“We can give you one,” said the lady, and took his portmanteau. She could have given him several, but not one worth having. She conducted him through one or two doors that led from the living-room. Each showed a less attractive bedroom than the one before, but the cheapest was barely within the range of prudence, as far as the gardener’s pocket was concerned. In a leaden voice, proceeding from a heart of lead, he concluded a bargain for the temporary possession of the least inviting. And when it was done, and the portmanteau deposited drearily in the middle of a dirty linoleum floor, he discovered that time had been standing still, and that it was hardly nearer five o’clock than before.
It was the first time he had realised the four thousand miles that lay between him and the kindly grey pavements of Penny Street. He remembered the look of the London lamps reflected in the slaty mirrors of London streets ... the smile of the ridiculous little griffin who sits on a pedestal at the top of Fleet Street, playing the ’cello with his shield ... the shrugging shoulders of St. Paul’s on tiptoe on the peak of Ludgate Hill ... the dead leaves blowing down the Broad Walk, in the rain....
There is no pose that saves you from that awful longing for the things that are no longer yours, and which you hated while you possessed.
“I said I was enough for myself. And I am not,” said the gardener, and hid his face in the mosquito net.
Strange things in barbaric colours made the garden outside a whirlpool. Sometimes these things say to you: “You are a very long way from home”; and you exult, and think This is Life. But sometimes they say again: “You are a very long way from home”; and you cry out, and think This is Worse than Death.
Now there are moral drawbacks about the posing habit. But there are also advantages, though possibly none deserved. For after three minutes of despair the gardener straightened himself, blinked, and began putting his spare shirt into a drawer that would not shut. He was posing as One Who was Seeing Life, and who was Making the Best of it. The vision that inspired this brave pose was the ghost of a pair of small haggard eyes, set in a short pointed face, eyes that cried easily and never surrendered. A thin unbeautiful ghost with clenched fists, and in the air, the ghost of a low and militant voice.
“I am not enough,” the gardener admitted. “But together, we are enough.”
He whistled a comic song tentatively. The Englishman never whistles or sings to suit his feelings. He dies to the tune of “Tipperary,” or goes to his wedding humming the “Dead March in Saul.”
There was no more life to be seen in that hot little room, even by one fixed in an optimistic pose. He emerged into the sitting-room, and through an opposite and open door he could see the pink dressing-gown, containing his landlady, heaving sleepily under a mosquito net. One of her bare feet was drooping under the net. At this he had to swallow down London again violently, and remember that he was Seeing Life, and that he was Luckier than Most.
Did you know that the surest way of ensuring luck is to be sure that you are lucky?