To the rim of a fine, but much-riveted blue-and-white plate he waxed the twenty-one candles, and in the centre, pedestalled upon an inverted soap-dish, he stood the birthday cake. The champagne and some glasses were placed on one side of this setpiece, the grapes on the other, while before it, squarely and precisely laid, were the two beautifully tied parcels of soap and scent.
So wrapped up was he in the exquisite pleasure of his preparations that he was quite insensible to the deliberate symmetry he had brought about—a circumstance which may prove a great deal, or nothing at all. When he had done he fell back and surveyed his handiwork as an artist before a masterpiece.
And outside rumbled the voices of the clocks saying the hour was eleven.
“Eleven! She will be here in a moment,” he thought. A sudden nervousness seized him. He did not know why or what it was about. He touched his pocket to be sure the matches were there. He wondered if she were all right, and had crossed Long Acre and Oxford Street safely—they were busiest in theatre traffic at that hour, and private cars and taxis paid little heed to pedestrians. It would be so easy for her to be knocked down and run over. He could picture the curious, jostling crowds that would gather round, the blue helmets of the police in the centre—and the gaunt ambulance which would appear from nowhere.
“God! What a fool I am,” he exclaimed. “She’s all right—of course she is.”
Yet, despite this guarantee of her safety, thoughts of possible disaster raced across his mind. Memory of his visit to the Morgue in Paris arose and would not be banished. He recalled what he had said that day: “Death is so horribly conclusive.” Conclusive! Suppose it were visited upon her?—something would die in him, too. He asked himself what that something would be, but could find no answer. It would be something so lately come to life that he did not know it well enough to name.
Once more his eyes fell upon the table, and the fears vanished. Of course she would come—of course nothing would happen to her. Even though it were against her will, she would be drawn by what he had prepared.
He blew out the lamp, and crossing the room opened the window and leant over the sill to wait.
It was a sweet night, starred and silent. Smoke rose ghostily from the silhouetted stacks, and a faint, murmurous wind, which seemed to have stolen from a Devon lane, touched his hair to movement. North, south, east, and west stretched the roofs of London, and in imagination he could hear the soft rustle as the dwellers beneath tucked themselves in for the night.
A hundred times before he had leant out, as now, with thoughts which ran on the groundlings who ate and slept and worked and squabbled beneath that army of stacks and slates; and how, one day, his name should come to be as familiar with them as the pictures hanging on their walls. But tonight his feelings were different. He conceived these people in their relation to each other and not to himself. In each and all those myriad abiding-places there would be folk with gentle thoughts and kindly desires, even as his were then. They would be linked together by the common tie of doing something to please. Never before had it occurred to him that in pleasing another happiness was born in oneself. Hitherto he had only thought to please by the nimbleness of his artistry—the perfection of a style, the ability to express; but now he saw the surer way was to appeal to the heart—to minister to the true sentiment—to hand over sincerity from one’s simple best.