Change was what he sought. Novelty without solitude. Therefore, instead of the quiet hotel in Jermyn Street, where he usually put up, he found himself this morning in a large City hotel not a bow-shot from the cathedral of St. Paul.
A while he lay awake listening to the tremulous mutter of the City traffic. What a contrast, these groans of wheels and clatters of hoofs with the morning silence about the Manor House. Here, the walls vibrated, the solid ground shook, the air fluttered against the window-panes with the sway of bodies moving ceaselessly hither and thither. There, no sound came in upon the desert realms of the morning silence but the faint twitter of a bird or the far-off crack of a carter's whip or a sportsman's gun.
Would it not be better for him to stop here always?
Here were no suggestions of the disastrous past. No one knew him here. Suppose he burnt down the Manor House, took twenty thousand pounds out of the Bank, changed his name, disguised himself, and came to live in the middle of roaring London? Ambition he would abandon. Blows had come so heavily and so quickly, the ambition had been beaten out of him. Security and peace were what he yearned for. Security and peace. Peace.
If he lived in this great whirlpool in the ocean of Man, the shoutings of his fellows would drown the memories of his ears. Who could hear the whisperings of a woman's dress in the tumult of this great city, with its turmoil of multitudinous wheels and clangour of innumerable bells? Here he could take his ease for the rest of his life, and drown the vague hideous whispers of the dead in the loud-toned wrangles of the living.
There was, however, no necessity for his now changing his name or adopting disguises. He had some days to rest and recruit. When these had passed it would be time enough for him to think of precautions.
He went out after breakfast, and strolled along streets he had never been in before.
He moved west through streets running in perplexing zigzags, a little to the north of Cheapside, Newgate Street, and Holborn. He strolled slowly, looking in at shop-windows, and taking interest in the disputes of ragged boys and the bargaining of slattern women at the doors of slopshops and marine store dealers. He was not used to such scenes, and they took his mind off his own affairs and condition better than the deserted parks or richer streets. It seemed to him as though he had already severed his connection with Daneford, and lived emancipated from the past.
At last he came to an open space, in the centre of which stood a large heavy-looking building he had never seen before. Passing along the southern side of this open space, he came to the entrance of that building.
He thought: "Often as I have been in London, I have never seen even the outside of this before. It will be a capital place to spend a few hours."