So, with June on his hat-brim, and the Archdeacon's homily fresh in his memory, he began to measure established facts with new purposes, and found that in several directions the two did not fit.
He felt as he sauntered through the silent streets to his noisy destination something like a pioneer landed on a virgin shore. New possibilities--vague and unformed as yet--loomed before him. These new possibilities at once attracted and repelled him. It was not to be easy for him to get out of the comfortable ruck in which circumstances had placed him.
Ordinarily, the way for him to take would be through sober squares--oases of iron-railed respectability--given up at that dull hour to cats, drowsy cabs, and constables. Now the splendid dulness and shuttered dinginess of the great houses under which he walked oppressed him, and the impulse came to wander by more devious ways, through that network of slums which all but touched the back-doors of the rich.
Never before in his easy-ordered life had such an impulse come to him. He had--as became his mother's son--instinctively refrained from looking on the unpleasant. Squalor and want existed to be avoided; they were so hopeless and--oh, so ugly! Unconsciously he had cultivated the happy, blind eye, and habitually overlooked the obvious. There was no callousness in his case, but merely ignorance. There are many like him. He was one of a multitude unawake.
At last he was ripe to shed his priggishness. June vigorously spurred his purposes. His latent power for real social service was suddenly quickened into life.
Marching into an area of meanness, which hitherto had been the Forbidden Land, he was at once face to face with heavy problems.
He passed a public-house, as a drunken woman, a baby in her arms, was put out from the portal. A whiff of hot air went with her. The potman who had turned her out--"chucked" is the word--talked to her in dingy scarlet, and then returned to his damp altar of a decadent Bacchus.
Geoffrey gazed at the woman curiously.
The horror of it! She was undivine, bestial, bloated; the victim--a greedy victim--to gin. She stopped and turned clumsily to stare stupidly at the lighted windows; then angrily, with hoarse voice, returned the potman's compliments. All the while the fragment of humanity was wailing, cradled within her shawl.
The threats of this demoralized Venus merged gradually into a pitiful whine--ah, the woes and wrongs she suffered from!--as she staggered hurriedly along the causeway, came to the door of her dwelling, and lurched over the step. There was the home of that English child!