Aunt Augusta showed a great deal of interest in the day’s adventures, and next morning I took a dark blue “blazer” to the office. It had the badge of Merivale first footer team on it; but, of course, I made my aunt cut that off. Because, though it meant a good deal at Merivale, to a man earning his own living in a hive of industry, it simply counted for nothing at all.
IV
When I heard that there was a cricket club in connection with the Apollo Fire Office I was glad, and still more so when I found that the team played other Fire Offices; for the Apollo is by no means the only one in London, though easily the best. Of course I never thought that in an office full of grown men I should be able to play in matches; but Dicky Travers explained to me that I might hope, if I was any good, as only a comparatively small number of the clerks actually played, though a large number patronised the games with their presence and came to the Annual Dinner at the far-famed Holborn Restaurant. This restaurant, I may say, is almost a palace in itself, and the walls are decorated with sumptuous marbles and works of foreign art. The waiters are also foreign. There are fountains and a band to play while you eat; and it shows how accustomed the London mind can get to almost anything in the way of luxury, for I have seen people eating through brilliant masterpieces of music and not in the least put off their food by them, though every instrument in the band was playing simultaneously. But, of course, there were no bands or fountains where I went for my Bath bun and glass of milk. As a matter of fact, this was rather a light meal for me, but I hoped to get accustomed to it. Anyway the result, when dinner-time came at the flat of my Aunt Augusta, was remarkably good, and I used to eat in a way that filled her with fear. And, after eating, I felt that I simply must have exercise of some sort, and I used to go out in the dark to the Regent’s Park and run for miles at my best pace. It worried policemen when I flew past them, because it is very unusual to race about after dark in London if you are honest, and policemen are, unfortunately, a suspicious race and, owing to their work, get into the way of thinking that anything out of the common may be a clew. Once having flown past a policeman and run without stopping to a certain lamp-post, I went back to the man and explained to him that I had to sit on an office stool most of the day, and that at night, after dinner, I felt a frightful need for active exercise, and so took it in this way. I thought he would rather applaud the idea, but he said it was a fool’s game and might lead to trouble if I persisted in it. He advised me to join an athletic club and a gymnasium, and I told him that the advice was good and thanked him. As a matter of fact, I was able to tell the policeman also that a great friend of mine had put me up for the London Athletic Club, and that I hoped soon to hear that I had been elected as a member. I mentioned Dicky Travers and thought the policeman would be a good deal surprised that I actually knew this famous man. However, the surprise was mine, because the policeman had never heard of him. But sport was a sealed book to him, as the saying is.
I only remember one other thing about those runs. I used to put on very little clothes, of course, but even so, naturally worked myself up into a terrific perspiration, which was what I meant to do, it being a most healthful thing for people who have to sit still all day. But my aunt was quite alarmed when I returned to have a bath and a rub down; and then it came out that she had never seen anybody in a real perspiration before! I roared with laughter and explained, and she said that she thought people only had perspirations when they were ill. She had never been in one in her whole life apparently. She was a very nice and kind woman, but I puzzled her fearfully, because she had never known many boys of my age, and though she smoked cigarettes herself, she thought they were bad for me and begged me to be very temperate in the use of them. To be temperate in everything was a mania with her. I must have upset her flat a lot one way and another; but she was very patient and wouldn’t hear of my going into lodgings alone.
“You are much too young,” she said. “You must look upon me as your mother till you are eighteen, at any rate.”
Then it was—after I had been in the City of London six weeks—that I met with my first great misfortune, though it began as a most hopeful and promising affair.
I had heard, of course, from Dicky Travers and Mr. Blades and others, that there were plenty of shady characters in London, and that their shadiness took all sorts of forms; but this did not bother me much, because a clerk such as I was would not, I thought, provoke a shady character, owing to my youth. But a good many of these shady characters mark down young men as their regular and lawful prey, like the tiger marks down the bison in the jungle. And a great feature of the cunning of these people is that they get themselves up in a way to hide their real natures—in fact, such is their ingenuity, that they pretend to go to the other extreme, and appear before their victims dressed just the very opposite of what one would expect in a shady character. They are, in fact, full of deceit.
One day I had eaten my bun and drunk my glass of milk in about a second and a half, and was looking at books in a very interesting bookseller’s window that spread out into the street near that historic building known as the Mansion House, where the Lord Mayor lives. I had found a sixpenny book about Mr. Henry Irving’s art and was just going to purchase it, bringing from my pocket a five-pound note to do so, when an old man of a religious and gentlemanly appearance spoke to me.
But first, to calm the natural excitement of the reader at hearing me mention a five-pound note, I ought to explain that that morning was pay-day at the office—the first in which I had actively participated. The five-pound note was the first that I had ever earned, and it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to feel it in my pocket. This was natural.
“Good literature here, sir,” said the stranger. “I hope you love books?”