“All right, Martin; bring me that.”
He dressed slowly, laying aside the garments of Mr. Petre and glad to find that two years had made him neither more nor less unwieldy. He approved the tie; he always wore the same kind. He approved the collar. He put watch and chain and keys and change and papers into the old regular pockets. It was a resurrection of the flesh.
Then he went into the sitting-room—they were but two, these modest ancient rooms of his on the second floor, with Martin and a boxroom up above. He sat at his desk by the window and pondered. It was half-past nine o’clock.
He sat at his desk recovering rapidly, moment by rising moment, from such weakness as a man feels after a long illness; but his mind was clear. All his boyhood, all his manhood, were before him as they are with you and me; the normal memory, here vivid, there imperfect, with the full personality and past of the man. He saw it all in its perspective and in its frame, and with his restoration came decision and will.
That life he had now before him had not been very eventful, it was nowhere tragic; it had its disturbances and its troubles; it had its few moments of petty glories and one short episode of passion.
The shock which had brought it back to him when he had come suddenly upon that friend of his youth did not exaggerate anything. It only restored. It shook him back into himself and their long acquaintance: the life of school together, and of college; the rooms above the Cloisters in Cambridge, the winter days in which he had gone down to Devizes to stay with them, and their hunting together.
He remembered his father’s death and how he had left his mother the use of Harrington, living himself between it and town. His determination, which had so grieved her, not to marry after his disappointment. He remembered those regular journeys up and down; the station in the country town of Patcham near at hand; the beloved accent of his own people on the platform, the beloved West-country talk of the Patchamites. The four miles’ drive home. He remembered his mother’s stroke, her decline, her death, and his own grief. He remembered (an odd detail which brought a tired smile to his lips) that bad investment in Mexicans, or to be perfectly frank with himself, that bad speculation.
He remembered how Charlie Cable had unloaded upon him, and how he had trusted him because Charlie had just got into the Cabinet and was somewhat of a hero in his eyes. He remembered the letting of Harrington and his furnishing for himself the cottage outside the North Lodge and how he regretted leaving the place. He remembered the conversation with Wilkins, the family lawyer: he remembered their office, the long talks on affairs: all futile. He was himself again.
He remembered the taking of these very rooms twenty years ago and more—not so long after the Great War. He remembered his habitation of them during the two weeks of the Levantine Crisis in ’39, when they were threatened with air raids, and had an oddly vivid memory of walking back from the office in which he had volunteered to work, half a mile away in Whitehall, during the first warning. He remembered how strange he had thought it was that he was not frightened—at his age. He was frightened enough a little later.
He remembered the occasion of his journey to the States twenty-eight months ago, the strange climate of New York, his days in Chicago, his disappointment at the condition of that land-venture of his; his renewed anxieties. He even remembered his amusement at the difference between what he had thought the land would be like and what it really was. The astonishing American landscape. He vividly remembered the return, the abomination of the crossing on the great liner, the bad company, the bad food. Then came, like the shutter of a camera coming sharp down on his mind, the darkness that followed: the dead blank—the gap, in a train.