“I wonder!” said he.
“Did you speak, sir?” said the lift-porter.
“Eh?” replied Gleam. “Yes; I wonder—I wonder why I have come down to the basement when I wanted the dining-room floor.”
But Goddard could not sit any longer in the library. The brooding spell was over, and its place was taken by feverish unrest. He left the Club, went out into the streets, and began to walk rapidly. Whither was he going? He did not care. A vague idea that he could free himself of his madness by physical exercise prompted him. He had a faint recollection of a scene in a penny dreadful read in his board-school days—a scene where the hero, to bring calmness to his throbbing brain, mounted his horse and galloped at whirlwind speed over miles and miles of moorland, in frenzied chase, until the noble animal’s heart burst and he staggered and fell, throwing his rider, who broke his neck. But Goddard walked—up the hurrying Strand and Fleet Street, through the fast-emptying City; eastwards, up Fenchurch Street, the Whitechapel Road, Mile End Road, jostling through the crowded thoroughfares that reeked with the odour of fried-fish, naphtha from costers’ barrows, and the day’s sweat of the toiling population; down Whitehouse Lane and Stepney High Street on to Ratcliffe Highway. The squalor and misery of it all touched the ever-responsive chord in his nature, awoke the demagogue in him to sympathy with the people. The East End had never appeared to him so terrible, so crushing in its vast unloveliness. Mile after mile it was just the same—the same stench, the same stunted men; the same anemic girl-mothers; the same foul, fringed, and feathered women of the street; the same bestial talk that seemed to hang continuously on the air; the same scenes of drunken brawling outside the public-houses; the same dreamy, endless tram-cars, smoothly gliding past this hubbub and swelter of humanity on the pavement; and everywhere the same joyless struggle for the four sole ends of life—food, raiment, shelter, and forgetfulness.
Goddard felt a strange and stern comfort in steeping his soul in these wide waters of bitterness. He went on and on, through brawling companies of sailors, swarthy Lascars, and the land-scum that clings round the seafaring life; past evil-smelling marine stores, live-stock dealers dissonant with the screeching of parrots, slop-shops, low eating-houses, scented from afar, even through the general stench, by the miasmic exhalations from basement gratings. At the end of the Highway he turned, retraced his steps, went through the foul river-side slums, crossed the Commercial Road, struck northwards, up dark, narrow streets, where the flare and turmoil of the great arteries were perceived but faintly, and the minor privacies of life were in sordid evidence. Through streets of sweaters’ dens he could see the vague forms of the workers behind the blindless windows. Once he stopped and counted—thirty in one small, gas-lit room.
To carry on the combat with the powers of evil that enthralled this hideous city, his life needed little reconstruction. He thought of Lady Phayre, clenched his stick, and swung it furiously.
“I’ll go on with my work, and she can go to the devil!” he said.
And he walked on through the endless streets.
It is a simple way to rid ourselves of burdens, to consign them to Avernus, and ship them on the waters of Lethe. Unfortunately it is not always successful. They are apt to be elusive, like the vampire in the Indian story which Vikram could not keep in his sack. They slip from the hold of the dark ship, and return to the shoulders of the consigner. But in this Goddard’s pride allowed no confession of failure. He blustered himself into the belief that Lady Phayre was no more to him than Hecuba was to the First Player, thus playing the hypocrite to himself with morose and stubborn futility. He plunged into his work with redoubled energy, grew angry when he found that it did not give him the old sufficing happiness, and obstinately refused to allow the simple, obvious cause.