For some seconds he was unable to speak, obviously struggling with his vocal cords, and then with a blast of exceptional sadness he managed to expel the mournful details. Suffering, as it appeared, from a temporary gastric distention, the amiable lad had gone to the medicine chest, where he had unfortunately mistaken the cyanide of potassium for the bicarbonate of soda.
CHAPTER X
Precautionary measures on entering commercial life. I join the N.S.L. and the S.P.S.D.T. A crying need in the conduct of prayer-meetings. I join the A.D.S.U. Personal appearance of Ezekiel Stool. Personal appearance of his five sisters. Predicament of Ezekiel Stool on the fifth of November. A timely instance of presence of mind. I am invited to a meal at the Stools’ residence. A foreshadowing of sinister events.
It was a distressing end. Few things are more distressing, indeed, than the sudden demise of a potential clergyman. And for the first three or four days of my work in Paternoster Row my spirits were appreciably clouded. Nevertheless I was happy not only that I had embarked upon the career so satisfactorily chosen for me, but also in the consciousness that, but for my own perspicacity, Providence would have found it difficult to assist me. Moreover it was an additional comfort to me to reflect that, during my upward progress in the firm, I should have the obligatory if unwilling support of Mrs. Chrysostom Lorton. A word in the ear of her husband, and her infamy could be no longer concealed, and I could not suppose that, callous as she was, she would dare to expose herself to such an event.
Few young men, therefore, can have entered business life better equipped or so advantageously placed, and had I in consequence been carried away a little, it would scarcely perhaps have been unnatural. Very fortunately, however, and thanks in a great degree to the character-forming incidents already related, I realized from the outset that I was now definitely committed to the most critical period of a young man’s life—namely, the years, so fatal to the vast majority, between his seventeenth and twenty-fourth birthdays. Then it is, alas, that intoxicated with the knowledge that he has become, in my father’s phrase, a marriageable adult that he begins to resort for the first time to the tobacconist and the publican—to buy the cigarette that will so inevitably lure him into loose and licentious company, and the fermented liquor that will only too surely encase him in a drunkard’s coffin.
Nor is that all. For it is in these same years, turning aside from the pleasures of home—from such innocent round games as Conceal the Thimble or the less familiar Up Jenkins, or from the happy singing round the family harmonium of such an humorous glee as Three Blind Mice—that he enters the Pit (so appropriately named) of some garish and degrading theatre.
It is a sorrowful spectacle. But happily for my own sake, I had already been so deeply saddened by it that I had long since resolved, when the necessity should arise, to take every possible precaution. No sooner, therefore, had I obtained my appointment than I hastened to enroll myself as a member of the Peckham Branch of the Non-Smokers’ League as well as of the Kennington Division of the Society for the Prohibition of the Strong Drink Traffic. Congenial in every way, I not only discovered in these an enormous sphere for the exercise of my influence, but the membership of both societies conferred the privilege of wearing a small badge or bone medallion.
A slightly convex and circular plaque to be pinned on the lapel of the wearer’s coat, the token of membership of the Non-Smokers’ League was about an inch in diameter. Of a pale cream colour, it was tastefully wreathed with dark blue lilies, symbolic of purity, the centre of it being occupied with the initials N.S.L. boldly imprinted in the same colours. No less decorative to the wearer than intriguing to the beholder, a reply to the question so often put as to what the initials N.S.L. stood for frequently afforded a valuable opportunity for soul-intercourse on the subject of tobacco.
Nor was the medallion of the Society for the Prohibition of the Strong Drink Traffic either less attractive or efficient as an instigator of fruitful converse. Slightly larger—its diameter was an inch and a quarter—its ground-work was of an olive green, the letters S.P.S.D.T. richly emerging from this in an ingenious monogram of canary yellow.