"'Appy Christmas, milord!" said he.
I paid him a shilling for his diplomacy.
Thinking to escape the match-woman, I altered my course, but with the intuition of her sex she contrived to put herself directly in my path.
"It's a cauld nicht," she moaned in a rickety, quavering Scottish voice—"a cauld, wintry nicht. Ye'll be haein' a wee box o' matches, aw'm thinkin'!"
I gave her twopence for them, and she shivered with cold as her skinny fingers clutched the coins. I can think of no excuse for my parsimony except the fact that I didn't need the wretched box—matches were not yet a luxury of the very exclusive.
Yes—in all Sloane Square, on that damp and foggy Christmas Eve in the year 1913, I doubt if a more morose, self-satisfied, cynical human being plunged into the mists than I. I was unhappy, and reveled in my very unhappiness. If it had been in my power, I would have sent a cloud of gloom into every home and over every hearth in London. There was something splendid, something classical, in my melancholy; it was like Hamlet's, but greater than Hamlet's, for he knew the reason of his mood, while mine was born of an intangible superiority to my day!
It is not easy, even now, to write of those days. The figure that crosses the screen of memory reminds me of Chevy Slyme—a debt-paying, respectable Chevy Slyme, forsooth!—but just as sulkily swaggering, just as superior, and not quite so human; for Chevy, at least, inspired the friendship of Mr. Tigg.
II
Unconsciously following the bus route, I emerged eventually on Piccadilly, and was jostled and ogled and blessed and cursed with the greatest heartiness. Somewhere near Bond Street I collided heavily with a young man who was trying to negotiate the crowd and at the same time lose nothing of the shop windows' display.
"A thousand devils!" I muttered, recoiling from the impact.