The Devil's Garden. W. B. Maxwell

crushing as that of interstellar distances, of the pathless void into which God threw a handful of dust and then quietly ordained that each speck should be a sun and the pivot of a solar system.

      He turned from the window to look at the dark little room, groped his way to the chest of drawers, and lighted a candle. Its flame sputtered, then settled and burned unwaveringly. Here in London the nights seemed as stuffy as the days; there was no life or freshness, no movement of the air; it was as if the warm breath of the crowd rose upward and nothing less than a balloon would allow one to escape from its taint. But he noticed that even at this slight elevation he had got free from the noise of the traffic. It would continue—a crashing roar—for hours, and yet it was now scarcely perceptible. Listening attentively he heard it—just a crackling murmur, a curious muffled rhythm, as of drums beaten by an army of drummers marching far away.

      When he got into bed and blew out his candle, the rectangle of the window became brighter. After a little while he fancied that he could distinguish two or three stars shining very faintly in the patch of sky above the sashes; and again thinking of remoteness, immensity, infinity, he experienced a curious physical sensation of contracting bulk, as though all his body had grown and was steadily growing smaller. Very strong this sensation, and, unless one wrestled with it firmly, translating itself in the mental sphere as a vaguely distressful notion that one was nothing but a tiny insect at war with the entire universe.

      Day after day he spent his time in the same manner at the G.P.O.—asking questions of clerks, lounging in stone corridors, sitting on wooden benches, thinking that the hour was coming and finding that it did not come. He was one of a weary regiment of people waiting for interviews. Clerks behind counters of inquiry offices hunted him up in pigeon-holes, looked for him in files and on skewers. "Oh, yes, let's see. You say you're the man from Rodchurch! That's north or midlands, isn't it? You must ask in Room 45. … What say? Down south, is it? Then you're quite right to ask here. No, we haven't heard any more about it since yesterday."

      At the end of each fruitless day he emerged from the vast place of postponement feeling exhausted, dazed, stupefied. The sunlight made him blink. He stood holding his hat so as to shade his eyes.

      Then after a few minutes, as he plodded along Queen Victoria Street, his confusion passed away, and he observed things with a clear understanding. It was a lovely evening really and truly, and these ponderous omnibuses were all carrying people home because the day's work was done. The streets were clean and bright; and there was plenty of gayness and joy—for them as could grab a share of it. He noticed fine private carriages drawn up round corners, waiting for prosperous tradesmen; young men with tennis-bats in their hands, taking prodigiously long strides, eager to get a game of play before dusk; girls who went by twos and threes, chattering, laughing, making funny short quick steps of it, like as if on the dance to reach sweethearts and green lanes. A man selling a mechanical toy—sort of a tin frog that jumped so soon as you put it down—made him smile indulgently.

      Outside the Mansion House Station the traffic stopped dead all of a moment, and directly the wheels ceased rattling one heard the cheerful music of a soldiers' band close upon one. It was the Bank Guard—Coldstreams—marching proudly. The officer in charge seemed very proud; with drawn sword, his broad red back bulging above his sash, and the enormous bearskin narrowing to his shoulders and hiding his neck.

      The wheels rolled again; the music, floating, fading, died beneath the horses' feet; and Dale stood gaping at a board over the entrance of the railway station. Places served by this District Company had pleasant-sounding suburban names—such as Kew Gardens, Richmond, Wimbledon. Reading the names, he felt a sick nostalgic yearning for the wind that blows through fir-trees, for the dust that falls on highroads, for the village street and the friendly nod—for home.

      He ate some food at an eating-house near Blackfriars, and then wandered aimlessly for hours. The broad river, with its dull brown flood breaking in oily wavelets against the embankment wall, exercised a fascination. He admired the Temple, watched some shadows on a lawn, and wondered if the pigeons by the cab-rank ever went to bed, or if, changing their natural habits to suit their town-life, they had become night birds like the owls. The trains passing to and fro in the iron cage called Hungerford Bridge interested him; and as he approached the Houses of Parliament, he was stirred by memories of his historical reading.

      The stately pile had become almost black against the western sky by the time that he drew near to it, and its majestic extent, with the lamplight gleaming from innumerable windows, gave him a quite personal satisfaction. It represented all that was grandest in the tale of his country. The freedom of the subject had been born on this hallowed spot; here had been thrown down those cruel barriers by which the rich and powerful penned and confined the poor and humble as cattle or slaves; by this and because of this, the people's meeting-place, men like himself had been enabled to aspire and to achieve. He was aware of a moisture in his eyes and a lump in his throat while he meditated thus; and then suddenly his eyes grew hot and dry again, and his larynx opened. His thought had taken a rapid turn from the general to the particular. It was a pity that an interfering ass like their member should have the right to come in and out here, record his vote, and spout his nonsense with the best of them.

      The metal tongue of Big Ben startled him, a booming voice that might have been that of Time itself, telling the tardy sunlight and the encroaching dusk that it was nine o'clock. Under a lamp-post Dale brought out his silver watch, and carefully set it.

      "I suppose they keep Greenwich," he thought, "same as we do;" and an apprehensive doubt presented itself. Would his clerk have the sense to see to it, that the clocks down there were duly wound? Ridgett, of course, could not be expected to know that they were always wound on Thursdays.

      St. James' followed Westminster in his tour of inspection, and then, after that amazing street of clubs, he soon found himself in the white glare, the kaleidoscopic movement, and the concentrated excitement of Piccadilly Circus. Then he sauntered through Leicester Square and began to drift northward. The gas torches outside places of entertainment had arrested his slow progress. One of the music-halls in the Square appeared to him as iniquitously gorgeous, and he gazed through the wide entrance at the vestibule hall, and staircase. The whole thing was as fine as one might have expected inside Buckingham Palace or the Mansion House—crimson curtains, marble steps, golden balusters, and flunkeys wearing velvet breeches and silk stockings. It grieved him momentarily to discover that two giant commissionnaires were both foreigners. He heard them address each other with a rapid guttural jabber. "Should 'a' thought there's large-sized men enough in England, if you troubled to look for 'em."

      To this point he had amused himself sufficiently; but each night as he turned his face toward the Euston Road, his spirits sank and the same queer mixture of bodily and mental discomfort attacked him. It began with the slightly bitter thought of being "out of it." He looked disapprovingly at pallid and puffed young swells gliding past in cabs; at the humbler folk who hurried by without seeming to be aware of his existence, who bumped into him and never said "Pardon!"; at the painted women of the narrower pavements—more foreigners half of them—who leered and murmured.

      "Where's the police?" He asked himself the question indignantly and contemptuously. "Can't they see what's going on under their noses? Or don't they wish to see it? Or have they been paid not to see it? Funny thing if every respectable married man is to be bothered like this—three times in fifty yards!"

      These incessant solicitations affected his nerves. So much so, indeed, that he cursed the impudence of one woman and called her a rude name. She did not seem to mind. While he was still in the generous afterglow produced by a bit of plain-speaking, another one had taken her place.

      With head high and shoulders squared he marched on, subject for some distance to a purely nervous irritation, together with a disagreeably potent memory of powdered cheeks, reddened lips, and a searching perfume.

      Then he thought of his wife, and instantly he had so vivid a presentation of her image that it obliterated all newer visual records. What a lady she looked when bidding him farewell at the station. He had watched her till the train carried him out of sight—a slender graceful figure; pale face and sad eyes; a fluttering handkerchief and a waved parasol; then nothing