VI—ONE OF THE CROWD
He comes out of the office, which is a pretty large one, with a series of nods—condescending, curt, indifferent, friendly, and deferential. He has detestations and preferences, even cronies; and if he has superiors, he has also inferiors. But whereas his fate depends on the esteem of a superior, the fate of no inferior depends on his esteem. When he nods deferentially he is bowing to an august power before which all others are in essence equal; the least of his inferiors knows that. And the least of his inferiors will light, on the stairs, a cigarette with the same gesture, and of perhaps the same brand, as his own—to signalise the moment of freedom, of emergence from the machine into human citizenship. Presently he is walking down the crammed street with one or two preferences or indifferences, and they are communicating with each other in slang, across the shoulders of jostling interrupters, and amid the shouts of newsboys and the immense roaring of the roadway. And at the back of his mind, while he talks and smiles, or frowns, is a clear vision of a terminus and a clock and a train. Just as the water-side man, wherever he may be, is aware, night and day, of the exact state of the tide, so this man carries in his brain a time-table of a particular series of trains, and subconsciously he is always aware whether he can catch a particular train, and if so, whether he must hurry or may loiter. His case, is not peculiar. He is just an indistinguishable man on the crowded footpaths, and all the men on the footpaths, like him, are secretly obsessed by the vision of a train just moving out of a station.
He arrives at the terminus with only one companion; the rest, with nods, have vanished away at one street corner or another. Gradually he is sorting himself out. Both he and his companion know that there are a hundred and twenty seconds to spare. The companion relates a new humorous story of something unprintable, alleged to have happened between a man and a woman. The receiver of the story laughs with honest glee, and is grateful, and the companion has the air of a benefactor; which indeed he is, for these stories are the ready-money of social intercourse. The companion strides off, with a nod. The other remains solitary. He has sorted himself out, but only for a minute. In a minute he is an indistinguishable unit again, with nine others, in the compartment of a moving train. He reads an evening newspaper, which seems to have come into his hand of its own agency, for he catches it every night with a purely mechanical grasp as it flies in the street. He reads of deeds and misdeeds, and glances aside uneasily from the disturbing tides of restless men who will not let the social order alone. Suddenly, after the train has stopped several times, he folds up the newspaper as it is stopping again, and gets blindly out. As he surges up into the street on a torrent of his brothers, he seems less sorted than ever. The street into which he comes is broad and busy, and the same newspapers are flying in it. Nevertheless, the street is different from the streets of the centre. It has a reddish or a yellowish quality of colour, and there is not the same haste in it. He walks more quickly now. He walks a long way up another broad street, in which rare autobuses and tradesmen’s carts rattle and thunder. The street gets imperceptibly quieter, and more verdurous. He passes a dozen side-streets, and at last he turns into a side-street. And this side-street is full of trees and tranquillity. It is so silent that to reach it he might have travelled seventy miles instead of seven. There are glimpses of yellow and red houses behind thick summer verdure. His pace still quickens. He smiles to himself at the story, and wonders to whom he can present it on the morrow. And then he halts and pushes open a gate upon which is painted a name. And he is in a small garden, with a vista of a larger garden behind. And down the vista is a young girl, with the innocence and grace and awkwardness and knowingness of her years—sixteen; a little shabby, or perhaps careless, in her attire, but enchanting. She starts forward, smiling, and exclaims: “Father!”
Now he is definitely sorted out.
Though this man is one of the crowd, though nobody would look twice at him in Cannon Street, yet it is to the successful and felicitous crowd that he belongs. There are tens of thousands of his grade; but he has the right to fancy himself a bit. He can do certain difficult things very well—else how, in the fierce and gigantic struggle for money, should he contrive to get hold of five hundred pounds a year?
He is a lord in his demesne; nay, even a sort of eternal father. Two servants go in fear of him, because his wife uses him as a bogey to intimidate them. His son, the schoolboy, a mighty one at school, knows there is no appeal from him, and quite sincerely has an idea that his pockets are inexhaustible. Whenever his son has seen him called upon to pay he has always paid, and money has always been left in his pocket. His daughter adores and exasperates him. His wife, with her private system of visits, and her suffragetting, and her independences, recognises ultimately in every conflict that the resultant of forces is against her and for him. When he is very benevolent he joins her in the game of pretending that they are equals. He is the distributor of joy. When he laughs, all laugh, and word shoots through the demesne that father is in a good humour.
He laughs to-night. The weather is superb; it is the best time of the year in the suburbs. Twilight is endless; the silver will not die out of the sky. He wanders in the garden, the others with him. He works potteringly. He shows himself more powerful than his son, both physically and mentally. He spoils his daughter, who is daily growing more mysterious. He administers flattery to his wife. He throws scraps of kindness to the servants. It is his wife who at last insists on the children going to bed. Lights show at the upper windows. The kitchen is dark and silent. His wife calls to him from upstairs. He strolls round to the front patch of garden, stares down the side-road, sees an autobus slide past the end of it, shuts and secures the gate, comes into the house, bolts the front door, bolts the back door, inspects the windows, glances at the kitchen; finally, he extinguishes the gas in the hall. Then he leaves the ground floor to its solitude, and on the first-floor peeps in at his snoring son, and admonishes his daughter through a door ajar not to read in bed. He goes to the chief bedroom, and locks himself therein with his wife; and yawns. The night has come. He has made his dispositions for the night. And now he must trust himself, and all that is his, to the night. A vague, faint anxiety penetrates him. He can feel the weight of five human beings depending on him; their faith in him lies heavy.
In the middle of the night he wakes up, and is reminded of such-and-such a dish of which he partook. He remembers what his wife said: “There’s no doing anything with that girl”—the daughter—“I don’t know what’s come over her.” And he thinks of all his son’s faults and stupidities, and of what it will be to have two children adult. It is true—there is no doing anything with either one or the other. Their characters are unchangeable—to be taken or left. This is one lesson he has learnt in the last ten years. And his wife. . . ! The whole organism of the demesne presents itself to him, lying awake, as most extraordinarily complicated. The garden alone, the rose-trees alone,—what a constant cause of solicitude! The friction of the servants,—was one of them a thief or was she not? The landlord must be bullied about the roof. Then, new wall-papers! A hinge! His clothes! His boots! His wife’s clothes, and her occasional strange disconcerting apathy! The children’s clothes! Rent! Taxes! Rates! Season-ticket! Subscriptions! Negligence of the newsvendor! Bills! Seaside holiday! Erratic striking of the drawing-room clock! The pain in his daughter’s back! The singular pain in his own groin—nothing, and yet. . . ! Insurance premium! And above all, the office! Who knew, who could tell, what might happen? There was no margin of safety, not fifty pounds margin of safety. He walked in success and happiness on a thin brittle crust! Crack! And where would they all be? Where would be the illusion of his son and daughter that he was an impregnable and unshakable rock? What would his son think if he knew that his father often calculated to half-a-crown, and economised in cigarettes and a great deal in lunches?. . .
He asks, “Why did I bring all this on myself? Where do I come in, after all?”. . . The dawn, very early; and he goes to sleep once more!
The next morning, factitiously bright after his bath, he is eating his breakfast, reading his newspaper, and looking at his watch. The night is over; the complicated organism is in full work again, with its air of absolute security. His newspaper, inspired by a millionaire to gain a millionaire’s ends by appealing to the ingenuousness of this clever struggler, is uneasy with accounts of attacks meditated on the established order. His mind is made up. The established order may not be perfect, but he is in favour of it. He has arrived at an equilibrium, unstable possibly, but an equilibrium. One push, and he would be over! Therefore, no push! He hardens his heart against the complaint of the unjustly treated. He has his own folk to think about.
The station is now drawing him like a magnet. He sees in his mind’s eye every yard of the way between the side-street and the office, and in imagination he can hear the clock striking at the other end. He must go; he must go! Several persons help him to go, and at the garden-gate he stoops and kisses that mysterious daughter. He strides down the side-street. Only a moment ago, it seems, he was striding up it! He turns into the long road. It is a grinding walk in the already hot sun. He reaches the station and descends into it, and is diminished from an eternal father to a mere unit of a throng. But on the platform he meets a jolly acquaintance. His face relaxes as they salute. “I say,” he says after an instant, bursting with a good thing, “Have you heard the tale about the—?”