The boy was out of the vehicle at a bound. He cried to the cabman, “Oh, t-thank you, oh, t-thank you!”
The fifth stroke of twelve had struck. No. 24 was displayed on a door six yards away. Beside it was a brass plate inscribed, Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker, Publishers.
In a state of excitement that he found it impossible to allay, the boy entered through the swing doors. Almost immediately he found his progress barred by a counter. Behind it a miscellaneous collection of street-persons, whose sex was unmistakably that of the male, was writing in books, clicking typewriters, ringing telephones, tying up parcels.
The boy, knowing he had come to stand on the threshold of nameless mysteries, awoke to the discovery that he was entirely divested of the powers of speech and motion. Yet as he stood in bewilderment, not knowing what to do now that after such infinite vicissitudes he had come to No. 24 Trafalgar Square at the appointed hour, the occupant of a tall stool behind a glass partition in the left-hand corner of the counting-house left that eminence, and at a leisure that was really remarkable sauntered up to the counter to the applicant.
The individual who had left the high stool was declared, when he came to stand before the boy, to be no unworthy specimen of his time and country. In age he might have been twelve or he might have been forty; yet upon every feature of a small and wizened countenance, which embodied all the most salient characteristics of the fox and the ferret, was stamped a not inconsiderable intellectual quality. On the score of physique this personage was not so well equipped. He was undersized to the point of the stunted; but Nature, with her liberal cunning, had granted him ample compensation for his lack of inches. He had an air. His air had the inimitable aplomb which is the perquisite of the few.
At first the boy could do nothing but stare in dire confusion at this somewhat sinister figure. He was dumb, yet his lips were wide apart, and he was trembling all over. The whole of the ritual that had undergone such a careful preparation, in which every possible contingency that could arise had been foreseen and counteracted, had vanished from his mind as completely as though it had never been in it.
“The tailor’s is next door,” said the wizened boy, after a period of thoughtful contemplation of him who stood at the other side of the counter. As he spoke he appeared to pick his words with the cool delicacy of a connoisseur.
Another period of silence followed this piece of information, which was broken at last by an ineffectual stammer from the applicant.
“I—I—I d-don’t w-want the t-tailor’s, s-sir,” he said.
“Really,” said the other with a courtesy which, although quite amiable, was in nowise expansive, “I thought perhaps you might.”