He spun round. The door was open, and at the other side of the table was standing a large, black-bearded, shirt-sleeved man, in an attitude rather reminiscent of Ajax defying the lightning. His hands trembled. His beard bristled. His eyes gleamed ferociously beneath enormous eyebrows. As Owen turned, he gave tongue in a voice like the discharge of a broadside.
“Stop it!”
Owen’s mind, wrenched too suddenly from the dreamy future to the vivid present, was not yet completely under control. He gaped.
“Stop-that-infernal-noise!” roared the man.
He shot through the door, banging it after him, and pounded up the stairs.
Owen was annoyed. The artistic temperament was all very well, but there were limits. It was absurd that obscure authors should behave in this way. Prosser! Who on earth was Prosser? Had anyone ever heard of him? No! Yet here he was going about the country clipping small boys over the ear-hole, and flinging loaves of bread at bank-clerks as if he were Henry James or Marie Corelli. Owen reproached himself bitterly for his momentary loss of presence of mind. If he had only kept his head, he could have taken a flying shot at the man with the marmalade-pot. It had been within easy reach. Instead of which, he had merely stood and gaped. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been.”
His manly regret was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Dorman with the information that the dog-cart was at the door.
Audrey was out of town when Owen arrived in London, but she returned a week later. The sound of her voice through the telephone did much to cure the restlessness from which he had been suffering since the conclusion of his holiday. But the thought that she was so near yet so inaccessible produced in him a meditative melancholy which enveloped him like a cloud that would not lift. His manner became distrait. He lost weight.
If customers were not vaguely pained by his sad, pale face, it was only because the fierce rush of modern commercial life leaves your business man little leisure for observing pallor in bank-clerks. What did pain them was the gentle dreaminess with which he performed his duties. He was in the Inward Bills Department, one of the features of which was the sudden inrush towards the end of each afternoon, of hatless, energetic young men with leather bags strapped to their left arms, clamouring for mysterious crackling documents, much fastened with pins. Owen had never quite understood what it was that these young men did want, and now his detached mind refused even more emphatically to grapple with the problem. He distributed the documents at random with the air of a preoccupied monarch scattering largess to the mob, and the subsequent chaos had to be handled by a wrathful head of the department in person.
Man’s power of endurance is limited. At the end of the second week the overwrought head appealed passionately for relief, and Owen was removed to the Postage Department, where, when he had leisure from answering Audrey’s telephone calls, he entered the addresses of letters in a large book and took them to the post. He was supposed also to stamp them, but a man in love cannot think of everything, and he was apt at times to overlook this formality.
One morning, receiving from one of the bank messengers the usual intimation that a lady wished to speak to him on the telephone, he went to the box and took up the receiver.
“Is that you, Owen? Owen, I went to White Roses last night. Have you been yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Then you must go to-night. Owen, I’m certain you wrote it. It’s perfectly lovely. I cried my eyes out. If you don’t go to-night, I’ll never speak to you again, even on the telephone. Promise.”
“Must I?”
“Yes, you must. Why, suppose it is yours! It may mean a fortune. The stalls were simply packed. I’m going to ring up the theatre now and engage a seat for you, and pay for it myself.”
“No-I say-” protested Owen.
“Yes, I shall. I can’t trust you to go if I don’t. And I’ll ring up early to-morrow to hear all about it. Good- bye.”