PART III
I
THE BATHS OF APOLLO
On a foggy November morning of the year whose events have been chronicled a man came out of a house in Westminster and stood for a moment on the worn steps, supporting himself against one of the pillars of the porch, to blink sorely at the raw day. The house he was leaving was one of a few old buildings that still exist on the long, crooked street whose northern frontage follows the ancient precincts of royal abbey and palace. From its size, the graceful detail of its doorway, the white and black squares unevenly paving its hall and the depth of brickwork which the long recessed windows revealed, one judged at once that this had been, in days gone by, the town mansion of a great legal or political family, forced by its very functions to dwell at the gates of the legislature. But whatever it had been in olden times, to-day the great house was inexpressibly sordid and degraded. The cupids and garlands of its doorway, blunted by two centuries of whistling house-painters, had well-nigh disappeared once for all beneath a last coat of coarse red-brown paint. With the same dismal tint—the old penitential hue of the galleys—were daubed window-sashes and sills, the panelling of the wide hall, the carved brackets that supported the crumbling edges of its tiled roof. Within, one conjectured rightly bare lime-washed walls—disinfection, not decoration—sodden boards worn away round the knots. Even in the foggy half-light, so merciful to all that has beauty of outline still to show, its crude defacement did not escape. One felt that the pickaxe and sledge-hammer of the house-breaker, busy in a neighboring hoarded space, spared it too long.
A thick, dun mist had been creeping up-river since dawn from the Kent and Essex levels, gathering up on its way the filthy smoke of glue factories and chemical works, and holding it suspended over the spires and domes of the Imperial city. The close alleys and wynds that, like a fungus growth upon polluted soil, cover the area once sacred to the brothels and dog-kennels of the Plantagenet Court, seemed not so much to be endued with smoke and grime as actually to be built up out of compacted slabs of the sooty atmosphere. The sun was still in the east—a red wafer stuck on a sealed sky.
For a few minutes the man stood still, as if either too tired to make up his mind which way he should take, or as if, really paralyzed for the moment by the equilibrium of the forces that acted on his will, he was at the point where, vertigo having seized upon the mind and, as it were, disorientated it, direction loses its meaning. It is almost certain that had any passer-by—a policeman, a man bearing a burden, even a child—jostled the man, he would have gone on in the direction to which the collision turned him.
He wore a jacket and trousers of what had once been blue serge, faded by exposure, by dust, by rain that soaked in the dust, and sun that dried the rain in turn, to that color which is obtained by mixing all the primaries upon a palette. A streak of the coat's original color showed still under the upturned collar, and had the effect of a facing upon a soldier's tunic. Coat and trousers were miserably frayed at the edges, but neatly mended in more than one place. Probably from being worn night and day upon an almost naked body, the stiff straight lines natural to modern clothing had disappeared, and they had acquired, in their place, an actual mould of the limbs. His shoes, spattered with mud and grease, seemed once to have been brown. They were broken, and the heels had been trodden down so far that the soles curled up in front like an eastern slipper. The man was quite clean, his hair and beard even trimly kept. His face was refined. Whatever physical suffering he was undergoing or had undergone, it was evident he had not yet reached the depth at which the soul contracts and shrivels once for all, and, dropping into some inmost recess where only death shall find it again, leaves the animal epidermis to bear the outrage of life. Under one eye the discoloration of an old bruise showed faintly.
As he looked about him—first above his head, then mechanically to left and right—what was almost a look of relief and peace came over the tortured face. In this narrow drab margin twixt night and night—a day only by the calendar and by the duties it imposed—it is possible he felt something akin. Something of the mechanical precision of life that was such a reproach to his own confusion would have to be relaxed. It would be a day of late trains, of crawling, interlocked traffic, of sudden warnings from the darkness, with the ever-present possibility of some levelling disaster to lend a zest to the empty hours. Excluded from human communion on the side of its pleasures, the outcast yearns toward it all the more upon the side of its pain and mischance. What is the savagery of revolution but a very exaltation of perverted sympathy? "Weep with me, my brother," says the red of hand, "weep with me at least, since I might not rejoice with you."
He had been the last to leave the common lodging-house which had given him a night's shelter, and, as he lingered, the deputy, a big, fleshy man in shirt-sleeves, came down the passage behind him, whistling and sweeping before him the caked mud which forty pairs of broken shoes had brought in during the night. At the sound of his broom against the wainscot, the man turned sharply, with a sudden energy that was like the release of a coiled spring, and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, strode off to the left quickly and aimlessly as a caged wolf. Where Great Smith Street runs into Victoria Street he turned to his left again, and followed the main thoroughfare southward. Through the happy accident of its deflection midway, at the point where the colossal doorway of the Windsor Hotel confronts the Army and Navy Stores, Victoria Street possesses, as all visitors to London with the architectural sense must have noticed, a dignity and effectiveness unique in the city of costly ineptitude. Approached from the river at sunset or sunrise, or in any light low enough and dim enough to hide the sorry detail of its lofty houses, the effect approaches the monumental. The wanderer's eyes had been fixed on the ground; but, possibly arriving at some spot where in former days he had been used to watch for it, he raised his head and stood, unsteadily, for a few seconds, intent upon the beauty with which the world is as prodigal as it is niggardly of its substance. The sky was an orange dun, deepening and lightening almost momentarily, as though some pigment with which the day was to be dyed later were being prepared overhead. The long Italianesque façade of the stores was all one blue shadow, but over its roof, through some atmospheric freak, the campanile of the new cathedral emerged, pale pink and cream, and in the upper windows of the great hotel, whose pillars and helmed mask closed the prospect on the right, a few wavering squares as of strawberry tinsel foil reflected the foggy sun. As he watched, leaning against the railing, one might have noticed his lips move. He took his clenched fists from his pockets, and opened them slowly with a strange gesture of surrender. It was as though some inward resolution, evidenced by the hasty walk, the lowered eye, the clenched hands, yielded at its first contact with the influence he was attempting to forswear.
A man who had been walking hastily from the opposite direction, with a long roll of blue prints under his arm, stopped short, pulled off his glove, and, diving into his trouser pocket, pulled out a copper and pressed it against one of the open palms. The dreamer started, closed his hand upon the penny convulsively, and, without a word of thanks, gazed after the bustling figure. He opened his fingers slowly and looked at the coin, with the same fear and repugnance that a sick man might show who, having put his hand to his mouth, finds blood upon it. Then, still holding it in his hand, he quickened his walk, until it was almost a run.