The Undefeated

by J. C. Snaith

Passing the tent sacred to the President and Committee, it gave him one more thrill to mark the bearing of the grandees. The famous white hat no longer adorned the head of the President. The great man nursed it upon his fat loud-checked knees. All the reluctant geniality a public function had inspired had passed from his ugly face. Yet in the purview of his son-in-law it looked a little less ugly at that moment than he ever remembered to have seen it. Those fierce eyes were not occupied now with the narrow round of their own affairs, nor with a swelling vision of self-importance. The world was on fire. He was simply a man among his fellow men; and like them he was wondering what ought to be done.

At seven o’clock a vaguely excited but profoundly depressed William Hollis made his way out of Jubilee Park. He turned down Short Hill in the direction of his home. But by the time he had reached the foot of that brief declivity, and was involved in an airless maze of bricks and mortar, the thought of his home grew suddenly intolerable. He needed freedom and space, he needed an atmosphere more congenial. Melia would not understand. Or if she did understand she would be dumb and just now he simply longed for a little human intercourse.

At the end of Love Lane, a mean and crooked little street debouching from the Mulcaster Road which wound a somber trail to the very heart of the city, he stood a moment gazing at the dingy sign a few doors up on the left, W. Hollis, Fruiterer. The obvious course was to go and deposit the prize he had won on the dresser in the back sitting room, or still better, give it into the personal care of Melia. But instead, he wrapped up the trophy a little more carefully, resettled it under his arm, and then allowed himself to drift slowly with the throng in the direction of the Market Place.

As was usual with him now, his actions were aimless and uncertain. There was no particular reason why he should be going to the Market Place beyond the fact that other people seemed to be going there, as somehow they always did seem to be going there at great moments in the national life. The factories and warehouses who happened to be working that day had disgorged their human cargoes and these under the stimulus of hourly editions of the Evening Star were moving slowly and solemnly towards the nodal point.

What the Market Place is to the city as a whole, Waterloo Square is to the teeming, close-packed population of its southeastern area. And at the busiest corner of Waterloo Square, at its confluence with Mulcaster Road, that main artery which leads directly to the center of all things, is the Duke of Wellington public house. William Hollis, drifting with the tide, felt a sudden, uncontrollable desire to “have one” at this famous landmark of the local life.

The Duke of Wellington was a “free” house and Mr. Josiah Munt had been able to maintain in its integrity the declining art of brewing Blackhampton Old Ale. This had a bite and a sting in it, with which the more diluted beverages of “tied” houses could not compare. At the Duke of Wellington you paid for the best and you got it; therefore it was patronized by all in the neighborhood who knew what was what; it had, moreover, peculiar advantages of tradition and geography which gave it a cachet of its own.

“To have one” at the Duke of Wellington, in the eyes of those who lived near by, was almost on a par with “looking in” at Brooks’s or the Carlton. It conferred a kind of diploma of local worth and responsibility. At the same time no form of politics was barred, but the proprietor himself was a staunch conservative and it was very difficult to find a welcome in the bar parlor without sharing that faith.

It could not be said that William Hollis had ever aspired to the good graces of the house. There were obvious reasons why this was the case. For sixteen years he had not passed through its doors; in that long period he had not even entered the humbler part of the premises known as “the vaults,” sacred to Tom, Dick and Harry, where the more substantial patrons of the establishment disdained to set foot.

To-night, however, new and strange forces were at work in Bill. Borne along a tide of cosmic events as far as those fascinating doors he was suddenly and quite irrationally mastered by a desire to go in.

Partly it may have been bravado; certainly it was a daring act to cross that threshold. But Josiah himself, for whose personal prowess his son-in-law had a wholesome respect, was safe at the Show; besides, the proprietor was too great a man these days to visit the house very often. Years ago he had ceased to reside there with his family; and in his steady social ascent he was careful not to emphasize a dubious but extremely lucrative connection with that which regarded in perspective was but a common public house.