‘I think we can arrange it,’ said Mr. Todd, and Dr. Pethwick saw success in sight. Mr. Todd pulled a printed form out of a drawer.
‘Here is our usual form of agreement,’ he said. ‘I suppose you can give me references?’
Dr. Pethwick took the form and began to glance through it. He was deadly calm, and it was only when he was half-way through the reading that he answered Mr. Todd’s question.
‘I’ve been puzzling over this reference business,’ he said. ‘And really, I can’t come to any conclusion. I’ve been a master at the Liverpool School for eleven years. I don’t know anyone whom you could consider a satisfactory reference. I’m not sure—it isn’t a matter of great importance, though—that the School would approve of my going into business.’
He smiled again at Mr. Todd, and then went on:
‘But I understand that if I make sufficient payment in advance—?’
Mr. Todd’s expression, which had clouded over for a moment, cleared at once.
‘Oh, yes, a year’s rent in advance will be quite satisfactory—Mr.—er—Dr. Pethwick.’
‘Then I may as well make out the cheque now?’
All the trouble Dr. Pethwick had taken; his purchase of new clothes, his careful behaviour towards Mr. Todd, had been solely directed towards the one end of gaining for himself a foothold free from observation in the City. When he had decided that he wanted one, he had been brought up short against the need for references. The difficulty was surmounted now. Pethwick, with the clarity of vision which had come to him with careful thinking, had foreseen that no agent would have let a City office to a shabby man who walked in without references and without a convincing story, however much advance rent he offered. But Mr. Todd was quite satisfied—or would be as soon as the cheque was cleared and his one or two private inquiries answered. In fact Mr. Todd, if he had been asked, would have said that Dr. Pethwick was a man of sound ideas who was likely to get on and who could be thoroughly relied upon—which was exactly the impression Dr. Pethwick had set out to convey.
Dr. Pethwick compelled himself to appear to read the agreement with care and attention. He picked his way through the crabbed estate agents’ English, noting odd things such as the fact that he promised not to sleep nor suffer to sleep on the premises, and the extensive classification of the businesses he bound himself not to carry on there.
Mr. Todd unbent sufficiently to indulge in a little trivial conversation with Dr. Pethwick while the final details of the transaction were worked out. A touch on the button of Mr. Todd’s buzzer brought in the pretty girl clerk to witness Dr. Pethwick’s signature; a receipt was made out and stamped in exchange for the cheque for fifty pounds which Dr. Pethwick made out in favour of Mr. Todd.
‘I’ll send you on a copy of the agreement signed by our client, Dr. Pethwick,’ said Mr. Todd, in final valediction. ‘You can enter into occupation from that day.’
And he ushered Dr. Pethwick out again. The interval of three days, as both Mr. Todd and Dr. Pethwick knew without mentioning the subject, would be employed in waiting to see that Dr. Pethwick’s cheque was met and in making certain that there was such a person as Dr. Pethwick holding a doctor’s degree in Science from the University of London, and employed at the Liverpool School. Mr. Todd was quite easy in his mind about it already. He was sure, from what he had seen of Dr. Pethwick, that he would not be likely to make use of his tenancy of the office in Hammer Court for any of the lesser or dirtier criminal offences; and no one would set out upon any of the greater swindles with headquarters in a single basement room.
Dr. Pethwick emerged into Fetter Lane a little dazed and fatigued. Now that the effort was over he began to feel the strain. Even the fact that he was wearing marvellous clothes meant nothing to him now.
He still had to make his way to the Tube station and collect his new suitcase. Then he had to engage a dressing-room in the men’s lavatory at London Bridge Station—he had borne in mind the possibility of doing this when he made his plans a week ago—and change out of the fine suit and the silk underclothes back into the shabby blue serge and the ragged shirt and vest in which he had started out. The good clothes had to be crushed into the suitcase—Dr. Pethwick, despite all his abilities, was deplorably unable to pack—and the suitcase left at London Bridge station cloakroom. Then he remembered with a start that he had to buy yet another suitcase; he did this before getting into the train for home. At the suburban station he took the first suitcase out of the cloakroom, and made a discreet retirement in order to be able to transfer his apparatus to the new one, which he left deposited at the station. Then, with the old one, empty now, he at last reached 41, Launceton Avenue, very tired, but very satisfied, save in one respect. He had succeeded in everything; he had remembered everything—everything except his lunch. That had slipped his memory until he realised that part of his fatigue was due to hunger. It was a pity Mary was at home, because that precluded him from satisfying his hunger until tea-time. Any excursion into the kitchen and clattering with crockery would have brought her out to see what was happening, and the spectacle of her husband eating at half-past three would have called not merely for unkind comments—Pethwick might have borne with those—but with questions about how he had spent his time so far that day. Pethwick had tacitly allowed it to be understood that he had remained at school clearing up after the end of the scholastic year, and he did not feel equal to facing any acute examination on the point.
Chapter Eleven
It is easy enough to work out the superficial reasons why the Pethwicks had not had a summer holiday away from home for so many years. There can be no doubt whatever that if they had decided upon such a holiday most of the trouble involved would have fallen to Mary’s lot. It would have had to have been she who decided where to go, and who booked the rooms, and who found out about trains, and who packed, and who saw to it that the trains were caught, and all that would have been a great trouble to her. She disliked the prospect of so much effort, and she also disliked the thought of being away from her favourite public-houses and cronies.
Pethwick, likewise, had equally cogent reasons for not wanting to go away. He shrank from having to face the comparative publicity of boarding-house life, and of being thrust into the society of people he did not know. He dreaded the fuss and bother of arrival and departure. Moreover, he liked to spend his holidays in catching up on the serious work of his life. He delighted in spending his holidays in reading and in calculation; after all, it was only occasionally that Mary came to fret about seeing ‘a man always lounging about the house,’ and to chafe at the need—which she never really fulfilled—of having to provide a civilised lunch for seven days a week instead of one. Moreover, there were occasional meetings of learned societies which Pethwick liked to attend, unobtrusively. They were rare in August, but during the rest of Pethwick’s holidays they were frequent enough to supply Mary both with an excuse not to take a holiday and with grounds for complaint.
So this summer holiday it was not remarkable that they should have done nothing about going away. During the opening days in July Mary pottered about the house in a dressing-gown complaining of the heat until it was time for her to go and see her mother, while Pethwick sat and read, or sat and thought, or sat at the table immersed in calculations. Mary did not notice that on those early days of the summer holiday Pethwick spent an unusual proportion of his time in writing, and she did not notice what he wrote. And he was very careful when she was out of the house to burn all the discarded drafts—and they were very many indeed—of what he was writing, and to keep the latest current draft locked up in the central drawer of his desk, whose key was the only one remaining in Pethwick’s possession. Mary only periodically had bouts of curiosity, but Pethwick judged it advisable to keep the document he was trying to compose safely out of her reach.
It took him three days to finish the thing he was writing—which, after all, was not too long to spend on a document which might alter the history of mankind—and
it took him two hours, with Mary safely out of the way, to make a fair copy of it when it was completed. But that length of time is not a fair measure of the length of the document, for Pethwick copied it out not in his own minute legible handwriting, but in a disguised hand—in other words, he printed it in Roman capitals, for he had a vague memory of having read somewhere that that was the best way of disguising one’s handwriting. And when it was finished he sought out a long envelope and placed the folded foolscap into it with care. He stuck down the envelope, and began to address it—‘The Editor, The Times.’ There he stopped short. He knew so little of the world that he had to go and find that day’s issue and hunt through it in order to discover that The Times office is in Printing House Square, E.C. He stamped the envelope and locked it away again in his desk. He stood there thoughtfully, with the key in his hand, for a second or two. Only incidentally was he thinking about the good that letter might do. More especially, he was thinking about his lost Dorothy, four hundred miles away from him across the sea. Pethwick surmised that The Times might penetrate even as far as the inner recesses of Norway; and when Dorothy read that letter she would know that it was he who had written it; and perhaps she would believe then that he was not a coward, nor a liar, and that even if he were not a rabid supporter of disarmament he was willing at least to imperil his future to bring it about.
Then Pethwick roused himself, and turned away from his desk to continue his period of waiting. When his wife came in she found him, just as she expected, sitting in an armchair with two books on his knees and two more on the floor beside him. It was as well that she was in an unwontedly good temper, and so did not abuse him too violently for making that shabby room untidy.
Pethwick’s period of waiting was not much further prolonged; it was in fact terminated the very next morning. He heard the postman’s knock at the front door soon after he had awakened, with the morning sunshine in his eyes and his wife stirring sleepily beside him. As he had done on the two previous mornings as well, he slipped quietly out of bed and padded downstairs, barefooted and in his pyjamas, to see what the postman had brought. He opened the long typewritten envelope expectantly, and the letter inside told him that he had achieved what he wanted. It began—Dear Sir, With regard to your application for the tenancy of the lower ground floor office in Tranby House, Hammer Court, we have now heard from our client and have much pleasure in—there followed the information that the office was now his for a year, that a copy of the agreement signed by the landlord was enclosed, and that the caretaker on the premises had been instructed to hand over to him the keys of the office. Pethwick hurriedly buried letter, agreement, and all, under a mass of odd papers in his desk, for he did not dare to go upstairs again for the key to the centre drawer. It was fortunate that the postman had brought at the same time some of those circulars which flood the letter-box of an assistant schoolmaster who is also a doctor of science; they made it possible for Mary to believe that they were all he had brought.
Pethwick could not but help feel a thrill of excitement at the near approach of action, but he would not allow himself to display it at all. At breakfast he read The Times, and after breakfast he announced, quite casually, his intention of visiting the University of London library. He would not be home to lunch—he would take that meal at the A.B.C. restaurant at South Kensington; and the only attention Mary paid to this announcement was to feel relieved at having him off her hands for the day. She might have been more interested if she had seen—as Pethwick took good care she did not—his lightning spring to his desk when she was out of the way, and his careful locking away of the newly-arrived agreement and his careful placing in his pocket of the stamped addressed quarto envelope containing the letter he had finished the day before.
Pethwick collected his two suitcases on his way to the office; and after a momentary hesitation he hired a dressing-room in the lavatory at London Bridge Station and changed into his beautiful new clothes. That was not really necessary, seeing that he was now the tenant of the office and nothing could unmake him. It was a pleasant indication that he remained a human; the most important motive influencing him was merely the desire to wear good clothes. The fine grey flannel suit had been badly crushed by Pethwick’s packing; the snappy grey hat had lost some of its shape, and Dr. Pethwick was not as clever in putting on clothes as the valet who had previously attended him. The general effect, taking everything into consideration, was a caricature of the well-dressed man who had interviewed Mr. Todd and the caretaker. But Dr. Pethwick did not appreciate this. He walked out of the cloakroom with his two suitcases and hailed a taxicab, feeling quite pleased with himself, and that at least was so much gained. There had been precious little pleasure so far in Dr. Pethwick’s life.
The caretaker actually contrived to raise a smile of welcome for Dr. Pethwick when he rang her bell on his arrival at Hammer Court. Yes, she had heard from Mr. Todd, and here were the keys. It almost seemed as she walked across the corridor with Dr. Pethwick to open the office door for him, as if she had lost the secret devastating sorrow which had given her such an air of gloom when Dr. Pethwick had seen her last. The caretaker threw open the door and Dr. Pethwick put down his heavy suitcase. Did Dr. Pethwick need tea in the afternoon? The caretaker was accustomed to supplying it to the other offices in the building. Messrs. Copley and Henfield, and the Cottage Supply Association, always dealt with her. Sixpence a head a week, she charged. Dr. Pethwick shook his head sadly. He was afraid he never drank tea—it was amazing how he had fallen into the habit of telling the most outrageous lies. But his secretary? Secretaries always wanted tea. Dr. Pethwick confessed that he had not yet engaged a secretary. When he had found one would be a sufficient time to discuss the question of tea for her—and with that Dr. Pethwick had to decline, regretfully, the caretaker’s eager offer to find him one. And what about office furniture? Pethwick had difficulty at the moment in keeping the expression of his face unchanged. Until that moment he had forgotten all about the question of furnishing the office. For his own purposes he would need at least a table and a chair; for the sake of verisimilitude he would need a good deal more. Dr. Pethwick, so the caretaker said, would find all he wanted at Mr. George Freeman’s round in Morton Yard. He dealt in second-hand office furniture, all good stuff. Dr. Pethwick made a mental note of the name and address, and thanked the caretaker. This business of making history involved a tedious amount of detail in its preliminaries, but at last he was able to get rid of her, and shut his door, and look round the dingy room with the eye of a proprietor.
Mr. George Freeman was delighted to see Dr. Pethwick. In this time of slump more people came to him wishing to sell office furniture than to buy it. With his thumb in the arm-hole of his waistcoat he proceeded to supply Dr. Pethwick with everything necessary for the efficient running of an office—desks and tables and chairs and cupboards, and box-files and expanding files, and letter trays and waste-paper-baskets and calendars and inkstands. He was a large red-faced man in a blue serge suit, and he almost carried Dr. Pethwick away on the current of his enthusiasm. But not quite, however. Even Dr. Pethwick jibbed at buying a typewriter and a copying press. By some miracle he thought of an excuse for postponement; when he had engaged his secretary and could consult her whims on the subject would be time enough for buying typewriters. But Mr. Freeman sold him everything else. Dr. Pethwick wrote out a large cheque—he was growing used to doing this—and Mr. Freeman promised delivery of the goods that very afternoon.
On his way back to the office, to await their arrival, Dr. Pethwick stopped at a letter-box. He brought out the big quarto envelope from his pocket, and pushed it into the slot marked ‘For London and Places Abroad.’ The letter slid irrevocably down into the slot. Nothing that Dr. Pethwick could do could prevent it from being delivered some time that afternoon to the Editor of The Times.
Then he went back to the office, to pace up and down the stone floor of the bare room until the arrival of Mr. Freeman’s van. It cannot be denied tha
t in the matter of furnishing his office Dr. Pethwick did not play his part well. Mr. Freeman’s henchmen demanded where this should be put, and that, and the replies they received were so vague and unconstructive that the workmen for the most part dumped down desks and chairs and tables and files wherever the whim took them—Dr. Pethwick had no idea how an office ought to be furnished and he could not compel himself to think about it and evolve ideas. There was no urgent necessity for him to play a part before these workmen, and he could not bring himself to do so. But by the time the workmen hd finished there was a realistic air about that office, all the same. Mr. Freeman had sold him enough office equipment to run a small government department, and when it was all in the room was crammed until there was hardly space to walk. It certainly looked as if a colossal amount of work was intended to be done there.
Chapter Twelve
Next morning at breakfast Dr. Pethwick opened The Times with his nerves set and ready to keep his expression from changing. He turned over the pages rapidly, but on none of them was printed the long letter he had written with so much trouble to the Editor. Dr. Pethwick was by no means surprised. Somewhere in his intellectual make-up there still remained a residuum of cool judgment. He had guessed that The Times must receive every day from cranks and lunatics a collection of letters every bit as startling as his; he had fully anticipated that his letter would be classed with the others, and, if not put in the waste-paper-basket, at least put aside for later consideration. In point of fact, Dr. Pethwick had been quite sure this would happen, and had made all his arrangements accordingly. It was only now that his judgment had been proved correct that he looked back and thought he had not been quite sure—but that was like him.
Dr. Pethwick was elaborately casual after breakfast.
‘I shall have to go to South Kensington again to-day,’ he said. ‘Do you mind, Mary?’