"No, is he?" yelled Andy in reply. "Hurrah!"
It was but two days after the great event had happened. Recently Andy had seen nothing of his Meriton friends. He had been working early and late in town; down at seven-thirty, up to work again at eight-ten. He had been a very draught-horse, straining at a load which would not move—straining at it on a slippery slope. Business was so "quiet." Could not work command success? At present he had to be content with the meagre consolation proffered to Sempronius. He must be at the office not a second later than nine. If the American letters came in, replies could get off by the same day's mail.
Yet the news of the engagement—he wished he could have had it from Harry's own lips—cut clean across his personal preoccupations. How right! How splendid! Dear old Harry! And how he would like to congratulate Miss Vivien! All that on Saturday afternoon or Sunday. Andy was one of the world's toilers; for them works of charity, friendship, and love have for the most part to wait for Saturday afternoon or Sunday; the other five days and a half—it's the struggle for life, grimly individual.
He loved Harry Belfield, and stored up untold enthusiasm for Saturday afternoon or Sunday—those altruistic hours when we have time to consider our own souls and other people's fortunes. But to-day was only Thursday; Thursday is well in the zone of the struggle. Andy's timber business was—just turning the corner! So many businesses always are. Shops expensively installed, hotels over-built, newspapers—above all, newspapers—started with a mighty flourish of heavy dividends combined with national regeneration—they are all so often just turning the corner. The phrase signifies that you hope you are going to lose next year rather less than you lost last year. If somebody will go on supplying the deficit—in that sanguine spirit which is the strength of a commercial nation—or can succeed in inducing others to supply it in a similar spirit, the corner may in the end be turned. If not, you stay this side of the magical corner of success, and presently find yourself in another—to be described as "tight." A life-long experience of questions—of problems and riddles—was not, for Andy Hayes, to stop short at the felicitous solution of the puzzle about Jack Rock's butcher's shop in Meriton High Street.
Andy had to postpone reflection on Harry Belfield's happiness and Vivien's emancipation. Yet he had a passing appreciation of the end of ordeals—of Curly, cross-country rides, and the like. Would the mail from Montreal bring a remittance for the rent of the London office? The other business men in the fast morning train were grumpy. Money was tight, the bank rate stiff, times bad. No moment to launch out! There were sounded all the familiar jeremiads of the City train. What could you expect with a Liberal Government in office? The stars in their courses fought against business. Nobody would trust anybody. It was not that nobody had the money—nobody ever has—but hardly anybody was believed to be able, in the last resort, to get it. That impression spells collapse. The men in the first-class carriage—Andy had decided that it was on the whole "good business" to stand himself a first-class "season"—seemed well-fed, affluent, possessed of good cigars; yet they were profoundly depressed, anticipative of little less than imminent starvation. One of them explicitly declared his envy of a platelayer whom the train passed on the line.
"Twenty-two bob a week certain," he said. "Better than losing a couple of hundred pounds, Jack. Not much longer hours either, and an open-air life!"
"Well, take it on," Jack, who had a cynical turn of humour, advised. "He (the platelayer he meant) couldn't very well lose more than you do; and you'll never make more than he does. Swap!"
The first speaker retired behind the Telegraph in some disgust. It is hard to meet a rival wit as early as eight-thirty in the morning.
The American mail was not in when Andy reached Dowgate Hill, in which important locality he occupied an insignificant attic. A fog off the coast of Ireland accounted for the delay. But on his table, as indicated by the small boy who constituted his staff—the staff would, of course, be larger when that corner was turned—lay a cable. There was no other correspondence. Things were quiet. Andy could not suppress a reflection that a rather later train would have done as well. Still there was a cable; no doubt it advised the remittance. The remittance was a matter of peremptory necessity, unless Andy were to empty his private pocket.
"Incontestable—Incubation—Ineffective." So ran the cable.