down the
stairs--O,--dear--"

She began to whimper, while Sorrell stood there with a blank face.
He realized that the woman was closing the door.

He blurted something.

"I've just come down.  I was to be--the assistant.  It's very--I'm
sorry--"

"It was so sudden," said the woman.  "Of course--without him--
nothing--you know.  I'm sorry.  Have you come far?"

"From London."

"Dear, dear, and you will have to go all the way back--for nothing.
It's awkward, but there it is.  If you'll excuse me--now."

She closed the door, and Sorrell stood staring at it.



3


Sorrell's first feeling was one of bitter resentment against old
Verity for dying in so sudden and inconvenient a fashion, but
before he had recrossed the Market Square he had realized the
absurdity of his anger.  It died away, leaving him with a sense of
emptiness at the pit of his stomach, and a chilly tremor quivering
down his spine.

He was trembling.  His knees were so weak under him that when he
passed through the gateway of the Close, and saw a seat under a
lime tree, he made towards it and sat down.  He felt helpless,
bewildered, for the disappointment,--coming as the last of many
such disappointments, seemed to have fallen on him with the
cumulative weight of the whole series.  He put a hand into a pocket
for his pipe and pouch.  His fingers moved jerkily, and when he lit
a match his hand was so unsteady that he had difficulty in lighting
his pipe.

The nausea of an intense discouragement was upon him, he felt
tired, so tired that his impulse was to lie down and to admit
defeat, and to allow himself to be trampled into the mud of
forgetfulness.  His senses were dulled, and the whole atmosphere of
this quiet old town had changed.  Half an hour ago he had been
vividly aware of the blueness of the sky and of the tranquil white
domed clouds floating above tower and tree, but now the objective
world seemed vague and grey.  His feeling of despair cast a shadow.

He thought of Christopher waiting in that upper room for his tea.

He shrank from the idea of facing the boy, of going back there with
a hang-dog illusion dead in his eyes.

All the sordid and trivial realities of the business buzzed round
him like flies.  He had thirteen shillings in his pocket; he would
owe the woman for food and a night's lodging; there would be the
cost of the tickets back to London; that damned portmanteau needed
mending; and if they returned to London there was nowhere for them
to go.

He realized the nearness of a panic mood.

He got up.  "When you are in a blue funk, do something."  That was
one of the human tags brought back from France.  He remembered that
he had won his M.C. by "doing something" as a protest against the
creeping paralysis of intense fear.

He walked back to Fletcher's Lane, and climbing the stairs, paused
for a moment outside the door of the room.  He was trembling.  He
heard the woman moving somewhere below, and leaning over the
banisters he called to her.

"We are ready for tea, please."

His own voice surprised him.  It was resonant, and it had a quality
of cheerfulness, and it seemed to express the upsurging within him
of some subconscious element that was stronger than his conscious
self.  He opened the door and went in.

The boy was standing by the window.  He had unpacked their
belongings; a nightshirt and a pair of pyjamas lay on the bed;
brushes, a razor, a comb, and three old pipes were arranged upon
the dressing-table.

Father and son looked at each other.

"Well, my son, what about tea?"

Kit continued to look at his father; his eyes were very solemn.

"Mr. Verity's dead," said the father; "he died this morning.  So--
Staunton's a wash-out.  Well, what about tea?"

The boy's face seemed to flush slightly.  His lips moved, it was as
though he was aware of something in his father, something fine and
piteous, a courage, something that made him want to burst into
tears.

"Sorry, pater."

His lips quivered.

"We--we'll have to make the best of it."

And suddenly--with a kind of fierceness, Sorrell caught his son and
kissed him.



4


Afterwards, they went out and sat in the cathedral and wandered
about the Close under the shade of the elms and limes.  The evening
was very still, and the sunlight sifted through the trees and lay
gently upon the mown grass.  Swans cruised upon the moat
surrounding the Bishop's palace.  There was the sheen of water, and
the mellowness of old red walls seen through the dappled foliage of
trees.  The canons' houses, sealed away in pleasant security, gave
through their gateways glimpses of their gardens.  Jackdaws circled
about the towers, their cries dropping from above into the deeps of
a green tranquillity.

A sunset filled the lacework of the leaves with red and gold, and
the smooth and stately security of the Close caught moments of
mystery.  Sorrell and the boy were sitting on a seat above the
water, with a slope of vivid grass going down to it, and a weeping
willow trailing its branches in a stream of yellow light.  It
seemed to Sorrell that no one who lived near the shadowy splendour
of these towers and trees could know what poverty was, or hunger,
or the filthy dread that oozes like slime over a man's soul.  Life
seemed so secure here, so incredibly secure.

He sat there, a shabby man beside a shabby child, and yet the
shabbiness had fallen from him, the shabbiness of little, suburban
make-believes.  He had discovered a sudden and helpful frankness.
He had undressed his soul before his boy.

They sat and talked.

"I'm not going to bother about the crease in my trousers my son.
Keeping up appearances.  I don't care what the job is, but I am
going to get it."

The thing that astonished him was the way that the boy understood.
How was it that he understood?  It was almost womanish, a kind of
tenderness, and yet manly, as he had known manliness at its best
during the war.

"It was because of me--pater."

"Captain Sorrell, M.C."

"But you will still be Captain Sorrell, M.C., to me, daddy.  If you
swept the streets--"

"Honour bright?"

"Honour bright."

Sorrell held Kit's head against his shoulder.

"Seems to me, kid, that you and I have got to know each other as we
never did before.  Thanks to poor old Verity.  I was so damned
afraid that you were going to be ashamed of me--"

The boy smiled.

"Dear old pater--I'll help."

"Think of that poor old portmanteau!  What its feelings must have
been--when it burst open!  But I have been burst open to-day, Kit.
You have had a look at the inside of me.  Yesterday--I was a sort
of shabby gentleman.  That's finished."

Christopher meditated some profound thought.

"I don't mind--just bread and butter."

"No jam?"

"No."

"Well, somehow--I think it was worth it," said Sorrell, "quite
worth it.  You and I know where we are."

The sunset was dying behind them, and the dusk and the shadows of
the great trees seemed to meet upon the water.  The Sorrells left
the seat and wandered away together, united by a sudden understanding
of each other and by a sympathy that was frank and tender.

"I am always going to tell you things, Kit; no more make-believe."

"And I'll tell you things, too, pater," said the boy--"everything."

"No secrets?"

"No secrets."

It was the beginning of the great comradeship between them, and for
the first time for many months Sorrell felt a happiness that
surprised him.  The shock of the day's disappointment had passed.
The human relationship suddenly realized between his boy and
himself swallowed up the sense of defeat.  His courage returned.
As they wandered in the dusk of the Close under the darkening trees
he felt Kit's nearness, a nearness of spirit as well as of body.

"If I had not had the boy--" he thought.

Kit's hand touched his sleeve.

"Look--"

They had turned into a stone flagged path that ran at the backs of
the old houses on one side of the Market Square.  Gravestones and
brick tombs showed between them and the houses.  A high yew hedge
screened many of the lower windows but Kit's eyes were fixed upon a
broad, arched window that was visible beyond the hedge.  The window
was brilliantly lit, and glowed with streaks of colour, orange,
green, blue, cerise.  A figure in black was moving amid the streaks
of colour.

"What's that?" the boy asked.

Sorrell smiled.  They were looking across the old graves into the
window of a Staunton modiste's showroom, and it would seem that the
modiste had received a consignment of silk "jumpers."  She was
unpacking them and hanging them up on the stands in her showroom
where they glowed brilliantly like jewels in a case.

"Clothes--Kit."

"They look like bunches of flowers," said the boy.

They passed on, and out by an iron gate into one of the Staunton
streets, and so back to Fletcher's Lane, where Sorrell sat and
smoked while Christopher undressed and went to bed.

Sorrell sat there for a long while after the boy had fallen asleep.

"Yes--there's my job," he reflected.

Undressing very quietly so as not to wake his son, he slipped into
the bed beside the boy and lay wondering how he would solve the
problems of the morrow.




CHAPTER II


1


When Sorrell placed two rashers of bacon on Christopher's plate he
found himself reflecting that he and his son were eating this meal
on credit, and unless some sort of job was to be discovered in
Staunton he might have to visit the sign of the three golden balls.

At the end of the meal he lit his pipe and glanced down the list of
the advertisements in a copy of the Staunton Argus.  Someone was
advertising for a chauffeur; a farmer needed a cowman, and a number
of ladies were asking for cooks and housemaids, but Sorrell had to
recognize his own limitation.  He could not drive a car, or milk a
cow, or cook a dinner.  Indeed, when he came to consider the
question there were very few things that he could do.  Before the
war he had sat at a desk and helped to conduct a business, but the
business had died in 1917, and deny a business man his office chair
and he becomes that most helpless of mortals--a gentleman of
enforced leisure.

At the top right hand corner of the page Sorrell noticed a
paragraph that might have some bearing on his case.  It appeared
that there was a private Employment Agency in Staunton, conducted
by a Miss Hargreaves at No. 13, the High Street.  Sorrell tore off
the corner of the paper, slipped the notice into his waistcoat
pocket, and passed the rest of the paper across the table to
Christopher.

"I am going out."

The boy understood.

"I'll be here when you come back."

No. 13 proved to be a stationer's shop, one half of its window
brilliant with the wrappers of cheap novels.  Its doorway looked
across the road into the arched entry of the "Angel" yard, and Miss
Hargreaves, from the moment when she pulled up her blind in the
morning till she pulled it down at night, lived in the gilded
presence of the inn's angelic figurehead.  Sorrell entered the
shop.  It was long and rambling and dark, and on dull days a light
was needed in the far corner where the circulating library lived in
a tall recess.  There were no customers in the shop, and the young
woman behind the counter, turning a pair of myopic eyes on Sorrell,
moved instinctively towards where the daily papers were kept.

"Daily Mail?"

That was the sound she expected Sorrell to make, but he surprised
her by uttering other words.

"I believe you run an employment agency."

"Yes," said the girl, "that's so."

She glanced in the direction of a kind of desk or cage at the back
of the shop where a woman's head was visible.

"You had better see Miss Hargreaves--there."

As Sorrell approached the desk Miss Hargreaves raised her head,
showing him the face of a woman of five and forty.  She was thin
and wiry, with brown eyes of a hungry hardness, and her nose marked
out a little red triangle with its congested tip and network of
minute blood-vessels.

"Good morning."

He was a stranger, and to this woman all strange men were
interesting, yet as Sorrell looked into her brown eyes he felt
himself growing inarticulate.

"I want to consult you--"

"You are wanting a servant?"

"No,--the fact is--"

But at this moment they were interrupted by the rush of a vital
presence into the shop, something highly scented and with the
suggestion of the soft friction of silks.  Its movements were large
and easy and swift, and bringing with them a sense of disturbing
and adventurous liveness.  It was at Sorrell's elbow, compelling
him to glance over his shoulder.  He saw the mass of tawny hair,
the broad and handsome face, the red mouth, the blue of the eyes.
There was something brutal in the face, a vivacity, a sensual
energy.  He felt as though a gust of wind had blown into the dark
shop, and that this large, blonde creature was stifling his
courage, overlaying it as though it were a feeble infant.  He
turned to the cage, only to find that Miss Hargreaves was all eyes
for the newcomer.

The thin woman was smiling.  Her face suggested some inward
excitement.

"Morning--Flo--dear--.  How are you?"

"Do I look ill?"

There was some element of sympathy between these two women,
contrasts though they were, but the lady of the tawny head was
studying Sorrell.  She stood aside, leaning easily against the
wainscoting, her blue knitted coat vivid against the old brown
wood.

"This gentleman--first.  Mine's not business."

Sorrell wished her with the devil.  He felt her eyes upon him, and
had he followed the line of least resistance he would have bolted
from the shop.  To stand there and blurt out his shabby business
while she embarrassed him and made him acutely self-conscious!

"Damn!" he thought, "haven't I decided to plunge?"

Miss Hargreaves was fingering the leaves of a ledger, and waiting
upon his silence.

"You said you wished to engage--"

"I want a situation."

"Oh--?  For yourself?  I'm sorry,--but--only domestic service--you
know."

"Of course," said Sorrell, stiff as a frightened cat, "that's what
I mean; a place as valet, or footman or something of that sort."

He felt that the two women despised him, especially that big,
blonde creature with her blueness and her hard world-wise eyes.
Why couldn't she clear out and leave him to the thin woman in the
cage?

Miss Hargreaves pretended to glance through the entries in her
ledger.

"I'm afraid I have nothing of that sort--nothing at all."

"I see."

"Why not try the Labour Exchange?"

"I might.  Thank you.  Sorry to have troubled you.  Good morning."

He turned abruptly, his back to the blonde woman and made for the
doorway.  He noticed how the worn boards of the floor squeaked
under his feet, an uncomfortable sound caused by a discomfited man.
He arrived at the doorway.  A voice reached after him like a
restraining hand.

"Hallo--one moment--"

Sorrell turned in the doorway, and saw the blonde woman sailing
down the shop, and he stood aside to let her pass, thinking that
his necessity was, no concern of hers, but she paused by a
revolving stand of picture postcards, and taking one at random,
gave Sorrell the full stare of her blue eyes.

"Serious?" she asked.

He looked at her rather blankly.

"I beg your pardon?"

Her smile puzzled him.

"Well--if you are--come across to the 'Angel' in a quarter of an
hour.  There's a job--vacant."

She passed out, almost brushing against him, and he watched her
cross the road and enter the arched gateway of the Angel Inn.  She
turned to the left towards a doorway, but she did not look back,
and he wondered why she had left him with a feeling of having been
crushed against a wall.  She had suggested immense strength, a
brutal and laughing vitality.

Sorrell went back suddenly into the shop, and along its dark length
to the woman in the cage.

"Excuse me--would you mind telling me--?"

She caught his meaning.

"That's Mrs. Palfrey, she runs the 'Angel.'"

"Oh.  Have you any idea--"

Miss Hargreaves looked at him queerly.

"They want an odd man--for the luggage and the boots and things--"

He stared at her thin face.

"Well,--why didn't you--"

"Because I didn't know," she said tartly.  "If it is any use to
you--well--there it is."



2


Sorrell stood on the footway and looked across at the Angel Inn.

The exterior of the building pleased him.  It had the creamy
whiteness of last year's paint, and a well proportioned cornice
that threw a definite shadow.  The window sashes were painted
maroon, and from the centre of the facade an old iron balcony
projected like the poop of a ship.  The gilded angel appeared to
have floated from off this balcony, and there could be no doubt as
to the rightness of the angel's political opinions.  She was a
solid Tory angel who had pointed the way heavenwards to generations
of Staunton crowds, carrying with her the eloquence of many
triumphant Tory orators.

Sorrell's glance travelled towards the arched entry, by which
coaches and carriages had entered and left the inn in the old days.
Above this entry a fine semi-circular window overhung the footwalk,
two tall Ionic pillars, painted white, supporting it.  Sorrell
noticed that the curtains were of green taffeta.  The window was
fitted with window boxes, but the flowers in the boxes were dead.

He strolled up the street, across the Market Square and into the
Close.  He was undecided.  He had glanced for a moment at the
shuttered windows of Mr. Verity's shop, only to realize how rapid
had been the drop in his expectations.  Odd man at a provincial
pub!  Assuredly he was landing with a bump at the very bottom of
the social precipice.

He sat down on the seat and watched the swans, casual and stately
creatures gliding as they pleased.

"Well--anyway," he reflected, "if one starts at the bottom one has
the satisfaction of feeling that one cannot drop any farther."

He thought of Christopher.

"I said I would get a job.  Any kind of job may be a ladder--to push
the boy up.  Or if he can climb up off my shoulders--"

He rose and walked back to the Angel Inn, and turning in at the
arched entry, found a doorway on his left that led into a broad
passage.  He was to learn to know that passage very well, and to
hate it and its slippery oil-cloth, and the stairs that went up
from it into the darkness.  A lounge enlarged itself on the right,
the windows looking into the courtyard; and opening from the other
side of the lounge were the office, the passage to the kitchen, the
"Cubby Hole," and the back entrance to the "bar"!

Sorrell paused in the passage, with his back to a map of the
surrounding country.  Two or three visitors were seated in the
lounge, smoking and reading the daily papers.  A ruddy woman in a
leather coat was turning over the pages of a Michelin guide.
Sorrell noticed that the tables in the lounge had an uncared-for
look.  Tobacco ash and used matches littered the trays.  There were
the marks of glasses.  The chair nearest to him needed the hands of
an upholsterer.  Moreover, the place had a distinctive and stuffy
smell.

Sorrell approached the office window, and as he did so a man
appeared at the doorway of the "Cubby Hole."  His suffused and
injected eyes sighted Sorrell.

"Good morning, sir."

"Good morning," said Sorrell.

The man was in his shirt sleeves, unshaven, and his close-cropped
head glistened white between his heavy shoulders; in fact his head
seemed attached directly to his broad, short body without the
interposition of a neck.  His shortness made his bulk more evident,
and even the effort of speaking appeared to render him short of
breath, for Sorrell saw the labouring of the ballooned waistcoat.
The man was not old, and yet he made Sorrell think of some poor,
obese, mangy old dog with bleared eyes and panting flanks.

"What can I do for you, sir?"

His bluffness had a certain pathos.  He appeared the master, a
hearty, loud voiced creature, and he was nothing but an obedient
sot.

"Mrs. Palfrey told me to call.  It's about--"

"About what--!"

"She is needing a man."

"Oh,--ah,--that's it."

The brain behind the blotched face functioned very slowly, nor did
the suffused blue eyes express any emotion.  They did not change
their look of solemn obfuscation.

The man moved to the door on which "The Cubby Hole" was painted in
black letters.  He opened it.

"Flo."

"Hallo."

"Someone to see you, a fellow after Tom's place."

"Show him in."

As Sorrell responded to the gesture of a fat hand he divined the
fact that this poor, rotten shell of a man--the bruised and swollen
fruit--was Florence Palfrey's husband.



He closed the door and stood by it, holding his hat in his hand.
It was a darkish room, with one window looking out upon a yard, and
beneath the window ran a long sofa full of crimson coloured
cushions.  The woman was sitting on the sofa fiddling with some
piece of needlework.

She did not tell Sorrell to sit down.

"Well, what's your trouble been?" she asked abruptly.

He answered her with equal abruptness.

"Is that any business of yours?"

Her eyes seemed to take in his thinness, the black and whiteness of
his rather solemn face with its little moustache and neatly brushed
black hair.  His quick reaction to her insolence did not displease
her.

"Do you want this job?" she asked.

"That depends--"

"On your pride, my lad.  Gentleman and ex-officer and all that!"

She pretended to fiddle with her needlework, and he looked down at
her and met her occasional and baffling glances.  He could not make
her out.  Her immense vitality, the brutal glow of her handsome
strength made him feel like an inexperienced and shy boy.  Why had
she told him to come to her?  Was it pity, good nature?

"I want work," he said.

"Married?"

"No.  But I have got a boy."

She gave him a comprehending stare.

"What made you come to Staunton?"

"I had a berth offered me.  At Verity's.  I came down yesterday.
He was dead."

She reflected for a moment, her head bent over her work.

"Rather a comedown for you."

"That's my affair."

He had a feeling that she was amused at finding a man-creature in
the corner of her cage.

"What about references, a character?"

"I could get you references from the Ex-Officers' Association.  My
name is Sorrell, Captain Sorrell."

"You will have to drop the 'captain.'  Temporary, I suppose?"

"Yes.  And what is the job?"

She dallied over revealing the details of the post he was to fill,
as though it piqued her to discover at her leisure how much mauling
the man-thing could bear.

"Of course--you are pretty raw.  The thing is--you won't be able to
put on side.  A man who cleans the boots in my house doesn't put on
side."

"Point No. 1," he said, "I clean the boots."

"And carry up luggage."

"Yes."

"And keep an eye on the yard and the garage.  By the way--know
anything of billiards?"

"I play."

"Then you know how to mark.  Then--there is the 'Bar.'  You will
have to scrub that out every morning, and give a hand sometimes
with the drinks."

"Right."

She felt him growing stiffer with the swallowing of each detail.
His pale face confronted her with an air of defiance.  With each
scratch of the claw he forced himself to a grimmer rigidity.  He
refused to wince.

"Anything else?"

"Oh--any odd job I may want done."

"Yes."

"And you will call me 'madam.'"

She gave him a stare, and in it was a brutal curiosity.  He was
like a slave in the arena, down in the sand, and she was wondering
whether he would cry for mercy.

"Very well, madam.  And may I ask--what I get out of the job?"

"Thirty bob a week--and your keep."

"Is that all?"

"Tips.  Don't forget the tips.  If a man's obliging--"

She gave an indescribable twitch of the shoulders.

"It's a posh job--in the right place.  You'll live in--of course."

Sorrell stood fingering his hat.

"And what about my boy?"

"I'm not engaging a boy.  We don't have children here.  You can
board him out somewhere, and he can go to school.  How old?"

"Eleven."

"Very well; it's up to you, Sorrell.  I can fill this place ten
times over in half an hour."

She saw the white teeth under the little black moustache, and she
understood how he was feeling.  He hated her.  He could have struck
her in the face, and his suppressed passion gave her the sort of
emotion that she found pleasurable.  She liked using her claws on
men, driving them to various exasperations, and not for a long time
had she had such a victim.

"I'll take it," he said.  "When shall I start?"

She had turned on the sofa to place a finger on the push of an
electric bell.  Sorrell heard the distant "burr" of it.  She sat as
though waiting for someone in order to keep him waiting.

"What did you say?"

Her manner was offhand.

"I asked you--madam--when I should start?"

"Right away.  I'll give you an hour to fix up that kid of yours."

"Thank you," he said, and opened the door to go.

But she called him back as her husband entered the room.

"I've taken this man on.  He is going to fetch his things."

Mr. Palfrey, stertorous and staring, was nothing but a fat figure
of consent.

"Right, my dear."

"That's all, Sorrell.  Be back in an hour."

It took Sorrell five minutes to reach the upper room of the house
in Fletcher's Lane, and he found Christopher at the window looking
out upon the world of Staunton's roofs.

"I have got a job, Kit."

The boy gave him that happy, radiant smile.

"I am glad, pater.  What is it?"

Sorrell took one of the first steps towards the greater courage.

"I'm porter at the Angel Hotel."




CHAPTER III


1


It took Stephen Sorrell the best part of a week to understand the
"atmosphere" of the Angel Inn at Staunton.

It was a little world in itself, a world dominated by that woman of
blood and of brass, Florence Palfrey.  The other humans were
little, furtive figures, scuttling up and down passages and in and
out of rooms.  There were the two waitresses, the cook, the two
chambermaids, and the apathetic young lady who helped in the bar.
Poor, besotted John Palfrey, waddling about like a pathetic yet
repulsive old dog, a creature of wind and of nothingness, was a
voice and nothing more.  He was perpetually fuddled.  His hands
trembled; his swollen waistcoat was never properly buttoned; even
his gossipings in the "Cubby Hole" were like the blunderings of a
brainless animal.  Sometimes Sorrell found him in tears.

"What is it, sir?"

"I've lost--my slippers--.  It's that damned pup--again."

He gulped.

"Who cares--?  I'm--I'm asking you?  Not a blessed--soul--"

Sorrell would find his slippers for him, or his pipe, though he
could not dry the poor creature's silly tears.  There were times
when he himself was on the edge of tears, tears of rage or of
exhaustion.  He went to bed each night, worn out in mind and in
body, so tired that he would lie awake and listen to the cathedral
clock, or to the noises of his own body.  The work was new to him;
he was on the go from morning to night; the luggage pulled him to
pieces.  Moreover, the food was execrable, and those slovenly meals
snatched anyhow and at any time in the slimy kitchen, turned sour
in his tired stomach.  Very often he was in pain.

But the thing that astonished him was the dirtiness of the place.
From the street the Angel suggested cleanliness and comfort; the
paint was fresh, the door-step white, but an observant eye might
have noticed the dead flowers in the window boxes.  Within, a
cynical slovenliness prevailed.  It was not safe to look under the
carpets, or to reflect upon the blankets hidden by the treacherously
clean sheets.  There were places that smelt.  As for the kitchen,
and that awful dark and greasy hole where the dishes were washed,
they made Sorrell wonder at the innocence of the people who ran
their cars into the Angel yard and ate the Angel dinner, and slept
in the Angel beds.

The place had a sly filthiness.  It was like a wench in silk
stockings and lace whose ablutions were of the scantiest.  Yet
there was money in the "house."  Trade was good; Florence Palfrey
never gave you the impression that she had to deny herself
anything.  She was brazen, voracious, insatiable, an animal with
bowels full of fire.  It was she who made out the bills, and in
most of them there was some flagrant item against which the easy
English visitor should have protested.  In nine cases out of ten
they remained mute and paid.  Florence Palfrey knew her world.  She
bluffed.  She chanced the protest, knowing that people would pay
and go away and grumble and forget.  She knew the world's moral
cowardice, its inertia.

Sorrell soon realized that the Angel as an hotel did not matter.
The coffee-room, the commercial-room, the bedrooms were of no
importance; what mattered was the bar.

Men came to booze.

In fact the "Cubby Hole" of the Angel Inn was a pivot, a fly-trap,
a cave into which all sorts of male things crowded, and drank, and
made silly noises and sillier laughter, and looked with lustful
eyes at Florence Palfrey.  At night the room would be full of them,
and even in the daytime it was rare for the room beside the bar to
be empty.  This cavity had a secret, conspiratorial air.  The men
who sneaked into it dreamed of catching old Palfrey's wife in a
mood of consent, and of exciting moments among the red cushions.

The "Cubby Hole" filled Sorrell with nausea.

He began to know the names and the faces and the callings of the
men who drifted into it.  There was Romer--the managing clerk to
Spens and Waterlove, a polite person with restless brown eyes and
an unpleasant tongue.  He had an amazing collection of stories.
Biles, who owned the big butcher's shop in High Street, would slip
in with his red, greasy and furtive face, and would spill silly
compliments from his coarse lips.  Sadler the "vet" went away each
night stiffly drunk, moving like a figure on wires, his eyes fierce
in his thin and debauched face.  But there were dozens of them,
farmers, tradesmen, commercial travellers, young bloods, all
slinking in like dogs, drinking, and lounging and lusting.

"The fools--!"

Sorrell called them fools, and his scorn of them was part of his
own pain.  He had to mark for some of them in the billiard room, to
listen to their dirty stories, to fetch them drinks.  It was their
amusement, and his torture, for often he was dropping with fatigue
and boredom, and yearning for the fools to go to bed.  And he would
hear the laughter in the "Cubby Hole," and the splurgings of these
tradesmen who made love like bullocks.

"Floe--on thou shining river."

That was Medlum's jest, Medlum who kept the book-shop and sold
prayer-books and Bibles and pretty-pretty art tourist guides, and
who had a wife and seven children.  He was a sandy man who looked
as though he had been dipped in a bleaching vat, all save his mouth
which was thin and red and lascivious.

They spent much money.

They would send poor old Palfrey up to bed, bemused, shuffling in
his slippers, grabbing at the handrail.  Often Sorrell would have
to help John Palfrey up the stairs, listening to his pantings and
to his fuddled confidences.

"She don't care--not a damn.  I've got water in me--.  I'm like a
grape, Steve.  What did the doctor call it?  Ass--i-tis.--Wish I
were dead."

He would pause at the top of the stairs, panting, and staring
solemnly at Sorrell.

"You mark my words--.  A coffin--in six months I'm asking you--.
Who cares--?"

He would weep.

"You're a good chap,--Steve.  Don't know why.  God,--I feel sick."

There were other things that Sorrell began to understand.  Women
came to the "Cubby Hole"; Miss Hargreaves from across the way, red
nosed, excited, ready with thin, hard giggles; the lady who kept
the fruit shop and who looked like an over-ripe plum, and who was
always protesting that she could not bear to be tickled.  "I'll
scream."

These earthly souls soon ceased to puzzle him, but the woman of
brass remained an enigma.  She bullied these people, even when she
treated them with brutal good-humour.  She knew exactly how to
handle each fool-man, and how to repulse some flushed face that was
breathing too near to hers.  There were times when Sorrell felt
that she despised the whole crowd as much as he did.

And since a man must wonder, he went in pursuit of her motives.
Did her huge vitality suck something from her herd of swine?  Was
it money?  Did it cause poor Palfrey to disobey his doctor's orders
and to shuffle nearer to the inevitable coffin?

She was shrewd, like a strong and cunning animal.  She never lost
her dignity, or allowed the amorous clowns to take liberties.

"I have seen something like her before," he thought.  "Where--?"

One wet night he remembered.  The den was full of her Circe troop,
and Sorrell, going in with a tray of glasses, saw her sitting on
the sofa and looking over the heads of her adorers.  Yes, he
remembered.  He had seen a lioness at the London Zoo, couched, and
looking just like that, savagely and superbly indifferent.  He
could remember the way the tawny beast's eyes had looked over the
heads of the humans fidgeting and chattering outside the railings,
those tame people, those monkeys.  The lioness, couched up above,
eyes fixed upon some distance of her own, had ignored them.

But she met Sorrell's eyes, and a sudden glitter came into them.

He was closing and locking the hotel door when he heard her calling
him.

"Stephen!"

He went to the door of the den.  She was sitting on the sofa,
yawning, and with the naturalness of a fine animal.

"What damned fools!"

She looked at him, and picked up a cigarette from the table.

"I want a match."

He produced a box, and striking a match, held it for her to light
her cigarette.  She blew smoke.  Her eyes lifted suddenly, and he
saw the big black pupils and the vivid blue of each iris.

"You look fagged."

"It's the end of the day."

"You ought to get off more.  You work too hard."

Sorrell's eyes dropped.

"If I could get out for an hour--after tea.  There's my boy; I
don't see much of him--"

Instantly he was aware of the fact that he had offended her.

"O--your boy!  What's he doing?"

"Going to school."

"The Council School?"

"Well, it's that--or--"

"A summons.  All right,--clear out for an hour each day.  Have you
locked up?"

"Yes, madam."

He had a glimpse of her profile as he passed the door on his way to
the stairs.  She was smoking and looking at and through the wall
opposite her.  The corner of her mouth was drawn down and she was
frowning.



2


Sorrell had particular moments in the day when life was worth
living.  One of the moments was when he got to his attic at night,
and counted up the day's tips and entered the amount in a little
black note-book; the other moment of happiness came to him with a
daily glimpse of the clean, frank face of his boy.

Kit would come to the arched entry, and Sorrell would meet him
there, and Kit would see his father in the old, familiar blue serge
suit grown more shiny and less neatly creased about the trousers.
There were times when Sorrell wore an apron, but he contrived to
appear before Christopher minus the apron.  His pride allowed
itself this little satisfaction.

They would stand together for five minutes beside one of the white
Ionic pillars supporting the bow window of the dining-room, the boy
looking up into his father's face.  He was an observant child, and
his love for Sorrell had undergone a transfiguration.  Christopher
noticed changes in his father's face; it looked more waxy; there
were little wrinkles as of a troublesome knot of effort lying
between the eyebrows.  Sorrell was thinner; he stooped more.

But Sorrell's eyes smiled.

"How's she feeding you, son?"

Christopher had no complaint to make of the food that Mrs. Barter
gave him at No.13 Fletcher's Lane.  She was a good woman.

"She's been mending my shirts, pater."

"Ha," said Sorrell, "has she!"--and glanced at the boy's suit.
Yes, that fresh face contrasted with the shabby clothes.

"Time I took you to the tailor, my lad.  I think I can manage it
next week."

Christopher could not analyse all that lay behind his father's
eyes, but he felt the warmth of the love in them.  He noticed that
his father's eyes had a filminess, a veiled and secret delight, a
moment of deep dreaming.  They were the eyes of a man who was
thirsty, and to whom the boy brought pure, clean water.  Christopher
refreshed him.  His candid eyes and the brown warmth of his clear
skin were unblemished fruit after the rottenness of those squashed
and purple souls, those men who made Sorrell think of faces trodden
on by an ever-passing crowd of sordid and unclean thoughts.  His boy
had youth, a future, possibilities; he was the sun in the east.

And poor Palfrey!

"My God!" Sorrell thought; "one must hold on to something, even if
it is nothing but a clean shirt and a piece of soap."

Christopher never asked questions, awkward and embarrassing
questions.  He accepted his father's job, and he understood the
significance of it far more subtly than Sorrell knew.  It reacted
on the boy, and deepened his sensitive seriousness.

At school he was very careful of his clothes.  He did not say much
about the school.  It was all right.  Better than London.  What did
he do in the evenings?  O,--went for walks, mostly.  There were
woods outside the town, and the river.

Those few minutes were very precious to Sorrell, but they
tantalized him.  His boy was so apart from him all through the day,
and whenever they met he would look eagerly at that frankly radiant
face for the shadow of any possible blemish.

He felt so responsible, greedily responsible.  The boy's clean eyes
made the life at the Angel possible.

On one occasion when he had walked a little way along the footpath
with Christopher he became aware of a face at a window.  The woman
was watching them.  He caught her bold, considering eyes fixed on
the boy.

He went back rather hurriedly into the passage, and met her there.

"That your kid, Stephen?"

"Yes, madam."

"He's not a bit like you.  The mother's dead, I suppose?"

"I divorced her," said Sorrell, pale and stiff about the lips.

Usually, it was about eleven at night when he went slowly up the
narrow staircase to the top landing where the staff slept.  He
carried a candle.  Sometimes he would hear giggling and chattering
in one of the girl's rooms, but he always went straight to his own,
shut the door, put the candlestick on the chair, sat down on the
bed and turned out his pockets.  At this hour he did his precious
calculations.  His little black note-book was a model of neatness,
with credit and debit entries.


     July 7.  Wages    L1 10 0     Christopher--Board L1 0 0

       "  7.  Tips         4 6     Tobacco  ..  ..       2 0

       "  8.    "          3 0     Tooth brush  ..       1 0

       "  9.    "            0     Christopher--Boots  1 0 0

       " 10.    "          7 0

       " 11.    "          5 6

       " 12.    "          1 0

       " 13.    "          9 0


He found that his tips averaged about twenty-five shillings a week.
He paid Mrs. Barter a pound a week for Christopher's keep.  He
spent a few odd shillings on himself.  He was contriving to save
about a pound a week.  L52 a year?  If his health held out?

Already he had a plan for his boy, an objective that showed like a
distant light through the fog of the days' confusion.

"It's my business to do my job thoroughly," he thought, "in order
to get Kit a better one.  I'll save every damned penny."

Life, the life that should have appealed to the cruder of his own
appetites, had ceased to attract him, and all his energy appeared
to concentrate itself and to flow in one particular channel.  He
developed a peculiar passion for thoroughness, even though he might
curse the inanimate things upon which he had to exercise this
thoroughness.  Queerly enough, much of his thinking and his
philosophizing were done while he was cleaning the various pairs of
boots and shoes left outside the bedroom doors.  He did not mind
this job,--though scrubbing the bar floor made his gorge rise.  It
was like cleaning out a pen where unclean animals had left their
ordure.  But boots--!  Boots had character.  He got into the way of
estimating the owners of the boots by their footgear.  He had a
preference for neat brown shoes, gentlemen's shoes, and his
favourites came in for more polish.  Young women's shoes--were they
ever so chic--gave him no thrills.  The boots he detested were the
boots worn by a particular type of middle-aged commercial
traveller, men who trod heavily and whose waistcoats bulged.  He
never put a hand inside one of these "swine's trotters" as he
called them.

But with a free hour each day snatched from the Lioness's rather
jealous paws, Sorrell began to see more of Christopher.  He took
his hour off from eight till nine, for he had found that too many
motorists arrived after tea and he was not there to handle the
luggage and to carry it up from the garage.  He wished to be in
evidence because of the subsequent tips.  But in these long summer
evenings he and Christopher wandered together; sometimes they chose
the Close, on other evenings they wandered out a little way into
the country; if it was wet Mrs. Barter let them sit in her parlour.
She was kind to Sorrell she offered to do his mending for him.

Christopher loved trees.  There was a particular elm in the Close,
a green giant with a ring seat round its bole, under which the boy
liked to sit.  Nor was Sorrell sorry to sit.  It conserved boot
leather, and rested his tired feet.  Kit had noticed on their short
country rambles that his father walked as though his feet hurt him.
He had noticed--too--that one of the boots was patched.

"Your turn next--pater?"

"What for, son?"

"Boots," said the boy.

He had fatherly moments towards Sorrell.  He too had his plans,
vague ambitions, and impulse that pushed him towards some
magnificent job in the doing of which he would earn much money.  He
had sensed the effort in his father's life; he dreamed of taking
his share of the effort.

"I can start work at fifteen, pater."

Sorrell was astonished.

"I hope not," he said, and glancing from the boy's face to the
spreading branches of the elm he saw life and its effort
symbolized.

"Most people grow like cabbages.  Look at this tree.  How many
years--eh?  O,--it was not in a hurry.  We--are not going to be in
a hurry."

The boy's eyes were questioning.

"Not as long as that--With you--sweating--and doing everything--"

"It's my job, Kit."

He looked mysterious.

"I've got plans.  The thing is--Well, you don't know yet,--what you
will want to do--I mean.  No blind alleys, or office stools."

"You mean--dad--what I would like to be?"

"That's it."

"Seems--one's got to earn money."

"Wait a bit.  There's something better: how you earn it.  The real
job matters more than the money."

"Yes," said Christopher very solemnly, "the sort of thing you love
doing.  Well,--I suppose I shall find out."




CHAPTER IV


1


An incident that occurred about five weeks after Sorrell's arrival
at the Angel startled him into a sudden aliveness towards the drift
of other people's temperamental whimsies.

It was early in the morning, before the paying part of the hotel
had descended to his breakfast, and Sorrell was down on his knees
in the lounge cleaning up the spilt contents of one of the ash
trays.  Someone had knocked it off the table the previous night.
The two waitresses were busy in the coffee-room, and one of them, a
little sallow girl, with a shock of black, bobbed hair, running out
towards the kitchen with a serviette over her arm, saw Sorrell
kneeling.  He had had glances from the girl; she was always passing
him in the passage, but Sorrell was too tired for life's little
frills.  He had forgotten the fact that he might be attractive to
women.  Anyhow, the girl slipped the napkin over Sorrell's eyes,--
and drawing it tight, bent down till her mop of black hair touched
his head.

"Guess who it is--?"

She giggled, but before Sorrell had made any effort to free
himself, the napkin was whisked away, and he had a glimpse of
Millie's slim legs disappearing urgently down the passage leading
to the kitchen.  Someone had come down the stairs, and was passing
behind him, and glancing round, he saw Florence Palfrey going
towards the office.

It was the most trivial of incidents, a mere piece of hoydenish
mischief, but when the staff of the Angel sat down to its midday
meal Sorrell realized that the little dark girl was not present.

"What's become of Millie?"

The other waitress gave him a sour look.

"You--ought to know."

"But I don't know."

"She--sacked her."

"What for?"

"Romping."

Not much was said, though it was obvious that the other girls felt
themselves injured by the peremptory ejection of a comrade, but
they were afraid of the Lioness, and they mistrusted Sorrell--the
man.  He became aware of the mistrust; it made him uncomfortable;
moreover he had felt a sudden, sordid tremor of fear.

That which had happened to Millie might happen to him, and he knew
that for the boy's sake such a thing must not happen.

The keenness of his own anxiety was a humiliation, and he accepted
the humiliation, explaining it to himself quite frankly as though
he were explaining the wearing of a shabby suit of clothes.  He was
alarmed at the possibility of his being pushed out into the street,
of losing his thirty shillings, his keep, and his tips.  Yet this
fear shocked him.  That a man should be afraid of being evicted
from such a caravanserai!  He had not realized how much the Angel
Inn had become his "straw," and that he was ready to cling to it
with the instinctive terror of a man who feared the unknown.

That afternoon he spent himself in a passion of activity.  He went
about eagerly looking for work.  He made work.  He attacked the
various slovenlinesses of the place.

He was aware of the constant nearness of the woman.  She--too--
appeared to be in a restless and active mood.  She kept coming out
of the office or the "Cubby Hole," going out or up the stairs and
returning.  She saw Sorrell in all sorts of postures and places, on
his knees polishing the "surround" of the lounge, cleaning the
glass panels of the doors, carrying out the aspidistras and washing
them in the yard.  She had one particular glimpse of him doubled up
under the big walnut table in the passage, but what he was doing
there she did not pretend to know.

Though she passed him a dozen times that afternoon she neither
spoke to him nor appeared to look in his direction, but each of
them was conscious of the other.  The feline intuition of the woman
divined Sorrell's fear.  He was like some busy thing in a cage,
propitiatory, eagerly turning a wheel.  Also, she knew that he was
cursing her, himself, and his activities.

Captain Sorrell, M.C.!

She was moved to brutal laughter, but her laughter was silent.
There were thoughts in her too that purred.  She had Sorrell on his
knees, and she could tell him to get up or remain there, to come or
go.  And there were inclinations in her that were whetted by her
sense of power.

"Damn the woman!  Is she going to--?"

He had a queer feeling that her passings and repassings were not
haphazard.  They concerned him.  She took notice of him by ignoring
him; her seeming indifference had an intimate and veiled
significance.

He had carried in a pair of steps and was polishing one of the big
mirrors in the lounge.  He saw himself in it, his anxious, sallow
face, the sweep of the hand carrying the wash-leather.  He threw
silent abuse at his own reflection, that sedulously active and
worried creature.

"You wretched failure,--you grovelling idiot!  Rushing about to
create a good impression--"

Suddenly, he saw her figure drift into the mirror.  She was
standing behind him, looking at him.  He fancied that he detected
amusement in her eyes, the kind of amusement a lioness might be
expected to enjoy if a lioness had a sense of humour.

"Very busy to-day,--Stephen?"

"Yes, madam."

He went on with his polishing, believing that he was going to hear
about the silly incident of the morning.  He waited.  She stood and
watched him for fully a minute, and he felt the back of his neck
and his ears all flushed.  Confound her!  What did she want?  Why
didn't she go away, or stick her claws into him and have done with
it?

He reached up to a far corner of the glass, and when next he
searched for her reflection, he found that she had gone.  He was
conscious of relief, but the sense of relief was only partial.  He
felt her somewhere.  Where?

The door of the "Cubby Hole" was wide open, and he could see a part
of the interior reflected in the mirror, a strip of green carpet, a
red cushion, part of the frame and glass of the window.  She was in
there, sitting on the sofa, watching him.  He saw the gleam of her
hair, and two eyes, very dark, like the eyes of a creature watching
him from the gloom of a wood.  He fancied that she smiled.

He tried to concentrate his senses upon the mere glassy surface of
the mirror, and to keep his vision and its accompanying thoughts
from passing through to the deeps of it where the woman was, but he
could not help focussing her.  She remained there, watching him,
enigmatic, motionless, like a great tawny cat.  Sorrell decided to
leave the mirror.  He came down the steps, and was folding them up
when he heard her voice.

"Stephen--"

"Yes, madam."

"There is a glass in here.  It hasn't been touched since--since--"

She laughed as he stood in the doorway with the steps and bucket.

"Since Adam and Eve."

Sorrell obeyed her with an air of great briskness.  The mirror was
over the mantelpiece, a gilt-framed thing of the "Regency" period,
and when he got on the steps he found that the top of the frame was
black with dust.  Florence Palfrey had picked up a paper that had
been lying on the sofa, but instead of reading it she fanned
herself with it, for the day was hot.

"Anyone in the lounge?"

"No."

Sorrell came down the steps to dip his leather in the bucket.

"Very warm to-day."

She did not reply, but watched him get to work, and his movements
told her that he was nervous.  She was satisfied in a part of
herself.  And then she began to talk to him with an air of casual
intimacy, and in a way that she had never talked before.  He was
both Captain Sorrell, M.C., and her "boots" and porter.

"Rather different from the war, Stephen."

He agreed.  He felt strangely alert.

"How did you get your M.C.?"

"I didn't know--"

"Oh,--I know most things.  Well?  How?"

"Oh, in a trench raid."

"Were you raiding the others?"

"No, madam, the others were raiding us."

He was working hard at the mirror, with his back to her, and
somehow he felt he had to keep a distance, though he could not
analyze the feeling.

"Well,--what happened?  Don't be so dashed modest."

"The Germans came into our trench."

"Yes."

"And they stuck some of our chaps.  It's a nasty tool, the bayonet.
And there was a bit of a panic.  I was in a deuce of a funk."

"That's funny!"

"It wasn't at all funny.  But something seemed to go off inside me--
and I saw red."

She nodded her head.  She was considering him, eyes half closed and
fiercely languid.

"So you can see red.  Well,--I shouldn't have thought it.  It's
rather--interesting.  You must have been stronger then."

"I was.  But it's not mere beef--"

"No.  Not bullock's strength.  Wounded--I suppose?"

"Twice."

"Badly?"

"A bit of H.E. in the chest--the second time.  I had to come home--
after that."

He both felt and heard the rustling of the paper as she fanned
herself, a disturbing sound, like the rustling of leaves or lace.
He had finished cleaning the mirror, and he came down the steps
rather hurriedly, folded them up, and grabbed the bucket.

"Anything else, madam?"

She observed him steadily above the rustling paper.

"No.  You are an odd fish, Stephen."

He stared, and she laughed.

"Odd as odd.  Go and see if you can find anything else to polish."



2


From that day Sorrell began to perceive Florence Palfrey more and
more vividly as the tawny creature, the lioness who had him shut up
in her cage.  She did not say much, but she managed to convey to
him the impression that he was dependent on her, and that she had
but to raise a paw--.  Her way of dealing with him was both subtle
and simple; it mingled moments of provocation and of caressing
cruelty with sudden flashes of naked intimacy.  Her badness was so
unclothed at times that it frightened him.

For Sorrell was thinking of the boy, and his thoughts turned to
escape from any entanglement, a shabby affair with a woman who was
both elemental and cynical.  He did not want it.  He was tired of
life as a merely personal adventure, and when this thing loomed
over him he realized that he was living vicariously, and that the
very roots of the will to live drew their substance front the youth
of his boy.

He was frightened.

For he had a most absurd feeling that he was being kept and fed and
played with in order to be devoured.  He divined her ruthlessness,
her ferocity, her stealthy, amused strength.  For some reason he
had piqued her, and he wondered why.  Was she intrigued by the fact
that he was a gentleman handling luggage and cleaning boots?  Or
had the obvious men, the blatant, butcherly people who stormed into
her den ceased to pique her?  He could imagine a lioness being
bored and looking about her for some new sort of victim.

Moreover, Sorrell was helping poor old Palfrey up to bed, and
though Florence Palfrey's husband might be no thing of loveliness,
the very act of helping a man begets a sense of comradeship.  John
Palfrey was derelict; no one bothered about him now; he might shout
feebly down the stairs with that husky voice of his, and no one
would take any notice.

"Hallo,--hot water,--shaving water--"

On more than one occasion Sorrell found him standing on the landing
in his old blue dressing-gown, weeping.

"I--want--my breakfast."

He had it in his bedroom, and it was Sorrell who took upon himself
the duty of carrying up poor Palfrey's shaving water and his
breakfast tray, for in Palfrey he saw the husk of a man, a man who
had been devoured.

"You're a good chap.  Steve.  I'm of no account now.  Who cares?"

"I do, sir."

Palfrey made a sudden clutch at his arm.

"Don't you ever marry, Steve; don't you ever let a woman get you.
She'll eat you up."

And Sorrell understood.

It happened one evening when he had helped the dying man to bed
that Sorrell found Florence on the landing outside the door.  The
landing was badly lit, and she was standing by the stairs with one
hand on the rail as though in the act of pausing.  She was in low-
necked dress of black, with her arms bare to the shoulders.

Sorrell still had his hand on the handle of John Palfrey's door.
Her sudden presence there agitated him; he felt that he had to get
by her quickly and go downstairs.  He could smell the particular
scent she used.

He walked towards her,--and remaining where she was she closed the
stairs to him unless he should push rudely past close to the wall.

"Put him to bed, have you?"

She looked Sorrell full in the eyes as though her stare could beat
down any independence that was in him.

"He won't last long now."

Her tone was callously significant.  It was as though she was
trying to convey to him her appreciation of his soft-heartedness,
to humour something childish in him, even while she conspired with
him as to the future.  O, well, she could lie sleekly in her cage
and wait for this odd fish who boasted a sort of absurd integrity
of his own.

Sorrell felt shocked.  Something flamed in him; he could have
struck her, thrown her down the stairs, with furious abuse, but
behind her he seemed to see the face of his boy.

"It is pretty rotten for a man--" he said.

He felt ashamed before her.  His eyes looked over into the well of
the stairs, and then--with an abrupt and awkward "Excuse me," he
pushed past her and went below.

He felt that he needed air, to be alone somewhere under the stars,
and daring the desertion of his post he went out into the High
Street, and along it into the Market Square.  The place was
deserted.  He saw a great yellow moon hanging in the tops of the
elms, and beside it the blackness of the cathedral towers.  He
walked up and down, hatless, and in his shirt sleeves.  He felt
that he wanted to rush round to Fletcher's Lane, and catch up
Christopher and hold him.

"The one clean thing left to me," he thought.

His lips made a movement as of spitting.

"Good God!  That a man should be left to die like that,--like a
piece of rotting meat in a corner!  If I should have to die like
that?  Damn her--!"

He was in a fever to escape,--but how?  Necessity held him chained.
If he broke the chain and plunged?  He was saving money, just a
little money, and if he could win a breathing space he might have
time to look about him.  It was the boy who mattered.  If he the
man--surrendered--and allowed himself to be cajoled and to be
devoured--?

But why this niceness?  How easy it would be for him--She had
hinted so broadly.  But his soul's exclamation was a "Pah!"  To
step into that poor sot's shoes, and to be pushed eventually over
the edge of all decencies when the feline creature was tired of
him.

No.  He struggled.  The nature of the struggle was vague and
elemental, and he did not visualize it as one of those primitive
crises in a man's life when something that is stronger than his
mere appetites pushes him a step higher up the precipice.  He clung
to a prejudice, and to the one human thing that mattered.  He was
not going down into the dubious muck, and to feel himself smeared
with it when he met the eyes of his boy.

"Damn her," he said, "I'll fight through," and he went back to the
hotel with his eyes staring as they had stared at horrible moments
during the war.



3


Sorrell's frenzy of activity continued.  It seemed as though he
were trying to lose himself in a desperate combat with the
multifarious slovenliness of the Angel Inn, to hide himself in the
dust cloud of his own energy.  He was never still.  He ran round
and round in his cage, sweeping, polishing, tidying, carrying
things.  His indefatigable activity impressed itself even upon the
loungers in the "Cubby Hole."

"That chap of yours seems full of juice, Flo."

"Well,--why not?  He doesn't belong to a Trade Union."

"Queer sort of beggar.  Looks at you as though he thought your pub
wanted a wash."

"That's not unlikely."

"Oh,--I say!  That's a bit thick.  Hallo, Bob, old bean.  Crush in
here.  What's yours?"

In this vulgar world Sorrell's nausea became too chronic and too
real.  He began to be afraid of his meals, and to wake at night
with a knotted pain under his ribs.  He thought of going to see a
doctor, but it was not a doctor that he needed, and he knew it, but
he did arrive at the more economical expedient of slipping into a
chemist's shop.  There were no other customers, and Sorrell made
his confession across trays of soap and washing gloves and
toothbrushes.

"I've got indigestion.  Can you give me something?"

The chemist was a colourless little man with thin and peculiarly
compressed lips.

"Pain after meals?"

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Oh, it varies."

He met the man's scrutinizing eyes.

"Look as though you wanted a tonic.  Run down.  I'll give you
something."

Sorrell sacrificed a precious three and ninepence for a bottle of
tonic and some tablets.

"Help you to get rid of the wind, you know."

The stuff did him no good, for he was worried, and overworking
himself, and eating bad food and rushing about after he had eaten
it.  The constant pain and the discomfort began to depress him; he
felt less and less of a man, and more and more of a sick animal in
a cage.  He had moods of melancholic apathy when a voice within him
played tempter, saying--"What's the use?  You are a failure.  Even
your wretched body is a failure, Why not give in, slide, go down
the shoot?  After all, what is the fuss about?  A woman and a boy
and an adventure that most men would laugh at?  You're a fool."

Kit saw a change in his father.  Sorrell's eyes looked strained,
and the whites of them were muddy; he stooped more, and appeared
uneasy when he was sitting on the seat under the elm.  A
discouraged figure.  And yet Christopher did not like to ask
questions.

"The work makes you rather tired, pater."

"Oh,--a bit.  I shall get used to it."

"Couldn't there be--something else?"

"I've got a plan," said Sorrell.

He was always talking about that plan.  The more difficult it
seemed of attainment the more obsessed was he by the contemplation
of it.  His plan was like a hypothetical sun invisible during the
greater part of an English summer, but there, and liable to shine
some day next year.  He forced himself to appear confident before
the boy, for he realized that Christopher was the only living
person who believed in him, and he wanted Christopher to go on
believing in him, especially when he was in danger of ceasing to
believe in himself.  It was suggestion, the dear--trusting stimulus
of youth.

One day he was sick, and he went about with a face all pinched and
the colour of cream, making himself do things.  He was tidying up a
disorder of papers in the commercial room when the woman glided in.

"You don't look well, Stephen."

There was a seductive kindness in her voice, and he mumbled
something about his dinner not having agreed with him.

"You fuss too much," she said.

He went on tidying the papers, feeling that her presence radiated a
false sunlight.

"You--might--do much less--if you cared, you odd fish."

He understood her.

"It's my job," he said.

"As you please."

When she left him he sat down in one of the chairs, and held his
head in his hands.




CHAPTER V


1


Sorrell was leaning against one of the white Ionic pillars that
supported the bow window when the claret-coloured car drew up
outside the Angel Hotel.  The car was a two-seater, and in it sat a
man wearing a grey suit and a soft grey hat.  He was very brown.
He beckoned to Sorrell.

"Any rooms here?"

"Yes, sir."

The quality of Sorrell's voice surprised the man, and he showed his
surprise by looking at Sorrell for half a second longer than was
necessary.

"Right.  The car won't be in the way here?"

"No, sir.  Would you care to go straight into the garage?"

"Presently," said the man.

He climbed out and stood on the pavement, glancing up at the
windows of the hotel.  He appeared to be about Sorrell's age, one
of those square men, but not too square, with a fresh brown skin,
blue eyes, and a firm but human mouth.  He moved easily, and you
gathered from his steady eyes and his rather measured movements
that he was a deliberate person, no great talker, a man with
courage, but one who never rushed at life haphazard.  There was
something about the man that attracted Sorrell, his freshness, his
obvious strength, the calm way his eyes looked at you and then gave
you a sudden and pleasant smile.  Sorrell had known one or two such
men in the war.  They had made good soldiers.

The man entered the hotel, and Sorrell remained by the car.  He
liked the colour of it, and the compact brightness of the dash-
board, and the neatly covered leather hood.  He himself would have
liked to possess such a car, but he did not grudge the man in grey
the possession of it.

Sorrell heard the pleasant and deliberate voice at his elbow.

"All right.  I'll drive in."

From the way the newcomer looked about him in the Angel yard,
Sorrell divined his disapproval.  Nor did Sorrell approve of the
yard.

"No lock ups?"

"No, sir."

"I want an inner tube mending."

"I'll take it round to a garage for you, sir.  Luggage in the
dicky?"

"Yes."

Sorrell extracted the luggage, a massive leather kit-bag, a
suitcase, and an attache case.

"Do you know the number of your room, sir?"

"Fifteen."

The visitor paused at the office window to sign his name in the
registration book, while Sorrell carried the luggage upstairs.  No.
15 was no better and no worse than the average bedroom at the
Angel, and though Sorrell had grown accustomed to the rooms, there
were moments when he appreciated their depressing casualness.  He
unfastened the straps of the kit-bag, and went downstairs, to find
the visitor talking to Mrs. Palfrey, and Sorrell came by the
impression that it was the woman who had begun the conversation.

He turned to Sorrell.

"Which way?"

"This way, sir.  First floor, second room on the left."

The man disappeared up the stairs, and Sorrell glanced at the
visitors' book.

"Thomas Roland.  London."

The handwriting was like the man, broad and deliberate and without
affectation.

Five minutes later Sorrell, who was rearranging the magazines and
papers in the lounge, fancied that he heard a bell ringing with
aggressive persistency.  It was an upstairs bell, and on going to
investigate he found Mr. Roland standing outside the door of No 15.

"Isn't there a maid on duty?"

"There should be, sir."

"I have no towels and no soap, and no one has brought me any hot
water."

"Sorry, sir."

"And look here--at this."

Sorrell looked, and gave a little lift of the shoulders.

"These confounded wenches--.  I'll see to it myself, sir."

He went out on to the landing calling "Maggie--Maggie," but no
Maggie materialized, for she was somewhere below at one of the many
back doors, and busy with the other sex, so Sorrell went to the
chambermaid's closet, and collected towels and hot water, and
purloined a new cake of soap from another bedroom.

Mr. Roland was unpacking his kit-bag and had thrown a pair of
orange and blue striped pyjamas on the bed.

"Thanks."

That was all he said, but he smiled at Sorrell and gave him one of
those quietly observant glances, and Sorrell went below feeling
warmed by something pleasant and human and wholesome in the man.
He wondered who Thomas Roland was, and what he did.

Meanwhile, Roland had paused in his unpacking, and was sitting on
the bed and examining the room as though it interested him.  Its
deficiencies, its perfunctory slipshodness interested him.  He
happened to be interested in rooms, and he was a man of detail.

His mental comments followed immediately upon his visual
perceptions.

"No wardrobe.  Now--where the devil--?  Faded green paint--dirty
paper--strings of pink roses between black and white lines.  One
hook off door.  Carpet--h'm--I wonder what a vacuum cleaner would
fetch out of it.  Brass bed, one knob missing.  Yellow chest of
drawers, one handle missing."

He got up.

"I bet the drawers stick, and that the paper inside them is last
year's Daily Mail."

He was right.

His observations ran on.

"Swing mirror plugged into place with a wad of paper.  Blind torn.
Japanese mats on floor need burning.  Slop pail minus a handle.
Marble top of wash-hand stand stained.  Tooth glass smeary.  Over
washing-stand advertisement of Jeyes' Fluid.  Over mantelpiece,
tariff and advertisement of local tradesmen.  Sheets need mending.
Blankets--yes--just so!"

He resumed his unpacking and his meditations.

"How many of these places have I stayed in during the last month?
A dozen--I suppose.  And only one decently run place in the dozen.
Slovenly holes, especially in these cathedral places.  Here's a
great opportunity under the noses of our innkeepers, and all they
seem to think of is the booze and the 'bar'!"

He put out his boots.

"The cheek of them--too.  Give you every sort of slovenliness and
inattention, and bad food, and then charge you top prices.  Now
take this place.  Nobody seems to care a damn, except that porter
chap.  No supervision, no discipline, no conscience."

His sponge-bag was extracted from a brightly polished cavalry mess
tin, the two halves of which found receptacles for his sponge,
washing gloves, nail-brush and tooth-brush.  He glanced at the
cracked sponge-basin belonging to the inn.

"No thanks!  Obviously--no.  Now--if that tow-headed female
downstairs did her job properly instead of--.  O, well, that's the
curse of these places; a lot of soaking fools, and yellow-headed
women.  But what I never can understand is--why--if people take on
a job--they can't do it properly.  And yet--not three in ten can.
Socialism!  What rot!"

He lit a cigarette and looked out of the window into a back yard
that contained the rotting relics of an old brougham, a pile of
bottles, and a derelict dog-kennel.

"Cheerful prospect!  I wonder what that porter fellow is doing
here?  Queer chap.  Takes trouble, but looks ill.  A gentleman's
voice--and eyes.  Does his job."

It was five o'clock, and Mr. Roland went downstairs into the
lounge, and rang for the waitress, for he desired tea.  He had to
ring twice before a girl appeared as though the last thing in the
world she was expected to do was to answer a bell.

"Tea, please."

"For one?"

"For one."

She went away, and Mr. Roland waited twenty minutes, and when the
tea tray did arrive he noticed that the girl had forgotten to fill
the milk jug.

"I take milk with my tea."

She whisked the jug away.  Sorrell was tucking letters under the
tapes on the green letter-board, and he happened to turn and catch
Mr. Roland's eye.  A faint, sympathetic and understanding smile
seemed to pass between them.

"You haven't forgotten that tube?"

"No, sir.  It has been done.  I put it in the dicky."

"Did you pay?"

"Yes, sir.  Two shillings."

"Thanks."

A two-shilling piece passed from Roland's hand to Sorrell's and
again their eyes met and smiled.

Sorrell felt cheered, though he had no great reason for feeling
cheered.  He went upstairs to No. 15, possessed himself of Mr.
Roland's brown shoes, two pairs of them, and cleaned them as they
had not been cleaned for a month.



2


Dinner was late.

Roland was chatting in the lounge with a big and genial person who
had grown suddenly testy with hunger.  The genial man was asking
his casual acquaintance to explain to him how it was that a certain
stereotyped piece of work that was done day by day could not be
made to keep pace with the clock.

"We abuse machines--but hang it all--they have rhythm."

Roland laughed softly.

"Well--I don't suppose it will be anything great when it does come.
And I think I could give you the menu."

"Guessing?"

"No, the law of averages.  We shall begin with tomato soup, go on
to tough chops--boiled potatoes and cabbage, pass thence to fruit
salad, tinned apricots and stewed prunes.  And we shall finish with
rather bad cheese."

"I don't care what it is," said the testy man.  "I feel inclined to
go and hammer that gong."

The gong sounded at ten minutes to eight, and Roland, strolling
into the dining-room, saw the usual number of small tables arranged
under the window and along the wall.  Each table had a cruet stand
from which most of the plating had long ago been worn away, and a
vase of perfunctory flowers.  A long table occupied the centre of
the room.

Roland waited for the waitress, his pose that of the interested
observer.

"One, sir?"

"Please."

The waitress indicated the long table, and Roland smiled.

"I prefer a table to myself."

"We have only tables for two or four, sir."

"Are all these tables reserved?"

"No."

He smiled again.

"If I can get a bedroom for one--I suppose I can get a table.  You
don't put me in a dormitory--thank you."

He was one of those unusual men who not only thought of things to
say, but actually said them, and said them with a smile.

He was given his table.

"Have you a menu card?"

"No, sir."

"What are we going to have?"

"Tomato soup.  Roast beef and veg.  Fruit salad."

Roland caught the eye of the testy man who was unfolding his napkin
at the next table.

"I gave you the menu.  There is only one alteration."

"What's that?"

"Roast beef instead of chops."

"Ah--!"

"And 'veg.'  A vague and comprehensive word that--veg."

Wandering out afterwards in the cool of the summer evening under a
tumultuous yet quiet sky Roland saw the great trees of the Close
all edged with gold.  He passed in, and stood looking at the
cathedral's western facade, the magnificent windows recessed
between two towers, the arcades and niches, and all that grey and
delicate silence in stone.  The lawns, like rich old velvet,
sheltered by the trees, and refreshed by the mists from the moat of
the palace, were vividly green in spite of the heat of the past
week.  Roland could see the gilded cupola and the clock above the
Tudor gateway of the palace.  He strolled upwards along the canons'
gardens, pausing to look in through the old gateways, and his
chance strollings brought him to the great elm where a man and a
boy were sitting.

Sorrell had been talking to Christopher of Thomas Roland, though he
himself was puzzled by the impulse that moved him to speak to the
boy of a man who was a mere passing stranger.  But he had let the
impulse have its way, and the spread of it had surprised him.  "So
I cleaned his shoes, my son, put such a polish on them."  Kit had
noticed a sort of shine in his father's eyes.  "Strange--how your
heart and your hand go out to some people.  He made me suddenly
feel good, and smooth.  I knew that I could do anything for him,
and that he would never ask me to do anything dirty.  Instinct.  He
looks as though he had come straight out from swimming in the sea,
when it's all blue and the sun makes a glare on the yellow sand."

Roland recognized Sorrell before Sorrell was aware of his nearness,
for Sorrell was leaning forward with his hands clasped between his
knees, and his eyes on the ground.  Roland went towards them, and
Sorrell sensing a presence, looked up, startled but smiling.

"Your boy?"

"Yes, sir.  This is Mr. Roland, Christopher."

Kit stood up and lifted his cap, and he and Mr. Roland took a
steady look at each other.

"Are you at the Angel?"

"No--I have him boarded out," said Sorrell: "we get an hour
together--when I'm off duty."

"So you get an hour?"

"Yes."

Sorrell was looking at Roland's shoes.  He was wondering whether
the other man had noticed the polish that had been put on their
comrades in No. 15.  Roland sat down on the seat, and laid a big
brown hand on Kit's shoulder.

"Sit down, old chap."

He filled a pipe.

"Pretty peaceful here.  Do you ever go to any of the services down
there?"

"Not often."

"I've been," said Kit.  "If you want to be alone--when the organ is
playing."

Roland made a slow movement of the head.

"I know.  Service; a full choir, half a dozen priests, three lonely
women, a verger and a forest of empty chairs.  And the organ notes
quaking, and a boy's voice soaring up to the grey roof like a bird.
Perhaps a few spectators standing at the west end of the nave.  It
always makes me feel queer."

Kit was watching him with solemn eyes.

"Queer?  How?"

"Oh--as though I had fallen suddenly through a trap-door into
another world.  Not our world.  Men saw the sunset through trees in
those days.  I suppose they looked at the stars.  Do you ever look
at the stars?"

His eyes were on Sorrell.

"No--hardly ever.  Never thought about it."

"Quite so."

"Too busy or too tired, and under a roof.  I used to look at them a
lot in the trenches."

"Ah--you were there too," said Roland, lighting his pipe.

And when he had lit it he got up, stood a moment, smiled at the
Sorrells, and tilted his head slightly in the direction of the moat
where the water was dappled with gold.

"Think I'll wander down here.  They still keep the swans--I
suppose?"

"And there are two peacocks, sir."

"In the bishop's garden.  I remember.  So--like us--they survived
the war.  Good night."

The Sorrells watched him go down the path to the water, holding
himself very square and straight, and yet moving with an air of
lightness.

"I like that man," said the boy, "he's--he's--"

Kit searched for some particular word.

"How do you call it, pater, when you feel right up close against
someone you've never met before?"

"Sympathy?"

"No, not quite that.  I can't get it."

"I think I know what you mean," said his father.



3


On the first floor of the Angel Inn, and at the end of a dark
passage there was a little, dim drawing-room, musty and sad, with
engravings of Landseer's pictures on the walls, and a Kidderminster
carpet on the floor.  On the hearth, behind the brass fender, stood
a cheap Japanese screen in black and gold, the centre piece between
a mock-mahogany coal purdonium on the one hand, and an occasional
table on the other.  The wallpaper displayed faded pink roses
blooming in a strangely detached way on a dull grey background.
There were a few books on an octagonal table, a Dunlop guide, bound
copies of the Illustrated London News twenty years old, Tennyson's
poems and a Latin grammar.  How the Latin grammar had got there--
heaven alone knows, but it remained there because no one troubled
to remove it.  A gilt clock that had not ticked since Queen
Victoria died, escaped the dust by standing on the white marble
mantelpiece under a glass case.  Two bronze gentlemen on horseback,
mailed and armed, menaced each other from opposite ends of the
mantelpiece.  The arm-chairs were of that bastard breed in which
each wooden arm bears an excrescence of padding covered tightly
with a material that is reminiscent of a footman's breeches sixty
years ago.

People rarely entered this room.  The windows remained closed, and
it lived shut up with its own dark mustiness.  Occasionally some
lone woman sat in it, and knitted, and looked at the books and put
them back again, but the women who sat in this room had no men
attached to them.  Any man chancing to open the door, looked in,
stared, and, feeling the room's unwedded deadness, fled.  No one
ever left the door of this room open.  They closed it carefully, as
though the room's emptiness were best sealed up.

Sorrell was coming down the stairs when he heard strange sounds
drifting from the dark passage.  There was a piano in the drawing-
room and someone was playing it, and playing it extraordinarily
well, feelingly, and with a strong, rich touch.  Sorrell paused.
Music, such music was so unknown in this haphazard house that he
felt like a man in a factory yard who suddenly hears a blackbird
singing.  It gave him a moment of exquisite pain.  He stood with
quivering throat, and a sense of strange and deep emotion stirring
in him.

The pianist was playing Chopin.  He or she was in the midst of the
First Prelude when Sorrell first paused to listen.  Then came the
Berceuse, and after the Etude in A Flat.  Sorrell, leaning against
the wall, felt his memories going back to the days of his youth
when he had sat and dreamed in Queen's Hall.  Romance.  Those days
when he had imagined--

But who was the pianist?  A car with two or three women in it had
arrived an hour ago, and Sorrell had carried up their luggage, but
these ladies had suggested rag-time rather than Chopin.  He felt
curious.  He approached the drawing-room door, telling himself that
it would be easy for him to enter the room as though in search of
some visitor.  He could wait for an interlude.

Leaning against the wall opposite the door, he let the surge of
those sweet sounds go through him.  A pause came.  He was about to
slip across the passage when the door opened.

It was Mr. Roland who opened the door.  His face had a kind of
radiance, a happy rapture.

"Hallo!"

Sorrell had straightened up.

"Sorry, sir.  I was listening.  Was it you?"

"Yes."

The two men looked at each other, and the light on Thomas Roland's
face seemed to have spread to Sorrell's.  They were together for a
moment in a transcendental world of mystic sounds and symbols.  And
life was drawing them nearer.




CHAPTER VI


1


Thomas Roland was a man of observation, and yet he was more than a
mere observer, and he saw much more than he seemed to see.  He
registered atmospheres.  That was the musical part of him.  The
practical part of him would sit comfortably in a chair behind a
book, and watch without appearing to watch, and his tranquil
solidity was so deceptive that his neighbours saw nothing but a man
and a book.

His interest in life might be catholic, but it was also fastidious
and very quick to seize upon an arresting figure or an intriguing
situation.  He had intended staying two days in Staunton, but his
two days enlarged themselves into a week.

He was interested in Stephen Sorrell, both as a practical man and
as a psychologist, and he became interested in Sorrell's
entanglement.  When he sat in a corner of the lounge and watched,
he could not help being struck by the porter's fanatical activity,
his thoroughness, his air of contending with the Augean slovenliness
of the Angel Inn.  Sorrell was never still.  His thin and slightly
stooping figure went to and fro, with its dark head, pale face, and
intent and rather sorrowful eyes.  He appeared to be always looking
for things to do; he was for ever clearing out the ash trays on the
tables or dusting the tops of the tables, or collecting the
scattered papers and magazines and putting them in order.  Nor was
it mere fussing, or a parade after effect.  The man was driven by
some urgent spirit within him; also he was reacting against some
painful pressure.  That was how Thomas Roland understood it.

Then there was the brass-headed woman, the lioness, the creature
couched in that den.  Roland was puzzled by her attitude towards
Sorrell.  She was for ever harrying the man, finding some petty
excuse for hounding him off on an errand.  She spoke to him with a
queer, intimate brutality.  She was like a woman with a whip who
found an elemental pleasure in flicking the man with it, tormenting
him, as though just to see how much of it he would stand.

"Stephen, run round to Pavits.  The fools have forgotten the fish.
You'd better bring it back."

"Get down on your knees, man, and scrub that hall.  It's a
disgrace."

"Hallo--Stephen.  No. 7 has been complaining that one of the
mudguards on his car has been buckled.  What!  You don't know
anything about it?  What do you think you are here for?"

She showed a sly unfairness in her persecution.  She appeared to
watch Sorrell's activities, and would then descend upon him and
heckle him for not doing the very thing that he was always doing.
She would sweep out of her den and discover a match and a cigarette
end in one of the ash-trays.

"Stephen!"

"Yes, madam."

There would be something very like fear in the man's eyes.

"Why don't you empty these ash-trays?  I've told you a dozen
times."

"I emptied them ten minutes ago, madam."

"O, don't tell me!  Look at that."

Roland wondered why Sorrell stood it.  Also, it seemed to him that
the woman's attitude was illogical.  If she pretended to such a
passion for detail why did she find fault with the one member of
her staff who did his job thoroughly?  Was it because he was a man,
and a man obviously out of his station?  Why didn't she go upstairs
and stimulate the casual energies of the young wenches who swept
the dust under the beds and crammed rubbish behind the grates?  Or
why didn't she supervise the cleaning of the table silver, and
discover that one fork out of three had the remains of some
previous meal between its prongs?

For five days Thomas Roland watched this piece of inter-play
without appearing to watch it.  A tacit sympathy had sprung up
between him and the Angel porter; the one man gave service and gave
it with open hands the other accepted that service and accepted it
as it was given.

Some time after tea on the sixth day when the lounge happened to be
empty, and the lioness had deserted her den, Roland sat and watched
Sorrell over the top of a book.  Sorrell was on one of his usual
rounds, going from table to table, and Roland's eyes studied his
long-fingered and intelligent hands.  They were very quick and
deft, but a little hurried.

He came to Mr. Roland's table, and Roland, putting down his book,
looked up at Sorrell.

"What are you doing here?"

"Tidying up, sir."

"No,--I don't mean that."

There was no resentment in Sorrell's questioning stare.  He emptied
Mr. Roland's ash-tray into the old metal flower-pot he used as a
receptacle.

"I have got a boy.  You saw him."

"The father for the son instead of the son for the father!  I
needn't ask you whether you loathe this job."

"It isn't the job, sir.  The job's necessary."

"But the place.  And yet you stick it.  There's a reason."

"Necessity."

Roland moved easily in his chair.

"Look here, Stephen--.  What's your other name?"

"Sorrell, sir."

"Rank?"

"Does that matter?"

"I'm a deliberate person.  Well, as one man to another--"

"Captain."

"War service--only?"

"Yes."

"Any decorations?"

"M.C."

"I got nothing but a mention in dispatches.  Are you going out to-
night?"

"I expect so, sir."

"Well,--let's meet at that elm tree and have a talk.  If you could
leave your boy at home--for once."

Sorrell stood there looking at the ash-tray that he had emptied.
His face was intensely serious.  His right hand gripped the lapel
of his coat.

"This talk of yours, sir, is it personal?"

"As personal as you please."

"What I mean is--anything--is so--infernally serious to me--When
one is just hanging on, and out of breath.  Like bad weather.--You
are afraid to expect--any sunlight."

The expression of Tom Roland's eyes altered.

"It might depend on what would seem to you to be sunlight.
Relatively.  Suppose you had to do the same sort of job, but in
different surroundings?  Would that be sunlight?"

"Absolutely."

"All right.  We meet about half-past eight.  This place is
impossible."



2


The astonishing thing was that Mr. Roland kept an hotel--or rather
that he was about to keep an hotel.  He sat under the great elm and
explained.

"What did you think I did, man?"

"I hadn't the faintest idea," said Sorrell.

"Nothing--perhaps!  I am rather music-mad, and after the war I
could not settle,--just drifted about.  But I have a practical part
to my soul, and it began to cry out."

He rested his head against the trunk of the tree.  He looked
amused; he was smiling at himself, and to Sorrell, who had been
living in a world that could not smile happily at itself, this
smile was like Tom Roland's music.  It took you into the big, wise
heart of the man.

"Knocking about, a dilettante, scribbling songs, with some sort of
idea that I could write an opera.  And so I can.  But, my dear
chap, the queer way things happen.  The way we react.  One day I
met a man I most cordially detest, a fellow who is a financial,
light--or something.  'Halo, Roland, still scribbling music?'
Well, it set me off.  'Damn these commercial people,' I thought,
'I'd like to prove their game is easier than mine.'  But--you know--
there was a rightness in what that fellow said.  He had knocked a
chip off me.  You can get many a good hint from a man who dislikes
you if you are not too pot-bound to soak it up.  I had been getting
a little--Londonish--shall we call it.  I took my car out--and went
touring, and then the idea was thrown at me.  I had it in my soup;
I found it in my bedroom.  These hotel places!  I went about
wondering if there were half a dozen men in England who could run a
country inn as it might be run.  Well, there seemed to be precious
few.  And so the idea hit me.  'Why not run an hotel, just to show
yourself that you can do it?  An Etude Pratique instead of too much
Chopin.'  Well, that's what I'm doing."

Again that pleasant, roguish smile, and a match held meditatively
to the bowl of a pipe.  A man of few words as a rule, when the
rhythm or verve of a movement took him Roland would break away into
a series of short, sharp sentences, pithy and vigorous.  He
described to Sorrell how, when the idea of managing a country hotel
had come to him, he had set about visualizing the scheme with
complete thoroughness.

"That is where we people with any imagination ought to score over
the commercialists.  If we have any vision--surely it should be
broader and more far seeing than the wall-eyed stare of a mere
money-maker?"

He told Sorrell how he had spent a whole day studying maps and
distances, for he had realized that the motorist was the man to be
caught and catered for.

"It seemed to me that I ought to fix upon a place on one of the
main roads going south-west, half-way between London and Exeter.
I drew a circle round a certain area, and dotted in the most like
centre for my spiders' web.  Then I got in my car and went
exploring."

Another match was needed for his pipe, and as he threw it down he
smiled at Sorrell.

"I'm not boring you?"

"Is it likely?"

Roland went on to describe how he had gone in search of the ideally
situated inn, and how he had found it, an old coaching-house called
the Pelican on the main road on the outskirts of Winstonbury.

"The name took me at once.  Pelican!  Unusual.  And it was sited
just as I wished.  A big old red and white place, part Queen Anne,
part Georgian.  It stood by itself.  It had an atmosphere.  Plenty
of room for expansion.  Other advantages too, a good garden and old
trees.  Our pub-keepers rarely visualize the atmosphere of a
garden.  Stuffy people.  Also--the Pelican catches the eye; three
or four hundred yards of straight road on either side of it.  Also--
it is within two miles of Hadley school,--parents--you know.
Also, Bargrave House--where all the Americans go to do homage to
the memory of one of their great men,--two miles off.  Then take
the road web for the ordinary tourist.  London some hundred miles;
Salisbury thirty or so, Bath about thirty-two; Cheltenham, the
Cotswolds not so very far away, and Amesbury and Stonehenge.
Exeter right down the road south-west.  Gloucester too--and the Wye
valley.  Well,--there you are.  The Pelican had a reputation of
sorts, clean and rather old-fashioned.  I offered to buy."

He paused as though passing to another line of thought, and his
face grew more serious.

"I am putting nearly all my capital into the show.  It is sink or
swim.  But--after all--one ought to be ready to back one's
theories.  There has to be courage in commerce.  It's an adventure.
I am taking the place over in a month.  The end of the season
you'll say.  Queer time!  Well--no.  There are alterations to make,
a lot of building.  Meanwhile I'm going to carry on and get things
organized and ready.  Then--there is the question of the staff."

Roland had realized the importance of a good "staff."  In fact it
was as important as the setting in which it was to function.

"Difficult these days.  But I am being extraordinarily careful in
picking my people.  I want character, conscience, and above all--
smiles.  I want people who'll take a pride in their work--and stay
with me.  I am going to pay good wages, and house and feed my
people well.  Besides--if the thing goes--and we tap the stream on
the road--it is going to be a comfortable and paying proposition
for the staff.  Perhaps--sixty bedrooms--the place full each night,
a constant flux, and tips--mind you--from people who are always
coming and going, people who have been well fed and well looked
after.  I have got my housekeeper and cook.  Also--the head
waitress--a rattling fine woman.  There are the maids, one of the
chief problems.  I want two porters, and I have got one--a head
porter.  He can't join me till February."

Again Roland paused, and his pause was explanatory.

"My one piece of sentiment, this Buck.  My first porter.  An ex-
sergeant major.  He saved my life out there.  I owe him--his
chance.  He'll get it.  The rest depends on--himself."  His mouth
and eyes hardened.

"I'm not a fool, Sorrell.  You know what the war was, managing men.
It is no use being soft.  I am not sure of Buck, but he shall have
his chance.  Now, what about it?  I've watched you.  I don't know
anything about you,--but I do know something of men.  If you think
my job is better than the one--there."

Sorrell sat very still, with his clasped hands between his knees.

"Wait.  I'll tell you my history.  I have nothing much to be
ashamed of."

He told it.

"That's that.  My job--is my job for the boy.  It's my centre-
board--my sheet-anchor.  If you offer me this chance I'll do my
best to see you don't regret it."

"Second porter--?"

"I realize that.  I have learnt a lot---there."

Roland smiled.

"At least you have learnt how--not--to do it.  But--remember--it's
an adventure.  I may go under.  I want people--"

Sorrell nodded a grave head.

"I understand.  You want helpers--not merely employees.  I shall be
a helper.  You have given me--a chance--a chance to get out of
hell.  I'm grateful."

They gripped hands.

"Gratitude!  They say that gratitude is a slave virtue."

"Call it good will, Mr. Roland."

"Ah, that's it--every time."



3


Sorrell was crossing the Market Square, and he paused by the market
cross to look back at the cathedral and its trees.  He felt happy,
most extraordinarily happy.  It was not only the sudden, pleasant
human relationship that had opened before him that had cheered him,
but the feeling of self-congratulation.  The fact that Roland
should have offered him work had given a flick to his self-respect.
What did the nature of the work matter?  He was a hotel porter and
he was a success as a hotel porter.  He had put a plain and human
back into the job, stuck to it in spite of pain and weariness and
persecution, and someone had come and said--"You are the man."

He glanced at old Verity's shop and walked on.  He was going to
tell the boy, and to say to him--"I have been offered a better
job," and he was immensely and absurdly proud of it.  The
afterglow--all yellow above the deep shadows of the old streets--
was the colour of his mood of exultation.  Second porter at the
Pelican at Winstonbury!  The Palfrey menage done with.  To work for
a man for whom he felt respect and liking, and more than that!

Fletcher's Lane was all shadow, with the pale primrose and blue of
the sky above.  He saw a small figure on the footwalk under the
overhang of an old Tudor house, an attentive and expectant figure.
The boy had been waiting for him as though he knew, or had divined
a change in their fortunes.

"Hallo, son!"

Christopher looked at his father, and it seemed to him that his
father's shoulders were straighter, and the flesh of his face more
firm and clear.

"I have got a better job, Kit.  Mr. Roland is opening a new hotel.
We are going there."

The boy's face lit up.

"He asked you to go, pater?"

"Yes."

Christopher snuggled up beside his father.

"He--knows," he said.

And Sorrell smiled.

"Another step nearer--the plan."




CHAPTER VII


1


The Sorrells marched out of Staunton with drums beating and colours
flying, and the little old portmanteau newly bestrapped trundling
to the station in a handbarrow.

The Angel had cast them out, for Sorrell had walked into the lion's
cage, and given notice.

"I have obtained another situation, madam."

She had stared at him fixedly.

"O, have you!  Very well."

"I shall be able to carry on for you until--"

"There is a gap, is there?  No,--I don't do things that way.  Out
you go,--to-night."

She had called him a fool, and he had left her without asking for
his money, a piece of fastidiousness which he did not regret.  He
had packed his belongings and gone out by the back way, and so to
Fletcher's Lane where Mrs. Barter had given him some supper, and he
had slept in Kit's bed.  In the morning Mr. Roland appeared at the
door of No. 13, Fletcher's Lane.

"You left rather suddenly--"

"Well--I thought it only fair, sir, to tell Mrs. Palfrey.  She
turned me out."

"What are you going to do?"

"I thought of going to Winstonbury, sir,--and of putting up there
till you take over."

"Can you manage?"

"Yes."

Roland did not offer help, and Sorrell did not hint at the fact
that he needed it.  Yet both men were satisfied, for neither of
them desired to cadge or to be cadged from.  The relationship
between them began on a plane that was above the baser level of
employer and employed.  The relationship had elements of
sensitiveness, delicacy.

Roland produced a card.

"You'll want a bedroom.  There is a very decent old soul whom I
happen to know.  Garland's the name.  No. 6 Vine Court, off
Baileygate.  Wait; I'll write it down.  And by the way, go to
Bloxom's the tailor in Lombard Street and get measured and tell him
to fit you with the Pelican uniform.  He knows about it.  I'd
better write him a note.  Sure you can manage?"

"Quite sure, sir."

"Good.  I am going on to-day to Bath.  I expect to be in
Winstonbury in a week or so."

Sorrell had exactly three pounds, two shillings and fourpence in
his pocket, for only three days ago he had bought Christopher a new
suit and himself a pair of boots and two new shirts.  But his motto
for the moment was "I'll manage."  He was not going to spoil this
new friendship by cadging, for he regarded the relationship as a
friendship; he might be at the bottom of the ladder, but the first
few rungs of it were made of human stuff.  He cherished the human
sympathy.

Roland went away satisfied.  He was a generous man, and like most
generous men he appreciated an independence that did not attempt
to exploit his generosity.  The world was so full of cadgers, of
people who levied blackmail upon those more capable few whom the
blackmailers described as "Them as 'ave 'ad all the luck."
Roland's interest in Sorrell felt itself justified.  Being of a
cheerful nature he hated snivellers.

So Christopher and his father got aboard a train, and after two
changes, made Winstonbury, that city of new strivings and
adventure.  They saw the square, grey Norman tower of the Abbey,
the clump of beeches on Castle Hill, the soaring spire of St.
Faith's Church.  The old portmanteau was deposited in the cloak-
room, and the Sorrells went in search of Vine Court.

Mrs. Garland opened a green door to them in the narrow face of a
queer, beetle-browed red cottage.  Sorrell showed her Roland's
card.  She had to fetch her spectacles to read it.  They were round
like her face, which was of a high-cheeked rotundity, and with a
spry little nose cocked in the middle of it.  Her head was as neat
as the head of a Dutch doll.

"Step inside."

Yes, she could lodge and feed them, and Mr. Roland's recommendation
was good enough.  Sorrell sent Kit outside, while he spoke frankly
and honestly to Mrs. Garland.

"The fact is I don't take up my new job for three weeks or so, and
I have about two pounds in hand.  It is only fair to tell you this,
but I promise you you will be paid.  I will hand over the two
pounds to you and just keep the odd shillings."

Mrs. Garland looked at him round-eyed.  She had not seen a great
deal of the world, but it seemed to her that Sorrell was an unusual
sort of hotel-porter.  He spoke like a gentleman, a real gentlemen;
the distinction was important.

"I dare say I could manage your food on that.  The room will be
five shillings a week, and two shillings for attendance.  So, at
the end of three weeks--"

"I should owe you twenty-one shillings."

"That's so."

"And by the way--I shall have to board my boy out.  He has no
mother; he's not a noisy youngster, or selfish.  Do you think you
might be able to manage him?  I shall be able to pay you well when
I get settled at the Pelican."

"I might," said the old lady, "there is only me and my daughter in
the house.  She's a waitress at the Pelican, but she sleeps at
home.  Mr. Roland has engaged her.  She's to be head waitress."

"I have heard about her," said Sorrell.

"Have you now?"

"Mr. Roland seems to think a good deal of her."

"Fanny's a good girl.  Well, would you like to look at the room?"

"I should.  I'm sure we shan't give you much trouble."

They called Kit in and went up a narrow pair of stairs into a
little, low, pleasant room, the casement window of which opened on
a garden.  The floor undulated and a beam divided the ceiling into
two equal parts.  The furniture was genuine cottage furniture,
rarely seen outside a curio shop; it was all old, save the bed,
which was a plain, black iron concern.  The window had white
curtains, and the white quilt on the bed was the colour of
swansdown.

The little room had an atmosphere of its own, a quaint and simple
spirituality that was so different from the casual "take it or
leave it" air of the rooms of the Angel Hotel that Sorrell felt
touched, though why a cottage bedroom should have touched him he
was not able to say.  Christopher had gone at once to the window
and was looking down into the garden.

"There's an apple tree, pater."

"So there is."

Mrs. Garland gave a tweak to one of the white curtains.  The apple
tree was a Blenheim, and full of pale gold fruit, each with a blush
of redness on the side towards the sun.

"My man planted that tree.  It's a Blenheim Orange.  Well,--young
gentleman, you didn't take long to find it."

Christopher turned and looked at her.  Mrs. Garland's tone had
accused him of a desire to get up that tree, whereas Kit had been
struck by the beauty of it, and had been guiltless of elemental
greed.

"They are quite safe with me, Mrs. Garland."

"Oh--are they,--my dear!  Well,--I don't mind one or two, so long
as you don't break, the branches."

"But I mean what I say, Mrs. Garland."

"Bless us,--I believe you do."

Sorrell agreed to rent the room.  He said that he was pleased with
it, and taking out his wallet he handed Mrs. Garland his two pound
notes.  She made as though to give them back to him, but Sorrell
asked her to keep them.

"Well,--just as you please.  You can take your meals in my kitchen,
if that will suit you.  It will save me trouble."

"Thank you very much," said Sorrell.

Thereupon he and Christopher went back to the station to fetch the
portmanteau, which Sorrell prepared to hoist upon his shoulder.
Their possessions did not weigh much, and as Sorrell put it to his
son--"I'm getting used to luggage."  Christopher, however, saw
himself as a partner in the adventure, and insisted on helping his
father with the portmanteau, and they returned to Vine Court
carrying it between them.

Mrs. Garland gave them eggs and bacon for tea; in fact the three of
them sat down together, amalgamating very happily in the kitchen,
the window of which showed the apple tree lit up by the afternoon
sunlight.



2


After tea came the event towards which all the other events of the
day had been tending, an exploration of their new world, of this
Darien with the Pacific of the unknown beyond it, and floating upon
the edge of the unknown Mr. Roland's "Treasure Island,"--the
Pelican Inn.

It was Christopher who thought of it as "Treasure Island," and the
symbolized nature of the conception was very evident to his father.
In the train from Staunton they had had a carriage to themselves,
and Sorrell, as though inspired by the hum of the wheels, had
talked much of the future.  He had been very frank with the boy.
He had told him that he regarded the future as Christopher's, and
that the Pelican was a place in which he meant to dig for treasure,
and to gather money for Kit's education.

"You must have your weapon, Kit.  It is no use being able to do
nothing but sit on a stool and scribble figures.  The thing is to
have some sort of knowledge, and a craft which other people can't
get on without.  Then you are a master.  The world has to come and
ask you to do something for it.  You must be a necessity, not a
mere fellow who opens and shuts doors."

Christopher understood much of this but vaguely, but he did
understand the nature of his father's sacrifice.

"I am carrying other people's luggage up and down stairs, Kit, in
order that your job may be a better one.  That's my ambition,--my
goal."

And Kit, in the quiet sturdiness of his young and growing
consciousness, had begun to realize what manner of man his father
was.

The Pelican first showed itself to the Sorrells some three hundred
yards beyond the red brick Unitarian church at the end of Lombard
Street as something that glittered beside a great mount of trees.
The something that glittered proved to be an immense, old-fashioned
sign suspended across the road on an overhead beam that was
supported by two huge oak posts.  Here was the Pelican--that Bird
of Piety--glittering for all the world that passed along the road
to see, men who went west, and men who went east.  Yes, assuredly,
Mr. Roland was no fool.  The very road itself here had a
spaciousness, and the inn--all red and white--with a group of
magnificent trees behind it,--looked south over meadowland to the
hills beyond.  Winstonbury had not splurged in that direction;
there were no prawn-coloured villas or post-war bungalows to spoil
the English landscape.  Moreover, Tom Roland had bought the land on
the other side of the road.

Sorrell and his son stood under an immense chestnut tree and
absorbed the scene.  The leaves of the chestnut were crisped with
gold.  A dipped holly hedge met the red angle of the building,
giving place later to white posts and chains.  The building itself
was in the shape of an L, and the space between the links of the
letter formed a species of court or space, partly flagged and
partly gravelled.  A white cornice topped the rise of the red
walls, and there were dormers in the roof above it, also a copper
cupola with a bell.  A part of the building draped itself with
wistaria and clematis.  The main entry had a hooded porch with
tall, white pillars.  A clipped yew, surrounded by a bright border
of flowers and a small, well-mown lawn, broke the open space
between the road and the building.

Sorrell saw the beauty of it, for the old inn had a presence,
tranquillity.  It was like a stately and gracious old lady who
could smile on the new age and understand it, and impose upon the
new age's restlessness a measure of her own tranquillity.  Several
cars stood on the broad space behind the posts and chains.  Voices
came from beyond the holly hedge but they were not unpleasant
voices.  Green and white curtains fluttered at the windows, and the
crisping leaves of the chestnut dappled the road.

"Mr. Roland's no fool," said Sorrell.

Strolling on, he saw the further possibilities of the place, and
he pointed them out to Christopher.  The Pelican had immense old
stables, solidly built, and easily to be absorbed into the inn.
They were being used as a garage, but Sorrell imagined that Mr.
Roland would lay a jealous hand on all that Georgian brickwork.
There was plenty of room for the erection of an up-to-date garage
beyond the stables where the noise of the cars would be less
troublesome.  Sorrell and Christopher strolled into the yard, and
beyond it they had a glimpse of a kitchen garden and an orchard,
and of a couple of old walnut trees growing in the centre of a
little paddock.

Christopher--the boy--had no doubts as to the future of the
Pelican.  The place had romance.  You could imagine yourself
leaning out of one of those little dormer windows, and watching
people coming and going.  The broad road suggested adventure.
There were fields and woods, and the hills in the distance.  And
wild life, rabbits, birds--perhaps a river where you could fish.

He glowed.

"It's a lovely place, pater."

"I think it is.  The old Pelican will cast a persuasive eye on
people.  And Roland?  Some people seem to change one's luck."

Returning they had a view of Winstonbury against the sunset, the
beeches and the castle mound looking like a huge plumed sable
helmet.  The spire of the church had a trailing crimson oriflamme
attached to it, and all about the town the country lay a bluish
green.

"I like this place," said Kit, "and I like Mrs. Garland and our
bedroom.  Weren't the bacon and eggs good, pater?"

"Very, my son," but Sorrell was thinking of other things.



3


During the next seven days Sorrell and Christopher began to know
Winstonbury very thoroughly.  They had a feeling that it belonged
to them, that it was theirs, with the wise old Pelican keeping
watch upon it.  They explored every corner of the town.  It was a
place of pleasant sounding old names, richly English and romantic.
It smelt of history, and of the old life before commercialism
invented galvanized iron and gas-works.  The names of the streets
fascinated Christopher: Green End, Lombard Street, Baileygate,
Golden Hill, the Tything, Market Row, Vine Court, Barbican, Angel
Alley.

On the second day Sorrell walked into Mr. Bloxom's shop in Lombard
Street, and was measured for his Pelican uniform, a neat dark blue
jacket with light blue lapels and brass buttons, and dark blue
trousers.  Mr. Bloxom was polite to Sorrell.  A porter at a
prosperous hotel wa