Then he rose and buttoned his thick coat; for, like all great travellers, he wrapped himself up heavily in England. It is only very young and quite inexperienced men who gather satisfaction from the bravado of wearing no top-coat in winter.
'Good-bye,' he said; 'I must go up to the publishers.'
'Good-bye,' replied the editor heartily; 'look in whenever you are passing. I hope to see you one night soon at the Homeless Club; they are going to give you a dinner, I believe.'
'Yes; I heard something of it. It is very good of them, but embarrassing, and not strictly necessary.'
Trist passed out of the small room into a long passage, and thence into what was technically called the shop—a large apartment, across which stretched a heavily-built deal counter, and of which the atmosphere was warm with the intellectual odour of printing-ink.
The door-keeper, who persisted, in face of contradiction, in his conviction that Mr. Trist was a soldier, drew himself stiffly up and saluted as he held open the swing-door. It was one of those cold blustering days which come in early November. A dry biting south-east wind howled round every corner, and disfigured most physiognomies with patches of red, more especially in the nasal regions. Nevertheless, the air was clear and brisk—just the day to kill weak folks and make strong people feel stronger.
With his gloved hands buried in the pockets of his thick coat, the war-correspondent wandered along the crowded pavement of the Strand, rubbing shoulders with beggar and genius indifferently.
He was not a man much given to useless reflections or observations upon matters climatic, and so absorbed was he in his thoughts that he would have been profoundly surprised to learn that a biting east wind was withering up humanity. He looked into the shops, and presently became really interested in a display of rifles exposed in the unpretending window of a small establishment.
It is strange how the sight of those tools or instruments with which we have at one time worked for our living affects us. The present writer has seen an old soldier handle a bayonet in a curious reflective way which could not be misunderstood. The ancient warrior's face, in some subtle sense, became hardened, and his manner changed. I myself grasp a rope differently from men who have never trodden a moss-grown deck, and the curve of the hard strands within my fingers tells a tale of its own, and brings back, suddenly, ineffaceable pictures of the great seas.
Theodore Trist stood still before the upright burnished barrels which the poet has likened to organ-pipes, and to his mind there came the memory of their music, and the roar of traffic round him was almost merged into the grand, deep voice of cannon. It is in the midst of death that men realize fully the glorious gift of life, and those who have known the delirious joy of battle—have once tasted, as it were, the cup of life's greatest emotion—are aware that nothing but a battle-field can bring that maddening taste to their lips again.