For a long while after Mrs. Purvis had left me to attend to the shrill wants of some of her elder children, I sat with it in my lap, looking out of the rain-spotted window upon the mouldering back gardens beneath, where string after string of intimate household linen dried or stiffened in the sooty air. I thought of the tender, mournful wisdom, the sad insight into life which that despised bundle contained, bought with the blood and sweat, and tears maybe, of thirty years: jotted down—for I knew its history—in cattle camps, by Algerian bivouac fires, in hotel lobbies of roaring Western cities. And I thought of the little luxurious house beside the Park, filled with all that ministers to the lust of the eye and the pride of life. A pretty face and figure, an aptitude for bodily movement, a few shallow tricks of manner, had earned that in a year for a woman whom I had already occasion to know couldn't spell. Well, the world knows what it wants. The world had chosen. Was there to be no appeal? Is failure here failure forever? Or is there, beyond this world, with its stark denials of justice, another where such things count still, and where the reward so insolently and capriciously withheld shall be bestowed, the hungerer after justice, even artistic justice, have his fill? Sad questions that no religion cares to answer.
And here my search ended. He had left no address: no letters had followed him. I took the manuscript away with me and locked it into a drawer. I was not sure yet what I would do with it. Show the world what manner of man it had despised, perhaps. Or perhaps tie a stone around it and sink it in mid-channel. I must think which Paul would have chosen.
Nearly six months afterward in late summer, I was sitting at my desk and beginning to think of turning in, when Mrs. McNaughten rapped at the door. A "vairy rough body" was asking for me. Should she show him up or bid him state the natur-re of his business?
"Doesn't he say what he wants?"
"He'll say nothing but that he wants Mister-r-r P. He says ye'll understand fine. Mister 'P.' I think the body's daft."
The advertisement. My heart jumped. "Show him up, please. At once!"
A short thick-set man in soiled working clothes and with a colored handkerchief round his neck came in, tossed a cap on the table with a gesture full of natural grace, stretched his neck two or three times, as if to intimate that he was ready for any manner of reception, and began to beat a limy dust with the back of his hand out of as much of his corduroys as was within easy reach.
"Nime of Palamount," he said, oracularly and rather hoarsely. "Builder's mite, my tride is."
I indicated a chair. "And what can I do for you, Mr. Palamount? I am not contemplating any repairs or additions to my quarters at present."
All this time the man had kept one hand in his pocket. He drew it out, holding a newspaper, folded very small and very tight.