He sat on—on—in the falling darkness; the little cheerfulness of his friends' visit had quite vanished. The lumber he had wallowed in had grimed his heart as well as his garments. He would have liked Tea—a great stand-by when pain and anguish wring the brow. But when you are too proud to admit that your brow is being wrung, and you know it is no use ringing the bell, because Mrs. Gapp, or her equivalent, is at the William the Fourth, why, then you probably collapse and submit to Fate, as Mr. Reginald Aiken did. It didn't much matter now if he had no Tea. No ministering Angel was there to make it.
He sat, collapsed, dirty and defeated, in the Austrian bent-wood rocking-chair. What was that irruption of evening newsboys shouting? Repulse of some General, English or Dutch, at some berg or drift; surrender of some other, Dutch or English, at some drift or berg. He was even too collapsed to go out and buy a halfpenny paper. He didn't care about anything. Besides, it was the same every evening. Damn the Boers! Damn Cecil Rhodes!
The shouters had passed—a prestissimo movement in the Street Symphony—selling rapidly, before he had changed his mind, and wished he had bought a Star. Never mind!—there would be another edition out by the time he went to dinner at Machiavelli's. He sat on meditating in the gloom, and wondering how long it would be before it was all jolly again. Of course it would be—but when?
A sound like a nervous burglar making an attempt on a Chubb lock caught his ear and interested him. He appeared to identify it as Mrs. Gapp trying to use a latchkey, but unsuccessfully. He seemed maliciously amused, but not to have any intention of helping. Presently the sound abdicated, in favour of a subterranean bell of a furtive and irresolute character. Said Mr. Aiken, then, to Space, "Mrs. Verity won't hear that, you may bet your Sunday garters," and then went by easy stages to the front-door, to see—so further soliloquy declared—how sober his housekeeper was after so long an absence. A glance at the good woman convinced him that her register of sobriety would stand at zero on any maker's sobriometer.
She said that a vaguely defined community, called The Boys, had been tampering with the lock. Mr. Aiken, from long experience of her class at this stage, was able to infer this from what sounded like "Boysh been 'tlocksh—keylocksh—inchfearunsh." This pronounced exactly phonetically will be clear to the student of Alcoholism; be so good as to read it absolutely literally.
"Lock's all right enough!" said Mr. Aiken, after turning it freely both ways. "Nobody's been interfering with it. You're drunk, Mrs. Gapp."
Mrs. Gapp stood steady, visibly. Now, you can't stand steady, visibly, without a suspicion of a lurch to show how splendidly you are maintaining your balance. Without it your immobility might be mere passionless inertia. Mrs. Gapp's eyes seemed as little under her control as her voice, and each had a strange, inherent power of convincing the observer that the other was looking the wrong way.
"Me?" said Mrs. Gapp.
"Yes—you!" said Mr. Aiken.
Mrs. Gapp collected herself, which—if we include in it her burden, consisting of some bundles of firewood and one pound four ounces of beefsteak wrapped in a serial—seemed in some danger of redistributing itself when collected. She then spoke, with a mien as indignant as if she were Boadicea seeking counsel of her country's gods, and said, "Me r-r-runk! Shober!"—the last word expressing heartfelt conviction. Some remarks that followed, scarcely articulate enough to warrant transcribing, were interpreted by Mr. Aiken to the effect that he was doing a cruel injustice to a widow-woman who had had fourteen, and had lived a pure and blameless life, and had buried three husbands. Much stress was laid on her own habitual abstention from stimulants, and the example she had striven to set in her own humble circle. Her third had never touched anything but water—a curlew's life, as it were—owing to the force of this example. Let persons who accused her of drunkenness look at home, and first be sure of their own sobriety. Her conscience acquitted her. For her part she thought intoxication a beastly, degrading habit—that is to say, if Mr. Aiken interpreted rightly something that sounded, phonetically, like "Bishley grey rabbit." At this point one of the wood-bundles became undone, owing to the disgraceful quality of the string now in use. Mrs. Gapp was dissuaded with difficulty from returning to the shop to exchange it, but in the end descended the kitchen-stairs, lamenting commercial dishonesty, and shedding sticks.