CHAPTER XV—KNIGHT-ERRANT
For all the change about him and within him, the hand of time might have been put back four years, and the tender might have been nearing the outward bound ship, instead of the Southampton landing-stage. It was the same raw mizzling rain as when he had crossed the harbour four years before; the same wet, shivering crowd of second-class passengers, with the water streaming from waterproofs, umbrellas and hand luggage on to the sloppy deck. In his heart was the same mingling of anxiety and apathy, the same ineradicable sense of pariahdom. He had thought that the sight of England once more would have brought him a throb of gladness. It only intensified his depressing fears for the future.
The circumstances reproduced themselves with startling actuality. One of the men in charge of the tender had a great ugly seam across his face. Joyce remembered having seen him before, in just the same attitude, with a coil of rope in his hand. Had he not awakened from a minute’s dream that had covered an illusory four years of his life? He looked around, almost expecting to see Noakes, in his ridiculous curly silk hat and old frieze overcoat.
The tender came alongside the landing-stage, and he stepped ashore with the dripping crowd. The flurry of the Custom House and the transport of his meagre baggage to the railway station broke the illusion. He was in England at last, and it seemed a strange country. During the journey to London, he had the companionship of some of his fellow-travellers. At Waterloo they parted. Then he felt terribly lonely.
“Cab, sir?” asked a porter.
He was standing over his luggage, somewhat lost amid the bustle and tumult of the station. It was the late afternoon, and the platforms were hurrying with suburban passengers. The incessant movement through the blue glare of the electric light dazed his unaccustomed eyes. He declined the porter’s offer. Cabs were a luxury he could ill afford. Besides, one meagre Gladstone bag contained his whole possessions, and he could easily carry it. Leaving the station, he took an omnibus for Victoria, with the idea of seeking his old Pimlico lodgings. If he could not be taken in there, it would not be difficult to find a room in the neighbourhood. Still confused by the sudden transition to the midst of the roar of London, he peered through the glass sides at the wet pavements glistening in the gaslight, the shop fronts, the eternal hurrying by of vague forms, and the dash past of vehicles. From Westminster Bridge the face of Big Ben greeted him. He stared at it stupidly as long as he could see it. The light on the Clock Tower announced that the House was sitting. It was all curiously familiar, and yet he felt like an alien. There was not a soul in London to welcome his home-coming. His heart sank with the sense of loneliness. He was as infinitesimal and as isolated a unit in this seething, swarming ant-hill of humanity as amid the starry solitudes of the African veldt.
As chance willed it, he found the house in Pimlico in the same hands as before, and his old room in the attics vacant. Nothing had altered, except that it looked smaller and four years shabbier. The same discoloured blind hung before the window, the same fly-blown texts adorned the walls. The same acrid smell of dust and ashes and earth and the unaired end of all human things met his nostrils. When he went to sleep that night, it seemed incredible that four years should have passed since he had last lain there.
In a day or two the strangeness wore off. London is in a Londoner’s blood. No matter how long his exile, life there comes to him as naturally as swimming does to a swimmer after years of non-practice. He remembered how he had yearned for its sights and sounds and stimulating movement. Now they were his again, and he took a measure of content. His first care was to provide himself with some clothes; his next, to visit the publishers. A cordial reception gratified him. The book was bound to have some success. The manuscript was in the printer’s hands. Publication was announced for the spring. Joyce went home lighter-hearted after the interview. It was delightful to be treated as an intellectual man once more. His prospects too were not so very gloomy. With the little capital he had brought back from South Africa and the £80 for his book, he saw himself saved from starvation for two years, if he lived very, very humbly on a little over a pound a week. Meanwhile he could earn something by occasional odds and ends of writing, and also complete his second novel. He arranged his scheme of life as he walked along. He would leave his lodging punctually at a certain hour after breakfast, walk to the British Museum, write all day in the Reading Room, dine, walk home, and write or read in the evenings until it was time for bed.