A line of memorandum was written, initialed, and signed; and Mr. Petre went out into the fresh air hooked, securely hooked, on to the Paddenham Site, and liable, morally liable, for rather more than £800,000 and frills. The man Williams, all witless of his happy fate, was saved.
Terrard took leave at his office door, and Mr. Petre, crawling back westward again in a taxi to his hotel, suffered what is known as the reaction.
He sat for the best part of an hour in his room, turning over in his mind the madness, the enormity of the thing he had just done. It rushed in upon him suddenly, like a fierce animal springing from the brake upon a traveler, that he had not realized—it had been too sudden—the affair of the £73,729 16s. 3d. He was living in a whirl of dreams. The reality of that solid sum now loomed upon him. It was jeopardized. It might go like smoke. Then with infinitely greater force, with a thud like a battering ram, came the consideration that he was by way of meeting a sum the like of which was fantastic beyond the powers of any but one man in millions. Under the deadening blow of that fairly obvious discovery he reeled back into the consolation which he had already found on that day, not so long past, when he had ordered with perfect simplicity in the corner of Berkeley Square the purchase of fifty-thousand barbarous things called Touaregs of which he knew not anything at all. He remembered the fate of that blind action of a moment. He trusted to the same good fortune. And there returned to him that odd consolation which he had felt on that first day. What if the whole thing crashed? He was only where he was before. Would a man standing as he was be held responsible? His conscience told him yes, but the Law?—He knew nothing of the law in the matter.
And then ... if he were really all they thought he was (and they seemed to know) he might be able to raise even so vast a sum.... But how without discovery of his dreadful secret?
It meant the revelation which he dreaded, at the worst; but that at the worst would come anyhow. At the best (and, after all, it was one chance in two), his fate would be postponed.
His disturbed and blinded heart was the lighter for this confusion of thought so ending, and he exercised what power he had over his own thoughts to drive from them all anxiety. He knew one way in which it could be done. He had tried it already. He left an abrupt message, as he had left one those few days before; he noted the date when he was pledged to return to the city, and he departed by the very next train he could catch for his retreat in Hampshire.
The playful Dæmon attached to Mr. Petre’s fortunes grinned to himself and acted. He it was that thrust a spear into the heart of a certain minor official of the Education Department.
He was a poet in the truest sense of the word; a creator, was that minor official. They only paid him £750 a year—from which income tax was brutally deducted ere ever he touched the checks—he lived a bachelor and alone in Clapham. But the Spirit bloweth where it listeth, it does, and it had inspired this isolated man.
Long ago this minor official of the Education Department had been inspired to save England.
It was a vision; a revelation; it had struck him in one blinding flash that what Elementary Education lacked in all our great towns and especially in London was a Central Physical and Civic Training Ground and Development Premises; what was soon briefly known under his energetic propaganda as a C.P.C.T.G.D.P.