CHAPTER XI
SEALED ORDERS
On a bright morning in April Hughie emerged from the offices of Messrs. Slocum, Spink, and Slocum, Solicitors, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and made for the Strand.
Like most men who have been abroad for a long time, he trod the streets of London with an oddly mingled sensation of familiarity and strangeness. At one moment he felt that he had been living in London for years, at another he felt that he was exploring a new city. The Strand itself, save for the old congested stretch in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, was almost unrecognisable. Gone for ever were the various landmarks of his youth, such as the Old Gaiety and the Lowther Arcade. Holywell Street and Wych Street, with their delectable environs, had vanished like a bad but interesting dream, leaving room for a broad and stately thoroughfare, in the midst of which the churches of St. Mary and St. Clement Danes split the traffic like boulders in a Highland spate, and the Law Courts acquired an unfamiliar prominence. A new fairway of uncanny width and straightness clove its course to Holborn, blocked at its mouth by a dismal patch of excavated territory resembling nothing so much as what Scotsmen term a "free toom," and proclaiming to all and sundry, by means of a gigantic notice-board, that This Site was To Let as a Whole.
The traffic had developed too. There were countless motor-buses, which shook the earth and smelt to heaven; and taxicabs, which skipped like rams and quacked like ducks.
But after all, though landmarks change their bearings and banks be washed away, the stream flows on unchanged. The people were the same, and Hughie felt comforted. The smell of asphalt was the same, and he felt uplifted. And when he beheld the torrents of traffic that converge on the Wellington Street crossing arrest their courses seriatim and pile themselves up in a manner that would have done credit to the waters of Jordan, all at the bidding of an imperturbable figure in a blue uniform, he felt that he was indeed home once more.
Presently he hailed a taxicab, and whizzed along, exulting like a child with a new toy, to a railway station, where John Alexander Goble, having previously superintended the placing of his master's luggage in the train (with a maximum of precaution on his part and a minimum of profit on the porter's), was waiting to see him off.
Hughie dismissed his retainer to take charge of his newly acquired flat until his return, and having secured his seat, followed his invariable custom and went forward to view the engine. He noted with interest that compound locomotives seemed to have made little or no progress in the country's favour, but that the prejudice against high-pitched boilers and six-coupled wheels had disappeared.
He then made his way to the refreshment room,—where alone, he noted, Time's devastating hand appeared to have stood still,—and having lunched frugally off something from under a glass dome which the divinity behind the counter, in response to a respectful inquiry, brusquely described as "fourpence," together with as much bitter beer as remained after the same damosel had slapped its containing vessel playfully down on the fingers of a pimply but humorous youth who was endeavouring to tempt the appetites of two wizened sardines, exposed for sale on a piece of toast, with a hard-boiled egg from a neighbouring plate, returned to his seat in the train; where he was duly locked in by a porter, who displayed an amount of cheerful gratitude for sixpence that an American baggage-man would have considered excessive at a dollar. Here, with a rug, a pipe, and a quantity of illustrated papers, most of which had come to birth since he had left England, and all of which appeared to depend for their livelihood on the exploitation of the lighter lyric drama, Hughie settled himself for a comfortable run along the Thames Valley.
This done, he took two letters from his pocket. One had been opened already. It was an obviously feminine production, and said:—