The waiting in London for July to come was daily more unbearable to Shelton, and if it had not been for Ferrand, who still came to breakfast, he would have deserted the Metropolis. On June first the latter presented himself rather later than was his custom, and announced that, through a friend, he had heard of a position as interpreter to an hotel at Folkestone. “If I had money to face the first necessities,” he said, swiftly turning over a collection of smeared papers with his yellow fingers, as if searching for his own identity, “I 'd leave today. This London blackens my spirit.”
“Are you certain to get this place,” asked Shelton.
“I think so,” the young foreigner replied; “I 've got some good enough recommendations.”
Shelton could not help a dubious glance at the papers in his hand. A hurt look passed on to Ferrand's curly lips beneath his nascent red moustache.
“You mean that to have false papers is as bad as theft. No, no; I shall never be a thief—I 've had too many opportunities,” said he, with pride and bitterness. “That's not in my character. I never do harm to anyone. This”—he touched the papers—“is not delicate, but it does harm to no one. If you have no money you must have papers; they stand between you and starvation. Society, has an excellent eye for the helpless—it never treads on people unless they 're really down.” He looked at Shelton.
“You 've made me what I am, amongst you,” he seemed to say; “now put up with me!”
“But there are always the workhouses,” Shelton remarked at last.
“Workhouses!” returned Ferrand; “certainly there are—regular palaces: I will tell you one thing: I've never been in places so discouraging as your workhouses; they take one's very heart out.”
“I always understood,” said Shelton coldly; “that our system was better than that of other countries.”
Ferrand leaned over in his chair, an elbow on his knee, his favourite attitude when particularly certain of his point.
“Well,” he replied, “it 's always permissible to think well of your own country. But, frankly, I've come out of those places here with little strength and no heart at all, and I can tell you why.” His lips lost their bitterness, and he became an artist expressing the result of his experience. “You spend your money freely, you have fine buildings, self-respecting officers, but you lack the spirit of hospitality. The reason is plain; you have a horror of the needy. You invite us—and when we come you treat us justly enough, but as if we were numbers, criminals, beneath contempt—as if we had inflicted a personal injury on you; and when we get out again, we are naturally degraded.”
Shelton bit his lips.
“How much money will you want for your ticket, and to make a start?” he asked.
The nervous gesture escaping Ferrand at this juncture betrayed how far the most independent thinkers are dependent when they have no money in their pockets. He took the note that Shelton proffered him.
“A thousand thanks,” said he; “I shall never forget what you have done for me”; and Shelton could not help feeling that there was true emotion behind his titter of farewell.
He stood at the window watching Ferrand start into the world again; then looked back at his own comfortable room, with the number of things that had accumulated somehow—the photographs of countless friends, the old arm-chairs, the stock of coloured pipes. Into him restlessness had passed with the farewell clasp of the foreigner's damp hand. To wait about in London was unbearable.
He took his hat, and, heedless of direction, walked towards the river. It was a clear, bright day, with a bleak wind driving showers before it. During one of such Shelton found himself in Little Blank Street. “I wonder how that little Frenchman that I saw is getting on!” he thought. On a fine day he would probably have passed by on the other side; he now entered and tapped upon the wicket.
No. 3 Little Blank Street had abated nothing of its stone-flagged dreariness; the same blowsy woman answered his inquiry. Yes, Carolan was always in; you could never catch him out—seemed afraid to go into the street! To her call the little Frenchman made his appearance as punctually as if he had been the rabbit of a conjurer. His face was as yellow as a guinea.
“Ah! it's you, monsieur!” he said.
“Yes,” said Shelton; “and how are you?”
“It 's five days since I came out of hospital,” muttered the little Frenchman, tapping on his chest; “a crisis of this bad atmosphere. I live here, shut up in a box; it does me harm, being from the South. If there's anything I can do for you, monsieur, it will give me pleasure.”
“Nothing,” replied Shelton, “I was just passing, and thought I should like to hear how you were getting on.”
“Come into the kitchen,—monsieur, there is nobody in there. 'Brr! Il fait un froid etonnant'.”
“What sort of customers have you just now?” asked Shelton, as they passed into the kitchen.
“Always the same clientele,” replied the little man; “not so numerous, of course, it being summer.”
“Could n't you find anything better than this to do?”
The barber's crow's-feet radiated irony.
“When I first came to London,” said he, “I secured an engagement at one of your public institutions. I thought my fortune made. Imagine, monsieur, in that sacred place I was obliged to shave at the rate of ten a penny! Here, it's true, they don't pay me half the time; but when I'm paid, I 'm paid. In this, climate, and being 'poitrinaire', one doesn't make experiments. I shall finish my days here. Have you seen that young man who interested you? There 's another! He has spirit, as I had once—'il fait de la philosophie', as I do—and you will see, monsieur, it will finish him. In this world what you want is to have no spirit. Spirit ruins you.”
Shelton looked sideways at the little man with his sardonic, yellow, half-dead face, and the incongruity of the word “spirit” in his mouth struck him so sharply that he smiled a smile with more pity in it than any burst of tears.
“Shall we 'sit down?” he said, offering a cigarette.
“Merci, monsieur, it is always a pleasure to smoke a good cigarette. You remember, that old actor who gave you a Jeremiad? Well, he's dead. I was the only one at his bedside; 'un vrai drole'. He was another who had spirit. And you will see, monsieur, that young man in whom you take an interest, he'll die in a hospital, or in some hole or other, or even on the highroad; having closed his eyes once too often some cold night; and all because he has something in him which will not accept things as they are, believing always that they should be better. 'Il n'y a riens de plus tragique'.”
“According to you, then,” said Shelton—and the conversation seemed to him of a sudden to have taken too personal a turn—“rebellion of any sort is fatal.”
“Ah!” replied the little man, with the eagerness of one whose ideal it is to sit under the awning of a cafe, and talk life upside down, “you pose me a great problem there! If one makes rebellion; it is always probable that one will do no good to any one and harm one's self. The law of the majority arranges that. But I would draw your attention to this”—and he paused; as if it were a real discovery to blow smoke through his nose—“if you rebel it is in all likelihood because you are forced by your nature to rebel; this is one of the most certain things in life. In any case, it is necessary to avoid falling between two stools—which is unpardonable,” he ended with complacence.
Shelton thought he had never seen a man who looked more completely as if he had fallen between two stools, and he had inspiration enough to feel............